Today I sneezed out macaroni and cheese onto my:
1) hair
2) breast area
3) thighs
At my desk. Eating lunch. With my desk-mates around me. No one even said anything because that’s how used to my antics everyone already is.
Again no recipe with this post, but like, I mentioned mac&cheese. Kitch!
Don’t worry, your regularly scheduled programming will return shortly.
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At Work:
1. Opened the refrigerator in the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of seltzer, dropped the bottle of seltzer, which exploded upon hitting the ground. Guy sitting in the kitchen on his cell phone: “whoa! that was totally crazy!”
2. Called my coworker over to my desk to help me solve a word search, and we needed to look up something in an email on my computer. Minimized the window that was open (my standard “work spreadsheet” window, natch) and sitting behind it was a browser opened to this page: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/10-charts-about-sex/
There are 2 ways to handle something like this. One way is to be like, oh, have you seen this? My roommate sent me this link, she said it was hilarious. It’s by the people who run the OKCupid website!
That is the cool and casual way. Hey, there’s a website about charts about sex open on my computer, but so what? I’m a 27 year old lady. Sometimes I read about sex. We’re all adults here. It’s cool!
The other way to play it is you can get really flustered, turn red, try to minimize the window but instead enlarge it more, laugh awkwardly, hurriedly and obviously drag another window on top of it for the sole purpose of covering it up, and ignore it and hope your coworker didn’t see it, though you know he did.
Guess which way I played it?
Ok so there is no recipe here, but last night I made a crazy delicious salad with romaine, lentils, tomatoes, parsley, hummus, balsamic, capers, and a little drizzle of olive oil. Like, you can totally make that at home, without help from shitty pictures from my smart phone, which is so much worse than an iphone, btw, sorry droid, you’re fucking terrible.
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Hiya internet.
Welllllll. The pie baking is off to a major start. That means we’ve been testing, and testing, and testing, and eating and eating and eating all of our potential recipes. That means a lot of pie. Like all UP in here. I live, breathe, and dream pie. Well, that’s not true. I dream about being externally pregnant with a duck egg and putting it on top of my sephora shopping bag and the duck egg falling off and breaking and me being relieved because I didn’t even like the father! So I’m full of pie and have gotten no sleep, and what little sleep I’ve gotten is devoted to weird single lady biological clock dreams. Gentlemen, please! Form a line!
Anyway, I went to a dinner party the other night and used it as an opportunity to test out a strawberry rhubarb pie recipe. Do you see all that liquid I collected from the macerating fruit? Yeah, well, all that drainage did no good. The final pie still turned out to be more of a pie soup. The innards, however, were quite tasty. Strawberries aren’t really THERE yet as far as flavor goes, but they’re on their way (and that is how you use there, they’re, and their in a sentence correctly, 80% of the people i know from high school TAKE NOTE). By the time we launch they should be hitting their stride, fingers crossed.
Pie crust, thankfully, never goes out of season. I feel good about this one. It hasn’t really ever let me down. Not that I’m just waiting for it to, god, I don’t do that with all the rest of the things in my life, stop, get out of my head! Former boyfriends are officially unwelcome to comment on this blog, btw. I don’t even know if any of them read this. Hey boyfriends! Do you read my blog? Dodged a bullet with this one, didn’t you, huh? Whatever, I didn’t want you to be the father of my duck egg anyway.
Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie
one double crust or lattice pie crust (my standby), chilled, rolled out, and pie-plated
4 cups strawberries, sliced
3 cups rhubarb, peeled and sliced
1 cup sugar (I used half brown, half white)
2 tbsp corn starch
1/2 vanilla bean
1/2 cinnamon stick
Preheat oven to 375 and prepare your crust up until the point where the bottom shell is in the pan, then refrigerate it. Mix together the strawberries, rhubarb, and sugar in a big mixing bowl. Transfer the mixture to a colander suspended over a big mixing bowl. Let them macerate for a while, like a few hours if you can spare it, or at least half an hour. Pour the liquid into a saucepan. Put a tbsp cornstarch in a little bowl. Spoon out some of the liquid into the cornstarch to make a paste, then add the paste into the pot. I like to boil it down with a half a vanilla bean (with the seeds scraped out) and a cinnamon stick for a while, until it’s jammy. Mix the other tbsp of cornstarch with the strawberries and rhubarb until you can’t see any cornstarch left. Pour the jammy liquid back onto the fruit, mix well, and pour into your prepared pie shell.
Bake at 375 for an hour or so. Really every oven is different. In general it should bake 10 more minutes after you see the filling bubbling. The crust should be a golden brown.
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Dear Internet.
A brief lesson from your favorite wisdom purveyor. Who may or may not have spilled an entire bottle of Honest Tea on her crotch this morning!!! (coworker: hey, dark jeans, no harm done! me: i smell like green tea. coworker: something tells me that’s not the worst thing you’ve ever smelled like. me: WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW ME!) I kid! It wasn’t an entire bottle. It was only 1/3 of a bottle. And it wasn’t all on my crotch. Some got on my thigh too!!!!!
Have you ever had a secret dream, internet? Not the dirty kind where you explore some of your confusing feelings toward your high school track coach or something less specific that doesn’t blow my cover just kidding coach!!!! But the kind where you truly want to BE something, and it kinda terrifies you? Because you know if you try it, you’ll try it truly, with your heart of hearts, and that opens you up to failure and shame and self hatred. Like even more than the usual amount.
I have those dreams. One such dream is to really try my hand at the baking world. You know, just really fucking BAKE for a living. Because it makes me happy to see other people happy at something that I’ve created, and that’s a seldom-experienced feeling in the marketing world. I mean, I really put my heart and soul into that communications document, but I’m pretty sure the project managers didn’t notice that all the font sizes are consistent.
And now I’m going to reveal how to make your dreams come true. Don’t shout out the answer, because it’s not any of the things you’re thinking. It’s not hard work, it’s not dedication, it’s not wisdom, it’s not bravery. It’s having a really ambitious friend that does most of the logistical legwork and kinda prods you into it and you don’t even really have time to stop and think about how scary it is and all of a sudden your business has a federal tax id # (which, if left up to you, certainly wouldn’t have happened).
SO, now you know: I’m starting a business! And by “I,” I mean, not really me at all. My friends Lenore and Anna and I are starting a business. We’re baking pies! Like, for money! Look, we even made a website: http://threebabesbakeshop.com. We’re really doing it! Because, why not? One day we’re going to die, you know? Like, I don’t know what the meaning of life is, but I want to try a bunch of stuff before my brain is being consumed by the flames of cremation. Ground burial is bad for the environment, y’all!
And because you’re such a loyal K in the K follower, you get to see it all unfold. The life-grabbing and the business-starting I mean. Because I’m going to be blogging the shit out of the process!!!!!!!!!!!!
Basically so many pies are coming your way, you don’t even know. STRAP IN, KIDS!
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So have you guys ever used one of those futuristic toilets? You know, the ones where you don’t need toilet paper? I mean, what is *need* really, right? Right? Too much yoga? Ok, yeah, I hear you.
Anyway, have you ever sat on a robot toilet? I have, many times. Usually there is no real incident. I just sit and use it like it’s a regular toilet, mildly curious about exactly HOW the robotic toilet SHOULD be used. More specifically, what’s the…how does it? Work? Exactly? God I really don’t want to get into the specifics of this, but…..seriously whaaaat?
Ok. So then I was at work, and I was sitting on a robot toilet. Like I always do! AND THEN. Oh friends. Then. Robot toilet went haywire. Robot toilet started spraying me with a very warming spray of water. Without me asking it to! Sure, I’d been curious. Sure, I wondered how it all WORKED. But as the internet as my witness, I DID NOT ASK ROBOT TOILET FOR ITS WARM WARMING SPRAY OF WARMTH.
So, internet. I panicked. I pressed the stop button! Stop, robot toilet, stop!!!! I pressed that button so many many times. So many. I turned the power off. (It didn’t have its intended effect). I squealed. I laughed. I laughed so hard, because there I was: atop a robot toilet, being pleasantly sprayed, against my will, and I just didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t get up, because then the spray would spray everywhere! And all my coworkers would think….I don’t even know what they would think! But I didn’t want them to think it! So I just SAT there. For WAY TOO LONG. Press stop. Power off, power on. Stop. Stop. STOP. FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING HOLY I DO NOT WISH TO BE SPRAYED.
And then……it just stopped. After what I can only estimate to be 12 minutes of warm water. And I’ve never been so happy in my life.
Ever. That was the highlight of my life. The sweet sweet sensation of not being gently cleaned against my will. I just….guys, I don’t even know. Do things like this HAPPEN to other people, or am I pretty much using up the entire quota of insane things? Also occurring during this whole episode: the soaking of the back of my shirt. Let’s just say I walked backwards out of the conference room of the meeting I went to next. Verrrry slowly. Oh this? Just working my complementary leg muscles. Nice to meet you too, Mr Businessman.
Spelt and Greens Salad
1 cup spelt or semi-pearled farro or wheat berries
1/4 red onion, chopped fine
1 or 2 stalks celery, chopped fine
2 cloves garlic
1 bunch asparagus
1 cup peas (mine were totally freshy-fresh)
1 cup broccoli, chopped roughly
1/2 avocado, sliced
3 tbsp olive oil
3 tbsp white whine vinegar
1 tsp honey
salt & pepper
splash of lemon juice
some mustard maybe?
1/4 cup toasted sunflower seeds
Boil a few cups of water and pour in the spelt. Bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer and cook for 45 minutes or until the spelt is soft but a little bit crunchy.
While the spelt is cooking, heat the oven to 400. Line the asparagus up on a baking sheet and spread the broccoli out in one later. Drizzle with olive oil and skritz with salt and pepper. Use your hands to mix until the oil is evenly distributed. Place the garlic cloves, peeled but unchopped, on top of the asparagus. Roast in the oven for 20 minutes or until the asparagus and broccoli are slightly soft and a tad bit charred maybe.
Combine the red onion, celery, and peas in a bowl. Chop the garlic and add it to a small bowl. Add the olive oil, white vinegar, honey, lemon juice, and mustard and whisk until fully combined. Salt and pepper to taste. Add to the peas and mix to combine. Chop the asparagus roughly and add it along with the broccoli to the peas.
Once the spelt is fully cooked, drain and add to the bowl. Mix thoroughly and add more dressing if necessary. Fold in the avocado.
Top with the sunflower seeds, and maybe some feta or some parmesan or something. I dunno. Whatever.
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HOLD UP HOLD UP, I BAKED SOMETHING. No foolin. I baked something without the sweet sweet useful amazing wonderful where are you I need you in my life help from my Kitchenaid. Let’s talk about making a homemade funfetti cake without a stand mixer. Namely, why would you ever do it? Why? It’s stupid hard and it’s stupid frustrating.
But it’s colorful! And your roommate loves funfetti and it’s her birthday, so look beyond your own pain and suffering for ONE MOMENT in your life and do something for someone else, god!!!!!
You know what else? You can’t cream butter with an immersion blender. Now you know! Also not recommended: using a glass fruit bowl as a mixing bowl! Unless you are really into butter being speckled all over your body. And the counter. And the floor. I think there is still some in my eye.
Know what else? I’ve been doing yoga, friends. Like, consistently! How do you like THAT? The least spiritual human being I know is trying her hand at plugging into the energy of the universe. Ish. Sometimes it makes me want to tear my heart out because my muscles are so tight. They’ve been that way forever, and despite having somehow made my trade as a hurdler in college, touching my toes is a struggle in every sense of that word. So when yoga lady Neesha is all “now REACH through your hamstrings and PUSH into the ground and FEEL the earth between you and open your heart and EXPAND your fingers into the universe and APPRECIATE the fact that you are alive and you can feel!!!” I am too busy imagining that the searing pain in my body is never going to go away. My personal hell? Holding a yoga pose for all eternity. Especially downward facing dog. It’s not even a cliche…god DAMN that shit is painful.
But sometimes I hit some sort of grand alignment with the universe or something. Then I feel this solid energy within me. Like I’m on the cusp of tapping into all of this boiling potential. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s either that or I’m getting my period.
In other news, this frosting failed horribly. Again, immersion blenders: awesome for soup! Not super for whipping egg whites. But hey, the cake is WONDERFUL. Like really good, so much better than the boxed stuff. If you’re a funfetti nut and also a masochist, boy have I found the recipe for YOU!
Homemade Rainbow Chip Cake
from Not Without Salt
1 cup milk, room temperature
2 teaspoons vanilla
6 egg whites (3/4 cup)
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup cornstarch
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 sticks (6 oz) butter, room temperature
1/2 cup rainbow chips (recipe below)
Pre-heat the oven to 350*. Prepare 2 9″ cake pans (or 24 cupcakes) with parchment then butter and flour.
In a medium bowl whisk to combine the flour, cornstarch, baking powder and salt.
In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment add the egg whites. Start whipping the whites on low. When frothy add the cream of tartar. Increase the speed to medium. When egg whites start forming very soft peaks gradually add in 3/4 cup of the sugar. Whip the whites until glossy, medium peaks form.
Transfer the whites to a medium bowl and rinse out the bowl of the stand mixer (unless you are lucky enough to have two bowls for your mixer). Fit the mixer with the paddle and cream the butter and the remaining 1 cups sugar until light, 5-7 minutes, on medium. Scrape down the sides of the bowl.
On low speed add 1/3 of the flour mixture. Then add half of the milk and the vanilla. Alternate until both wet and dry are all added. Stop the mixer before all of the flour is combine. Scrape the bowl and finish mixing by hand so as not to overwork the batter.
With a light hand fold in 1/3 of the egg whites into the batter. While some egg white streaks still remain fold in the rest of the whites. Add the rainbow chips. Admire the beauty.
Divide the batter into the cake pans (or cupcake). Bake until the cake springs back when gently pressed. 25-30 minutes for the cake 17-22 minutes for the cupcakes.
Rainbow Chip Frosting
*I didn’t use this, but I’d imagine it’s quite good!
3 sticks butter, room temperature
8 oz cream cheese, room temperature
4 cups powdered sugar
1-2 tablespoons heavy cream
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 vanilla bean, seeds removed (or 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract)
3/4 cups rainbow chip (more if you need more brightness in your life)
Cream the butter and the cream cheese until completely smooth. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. On low speed add the powdered sugar. Add the cream, starting with 1 tablespoon. If you want a slightly looser frosting add the other tablespoon. Add the salt and vanilla seeds. Once again, scrape down the sides of the bowl then fold in the rainbow chips.
Well covered this frosting will keep in the fridge for up to one week, although some of the food color will start to tint the frosting. I recommend using it right away.
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