Kathy ended last week with one of those photodumps about food that make you feel like you’re being forced to watch, like, the 38th season of Survivor, where they’re only even producing it because it’s a contractual obligation, and they’ve run out of places to go so they’re filming in just some shitty suburb of Ft. Lauderdale where they’ve cut power off, and you’re hungover or just can’t be bothered to eat anything but soup all day, and — actually, this scenario sounds preferable to the experience of going through a “Lately” post. Kathy’s entrances are always forced,

What’s been on the menu? Tons of fresh summer produce!!

she always busts her ankle on the landing at the end,

Hope y’all are enjoying the dog days of summer!

and everything in the middle is just her taking photos off her camera and trying to remember what was in each Things In a Bowl creation. For instance. • Something she calls a “parfait.” It’s not. It’s the same thing she eats every morning in a jar.

 I’ve gotten lots of questions about this bowl over the years – it’s a Weck jar, actually!

I can’t understand who’s still asking her questions about her things-in-a-jar breakfasts, unless her readers are poorly written soap opera characters who lose their memories daily. The only time I’ve ever wanted to ask a question about a jar-related image was when I was looking for gifs for this site and I found this, which is CROPPED:• A very sad breakfast, because it included fakery bread that was

the last red, white and blue swirl of the summer!

• Another meal that thoroughly exhausted her, as her child required her to exert energy:

Mazen loooves pancakes, so we have them as often as I have the energy to make.

I don’t know what’s on those “pancakes,” but I think people traditionally say it’s good luck for birds to do that.

• Another such breakfast, ruined again on yet another day because her child wouldn’t eat the things she thought he should eat:

If I put blueberries in Mazen’s oatmeal he screams bloody murder, so I can’t add mine until after the oats are in the bowl.

•  Leftovers on top of salad she’s too bored to even mention. (She mentions “the lunch front” again, which makes me think about desert-tested drones dropping refrigerator-congealed Weck jars of oats into her lap, avoiding her tablet, of course. The reality is far more soporific, of course.)

What are those spidery legs — dill? — trying to crawl out of the bowl while lettuce escapes?

• Other leftovers, this time the noodle sort, whose only purpose is to allow her to, again express her displeasure with her child:

leftover chicken sausage that Mazen wouldn’t touch

 Yeah, I can’t say that I blame him. Unless Kathy is pioneering some new campfire cooking trend, how the shit did that get MORE burned?• Three restaurant lunches: one, with unspecified “blog friends” where she showed off a super appetizing view of her outsider art piece, Homage To Richard Serra En Pollo

(2014, gnawed chicken carcass, from the artist’s private collection)

Yeah, but I’d never send my bear to “manners camp.”

a second, a tofu and pimento cheese fakery salad, with

sisters Candace and Cara who were visiting Cville from Ohio!

and a meal at a restaurant named after a jar with

Baking Me Krazy Karen and her sweet daughter visiting from Canada!

Sweet Canadian daughter doesn’t understand the cropping either, Kathy, but thank you for giving us the widescreen of that traffic sign instead of pan-and-scanning it.

Can American mothers please start learning how to stand and imparting that skill to their daughters again? Why does 2/3 of the population of this photo look like they need leg casts or spinal braces? Girl on the left is affecting pigeontoe and ready to punch someone, and Kathy looks like something out of a Dick Guindon cartoon.  • One of Kathy’s Lost Weekend meals, a smoothie where she doesn’t even know what the hell’s in it. It could be the nitrogen waterfall of a freshly poured Guinness (doubtful) or it could be Fruit Fugue:

a smoothie – with kale and yogurt and things – probably more peach

• A dinner at “book club” where it sounds like she didn’t contribute reading comprehension or a fucking dish:

We had everything from fresh fruit to baked fruit in cobbler form to garden-fresh tomatoes and salads and Thai noodles. A yummy evening discussing Oryx and Crake, which I liked but didn’t love.

• The tiny remnants of what appears to be a miniature forest fire, plus a Carnac stone structure of “amazing!!!!” recipe for “panko tofu” that Caitlin (of “Healthy Tipping Point” I guess came up with, even though Kathy doesn’t even link to it):

Matt decided to try grilling some kale from our garden that turned into this dinner. …. Sweet potato fries round out the meal. ….I can’t wait to make that tofu again!

• Leftovers from that terrible thing where she spends a whole day baking unrinsed canned beans, frozen vegetables, nasty boneless chicken legs, and her memory:

I think this was actually a Sunday night dinner. Served with cheddar garlic bread and tomatoes.

• Some tofu, sweet potato, and eggplant thing she made her babysitting friend cook for her. Kathy claims the tofu was somehow “BBQ” and that the eggplant was somehow “fries” and that she somehow is totally a busy, coffee-tossing urb pro:

I prepped this whole dinner before my friend Sarah came to babysit for us in the afternoon. She put it in the oven at 5 and we ate together when I got home. Those eggplant fries were soooo good!

Isn’t that nice to have someone who’s at a house with cooking facilities all day who appears to be interested in making nice tasting food for people she cares about and can have it ready when said people come home from whatever it is they’ve been exerting energy for every day? Just an observation.• A soup Kathy describes revoltingly (and sloppily — does she write a sentence, then come back to it later and add more in a new sentence rather than just edit her original writing for coherency crunch?) as

a lentil, potato, okra and more kitchen sink soup. I was cleaning out the veggies it [sic] the fridge! There were some fresh lima beans in there too. Topped with cheddar and yogurt.

Not too terribly relevant to Kathy’s food blog, but Robin Williams achieved and related greater joy in half a second of “Mrs. Doubtfire” than Kathy will ever accomplish.    That would be a terribly low place to set the bar, but at least he made it fucking funny.

Monday’s post about Kathy’s weekend is about how she and Bath Matt had “lots of plans” including unspecified “events” —

but all of our plans changed.

Oh no, Kathy. Did a hurricane destroy a shed where your family had once stored a Slip N Slide in 1988? Did your dad get a paper cut from a dangerous coupon plummeting out of one of his walkin’ magazines? Did Churton come home from the doctor with crabs again?

Friday night I came down with a weird sickness. I thought I was getting a killer cold and had chills, aches and the like,

but less than 24 hours later there was no cold and I was better.

Puzzling! It was sort of the best kind of sickness to have though because I was just out of commission enough to get to watch a marathon of Survivor Season 16, but not so sick that was miserable or unable to care for Mazen, who kept me very well entertained.

Pawning Toddler Carbz off on her husband for a thrilling evening of pizza, Kathy “rested” and ate boxed soup and leftovers and “two big hunks” of cheese.

The next morning, she awoke “starving,” ate pancakes, stayed home with her child, and ate pizza

leftover pizza and calzone, which Hit.The.Spot.

while he destroyed her beach cottage in training even as she consumptively tried to rally by polishing the subway tiles, re-unfolding her laundry, and dusting the Family Oar.

….I was still recovering, and I got the house in order while he simultaneously spread toys over every inch of the house.

The promise of “buttery” fakery rolls, fakery cookies, ice cream, meat her husband prepared and produce he grilled,

and stupid beer she thinks tastes like pie — was all enough to suddenly bring her back to

….100% normal again, so we merged dinners with our neighbors and grilled out!

The first pumpkin beers of the season were sipped!! Never too early : )

Ms. Mindful Eating (she didn’t want to take her husband’s last name because she has a mug that supports voting rights, and is therefore a feminist) opined:

On Sunday, they ate

a big pot of family oatmeal

before Kathy grabbed her baby and took off for a beach vacation with her parents AGAIN, with Bath Matt

staying home because he’s going on a different trip by himself soon!

Maybe it’s just because Kathy is trying so hamhandedly to not talk about her personal life and doesn’t want to say something normal-sounding (like that her dude has business to wrap up before going to Carb Warrior Training Adventure, or that Karen has gamely offered to chaperone him to Smashmouth-Fest, or that he’s got mandatory volunteer training for Burning Kale, or whatever it is that he scampers out of town for in his black anklets) but “going on a different trip” really makes it sound like Bath Matt’s going up the river for twenty to life on a Pumpkin Oh RICO charge.

Whatever the case, the important thing is that someone bought something for Kathy:

Our master bedroom got yet another makeover this year. This time in the bed department!

We learn about the bed in Tuesday’s post, called “The Princess and The Pea: Sleep Number v. Tempurpedic.” Kathy’s the princess in this fanciful tale, and instead of showing up, bedraggled, at a castle, and being unexpectedly irked by a single pea at the bottom of a stack of 26 mattresses, her story is about how she tested out two beds that are so expensive that most people, retiring after a lifetime of exhausting themselves for work and children, can’t fucking afford them.

Yep, a king sizer! …. Merry Christmas to us!

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being able to pay a shit-ton for a bed at any age off your own labor, but using your “real food” blog to brag about the gigantic new bed you acquired somehow at Christmas, for really no other purpose than to talk about what a struggle the process was? Klassy.

Why was Kathy so happy to swap out the “pretty cheap” master bedroom mattress they’d had for eight years? For one thing, it was EIGHT years old, you guys. Additionally,

I am still obsessed with sleep. Pregnancy + a newbornhood leave a lasting impression!

Yeah, enjoy that when you’re trying to study for finals in college, Carbz.

And yet, sleep-deprived Kathy made the sacrifice to tell the world

I decided to share all of this for anyone debating between Sleep Number and Tempur-pedic. I wish I could have read a post by someone who had owned both!

Excuses Kathy had:

•  “how close in price a queen and king size were.”

• She just wanted one, okay? She’s “a sprawler! so I knew someday we wanted to get one.”

•  “The objective wasn’t so much the cost of the mattress, but having to get a new bed and bedding too.”

That sentence doesn’t even make sense as a normal goddamn sentence, so I’m putting it in the “excuses” category because Smugnom’s compost bin is outside soaking in vinegar or something.

She ends up trying out a memory foam mattress and blaming it on her friend Alice, because

every night when her husband gets into bed he says “Best. Mattress. Ever.” I wanted to love our mattress as much as they do!

I went to test out a Tempur-pedic and liked it a lot. But I didn’t know if I was going to loooove it …. [Bath Matt and I] needed to sleep around – ha!

Also to blame, obviously, is Toddler Carbz, who needed to “run around indoors,” requiring a trip to the mall, since it was raining. Oh, and Bath Matt, who was “bakery-friends with the sales woman and she was very sweet to us.” They came back a few days later, during a 40% off sale, and bit the bullet on a different “glorified air mattress” and felt like idiots:

I guess you could say we were sucked into good marketing

We were assured that it takes a while to find your perfect number. I seemed to be happy somewhere between a 35 and 40 and went to bed that night ready to wake up feeling the best I had in years. At 3am I woke up and knew we’d made a terrible mistake. I almost started to cry. As a stomach sleeper, I was nestled in a hammock of deflated air and my back hurt from a mattress for the first time in my life. Although the thought of sleeping on air sounds soft, I felt like I was sleeping on a tire.

In addition, she had to fuck around with a remote and “HATED” the “un-romantic” seam where the two halves of the mattress connected.

Luckily, the company’s customer service was “incredible!!” during Kathy’s week of phone calls.

They offered to do everything in their power to help me out, including sending $500 worth of memory foam toppers for free. I agreed to give it more time, but my gut just knew this was not my dream mattress. It was OK, but it wasn’t what I had hoped.

So she sent back the first bed and went back for a mattress that’s almost $3,000 by itself, the Tempur-pedic Cloud Supreme:

Kathy very much likes her new bed:

It is sooooooooooo comfortable on my stomach, side and back. There isn’t anything electronic to mess with. We absolutely love it!

And guess what I say when I get in bed every night: “Best. Mattress. Ever.” (It’s true – ask Matt!)

This required a new bedframe, so Kathy did the creepy thing and got the same one her newly married sister has, she describes in, like, gross “The Ice Storm” stumbling Nixon-era swinger language:

We saw hers at Christmas and loved it, and after all we share the same genes, so it makes sense that we’d love the same bed : ) Plus we’re both from near Raleigh, NC!

It didn’t require a bed skirt, but it did require $200 of West Elm pillow cases and a sham, a $180 white “for summer” blanket from Pottery Barn, a blue $36 Pottery Barn “Tonal Linen Flange Pillow Cover,” a $50 striped sham:

 (in the middle – it has a beachy look that I love!)

I mean, technically, so does this.

and the only item she discloses the price for, a set of Lands End sheets called the “Five Star Hotel Embroidered Diamond Sheet Set” she’s so happy to say she got for $60. That was the only happiness in her gigantic purchase, though, as

It was really sad to say goodbye to our four poster bed,

but it’s now in the attic to come back down when we have a house big enough for it in a secondary bedroom someday!

She ends with a flashback sequence of all the other boring ways her and Bath Matt have had their stupid room set up, and, to tie in with the dumb theme of the post title,

I whipped up this pea dish for lunch last week:

1 cup frozen peas, microwaved with a tablespoon of water until they were steaming
1 ounces goat cheese
1/4 tsp herbs de Provence
1 pinch salt
1 tablespoon shredded parmesan

It’s a little complicated to follow, but apparently, you’re supposed to mix things, and the cheese melts, and then you have to “enjoy!”

Kind of like macaroni and “peas” : )

Stop trying to make “writing” happen.

Yes, except that you’re not swapping out the cheese in macaroni and cheese for anything. You are not eating macaroni and peas. You are eating peas and cheese. And just the mere act of typing that makes me want to go to sleep for several stretches of 10.26 hours, so, yeah, Kathy, I kind of understand now.

On Wednesday, Kathy has guest blogger Michelle Remkus, a Registered Dietitian (like Kathy) who earned a master’s (unlike Kathy) visit the Kath Buys Real Things blog for a talk about what 100 calories worth of various foods looks like.

Remkus writes at “Live…Don’t Diet,” and, Kathy writes,

did a cool visual collage of 100 calories 24 different ways to give you an idea of how calorie density varies. Pretty cool! I’ll take the blackberries please!

So, almonds are equal to gummy bears? Thank you for the diet advice, Guest RD. You are really helping people make awesome diet choices.

This is a totally innovative idea that nobody’s ever done before, not in 1930, an age where eating a pound of tomatoes and “loaf sugar” sounded delicious, I guess —

— and certainly not in recent years, when people have obviously used the base 10 number system to base their calorie-counting on, since it makes so much sense and has thusly prodded people in totally healthy directions:

Sure, FitSugar has done its own look at what 100 calories in vegetables looks like (answer: if you’re throwing spinach and carrots and cucumbers and radishes into a bowl and feel like you need to count calories there, you are doing it wrong),

as has Greatist (with its hilarious recipe for a “Mexican Potato), as has Hungry Girl (who makes shirataki noodles sound more delicious than any of Kathy’s essays on cake) as has Women’s Day, Food Network, Ladies’ Home Journal, WebMD,  and so on and so on.

But the world totally needed another reminder of this astounding research into Figuring Out Portion Size Of What Will Probably Be 5% of a Day’s Restricted Diet. Remkus uses her years of advanced studies to clue in us hapless fats that some foods take up more room than others, and yet provide the same amount of calories, but you probably don’t know that because your brain is kind of stupid:

Something called “mindless” eating can take over and without you being conscious of it you may devour 500 calories of a snack food. For example only having 13 gummy bears can be difficult when you have a whole bag in front of you.

The piece takes a weird hairpin turn into gambling problem PSA at this point.

If you’ve ever over-indulged and ate a whole bag of potato chips, you aren’t alone. In fact millions fall victim to this unconscious eating. Unfortunately, this mindless eating habit can be the answer to many people’s weight gain.

She talks about

Food psychologist Brain Wansink, PhD

who obviously knows what he’s talking about. HIS NAME IS BRAIN. Dr. Brain used his years of schooling to discover that people ate more if they ate out of “ginormous” buckets and stuff, which is why Kathy switched to eating things out of tiny bowls with tiny decorative souvenir spoons, which has clearly kept her weight at a dainty 26 pounds with no additional effort. Tell us more about this, Remkus, because it all sounds so healthy:

The best approach is to keep the candies, chips, and soda out of view and instead keep healthier foods at eye level.  By filling your refrigerator and pantry with fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy, and whole grains you are more likely to snack on these healthier, lower calorie foods. Another change is to swap out your large bowls, cups, and plates for smaller ones. The smaller our plates are, the less food we can fit on them, and the less food we will eat overall. Lastly, don’t eat in front of the TV or computer.

Remkus then cites an article about how people who were given macaroni and cheese with squash and cauliflower blended in ended up eating fewer calories.  Those people are obviously better at making their health and diet a priority, and I’m sure that has nothing to do with the fact that anyone who could eat that meal would have squash and cauliflower, the time to prepare them, the time to blend them in with macaroni and cheese, and the time to clean those additional dishes. As we all know, people who eat things that come three boxes for a dollar have lots of extra time, and simply make the easy dish because they would rather devote their time to eating food-stamp bonbons in a bubble bath while watching “Long Island Medium.”

In conclusion, she says that you should just learn

to eat mindfully and follow portion control …. Reach for fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy, lean meats, and whole grains.

And ends with a really crappy attempt at good writing:

by eating these healthy foods you get more bang for your buck…or I guess I should say more bang for your calorie.

Especially since this is what she’s actually saying: Eat stuff like spinach and fruit and nuts and lean protein. The lower calorie density will satisfy you more than if you ate a Dollar Menu serving of fries, because they will have more nutrients. And it’s just that easy, isn’t it?

Because we all know that humans are capable of being satisfied just as easily by five gallons of spinach instead of a slice of pizza, right? Because it’s not like anyone has already used up their stores of willpower by the time they get around to making a five-second decision of what food they have the time to eat and the money to purchase.

It’s simple, guys. Just reach for the blackberries and bell peppers that are obviously at your disposal, and if you don’t, just know that you’re getting the judging, pitying glances of everyone with a blog and an RD certification, because they know better.

Kathy ended the week with posts on Thursday and Friday where she just posted about the “short week” of beach vacation she took with Toddler Carbz and her parents, calling it “Summer’s Last Hurrah.”

This place is just so beautiful. We are lucky to be able to be here! We have also been very lucky with the weather. It has been flawless!

….

We are soaking up every last drop of summer fun! We don’t often get to come to Bald Head in the prime season, but we’re renting a family friend’s 3 bedroom house, and it was the perfect late summer getaway.

Kathy illustrates this with a picture of the wake behind the ferry you have to take to get to Male Pattern Baldness Island, one from the water’s edge of the beach house where they’re staying, one of a fake fish hanging under a “WELCOME” sign on the side of who knows what, this butt-dial of a photo —

— one of her child running all alone down a boardwalk, and some pictures of her parents actually looking like they’re experiencing joy in the presence of Toddler Carbz

I hope Buzz knows how spontaneously beautiful and happy she looks in this one.

From the comments:

But Saint Kathy reminds us that she and her family haven’t been to the island since OMGlast summer, missing out on so many days of doing things you simply can’t do in dumb Charlottesville, like go for walks, eat fakery bread, read “Orange Is the New Black” and drink wine.

Plus, there’s all that awesome island culture, like visor bans for dudes, “dress denim” and croquet-mandatory “white attire,” available to people who are guests of island property-owners:

Even though her “precious DSLR” is broken and she has “had to” take photos with her cell phone, she still bravely manages to show her audience how much everything has changed in an entire year. They got to their beach house, cracked some wine, let Toddler Carbz have a nap, and, uh, went to a pool snack bar for nachos, “summery” MillerCoors beers, and a “So cheesy!” pizza. Or, I guess if you’re describing it like Kathy, they

dressed up for dinner and headed to the Peli for pizzas!

Via Yelp.

They consented to a trip to “some playground fun” for her child, after which they retired to something rather “Motel Hell”-ishly called “family ice cream bowls!”

The next day, Kathy

woke up and went for a quick run

It’s a good thing she specified that, since two-mile runs are so frequent in one’s sleep.

She then selflessly threw herself into the Thanksgiving-scale task of making egg sandwiches for three adults and one small child and dumping blueberries out of a container

before going to the “Shoal’s [sic] Club,” the private club their home-owning pals got to be members of after passing a credit and criminal background check, paying a $12,000 initiation fee, and $150 a month, so that Kathy could take lots of photos of the back of her son’s and her dad’s heads as they stood on the beach and her interesting decisions about her child’s safety, whether on a golf cart

{I sit next to him so he’s sandwiched between us and act as his safety seat.}

or far, far, far, far away at the Shoals Club pool,

something so dumb and preposterous it made it to the front page of Smugnom mothership GetOffMyInternets for flouting the American Academy of Pediatrics’ number two pool safety rule:

Whenever infants or toddlers are in or around water, an adult – preferably one who knows how to swim and perform CPR – should be within arm’s length, providing “touch supervision.”

Luckily, Kathy’s pals are there to chime in about how mean it is to care about children’s safety, and, what, do you, like, buckle your kid in, too, like a dick?

As Kathy would say, do you guys remember when they put 4-Days-Old Carbz in the Boba Wrap and didn’t have him upright or exposed and Kathy similarly dismissed people who expressed concern —

katheats He was OK… We were watching him and fixed shortly after

katheats Face was still up

— but then scrubbed the image from Instagram?!?!

Anyway, after solitary hour at the pool, Kathy amazingly managed to set out a single toaster-pastry’s worth of crumb-scattering fakery shortbread,

a big bowl O chips

and bowls of mixed greens, tuna, and cheese for her dad and recovering-from-cancer-surgery mom

before collapsing into a nap from the exhaustion, awaking finally for dinner out at the Rogaine Island Society’s Grillllllle.

Mom and Dad are taking ME out to DINNER!

The family shared six baked oysters “topped with breadcrumbs and pico” for $13, Kathy ordered the $12 fish tacos

which came with a black bean cake on the side.

and coyly consumed some omgalcohol:

And I had an epic glass of wine. Or two…

They ate Breyers ice cream, the brand that so bedevils the New York Times, back at their rented home, and Kathy squealed that it was

my fav!

The next day, they ate fakery bread, eggs, and watermelon, had a “family walk” on the beach, and

spent our mid-morning time by the pool to keep things simple. 

You know, since this family totally over-extends themselves during typically complicated days of eating and activities you do in the dentist’s waiting room when your phone is dead. When they finally needed “a break from the sun,” Kathy revved up her hostess skills to whip up

a tuna salad with red pepper, tomato, capers and pickle, plus mayo and mustard. Served with wheat thins (best crackers!) and two drinks: a little beer and sparkling water.

She read her child stories, put him to sleep, read, and

I did a little work (this time with no wine)

before what Kathy describes as “a night on the town!” — a free wine tasting that just thrilled Kathy, as

The nice gentleman pouring gave us pretty heavy-handed pours

But, as usual, the family was forced to retreat to at “the Peli” when Toddler Carbz ruined his mom’s buzz:

We attempted to go to one restaurant in the harbor and had a complete meltdown.

Saying she was “thankful” for the “casual atmosphere,” Kathy drank another MillerCoors beer and ate an “Asian arugula salad” and pizza before “Family ice cream time” back at the rental house in front of the moonlit and softly crashing waves. No, just kidding. They turned on the television for

a little So You Think You Can Dance watching. I just bought tickets for the tour in Richmond and am so excited!!

For her last day of vacation (before what would surely be a grueling Friday and then, hey, the weekend!) Kathy went for a 30-minute run, using it as the perfect way to prime a day of complaints.

• About her child and her body:

It’s a real struggle for me to run first thing in the morning these days. One because I don’t have a babysitter and Mazen wants to eat and play rather than get in a stroller, but two because my body just feels more tired and stiff than it used to.

• About the ocean’s behavior when they went there after breakfast:

the tide was now very far in and kept us smushed up on the dunes

• About the not-boozy-enough drinks at the Bald Head Island Club:

where mom and I split a pre-lunch pina colada! Not sure they added more than a dash of rum – we didn’t taste or feel a thing!

• About her unbearably smothering family, who, after a lunch of potato chip-topped salads and melted cheese on bread,

allowed her out shopping so she could buy a new hat and some glass Lily and Laura bracelets for $10 each, to match her new calorie-counter strap.

First time on the golf cart all alone!

• And about her destructive child:

They supposedly “dressed up to go out” to “an art reception” at All About Art where there was seemingly free wine and snacks and metal pig sculptures for Kathy’s child to kiss. Deciding that buying fresh fish to cook was too expensive, Kathy et famille returned to the BHI club.

There, they positioned Toddler Carbz’s toys in frame and had wine, fondue, fish, fries, and “sweet potato fries” for their last meal,

and Kathy was really upset that she had to go home to her not-at-all-beach-vacation-like life where she can drink wine, read fluff, eat ice cream, and, um, plan for her second-child-postponing vacation to Napa and her trip to see dancers from a TV show in Richmond in a few months.

We finished the trip with more ice cream at the house. We are sad to say goodbye to this beautiful island!

I mean, jeez, Kathy. You have a gold-painted crab and an ornamental oar. If your life were any more littoral, you’d be shaking sand out of your shoes.

My apologies for the hugely late recap of Kathy’s entire week, although I guess I could say I’m merely trying to attempt her style of eating things in the first week of the month, writing about them in the second week, going back in time three weeks to make things interesting, and then teleporting through the space-time continuum upon hitting “post” because her travels have resulted in Pee Paw’s untimely death and Buzz getting married to local jerk-turned-casino-jerk Biff Tannen.

Don’t you dare speak that way about Pee Paw! You’re not even half the magazine-walker he was!

So after Kathy’s latest vacation, she posted some

sad cell phone photos!

from the trip from Bald Head Island to her parents’ home in Hillsborough and back to Charlottesville. With her sister and brother-in-law in town, the parents took their slacker grownup children out for a dinner of complaints and Kathy’s shrill insistence that she ATE JUST A TINY AMOUNT!

We tried to go to Bull City Burger, but it was too crowded and loud, so instead we went to Tyler’s Taproom. I had fried pickles, a beer, a salad and fish and chips that hit the spot. (A lot of this was shared!)

The next day was a penitent dredge through oatmeal, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, biological processes —

After digesting, we went running

— and being the superficial magazine bullet-point definition of healthy, following the running with a mile-long walk out to eat salads:

Mine was piled high with vegetables (I feel like I have a lot of veggie eating to do this week!) and I shared a kombucha with Larbs.

Did you also eat a lip balm or a travel-sized sunscreen or a votive candle with a screw-top lid? What IS that?

Kathy and child “road-tripped” home and met up with Sarah, her “BFF,” house-sitter, and witness to Kathy’s tireless efforts at being a supermom:

The kiddos played in the yard while I frantically unpacked from our trip

and made dinner while chatting with Sarah.

After a dinner of meatless lentil pucks, baked sweet potato and parsnip “fries,” there was a slumber party, Kathy made everyone apple pancakes for breakfast, bought groceries, did housework, and then met up again with Sarah at her newly renovated house in “the country.”

The house came with a killer pool that was just prepped for human swimming!

We splashed around and enjoyed burgers on the grill and simple salads.

Kathy ends her post by reassuring the world that her camera isn’t broken, just her lens, but that she liked using her cell phone, saying in comments that she uses her phone a lot anyway, and, huh? —

— and mentioning that there were other hours of her weekend where she did more, unspecified

catching up on house work and prepping for the week ahead. Happy Summah!

This is the first image result for “summah,” and I think that says everything you need to know about that “word.”

Tuesday’s post is sponsored by Kathy’s favorite monolithic cereal company, General Mills. Oh, I’m sorry. It’s not a post. It’s something far more personable and intimate:

This conversation is sponsored by General Mills

Oh, brother.

Worst cat food dish ever.

Okay, so Kathy’s introduction is about how she loves oats and eats them

for breakfast in some way or another everyday

She says that oats are

also one of the worlds [sic] healthiest foods! They’re packed with manganese and phosphorus, good-for-you fiber, antioxidants and energy.

Worst HOA supplemental leaflet ever.

I want to know more about bad-for-you fiber and this “energy” thing Kathy’s talking about. Kathy’s readers have some questions too:

I also want to know if she literally went to the page about oats on World’s Healthiest Foods (which she’s raved about since 2008, citing it since then in rehashes about why eggs, kale, and groats are so awesome for you), scrolled to the bar graph on nutrients, and decided it would look disingenuous if she mentioned molybdenum. Maybe, in addition to doing their laundry for them, Davidson College had servants to cite sources for students’ research papers too.

From the Washington Post, May 8, 2014.

Kathy lists more awesome facts about oats

(from my own research and interpretation):

like that they’re low in fat, which is a total surprise to no one, that they’re

packed with beta-glucans, a type of fiber famous for lowering cholesterol

that they have “several antioxidants,” including

including one unique to oats

which isn’t totally true — it’s just that Kathy’s not going to go eat butterfly eggs and wilting carnations, where avenanthramides are also found. She then links to a 10-year-old press release in something called the Kansas City infozine, of all ridiculous places, about how maybe there’s way more antioxidants in grains than we know. Is this important? Well, it gives Kathy an excuse to talk about how she has “favorite nutrition scientists” (like this one) whom she has name-dropped “frequently in [her] Real Food research,” so.

I couldn’t define “antioxidant” if you asked me to, but I think this cat could.

She also uses this exact image again:

Kathy’s also a fan of oats because there are “studies” where oats are linked to reduced risk of diseases, and because all the magnesium you need in a day can be found in one and a half cups of dry oats, and magnesium

is a co-factor to more than 300 enzymes. That’s a lot of processes to have a hand in!

What this cake said, Kathy.

To conclude, Kathy is impressed with oats because 300 is a big number, and not because of science:

I’d probably eat oats even if they didn’t have research to back them up because they are versatile, filling and delicious! 

Anyway, she finally stops

all this oat love

and gets around to the point, which is that she read the Wikipedia page on Cheerios and that she has decided that Cheerios are “real food” because she “might have” the ingredients to make them if she ever wanted.

When I visited General Mills last year, my big question to them was: Could I make Cheerios in my home kitchen if I had the time and resources? This is always my ‘Is it real food?’ question. The Cheerios team says yes you can.

What else can you do regarding Cheerios? This.

That’s awesome, Kathy. I’m sure no one with a food blog could be expected to come up with any more of a “big question,” like, for instance, Why the fuck did General Mills give more than a million dollars to the effort to defeat a ballot initiative that would have required shit with genetically modified ingredients to say so on the label? 

No? How about another question? Like, um, okay, General Mills, What were you thinking with that shit where people had to agree not to sue you if they downloaded a coupon? WTF?

Too easy?

Warning: This is the boring, preachy part.

How about this one: General Mills, why did you have to get the shit bugged out of you to the point where it took you until 2010 to certify that, by 2015, the palm oil you use in Cheerios and other products wouldn’t rely on child labor

and the destruction of the habitat of orangutans and elephants?

One of the least horrifying images you find when you Google palm oil and deforestation.

And if we’re going down that path, let’s just go ahead with this: How do you justify protesters inundating you with photographs from the scene of palm oil production resulting in the literal running over, beating, and burning of these beautiful creatures — and decide that the best way to respond is to dismiss protests as “nonevent“s and sleep at night without a bottle of sleeping pills and a note expressing sorrow upon regret upon eternal begging for forgiveness, you absolute fucking careless, scummy pieces of shit?

Yeah, we know. Enjoy your private jet to hell.

Maybe we know the answer; you know that the regular citizens with the largest voices — people like Kathy — don’t give a shit about any of it, are willing to sell out their humanity and their ability to spend their time advocating for justice, awareness, or meaningful criticism, even a second of it, as long as you send her a free box of Lucky Charms and a handful of quirky “Cheerios” seeds.

Because who cares about all that when Kathy has burning questions like if she can make a Cheerio? General Mills came through on that one like a champ, inspiring Kathy like her very own Professor Keating of agriculture!

To challenge me to follow through with my question, they sent me a few oat seeds to plant …. I’m sure this variety of oat has special characteristics to make Cheerios taste good.

Kathy rambles on about how “sustainable” and “hardy” oats are and how they

usually require less fertilizer and pesticides …. [and] typically rely entirely on rainfall – instead of irrigation – for water

Under the care of Kathy, her amazing oat seeds have been “coming up and at ‘em” and eventually did this:

I don’t have any oat seeds to harvest yet (that’s part of the time + resources conditional in the real food question) but I’m sure if I kept loving on these I’d have real oats to harvest and then cook. I’ll keep you posted as time goes on!

She concludes that she will figure out if she can create her own Cheerios in another post, if we can stand the suspense.

Ahem.

So.

Wednesday’s post, titled:

helps take one’s mind off the burning question of “CAN CHEERIOS BE MADE?!” by talking about things that you can drink that don’t have alcohol in them. Did you know such things existed? I certainly didn’t,

and neither did Kathy’s readership, apparently. 

Kathy starts out with a charming anecdote about how she was raised like a child in France, introduced to the ritual, normalcy, and food-enhancing attributes of fine spirits gradually, so that she would appreciate a leisurely glass of Châteauneuf-du-Pape with dinner instead of downing shots out of parental view as an underage college student:

Y’all know I love me some cocktail hour. It’s a tradition I grew up with (although obviously not always with alcohol involved!) When I was young it meant Shirley Temples with cheese and crackers!! To me cocktail hour signifies the end to the day (whether that’s a day of sightseeing or work meetings) and the beginning of a relaxing evening.

Yes, “work meetings”! Thank you, Kathy. I needed a laugh.

Those cherished ginger ale and maraschino beverages (which she’s actually never mentioned on her blog, compared to the dozens of times she’s talked about having hangovers) have blossomed into something grown-up and thoroughly pleasant, she explains in something resembling ad copy:

I find myself craving a drink everyday at 5pm, especially if I’m about to start cooking. But that craving isn’t for alcohol itself (that’s just a nice bonus!). The craving is for the clink of a glass, a dance of flavor on the palate

and the nostalgia of that time of day.

There’s nothing like a glass of wine to sip while cooking, but alcohol (as you know) isn’t something I recommend daily for your healthiest life.

Yes, Kathy, we know there’s “nothing like” a lot of things in your world. Perfectly poached eggs, pumpkin pancakes, toasted coconut on a crispy, crunchy sandwich, and so on.

Anyway, all this is just a lead-up to Kathy’s list of five things you can drink that will

help you unwind without the booze.

Kathy’s list is truly revolutionary:

• kombucha, for

the intensity of a mixed drink without all the loopiness

The kombucha may not have booze in it, but the camera does.

• juice, served in a wine glass

• iced tea, because her life sitting at home and taking care of one child is so relentless and requires such long hours that, she says,

…. I need something tasty on ice to sip while I relax on the porch at 5:00.

• Soda water with juice or “a splash of wine or beer” in it:

The bubbles ooze fun

and a splash of juice, lime wedge, lemonade or a cherry add a hint of flavor so you don’t feel like you’re having just another water. 

Don’t bother to turn on any lights, clean your table, or wait for the ship to stop listing before you take your photo for extra fun.

At least she’s stopped calling it “KERFweiser.”

Love comes sneering, February, 2011

• Things that are tagged as “mocktail” on Pinterest. Which, I suppose, could just sum up the entire post. I wanted to write a list of things that aren’t booze that you can drink. Here’s a Let Me Google That For You link for you, because that will tell you everything you need to know. Bet you didn’t know you could look up things on the internet all by yourself, did you?

Her favorite, she says, is:

a combo of lemon and lime juice with a little simple syrup. Served in a martini glass of course! 

She ends by remind her readers that she’s only writing the post now because she’s been meaning to forever, and that, “alas,” it doesn’t mean she’s pregnant, because she’s not. Because if we’re defining tragedy, surely that’s at the fucking top of the list.

Kathy’s post on Thursday is about how a company sent her a box of stuff that allowed her to obtain things for free and spend less time thinking about her inconvenient child, a win-win. The “Kiwi Crate” is a box with stuff in it and you can make a few crafts from the felt and popsicle sticks or whatever they send, and they send you a magazine too, and Kathy, with her writing style more suited for a community college course catalog that, for some reason, is puppyishly desperate for attention, is completely flummoxed trying to make it all sound as amazing as possible:

Focuses range from art, science, games to imaginative play, and more.

Unable to think about why this free thing might actually be cool, she raves about how there was a “bonus sticker” included, and how there are “lots of choices” — meaning that you can buy one, or get a subscription, or you can pay more to get more stuff if you have more kids, or you can buy other things from them, like party favors. Kathy decides that the stuff is “BRILLIANT!” and a “rainy day saver”

If it comes neatly in a box, kids are going to go bonkers. Of course you can go out and buy materials and to create your own crafts. And you should. But the beauty of Kiwi Crate is that it comes in a box, in the mail, with everything neatly tucked inside.

She brought her “very cute” free shit to her most recent beach trip, which was great because she didn’t have to put any thought into it or bring anything of her own. Unfortunately, not-quite-2-years-old Toddler Carbz ruined things by not being old enough for her sponsor’s needs: She and her mother had to help him decorate puppets, she had to take away the scissors, he made it really hard to photograph what he was doing (as we know, it’s way easier to get photos when he just sits and cries), and it took him “a while to get what we were doing,” even getting watermelon “all over” his shirt, requiring a change of clothing. The conclusion was that Kathy decided her child “loved” playing with puppets, “had fun” making noises, dragged the crafts to dinner throughout the week,

WAT IS EVEN.

but was “probably still a little young to be the ideal age for this.” To pad out her post, Kathy made a recipe from the sponsor’s website for “No Bake Peanut Butter Bites” because they required the least amount of effort. What little was required was an incredible imposition, though, because her toddler sucked at his tasks:

We made them together, and he loved dumping each ingredient in a bowl. I rolled most of the balls and gave him one to do himself, which looked more like a worm than a ball at the end of it!

When the graham cracker, peanut butter, sugar, honey sunflower seed and raisin creations had set, her undiscerning child was happy to eat them even though she knows how they totally could have been made healthier:

They were super easy and are soooo delish! While I’d put them more in a cookie category than a snack due to the powdered sugar, they are still packed with healthy ingredients like sunflower seeds, raisins and good ole peanut butter. I’m already pondering if I could make these with whole wheat flour and oats and cut way back on the sugar! But for an after-dinner treat, Mazen gobbled them down : )

Her commenters are less pleased with the awesomeness of it all, with 12 of them saying they don’t enjoy the amount of sponsored posts on Kathy’s blog lately and two of those saying they’re getting turned off of reading the blog altogether. One calls them:

very cumbersome …. rather excessive as of late …. not enjoyable to read.

Another asks for Kathy’s feedback — — and says she’s

really disliking these sponsored posts.

meaningful content that brings readers back

gives the impression that all these bloggers will sell themselves out to the highest bidder. Kath (and other bloggers) might want to start asking companies how many other posts they are planning on sponsoring, and evaluating whether or not being part of a saturation campaign weakens their own personal brand.

The last commenter who doesn’t get a response from Kathy flat-out says she doesn’t

enjoy these sponsored posts and I never even read any of your Guest RD ones. I come here to hear from YOU and to read about your life, I don’t really have any interest in reading something someone else writes or about random products sent to you to review.

Thankfully for Kathy, three people chime in to say they’re not bothered, one writing:

Wow….it really is amazing. No one is required to read this blog. If you don’t like Kath doing sponsored posts don’t read the blog. She has stated many times that she does utilize the blog for sponsored posts and as a source of income from time to time. I have a great idea….Kath go to college and become a Registered Dietician and then why don’t you go ahead and give us all advice for free all the time and let us dictate what you write about on YOUR blog. Are you kidding me?? If Kath charged us all to read her blog that would be one thing and I could see someone having a right to complain about what she does or does not post about. But until you are subscribing to her blog and paying her it’s a bit selfish to complain…….

Kathy ended the week — yes, last week, and I’m going to continue as an homage to her nonsensical and selective posting schedule — with a list of the things that she ate, doing so in a way that proved that she’s as talented at inserting out-of-place complaints in basic lists about her life as she is at putting nut butter on inappropriate foods.

Ridiculous things she consumed:

• “Drippy sunbutter.” Which, uh, thanks. Now I know this exists.

• A “smoothie in a bowl” with fakery granola made from lemon-flavored buckwheat on it.

• A lovely cheek-puncturing straw’ed seltzer and soup with yogurt on top, which is

the best because there is no prep or cleanup!

• Eggs she made an unnamed friend help her hard-boil for a one-egg-per-person lunch where said friend also had to eat fakery bread and leftover vegetables.

• Something she described as “one of the best salads of the summer,” even though it was full of leftover grill-scorched produce and leftover meal-planned tofu — from this dish, which I assume is some sort of earthquake-themed sandwich dish:

Kathy is amazed that the dish managed to be improved by her free $60 olive oil:

I made a homemade dressing [with] some of the Oliviers & Co. products – I think that was the secret!

The “secret” certainly wasn’t anything else in this trough of wilting misery.

• Meal-planned chicken on skewers in stale, cold breadsleeves

tucked into pitas …. Easy peasy.

• Dough full of cheese:

Matt and I have been on a calzone kick.

• A boiling hot soup in boiling hot August that came not from inspiration, hunger for a particular, fresh ingredient, or a craving for something delicious, and needed cheese and yogurt on top for it to be palatable.

This soup was the result of me cleaning out the fridge. I combined lentils, chicken broth, potatoes from the market, carrots, celery, okra, peppers, eggplant and more into and [sic] pot and let it simmer for 30 minutes.

That’s not a soup, Kathy. That’s what they saw when they uncovered that horrific well underneath that house where they buried that boy with the medal in “The Changeling.”

And Kathy, of course, does more complaining than actually discussing her diet.

• She is suffering with frozen Whole Foods waffles because her readers have slacked in selling her on a useless appliance:

I’m still debating buying a real waffle maker – convince me!

Can we convince you to buy a collection of mugs that don’t look like they came free with Edible Arrangement gift baskets instead?

• Summer threatens to end soon, even though Kathy is

totally not over the beach, the pool, cookouts or hot days

• And yet, it’s not autumn yet, which Kathy wants it to be because that’s her

very favorite time of year: pumpkin season.

• She had to make a smoothie in order to convince her inconvenient hell-child to eat

summery fruit …. the only way to get Mazen to eat berries. He turns his nose up at all of them!

• Her child “hated” a breakfast of

 

leftover quinoa and millet mixed with yogurt, mashed banana and sunflower butter

• Bread her husband made at work was good, which was very surprising to Kathy, who called it

an unbelievably delicious salad topper

• It’s difficult to be social because her child sleeps so much, from 2 p.m. until 4:30 or 5 p.m., meaning he only gets “just a playground trip or yard playing” after that, since we all know that 5 p.m. is “cocktail hour” for Mama.

• Her almost 2-year-old dared to be finicky about a dinner his mother “loved” —

 

Mazen loved the grilled red peppers but wouldn’t eat the orzo. Go figure!

— probably because she was able to get away with skimping on the meat protein.

• Her husband had the nerve to spoil his dinner, giving Kathy, the Patron Saint of Deferred Gratification, an excuse to slack off

 

this easy dinner because Matt had been at the market late and had snacked, and I was on my way to an evening meeting where there was more food!

• Her almost 2-year-old, again, continues to be difficult when delicious-sounding meatless, frozen, lentil pucks are placed before him by an unsmiling woman more interested in teaching him how Mama needs “chill out” time:

Mazen actually liked the No Bull Burgers for the first time in about 9 months! I REALLY hope I can get him to eat them more often!

Lest we think Kathy isn’t fully connected with social media, she’s made sure to also post complaints about her son and his favorite playmate — his mother’s martyrdom — all over Instagram, pointing out to the world the crazy things that make him cry

and the even more irrational things that make him happy even though they only cause her pain:

Monday’s post is about what an amazing weekend Kathy had. Which, let’s be honest, is the theme of every post she writes about every weekend, even though nothing ever happens besides cooking something, going to a restaurant, drinking alcohol, mentioning chores, and going to the beach — it’s like Kathy writes an exhaustive makeup blog that sneers at all products aside from its focus, which is one cheap, matte bottle of foundation that never runs out and always leaves an unnatural line along the jaw.

OH BUT IT’S GONNA BE DIFFERENT THIS WEEK, BITCHEZ:

I’ve got a lot to share from this weekend, so fasten your seatbelts!

Whatever, Kathy.

Unsurprisingly deciding to make sure she had way more fun than her child would ever have in his daily life, she went to that twice-monthly Friday night fitness, snack, and wine-out-of-plastic-cups thing they have at her expensive-ass gym.

Tonight’s class was Field Day themed!

After “a 30 minute athletic conditioning class,” in which I imagine Olympic athletes viciously rub cream rinse into their scalps,

we competed in potato sack relays, scooter races, and sprint relays.

Followed by a classic water balloon toss

And lastly, a parachute experience!!

Wait, a parachute EXPERIENCE? Did everyone at the Charlottesville ACAC drop high-powered Peter Rabbit-printed blotter and realize that they were just manifestations of the universe experiencing itself?

I actually got to lead this with the mic because I have a good memory of 3rd grade and could remember all the fun things to do with a parachute.

Oh, crap. I guess not.

Anyway, I guess the fakery “catered” the “rooftop” “dinner,” er, boxes of scuffins and sandwich quarters,

with

assorted sandwiches, rolls with dips and spreads and cookies. And WINE of course!

On Saturday morning, just 12 hours after Adult PE, Kathy’s friend Alice totally begged her to come back to the gym:

So I glugged some coffee and ate a slice of Raspberry Swirl to fuel up before heading to 9am athletic conditioning.

And we skipped (not ran) back to the gym for a hard-core class!! More Chris. More good music. More fun. More sore legs.

Kathy and Bath Matt showered at the gym, because her readers really needed to know that, and they virtuously headed to the not-farmer’s market, and they went home and ate salad and

a mini quesadilla made with a local corn tortilla and a slice of cheddar

Label obscured — did the sponsorship courting go sour?

Which I would picture like this, except this image seems actually appetizing:

From “The Mini Food Blog,” a food blog about dollhouse miniature food that is ALWAYS more appetizing than any Healthy Living Blog in existence.

Kathy got a

pedi

WHYWHYWHYWHY

and took a photo of it, bought a

capp

while she was buying cupcakes for a

Sat night …. appreciation soirée

Some fucking soirée.

and pretended she was “developing” (and then “finalizing”) a recipe with “homemade Cheerios” that she’s going to stretch out into another post.

OH GAWD KATHY YOU ARE SO FUCKING SUR LA TABLE

Don’t worry about the tension though, as I’m sure it’s completely disappointing. I’m just surprised she didn’t try to abbreviate Cheerios, although I guess it’s probably contraindicated by the Demonic SEO Rules of Overlord General Mills, who is willing to risk the anti-gay marriage crowd but knows that people don’t actually give a shit about slaughtered orangutans and child slaves. Fun!

What was the party all about? As far as readers can tell, it was a PR effort whose only tangible effect was to allow Kathy to

[do] lots of chip eating

eat

big juicy burgers

I honestly don’t care about her rare burger. I eat meat like Denis Leary suggests: “Carve off what I want and ride the rest home.” I understand it grosses most people out though.

and dole out the tiniest serving of praise to her husband’s

salad that was a nice change from your typical side of grilled veggies. He tossed grilled squash, eggplant and corn in a sesame dressing. Loved it!

even if it was only because she was just staying on her best behavior in anticipation of frosting, saying she

was saving room for THESE! Sweet Haus to the rescue.

Rescue for what? A supposedly perfect company party, right?

Mostly, from Kathy’s description, it seems the purpose of the party was to make guests stand around awkwardly while it rained:

Fortunately it stopped raining long enough for M to learn how to play corn hole!

Something I’m sure employees and readers are thoroughly invested in.

On Sunday, Kathy

woke up slowly

A single bite out of a toast, and a smoothie styled after Elmer’s Glue milk food design.

and ate a smoothie she read about in a book written by one of those Healthy Living Bloggers who has a book deal (which is to say, all of the others) and toast and coffee before going on something grimly described thus:

a family run/walk to the park mid-morning. I was planning to take the day off but we ended up walking 2 and running 2 miles.

They returned to another dire lunch of leftover meal-planned

tuna orzo with cheese on top

before Kathy made a virtuous visit to that chick who had the baby for whom Kathy threw the baby shower where she did nothing besides write “Rose” on a chalkboard, stacked some mismatched plates, and chilled some rosé and then cooked some shit for some other things she’s going to make another post about:

(It’s a BRILLIANT cookbook!) I’ll tell you all about this soon!

After finalizing her balls,

Kathy and Bath Matt ate leftover burgers and ate salad. Virtuous Kathy

went bun-less because of all the taste-testing I’d already done!

We totally can’t wait.

It’s a strange thing to post about this awesome dinner you had with your neighbors without having any photos of said neighbors, but that’s what Kathy did on Monday. Had Kathy “almost” minored in photography instead of “almost” minoring in anthropology, she would have been instructed to try to get candid humans in her photos. I know this is a silly comparison, but here’s a shot by Weegee:

Children playing in water sprayed from open fire hydrant, Upper West Side, New York, Ca. 1945

And here is the only group shot of any of the people Kathy invited over for dinner:

That little girl is DONE with this scene. I can’t say that I blame her.

The rest of the photos are of the quality one would use in compiling a renters’ insurance inventory:

Kathy says she waved to her neighbors a month ago, and the two families

let the kids play

before Kathy suddenly realized she could start pawning off more horrible food preparation and fakery loaf-eating on her new pals. Or, as she puts it, “join forces in the kitchen,” like the world’s lamest robot. before Kathy suddenly realized she could start pawning off more horrible food preparation and fakery loaf-eating on her new pals. Or, as she puts it, “join forces in the kitchen,” like the world’s lamest robot.It took almost a month more for her neighbors to find the appropriate levels of psychiatric medication/Wild Turkey to make such a proposition bearable. Since everything cooked by everyone she knows has to be either “famous” or “epic,” Kathy decided the two-household dinner should be dubbed

our first Magnificent Monday Dinner!

Since it was on Monday and they didn’t know each other and they clearly wouldn’t be able to stand each other, Kathy broke out some pumpkin beer that’s gotten stale and shitty over the two years she’s hoarded it,

to extend the weekend a bit : )

Oh, shut up.

Well, either that or so she could tell the story about how she OMGgavebirth again, since

This Pumking was purchased when I went into labor!! Very sentimental and one of the last bottles from the case we bought that day. It has aged such that it’s not as sweet and bright, but still the good old Pumking I love.

I can’t imagine that anyone realizes how much Kathy adores this stuff since discovering it in 2010 and describing it in terms of Nasty Scented Candles I Never Fucking Want To Sniff:

Oh, here’s an old photo from her raving about it too, for giggles:

Kathy Younger, the poster girl for Google Ass.

Anyway, not having any idea what sugar high awaited them, the neighbors brought appetizers, which seem to include the “smashed” beans on toast with other things, “finished” by Kathy with some of her free fancy-ass oil and sponsored “Aztec” salt (the one that came in that ugly-ass “handy” pouch and unseated poor local Peg’s Salt) but it’s not clear, so this bean and toast dish might have been something the Younger-Smugsons came up with. Wherever it came from, this is Kathy’s verdict:

Yum!

The mysterious neighbors also brought a Julia Child eggplant and zucchini gratin, perhaps to pick at while they waited for the charming duo of oven-fearing Kathy and sporty-shorty camp-bell-ringing Bath Matt to finish cooking this oily, bloody-looking dinner of rice-cookered grits, farmer’s market vegetables, and sausage from a place called Rock Barn that sells its products by the too-cute-by-a-snout unit “porkshare”:
Kathy decided the Julia Child recipe was “delish!” High praise from someone who thinks leftover squash stirred into oats, sandwiches made from Crazy Camel pumpkin pie dessert hummus and spinach on Cinnamon Chip bread, and coffee delusions also deserve the term.

Again slamming a day of the week that contained nothing more than well-rested, stocked-larder, utilities-functioning, house-cleaned tending of self and baby, she ends the post by saying that

because Monday called for it

they all “nibbled” on the chocolate she “homemade” during her Caramel-Covered Vapidity Tour 2014 to the Hershey company and then gave their children a bath together. Which, I guess, is a thing?

How did you make your Monday magnificent?!

Well, by not looking for unnecessary things to complain about in it? Wednesday’s post is another dreadful list of compliments Kathy gives herself on things she’s eaten semi-recently:

delicious summery fruits!

….a nice nectarine. Aren’t nectarines nice?!

  Orange juice on the side. I sure love OJ for breakfast! Just a swig or two. I brought home a bottle from our beach trip and have been sipping away.

….topped with more of the crunch.

I had a friend over for lunch and made us grilled cheeses with tomatoes and cheddar, arugula salads and berries. YUM!

….smoked trout (from our farmer’s market), tomatoes from the garden…. leftover roasted veg and a mini quesadilla on a locally made corn tortilla with cheese melted in the middle.

THAT QUESADILLA IS AN IMPOSTOR! SEIZE HIM!

We are still using up sauce we canned last year!

You guys canned that shit in 2012, Kathy. We’ve discussed this.

Add in some whole wheat pasta and fresh veggies and you have a gourmet meal in minutes. This guy featured peppers, some chicken sausage and parmesan cheese on top.

This dinner rocked …. A little wine to spice up the weeknight! 

With, of course, just a soupçon of complaining about the other parts of her life that just aren’t measuring up to Kathy standards:

I’m planning to do a scrambled egg video soon – just gotta find time when Matt is around to film!

Doesn’t dude get home at 5? And, jeez, Kathy, considering you posted the fakery phone number in the post for all the hordes of people you’re complaining still want to order granola, maybe you could strap on your “Nerd KERF” cap and figure out how to set up an online store for the “local business” you’re supposedly an “owner” of, so that your husband would be able to come home on demand and film you creating the ideal serving of scrambled eggs, which, you’ve said, are

….best when the yolk and white don’t completely mix, so I don’t whisk them together in a bowl first – I just dump the eggs in a skillet, poke the yolks and slide the whole thing around in the pan with a spatula. Perfectly unmixed eggs! [Also saves washing a bowl!]

The post ends with what’s probably the most unintentionally ominous exchange about nectarines ever in the comment section:

Thursday’s post is a discount code link and a giveaway for $1,000 credit for Gemvara, formerly known as Paragon Lake, a Boston start-up that customizes jewelry — or, rather, what Kathy refers to as “Bling.” The post is totally phoned in because Kathy and Bath Matt are jetting off to Sonoma

(leaving our sweet baby at home in the good hands of his grandparents)

rather than stick around to wonder, say, whether Gemvara’s jewels were mined by child slaves (gruesomely described by NBC: “small enough to be lowered into small, narrow pits by ropes to dig out sacks of dirt, which is in turn washed by other children in search of diamonds”) or women gang-raped by HIV-infected soldiers whose regimes are funded by the trade, which destroys the landscape with open pit mining that gives not two fucks about “salt, heavy minerals and chemical products from mining equipment [that] run off into rivers and pollute vital water sources for mining communities,” according to the same NBC piece.

From an essay on “blood diamonds” by students at that school Kathy couldn’t get into.

Oh, but I’m sure Kathy went to company’s website and was thoroughly happy to be patronized by their insistence consumers believe how very ethical they are: “Our precious metals are recycled or responsibly mined …. Because the earth is precious too, we make our jewelry from conflict-free gems and recycled precious metals.” — even though such a line has been exposed as a myth, by Salon, and impossible to ensure, by the BBC. GOOD Magazine goes right to the heart of the ugliness in a piece about the engagement ring Brad Pitt gave Angelina Jolie a few years ago:

There are other questions, of course. Like, why an online jewelry-customization place would want to be promoted by a food- and baby-blogger whose tastes typically run to things that cost $26 and can be hung on a chicken-wire board. But they likely put as much thought into that as Kathy did about accepting the sponsorship. She’s too busy bubbling over with excitement about her new pals and their

more than 20 different natural gemstones and nine precious metals free shipping pretty stone colors

and pieces

handcrafted by artisans in New York City

The company sent her a shit-ton of jewelry so she could “showcase” it against the romantic backdrop of gouged, dusty dresser top. Kathy responds to the whole thing by acting like a child:

I was very nervous to have this much gorgeous and expensive jewelry in my possession! 

  And, referring to a $1,560 version of this pendant Kathy whined that

…. this pendant necklace, the Pure Round Pendant, looked gorg in my grandmother’s vintage jewelry box. It wanted to staaaay!

The free piece they did allow her to design cost less than half as much as that one:

Knowing my love for blue and aqua, I chose this set of Round-Cut Halo Earrings with a Blue Topaz center stone and Aquamarine accent stones as the halo …. I have already worn them every day for the past week!

Wait, did she really just say that? Did she really just call back to her own knowledge of her preference for blue to explain why she picked blue earrings?

And, if she’s really worn them every day for a week, why are they only photographed in the box?

For their $1,000, Gemvara appears to have gotten about 470 email addresses and site visits from readers similarly drooling over cut-rate, pedestrian jewelry. Congratulations, everyone?

There’s a week of wine country to get through. (Damn it, Conchshell!) Fasten your wine goggles and buckle in to your five-point cat hair harnesses, hams. It’s going to be a frumpy night. First, let’s dispatch the two posts she scheduled to go up while she was nibbling and sipping her way through wine country in subscription clothing. The first is a phoned-in snooze about granola bars:

Remember the days of the blog world when there was a new bar out every week? Remember those big plank bars I used to eat?

No. Fucking no. Why would we remember that? Who keeps that kind of information in their head?

I probably tried 100 different bars in 2009!

Kathy, your memories are crap. Go on, though, as I’m sure you can turn a discussion about bars into a way to make fun of your tiny child:

Mazen thinks [mini Lara bars] are cookies!

The first bar Kathy talks about is the “Simple” bar, which retails at $2.25 plus shipping, sent to her from Alabama for free from

a friend of a friend of mine who also happens to be a blog reader!

Kathy dutifully summarizes the product information found on the website of “marathoner and mom” Erica, who does the thing where she talks about how making healthy food is more important for her “as a new mom” (Erica’s words) and how utterly healthy she is:

Everything I’ve ever done has sort of revolved around food! Thankfully, I have balanced that lifelong love of food with an obsession for fitness, especially distance running.

Yikes. Anyway, Kathy eats her free snacks and writes about it:

Taste test? They are delicious!! Kind of like a Larabar with big chunks of nuts. Of course the Chocolate Peanut Butter was my favorite.

The second “bar” Kathy reviews is a line called Speedie B’s that’s made in Charlottesville. Kathy says they are “awesome” and that she

bought – guess which one – the Chocolate Peanut Butter. It was incredible and I Instagrammed it during a car trip.

The chick who makes them sent Kathy all the flavors of them, Kathy reports, after she

saw the ‘gram  

Anyway, Kathy reports that they are

all great!!

because they’re

chewy with lots of chia seeds for crunch. I love the addition of oats too – they are super doughy!

The next free bars she was sent are “Slow Bars.” I know their creators were trying to go for a connection to “slow food” or something, but really, thinking about the way misguided career counselors used to refer to kids in remedial English doesn’t really make me want to buy snacks. I’ll think about this instead: Kathy is overwhelmed by how unlike dessert these bars are, calling them

super savory …. And when I say savory I don’t mean dates with a little veggies mixed in…I mean S.A.V.O.R.Y. I can’t really say these bars are my favorite, but I do love the concept! They are made with real food – dehydrated veggies, seeds, dried fruit and spices. Lots of spices!

And we all know how much Queen Kathy, Kingdom of 1/4 Teaspoon Dried Spice Servings For Dishes For Six People, loves spices. Which is to say, she took a bite of all four, said one was her “fav,” and dismissed the line by calling it

wild for your taste buds …. [without] a sugar high

The last bar review is about those “Fannetastic” bars that Kathy’s been making without nuts so that her child can go to

preschool (and our gym’s daycare)

She reports that she individually wraps and freezes said bars and that Toddler Carbz, whose tastes are desperately less wonderful than hers,

thinks they are cookies! I absolutely love the chunks of baked apple.

But, eager to jet off to whine country, Kathy links to three other slabs of nuts she’s eaten and pretends to ask her readers what their “favorite bar these days” is. Kathy, do you even know what a bar is? This is a bar (edit: well, as finestwinesavailabletohumanity points out, it’s a cafe, but I’ve been known to confuse plenty of reputable places of business with bars):

Tuesday’s post is a guest post from another registered dietician, Kayla Womeldorff, who, in her own words, is

one of four registered dietitians working for Harmons, a small, family owned grocery store chain with 16 stores in Utah.

Womeldorff describes what she does in her job (helping shoppers find healthy food, individual nutrition counseling, store tours and workshops, specialized work with her store’s departments, educating employees about nutrition,  and marketing) and talks about what she suggests people should eat more of: yogurt, nut butter, salad dressing and “nutrition bars” that aren’t loaded with sugar and other crap, and she recommends people use a little more critical thinking about seemingly healthy sweeteners, reminding readers that they are all basically “empty calories.” Well done, Guest RD Womeldorff. Well fucking done. On Wednesday, Kathy starts her posts about her OMGamazing vacation, which could be honestly summed up like this:

You may have gotten wine wind that we were in Sonoma last week!

Kathy rehashes how she and omghusband Bath Matt honeymooned there, took an anniversary trip there three years later, and got totally prevented from going there for another vacation by the inconvenient child they decided to have and the reticence of Kathy’s parents to drop everyfuckingthing on her demand:

Matt and I have been planning a return trip for 2 years and 9 months. We always hoped that when Mazen was old enough to stay with his grandparents (and when they were willing to care for him for a solid 5 days!) we would plan a trip back.

That’s not the end of Kathy’s list of how much she deserves a vacation in Sonoma, either. She wants to be charitable to her poor little sister Laura and Laura’s husband,

who had never spent more than a day in Sonoma before.

The two couples rented a house with “2 masters”

a great kitchen, bikes, a hot tub and was walking distance from the Sonoma Plaza. We would definitely rent it again! It was recently renovated and the décor was gorgeous.

In the subsequent entries, padded with deadening detail about what time she and Bath Matt arrived, how they rented a car and made various stops to obtain groceries, Kathy makes her most effort to describe how cultured and influential and smart she thinks she is. At Scoma’s Sausalito, the insufferable bunch, clamoring for wine — which apparently is impossible to obtain in Virginia?

DRAANNK

jumped right into vacation mode and ordered a bottle of Matanzas Creek Chard – a winery I visited on a previous trip!

“I don’t approve, and neither does the Beta vulgaris subsp. cicla.”

Our tiny, delicate, health-conscious heroine even consented to eat a sandwich, fries, and mussels,

broth and all!

Martyr Kathy then consented to stop at the Lagunitas Brewing Company, where, even though her sister was the “DD,” Kathy only wanted “a few sips” of beer and allowed her husband and brother-in-law the ridiculous indulgence of a tasting flight (which, as far as I can tell, is 8 pints for $11). The whole thing, abstemious Kathy reports, was

Matt’s idea of heaven!

Matt brought a bottle of his home-brewed Brown Shugga to share with the staff.

They may have just been being nice, but in my opinion they were really impressed! Most said it was a near-perfect clone.

No, Kathy. I’m sure it was exactly as she describes. (Also, ugh, they really do spell it that way.) I bet everyone was totally impressed and missed Bath Matt and his charismatic entourage so much as soon as they left and the Lagunitas top dogs have been in heated late-night discussions since then to try and figure out how they could possibly lure Charlottesville’s answer to Tequiza away from his gig baking unsalted bread bunnies to come and invent the best beers ever for them. Anyway, being spontaneous, awesome young things, the couples had joined a few wine clubs before going on their trips. Kathy doesn’t tell her readers which clubs she joined, or how to go about that process, but is happy to report that, whatever she did, she “got free tastings” and some 10% discounts on purchases of wine and food. Kathy reported that they

calculated joining saved us more than $200 – and we loved the wines we tasted at all 3 places! (Plus there were more if you had more time.)

After a nice workout of patting themselves on the back, they went to Whole Foods for

breakfast supplies and hydration necessities

before going to dinner at some place Kathy had eaten before,

The Girl and the Fig of course!

Sadly they have changed the sign so my traditional headshot wasn’t be [sic] the same : (

Oprah was on the cover of every issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, and even she is giving you the side-eye, Kathy. Also, “wasn’t be”? Someone underestimated her hydration necessities.

Devastated by the change in signage over the last seven years, Kathy had a “juicy” selection of tiny wines, noted that everyone else “got cocktails,” and listed what she ate: cheese, figs, fish, and two shared desserts:

Needless to say we were full and happy when we left!!

And by happy, I’m just going to read “turnt.” She leaves her audience with the image of her and Bath Matt and her sister and her sister’s husband being drunk and jet-lagged in a hot tub, which is awesome, and, by awesome, I mean utterly repugnant. Unfortunately, their horrible trip of indolent idiocy had several more installments with which to drag on. Steel yourselves, my darlings.

Kathy dragged out the tale of her trip to Sonoma for another three days — Thursday, Friday, and Saturday — so that she could cram in all the chewy brags and jammy shots of her with her hair flopped in a totally not posed way in front of her, sunglasses covering eyes glazed over with the satisfaction of tanning and drinking on vacation. Unfortunately, there are two more posts after this one, each full of details about why Kathy is totally awesome for getting on a plane and spending money on food and wine and wearing things and having photos taken of herself and her half-assed hairstyle.

Tell us why you and your husband and your sister and your brother-in-law are so great, Kathy:

• They got up “very early” their second day, so they decided to start off a day of drinking by running 4 miles and deciding to retire in one of the town’s “Cute, perfectly manicured cottages!” (Confidential to Kathy: you’re already retired.)

• Their “fancy breakfast” of eggs and toast for “fuel,” at seats wearing marching band jackets just like Kathy’s.

• “Picnic supplies” from the Sonoma Cheese Factory, whose owners inexplicably allow patrons to order sandwiches with all sorts of horrific items on them, like onions. One hopes Kathy and Bath Matt had a stern talk with them about that, since their fakery’s zero-tolerance policy is clearly a better business move.

• Dainty portions of beer, obviously shared three ways, from Russian River Brewing as “another treat for Matt!” He also shipped home a crate of “goodies.”

• A visit to Chalk Hill Estate Vineyards and Winery. They “meandered” there and Kathy swooned:

the wines were so complex. Layer upon layer of tasting secrets.

• A visit to “Roth,” her name for Roth Estate Winery, to buy a bottle of “Red Heritage blend” and enjoy “a free tasting” of “good” wines thanks to their wine club membership. With one brewery and one vineyard under their collective belts, the bunch was left to their own devices, ignoring the winery’s own attempt to sell $18 lunches by breaking out their already-purchased cheese store olives, cheese, sausage, bread, cookies, and grapes on site:

We were able to taste outside at a table while we enjoyed our picnic and were given a cutting board, plate and extra knife.

#eatallthecheese

They boys got lucky with a corn hole set as well!

• A visit to

one of our favorites from our honeymoon – Tretadue!

• A visit to Lambert Bridge Winery, which Kathy decided was

You know, if you’re into getting down on one knee with a ring in a clump of feather reed grass.

 • Walking their beloved pet “time to kill” around their vacation spot, they “couldn’t help but” buy two kinds of dessert from “Moustache” and “Noble Fork,” (by which she means Moustache Baked Goods and, um, Noble Folk Ice Cream and Pie Bar), decide  that “La Crema,” which is actually a wine tasting room, though it’s not like Kathy needs to share information with anyone, was

smooooooth!

and that “Shed” was “a COOL SPOT!” because it has a bar where you can get $6 kombucha and sells $33 enamel trowels, $28 dandelion chocolate bars, and rice for $8 per pound.

CHAMBRAY AND ROSÉ HAS A QUESTION ABOUT LARBS’ SHOE CHANGE.

• Dinner, which they managed to choke down even though it wasn’t the $129 Grande Dame menu at now-shuttered Cyrus that the Younger-Smugsons considered the highlight of their honeymoon in 2007.

2007

Matt and I shed a tear when we heard that Cyrus had closed, but Chalkboard was pretty darn delicious!

Kathy, who had to drive the group around, ordered “something lemony” and “didn’t miss the alcohol!”

Kathy got served the crappy slice of the lemon.

The food was “outstanding” and “awesome” and “Omg – incredible!” and she “loved” and “enjoyed” everything: $12 pork belly biscuits, $12 crab tater tots, $9 grilled corn, grilled peppers, $12 sliders, a $15 strip of raw tuna, $18 fried quail, and a $15 pasta dish that Kathy adorably copied down from the menu, quotation marks and all:

smoked paprika strozzapreti with pork shoulder “carnitas”

Oh, I know, Kathy. “Carnitas.” Who ever heard of such a thing? So funny and ethnic, amirite?

The last thing they had was another kind of pasta, gigli,

that Kathy tactlessly says “was to die for!”

Another classless comment about the value of life from Our Kathy.

Of course, Kathy reminds her readers that she shared all the “Omg – incredible!” food, because part of her actually is afraid we’re going to think she’s eating two pasta dishes, pork, potatoes, tiny birds, AND burgers. Will someone please award Kathy the certificate that tells her she’s the Salutatorian But Really Technical Valedictorian of Dieting so that she can stop wasting bandwidth on every post explaining how she really ate less than what she photographed?

For reasons that aren’t included but that probably involve an argument over one of Kathy’s self-proclaimed “eclectic” playlists.

2008 mix

We had a long, winding drive home that was not very pleasant, but an hour later we were back in Sonoma and eating our cupcake and pie.

Oh, thank goodness. We would all be so upset if Kathy had to endure a “not very pleasant” ride without being compensated with dessert for her horrible inconvenience. It must be terrible to have to go through trips in cars that take too long when you’re on vacation and impatient for chocolate hazelnut pie.

And not, say, other things.

Just when you think it can’t get any worse, this “totally sad and inconvenient” thing happens:

And that’s when my camera lens fell apart in my hands. I seriously have no idea what happened, but I think this is a lesson that I really need to be using a real camera bag and not just my purse.

Not that she has a $90 Jo Totes camera bag and a $45 LowePro she’s ever raved about or anything.

Ugh. My sincere apologies that Kathy has two more posts about this shit.

It feels like Kathy’s been on vacation in Sonoma for as long as she was pregnant. Yes, part of that is because I’m slacking, but I’m blaming most of it on her luxuriating in the act of grenache gestation. It seriously feels like sitting with a relative who brought a point-and-shoot on a long trip to New England to watch the leaves turn, except they got the timing wrong, so all the shots are of clusters of foliage that just look slightly sickly, and there are far too many shots of smiling directly into the camera in comfortable shorts and poorly chosen jewelry, holding a big, ugly water bottle or a kicky cocktail, with the camera strap dangling in most of the shots.

or baskets and stone tools used by the Pomo and Wappo tribes at the Healdsburg Museum and Historical Society,

and marveling at how Spanish goons thought California was an island up until the mid-18th century?

Would the future beach cottage-owners like to choose from seven kinds of oysters and as many kinds of desserts at Willi’s Seafood and Raw Bar

or wander through the “enchanted garden” at the Russian River Rose Company?

How about some badass canopy ziplining 40 minutes away

or some kayaking and canoeing on the Russian River

— I mean, if you think you’re not spoiled by sack races and other elementary P.E. activities before drinking jug wine from a plastic cup at the expensive gym in Charlottesville.

Nope. It was more eating, drinking, and being sedentary in sunglasses, what we call in Los Angeles a hungover Sunday morning:

Saturday was our biggest day – we had arranged for a driver! …. We wanted one full day when we could all fully participate and plan our most exciting adventure.

Which makes me think this is Kathy’s definition of “biggest”:

After a hangover-proof breakfast of eggs, toast, and fruit, they piled into a wine tour vehicle, where their driver, Kathy raves, totally “pulled strings” to get them special tastings. In other news, Kathy, her husband, her sister, and her brother-in-law are rubes. They started at DaVero Farms and Winery,

an Italian-focused winery with roots in olive oil.

I think she means that they started out making olive oil, but switched to making wine, but who cares — Mama needs to get her mama drink on. Kathy and her entourage drove owner Ridgely Evers to drink, er, grant them a “private tasting …. in a small shed.” He imparted upon them secrets such as how he makes Italian wine there because of “latitude.”

Kathy says everyone liked the Dolcetto and the “nibbles,” including “dehydrated Asian pears” that were grown on-site.

Their second stop was Montemaggiore, where Kathy uses the word “biodynamic” without explaining what it means (organic, but better) because, let’s face it, she has no freaking idea.

Again, the owner allowed them to barge into his house, even though he had no idea they’d want to gawk out his windows and get naked:

It’s too bad we didn’t bring our suits : ) And check out the view!

Kathy bought a bottle of the Syrah after giving it a highly intelligent rating, saying it

knocked our socks off!

Two wineries in, their driver decided it was snack time for Four Go Dull in Sonoma, and fed them their

snacks and fresh figs and olives from his property …. [and] a platter of sandwiches from Oakville Grocery along with a quinoa salad that I loved.

The woozy couples stumbled off to Rochioli Vineyards and Winery, where Kathy’s only comprehensible note was,

(loved the rose and pinot!)

and to Thomas George Estates, whose wines were “perfect,” and finally to Moshin Vineyards, which Kathy declared was “good but not amazing.”

Dropped off before dark by a most likely weary and thankful driver, they walked (thank goodness) to HopMonk Tavern to eat sandwiches, mussels, and fries.

There, Kathy decided she

had slowed down on my sipping towards the end of our day, so I was ready for my finale – a juicy Syrah from Cline Cellars. Perfection!

The wine, however, didn’t soothe her pain at having busted her lens in a totally-not-wine-related incident earlier in the trip:

{Here is where I say: wah wah I miss my camera!!!}

After slumping home to sleep off a day of drinking, the final chapter of Kathy’s Wine Trip is the fourth, giving her the chance to make the shittiest Roman numeral joke ever:

IV of water definitely necessary! Ha! Our final day in wine country was bittersweet. We were all starting to feel quite overindulgent, but we wanted to live up our final hours!

What this should mean:

What this actually means is that they had a “low-key” breakfast (read: exactly the same, but with nouveau hangover remedying coconut water), and, besides, there had been plenty of virtue-proofing activity to counteract any overindulgence. At least, I think that’s what Kathy means by this out-of-nowhere sentence:

Also 2 of the 4 mornings we went out running, which was a nice refresher!

Anyway, without further transition, Kathy mentions a friend she mentioned like, three times in Charlottesville, Genevieve (they went to hot yoga, and they went for a walk, and they went to a beer place and Kathy droned on about the similarities between hops and hibiscus). Genevieve’s dude hooked them up with a highly sought-after tour of one of the rarefied wineries of the exclusive Gallo Family.

We were greeted by a glass of chardonnay to sip under a beautiful arbor. We then tasted the flight, impressed more and more by each bottle. We snacked on truffle popcorn and local olive oil in between sips

Then, a PR lady gave them a free bottle of a blend of jammy jam-like jamwine.

I think we should save it for our 8th wedding anniversary, don’t you?

No, Kathy. Here’s what I think you should do with it: drink it without ceremony. It’s free wine a flack gave you. If you feel it’s appropriate to celebrate your marriage with the alcohol equivalent of the squishy stress ball from Northrop Grumman, maybe start on the asset division list already.

Whatever. They had a tour.

Luckily they only lost one barrel in last month’s earthquake!

And that’ll do with mentions of that, won’t it, Kathy? Leaving whatevs-earthquakezone, the group bought “picnic ingredients” and went to the winery that made Kathy’s dinner wine the night before.

It ended up being really hot, crowded, and buggy at Cline so we didn’t have the best experience. But the cheese was good!

No shit? It was warm and there were bugs and people during a summer holiday weekend in the California countryside? How totally unexfuckingpected.

They dejectedly slumped away to Bodega Shipping Company to mail themselves their wine and beer at $70 per 12-pack before facing the toughest decision of their lives:

We had to pick one final vineyard as our last of the trip. There were so many more we never made it to! Must. Go. Back.

They decided to go to Gundlach Bundschu Winery and Vineyards, which Kathy again had complaints about:

Yummy, but the crowds had picked up a lot in the thick of the holiday weekend, so we were in and out quickly.

Luckily, Kathy’s spirits were revived by a visit to Envolve with

Kate, a blog reader/Instagram follower who happened to be in wine country the same time that we were. We met up for a drink before our groups went to dinner later that night. Blends!

Finally, Kathy’s Krowd (by which I mean Kathy, Bath Matt, her sunlit boob, and his slacks wrinkles) posed on a sidewalk next to a postal blue box and headed to Portuguese restaurant La Salette, where Kathy ate a $25  fish stew, $12 cod cakes, a $25

appetizer plate – a mix of tastes including goat cheese, fig bread, sausage, beans and almonds

and some special complaintreats that sound like they were made out of random ingredients that would have been chucked at the end of the night anyway:

pineapple balls (a dessert surprise for having to wait for our reservation table a bit!) …. [and] tomato water (another surprise!)

After checking out, they ate a final meal at Sunflower Caffé Espresso & Wine, which Kathy calls “Café Sunflower” because she is at honeybadger levels of not caring at this point.

Our final morning, before departing for the airport, we ate at Café Sunflower on the Sonoma Square. I highly recommend it!!

They ate waffles and eggs and tea, and I’m sure they didn’t at all partake of anything else. Kathy ends in classic Davidson English 101 style by not being able to come up with words unless they’re to describe how lame it is that raising her 2-year-old is going to keep her away from visiting California wine country every two years:

We had a great, great time and can’t wait to plan our next adventure…even if it is many years away!

Fucking finally. It’s over. Take it away, Buster:

Monday’s post is about Toddler Carbz’s second birthday party.

Kathy name-drops the place where her mom bought the blow-up dinosaur decorations and 12-for-$10 dinosaur cups, which were also the party favors.

It’s nice to see a place like Oriental Trading get a shout-out, since they sound like a nice little local store. The website Build a Balloon also helped out by sending a few $38 balloons.

Party guests were served guacamole cut with Greek yogurt, watermelon, Bath Matt’s mom’s bean salad, and “burgers with all the fixins.” Unfortunately, Kathy, who was totally just enjoying the spirit of the party and not trying to get more steps counted on her borrowed FitBit,

was too busy running around with toddlers (literally!) to snap any photos

The party concluded with an “oh-so-cute!!” cake from Sweet House, 50 cupcakes that got eaten or squirreled away without being photographed, a “fab” wine provided by a mysterious person identified only as “Canadian Karen,” and some insults about her child:

…. it was beasty [sic] hot, and Mazen did his best to look like a hot sweaty mess for all of his birthday photos ; )

Kathy talks about how the weather was similar on her child’s birthday to when he was born, which is just astounding, and then lists the birthday presents he got. Even though his actual birthday was on Sunday, she had the party on Saturday so that his actual birthday could be reserved for her community league soccer game. Because, priorities?

She talks about the game by captioning a bunch of photographs of herself in which she looks frustrated and basically immobile with “<Begin sarcasm>” and ending the aside with “<End sarcasm.>”

Good thing that, unlike her inconvenient child, Kathy is totally able to not look like a hot, sweaty mess. Oh, wait.

What’s amazing is how Kathy is able to give her all to soccer when she has such a flip-flopping fair-weather fan on the sidelines, ruining her game with his birthday tears:

M always says “Mommy plays soccer!” with such enthusiasm, but when he sees me on the field playing he cries until I come off and hug him.

It was okay, though, because Kathy made up for her child’s tears by showing him some school buses and having Bath Matt’s mom, dad, and stepmom (and another person, who only appears as a disembodied hand in a group wineglass shot) take them for dinner at Bella’s, an Italian restaurant whose main webpage image makes it look like THE place to go if you’re an impatient white dude not having a whole lot of fun eating your $16 bruschetta, $17 gorgonzola grilled salad, $32 calamari, $48 seafood pasta, “meaty marinara” and “vino.”

She ends the birthday post talking about the best part of her child’s birthday, which is, of course, cake. Duh.

And in the comments, aside from learning that Kathy is on her 6th HP computer since 2008 (but it’s cool, because she hands them down after 3-4 years to her parents, she says), we get some stomping upset from Kathy when people suggest she might not need 50 photos to tell a comprehensive story about her toddler’s second birthday:

It’s okay, Angie. None of us think you’re Kathy using a sockpuppet name. Luckily, after carefully considering her readers’ thoughts, Kathy is her typical patient, gracious self:

Tuesday’s post is the not-awaited follow-up to this one, from a few weeks ago, where she planted those lame oat seeds General Mills sent her to prove that you could totally grow your own oats, which means you could totally make your own Cheerios, which means they are “Real Food,” and therefore Kathy can keep her claws on the traveling trophy of virtuous eating. She’s even made a lavender, yearbook-style pull-quote for her definition.

That’s how important the topic is to her.

Kathy says that Cheerios can totally fit that definition because

….I flush out that definition even farther and say that I consider something to be real food if you could make it yourself if you had the time, energy and/or simple equipment.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Kathy obtained a spaniel and sent him in to rustle that definition out of the bushes like a pheasant.

But back to needing time, energy, and equipment. Does Kathy have all those things? Shit yeah. She also has “guidance” from General Mills, who helped her as she “developed” a recipe that was, well, let’s be honest:

The final result turned out great, but let me tell you that this is not a quick or easy recipe : )

She put “good old rolled oats” in a food processor for about five minutes and,

In the mean time [sic] I mixed together the remaining ingredients for the dough: salt, brown sugar, corn starch, all-purpose flour, and baking powder.

She mixed that with her oat flour, added 3 tablespoons of water, kneaded the dough, sectioned it, and resisted temptation:

At this point I wanted to pop this in the oven and make scones, but I had to persevere!

The dough wouldn’t roll, so Kathy “formed each section into a snake” by “pinch[ing] it out.” She used a skewer to form an O-shape, at which point she gave into her most base desires:

I had to taste the dough here too, and boy it was yummy!!! Sweet and doughy, of course.

Chopping up all her pinched snakes of sweet flour took

about 4-5 minutes per section times 7 sections, so this was quite the time-intensive process. But it was also very soothing.

After Kathy

took the eighth segment and rolled it into a giant O!!

she baked her creations for half an hour

in a 300* oven

on a pan that looks like it’s lived lifetimes in a rotisserie oven

 until they were good enough for Kathy to be proud of

very, very crunchy. Perfect for adult chompers, but not so great for a finger-food eating baby perhaps.

They turned out wonderful!!! Slightly sweet, very crunchy, oat-y cereal!

What she was really looking forward to, however, was her oddly feminized segment of dough:

As for that jumbo…I kept her in the oven a little bit longer to accommodate for her size.

And once she was done I iced her in a coconut butter + pumpkin spice frosting and ate her on the spot!

After around two hours, Kathy had a cup of fake Cheerios, which Kathy concluded were “a very close replica” even though they lacked the

confidential …. extra ingredients, mostly to keep the Cheerios dough at an optimal pH and to preserve the cereal

Ahem. The word is “preservatives,” dude. Kathy’s conclusion is that she could make Cheerios, but that she won’t. She has a way better idea for how the world can serve her:

I found myself thinking: “There should be a machine invented to do this for me!”

In her comments section, Kathy experiences a backlash from readers saying that calling Cheerios “real food” is basically bullshit, and responds by saying she’s not worried about genetically modified ingredients (“I would prefer that no foods use them because they are tampering with nature, but they are also not something that I freak out over. I think there are scarier things in our food systems to avoid”) or the processing at General Mills, which, she snarks, isn’t a “fun house”:

What a good little flak, selling out her “real food” ethos to the lowest possible bidder.

Wednesday’s post is about how Kathy was going to make meatballs, and then she thought

it would be nice to have a jumbo meatball.

Kathy then realizes that meatballs are best treated like Norwegian blue parrots, and

that a muffin tin would make the perfect perch for them while they baked.

Therefore, they turned into “muffins,” according to her. I think they probably just came out sad and unseasoned, which is unfortunate, because she’s not using crappy beef, and I bet if she threw some onions in there and tried not to insist that she could also put an entire salad in each meatball, they might taste okay.

Also? Her cooking process honestly sounds kind of terrifying:

I furiously begin writing down ingredients and taking photos.

Anyway, Kathy says she used a “TON” of produce in her nine meat-pyramids, like a massive green bell pepper, an enormous lame-ass, two gigantic garlic cloves, one deseeded jalapeno “for spice,” and an entire half cup of baby spinach “for extra nutrition.”

This is a great way to use up the herbs in your garden as summer comes to a close or the other half of a bunch from a recipe.

There’s also a wonderful reliance on prepared products, like jarred, oily sun-dried tomatoes, breadcrumbs, and liquid smoke in the mix.

She also suggests taking the meat-VWs out ten minutes before they’re done and plopping a tablespoon of parmesan on them. The cheese, she claims,

takes the flavor (and appearance) up a notch!

Kathy’s “TON” may not translate to your own “TON,” however, as it means a third of a cup of parsley and a fourth of a cup of dill for nine muffin-shaped blobs. You might not notice that, though, as her recipe would also overwhelm you with a giant teaspoon of salt and half-teaspoon of black pepper.

She also specifies, in her instructions, that when you’re gooping around the ground beef, you should “mix with clean hands.” Do readers really need to be reminded to keep their shit clean while preparing and cooking food?

My apologies to you guys and appreciation for bearing with me during my ridiculously late postings in the last month. This last month has been harrowing, which is about as much as I want to make public about it. I miss being able to sleep, and I miss being here regularly, and I miss just the quotidian WTF-ery of oats and oversharing and bullshit sponsored posts by companies that don’t give a shit about stainless steel straws or homebrewed beer. I love you hams.

Sorry for condensing seven damn posts into one recap, hams. Your kind thoughts are much appreciated during this bullshit month, and fuck if I’m not thankful for Kathy’s ceaseless train of free-association food diary nonsense to keep a lot of us distracted from actual, pressing, real, heavy things that exist in the real world.

Thursday’s post (the one from Sept. 11) is another endless slog through what Kathy ate at one time or another, with a zesty sprinkling of complaints and an odd pinch of misplaced patriotism. She has the usual damned regimen of “Yummmm overnight oats,”

more oats, eggs, more eggs, toast, pancakes, “blob”s of nut butter, berries, peaches, watermelon, soup and salad from Panera, a quesadilla and salad and “parsnip fries,”

leftovers on salad, more salad, fish, squash “(a weird kind from the market)”, more leftovers, more fruit that she has to specify was “on the side,” quinoa

(With parm and butter is the only way I’ve discovered I love quinoa!)

those muffin-tin meatballs served in the middle of some sort of bombed-out slaw countryside,

meal-planning service chicken and cheese and tapenade, meal-planning service “Tuna Orzo,” and salad from Whole Foods with this disgusting combination of things on it:

Kale salad, tofu, cod, noodles, sweet potatoes and melon.

She also had her typical dribbles of bizarrely described food, including

….a raspberry blast bowl! Raspberry Siggi’s yogurt with fresh rasp,

Yum.

chia seeds and Great Harvest Raspberry Swirl bread “croutons.” Texture heaven!

and leftover orzo she called

An all-in-one bowl delight. A plum on the side that the toddler stole most of!

Kathy ends by doing this

No you don’t, Kathy.

and by saying she’s

Proud to be an American on this day

I suppose it’s a reference to the attacks of Sept. 11, but — why? Why would the anniversary of terrorist attacks make someone more proud to be born in the country that was attacked? Not that I’m saying there’s not a case to be made if someone wanted to draw out that line of thinking — if someone wanted to say that they saw shit happen and people deal with it, or learned of people like Morgan Stanley security head Rick Rescorla, or combat pilot Lt. Heather Penney, and the attacks led them to a place where they better understood resilience, or selflessness, or sacrifice. But, no. None of those things will result in Kathy obtaining free trips to corporate headquarters or ugly blue jewelry or plastic bags of salt, so why the fuck bother?

The next day’s post is about stuff she’s kept from that subscription service that sends her the same grab-bag of clothing they send the other random grab-bag of subscribers, Stitch Fix.

comfortable and casual with a little bit of style to jazz [it] up …. It’s super comfy, great for hot days and goes with everything.

• From the same photo, a necklace with two little gold circles that’s called the “Bridgette Hammered Circle Necklace,” which really just makes me think of the hours I wasted ten years ago watching “The Surreal Life.”

• This thing, an innovation in fashion, which has sleeves “that can roll up or down for spring, summer, or fall.”

Knee-pop.

• Another shirt good for getting

a wee bit dressed up. I’ve worn it a few times to business meetings this summer with a skirt.

Make sure to always knee-pop at “business meetings.”

• That striped dress, which Kathy loves because it doesn’t let her boobs flop out. Apparently, this is a problem:

I am normally way too short for maxi dresses, and they often have low-cut necklines and spaghetti straps, making them not very practical for chasing around a toddler.

Would it kill you to clear off that bench or crop it the hell out when playing dress-up with the camera, Kathy?

• A “fab” bag worth every penny of the two dollars she should have paid for it at Goodwill:

• A nice black dress that she weirdly describes as being

great for a bra-wearing woman like me

• A white shirt that looks just wonderful with all those unironed wrinkles in it.

• That schmatta she wore all over “wine country” when she should have left it in the sauna:

• This “UVA colors” shirt, which I can’t even pay attention to because, seriously, those turquoise bandage Target sandals — and pick that pink crap up off the floor behind you, Kathy:

She ends with selfies wearing three shirts she didn’t keep because they were too small, too big, and too — I don’t know. I guess the last one clashed with her almond butter or something. The point is, it’s four miles to the nearest Marshalls, six miles to T.J. Maxx, and half an hour to the Ross Dress For Less; Kathy needs her readers to click on her referral links so she can stay well stocked on the latest trends in mass-produced clearance bin failure fashion.

Monday’s post is the typical weekend recap where Kathy talks about what a crazy whirlwind those two days were, what with her and Bath Matt’s regular meals, chances to exercise, clean, attend a thing or two with beer or wine, and go to bed at a reasonable hour.

They start with that Friday evening thing where they sit on the grass and eat pizza:

Per usual, Mazen finished his pizza and proceeded to run around for 30 minutes straight before we headed back for a bubble bath and early bed time for us all.

Nope, doesn’t look like this at all:

Bath Matt had to work the 3:30 a.m. shift on Saturday, so Kathy woke up at 6:30 a.m. ON A SATURDAY LIKE A FREAKING CRAZY PERSON (sorry) to leave Toddler Carbz at BFF Sarah’s house so she could play soccer for an hour and a half without him crying for his mother, and then returned so that she and her husband could go to the wedding of one of their former employees, this guy, Alex, who always seemed like a real good sport:

Especially given that he had to work around this kind of fedorkitude:

And bosses who publicized their manicures and “hand massages”

Kathy writes:

Alex was one of the first employees that we hired at the bakery, and he has since gone on to do amazing culinary things! He’ll always remain dear to us for being part of our very first crew.

For some reason, Kathy includes this photo to introduce the wedding. Perhaps a few members of the bride’s family are gnomes.

Kathy bravely manages to make it through the festivities despite actual drops of rain:

Unfortunately the weather is less than ideal – drizzling rain was coming down on their wedding day.

But may they have the best of luck!

The setting was beautiful regardless, and the bride looking radiant.

Especially since she had so much to look forward to: appetizers, giant servings of wine,

a “taco bar with all the fixins,”  champagne toasts to the couple’s late parents, champagne-looking bottles of bubbles,

and, especially, cake and four kinds of cupcakes:

This prompted the most tension of the weekend:

We picked Banana Pudding and Lemon – a very hard decision!

But who am I kidding – when there were tons leftover after all the guests had had a taste, we tried the other two flavors as well! They were all fabulous!!

The kidless duo returned home for “a low key evening,” whatever that means, and for whatever reason it needed mentioning. The next morning, Bath Matt’s mom invited the couple to a brunch of egg and sausage casserole and fruit and toast and sitting on a porch with her and her friends

and making weird comments about her kid and her guts:

Some of us ran off our breakfasts. Others simply digested.

After her free, dishwashing-less meal, Kathy bought groceries

and then got together with some of my girlfriends for an afternoon of wine and chocolate – for a special upcoming blog post!

What’s going on here? It’s either the Totally Blasted Supper or Chocolates Against Humanity?

In other words,

Tuesday’s post is about how Kathy “had the honor” of going to a preview of this thing:

It was nice that she got the invitation to the early event, too, since people keep getting married and, in the case of her child, being born, ugh:

For the third year in a row I’ve had a major conflict meaning I couldn’t attend the actual festival (giving birth, Mazen’s first birthday and this year, a wedding)

Kathy’s fun day involved hanging out

with the press and many of the speakers to get a taste for the weekend ahead – literally! I rode the shuttle up with Aaron Keefer, the Culinary Gardener of The French Laundry. We had lots to talk about since I had just come from Napa!

Why is that, Kathy? Want to explain to your readers what a “culinary gardener” is, or what The French Laundry is or, I don’t know, explaining anything other than expressing an interest in whatever faux fancy pop food term you’ve gleaned from HGTV this week, because it’s SO TOTALLY chia seeds and kale you want more than anything.

Nah. Kathy rambles on with a few paragraphs explaining how Thomas Jefferson is celebrated by the festival as a “revolutionary gardener” and  “America’s first foodie” and how she got to “taste” a bunch of pretty tomatoes. Kathy Maiden-Name-Keeper and known owner of an actual feminism-indicating “Votes For Women” mug has no comment on any other aspect of presidential anything.

That’s because Kathy was there for the table of cheese straws and candied pecans and chocolate and chardonnay, and the

local fruits, including the new-to-me pawpaw …. [which] tasted like a blend of coconut, mango and mashed banana. Why aren’t these the most popular fruit in the world!?

I don’t know, Kathy, but I’m sure it’s completely possible to have everything in season and available to everyone year-round. It’s not like we live in a world where some fruits are fragile, and some berries don’t travel well, and some greens are only in season for a few weeks, or where an adult working full-time for $7.25 an hour can’t afford heirloom green zebra stripe tomatoes, or where not every damned edible thing in the world can be made immediately accessible to every person everywhere who can choose whether she wants to take her brand-new SUV to the store to purchase it or walk in order to get her daily 10,000 steps in, and maybe the reasons for that are a lot more complicated than a general lack of food bloggers talking about how great said foods are.

Anyway, Klueless Kathy also dug the “out-of-this-world delicious” food from A Pimento Catering, even though she couldn’t be bothered to discern or ask anyone what they were:

My favorite was one that had to be beet based but was sweet like apple and a little vinegary as well. I’m guessing the base was pickled beets!

Kathy briefly notes that she got to hang out with OMG

Holly Shimizu, former executive director of the United States Botanical Garden!

From this article.

And she ends the post by saying that she hopes, barring any wretched healthy babies’ births and happy marriages, that she should be able to go and be able to participate in some schmoozing at the actual festival next year.  Look for that holiday invite from Shimizu real soon, Kathy. What with your frozen pesto and 2-year-old tomato sauce and “unmanageable” herbs, I’m sure you guys have a billion things to talk about.

Wednesday’s post is a sponsored post, because, somehow, Kathy is still getting paid by Cooksmarts/Cook Smarts (depending on how she wants to spell it, because precise naming conventions so don’t mean anything to Kath-Don’t-Call-Me-Kathy-Or-Katherine-or-Monson):

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about Cook Smarts, but I’m still loving the service!

The post is actually about something our flatly fissiparous Kathy has completely covered before, which is how she uses CookSmarts dinner leftovers for lunches in the next days by putting them on top of a few handfuls of salad. Kathy says that after using it through all of 2014, she uses it, well,

at least 2 of the 4 weeks of the month.

Why is that, Kathy? Isn’t this supposed to be something that gives you a planned meal for the week and then relieves you from having to think up what you need to buy and what you need to cook? Apparently,  as seems to be the case with all the blessings in her life, Kathy’s vacations seem to have fucked up all her success with the program:

Travel and summer unpredictability have meant a few more meals thrown together at the last minute then [sic] I’d like.

Can anyone remember a meal Kathy’s been excited to make that didn’t include ingredients she was sent for free by a sponsor?

Well, okay. What she says she likes about it is the ability to throw whatever is leftover from the night before onto a bowl of lettuce for

some kind of delicious lunch. My default lunch is a salad with something on top, and it makes my day when I have something a little more gourmet to eat.

So, she had a recipe for “Balsamic Chicken Kebabs” with orzo on the side.

She makes sure to tell her readers she used “high quality” vinegar and swapped out

peppers instead of onions…cause it’s me!

and so, the next day, she put the leftovers into a pita with arugula and yogurt for a “perfect” lunch, and, another night,

I needed a quick dinner on a rather chilly summer night and opened a box of creamy tomato soup. I filled it up with leftover orzo and chicken and topped it off with some goat feta.

The second example she uses is a sandwich made from tofu she put in barbecue sauce and had Bath Matt grill and put on fakery rolls and ate with corn.

The next day, she served her “girlfriends” leftover tofu and corn on top of salad, and it was “awesome.”

They were joined with other leftovers like grilled eggplant, avocado, candied pecans and a homemade dressing …. This may have been the best salad I’ve eaten all summer.

The last example is another grim, tinily portioned chicken breast dish in “rotation,” where she has to make an olive tapenade beforehand,

so dinner comes together in a flash, and the melted cheese on top of the chicken brings a whole new level of savory.

Ugh. So, I suppose the next day or whenever she got around to it, she put the leftover chicken and more cheese into

a local corn tortilla. A few minutes under the broiler, and I had one gourmet quesadilla!

Come on, Kathy. You don’t give a shit about “local” or “gourmet.” Just make some by-the-book salad so you feel like you’re being healthy, and melt cheese on it, and follow it up with a slice of cake with buttercream frosting. That’s all you really want out of a meal, isn’t it?

Well, that and not having to explain how anyone else could make it or adapt it, so much that your actual sponsor has to come in to clarify things and provide an attempt at human interaction:

Kathy concludes by talking about how she’s saved “time and money” by having leftovers, especially since there’s this dastardly, small being in her house who, for some reason, needs to be fed on some kind of regular schedule:

I can’t say how nice it’s been to have quicker lunches with a little one who always needs to be served first.

I’m wondering why Kathy is surprised by the fact that she needs dinner on, well, any given night.

Do you even Google, bro?

Also, not that I’m saying it’s her responsibility to take care of creating meals for her family every night, but if you’re a food blogger, and you refer to the food blog as your career and your brand, and you do nothing but go to the gym, ensure your toddler’s survival, and take care of said blog on any given day, and you have a meal-planning service that literally says to buy this list of things and make this list of recipes with it, it’s hard to understand why Kathy is scrambling about like she’s some kind of overplanned 24-year-old career girl with blisters on her feet from too many hours in Jimmy Choos trying to whip up bachelor-girl microwave dinners from Lean Cuisine.

Thursday’s post is a recap about how Kathy’s been trying to eat “pretty healthy” stuff because she’s stressed out about everything else she’s eaten this summer, not that she’s describing this stress in any concrete or relatable terms, like that she’s gained a certain amount, or that her fake band jacket is so tight it’s cutting off the circulation in her homph-gomphin’ hand, or that she’s finding herself sobbing in the corner of the basement, surrounded by empty homebrew bottles with her gums bleeding from the force of jamming frozen cake hunks into her mouth. As usual, even her complaints have to include the requisite ingredients of brag-blaming her child for having a 2nd birthday cake, her friends for letting her have an ice cream sandwich on the beach, and her sister for letting her drink all the wine in Sonoma:

At least, that’s what I’m getting from the picture.

Will a “system reset” get the snowball talk and the squiggly line-tipping and the vague statements about faking something out of her system? We can only hope. In the meantime, here are the things she’s eaten in whatever week-long period she’s discussing this time, aside from the usual repetitive fever dream of smoothies, nut butter on fakery toast, granola not disguised by yogurt and fruit, eggs and toast, no-meat lentil pucks shared with her toddler/on top of salads/on a fakery roll with only ketchup and a pickle,

leftover baked diet fish “piled into a bowl” of salad because it was “quick n easy,” and that “soooo good!” locally made pasta because she’s still trying to get through two ice cube trays of frozen pesto she and Bath Matt made with last summer’s basil 14 months ago. So, I guess, look for whatever basil they grew this year to be served at High School Carbz’s graduation party.

The other stuff she ate included

cuc

about 26 grams of blame-bacon:

Matt stayed home for breakfast one day last week which meant a little bacon ended up on my plate! 

some psychedelic toast:

Along with swirl bread, eggs and peach.

something every lazy high schooler too impatient to boil water for Top Ramen “discovered” years ago:

I’ve been buying these locally made corn tortillas at the market. I have discovered they make an amazing instant quesadilla in our toaster oven – just one slice of cheese in the middle, “baked” for 4 minutes and then folded in half.

a bacon, tautologically described cheese, and uncapitalized “asian pear slaw” sandwich from a restaurant near BFF Sarah’s new house:

Boy was it good!! The gorgonzola flavor melted throughout the whole sandwich.

some not-fried okra, and gross and frozen shrimp “burgers”

that she dragged out of cold storage to serve her parents:

the shrimp burgers were some I made a while ago and froze that weren’t worthy of a recipe – tasty but kind of fall-aparty.

and three other dinners where heaping portions of Kathy Not Giving a Shit About Food was the main course:

a green shrimp curry we threw together one night when we had friends over. I made a quick curry sauce with a can of coconut milk, a few heaping tbsp of green curry paste, peas and spinach and shrimp that I had sautéed first. We served it over a bed of rice cooker brown rice. It came together in minutes and was pretty tasty!

NOT CURRY.

and a dinner they made when mother-in-law Karen was over of chicken breasts, potatoes, beans, rice-cooker grits, and whatever this means:

A little beer for max flavor!

and finally, a “low-key” dinner her husband timed to have ready right when she walked in the door from work, er, her Friday evening

at the gym doing a workout class and eating chips and guac on the roof. Matt stayed back and prepped beans and fish so we could cook as soon as I got home.

At the end of the post, she comment-baits by asking for tricks “to get yourself back on track after a few too many vacations” and actually allows two comments to get through from people who are like, Uh, too many vacations? I don’t think I’ve ever had that problem.

Finally, Friday’s post, “Cookbooks Du Jour,” is a review of three cookbooks that are “all really awesome!”

Kathy starts by mentioning that she’s so cool, people actually ask her to review cookbooks so they can get that sweet KERF bump that’s propelled all sorts of nothing to the top of no markets ever. The three she reviews Friday aren’t necessarily ones in which that was the case, she’s just mentioning that because, damn, people want her sweet review skills.

Of course they do, right? The first book she reviews is “my friend Tina’s” and has more than 140 recipes, “including all kinds of smoothie categories.”

Linking to Tina’s blog without name-checking it (it’s that Carrots and Cake one), Kathy says she used the book to make a total of two recipes. One, containing milk, orange juice, fruit, and spinach, was a

winner that I otherwise might not have thought to combine.

I think she forgot to include a few words, like, “using ingredients,” in that description, but, for fuck’s sake, she’s talking about combining orange juice and milk, and not in a Morir Soñando kind of way, so I can understand why she might not want to linger on it.

At least a Cement Mixer has freaking booze in it.

The other smoothie she made was because she needed to use up a free sample of vanilla protein powder and a pint of raspberries that were about to go bad, because eating something instead of throwing it away is a great way to demonstrate respect to her friend’s work. Oh, but they were local, so, I guess she gets points for that, or something. Kathy says she “loved the in-your-face raspberry flavor.”

Kathy sums it up by reminding her readers of the drudgery of eating, and the ceaseless movement of the universe, bearing down upon all of us day after endless day with its horrible demands that we confront our bodies’ cruel hunger that we wish would just vanish like a green goo through a straw:

Now most of you probably know how to make a smoothie. You probably have 2-3 smoothies that you rotate through the week. I have no idea how Tina thought up so many different recipe combos, but you won’t get tired of smoothies if you rotate through these!

Or, you could have a bag of these and call 250 calories 250 calories.

Next, Kathy rotated onwards to an $8 PDF of something by another blogger, Kylie, who is working on earning registered dietician status and maintains a blog called “Immaeatthat.” Kylie’s cookbook is called “The Single-Serving Cookie Cookbook.”

The concept of her book is GENIUS!! Who doesn’t want just a little dessert at night? And who has trouble resisting a giant cookie jar if you make too many?

 

Brilliant I tell you!

The thought of Kathy having a husband, a child, a mother-in-law who’s just had cancer this summer, and a gym parking lot’s worth of friends in the same town, going to Whole Foods to specially purchase butter extract and choosing to make a recipe that will result in one, count it, ONE cake batter cookie for just herself, might be the most depressing thing ever. Not that she should be shoving sugar in her kid’s face or anything, but she can’t make a batch of cookies and keep all but one of them around until the next morning — when she could take them to Karen, or BFF Sarah’s house, or anywhere — without being haunted by their presence?

The last cookbook Kathy discusses is “from another real foodie,” Lisa, who writes the blog “100 Days of Real Food,” which sounds like it would have a pretty short run, except that I guess she turned it into a 2.5-year project writing a book with a name that takes 100 days to read: “100 Days Of Real Food: How We Did It, What We Learned, and 100 Easy, Wholesome Recipes Your Family Will Love.”

Again calling the recipes “wholesome” —

— which she did for the cookie book but not for the smoothie book (sorry, Tina) — Kathy raves that Lisa’s book

is just what you’d expect and more.

By which she means that girlfriend ate “real food” for that many days and then wrote down some tips and some recipes, resulting in “truly a handbook for eating real food with tips …. and great recipes.” Hey, Kathy, I’ve got 8,000 words more due on my midterm essay — do you think you could help me pad the word count?

Kathy was “all over the concept” of making a squeamish not-quite-Allrecipes.com version of slow-cooker beans “with chips for dipping!”

and “loved” the result, even though it included freaking celery instead of onions.

She utterly lies and says they were “just as delicious” as anything you’d find at “your local Mexican joint.” Kathy, you owe Mexico an apology. Since that’s not going to happen, I’m going to do my part by stuffing tacos in my face until I can’t breathe — as soon as I can find what website this lady’s on:

I just can’t figure out why, after seven years, Kathy doesn’t have her own cookbook yet.

Surrender to the NASA scientists, because we’re about to take a time-dilated trip to a planet 260 smug-years away to fill our minds with details that must be shared with the world about what some 31-year-old stay-at-home mom ate, how she was totally overwhelmed by taking care of one extra child for two days, how she cooks eggs, and which companies are sending her free things in exchange for reviews wherein she’s totally not influenced by the giddy thrills of getting prezzies. That’s right, it’s another entire week of KERF to get through.

For Waldo.

Let’s start with what a difficult weekend Kathy had:

I don’t think I sat down between Friday and Sunday evenings.

Oh no, Kathy! Why was that?

We were parents of two twins this weekend, and had our hands full!

Also, as opposed to three or four or five twins?  Okay, so Kathy’s BFF Sarah and her husband dashed off for a “romantic getaway,” leaving their daughter at the Younger-Smugsons’ home. This was obviously a gigantic burden on Kathy. On Friday, she left the kids at gym daycare so she and Bath Matt could bring fakery sandwiches and cookies to that happy hour/grown-up field day exercise thing. The event

was EXHAUSING [sic] and probably the fastest I have ran [sic] in 3+ years.

All that exhausing have-ranning paid off, despite the best efforts of her child, who has been existing in the most dastardly way these last two years:

Sadly my team lost, but I came in as the female with the fastest run time and second overall! I was pretty pleased with that considering I have done zero training or races since becoming a mom. Just my competitive nature coming out!

Not to be outdone, Bath Matt did his best to cheat in the evening’s lame-ass beer-drinking competitions: On Saturday, Kathy forced herself upright and allowed the children to do things:

took it easy with the kiddos and let them play inside and outside and all around. I ate breakfast standing in the kitchen while pacing back and forth making sure both kids had everything they needed.

Bath Matt brought home fakery quiche and salad for lunch, after which, the couple brought the kids to a Farm Bureau event that Kathy described as “a 4H festival at Lee Park where they got to see a host of animals up close and personal.” After going home to nap, the couple and Bath Matt’s mom took them out to a pizza place, where Kathy ate salad, “had a beer sampler for old time’s sake,” and

shared FOUR pizzas between the 5 of us – with the intention of bring home plenty for lunch the next day!

At home, fitting perfectly with Kathy’s statement that keeping track of two toddlers meant she couldn’t sit down once during the whole weekend, she reports that,

Once the kiddos were asleep, Matt and I watched some TV and totally vegged out.

On the final day of Kathy’s grueling two-child weekend, she reports that “we” made eggs, toast, and fruit, before Bath Matt took the children to the gym (again) and to the park, while Kathy went grocery-shopping, put some apples and cinnamon in her $145 Zojirushi rice cooker,  and

worked my butt off around the house. I logged 5,000 steps on my Jawbone before noon!

all by herself for two hours. When Bath Matt brought the kids back, they fed them leftover pizza and salads, and then took them to Kathy’s grown-up soccer game.

{WE WON!!} Jawbone total including soccer = 19,683 steps. I think I’m going to hit 20,000 before this day is over! (A record!)

With Toddler Carbz’s pal’s parents back in town, the Younger-Smugsons had them and Bath Matt’s mom over to eat pork, zucchini, eggplant, fakery rolls, “taters,” and “Simi Sauv Blanc” for dinner. Kathy concludes her five-paragraph essay about her weekend by saying that it was

a lovely mix of kicking back at home and the flurry of having two children underfoot.

Have a Miltown, Kathy.

Tuesday’s post comes from the agonizingly ambitious promise of Kathy teaching us how to make “Perfect Scrambled Eggs.” There’s a video with some ear-skewering, tinny sound quality straight out of a Skype call over dialup in 2005, where Kathy says she won’t be sharing anything “profound” because she assumes everyone already knows how to scramble an egg, and also the post itself, where she blames her Inconvenient Toddler for prompting her

love affair with eggs

since he was born two years ago.

Call it a physiological craving or a random change of palate – I have no idea when my taste shifted from oatmeal to eggs.

Whatever. We don’t call it anything because who sits around trying to assign thesis titles to Why They Like Eggs More Than They Used To? Kathy then mentions how OMGSOMANYPEOPLE have mentioned how creamy and deep golden her eggs look, which

comes from the fact that I purchase pastured local eggs, either from one of our farmer’s markets or from our neighbor who has a girlfriend with chickens. When traveling, I’ve eaten eggs that are most likely from that other kind of chicken, and I can see and taste a huge difference.

Yes, those italics are hers. Kathy says she got her “technique” from Bath Matt,

although he says I don’t use enough butter and stir too much!

Ugh. Okay, Kathy, how do you make your “perfect, fluffy, creamy eggs every time,” or at least every time some of the time since you decided to change the method since last summer, when you were still half-assedly saying you liked them better when you pretended to scramble them IN the pan? (Yes, Gordon Ramsay suggests doing this, AND not adding salt before cooking, but his method also involves chives, crème fraîche, well, professional culinary training and proven knowledge of how to make things people actually find delicious.)

In this part of the video, she says she “always adds a little bit of butter” — into the jar?

She beats “farm-fresh eggs” in a mason jar (because you can put a jar in the dishwasher, while “you have to hand-wash” a bowl, she explains in the video — WTF?) with salt and a tablespoon of water that she says

water helps to steam the eggs, making them fluffy.

Side note: When you Google “scrambled eggs” and “water,” you get a giant list of “How You’re Fucking Up Your Scrambled Eggs.”

From Bon Appétit.

Next she heats up the made-in-China* “Calphlon” [sic] skillet already helpfully coated with polytetrafluoroethylene (Teflon, which is made with something called perfluorooctanoic acid that’s been “linked to cancer in laboratory animals, and possibly linked to elevated cholesterol, thyroid disease, and reduced fertility in people.” Yummy!). Hey, whatever. As long as Kathy doesn’t have to “go heavy on the butter,” right? This way, she only has to add one tablespoon of butter. After pouring in the eggs, Kathy suggests using

a rubber spatula (a spoonula will work best!) [to] push your eggs around the skillet being careful not to break them apart too much.

(This is the part of the video where she calls Bath Matt out for using a fork in the past, resulting in “stringy” eggs.)

There’s nothing worse to me than stringy bits of egg stirred too heavily with a fork. 

Nothing worse? Really?                It’s cool. We get it. This is the chick who’s said there’s “nothing worse than cold bread in a basket (esp if it’s the dry kind that hurts your mouth)” and “nothing worse than a dry, falling apart bean burger,” among other things. And it’s not like Kathy earns a living by writing things that are supposed to be concise and meaningful and described well. Go on, dear. Tell us about how you’re supposed to keep dabbing about in the pan “until the eggs are allllllmost cooked,” when you take them off so that they

will be done by the time you get a plate. Overcooking eggs makes the proteins constrict and then leak water on the plate – giving your toast and fruit a soggy bath!

(And if anyone knows something about how things should or shouldn’t be cooked, it’s the author of the Sponsored, Then Erased In Shame, Paella Mac & Cheese roux-less recipe.) At the end, ugh, not that Kathy would recommend seasoning things, but, gawd,

If you choose, season with black pepper

Mystery solved! Thank goodness Kathy’s taken on “perfectly scrambled eggs,” because it wasn’t like Julia Child had already done so, not like Martha Stewart’s Director of Food Development had made a video on the process (both methods with eggs properly whisked in a bowl, then cooked on low heat, with no water, pepper added at the same time as the salt). Oh, and at the end of the video, there’s a bonus clip of Kathy side-eyeing Toddler Carbz, who shows up on the scene because he probably knows better about how to cook a damn egg. And Kathy knows it. Wednesday’s post is the first of two sponsored posts Kathy had this last week, the second coming in Friday’s post. Kathy joins the obviously very exclusive ranks of Peanut Butter Fingers, Fitting It All In, Fitnessista, J’s Everyday Fashion, Eating Bird Food, Camp Patton, Time Flies When You’re Having Babies, Carly Maddox, Lush To Blush, Simply Taralynn, Always Maylee, The Lean Green Bean, Tales of Me and the Husband, and Still Being Molly (who the shit are all these people?) in promoting “online boutique” White Plum. Kathy writes:

I have had so much fun stepping out of my fashion comfort zone (aka shorts and a t-shirt) this year …. [White Plum] asked if I’d like to do a giveaway and I couldn’t refuse – I know y’all love clothes!

What did she get to “showcase”? The $40 dress she wore in the (sigh) teaser image for the whatever sponsored wine giveaway she mentioned a few days ago. The dress, which, to its credit, is one piece that’s actually made in the U.S., is named “Sweeter than Taffy” and she says it reminds her of “a candy shop.” It reminds me of poorly made, inspirationless, all-polyester fast fashion that no one will be wearing in a year, but de gustibus non est desputandum. She also got a $20 necklace and earrings set that “goes with everything,” a $27 purple shirt that “would look nice with some jeans and heeled boots,” and a $55 cardigan whose sleeves are totally the right length, about which she said she’d like to, um, “wear it with slim jeans and boots!” I’m sure this will be the beginning of a long and mutually beneficial sponsorship, and that Kathy’s style will become classier with the addition of more “White Plum” pieces. Nah, not really. I give it three free plastic necklaces and garish tops more before they disappear into wherever it is Kathy’s clothes go when we never hear about them again. Thursday’s post is Kathy’s terrible weekly list of what she ate last week, starting with an Instagram video where she shows Toddler Carbz dipping arugula in dressing (made at the bottom of the salad bowl, because who cares if only 5 percent of the salad has dressing on it if you can avoid putting one whole bowl in the dishwasher?) and ignoring his mom as she asks, twice, if it’s good. What irritatingly named things did Kathy hork down recently? • “a typical AB&J” • “Peach and tea on the side!” • “two cakes with drippy nut butter” • “Peach + yogurt bowl with granola” • “chia sprinkles” • Spinach and all the things she would usually put into a bowl of oats, for “when we all woke up too late and I needed something quickly digestible.” • Leftovers from her son’s birthday party, which included a burger, “salady things” and no mentions of freezer-hoarded cupcakes. • Meal-planning service “lamb and feta burger that [she] turned into meatballs (of course!)” • Leftover meatballs • Leftover egg muffins she made from a cookbook about making food for your baby, with “apple slices” because she, too, is an infant. Over on her baby blog, where she did a giveaway for the cookbook, she gives a backhanded compliment to the book’s author, saying Toddler Carbz

loved them! (But he also loves broccoli, eggs and cheese…sooo I picked a good one to try : ) )

• soup, salad, and a fourth of a cookie at a pastry shop for “a working lunch” where she apparently faffed about on Google Calendar: • Leftover pasta and chicken in sauce that Bath Matt’s mom brought over and that Kathy had to put broccoli in, because looking a gift meal (from someone who had cancer surgery this summer, no less) in the mouth never stops being classy.   • A $15 beet salad she shared with “Tricia” and $25 scallops over risotto at “Girls Night Out” at this place:
• Frozen shrimp not-curry, Greek yogurt, and rice the next night, when Bath Matt was “out,” because there’s nothing better than planning your life so that you get consecutive nights away from the person you’ve chosen to spend your life with. • After feeding her husband and child refried beans, Kathy ate a single, Zorak-looking taco at

another girls’ night after the Monticello event – tacos at a new friend’s house! (I actually only had one – this is Sarah’s plate but it was a lot prettier than mine!)

Prominently displayed Tory Burch Bombe Reva clutch in magenta (MSRP $350) totally accidentally included in-shot.

• Leftover refried beans and “cheese bites” on a salad

I’m Not A Quesadilla, Not Yet a Lunch

At the end of her post, we learn that Kathy thinks inspiration is just too complicated: and she defends the horrific practice of mentioning that someone else ate two tiny tacos when she just had one: Kathy ends the week with a Friday post sponsored by Mandible or something, which gave her a $130 technology bracelet so that she could finally tell if she was getting enough sleep, drinking enough water, and  doing enough exercise. It also lets her log what she eats, because having her own website dedicated to exactly that for seven years can’t possibly be expected to do the same as well.

No, Kathy, it won’t log your fidgeting during “The Survivor” if you attach it to the couch.

Kathy says her

latest fashion accessory …. [is] sleek and stylin’ and helping to keep me on track.

She doesn’t say why the FitBit her friend was lending her didn’t do that, though she says in the comments section she’ll “try” to write a comparison of the two, but — on track with what? Well, “healthy changes” after

a little too much fun this summer …. convinc[ing] [her]self that [she] want[s] more cake, one more drink, to skip [her] workout at 6am.

She then pretends to do graphic design on a bland gym-wall inspiration quote that the Internet unconvincingly says is that of Napoleon Bonaparte: History major Kathy doesn’t care about finding inspiration from actual historical figures, though, and the quote, as is typical of the ubiquitous genre of Notable Figure as Hand-Wringing Motivational Pageant Contestant, and might as well have come off a GM Nature Valley bar. As Napoleon actually said, “The fool has one great advantage over a man of sense — he is always satisfied with himself.” Anyway, Kathy says wearing her Temporomandibular Joint bracelet is like a high school valedictorian speech made (probably in Shenzhen, China) of thermoplastic polyurethane:

Wearing a fitness tracker is that subtle reminder that your goals are larger than the cake, the happy hour or the extra 20 minuets [sic] in bed.

Kathy says she “need[s]” her new device to remind her of three goals she’s trying to make herself stick to “for the next few weeks,” I guess the amount of time she figures she’ll be able to be interested in her gadget before handing it down to her mom or her toddler. She wants to drink 64 ounces of water a day, log 10,000 steps (instead of her currently inadequate 8,000 steps, which is about 4 miles), and sleep 8.5 hours every night, which she hasn’t been able to because of her inconvenient 2-year-old:

I used to get in bed at 9:30 in anticipation of a 5:45am wake up, but now that he’s sleeping closer to 7 or 7:30, I have pushed my bedtime back to 10:30 or 11.

Not that anyone in her comments section can relate with that, leading to a lot of head-scratching followed by Kathy stomping in to talk about how hard it was to drive to her job as a public relations assistant account executive for 13.5 months from 2006 to 2008, her six-month RD internship in the first half of 2010, and the first six months after she gave birth in September, 2012: Even if her meany-jerk readers don’t understand, all these horrible aspects of Kathy’s life have apparently combined to turn Kathy into a disheveled, chip-eating Johnny Depp in “Secret Windows.” She ends the post by telling her readers that they really need to step up as well and join her rubber bracelet in helping to lose weight:

I really could use your encouragement – my 31-year-old mom self isn’t as motivated as I once was at 25!

*Something Kathy’s never given 1/26th of a shit about, even bragging, in 2009 and 2010, about her “knock-off $120 Longchamps [sic] that my college roomie’s mom [probably Meredith's mom, a flight attendant for United who brought them wedding accessories] brought back from China ” 

Kath Eats Real Food used to be a blog where a chick who wanted to lose weight before she had all them fancy engagement photos done in 2006

would post to the internet three times a day about what she ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, chiding herself for every naughty Diet Coke and sharing her calculations for which yogurts and ounces of bourbon were cancelled out by fake stairs at the gym or running.

A food and exercise diary can be a useful tool when someone is trying to lose weight. Whether one is doing it in a healthy way or for healthy reasons (Kathy did write, “I got married on June 2, 2007 and know the day wouldn’t have been as wonderful if I were 30 pounds heavier, but instead I had people telling me all evening how tiny my waist looked in my dress!”) are entirely different conversations, but sometimes it is useful for people to share a struggle with the world because it helps them stay accountable and motivated.

That said, that’s not what Kathy is doing with Kath Eats Real Food these days. She stopped posting three times a day after her kid was born because, well, duh, that’s a crazy posting schedule, but this week has probably been the most sponsor-heavy return to Kathy’s former real job, which she left almost seven years ago.

Kathy posts five times a week now, and three of those posts this last week have been about free shit she was given. They have nothing to do with “real food,” and everything to do with Kathy not having any ideas for what she could write about, wanting to accept presents, being willing to sell out her privacy, preferences, formerly expressed standards, and enthusiasm, and not understanding that free things frequently — and, in her case, always — come with a price.

But on Monday and Friday, she posted her typical slapdash rundown of what an OMG AMAZING TIME she had on the weekend and what OMG AMAZING HEALTHY FOOD she ate during the past week. Here’s the summary of her summary:

How were your weekends friends?

Ours was full of social events – always fun and always busy!

Awesome vaguebrag, bro? How much do you lift?

Friday night we went to the Nest Realty County Fair, which is an event that Nest Realty puts on for all of their clients. Our realtor is Karen Ball, and she is fab!

Your Realtor®, who sounds like a pretty badass, hard-working go-getter, is probably gritting her teeth at your shoddy use of “realtor.” (You probably pronounce it ree-luh-tor, don’t you, Kathy?)

Kathy writes that she was totally excited about the “fair” because it was a

totally FREE event with lots of delicious barbecue, kids events, drinks and music.

Because she is Macklemore, Kathy started with a

Shout out to that cornbread!!

She then took a hard left into drunken toddler reportage,

Yum yum! Plus 2 glasses of vino : )

before ending her report on the Realtor’s event by complaining about her child, saying that Toddler Carbz was “too intimidated” by some big kids and including a photo of him crying, captioning it “Failed attempt at a family photo,” because I’m sure that’s the kind of detail that needs to be preserved for all time on a fucking food blog.

Yes, there is failure in this photo, but it’s not coming from the child.

After an “early” bedtime, Kathy “quietly sipped” coffee the following morning, because there’s a way to be loud about your coffee-drinking, I guess.

She dragged Toddler Carbz to the farmer’s market for a breakfast of already-made things:

one of the sprinkles donuts I’ve been eyeing all summer and a green juice from The Juice Laundry! This ended up being the perfect pre-workout snack. The donut was cakey (my style!) and the glaze amazing.

and then went to the gym, where she

took it easy on the elliptical because I did 30 assisted pull ups the day before with Erin and could barely lift my arms!!

I don’t even really know what to say about what Kathy did next. She and Bath Matt went to Seamane and Rob’s house for an “all out!” Oktoberfest party where they brew their own beer and order in pretzels and provide costumes.

Even though it resulted in this chicken-and-bean-bake of an outfit,

Kathy grades the party and decides it can live another day:

The food spread covered all of the bases – pretzels, brats, sauerkraut, potato salad, egg noodles and lots of mustard. Plus cheeses and deviled eggs and Seamane’s famous German chocolate cupcakes!

There are also “games”:

Matt won the keg carry!

Dramatization.

Mazen won the toddler jump

The Younger-Smugsons returned home to “modest dinners” of leftover soup and chips and television. It takes someone prodding her in the comments before she mentions that the soup recipe comes from Gimme Some Oven, where the soup looks like soup.

As opposed to Kathy’s arid, desaturated Yuma Desert of a bowl.

I’m guessing she left out the onion.

On Sunday, she ate

pumpkin pancakes, which I topped with butter, banana and a drizzle of maple.

Because it’s cute to shorten “maple syrup”?

before going to an unphotographed

soccer game – wheee –

and

a special date night

that she delays in writing about because it’s a sponsored post she drags out into later in the week, after this poorly shot whinebrag:

So. This is where the mid-week most-of-week wave of WE HAVE TO GIVE STUFF AWAY posts starts.

Tuesday’s post is about Scharffen Berger, owned — since 2005, when its San Francisco location was shuttered and its employees laid off because $20 million, yo — by those lovable, child-labor-using scamps over at Hershey.

Four of Kathy’s commenters even cringed at the association with the company:

Not that Kathy cares a ton, reporting:

When I sent out the invite asking if anyone could join me for chocolate and vino during toddler nap time, one of my friends replied “Is this a dream?” It sure felt like one!

I first fell in love with Scharffen Berger chocolate back in 2009 at the BlogHer Food conference. The blue bag of 72% bittersweet chocolate chunks is known in our house as “the good guy.” It’s my favorite baking chocolate…er…and snacking chocolate. I love that Scharffen Berger chocolates have simple ingredient lists and focus on pure cacao bliss. During my trip to Hershey in July I learned that Scharffen Berger is actually part of The Hershey Company, so I was thrilled to take it under my wing for a future post.

Really, Kathy? A brand of chocolate needed your protection?

Determined to make an afternoon getting drunk and eating sugar not fun, Kathy “took notes” from the company’s website, mentioned its “downloadable booklet you can print,” gave her guests water and crackers “for palate cleansers,” and made her guests write down observations on the four kinds of chocolates and wines (including a cutesily shortened “Cab Sauv”).

We sniffed, swirled, chewed, sucked and nibbled.

That’s not fair, Kathy. You continue to suck.

“Oh! Tell us the one where you put on mint-green shorts, a promotional shirt, hangover sunglasses, a plastic necklace, a promotional necklace, an overpriced pedometer, a vest with Sonic the Hedgehog spheres on it, and a doll-sized witch hat, and then posted photos of it online!”

I’m not sure what their extensive research (snort) was supposed to accomplish —

“Brie Cheese”? “Smooth and soft fruit”? “Toasted like a grill”? Did they do Jägerbombs before the wine tasting?

Women With Striped Dresses and Diamond Rings and Phones Record Important Thoughts About Wine and Chocolate.

— but Charlottesville’s best brain trust concluded:

Overall we felt that the darkest chocolate and boldest wine were the most perfect pairing of the bunch.

Awesome. Let’s move on to Kathy’s second sponsored post of the week, Tuesday’s entry about a conference we don’t know who invited her to or what the purpose of it was, and she didn’t even stay the whole time. The conference is about “the Craftsman,” and Kathy is all excited because she thinks it’s going to be a live version of some HGTV show, but

alas, it was a celebration of those who have honed a craft.

Yikes.

The half-assery continues as Kathy and Bath Matt

took advantage of our date night

to pre-game at Brookville, a restaurant that sells a thing they call a “sammy,” uses “w/” on its menu, and has a section they call “Indulgences.”

No wonder Kathy calls it

one of our favorite date night spots

Kathy had a “Peach Julep” and was very proud that she warranted special attention by way of $15 in free appetizers whose ingredients (it’s goat cheese, not “cream cheese”) she couldn’t even bother to get off the menu:

Chef Harrison …. sent out these bites on the house for us to taste! Mini corn dogs made with local pork and a house-made mustard sauce And the best biscuit EVER!!! Seriously. Biscuits are all over the Brookville menu right now! Served with cream cheese and house-made pepper jelly.

Uh oh, Kathy. Chef Harrison enjoys onions. (Also, why does scoutology.com writer Jerry Miller think the University of Virginia is overseas?)

There are three photos of her giant biscuit and miniature corn dogs. The whole thing looks haphazard and ill-staged from any angle.

Warning, Chef Biscuit. Kathy promises to return because someone let slip that you’re

working on a pumpkin spice cocktail

Because that’s the kind of thing that clearly takes hours of work, and it’s not like you can just put Monin/Torani pumpkin pie syrup and bourbon in a glass and Kathy would slurp it down, duh.

So, Kathy and Bath Matt go “alas”-ing over to their free event,

nibbled on some more bites

and she takes a photo of a crowd and captions it

Mingle, mingle

Ew.

They stuck around to hear people from four businesses talk about, um, their businesses, which Kathy describes as being

The heart of the night …. It was great to hear how each of these entrepreneurs got started as well as the challenges and light bulb moments they had along the way.

Too bad Bath Matt had to go and ruin her evening:

We sadly had to leave before dessert was served because Matt had an early wake-up, but I hear it was good!

Kathy also crams a sponsored hotel stay into Tuesday’s post, staying at “a new boutique hotel” in Charlottesville that costs $169 during the week and more than $200 on the weekends for the joys of dim lighting, inconveniently placed televisions

and clumsy cord management.

While on what Kathy calls a “staycation,” the gruesome twosome “took advantage of [their] toddler-less time” to go to a restaurant at the PetSmart-free Sprawl at Stonefield mall, where I suppose it’s okay to wear flip flops and jeans and be on your phone like a jerk.

 Kathy tried desperately to think about what she could mention, and came up with:

lots of cool details – I loved the string lights overhead.

and a clumsily punctuated sentence about how it was so hard

choosing between vino and a cocktail, but ultimately wine won,.

Calling it “vino” doesn’t make it classy, dear.

She also calls herself “a seafood lover” who “couldn’t have been more excited” for a shared bowl of $6 chowder, which she describes meaninglessly as

the perfect example of creamy-but-not-too-rich.

They also split a $13 dish of lamb and clams, and Kathy says it

lived up to its reputation. The BROTH!

What reputation? The restaurant opened A WEEK AGO.

They haven’t had time to hire a copy editor yet.

Anyway, Kathy ordered a $28 scallops dish with “ham dressing” and succotash she calls “hash,” and Bath Matt ordered a $24 lamb thing. Kathy notes,

The seafood was awesome, but this flourless chocolate cake topped with a toasted MARSHMALLOW was my favorite part. We weren’t planning to get dessert and then I saw one of these walk by and had to see what it was all about. The “cake” was almost like a ganache, and I’m pretty sure the marshmallow, which was torched to a golden brown, was homemade.

I don’t know where she got that idea. Kathy would never ask a restaurant employee anything about anything she ate, and it’s not like that kind of detail is on the menu,

except that it is.

Mrs. Drunkypants came back to a “much appreciated” thing of water and, the next morning, watched “Good Morning America,” OMGing over the spare rooms the inn put Nespresso machines and books in, and thinking up complaints about the child she was going crazy to have while

sipping espresso for a while. More than anything else staying in bed is something I miss from my pre-baby days.

The regretful parents finally dragged themselves to the hotel’s café for

frothy drinks (decaf this time or I would have shaken myself out of my clothes!)

Gratuitous foot shot because duh.

[and] gourmet dishes – it was hard to decide!! They even had a savory oatmeal, which I almost got.

Awesome photo, Kathy. I love the way you didn’t crop out that random white car and framed the photo to show the ugly root protector on the tree you have blocking the entrance.

But I just had to go with the Buckwheat Shortcakes!! …. We think there were flecks of rosemary in the batter which made for a hint of savory rising out of all the sweet. I forgot to ask for the syrup on the side – I’d recommend that next time because it was pretty decadent!

My side of breakfast asparagus helped healthen things up : )

Bath Matt got

wine-poached eggs with shitake [sic] mushrooms, bacon and asparagus. Delicious!! We traded several bites of each other’s to balance the flavors.

In conclusion, Kathy says the hotel is decorated in a “really cool!” and “unique” style, copies & pastes a whole paragraph from the hotel’s website, and is so out of ideas that she fills up her word count by mentioning the turndown service (they put a cookie on your pillow and she calls it “awesomeness,”) the “pull-down night stands,” electrical outlets, ceiling fan, TV, and “old phone.” She also calls the bathroom “especially European” because it has a glass shower door and a pedestal sink, but she mostly liked the $18 Malin + Goetz body wash.

Downsides? You “have to valet your car for a fee,” as opposed to those places that have magical valet parking where you don’t have to tip.

Still, in a ringing endorsement, Kathy says,

it beat out a standard chain hotel in all the details …. We’ll definitely consider coming back for breakfast sometime.

Thursday’s post is her third consecutive sponsored post, and it promotes Boxed.

Why is there glitter on your sponges and why did it take you three fonts to caption it?

Boxed is not a service where someone comes and bops her one in the chin.

She leads by saying that, even though she has a basement, extra rooms, “an actual closet” in her bathroom,

and a

giant wall of closets

it’s taken her literally years to discover how not to have

toilet paper and paper towels overflow out of closets

She shows some photos of said closets, noting in excruciating detail that I can’t imagine being of use to anyone else, that she needs “a ton” of picnic supplies for all the parties she throws, that she takes paper products out of the plastic to make them “easy to grab” and that

The toilet paper is also split up so that both bathrooms get a few rolls should someone run out on the spot

Kathy also points out that she likes to have two extra packs of other kitchen shit like dish soap:

Clearly a second foil needs to be purchased soon!

She also talks about how she keeps, like, 26 “Magic Erasers” in her laundry room, and screws up when she needs to use the word “fewer,” saying,

I still use the Shaklee concentrate as my basic household cleaner, so that means we have less bottles to have to keep on hand.

There’s another paragraph where she fertilitybrags about how while

nesting when pregnant with Mazen I organized bins that are labeled and contain household supplies like batteries, tape, nails and light bulbs. They are up on some shelves in the brewery. When we start to get low on something I make a note and a replacement is purchased – like batteries.

As for her kid, his diapers get

packed into a crevice in his closet. Rather than have a big box hanging out elsewhere, I unpack them and slide them in here. 

Oh, were we going to talk about that Boxed service? Well, Kathy does say they sell some baby shit (which she calls “these guys”) at a lower price than she can get them at Target, because Target is totally the cheapest place you can buy things. Kathy says she wants to like “bulk stores” but doesn’t want to waste

20 minutes looking up and down the huge aisles for something the store doesn’t even carry

or figure out

where to store a 50 pound tub of ketchup.

Keep working on that stand-up routine, Kathy.

Kathy says Boxed is awesome because they sell shit she likes, like

trendy beauty items – like the Method Hand Wash and Honest & Company Baby Shampoo along with groceries like chia seeds and quinoa

and she concludes by demonstrating how bland her imagination is:

I can’t imagine anyone not liking this process.

Kathy ends the week with one of those posts where she claims to describe via typing everything she photographed and then chewed in the previous week, which she has been calling “Lately” but has just this week started calling “Eats Lately,” which is even more icky, for some reason.

Speaking of icky, this is how she starts:

Guess who put a can of pumpkin in her shopping cart last week!?

It’s time y’all.

Although I have yet to open it, I’m ready to rock and roll.

Who’s ready for pumpkin meatloaf, pumpkin baked oatmeal, and pumpkin lasagna?!

Uh, I guess you are?

Anyway, she leaves her readers with a total cliffhanger, warning,

Until that can gets opened….let’s see what the end of summer eats included…

This is some of the nonsense she ate:

• “AB&J”

• “Autumn-y oatmeal with a big puddle of almond butter.”

• Something that seems to bend the very fabric of space and time: “I made leftover salads packed with lentils, corn, okra and tomatoes and feta on top.”

• Chicken noodle soup made from chicken someone else already cooked.

In comments, Kathy says there’s no broth because the soup was “unevenly served,” whateverthefuck that means.

• “cheese and crackers, fruit, and veggies in hummus” at a picnic.

• Barbecue and vegetables Bath Matt went out and bought because Kathy burned the bean soup she was making that I’m sure everyone was totally looking forward to eating.

• Free “cookout” food at her gym. She didn’t eat any cake, but she had “a taste of the frosting”

• A “killer salad with fruit, candied pecans and goat cheese which I got with a grass-fed burger on top …. [and] quite a few of Mazen’s sweet potato fries” at Citizen Burger Bar.

• Fish tacos at her friend Lynsie’s house.

• Food and “juicy wine” at some reception for people who donated something to a race sometime.

Kathy says there was a “fight for the bacon-wrapped apricots!” My condolences to everyone who woke up with a denim peeptoe dent in their head the next day. 

In the comments section, someone brings up the HOLY WTF that is this photo on her Instagram:

FUCK THIS SHIT, MOM.

She responds, but not really:

Kathy started out last week with two solid days of sponsored posts, the first one by her pals at General Mills, the awesome people whose supplies overseas rely on child labor and the hacking away of the last bits of orangutan rainforest for dumb palm oil, and the second by Celestial Seasonings.

She starts out with a post she hashtags “#Happysnacking,” returning to those

homemade Cheerios-like toasted oats cereal

that it took 90 minutes to construct. She wanted to figure out how to make them into something that would take her a long time to eat. She could have easily frozen them in a gallon of water, the way people do with a credit card they don’t want to be tempted to use, but went with “morph”-ing them into “snack balls” so that her “homemade efforts [would] last longer.”

You put Cheerios in a bowl, sprinkle them with spice,

(or cinnamon or nothing!)

honey, seeds, oats, and “blob in” the nut butter and coconut butter before rolling them into balls, and putting them into the fridge.

They might not be perfect, but who cares!?

The balls “are full of nurients [sic], from healthy seeds, hearty oats, crunchy O’s and creamy coconut butter.”

In day one of this week’s latest tepid commenter rebellion, Nicole pipes up to say she’s kind of over the sponsored stuff, because those discussions always end up so well.

As usual, Kathy has an explanation: It’s all Toddler Carbz’s fault, duh.

Celestial Seasonings gets Kathy’s magical touch on Tuesday. The company flew out a bunch of bloggers so they could tour the company’s headquarters:

Celestial Seasonings’ holiday teas are my all-time favorites (Candy Cane Lane! Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride!) so this was such a special trip.

Oh, but Kathy has complaints!

This was my first visit to Colorado, and I hate that most of it was spent indoors! …. I flew in late in the afternoon, and sadly my suitcase did not make it with me. So I had to trudge around in my airport clothes the first night. My suitcase was delivered at 5am – just in time for the trip to officially begin!

Kathy loved the accommodations at the St. Julien Hotel, her “new favorite hotel” because of the live music and something that, honestly, sounds terrifying:

The lobby had a stunning gas fire

But it sounds like the staff (they gave her “toiletries” since her suitcase was delayed) and bathrooms were so interesting they took Kathy’s attention clean off the raging inferno downstairs:

A soaking tub with bath salts, minty spa products, a glass shower, robes and a four-poster bed.

All that in one bathroom! Golly.

They went out to a beer place for a flight of beers, a pumpkin beer, and a not-Niçoise Salad

at West Flanders Brewing Co.

Matt was so jealous that I was in Colorado in the company of so many craft beers, especially since the Great American Beer Festival was going on that weekend!

Kathy completed a 5K on the treadmill the next morning, ate a breakfast of yogurt, fruit, granola,

And hot tea of course!

Then, they got in “a LIMO” (yes, she writes it like that) and arrived to find all the company’s employees hustled outside to wave signs.

They went in, sampled tea, looked at box design, learned how to set a timer so you don’t oversteep your tea, and then listened to

the history of Celestial Seasonings as well as a bit more about the company’s mission and ingredient sourcing …. We learned that Millennials actually lead the growing tea population, and tea is becoming increasingly popular in the USA …. My biggest take-away from our visit was the realization that I am totally underestimating tea’s role in wellness. When I think of tea, I think of a warm beverage. But Celestial Seasonings will tell you that tea is the second healthiest beverage – second only to water. I have to agree, and I would like to add more teas to my life for their ability to calm, sooth, destress, aid in digestion and encourage sleep. Not to mention all those antioxidants!

Giddy with thoughts of antioxidants, Kathy piled up a few plates at this “BYO salad bar”:

Kathy and pals then donned “space suits and hair nets” for “the famous behind-the-scenes tour of the factory.”

She had what she decided was “the best” kombucha she’d ever had, sampled “some of the secret new products” she’s not allowed to talk about, heard a cute spiel about box design and “all the names that Jammin’ Lemon Ginger almost became,” drank tea with bourbon and sugar and stuff in it, and walked around Boulder with Caitlin of Healthy Tipping Point. Miss Beach Cottage decided:

Their pedestrian mall is much bigger than Cville’s!! I want to live here (except for the snow and the distance from the ocean!)

The sponsor’s final dinner, in the “swanky” confines of The Kitchen, included “tea-marinated” peppers, “tea-infused” flatbread, salad with “tea dressing,” “tea-brined” chicken, “tea + pepper shrimp,” tea sorbet and tea cakes.

They went back, got in the hot tub, went to the fakery’s cousin at Great Harvest Boulder, and Kathy set her sights on getting Bath Matt to try and wheedle the recipes for two kinds of “hearty muffins and a raspberry cinnamon roll that was to-die-for” from Boulder fakery dude.

Kathy returned home with some swag to give away to her readers and a new promise to “add more tea to [her] routine,” now that she has a new corporate sponsor breathing down her neck about it.

The trip appeared to have exhausted her so much that she was only able to type out half-responses to her commenters — the kinds you type from your phone during a second’s pause at an intersection.

Lori’s actually correct. Celestial has been blasted recently after Glaucus Research sent their teas to the Eurofins lab to be tested and found “dangerous levels of pesticides” and carcinogens in 91 percent of them.

Propargite, sold by Chemtura, is a mite-killing pesticide that causes fatal intestinal tumors in lab animals. Propachlor is a delicious Monsanto herbicide that hasn’t even been manufactured since 1998.

Glaucus, a short-seller that makes no effort to hide the fact that it stands to benefit from any damage to the company, says Celestial Seasonings is “masquerading as a healthy/organic food company,” and recommends people ditch the stock before the company tanks altogether.

With scandal far too spicy for Kathy’s palate, though, such issues are obviously not her cup of tea:

Wednesday’s post is a gross combination of bad food and Kathy being glad to have her 2-year-old away at “preschool” so she can get back to living her life:

Preschool is way, way underrated y’all. I can’t even describe how nice it is to have a consistent two days a week where I know I can schedule appointments, work on the blog and actually create again.

Sure she had babysitters, but they only tended to her child. Preschool gets rid of him!

Unlike having a babysitter, I can actually be at HOME while Mazen is out. (It’s so surreal to be home alone after having a baby!)

She doesn’t have to teach him songs or colors or words, she doesn’t have to introduce him to other children, and she doesn’t have to watch him paint! (She does have to do something with all his “kiddo art,” and has deigned to hang up a piece of string and a few binder clips.)

But other than that, it’s amazing!

….and I have a little time to really focus on the blog without fear of his nap ending at any moment.

Newly fearless Kathy has “gotten busy in the kitchen!” Oh? Do tell.

I had a giant bowl of leftover lentils and a stack of corn tortillas in my fridge and figured the two would go well together.

Now, look. Lentils are awesome in Indian dishes and French soups and Middle Eastern mujadaras. Every one of these recipes (and these) looks delicious and easy.

But Kathy put leftovers in tortillas. That’s her definition of “busy”?

What’s worse is that this is her definition of “rock and roll”:

She cooked bell pepper and garlic “in some cooking oil,”

As opposed to the garlic-infused 5W-20 synthetic?

She added her leftover lentils, “spices,” (a half teaspoon each of chili powder, cumin, paprika, coriander, and salt) and a quarter cup of water, which “kept things moist.”

Shadowy tacos and a smeary countertop. Appetizing!

She commands:

Top with cheese, then avocado, then hot sauce, then yogurt, then mixed greens.

It’s the hot sauce she calls it “the secret ingredient,” and notes that you need

freshly grated, really good sharp cheddar cheese. Do not buy bagged cheese ever again!

Kathy, you’ve been ranting about that for four years. (“The process of grating cheese sucks”!) Are you sure you’re not a harried character from an infomercial?

Kathy had her friend Alice and Alice’s kids over “after school” and I guess everyone had to awkwardly portion out four tiny tacos for five people. There are no photos of this event.

Tacos for everyone! And three cheers for preschool.

What a great use of your free day, Kathy. Maybe next time you can put leftover pasta on a scuffin, or leftover rice on a piece of bread.

Thursday’s post is a guest post by Lauren Fowler,

Not surprisingly, considering the title of her blog, her guest post is about how to, in Kathy’s words, “slow down and listen to your body” so you can lose weight.

What does Fowler suggest?

Stop being so busy! Create time so you can eat slowly! And chew and chew and chew. If you don’t, it’s not that you have too much to do, it’s just that you really don’t care enough:

Taking time to eat a meal is a beautiful act of self-care, and it lets your body know that you value it enough to make eating as important as work or sleep. When you eat on the go in a rush, your body is stuck in a ‘fight or flight’ mode, and you won’t digest or enjoy your food as much.

Oh shut up. The bag of Cheetos next to my computer right now isn’t prompting an acute stress response. The fight or flight response is a real goddamned reaction to real or perceived danger, a panicked state of tension, dissociation, and other things that are just a little bit more unpleasant than not being able to enjoy your massaged kale salad.

What else should you do? Talk to your stomach and ask it if it’s still hungry. After another bite, do the same thing. Maybe you can leave food on your plate and not eat it, fatty! Hooray!

They’ll [sic] always be more food later when you’re hungry again. By honoring your hunger and fullness, you can start to build self-trust around food.

But wait! There’s more talking to your stomach to be done. Stop eating cheapo M&Ms — they don’t taste fantastic.

Instead, I’d rather enjoy the best dark chocolate, eat it slowly, and let it melt in my mouth to enjoy it.

With all this chocolate-commercial savoring, talking to your tummy, chewing and chewing and chewing, and sitting down with plates, you might not think you’ll have any other time in the day for things. Guess what? You should figure out how to make it! Especially because there’s more talking to your stomach to be done.

Notice if you feel energized after eating a big salad for example, or if you feel drained and tired after eating sweets. Notice if any foods make you feel bloated or give you headaches.

Okay, well, what if I feel awesome after a 10-cent ramen noodle soup, and it makes me really happy to eat an entire box of Yodels?

The Downward Facing Conch pose

And how much time should I really be devoting to thinking about all this and figuring out my feelings about what I eat? Does Fowler realize that people have shit to do and things to get back to after they finish lunch? What crowd is she going for?

This is sort of a serious question, because her last piece of advice is that you should make your life awesome:

Just find other parts of your life that give you pleasure and fun as well, like your job, relationships, hobbies, traveling, movement, and more. You want to make your life full of joy, so you don’t have to turn to food to find a quick boost of happiness when you’re bored or feeling emotional.

Book that trip to Tulum! Stop working that office job and start working as a Personal Ferrari Shopper!

Go land that sexy boyfriend! Take up aerial fabric dancing!

Unfortunately, Kathy’s readers are less than inspired by all this mindfulness:

Kathy ends her week with an actual post she wrote herself — the list of most of the stuff she ate over a recent week or so — where she’s not talking about free crap she got from a company and pretending to be in love with. She starts by mentioning the “paint with water” stuff she got for Toddler Carbz. I think she probably only likes it because there’s no paint to get anywhere.

She starts by mentioning this homebrew a reader sent her.

It’s named after the reader’s daughter, which gives Kathy all the more reason to adore it, because if there’s one thing she likes more than drinking alcohol she thinks is fancy, it’s complaining about the child she’s always wanted at the same time.

Beer Professor Bath Matt liked the beer too. He even took notes on it, which Kathy hashtagged “beernerdsunite.” Apparently, this is how a “beer nerd” writes:

Aroma – Nice citrus upfront in the classic navel orange/tangerine zone.  There’s a little vanilla or bubblegum in there too.

Flavor – Great bitter/sweet balance hitting the tongue at the same time.

Overall: Great American IPA, excellent balance of malt and hops, the finish is dry enough to make it refreshing but there’s still enough body to know it has some oomph.

What else did she consume besides beer?

• Pancakes with “drippy” nut stuff and, OH NO! maybe the last peach of the season:

Sniff.

• That coffee cake thing called “Apple Scrapple” that’s not scrapple and just looks like someone tried to make bread out of an apple pie and fucked it up.

• A salmon, cheese, and spinach omelet, grits, and “a toasty biscuit” at Bluegrass Grill with “girlfriends.”

Worth getting my workout in at 6am so I could enjoy the morning!

• Eggs, toast, berries, and coffee. Somehow, this deserves shouting:

Standard American Breakfast these days!

• Toast and yogurt and another peach:

No plate necessary.

Why would one need a plate? One has a bowl and a cup and a tray and a tray liner and a table. It’s not like this meal is being eaten off the floor, for fuck’s sake.

For lunch, Kathy ate

• Kale and red peppers, and “the prop” from a recipe she spent “a whole preschool morning making.”

• Nothing! You guys! After her restaurant omelette,

I wasn’t hungry till dinnertime!

• She calls this “a mixed plate” and apparently “drizzled” her sprouts with “EVOO and honey.”

• Whole Foods deprivation box with “a picnic lunch” with “some friends.” It was so unsatisfying that she had to supplement with

a few bites from the toddler PB&J box : )

• Beans and more kale salad. Okay, actually, she just talks about her child and her husband eating them. Well, more accurately, she says Bath Matt ate them and she details the sneaky mama tricks she had to use to get Toddler Carbz to eat them:

I knew if I put these beans on M’s plate he would have turned up his nose, but on Dada’s plate they were all the rage! He was quoted saying “More beans Dada!!” several times.

He was “quoted,” Kathy? By whom? The society editor from the Charlottesville Pennysaver?

He did not, however, go for the kale.

Of course he didn’t, Kathy. It had sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, blue cheese, and avocado on it.

She also writes,

The beans were a mix of pinto beans and leftovers from a crockpot short ribs meal that Matt had when I was out one night. It worked!

First of all, the beans were a mix of beans? Secondly, what worked? The fact that it functioned as food? And why does Bath Matt look so furious at his son forking one of his beans? Go eat a cheese bunny. Read some fangirl comments. Something.

Another night, Kathy had dinner out during a “Ladies night.”

I, of course, got the chili relleno pepper and ate the whole dang thing! Best entrée ever!

“Of course”? “Chili relleno pepper”? Good grief.

The last meal she mentions is a “soup” from Gimme Some Oven. On Gimme Some Oven, it looks delicious — it has onion and homemade enchilada sauce in it, as well.

Kathy’s version doesn’t even compare:

And she ends by hoping her readers have weekends that are “pumpkin-licious.” Do you guys remember Second Life? Did you know that there were nearly naked Halloween costumes you could obtain for your avatars in Second Life?

I kind of wish I hadn’t Googled “pumpkinlicious,” because now, I know that exists.

Our Kathy starts out this last week with a post about how a restaurant called Burton’s gave her and Bath Matt a meal in exchange for a “recap.”

Kathy says she had always thought she was better than said restaurant, but then sat down with a free glass of wine (and a free beer for Bath Matt) and decided she would give up her standards for some comped entrees she didn’t have to share under the guise of being dainty:

I have to be totally honest and say that we had debated going to Burton’s before but thought it would be just another classic American restaurant …. But I humbly eat my words after our visit – we were very impressed. This is not a typical chain restaurant, and the food was top notch.

Everyone was so very nice and excited to have us there.

The restaurant’s executive chef gave them a tour and recommended a plate of four rice fritters. Kathy was very impressed that they made dishes to order, which meant that they were

able to make a dish without onions (yeah!)

Kathy says she “didn’t expect” that the “dressings, sauces, and desserts and ….. pickles” would be made at the restaurant either.

You know what that means: Dishes that have onions in them? She could tell them to leave that shit off.

She could barely get a handle on her emotions about that before realizing that the fritters she ordered

were coated in panko and stuffed with sausage!

And, that the $10 beet salad they shared would be so “amazing, especially with the layer of goat cheese and candied nuts.” Why’s that?

Loved the presentation! They told us they toss the beets in the homemade Dijon dressing shortly after they come out of the oven and the beets soak up the flavor, making them a lot less earthy.

Oh, but it was the free $22 “Autumn Pork” that “had [her] at hello.”

She makes a special point of noting that her husband liked his $21 steak and fries, but that her choice “was the best.”

Sweet / savory my love!

The pork tenderloin came with a stuffing made of DONUTS!!!!!! This dish was the bomb!

First off, this was the best pork I’ve had in my life. Chef said it’s their perfect brining technique – 12 hours no more no less. I usually think of pork as dry and thinly sliced, but this was thick and succulent like prime rib. It was so tender I barely had to chew! It was served with a blueberry gastrique. And of course the donut stuffing was life changing.

They concluded their meal feeling “totally stuffed” after a concluding course of port, a Key lime pie Kathy describes insultingly as “really, really good …. expectations were totally exceeded,” and the commentary that it’s really awesome they have a kids’ menu called “B Choosy.”

I suppose this is since Kathy’s 2-year-old, presumably eating a fitful dinner in parts unknown, is such a disagreeable hellion when it comes to ingesting meals. (But not actually.)

Apart from the free dinner, Kathy’s weekend was pretty lame. Their neighbors came over, they drank a wine they just brought back from Sonoma,

and crunched apple crisp for dessert!!

I threw the crisp together with a topping made from oats, flour, brown sugar, and butter. Our freshly picked apples were underneath. Delish, but it needed about 10x more topping!

On Saturday, Bath Matt didn’t have to work, so he stayed home and made Kathy “Blended oats with apple crisp on top!!” To match his level of dedication to having a good night’s sleep, Kathy

took the day completely off of exercise. I was coming off of a week of really hard workouts and needed to rest my legs. No walking – nothing! It was great, especially with a soccer game on the horizon.

They went to a brewery and had a flight of beers—

— ate a grim salad —

— went to a butcher’s event that was offering free samples

While [the Three Notch’d pumpkin beer] was pretty low in alcohol (4.5%) it was pretty good for such a drinkable pumpkin!

— where Kathy bought cheese, wine, and a copy of a “beautiful book about the local food scene in Charlottesville.”

They stumbled home to clean, ate

Leftover noodles, sautéed eggplant, zucchini and mushrooms, plus a jar of our canned tomato sauce. Grated mozzarella on top!

and re-watched old seasons of “Survivor”:

I have watched seasons 10-17 and am jumping back to watch a few older ones before continuing on. Love that show.

Don’t think that their day was all fun. Kathy

ended up pushing through and doing more food prep

so that she could keep up with the tremendous plans of Sunday:

She’s sort of vaguebraggy about those, promising details in subsequent posts. (We’ll read about her dinner in Wednesday’s post.)

On Tuesday, the ominous-sounding Shrimp Council gave Kathy money for

a pasta party

With these diverse ingredients, she was trying to make a pasta-squash-bacon-cheese-yeast-garlic thing that served as

comfort foods …. [and] all things orange!

She made a “not super heavy” recipe she says has “richness” because of “bacon and parmesan cheese,” but that’s okay because most of it is

nutritious butternut squash, spices and lighter shrimp. A few tablespoons of nutritional yeast amp up the cheese factor and bring lots of B vitamins along for the ride. Use whole wheat pasta for extra fiber.

The Shrimp Council and its partner, Cuisinart, apparently gave her a “shiny new” food processor — even though she already had a Cuisinart food processor — and her neighbors gave her a squash, so that she could make some crappy meal with too many ingredients.

Oh, but if you’re a basic bitch who’s not as cool as Kathy, and you don’t have the awesome amount of time she has because she’s so great,

you could easily use canned squash or pumpkin and cut this recipe time in half : )

She boiled 3 cups of squash she got free from a neighbor, drained it, and pureed it with “veggie broth.”

She then advises to cook 4 slices of bacon in a skillet; She then cooks a pound of shrimp in the bacon grease, because she can avoid cleaning.

You’re then supposed to make pasta, but less of it than normal, because a magazine says so (I think?) and Kathy wants to mention that she had fresh pasta, but if you’re a dumb poor idiot who can only afford regular people Barilla, she supposes that will manage to suffice:

Cook your pasta – ooo la la! I went with fresh pasta for extra pizzazz but you could easily use dried.

With everything cooked and sitting around getting cold, Kathy finally cooked 2 large cloves of garlic in an unwashed skillet, then added the squash puree, 1/4 cup of cheese, two tablespoons of nutritional yeast, and measly amounts of spices (a half-teaspoon of smoked paprika and two pinches of nutmeg) —

Turn your skillet heat back to low and add in your garlic. I didn’t wash my skillet so that the bacon and shrimp brown bits would provide lots of flavor and the fat still in the skillet would serve as my cooking oil for the garlic.

— then a pound of already-cooked pasta, garnished with thyme,

“gently mixed” shrimp and bacon, and concluded that she’d made a

fancy pasta dish loaded with cheesy squash sauce, succulent shrimp and crispy bacon!

But let’s be real – it’s not that fancy, it’s just gooood : )

Kathy returns Wednesday with a third sponsored post in a row about Charlottesville’s Local Food Hub, a food-distribution non-profit a former fakery employee works for. Kathy says she could totally understand the demands of their administrative toil, since

We home cooks know how tedious it can be to keep vegetables from going bad in the fridge

She’s writing about the place because, the previous Sunday, she and Bath Matt got offered another free dinner at Verulam Farm — because it wasn’t like they were going to pay their own money to celebrate the 5-year-anniversary of the organization. She threw on her bridesmaid boots and her automatic subscription service jacket:

Dress was “comfortable, warm, fall festive,” and the atmosphere matched.

Pretty sure she hasn’t even worn these boots since two years ago, when she needed to be a bridesmaid for her college roommate and she decided newborn Carbz was good for warming up her and Bath Matt while they partied.

Kathy thinks it’s pretty witty that she says she “feasted on hors d’oeuvres by Feast!”

She name-drops the places where the booze came from, says there were other “bites” that were “delicious” and ham and sweet potato biscuits that were “GREAT!” and says that

The dinner was prepared by a team of all-female chefs.

By which I suppose she means that all of the people who prepared the food were biologically female and adhered to conventional cis-gender roles. I think? As Oatsiedog far-more-eloquently put it,

There was a squash soup (with one kind of wine), followed by lamb, grits, and ragu (with a different wine) and a cheese plate with another kind of wine.

They ended the evening with a hard cider, raspberries, pears “drizzled” in caramel, and a caramel cake Kathy wished she would have smuggled a slice from:

What I would do for another slice this morning!!

She ends by namedropping who she and Bath Matt sat next to, and saying that “we hope to support the Local Food Hub any way we can.” You know, except for going so far as to pay for their own tickets. Fuck that, I guess.

Thursday’s post is, yes, really, yet another fucking sponsored entry. This one was sponsored by that company, Mandible, that sent her that plastic bracelet that tracks her movement, the one that she got because it would be a shock therapy way to

act as a reminder that it’s the everyday moments that add up to good health.

She’s decided that she likes it because it has one of those ubiquitous “smart” alarm apps that’s supposed to wake you up when it senses that you’re sleeping lightly. Because it’s not like you can get that function from any number of free apps that run off your phone and make it so that you don’t have to wear a chunky slap bracelet while you sleep.

I set mine to wake me up within 30 minutes (before or after) of 7am when I entered light sleep. It’s also the most gentle alarm that buzzes on your wrist – no obnoxious loud sounds or phones to fumble with!

Apparently, it’s kind of a crappily functioning alarm, and it has woken Kathy up before when she’s in the middle of scrunched-brow exercise, but it does give her the ability to complain about her 2-year-old, which is very important:

One day when I went to 6am athletic conditioning it “woke me up” right at 6:30 in the middle of the class thinking “Boy she is in really light sleep!” I was most definitely awake then ; )

get a new hat, jerk.

But overall, this feature is great because it gives me an extra 30-45 minutes before Mazen wakes up to get the day started. (He has been my alarm clock for 2 years!) Mission accomplished!

She also likes being able to track that she sleeps between 7 hours and 25 minutes and 9 hours and 23 minutes a night.

oh shut up.

She notes:

I guess I’m pretty tired because I’m always asleep in under 12 minutes and sometimes as little as 4.

Tired? From what? Googling recipes that you can take the onions out of, and responding to emailed offers of free shit with OMG YES?

I think there are other words for her condition:

Why is she so tired? Because of her inconvenient toddler, duh:

On the downside, Kathy admits next that she didn’t drink her aimed-for 64 ounces of water a day:

I still suck at drinking water! But I will say it improved a little bit …. I am drinking more tea, so that counts for something!

But, she brags uncomfortably, she

rocked the step goal! My most recent 5 day average was 12,665 steps.

I do wear my Jawbone all the time, so it counts my workouts and I also wore it during a soccer game and hit nearly 20,000 steps that day! Again, why didn’t I walk around the block to finally see a 20,000!? Another soccer day I was at 19,938 – so close! I’ve come close but haven’t crossed over to the 20s yet.

Not that she’s even thinking about shitting on a potential sponsor by talking about what she liked less with the FitBit exercise-logging bracelet her friend lent her.

She lists a few superficial differences (battery life, logging problems, one being more “modern looking,” one having a “clunkier” band and a “not quite as visual” band) I mean, what if Kathy says something critical about it and that turns them away from wanting to send her free products in the future?!

All out of people giving her free stuff that could be written about as independent entries, Kathy ends the week with a “New Finds” post where she talks about things she’s bought, been given, or been involved with for some sort of cringe-inducing promotional purpose recently:

• Three $35 fake travel posters she “read about …. in one of [her] magazines — I think it was Coastal Living.” She thinks they “are the perfect beach house décor.”

• Two colors of Born sandals:

I’m one of those types where when I find something I love and I want it in All The Colors. I was browsing the net one day …. before I knew it they were on the way to my house. Y’all know I love me some comfortable shoes that I can dress up and dress down….

• A rumpled towel with a tiny “EatRealFood” hashtag that someone sent her from Etsy.

• Marshmallow ice cream that’s only available in Charlottesville:

Her Toasted Marshmallow wins for BEST ICE CREAM EVER! She uses real toasted marshmallows that she roasts herself! I special order pints regularly.

• A $78 gift set of Oscar de la Renta perfume

so that she could prove what a fancy nose she has:

I am a bit perfume obsessed and can often pick out what someone is wearing by standing next to them. (“Are you wearing Ralph Lauren Blue!?” I asked a women at the farmer’s market. She was floored.) When I went on the Hershey trip earlier this summer I sat next to one of the girls on the trip there and she smelled WONDERFUL! I asked her what the scent was and she told me Oscar de la Renta Live In Love. 

• Some sunglasses for her 2-year-old that cost $17 each, which she says is “not cheap.”

• A travel-ready perfume container so that she can apply her immature scent profile to herself as soon as she leaves the gym.

It’s nice, she says, except that Kathy’s kind of squeamish to recommend it because it looks like a buttplug or something:

My only complaint is it looks like something ….personal…..due to the double rounded tips!! Wish they would square it off.

• An e-book that the blogger Fitnessisisisisisista sent her.

It provides a wonderful foundation for creating a blog and turning it into a business. I’ve been blogging for years and pulled a few really good tips away, but I think those just starting out would get a lot out of it too. Gina’s voice is great – very personal and relatable.

It doesn’t seem like the tips suggest giving entries a quick once-over before hitting “publish,” because Kathy refers to the edition she received as a “previous.” Oh boy.

• Another book another blogger gave her. This one is called “The Nesting Place” by the lady who writes at the blog called “The Nester.” Kathy’s review?

This book was AMAZING. So, so good. I looked forward to getting cozy in bed and reading a chapter every night. This isn’t just a decorating book – it’s about how you feel about your home. It was life changing for me, and I want to read it again!

Kathy says that “a large part of what I took away from it” can be summed up in two quotes:

• Although it’s not something she obtained, Kathy shoehorned in a mention for some company called “Plate Joy” that charges people to deliver ingredients from grocery stores asked her for some of her recipes. Why? Because.

She also, apparently, wants to start up a monthly newsletter, and have people subscribe to have her daily posts emailed to them. I’m not sure what the point of any of this would be — but it doesn’t sound like she is either. Nearing the end of the month, let’s just hope Kathy has the sense to not echo her end-of-month conclusions about September by talking about how, thanks to her ability to live a life in nut butter-blinders and magazine-walking ignorance, she’s had the most amazing, sadness-free October ever.

If you were wondering about the ticker-tape parades, ceremonial bell-ringing, and groups of children caroling that surely overwhelmed your neighborhoods this weekend, it was Kathy’s birthday, duh.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves (said Conchshell, posting five recaps a week late). Let’s return to the suspenseful build-up of Kathy’s Birthday Week.

Pretend these are viewing guides for Survivor.

On Monday, Kathy talked about what a “most beautiful” weekend she had, in which it wasn’t too warm to wear jeans and she put an owl-shaped plate on her dining room table to make it “more spooky.” If you don’t remember, I think it’s that white plate she put sliced up stuff on and it ended up looking like something out of this roundup of edible animal penis. I do not care to look up the original image, thank you.

First, the neighbors came over for “cocktail hour” Friday evening and they “sipped pumpkin beer [and] ate Monticello peanuts” and ate pizza. She allowed her kid the tremendous joy of jumping off a bench, and took a photo where she’s wearing that awful dish scrubbie shirt and her tiny son looks so thoroughly reticent and creeped out.

Continuing to ignore apparent reality, she writes:

The kiddos were in seventh heaven.

Loomed over by a hirsute, chewing Bath Matt, these children — as is strangely typical for Kathy’s photography — look overcome by the kind of existential angst that makes one unable to conjure hunger at all. Not pictured: the copy of Arthur Schopenhauer’s “On the Vanity of Existence” from which Carbz was reading passionately 30 seconds prior to the snapping of this photo.

The next day, Kathy deigned to recognize the birthday of her little sister in (her new swanky-I-guess home in Dallas) by putting sprinkles on her own pancakes.

Happy birthday, Laura. I’ll celebrate you with 5 cents of waxy sugar sand.

Pawning off her toddler on Bath Matt, Kathy headed out to play soccer on Saturday, using some old bag she hardly remembers from high school that her mom gave her while playing wistful house-clean-out games in North Carolina. I’m not sure why this needed to be noted, or preserved for all time, but here it is:

She came back and ate a meatless lentil puck, leftover parsnips, peppers, and hummus, a lunch she says came “from deep inside the fridge.”

With the changing of the seasons I get a little sick of salads. I was glad to have a veggie alternative. It’s soup season!

When her husband and child returned, Kathy set herself to slave away in the kitchen and rolled her eyes at her child’s pitiful attempt to mimic her:

Saturday afternoon we did some baking! While I prepared the real recipe, Mazen did a pretend one with honey in a cup. He is loving cooking these days.

Whatever it is she made, it is horrifying-looking. Here it is on the left, and here is what it reminds me of on the right, with all relevant apologies to spiders:

Saturday night, they “headed into the country for a harvest party!” where there were four kegs and I’m sure nothing was harvested except selfies. There was a bonfire and tiny portions and “s’mores were gobbled down!”

At the disgustingly early hour of 8:30 a.m. on Sunday, Kathy was at Whole Foods, drinking cappuccino and noting how “GLORIOUS!” it was that no one else was in line. She came back, chopped a sweet potato and a squash and responding perfunctorily to anyone who wanted actual information about the process —

— and went out to play another soccer game:

Our team played so well, and we almost won but ended up in a tie. We always tie!

She came back to eat smoked salmon, sweet potato fries, cheese, greens, and baked apples,

then blogged and went to a neighborhood association picnic so she could take a photo of herself holding wine and her kid in falling-off sunglasses painting a miniature pumpkin and herself holding a plastic glass of wine and this:

It was a little weird to eat dinner at 4:30, but I can be convinced to eat at any hour : )

and another photo of her child painting pumpkins with the caption:

Happy birthday week to me

Tuesday’s post is another sponsored post brought to us by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (the sponsors of the second post recapped here, in June) about how the center has named Oct. 24 “Food Day”:

Food Day “aims to bring us closer to a food system with “real food” that is produced with care for the environment, animals, and the women and men who grow, harvest, and serve it.” Obesity, chronic disease, food insecurity, hunger, food safety, farm labor, and animal welfare are just some of the topics that Food Day addresses.

Kathy doesn’t even know what that means, but she thinks it means that the way she eats will keep her safe from obesity and chronic disease, and that she can afford pasture-raised eggs, and good for her for that, because “those other eggs” are ew.

As for caring about hunger, food insecurity, food safety, and farm labor, Kathy hasn’t seemed to ever give a shit so long as her yearly batch of pumpkin beer is brewed on time.

She’ll leave the serious conversations to her commenters:

Nevertheless, she pretends to be totally hip to the movement because she can do a dump of her old links and consider her post complete:

She sums up her mission by name-checking three groups — the Charlottesville Local Food Hub (the place that hooked her up with dinner and a chance to wear her bridesmaid boots earlier this month), the City Schoolyard Garden (to which she and Bath Matt have donated bread at least once a year in exchange for dinners, mini cupcakes, and publicity) and Peanut Butter & Jelly Fund (which she has never before mentioned on her site) — saying that she’s “incredibly lucky to be able to afford” fancy food but that she’s doing a noble thing by “consider[ing] that each purchase …. encourages producers to provide these foods to consumers at more affordable prices,” and concluding that she hopes her blog is “a tiny part” of explaining to people “not only that an apple is a better choice than a bag of Doritos, but also why.”

Thanks for that groundbreaking information, Kathy. Let us know if you ever decide to talk about hunger, farm labor, or any of the other topics you’ll never touch with a 10-foot-pole made from soup kitchen bologna sandwiches.

She ends the post with a link dump to 28 blogs that mention “Food Day” for “Food Day’s first-ever Coordinated Blogging Event,” and points out that her post isn’t sponsored,

just showing some love for real food.

Wednesday’s post is a guest post by

Katy, the registered dietitian behind Have Fruit Will Travel

Katy and her dude quit their jobs (she was a corporate dietician) to travel through Central and South America, then Europe and Asia for a year, so Katy wanted to know all about what she would be most fascinated by in another country — avoiding gaining weight:

Vacation pounds can settle in fast, and since travel is her lifestyle at the moment Katy gives some good tips on eating well abroad.

To sum up, Katy has been doing the thoroughly unexpected by

making sure we are getting enough of the good (fruits, vegetable, fiber and protein) while still enjoying the occasional indulgence.

To stay skinny in these horrible countries that only want her to gain weight, the savvy Katy has been carrying “healthy snacks….everywhere we go” (even though she doesn’t say what the hell they are) and eating rice and beans, ceviche, and smoothies to balance out the night where she goes to secret Argentinian restaurants that she only knows about because she is awesome.

Because fuck knows you can’t get white rice and beer and beef anywhere else in Buenos Aires.

They’ve also been splitting restaurant meals and making “some killer, veggie packed dishes” in a rented apartment with a hotplate and a microwave, just in case you were about to complain that your long hours at work and other generalized exhaustion was preventing you from keeping up with some young, job-ditching things munching their way around the world for a year.

GETTING A SALAD AND SPLITTING A SANDWICH? THIS IS REVOLUTIONARY!

In conclusion, Katy the guest blogger describes herself as a foodie three times. How wonderful for her.

All Thursday’s post is about is how much television Kathy’s been watching and how she’s putting apples and cheese on a sandwich in the morning.

Kathy dialectically opines that:

Y’all know I’m not the biggest savory breakfast girl. About as savory as I go is bacon from time to time. Maaaaybe a spinach omelet at brunch. But one morning cheese sounded good.

We had a yeasty Virginia roll in the bread basket, and I sliced up some apple, sizzled some butter, sprinkled on cinnamon and this sandwich was imagined.

Everything is cooked together in one pan – the egg in the middle with the cheese on top once it’s set and the apples in butter along the edges.

Irritating things about this post include that she says she’s:

Popping in for some chit-chat this morning.

And that she is positively Scarlett O’Hara-d about watching these pre-2005 episodes of “Survivor.”

My two friends Hillary and Ellen and I are OBSESSED. Like so obsessed we get together 4-5 nights a week to sip hot tea and watch together (luckily we all live close by).

And then Kathy realized that there were more seasons of Survivor to be watched.

Sometimes one of us gets so enthralled that we have to keep going and get ahead of the others. So far I have watched Seasons 7, 10, 11-17, and the 4 most recent ones on TV in real time. We now have a Google Doc to help manage our obsession. It’s amazing.

I secretly want to apply for the show, but I don’t think I could leave Mazen for 40 days. Maybe when he’s in upper elementary school : ) I also have a glorified impression of Survivor and think that 2 nights of going to the bathroom outdoors and seeing a wild snake or spider would have me crying for home.

I would mostly be in it for the challenges, which look so fun! My friends and I think there should be a Survivor resort where fans can check in and live with pretty minimal comforts and participate in challenges during the day. Only Survivor geeks would actually pay to do that!

Her fans apparently like that idea too:

So. She says another “obsession” of hers is playing soccer.

This is apparently related to why she doesn’t want to have another kid:

Soccer is one of the selfish reasons I am not ready to get pregnant again. I don’t want to give it up just yet.

I’ve been guesting playing for some of the other teams in the league just to get in more field time. I have the world’s best husband who loves hanging out with Mazen on Sunday mornings and totally supports my love of the game. In fact, I think they cherish their solo time as much as I do since Matt doesn’t have as much time alone with M during the week. Soccer is by far my best workout of the week –both mentally and physically. I have reached 20,000 steps on the Jawbone on some of those bonus game days.

I know she’s trying to say that she has a loving family who are all flexible enough to support her love of the game, but for some reason, it just keeps coming off like Mommy Wants To Play Games, And Fuck You, Second Future Planned Child; You Are Getting In the Way Of My Adult Hide-And-Seek.

After her sponsored tea, Kathy says that she comes home to tea made by her new sponsor, Celestial Seasonings, because she is “now addicted” to some Sleepytime tea. (Which is awesome, because Kathy is 32 and has never had any experience with addiction that would prevent her from using “addiction” in a glib and superficial manner. Yay!)

Seemingly unbelievable for someone who’s now 32, she says she doesn’t:

think I’d had it before the trip, but I’m hooked on its minty herby aroma and swirl in a teaspoon of honey.

She ends by saying that she bought a set of “Pumpkin Pecan Waffles” and “Pumpkin Cupcake” candles from Bath and Body Works because Seamane gave her a set in 2013 and,

These guys make my house smell incredible!! …. I happened to be at the mall this week and saw they have them again this year. Best candle I’ve ever burned!

Friday’s post is one of those long-dreaded “Lately” posts where Kathy lists everything she’s eaten in a given week. She ate:

• Oats, banana, yogurt, granola, “sunbutter,” and coffee that looks like it’s been sitting out for five hours.

I really like the yogurt on top – it’s kind of like frosting……ok it’s nothing like frosting, but I still like it!

• Some pre-packaged Whole Foods oats “with chia seed explosion!”

Kind of like a single serving of overnight oats minus the yogurt. Chia, oats, apple – ready to eat! This would be perfect for a traveler who needs a quick and cheap breakfast and passes by a grocery store. Spoon included! You could eat it cold, but heated up it was great.

• Something she called “Eggs, toast with jam, a grape arch.”

• A “pumpkin pie smoothie in a bowl!” with granola on top of it.

So, for lunch, she and her mother-in-law took her child to an apple orchard, took a photo of him in sunglasses, and decided that he could go fuck himself after he stopped wanting to dutifully pick apples and just run around.

Karen, recovering cancer patient, grated hard-boiled eggs to make this:

After sandwiches and Terra brand chips, Kathy recorded that her child had “fun for about 5 minutes” while picking apples but then “ just wanted to run up and down the mountain.”

• This stupid, sad thing,

a big salad at home – quesadilla on the side made with a local blue corn tortilla stuffed with a slice of cheese plus greens with beans, hummus, peppers and feta cheese.

• A free lunch at the fakery, where Kathy had a salad containing cold looking turkey and frozen cubes of cheese.

• The most funereal thing that’s ever been described as a “perfect quesadilla.”

• Salad and eggs on top and a fakery roll.

USE ANOTHER PLATE. JESUS.

• I don’t know what this vile thing is supposed to be, but it’s described as

Too thick for soup, but too soupy for pasta …. 4 cups of squash and pumpkin puree with 2 cups of chicken broth, 1 can of white beans, 1/2 tsp of salt, some garlic and fresh rosemary. Plus 3 cups of rigatone. All cooked together into a “stoup.”

• Grim, dry pizza that Bath Matt made one night.

• A subscription recipe “classic beef chili,” which she says is “amazing!!”

• This “amazing” beer with recipe subscription service lo mein noodles and chicken. Kathy calls it:

Another winner and chicken dinner!

• White bean and sausage soup from her recipe-subscription service:

Loved all the parsley on top. It’s soup season y’all.

She ends by noting that it was

2 days till my birf-day!!

Finally, a trembling Kathy reached the anniversary of her birth. She assembled her horrific soccer shoes, her ketchup, her many hair bands, and her selfie-o-matic for some in-your-face, better-than-you health-shaming….

….a reminder that she could have had (and deserved) breakfast in bed, but took to the field instead, because she is just so super sporty,

….and even a digital report card proclaiming her the technical valedictorian of swinging the arm upon which she’s clamped her bruxism-recalling “Jawbone” fitness device:

Congratulations for “outstep”ping the other women in this world who are just trying to get in shape too, Kathy. Good heavens.

What else has been going on in Kathy’s life apart from her blog? Well, Instagram tells us that she’s been getting makeup in the mail and still watching the first nine seasons of “Survivor” that aired before she started watching in 2005.

Her child is being allowed to smear paint on stuff in the safe confines of “pre-school,” far from Mother’s White Couch in the No-Food-Allowed Room. Actually, the strangest part of this photo comes from a commenter who says it makes her “sad” that Carbz is making “structured” art, as though he’s being sent off to sew zippers into anoraks at a World War 1 era boarding school.

Carbz also got a haircut! Which is fine. (Why is Kathy holding her breath during it?) The weird part is Kathy trying to turn it into some kind of a charity nudge, and completely faceplanting in her delivery:

Her photo says “#EveryParent deserves to hold their breath during their child’s first official haircut. @WhiteHouse please fully fund Gavi to make sure millions more parents have that chance.”

Having made “Gavi” sound like some kind of Santa Claus who needs money to administer haircuts for deserving tots, Kathy chimes back in to say “Click the hash tag! I’m supporting an organization campaigning for vaccines.” After being told by subsequent commenters that the hashtag isn’t clickable, Kathy just gives up.

So what is Gavi? It’s the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations. Bill and Melinda Gates founded it in 2000. This week, the ONE organization Bono co-founded is trying to get people to encourage the American administration to pledge $1 billion to GAVI in the next four years. There’s a petition ONE wants people to sign, or people can call the White House comment line (888-213-2881) and tell the operator, “I am asking President Obama to help save 6 million children’s lives by pledging $1 billion over the next four years to GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance. Thank you,” and say you want to submit it as a comment. And there’s the #EveryParent thing where you hashtag something on Instagram to spread awareness, like these people did:

Kathy’s also giving back to the world by Instagramming a photo of peanut butter with a charity tie-in it sounds like she was given for free:

Good on you, Kathy. But enough about starving, unvaccinated children. If you can stand the excitement, Kathy will be posting about her real passion — what she thinks about 17 different pumpkin-flavored beers — on Tuesday.

Hopefully, this will bring her out of the daily depression she feels about the Dixie Chicks being “no more.”

Anyone want to tell her the band literally toured last year? Nah, I didn’t think so.

P.S. Holy shit, Louis Pasteur’s Undead Chicken Flock (fm Black Honey of the Shadowy Clinique). I subscribed to Lisa Schmeiser’s “So What, Who Cares?” newsletter the moment you recommended it and am currently in giggling, drooling awe of the Martha Stewart “punk party” comments section she points readers to.

And good on Martha for not deleting the riptide of hilarity.

To the world, Kathy’s birthday may be rapidly fading like a basil-scented beer belch, but Our Heroine remains positively aglow by the whole thing — to the extent that she’s typed 1,241 words in an actual trilogy of posts about The Day She Finished Her 32nd Year. (In comparison, she’s written 784 words — total — about her child’s first and second birthdays.)

She also made some misshapen popsicles and wrote a list of food, but all you need to know about that is that she ordered a whole cookie at lunch —

— but took HALF of it home, guys.

Thanks to her parents coming to town to babysit for the weekend, Kathy was treated to

Friday night date night // Saturday’s pumpkin beer tasting party // Sunday’s birthday events and Homebrew for Hunger event

Kathy and Bath Matt “double-dated” with Jeff (the former employee who inexplicably makes jambalaya for the Younger-Smugsons) and his wife, who doesn’t have to have an “ongoing game” of “pretend I’m an urban professional” like Kathy, since she’s in actual medical school. They went to Alley Light so that Kathy could drink a made-up drink —

Bourbon // Apple cider reduction // House made pumpkin butter suspended with egg whites // Brown sugar

— out of an “old fashioned glass” and mention bartender Micah for the third time this year.

She calls it “SO DELISH!” and posts a picture of it and of herself admiring it:

The well prepared foursome tried to go to a restaurant that was closed for a private event, but “ended up” at Petit Pois, which they called “romantic,” even though they were having dinner with a dude who literally could have described the night as Dinner With My Former Boss’s Wife Because It Was Her 32nd Birthday.

The “and romantic….” fragment is just something that got caught in the image capture showing the two couples.

Delightfully adhering to some kind of outdated nibbly rabbit stereotypes of dainty femininity, Kathy writes:

The men shared steak tartar while the ladies split an arugula salad with goat cheese, endive and hazelnuts.

She let Bath Matt continue to indulge his ravenous cave-man sensibilities by gawking at him as he ate lamb, while she fluttered over a $20

vegetarian dish! The combination sounded so delicious: farro, chickpeas, Swiss chard, roasted root vegetables, arugula, and parmesan. This dish was so “warming” from the inside out.

They trotted off to have 1-ounce servings of $1.25 ice cream

and rest up in preparation for cinching back her hair, strapping on Pair 1 Of Gold Sandals, and playing on her friend’s soccer team in the morning. Writes Kathy:

I couldn’t think of a more fun Saturday morning activity : )

She returned home for a “healthy lunch” of kale chips and pumpkin-flavored yogurt from Whole Foods, and then kicked her feet with glee as “a bunch” of blonde women flooded her house for a “pumpkin beer tasting party” that Bath Matt threw for her birthday.

Bath Matt assembled not only blonde women (the one on the left brought the handfuls of red crap — and maybe the miniature pumpkins? — to dump on the table! Thoughtful!) but also seven kinds of “EPIC!!” cheese, grilled flatbread, and “nibbles,” one small dish of olives and one sausage cut in half, as far as I can tell:

And then came the pop quiz, where everyone had to write down what they thought about 17 varieties of pumpkin beer, using generously provided paper and colored pens…. even if there weren’t enough seats for the guests forced into this snobby little ranking game. Here’s Kathy taking “notes” and judging “favorites” and everyone else being clearly overjoyed to do the same:

She types out her notes (“Sweetness.” “Sweet.” “Beery.” “Not Sweet.” “Marshmallow.” “Sweet.” “Bready.”), in which she makes special note of how she correctly guessed Southern Tier Brewing Company’s Pumking and Warlock, AleWerks Brewing Company Pumpkin Ale, and the homebrew her husband made this year.

Many beers got wretched marks, with Kathy noting, “Meh” and “No pumpkin flavor” for the 21st Amendment Elysian He Said, and “Meh” for the Hardywood Park Craft Brewery Saison Rustica. The Devils Backbone Brewing Company Pumpkin Hunter got a flat 0 score from Kathy for being “sour.”

After all that tedium was done, she made everyone raise their hands and she counted them to see which beers they liked the best, so that she could report that two of Bath Matt’s beers tied in the list of the top four beers ranked in people’s “top 3.” If that makes any sense. The result was that Bath Matt made this face:

And that Kathy took a photo with a bunch of people all lined up and noted that it was taken after a BUNCH of people had already left, and then she memorialized the mini cupcakes from Sweet Haus, because DUH:

No idea what her parents or her child did while everyone was standing around pairing pumpkin beer with sausage and olives and cheese and barbecued pita bread, except that that evening, Kathy treated her mom to a typical Kathy evening of eating “nibbles of cheese,” watching “Survivor,” and drinking some hangover-preventing tea.

Finally, we get to Kathy’s actual stupid birthday. It’s chock full of 26 points of idiocy:

1. It’s an even year:

I like even birthday years more than odd, so I’m happy to be 32 : )

2. She makes Bath Matt take a photo of her triumphantly posing and pointing with her thumbs at herself/her shirt/her number/whatever. Bath Matt doesn’t tell her her ponytail looks like crap.

3. A second adult soccer game of the weekend.

4. A birthday mug from Rachel.

5. Sweet fakery toast and nut butter.

6. She must have done lousy at the game, because she says she was “a little stiff…. but…. had a great time.” And she mentions, again that it’s her SECOND GAME GUYS SHE PLAYED SOCCER TWICE THIS WEEKEND.

7. There were at least 15 people at her party, and yet there was still enough leftover from seven slabs of cheese to serve five people “Lentils with parmesan, grapes, carrots, squash, cornbread and CHEESE!”

8. The second afternoon of her weekend is again centered on beer.

9. Oh, but it’s “awesome,” because it’s a collection of 40 people who think it’s cool to mix cilantro and fennel seeds and Snickers or whatever with their beer in their basement and they all buy each other’s stuff and it benefits the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank, which Kathy doesn’t even link.

10. Bath Matt picked up some chalk and drew some leaves and a bent halo on a dude in a hoodie. Kathy notes:

He drew the artwork himself.

11. She ranks the beer again and types up her notes again.

12. So proud of people doing tiny tasks for their very own selves, she notes that Seamane and Rob made a porter with coconut and “toasted the coconut themselves.”

13. Not only that, but and you could actually taste it! Writes Kathy: “the flavor really came through.” Way to be competent, people other than Kathy!

14. Kathy bestows other beers with praise too. One is “pretty sweet!” and another is “pretty cool — lots of caraway flavor” and another is “pretty awesome …. brewed with serrano, cayenne cacao nibs, cinnamon and roasted bell peppers.”

15. Kathy points out one home brewer because his wife reads her crummy blog, and another because she plays soccer with him.

16. There was “a nice woman brewer” but Kathy doesn’t get her name or describe what she made aside from saying they were “delicious…. flavor combos!”

17. Kathy describes her time as “lots of fun.”

18. She reports that she “ate sweet potato fritters as a snack.” Which is good, because it would be confusing if she ate them as a breakfast or a tea.

19. Kathy points out what the dog is doing. Oh, what a wacky dog, Kathy. Look how spontaneous you all are being. Whee.

20. She ends her reportage on the beer festival like a kid writing home from camp:

Guess who won the whole event!? ROB + SEAMANE!

even though she and Bath Matt had to be sobbing in their horrible basil-pumpkin beer that they didn’t win.

21. Kathy concludes that she drinks too much, duh, but it’s cute when she says it because SMILEY FACES!

We had a great time….but I don’t want to drink beer again for a while!! : ) : )

22. The Younger-Smugsons and Kathy’s dad, who I guess was also there, not being photographed, maybe magazine-walking amongst booths, walked home, which I guess at least is a blessing for the drivers of Charlottesville.

23. Grandma and Grandpa Babysitter presumably paid the tab for “a family dinner” at Commonwealth Restaurant and Skybar, where Kathy ate $8 empanadas, the $25 scallops, pork belly, and sweet potato.

24. and a $9 toffee pudding cake with a freaking candle in it:

25. Their usefulness over, on Monday morning, Kathy snapped some photos and shunted her parents off back to North Carolina, noting briefly:

We really appreciate all the playing that Grammie and Mazen did while we lived up the weekend! I hear they had as much fun as we did : )

26. The comments on these three birthday posts are full of women saying they need to treat themselves to lavish weeks of birthday fun from now on.

Ina, you gotta be kidding me.

With her birthday over and no guest RDs or incongruous sponsors banging down her door to make her daily typing go by quicker, Kathy is forced to come up with original content. She turns, as she does, to her typical source of inspiration: sugar.

Introducing her recipe by saying that there are still days of overheated laziness —

sweating in short sleeves and jeans – and not quite convinced to bring the shorts back out.

— and that

These popsicles were conceived on one of those warm days.

Sweaty, jean-clad Kathy, her shorts presumably packed away in the attic,

had way too much pumpkin on hand that needed using up

and decided to make a smoothie.

She actually writes: “See it’s a smoothie!”

Kathy then tries on descriptive writing, and finds it as ill-fitting as that horrible band jacket:

The seasons were getting as blended as the smoothie itself!

She used a Whole Foods-bought yogurt, “which rocked!” and “some Halloween treats. I mean, why not!?”

She crams a giant marshmallow into one of the molds, adds “A little more sprinkles to jazz things up” and wishes she had graham crackers so they could have “joined the party too!”

Kathy then treats us to the image of her smacking her counter with her crappy plastic popsicle mold —

bang the set on the table a few times to really let the smoothie sink down in there and around the toppings.

— and describes several hours of chilling as the popsicles “rock[ing] and roll[ing] in the freezer.”

Yes, she really says she considered putting a plastic spider in a popsicle. She contented herself with piling her five surviving popsicles on her shapeless-supposedly-owl-shaped plate and adding a clip art one instead:


Kathy ends with a Friday post listing the food (well, most of the food — maybe?) she ate in the last week. Since Friday was Halloween, her post is as loopy as a kid who’s stayed up too late and so voraciously gorged himself on candy he’s accidentally eaten half a cheapo Dracula makeup palette in the process without realizing it. There’s her sputtering opening:

She leads us first through her “fond” Halloween memories, which are about as delectable as a bowl of these hated things —

Mary Jane Peanut Butter Kisses, useful for budget tooth removal and notable for being the only candy that seems to break Conchshell’s Rule 31 of the Internet: There Is A Recipe To Turn Every Candy Into a Cocktail.

— including having to wear a coat because it was “20*” (yes, that’s an asterisk, not a degree symbol) out, dressing as “a clown with a ridiculous red lipstick mouth” for her “very first Halloween” in 1985

Because her mom’s good tube of Revlon Orange Flip is unacceptable.

But this makeup job is worth grinning about.

and this stand-out wrinkle in her grey matter:

one Halloween it poured and I had an umbrella with a curved handle that I dangled my bag from.

Thankfully, Spunky Buzz comes to the rescue in the comments section. Kathy’s reaction is wonderfully humorless:

She crafts a sentence about Carbz “practicing” for Halloween so she can link to a YouTube video where parents tell their kids they ate all their candy. Something tells me Kathy was trying to see if there was a way she could get away with such a line. After a diversion where Kathy shares that her favorite YouTube videos include the one where two dudes do a voice-over of a video where cats play patty cake, and the one where someone in a dinosaur costume runs after Japanese people in a hallway, Kathy finally gets around to the point, as it were, and shows off her five awesome breakfasts (with an average of one exclamation point for each), which she says are “Appropriate for the week” because they’re orange:

good old pumpkin oats

Pumpkin pancakes

pumpkin swirl bread that my friend made served over yogurt

Deep dish pancake, pumpkin style!

Yum!

Each breakfast also has nut butter and either granola or chia seeds on it. This is their primordial ooze.

We move on to her lunches:

• Melancholy leftover noodles glopped out onto lettuce:

• Leftover cauliflower, cheese, pickles, and a meatless puck on more salad.

• Leftover “pumpkin swirl bread” from the fakery and approximately 26 grams of “dairy cheese” and dressing she made her very own self on greens. The bread was “on the side,” in case you were wondering if Kathy decided the bread was her entrée and considered her greens to be on the side. (Aren’t you glad you don’t have to wonder about that?)

And two restaurant lunches. Kathy needed to go to the first one, guys, because she had “to get some work done.”

I had a bowl of their Cuban black bean soup and a Hot Toddy cookie on the side! (The cookie was ginormous so I brought half home, for the record)

Plus, it was at Paradox Pastry, and she had to go because this is how they sell their soup & cookie combo on their menu:

The other restaurant lunch was “a lunch date” at Eppie’s with her 2-year-old where she had a “4 Veggie Plate” and something off the “kid’s menu (for all ages)”:

We shared this huge veggie plate plus some pumpkin bread and macaroni! The pimento cheese grits are sooooo darn good!!!

Finally, she generously provides photos and descriptions of “a few dinners to share.”

The only one she made up came from when she and Bath Matt were both feeling like “tired,” whiny monsters, so they ate “quick n easy” scrambled eggs with cheese, green beans with cheese on them,

and avocado that Mazen rejected.

She doesn’t say, but I’m guessing that gratuitous bitching was on the side. You know, next to the watercolor she appears to be using as a trivet.

The last two were subscription meal-planning service meals, and, unfortunately, disaster struck both times. She made chicken, cauliflower, and potatoes,

but at the last moment, Regan from The Exorcist showed up and told the meal it was a faithless swine whose mother sucks cocks in hell.

Kathy appears to have been completely exhausted from the fight against demonic possession by the next evening, because she calls this a taco, uses the word “orangey” to describe a “salad on the side,” and poses a real pair of leaves and a digital, oversized, clip-art spider on her plate to complete the Disguise The Red Meat in the Dinner farce.

She ends with the healthy-living blog equivalent of the household that gives out boxes of raisins and a pat on the head —

And because we had this dinner two nights in a row, you get a second photo!

— and the encouragement to

Have a spooooky day y’all!

Welcome to the latest summation of the last week of Kathy’s food blog that’s not really about food so much anymore. This week, the blog about “Eat[ing] Real Food” discussed

• The Halloween weekend Kathy had, despite the best efforts of her candy-seeking child.

• What a typically perfect day looks like in Kathy’s life, even though her dastardly child interrupted her beauty sleep.

• A thing Kathy made with chocolate she’s being paid by Hershey to use in a blog post.

• A list of the ways Kathy has put nut butter on day-old fakery bread and put leftovers on top of salads.

• Metabolic testing. A guest post, naturally, as Kathy’s priorities these days are spreadsheeting her viewing of old “Survivor” episodes and sticking to her pledge “to utilize Pinterest more often.”

First off, Monday’s post is about Halloween weekend, and what a shitty time Kathy thought she was going to have with her 2-year-old:

I really had no idea how Mazen would like Halloween. My gut instinct told me he would hate every bit of it. But turns out he loved it!!

Kathy put on some clothing-subscription clothing and a cheap witch hat and steeled herself for a terrible night, enlisting Bath Matt’s mom to escort them to the University of Virginia and surrounding herself with “friends” (not pictured with their faces showing). Luckily, her 2-year-old didn’t embarrass her too much in front of them:

Mazen really got into the spirit… a little too much! Often he tried to get 2-3 pieces of candy from one person. He didn’t understand that one was enough. He also didn’t understand that we weren’t supposed to eat it all at once! The one thing he did really well: lots of “Tank yous!!”

Exhausted by the outing, Kathy and Bath Matt opened some of their Sonoma vacation wine, ordered a pizza —

From a place whose selections sound like overpriced apartment complexes with astoundingly thin walls and fake ivy filling the lobby.

— “to fuel up,” and Kathy tsks herself for having a piggy piece and a half:

Note that the witch was hungry!

They head into the neighborhood to trick-or-treat, and Kathy has a tiny moment of tenderness —

There was a moment when everything was dark and children were plentiful that took me right back to the Halloweens of my youth. It was a moment I haven’t relived in many years!!

— even though it’s vague, poorly articulated, and ephemeral next to her Edmund Spenserian odes to cake and frosting she’s penned. The moment passes quickly, and soon, Kathy is watching television and passing out.

Saturday is a far more exciting day, racking up 8 exclamation points as Kathy mentions Grand Pee-Paw’s 60th birthday, the blueberry syrup she put on her not-French toast, her trips to the gym and the grocery store, a birthday party — and the cake, of course — for a friend she hasn’t mentioned since she published a photo of her a week after she gave birth two and a half years ago, and a walk to a brewery for a dinner of nachos and salad.

But wait! Sunday was even more stupendous!

There was “a really fun family breakfast!” — which I imagine involves a jumping castle, a unicorn, plates of that brightly colored goo the Lost Boys eat in “Hook,” and a tank of nitrous oxide. My imagination is wrong, though, because all the Younger-Smugsons really ate was

Eggs, bacon, toast, grapes and coffee.

The whirlwind continued as Kathy logged 23,000 steps on her fitness shackle running at a soccer game, going up and down her attic steps “100 times” to sort “breastfeeding supplies” and pitch things from her and Bath Matt’s sole “memorabilia trunk,” getting rid of everything but her “high school graduation speech!” and “collage acceptance” letters.

For dinner, Kathy and Bath Matt decided — while not under the influence of drugs or Truth or Dare — to make shrimp and grits, to put both of those things in sushi, and to eat brussels sprouts and bacon to go with said sushi.

I’m starting to think Kathy’s sponsor, the ominous-sounding Shrimp Council, might be messing with her.

Kathy concludes her weekend post:

And I’d call that a wrap!!

Would you? I’d call that Reason 26 why no one’s ever going to be inspired enough to want to buy a vinyl doll of you, Kathy:

Tuesday’s post is another one of those “Day In The Life” things Kathy last did six months ago. Here’s what she did in her second installment of How Perfect Can I Make My Life Look, 2014 Edition:

• “Didn’t quite hit 8 hours” because her inconvenient toddler woke her up crying in the middle of the night.

• Woke up at 5:40 a.m. to go to “athletic conditioning,” and congratulated herself for being “strong ’till the end despite being very tired and drenched with sweat!”

Because I only get up once per week for an early class, I don’t dread it like I might if I was a daily occurrence (as it used to be back in the day!) It’s sort of, almost exciting to get up this early once a week!**

• Called half a banana “fuel” for the gym.

• Mentioned brushing her teeth twice.

• Said she had to “sneak in a shower” before her child could wake up again and ruin things.

• Mentions her subscription clothing service.

• Sent her husband to work at 7:45 a.m., when their child wakes up.

• Called a pumpkin pie-flavored yogurt “this guy.”

• Noted that her child failed to inconvenience her once she had him in his Halloween outfit:

I get Mazen dressed – in his Halloween costume! It’s the day before and he has a party at preschool. No tears this time! After some practicing he gets that costume = fun and treats.

• Said she had to/was able to “quickly” clean her kitchen.

• Pretended to

work on emails and comments before a 9:30 call with Relay Foods about a potential project.

Even Barbie’s “Home Office” set looked like it got more use.

• Was able to go to the TJMaxx factory second housewares store HomeGoods to buy useless decorative crap for her friend’s new house and “a new piece” for her own garage-less not-beach cottage, saying that being able to do so is

{Reason #562 why preschool days rock!)

Her caption is “Love the glam.”

• Lamented that, after walking the half mile to pick up her child, the walk back “was a slow one” because he “wanted to walk.”

• Had a lunch of photographed salad, photographed carrot sticks, and unphotographed lasagna her child didn’t eat in his far-off high chair.

• Put her child down for a nap around 2:30 p.m. so she could rejoice, uninterrupted, over a package of free nut butter from a new company she’s already not doing any favors for:

I taste the chocolate right away and it’s heavenly – kind of gritty almost like little bits of crackle inside!? The cinnamon raisin reminds me of pumpkin spice!

• Pretended to work “2 solid hours …. including uploading these photos and writing this post up to here! I also had a call with a sponsor. Exciting times. And an empty inbox at the end!”

• Handed off her son to her husband when he came home from the fakery shortly after 5.

• Started making “sausage and root soup” but got distracted by “wrap[ping] up on the computer for the day. She came back up and threw some frozen spinach in the soup. Her son didn’t approve.

It was OK, but not amazing.

• She “thought about opening a bottle of wine but …. decided to pass since there is a good chance ice cream is in the cards tonight during Survivor hour!”

• After putting her child to bed at around 8:30 p.m., (she elaborates in comments that “I’d love a 7pm bedtime for the evening time to myself, but it also means we can go out to dinner with him more easily and attend parties and things.”) Kathy returned to her favorite spot in front of a screen for “new ice cream flavors” with two of her friends:

After M went to bed, Hillary and Ellen came over for some Survivor!! We try not to have dessert every night during our Survivor parties (most of the time it’s just hot tea), but I just got some new ice cream flavors from Sweet Sandies that we had to try.

• Called the ice cream and the reruns of the reality show “Amazing” and went to bed at 10-freaking-26 in honor of her birthday on Oct. 26.

Wednesday’s post is another that Kathy was paid to write by the asses at Hershey, a sponsor relationship she doesn’t mention until the end of the post, because the FTC’s rules on “clear and conspicuous” disclosure don’t apply to Stompy Kathy Secretkeeper over here. (Although she might care if reprimanded by Hershey, since it’s more likely they’d get dinged for noncompliance, as marketing agency Location3 wisely points out.)

Kathy wins at typography.

It’s not like she majored in history or anything. You know, the kind of study that would have maybe mentioned the payola scandals that swept radio and television in the 50s.

To earn her money from Hershey, Kathy talks about how great s’mores are:

….marshmallow, chocolate and graham in any style of dessert wins my heart. 

I love the texture combination: sticky, gooey mallow // creamy, milk chocolate // crunchy, spiced graham cracker.

Wait, spiced? Spiced? That’s like celebrating Franzia for its famous sobering effects, or nut-butter for how perfectly fat-free it is. Not just because the closest thing to spice in your average graham cracker is thiamine mononitrate, but because Graham crackers were like, the flagship product of a diet invented by a minister who thought a bland diet would stop children from touching themselves — something that led to terrible consequences, he argued, including “a fondness for spicy foods.”

Kathy decides that she can definitely top the merely “good” graham crackers they sell at the store by making her own graham crackers and then, “the ultimate s’mores.”

Thus, these Pumpkin Spice Homemade Graham Crackers were born.

Ugh. Between this and the popsicles that were “conceived” last week, I’m hoping she doesn’t get “knocked up” with a casserole for Thanksgiving.

Kathy goes on to say a number of dumb things:

• Her cookie cutter made the cookies “extra fun.”

• One of the “things [that made] these graham crackers pumpkin spiced” was “pumpkin pie spice.”

• She included pumpkin beer in her recipe, and decides the beer “isn’t that detectable” but also “adds a festive punch.”

• The sugar, butter, and flour dessert she made is basically a health food because she used whole wheat flour “to amp up the nutrition.”

• She “Poke[d] some holes in for graham cracker loyalty!”

And Kathy makes sure to mention eating “extra dough balls” and show plenty of photos of her child not having much fun and the electronic monitoring device she’s required to wear as part of her life sentence from Diet Court.

And, of course, she talks about how she schlepped her sponsored post supplies to a bonfire (not pictured) and how all her friends (not pictured) told her that the s’mores were definitely the best they’d ever had in their whole lives.

And she ends by asking,

How do you like your s’mores? Charred marshmallow? Perfectly brown?

I like mine to be made without children suffering machete scars from clearing brush so that companies like Hershey can get the cheapest ingredients at the highest human cost. I like mine to be made in a way that doesn’t require me blocking out the knowledge of elementary school-age children kidnapped and sold for $30 as slaves, admitting quietly, “I wish I could go to school, to learn to read and write,” or unable to say anything at all*:

Passage about the child trafficking investigations of former Malian diplomat Abdoulaye Macko, from “Bitter Chocolate: Anatomy of an Industry.”

Kathy finally gets around to that pesky disclosure at the end of her post, candy-coating it with a little defensive sucking-up:

Disclosure: This blog post was sponsored by The Hershey Company as part of my participation in their Food Ambassador program. All thoughts and opinions about delicious s’mores and chocolate are my own.

And all research? That’s courtesy of her commenters:

Thursday’s post is about metabolic testing, and it’s written by this lady:

Kathy’s opening commentary is limited to:

(Whoa that’s a lot of credentials!)

and

I actually had the opportunity take a similar test many years ago. I think this stuff is so cool!

We think it’s “cool” too, Kathy! Let’s travel back to 2009, about a month before Kathy’s 27th birthday, when she talks about the test and reveals that she was freaked the fuck out about her weight —

— that she had to call herself “perfect” to calm down, and that she was super cool about having this photo published online, for all eternity.

Back here in 2014, Horner wants to talk about how one calculates how many calories one burns. Or, as she says,

how this number get’s [sic] calculated

Oh boy. You know, if someone is going to name-drop “predictive equations like Mifflin St. Jeor and Harris Benedict,” I’d like to think that person knows what a fucking apostrophe does.

I can use Wikipedia too.

“Gets” isn’t even a possessive word or a contraction. The word “its,” indicating possession, confuses some people because if you said “Joe’s,” you would add an apostrophe and an “s,” but one doesn’t do so with “its” because “it’s” already exists as the contraction for “it is.”

BUT GETS IS JUST A VERB. LIKE “EDITS.”

Anyway, Horner explains that the best way to get a super-accurate metabolic test is to go to a gym and get a breath test.

While they are more expensive than the null expense of predictive equations, they are often very reasonable.

Look, say “null” all you want, Angelina Jolie in “Hackers.” For someone who was going to lend us a lab coat and take us behind the scenes, you’re sure coming off a lot like that Omaha humbug Oscar Diggs.

From BodyFatUsa.com. A price list from the University of California at Irvine puts their test at $50 for people who are already patients of their weight management program, and $85 for others.

So, the test. You’re not supposed to eat anything for a while beforehand, which makes sense, because you don’t want to measure your body’s metabolic rate when it’s working on digesting last night’s lentil puck or this morning’s oat sludge. Horner says:

The test works by measuring the amount of air you exhale and thus determining the amount of oxygen your body is consuming. This can then be calculated to discover how many calories you are burning based off an “oxygen consumed per calorie burn” ratio.

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? No, seriously. That second sentence could be a randomly generated string of words regurgitated from a MetaCheck Analysis System promotional leaflet. Miss Null Expense of Predictive Equations may very well understand what she’s trying to explain, but she writes like a Xerox machine calibrated to copy key phrases without comprehension.

Here’s how a breath test can determine how many calories you burn: If you put a tube in your mouth and plug your nose, everything you breathe in and out is going to go through the tube. The tube is hooked up to a machine that measures how much air you breathe in, and how much oxygen is in it to start. Over a period of time — say, ten minutes — it is also measuring how much air you exhale, and how much oxygen remains in all those exhaled breaths.

Since your body burns about 5 calories processing a liter of oxygen, the machine must have measured about 1.81 fewer liters (or about 366 adorable teaspoons) of oxygen at the end of Kathy’s 10-minute test than it measured going into her healthy little lungs, meaning she burns a little more than 9 calories every 10 minutes, about 54 calories per hour, and, ultimately, about 1300 calories per day if she did fuck-all.

Even Kathy’s metabolic processes resemble inoffensive, made-for-TV pop music.

Horner’s not up to explaining those yicky details, though. She’s much more interested in talking about relaxing, using a towel because she was drooling around the tube, how she had to stop giggling because she sounded like Darth Vader and how she was — clearly, very competently — “educated”:

I was educated to breath [sic] in and out of my mouth at a normal rate during the testing period.

“Breathe,” Katie. The verb is “breathe.” Even Danielle in “Ever After: A Cinderella Story” knows that.

Anyway, according to Horner’s test, Horner burns 2,261 calories per day at rest — about 33% more than the average person of her age and height and weight — which really must chap Kathy’s below-average, 1300-calorie-a-day-burning hide, especially with Katie’s humblebrag about how she finds that, “many times I am not eating enough for my body.”

Kathy’s last post of the week, on Friday, is the usual bland sandwich of all the nut butter-topped oats and salads with dinner leftovers ate in a week, held in place by two slices of awkward salutations (This week: “Just enjoying the fall around here!”) and insincere-sounding farewells (This week: “Hope you guys had a great week of eats!”)

She begins by saying that

I probably shouldn’t tell you

—And stop. Oh man. Kathy. I can think of 26,000 ways you could finish that sentence. I probably shouldn’t tell you I think my mom walking around her old house sounds like a hurricane. I probably shouldn’t tell you my horrible thoughts about people who show up at soup kitchens in cars and have the nerve to eat more than one sandwich. I probably shouldn’t tell you anything about my cervix or my mucous plug or how my placenta was on a cutting board I still use. I probably shouldn’t tell you how many complaints I have even though I have almost no obligations and can sleep and exercise as much as I want. I probably shouldn’t tell you about how I felt inconvenienced by the death of a grandmother and how I took a grinning selfie with a casket. And I really probably shouldn’t tell you about what a “dancer” I am, or how “athletic” my calves are, or how “sensitive” my nose and palate are, and all the boring playacting I’ve done with my stuffed teddy bears.

Alas, she really finishes it this way:

that I already put Christmas pillows on my couch…. ! Only because I found them at Target and they aren’t that Christmasy but they are red and green and I couldn’t wait to use them. I also already ordered our Christmas cards and have gotten a head start on shopping. I completely admit I live one season ahead. Don’t hate me!

Hate her? Why would anyone hate her? She spent some money. Planning and preparing for a holiday meal takes time and brainpower. Hanging up Christmas lights takes physical effort, organization, and patience. Writing heartfelt things in cards takes time, a good memory, and a heart that understands the fine line between being doughballs-to-the-wall giddy about frosting and presents and leisure, and optimistic, encouraging sensitivity for those who are taking stock of 2014 and finding financial struggles, medical challenges, perhaps death, or perhaps distance and loneliness amidst the bright points and happy days. All the fuck Kathy did was enter her credit card information online, pick a cart at Target, and threaten her family with an unnamed Christmas playlist that seems to include two versions of her second-favorite Andy Williams rendition —

I promise I haven’t busted out any holiday tunes yet, but the “Most Wonderful Time Of The Years” might be starting soon…since Thanksgiving qualifies as the start of the season in our house!)

— her absolute favorite, of course, being the one she danced to at her wedding, “Moon River,” though she probably prefers the “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” version since she’s featured this framed poster in her room a few times:

I wonder what Kathy misconstrued about that classic to enjoy it?

Hmm. Well.

Speaking of pumpkin season, holiday music season, mediocrity season, and so on, I think I’ve duplicated Kathy’s squiggly calendar:

But, yeah. Pillows. Christmas pillows. That’s what she shouldn’t have told us. Even though she can’t wait to tell us again, in the comments section:

So, probably this $24 “imported” (read: Made in China) thing:

and, I don’t know. What does “one is green pattern” mean? Hopefully, this:

Kathy does know she doesn’t get retroactive extra credit points for being the Technical Valedictorian of Christmas, that Santa won’t be bringing her a do-over of the speech she got to give to the Orange High Panthers of 2001 just for racking up an extra thousand arm-swings on her Mandible at Target, right?

Whatever. Let’s move on to what she ate. We all know what she ate. Oats. Eggs. Toast. Nut butter. Cereal. Granola. Yogurt. Sponsored Cheerios. Banana. Chia seeds. Here are the bizarre notes:

• Toast with jam “homemade by my sister’s high school friend.”

• A “pumpkin pie smoothie.”

• That thing where she cracks an egg in a pan and drags an old slice of bread through it. She still calls it “French toast.”

Remember when I used to eat this every day?

NO.

She continues, telling us both how her child’s speech development is really fucking messing up her breakfast and also how she loves her some personal datives:

For various reasons I feel like my breakfast making time has gotten cut short now that Mazen can say “HUNGRY MOMMY!”, so I tend to fall back on quicker things most of the time, but I still love me some FT! 

• Toast, eggs, and canned peaches. She got them

at the market at the end of the summer – just stretching the peach love out a bit!

WOLVERINE SAYS: LEAVE MY PEACHES ALONE.

For her lunches, she had two things that she enjoyed and five things that showed what a martyr she is:

• Another alleged food. This one was supposedly a “quesadilla,” which means she heated up smoked salmon and cheddar in a tortilla.

• A salad from Eppie’s — “instead of the veg plate” — after picking her kid up from pre-school.

• A salad with that sponsored expensive olive oil she shilled for in August. She calls what’s on top of the salad a

strange looking pile …. a No Bull Burger that I cut up for Mazen and then he rejected. I had to take one for the team : )

Yeah, Kathy. Because it’s not like you put meatless lentil pucks on top of your salads every single damned week on your own.

• Her child’s lunch. Or parts of it, anyway:

Lunch #4 was consumed standing at the kitchen counter…tsk tsk. I was tasting this and that while I was making Mazen a plate and before I knew it I figured I’d had enough nibbles to call it lunch!

• Two lunches of leftovers and one that was “a quickie” (“salmon salad,” a pear, and “Kashi cracker for dipping”), all photographed on that wicked kitchen counter she’s just indicated she’s chained to because of that tiny tyrant of hers. Note how she leaves the sad little shred of plastic wrap sitting on the gelatinous piles….

….creating tableaux that fully convey her glum status as Eater Of Old Things, Preventress of Food Waste, She Who Hasn’t Time To Sit Down, For Her Royal Meals Are Over.

Thankfully, Kathy’s moods became sunnier after eating things her subscription recipe service gave her instructions for:

• Pasta (she doesn’t indicate who cooked) topped with “a soup-turned-sauce” of sweet potatoes.

Kathy’s verdict: “Delish vegetarian dinner.” Conchshell’s verdict: How the hell didn’t that taste like pecan maple parrafin soap candles?

• A steak that “we grilled,” which I’m pretty sure means Bath Matt, and the potatoes and green beans we saw earlier, made with butter, parmesan, and parsley. Kathy is amazed by this unusual grouping of ingredients, exclaiming:

Loved that combo!

• The first of the two non-recipe subscription service dinners was a combination of leftover green beans and potatoes from the steak dinner mixed with lentils that had been cooked in maple barbecue sauce. She put “lots” of cheese and yogurt on top, and called it all

amazing despite being hard to decipher! …. [with] Juicy wine from La Crema in the back : )

• The last dinner was something she didn’t even need a recipe for, a “simple salad” before she was “headed out with girlfriends.” Tell us more:

It was made with geens [sic], peanuts, cheese, and roasted squash and served in a homemade dressing. Consumed after dark!

Sure, Kathy.

What could she have been doing out at such a witching hour? Tossing toilet paper in the trees outside a rival bakery? Tumbling to the ground underneath the bleachers at the high school to neck with a jar of nut butter? Conducting mini-cupcake-summoning rituals? Watching “Survivor” on a 70″ TV at the nearest Best Buy? I’m sure Kathy will detail her nighttime after-dark activity in an upcoming post.

Outside of the blog, it looks like Kathy and Bath Matt remembered to update their Facebook page, since they’re heading into their high season of reduced hours and crankily offered goods.

And, wow, their slapdash holiday menu.

The style of their hours is inconsistent. Their pitch for giving bread as gifts needs a semicolon and a verb. There are muffins and bars listed, but each of the five varieties of “cookie” is singular. Their list of items for sale is more tedious a read than Kathy’s old RD school notebooks: Each day is broken out into its own list of items for sale, even though some items — like all five of the cookies — are sold across multiple days. Because so much text has been crammed into the flier, “Pumpkin Choc Chip muffins and teacakes” has that horrible abbreviation in it — each of the three times the item is mentioned. Is there a difference between “Whole Wheat Cinnamon Chip” and “Cinnamon Chip”? Am I the only person who didn’t know a cinnamon chip was an actual thing?

As delicious as the child labor that ensures their presence on our shelves.

The worst part, though, has to be the three-exclamation-point paragraph at the bottom: THREE LINES OF ALL CAPS, followed by a huffily passive-aggressive request for people to order pies and “Pumpkin Ohs” early: “Our bakers would sure appreciate knowing how much to bake!” Dude. Monson. This is a pretty standard paragraph in your business. You know Paradox Pastry, right? It’s not clear online if they’re offering holiday items this year, but here’s what they posted on Facebook a few years ago:

How about emulating this straightforward instruction from Charlottesville’s Chandler’s Bakery: “Not all items are available daily. To guarantee availability, please call to order”? You could even follow the lead of local bakery HotCakes, which words it a similar way: “We will prepare foods to be ready for pick up on Wed. Nov 26. Please place your order by 11AM Sun Nov 23.” They also provide size and pricing information, something I’m sure you would have included had you not had to type “cookie” 15 times.

And, honestly, last year Great Harvest made Pumpkin Ohs on Dec. 17, closed their doors for two weeks, and returned to find they still had a shit-ton of Pumpkin Ews sitting around that they had to unload for $3 each.

So maybe be a little less pushy about how everyone totally wants them, okay, Monson? Especially when commenters on your wife’s food blog seem to be the only ones paying attention to the details for you:

• Grist.org’s Deena Shanker recommends Gail Ambrosius, Dandelion Chocolate, and Askinosie Chocolate. Their chocolate costs $4.50-$8.50 per bar at its least expensive, but at least it doesn’t ruin the lives of 10-year-olds for cheap “chocolatey” non-chocolate that tastes like cheesy, soapy vomit.

**Except that it’s exciting because it makes her feel superior. Flashback to Sept. 13, 2007:

I was thinking while I was running “I am crazy to be out here in the silent dark running at 6am.” But then I thought that this is why sleeping America is obese and I’m not. I’m the normal one!