The Kale and the Fury

Detox shakes. Health shakes. Drink your veggies courtesy of your blender. Sounds good in theory. Sounds so damn healthy that you can't completely ignore the possibility that the effort might be worthwhile--the effort of hording said veggies, blending them, and holding your nose as you choke them down.

I'm not a big fad dieter, but I've been known to dip my toes into a fad or two, maybe even wade in knee-deep.

That "Sacred Heart Diet" was one of the longest weeks of my life and it didn't even do that much in spite of the pounds my sorority sister claimed to have lost while eating only the prescribed veggie soup.

And I'm not EVER going to gulp down a raw egg, blended or otherwise. But the concept of a fresh, good for you, homemade beverage can lure me in like the glowy antenna of some deep water predator.

I chose the least scary detox shake recipe I could find on the internet. Okay, the second least scary as the one that called for dark chocolate powder and coconut milk I couldn't finish because I didn't have any strawberries . . . or coconut milk, actually.

So here I am blending frozen blueberries and soy milk and a bit o cucumber with water and probably something else, and I'm thinking how hard can it be? It's not like I'm doing a freaking kale infusion here.

So wrong. I was so wrong.

Read the rest of "The Kale and the Fury" #HiddenKaleFTW . . .

Christmas in geekdom

Two absolutely awesome holiday projects to share with you today. And I can't take credit for making or even attempting either of them.

The first is this absolutely awesome gingerbread AT-AT complete with little gingerbread dude swinging from a rope beneath the belly ready for AT-AT destruction and a nice big boom.

(Found via.) At first I must admit that I got a little huffy because I thought the gingerbread dude was supposed to be an Ewok and, if this is an Ewok, then this is totally the wrong sort of Imperial walker (the Ewoks attacked the two-legged kind that were on the jungle moon of Endor). Then I looked a bit more closely at the gingerbread dude. No ears. A helmet. Sort of a snowsuit collar and boots. Oh, oh, oh! That's not an Ewok, that's Skywalker! Sorry, my bad. It's so hard to tell humans from annoyingly cute savages who like to roast their sacrifices over the fire while still alive.

This gingerbread walker is rightfully the four-legged kind from the ice planet of Hoth. Duh: Christmas = ice planet + gingerbread -- it took me a while, but now I'm on board.

The next exhibit I have from Christmas in geekdom is what the site BuzzFeed is calling DIY Holiday Nerdflakes. They're instructions/patterns for how to make paper snowflakes featuring shapes from all our favorite sci-fi shows. This one is the starship Enterprise.

They also have patterns for a Tardis, a Cylon, storm troopers and bounty hunter masks. But I think my favorite is the laughing Darth Vader because he looks a little like a malevolent Santa. And I bet that if you make that snow flake and showed it to your non-initiated friends (those who've never come to play in the land of geekdom), that they'd never realize that it wasn't Santa and then you'd have the joy of having pulled one over on them. Of course, they might start to wonder what that strange cog-like shape was in the middle of the flake, but just tell them it's a geometric pattern not the not the symbol of evil that made the galaxy shudder. Wha, ha, ha! Ahem, I mean, Ho, ho, ho!

Mysteries of the universe

So as I was eating Chinese food for lunch today -- I'm having a bit of a spat with my Jenny Craig counselor, thus my deviation to the land of vegetable lo mien -- I stumbled upon a question that perplexes me: the origins of baby corn.

Is baby corn the same as regular ears of corn but someone has picked them when they're small and young? Like how bonsai trees are actually regular trees that someone has just forced to their small stature?

Or is baby corn a genetically different breed of corn that will never become the corn I, as an American Midwesterner, am infinitly familiar with? Like how a teacup poodle will never become a standard poodle no matter how much you feed it?

These are the mysteries of the universe.

I suppose I could Wikipedia it, but I'm not that interested in the right answer; I'm more interested in posing the question. Which is probably why law school failed to interest me for even one semester.  So instead of spending my time looking up the answer, I thought I'd share with you my lunch-time thought process.

(picture shown is not my lunch)

Pepper Confidential

There's always plenty to choose from in August at the farmer's market in Michigan. I walked off with peppers, summer squash, a pound of green beans, celery, tomatoes, more tomatoes, peaches, and blueberries -- I was completely weighed down by the time I left and I think I spent only $17 or $18 on the lot of it.

The table I grabbed the summer squash from was running a pick-3 deal and so I grabbed some adorable tomatoes that looked like baby watermelons and then looked around for something else to get.  My options were, unfortunately, limited.

They had green beans, but I already had a pound of them in my bag. They had okra, which I won't eat unless it's breaded and fried. They had more tomatoes, but I'd already made a collection of red, green, orange and yellow tomatoes and, geez, there's only so many tomatoes a girl can take on even when she likes tomatoes.

So I grabbed a tub of peppers. Peppers are always useful, I thought.

Except I have no idea what kind of peppers I actually grabbed.

At the time, I only saw their tops and stems. And in the past I've purchased these translucent-ish somewhat green almost purple bell peppers at farmer's market. I thought I was getting those. When I got home and pulled them out of the bag and saw their entire shape ... I don't think I got bell peppers.

But what the hell are these things? No two of them are shaped alike. And I'm a little bit nervous to expose their secret peppery identities by just chomping down on one.

Edited to add: I poked around on the internet and found a visual guide to peppers which has led me to believe that these are in fact banana peppers. Great. Now I have to figure out what to do with like seven of them.

Deadline Food

When I was a freshman in college my mother would send me care packages of "study food." Bags of microwave popcorn and candy like M&Ms.

Now I think of it less as "study food" and more as "deadline food." When I'm on deadline (read: when I've procrastinated myself into a corner), I hie myself out to the store and come back with some variation of the following:

• 2 liter diet cola (Diet Pepsi or Dr Pepper preferred)
• Chex Mix
• Chocolate covered raisins
• Coffee beans
• Cereal

I don't know if deadline food is a safety blanket for me, or if it's that my mind is so much elsewhere that I give up and let myself consume mostly junk for a few days. Either way, right now I'm happy and on task.

The Unroasted Nut

I've been testing the smoke detector lately. That is to say I've been using my oven more often. The smoke detector -- actually both smoke detectors -- work great. They pick up the merest hint of smoke that not even I can catch when my nose is facing the open oven while pulling sheet pans off the rack.

Most of my recent mishaps have come from attempting to bake the at-home version of Chex Mix. The recipe is simply and it is easy to make; I'd just never done it in the oven before. When I was a teenager I made a batch of the stuff every time my friends were coming for a sleepover. But with my teenage attention span I always opted for the shorter microwave recipe that did not present quite the same challenges as the oven version.

So when it came time to "toss" the Chex mix baking in my oven, I opened the door, pulled out the rack, and used a spatula and tossed gently. Despite my gentleness a single Chex cereal square made a break for it and landed on the bottom of the oven. I tossed a curse word in after it, shrugged and closed up the oven.

Thirty minutes later the smoke detectors added their opinion of the situation as well.

There is a coded message in the direction toss gently every 15 minutes and that is remove pan from oven, toss gently, and then return to oven every 15 minutes. But did I listen even after the corn Chex square on the bottom did its best impression of a charcoal briquette? Nope. Just got more careful with my tossing.

As part of the recipe I bought a bag of raw peanuts on sale. On sale! I thought. Yay! No where did the more pertinent thought How is "raw" is different from "plain"? cross my mind.

Popping a handful of raw peanuts into your mouth is an unfortunate way to discover the technical meaning of "raw" as it pertains to peanuts. It is an equally awkward time to have the realization that the way a peanut comes out of the ground is not remotely the same as the way it comes out of the Planter's can. Having cracked and eaten peanuts in the shell, it never occurred to me that the infliction of heat, or roasting, on a nut made all that much of a difference other than as a way to adhere salt or other flavor, like honey to the nut.

I was so naive.

That handful of peanuts that I popped into my mouth tasted like peanut butter that had never even heard the word sugar. But with a worse texture than peanut butter. I'm making a face just thinking about it.

What I can't figure out is the reason anyone would want to buy raw peanuts at the grocery store. I'm guessing it's what you would use if you were keen on making your own peanut butter, but this store wasn't exactly a specialty store that would cater to people who care to spend their time doing such things as making their own peanut butter. Do you use raw or roasted nuts when you make candy? I don't know, but that's my best guess. Unless there are people who actually care to spend time roasting peanuts at home. Yes I did it, and no it's not that hard, but why would anyone (other than people who've misunderstood the label and now have to correct their mistake) want to spend several hours roasting their own peanuts?

Freezing and Reaming

When I awoke this morning it was 32 degrees. And -- as the weather man on NPR predicted -- it got colder throughout the day. At 4:45 PM it was 19 degrees.

So what did I decide to do during freezing temperatures and light snowfall? All my Christmas shopping, of course!

I even braved the mall.

My father wanted something we thought was called a lemon juicer. You know, the pointy thing you stick in a lemon to get all the juice out. Turns out it's called a lemon reamer. As in whoa man, that lemon just got reamed! I'm still amused.

Headless Horsemen (the food post)

If the ginger bread man and your pumpkin pie had a love child this is what it would look like.

I've decided to name these monstrous cookies Headless Horsemen for their gargantuan size, their scary unladylike look and their half pumpkin nature.

Over the past year I've been experimenting with cookies to see if I couldn't fuse a ginger snap with pumpkin pie filling to get a good cookie. The results were varied. But last night's attempt is pretty damn good - although huge in size. I didn't mean to make them that big (see the picture where it takes up the palm of my hand) but they bake nicely this way. They poof in the oven and then they suck up moisture like mad. The air conditioning has been on the entire time these creatures have been living in my kitchen and still they are noticeably moister now than they were when they came out of the oven.


It's been a summer of good food experiments. After going to Gambier, Ohio and eating at the Village Inn I wanted to try and recreate their Corn Cakes and Black Bean Salsa ... and I did! It not only tasted great but it was sooooo pretty.

Speaking of pretty, I would also like to note that it is tomato season in Michigan. Farmer's Market is filled with them the past couple weeks and they're just so lush looking that they're hard to not smile at.

I also did the world's best stir fry last night! I got the timing down perfectly for how each vegetable should cook -- a first for me -- but I didn't take pictures of that one.

As you might have guessed from all my fabulous cooking successes, the writing's not going so hot.

If you haven't already left my blog to run to your fridge after all this food talk only to discover that you really, really need to go to the grocery store, I'll ask you to put off shopping for just a few more minutes.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by the new website and made the launch party such a great success! If you haven't gotten a chance to check it out yet don't worry, a few things have changed but the site isn't going anywhere. Actually, as soon as I get my feet under me after my move there will be more stuff to see.

Arriving yesterday on the web was the first installment of Carful of Witches (which I continue to read as "careful of witches" because sometimes dyslexia never leaves you). The author, Emily Kajsa Herrstrom, is yet another "internet acquaintance" I've made over the past year.

And because it's getting to be that time of year again -- MFA application time, that is -- I'll be posting the statement of purpose (or one draft of it) that I used in my applications last fall. Look for that post later this week.