My body says yes

Hey friends, sick of chocolate and cookies and pies and cakes? I know my body is. My health hasn’t so much put up a white flag of surrender as it has rolled itself up into fetal position and whimpered “dear god please stop. please. just stop. i can’t.”

So I bought some green to go with my 3-meals-a-day-cookie-diet. I was going to make my tried and true raw kale salad, but there were so many PARTS to it. I was trying to clean and wrap presents and go on ridiculous errands, and I didn’t have time to make any casual homemade breadcrumbs or mortar and pestle any garlic cloves. So I was like , can I just fuckin…..eat this? The answer, of course, is yes…with the help of salt and olive oil. Basically the kale just becomes a conduit for salt and oil. They could be pieces of paper towel for all anyone cares.

I suppose that’s not fair. I do enjoy the taste of kale. I don’t cream my jeans about it, but it’s got some nuttiness and greenness and whatever. So I ate the whole bunch of it in the form of kale chips. All of it. All the kale. If you want, buy me a few drinks and I will tell you what happened to my poop the next day. You can actually just buy me a few drinks to NOT tell you poop stories. Which is my standard Saturday night bargaining and how I get free drinks from dudes.

Kale Chips
from the Horny Toad email newsletter (yeah………I subscribe. their fleece is booommmmbbb)

1 bunch of organic kale
olive oil
sea salt

Preheat your oven to 325°.  The secret to kale is that it responds really well to human touch, so use your hands to de-stem and tear it into chip-sized pieces.  Put the kale in a glass baking dish.  Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with sea salt.  Use your hands again to massage the kale until it’s completely coated with the salt and oil.  Think happy thoughts or hum a happy tune while you do this, and the chips will be even more delicious and special tasting. Bake them for about 15 minutes, more or less, depending on how crispy you like ‘em.

 

Extra special miscellaneous post!

I’m sorry, I just had to share this with the world. While doing work in Photoshop today, I got the following message:

Then, my brain imploded.

Tonight I’m making a cake! Stay tuned…..

December?

Wait, what? It’s mid-December? The waning weeks of 2011? What? What even HAPPENED this year? Oh wait. ALL OF THESE THINGS HAPPENED: ran a marathon, quit my job, rode the train to Glacier, got stranded in Montana, moved to New York, got a new job, went to the Florida Keys, moved BACK to SF, got into grad school, got a teaching fellowship, moved into a new apt, filed a restraining order, moved into another new apt, started a business, didn’t sleep, made a wedding cake, quit a business, made another wedding cake, attended my sister’s wedding, snorkeled in the pacific, got a tooth extracted, didn’t run another marathon (though i trained for it), biked up mt tam, quit my job (again), started a new job. ETC.

That’s a lot of things. I’m ready for a clean sheet of paper, as it were. I have scribbled the shit out of 2011′s. Like, I didn’t even pick out colors. I just overturned the crayons and went manic. But somehow my resulting drawing isn’t the worst year ever. It’s dense and soggy and there are all sorts of unsavory bits, but there’s also a lot of pieces that somehow got colored in and connected. I’m not ready to phone in my final thoughts on 2011, but I haven’t felt this decent about a year in a long ass time. Certainly not since, like, 2007. I don’t know about you, internet blog reader, but I might be starting to find some sort of comfort in the fray. Not the band The Fray. God, they’re terrible.

Since we are approaching “The Holidays,” my sister and I made some red stuff: pomegranate jelly from some donated-and-only-slightly-moldy backyard pomegranates. My sister did the grunt work of picking all the seeds out, which is super laborious and probably 100% the reason pomegranate juice is like $8 per oz. Also, it stains everything. I at least remembered to take precautions. I was wearing a white long-sleeve shirt, which I removed because–I am no dummy! Then, for further protection, I wore an apron. I started to push the pomegranate seeds through a sieve with confidence only to look down and see that I had completely sniped. There might’ve been a square centimeter of exposed fabric and that pomegranate laser beamed itself onto it. I couldn’t believe it. What a dick!

Bloodlusty pomegranates aside, this was really a beautiful jelly to make. Deep dark red, and tart! Though we started with about 10 pomegranates and ended up with about 1 pint of jelly, it was really quite beautiful and delicious. Whoever once decreed Quality Over Quantity must’ve made some pomegranate jelly in their time. That person probably also has never spent $100 on taco bell (yes. yes i have. you get SO MANY things!).

So go stain some shirts, reader. Go on a self-destructive dinner date. Cry when you read a shitty email from your ex. Pull a muscle riding up a mountain. Ruin your favorite pair of jeans mud-sliding. Let someone keep you up all night and kiss him if he doesn’t kiss you first. Bite off more than you can chew (and  just keep chewing with your eyes closed until you can swallow). I don’t have any of the answers, readers. All I know is that I made by far the most mistakes of my life this year, and somehow none of them are what I regret. Strangely enough, I ALMOST regret not making more. Well, yeah. Almost.

Pomegranate Jelly
adapted from several sources 

8 or 9 pomegranates (supposedly 5 cups of juice, though we got a measly 2. i guess our pomegranates weren’t particularly robust)
1 package pectin (6 fl oz?)
juice of one lemon
5 cups sugar (or 1:1 ratio with your juice)

Boil the juice, add the sugar and lemon juice, then the pectin. Boil for a few minutes, skim the foam, and jar.