27 / my favorite pancakes

September 28, 2015Leave a comment

I turn 27 this week.

pancakes

I recently watched the movie My Best Friends Wedding, with Julia Roberts in it. In the opening scene, we learn that she is a food critic and 27 years old. I first watched that movie over a decade ago. I remember thinking how put together she seemed, with her huge brick of a flip phone and unfortunate 90s suits and career that gave her travel and good food and the ability to write and get paid for it. For some reason, this woman that Julia Roberts was portraying exuded adulthood to me. I just knew I would have my career and life figured out by the time I turned 27. I predicted I would be married and well establishing in whatever I was doing, maybe even with a kid or two, because we all know the clairvoyant powers of 16 year olds. I knew that by the time I was 27, I would have my life together.

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labor day weekend / vegetable soup that’s actually good

September 11, 2015June 11, 2018Leave a comment

This past Labor Day weekend was long and really comfortable. I spent a couple of days with my college girlfriends at the beach. We ate and drank and laid on the sand. There was a baby in our midst and two more on the way. I could almost feel the change in the air: new life, (literally) new people, jobs and careers and locations were all ending and starting between the 10 of us. Even our conversations felt different, we talked about politics and being pregnant and giving birth and buying houses, all kinds of heavy, adult themes that weren’t even considered almost a decade ago when we first met, when our conversations were filled with boys, food, clothes, occasionally school, and whatever else undergrads talk about. I forget, it was so long ago.

After college when we all got married and transitioned into careers and churches and awkward, quarter life crises that some of us (or maybe just me) are still going through, we met new people and had new relationships that felt awkward and strained at best. Being back with the people who really know me, friends who need no explanation, who were at and in my wedding, and saw me really grow up, felt like a breath of fresh air. Which it literally was, since we were at the beach. Despite all of our personal changes, it was incredibly refreshing to be with people whose friendship with me hasn’t changed.

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cauliflower is not bread / kind of a salad / turkey meatballs

September 1, 2015June 11, 2018Leave a comment

dinner in a bowl : kind of a salad

There is a genera of people out there who like to substitute cauliflower for certain grains and bread products. Chop cauliflower small enough and pretend its rice or pasta! (it’s not) Or, an even worse travesty, mashing up cauliflower for baking and pretending it’s a pizza crust.

What?! If you have experienced the vast internet expanse that is Pinterest at all or have ever journeyed into the dark land of The Paleo Diet, you have probably been exposed to cauliflower pizza crust. You know what I call cauliflower topped with tomatoes and cheese? A salad. If you’re trying to find ways to cut calories, ok. If you want a salad, eat a salad. But if you want pizza, EAT A DANG PIZZA. Please, don’t mess with the perfection that is a toasty, chewy, delicious yeasted crust and pretend that cauliflower can replace it. It can’t. There is no such thing as ‘diet pizza’. Some things are sacred. Stop trying.
I’m done soapboxing. For now.

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