Hams, I’ve been working (like, at my day job) the last two weeks, including weekends, so this post is much more disgustingly late than usual. A turkey-induced tryptophan coma of lore would be nothing compared to the 10-hour sleep-mask coma of the following two-week recap.

Strength, my lovelies, as we journey back to the distant days of November 10.

Last Monday’s post is Kathy’s regular, exuberant retelling about what a great weekend she had. She surprised her neighbors by having them babysit her toddler so she and Bath Matt could have “a date night.”

Free from their child, Kathy and Bath Matt went to a store so Kathy and her flyaways could enjoy a free wine tasting —

Her commentary? “Yum!” They then headed to Brookville, home of the infamous 2011 Groupon incident:

For the second time in a month, Brookville was closed until early evening for another private event and Kathy thought it would be classier to just show up and figure that out rather than call, maybe because using the phone doesn’t earn any pedometer steps. They “killed some time” at an art gallery before returning.

Seemingly intimidated as usual by the restaurant’s prices, they shared “small plates” — fried “shitake” [sic] mushrooms, beet and cheese salad (about which Kathy “loved the contrast of flavors”), a cheese biscuit (“PERFECTION!”), a grilled cheese and bacon sandwich (“epic”), “local sausages cooked in a maple sauce,” and a free (or possibly conjured by black magic) roast beef sandwich, which “appeared compliments of the chef!!!” — even though Kathy says that was just because she “love[s]” the place’s “Southern spin on tapas.” Finally, the gruesome twosome “couldn’t resist” ordering a “famous bacon chocolate chip” cookie that was “hot and gooey!”

Possibly the weirdest thing about this dinner is that both Kathy and Bath Matt took advantage of the cup of crayons at the table (Bath Matt appears to have written a burnt sienna manifesto on his side) but covered up almost all of their scrawls on the paper tablecloth except for this:

Saturday was appropriately penitent to make up for Kathy’s having eaten part of a cookie. She went to a “rockin’” gym class “in the dark with strobe lights and all!” at 8 a.m., took “a how [sic] shower!” and had a pumpkin smoothie she modified herself

I asked about the smoothie ingredients and they normally make it with cider, so I subbed in milk instead for more protein. It was delish!

on a crumby, splattered-looking table at the gym’s eating place.

She met mother-in-law Karen and “the boys” at the farmer’s market.

There, Karen entertained Toddler Carbz with a bus ride, which he “LOVES,” and Kathy “did some solo shopping” at that jewelry booth she likes and the ice cream place she likes even more, “nearly wip[ing] out” their stock of ice cream sandwiches. She bought a “crabcake sandwich” home “and paired it with…a pear!”

Bath Matt stayed home (presumably) for Toddler Carbz’s naptime, so Kathy “snuck out” to go to the “holiday trunk show” of “a friend” and bought some earrings that, from her photography, look like plastic earring backs.

At home, she writes, “We” labored over something that ended up looking like watery sausage, zucchini, and rice.

Kathy called the one meal they made at home that weekend “gumbo-y,” even though she might as well have compared it to a taco or a Negroni for all it resembled actual gumbo, like this one from Southern Living:

She also called her evening “chill,” one of those meaningless adjectives she seems to think is interchangeable with “famous,” “amazing,” “fun,” and “fab.”

At least she’s not using “chillax” anymore. She and Bath Matt split an “amazing bottle” of Chardonnay they hauled home from Sonoma before she passed out watching “Portlandia.” (Really.)

On Sunday, the Healthiest Kathy Ever walked to a breakfast place and exerted herself oh-so-hard, eating scrambled eggs, decaf coffee, and “(3/4)” of a waffle for the sake of the terribly sad “final soccer game of the season,” even though there’s literally less than two months between seasons:

My goal was to eat a big enough breakfast to satisfy lunch as well because I had a 2pm soccer game….Mission accomplished!

Seemingly realizing she was neglecting her mission of ragging on the infuriatingly conflicting desires and needs of her 2-year-old, she posted a photo of Toddler Carbz on his dad’s shoulders, noting,

We have experimented with leaving the stroller at home because Mazen likes to walk, but he still gets tired and needs a ride sometimes!

and followed that with an explanation of how “We” finally changed his crib into a toddler bed because he “has started to want to sleep in his twin bed and climb out of his crib with more frequency.”

Kathy played at busily stocking away a week’s worth of ready-to-eat meals for her whole family by halving maybe 15 brussels sprouts—

— and then went to play adult soccer, her favorite part of which seems to be having photos taken of herself wearing a pair of horrible sandals.

Her team lost, 3-4, but was “winning most of the game!” and the important thing is that Kathy, I guess, burned a bunch of calories and has already signed up for the winter season:

I played 110 minutes straight of soccer and now I can barely hobble around!

She ends the post with a giveaway of a $28 necklace from that farmer’s market jewelry booth she likes.

Probably because leaving a comment is frequently a requirement in contests, this giveaway resulted in about 250 comments, including this oddity:

Tuesday’s post has another giveaway, thanks to its sponsor, the monolithic SHRIMP COUNCIL.

The Shrimp Council must have told her to make something festive, because Kathy seems to think she’s making something that will recreate the raucous romp of what she refers to as her “sushi and champagne fiesta” New Year’s Eve party of 2012, which seems like it was just an excuse to use commission-earning links to the rice cooker and plastic sushi-making kit she owns. Anyway, Kathy promises that her awesome appetizer will be one  “your guests will be talking about the day after.”

I think she’s right, but only because it’s not sushi — it’s cooked shrimp, and grits, and “dipping sauce” made from yogurt and Old Bay. I guess it could have been worse, since she says she and Bath Matt were “brainstorming” about “a ‘meatloaf’ style dish.”

Kathy is extra proud of herself because not only did she get money from lobbyists for this entry, she also gets to brag about how her and Bath Matt’s recipe “ranks pretty well” on a thing that exists in her head called “the healthy recipe spectrum.” In inspired language suitable for the finest Lean Cuisine packaging, she writes:

Low-fat shrimp, wholesome grits, nutritious bell pepper and nori, and a dipping sauce made mostly with yogurt means this sushi is good for your tastebuds and your waistline.

That’s delightful, Jiro. What do you think about the KERF take on sushi?

Kathy and Bath Matt’s directions include “cooking your grits” and “put[ting] down your sheet of nori (found at most grocery stores in the Asian section).” Both of these are very helpful instructions, because the average person could very easily mess up and think you were supposed to use uncooked, dry grits and make the sushi while holding the sheet of nori, pinning it to the wall, or flinging it angrily at guests.

A few unnecessarily confusing orders follow:

Add your sliced bell peppers about 1/3 of the way in

A third of the way spatially? Temporally? Existentially?

Stretch [the shrimp] out a bit so they take up less space lengthwise.

By the time she’s advising to “roll ‘er up,” Kathy has given up on trying to educate anyone and is resorting to insults:

There are lots of You Tube videos on this if you need some some more visuals. It’s really not that hard to do!

Well, it’s not that hard to do poorly. It’s probably plenty hard if you want your shrimp and grits sushi to look like something that’s not going to fall apart the second you pick it up off your plate.

After not linking to the supposed plethora of tutorials, Kathy instructs cutting the roll into pieces with a sharp knife. This is a good idea.

But what she shows is a photo of hacking the roll into unevenly squeezed cartoon-flat-tire shapes with a dull, sponsored Guy Fieri knife.

Kathy recommends making four such lumpen rolls, producing 32 pieces, “for a crowd.” She doesn’t say how much “dipping sauce” a crowd requires, but this part of the recipe

is key, as it gives another punch of Old Bay and is a wonderfully creamy balance to the shrimp.

Dunk!

Kathy gets nearly 400 comments on this post thanks to another giveaway “to get you even more pumped for party season.” This one is for a cooking set Walmart had on sale for $28.97 in 2013, which she calls “a super-stylish excuse to eat, drink and be merry.” I guess they still haven’t gotten rid of them, because Kathy’s trying to unload one she promises “will help bring shrimptastic inspiration to the holiday season.”

Wednesday’s post is a guest post by Bath Matt himself, who shares his fascinating opinions on his wife’s favorite kind of alcohol, something he calls “pumpkin beer,” even though he means sweet, pumpkin pie-flavored beer.

Bath Matt’s piece is mostly a rambling theory-dump of self-aggrandizing nods to how “beer geeks” observe the market of seasonal beer, “how [the market] used to be,” articles that “we’ve all read” on the topic, and how putting shit on the shelves earlier and earlier every year is “a frequent topic in the craft brew industry.”

While he says he “want[s] to talk about pumpkin beer hate,” Bath Matt’s inquiries are, well, insincere:

There’s a stigma that “real craft beer lovers” shouldn’t like pumpkin beer, and that it’s just a gimmick to attract the people who defiantly say they don’t like beer. Is pumpkin beer the equivalent of cheap, sweet, white zinfandel in the wine world?

Spoiler alert: The guy who hosted a pumpkin beer tasting party thinks the haters are wrong because he’s smart.

The post isn’t so much about pumpkin beer as it is about Bath Matt and how many ways he’s great (the answer is 7, but not really):

• He’s some kind of brilliantly cut diamond, whose facets are many:

Don’t get me wrong, I still have a lot of positive things to say about pumpkin beer. Despite being a warm-weather, savory-food kinda person, eventually I admit to myself that summer is gone and fall is here. 

• He was hip to the craft brew scene when he was in middle school:

Dogfish Punkin’ has been around since 1994 and at the time it certainly embodied the company’s approach to off-centered ales. As a 7% ABV brown ale, it was one of the few examples of Imperial Pumpkin back when most pumpkin beers were simply light, refreshing amber-colored ales and lagers with a little bit of extra spice.

• He’s a furrowed-brow number-cruncher, describing how he

took the top 50 most-reviewed beers and then sorted them by their scores

and

looked at Beer Advocate’s ratings for the Pumpkin Ale category, starting by sorting the list for the most-reviewed beers

to learn the cold, hard facts about what people like. (It’s not like the site has already sorted the most-rated and the highest-rated pumpkin beers.)

• He’s a discerning man who knows how to pick a beer-drinking woman, claiming twice that his wife’s tastes run to “cult” favorites:

The beer with the most reviews was Southern Tier Pumking (one of Kath’s favorites) with over 5,000 reviews,

and Dogfish Head Punkin’ a close second. The third most reviewed was Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin with just over 2,000 reviews, and the list drops dramatically from there.

• He’s also a savvy navigator of social trends who found “revealing” information by searching Twitter for #pumpkinbeer:

The first tweet of the year was on June 30th from the beer news website BeerPulse.com, announcing (appropriately) the availability of Pumking. The next several are retail locations announcing the arrival of pumpkin beers, and then the customer comments begin. Many are positive, but there are plenty of “come on” and “too soon!” mixed in as well.

I’m not sure how he did his search, but if you search from the actual beginning of the year, there are “customer comments” from long before BeerPulse’s end-of-June announcement (engaging in some kind of competition to be either the person who is most fanatical about pumpkin pie spice in alcohol) and plenty after it, from people competing to have the narrowest definition of the season to drink it.

• He is able to write down multiple sentence-length quotes from people with actual knowledge about things: a guy with a beer podcast, a Charlottesville beer store employee, and the president of Champion Brewing. (This is, actually, a change of pace from Kathy.) The first tells him that some brewers are too nutty in their experimenting, and try to stand out with more alcohol or stronger flavors than other pumpkin beers, which “may be what is making hardcore craft drinkers jaded.” The second says that might be true, but that it sells well: “Even our devoted hopheads will walk out with a few bottles of pumpkin every year when they roll out.”

• He is among that crowd of imperious hypocrites (really, dude who has previously written a guest post about the contents of your beer fridge?) saying that “probably half the beers I buy are hoppy, many of them are imperial, and I’m always looking for well-made examples of the classic beer styles. However, when the pumpkin beers come out there are a few that I cannot miss every year.”

Champion Brewing’s president is least interested in saying anything nice about pumpkin beer, calling it an overall  “rushed and played-out style,” but admitting that his opinion comes from him “being narrow in his view” about the topic. What seems to interest Bath Matt most in talking to someone from Champion, though, is how he can again prove how goddamned bright Bath Matt is, noting that it’s

one of the few breweries in the world producing the gose style (look it up!)

(Look, fucker. Would it have killed you to say it’s a tart beer made with salt and cilantro? Jeez. Plus, you’re publishing online. Throw a fucking link in there if you’re too busy to explain it well.)

Bath Matt ends the post by talking more about the internal struggle between his wistful heart and his pragmatic brain —

I have mixed emotions about seasonal slide. As a hot weather lover, I’m never ready to admit that summer is over. Pumpkin beers on the shelf just rub it in my face. But as a small business owner, I definitely understand the pressure that breweries must feel to get their beer out and available.

— reporting there’s still lots of pumpkin beer on the shelves of Charlottesville, (either because people are over it or because Charlottesvillians have “been such a high buyers in the past,” whatever that means), and concluding that,

In either case, with two kegs of homebrewed pumpkin beer on tap, I think we’re firmly pro-pumpkin in our house!

The only things we learn from this post come in the comments, where Bath Matt admits he can’t stand Pumking —

— and that he sort of half-assed and never finished the post in August, which is why it kinda sucks:

Speaking of kinda sucking, Thursday’s post is Kathy’s recipe of the week that answers the question Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? with a resounding Because it sounds disgusting:

Introducing….the deep dish pancake!

So, the idea of this post is that Kathy has no time to do anything (See also: “The problem with the French press is that it takes a good 4 minutes of hands on activity from start to finish,” “Oatmeal and I are still in love, but I don’t make it as much because it takes just that much longer to make …. when I have a toddler saying EAT EAT EAT at my feet, time is of the essence!” “Lunch used to be a royal event, but now I just eat whatever’s in the fridge to knock my hunger out. #lifeofamom”). 

One morning,

a certain toddler who didn’t want to put on his outfit

was delaying her from getting out the door, and she didn’t have time to make herself pancakes on the stove top. Since it would have been impossible for her to take her child to preschool, return, and then eat, Kathy put her batter in a bowl and microwaved it, and says the result was “delicious.”

Because Kathy’s mornings seem to open up when she’s all out of child complaints, she’s magically had all sorts of time at her disposal since then:

I’ve been playing around with this concept for a few weeks now and created several variations. It’s kind of a cross between a pancake and cake! (Mazen calls it “cake” : ) ) …. The next week I made a pumpkin version! Delicious topped with melted Barney Butter and chia sprinkles. I tried it a third time with my own DIY batter for those of you who don’t have access to the Great Harvest mix.

Time to learn how to slap on some nail stickers and make her own inane little gifs as well, it appears:

There are other qualities that recommend her new microwaveable wet flour: fewer dishes for her to put in the dishwasher, and microwaving it for a little less time, results in “a little batter left in the middle,” something Kathy loves.

She also thinks her recipe for rushed, undercooked batter “could” be baked, but isn’t sure how, so she provides the least helpful directions ever, complete with asterisk degree symbol, because I’m sure Toddler Carbz has made it so she doesn’t have time to press ALT and 0176 too:

….I’m not sure of cooking times. Just set the temp around 350* and watch for the middle to set.

Astoundingly, even with a child tearing about, Kathy is somehow able to multi-task and keep an eye on her microwaved dough for a full 60-90 seconds. How does she do it?

At least she makes the effort to tell us what the nutrition is made from in her recipe. Wait…. what?

And lastly, it’s great with any and everything on top. 

Kathy concludes the week with her second sponsored post, even though she doesn’t disclose it until 127 words into what she claims is just a “great recipe to share with you today” that happens to involve coffee.

Describing herself as

hooked on afternoon decaf cappuccinos [since] last winter while taking Mazen out for walks downtown. ‘Tis the season.

Kathy asks what her readers think is the “best coffee,” and launches into a tall tale:

I remember hunting down Blue Bottle in the Ferry Building of San Francisco during my first visit and then waiting in a line for a realllly long time. The reward was amazing –>

Is that so? Because that’s not really how she described it in late 2009, when she submitted a recipe to Bertolli and the pasta sauce company paid for her to collect swag and drink free wine at the first FoodBuzz Blogger Festival in San Francisco.

She trudged out on a field trip with a bunch of the other bloggers one day and her only comment was:

We waited in a long line for the infamous Blue Bottle Coffee. I got a Cafe au Lait.

In fact, when she headed out to Flying Goat Coffee two days later, she raved that her café au lait there

….was incredible. So rich and not too roasty. Way better than the cup of Blue Bottle coffee I had at the Ferry Building

Confidential to Perfect Coffee: five years after launching, that conference that awarded Kathy “Best Food Blogger” seems to have been acquired and euthanized, and Kathy hasn’t mentioned the company that footed her bill there since finishing her last free samples a few months after the trip.

Kathy discloses her sponsor and tries to describe what they do:

Perfect Coffee’s subscription service starts at $15 a month …. [or] $1.88 or less per cup, which would be a great way for coffee-lovers to save some money while discovering new types of coffee in a perfect cup made at home.

Since Kathy thinks $1.88 for a cup of coffee you make at home is thrifty (side note: I helped someone price grocery store coffee against a subscription service recently and  the supermarket stuff cost about 50 cents per 12-cup pot), I guess she saw no reason to mention that the cost goes down to $1.11 per cup if you get the 70-cup per month option•.

They send “small serving packets” from roasters including her hated Blue Bottle, which somehow got so much better as soon as she was being paid to drink it —

I savored the decafs (the Blue Bottle Decaf Noir was my fav!), and I had the regulars before my soccer games!

— as soon as she was free to add stuff to it —

— and as soon as she was being paid to drink it out of a free AeroPress, a small, single-serving coffee-making device that costs $26 and comes in packaging that recalls rough-around-the-edges, bulk psyllium-selling, B-vitamin-scented health food stores of the 80s.

This is how Kathy describes the device:

It makes a concentrate and then you either add water or milk. Adding frothed milk made an amazing latte!

It also goes contrary to everything Perfect Coffee seems to stand for, not that Kathy indicates she gives much of a shit about that. On the company’s web site, founder Neil Day says in a video intro:

The solution, for most people, for bad coffee, is loading it up with condiments. Cream and sugar, vanilla flavoring or hazelnut flavoring are always to mask either stale, or badly prepared coffee. One of the things that’s really fun for me is the look on people’s face[s] when they taste well prepared coffee and realize they don’t need any sugar — they don’t need any cream.

Sorry, Mr. Day. That’s not a look Kathy’s ever likely to have on her face.

This look, on the other hand?

Need more proof? Later in the post, she gets around to the recipe the post was supposedly about, saying she was “Inspired by all of [her] delicious coffee” to add half a cup to baked oatmeal — sort of like how her blogger conference recipe no one liked in 2009 was “inspired” by a sauce she never uses anymore?

I suppose there’s one thing to be thankful for in her new recipe: she’s finally willing to use butter in her cooking dish:

Her original recipe, which is still up, still advises lining the dish with flammable-but-calorie-free parchment paper before you put it in the 375-degree oven for 26 minutes.

Still, even though she came up with the “super easy” recipe, she thought it could have been better:

You know what would take it over the top? Chocolate chips and coconut! I added a dollop of chocolate peanut butter “frosting” (Buddy’s brand!) to make up for my lapse in judgment not adding any chocolate chips to the recipe : ) What is it about chocolate and coffee together…

What is it about them? It’s that you’re not interested in coffee, Kathy. You’re interested in sugar. And if coffee and whole grains, or a fritter-topped salad, or greens cooked in maple syrup a can be a sugar-conveyance, you like that.

Kathy’s stellar review of the coffee service is evident in the post’s comments, where she talks about what an enormous amount of effort she puts into her writing—

— even though, at the end of it all, her readers can’t quite figure out what she’s writing about:

We returned Monday to hear all about Kathy’s weekend, in which she opens with small talk about the OMG cold weather —

Kathy, spend some of that coffee money on a lint brush and a new pair of gloves that didn’t come from a $4.99 stocking stuffer bin. You can see the holes in those.

— as a way to segue ickily into gym talk:

I know some of you have seen snow already this year, and I have one thing to say: I’m sorry!

Our weekend started off somewhat hot and steamy – in a Friday night workout class at the gym!

The gross “evening happy hour” at her gym forced Kathy to sweat (ew, thanks for letting us know) while she “used 20 and 25lb kettlebells.” For what, she doesn’t say, except that it seems she was allowed wine, fakery sandwiches, and cookies as reward at the end.

On Saturday, she ate a pancake, peanut butter, and eggs, and no fruit, “unfortunately,” before going to the farmer’s market and letting Toddler Carbz play behind the wheel of the hardly seen fakery truck while Bath Matt sold bread or something. Kathy was sure to let everyone know how much it put her out to let her child mess around in the vehicle:

I promise you that sitting in the truck for 20 minutes was not the highlight of my day : )

Once her husband was finished with the morning shift, they took their child to the child-aimed Virginia Discovery Museum, where Kathy insisted her child played “bakery”:

Although he definitely thought the cash register was a toaster oven (also appropriate!)

Please, Kathy. In the grand scheme of misconceptions, putting a piece of bread on a cash register barely ranks next to putting on a dust mask and spray painting two pieces of furniture while pregnant

Her best salvo in the Valspar Sparring of 2012: “Lets stop the mommy war judgment please”

or being puzzled over why African women don’t shove as many ice cream sandwiches in their faces as she does:

Back at home, Kathy was “pumped up” about a broccoli soup she was thinking about:

I put garlic, carrots, peppers and broccoli in a pot with some broth, let is [sic] simmer a bit, added some half and half and then 2 cups of sharp cheddar cheese.

And then something went terribly wrong. One of my dairy components curdled – I think it was the cheese given the timing. It also could have been the crème fraîche I used for a garnish, but I’ll never know. The soup tasted great, but the recipe was not blog worthy.

She’ll never know — except that her commenters are willing to explain exactly what went wrong.

How the fuck was she in a hurry? She made the soup and took a NAP.

Anyway, after waking up from the most urgent nap ever, the family drove to someone’s house to eat chili from paper plates and s’mores and drink beer and wine.

Must have had onions, judging by the size of her portion.

On Sunday, Kathy ate breakfast, went to the gym, then met Bath Matt’s mom to go grocery-shopping and eat brunch at Brookville:

I ordered a sandwich made with pancakes (OMG!) with egg, bacon and gouda. TOP NOTCH, I tell ya!! I brought some home for tomorrow.

But the real kicker was MBF Pancake (aka my big fat pancake) that was literally the size of my head!! It must have been made in a cast iron skillet – that’s a dinner plate folks! Chef sent it out to us gratis, and I’m so glad he did because I’m ready to go back next weekend : )

Kathy avoided further cooking responsibilities by traipsing off with “[her] soccer team for an end-of-season party at South Street Brewery” and coming home to eat

curdled broccoli soup for dinner  It tasted good – I promise!

With that appetizing picture in her readers’ minds, Kathy barrels into Tuesday’s post, which is a Celestial Seasonings-sponsored variation on Kathy’s now annual rehash of every pre-holiday women’s magazine article about how, if you own a vagina, getting through Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s is akin to explosive ordnance disposal, and don’t you dare think about indulging, because you’ll gain 500 pounds, but don’t you dare unhealthily restrict, because your seasonal joy is mandatory lest you fuck up the holidays for everyone, you jerk.

Kathy spices things up this year by writing the exact opposite of what she wrote last year.

In 2013, Kathy bragged that she’d actually lost weight over the holidays, and that she had an innate ability to “sense that more eating is coming …. [and built] up hunger in between the holidays”:

Conventional diet advice means you’re missing out on the most wonderful time of the year …. Apparently the average meal is 7,000 calories? I’m not sure I believe that. One dinner will not make you fat. 365 dinners will …. So [don't spend mental energy] stressing out about how you’re going to say no to Aunt Erma’s triple chocolate cake on Christmas….

But this year, Kathy advises spending all your mental energy stressing out about that exact thing:

Make a mental plan for the night (or season!) Whether you balance your nights out with home cooked meals the next day or you simply map out a party plan in your head before you go, the more mindfulness you can practice the better. Think about the events ahead: you’ll have your mom’s famous pumpkin pie on Christmas and will save the eggnog for next week’s party.

In 2013, Kathy admitted that trying to satisfy her hunger before a party didn’t work, and that it was okay if she didn’t eat kale on Christmas:

When I eat before the holiday party I end up having two dinners, which is even more calories then if I’d just eaten at the party alone! I used to have a big salad before just to ensure that I got vegetables with my dinner in the event that the party had no crudités. But I have decided that having a salad for lunch and no vegetables for dinner is perfectly healthy a few times a year (or month…). Vegetables rule, but like I said above, we’re talking about very few days of the year.

But this year, Kathy decided salads were satiating, and that taking a day off from “your veggie quota” is out of the question:

Pre-Game For The Party

On healthy food – not booze! Have a salad or a hearty, nutritious snack before you head to a holiday party. You don’t want to have to rely on cheese and crackers to satisfy your hunger, and crudités alone do not a dinner make. A simple salad before you go will help fill you up. And once you’ve met your veggie quota, you can sample some of the very best hors d’oeuvres.

In 2013, Kathy encouraged cutting loose with eggnog instead of lower-calorie drinks:

Everyone knows eggnog is one of the most calorie dense drinks on the planet. But what would Christmas be without it? …. [E]njoy a little. Just make sure you keep your portion on the small side. Maybe a light beer is less calories than a White Russian, but if you have 5 of them because they taste like water you’re not saving very much! …. Anyways, my point is drink what you want most and what you will savor.

Not this year. This year, Kathy Kommands you Konsume tea, because “hydration” is more important than enjoying yourself, and because they will totally trick you into thinking you’ve had something sweet:

Drink more tea! Not only does a steamy mug of tea warm you up on cold afternoons, but tea counts toward your daily hydration needs. There are so many amazing holiday flavors …. and they have aromas that will satisfy your sweet tooth after lunch instead of reaching for the cookie tin. 

The one thing she’s consistent about in both years’ posts? Laziness. Laziness and wine:

2013:

My drink of choice – red wine divided into a few small pours. Some before and some with dinner.

2014:

My drink of choice – juicy red wine divided into a few small pours. I’m more likely to wash it down with dinner, so I prefer to have a little before and after and stick to water during the meal.

On Wednesday, Kathy pens another diary post about nine thoroughly random things: she ate something, she watched television, she watched her child on her baby monitor, she wore clothing she got in the mail from that company she has a subscription to, she window shopped online because she needs more shit with pictures of kale on it, she sucked at finding slow cooker recipes suitable for her Pinterest board (ironic, since she is replete with Crockpot Information), and she left the house to eat free food and drink free alcohol at a soft opening of a brewery and a “special press dinner” at a place that makes cider.

1. She starts out by saying she’s quoting “E.T.”:

What’s happpppening?! (Quote from E.T., if you didn’t realize!)

No. I did not realize. Partially because Drew Barrymore doesn’t Roger Rabbit the word like Kathy’s spelling, but mostly because nobody quotes this:

Other famous Kwotes for Kathy:

“Gone With the Wind” (1939)

“Citizen Kane” (1941)

“Casablanca” (1942)

2. There’s a photo of a breakfast she ate on an unspecified day. It’s leftover oatmeal

and a big glob of Barney Butter from the bottom of the jar. Yeah!

3. She talks about how she’s made it through eight old seasons of “Survivor,” is watching Season 18, has really enjoyed some kind of  Season 26 to the point where she says she

love[s] it more every day …. I am DEFINITELY going to apply and if I get picked I have to go

even though it won’t be “like this,” she says, posting a photo of the most miserable blogger on vacation ever.

4. Now that Toddler Carbz’s bed is a toddler bed, Kathy’s likes looking at him on her tiny screen in another room:

It’s so sweet to see him on the monitor looking all grown up sleeping instead of bunched in a ball like a baby.

Well, some of the time she likes it and most of the time she wishes he would just stay cribbed up, she admits in the comments:

5.  Kathy loves her subscription clothing service more and more every day too, saying it

has been killing it lately! I just love the comfortable, casual but slightly-more-stylish-than-anything-I’d-pick-out-for-myself pieces they have been sending.

Although she admits in the comments that it’$ not for ju$t everyone:

6. She and Bath Matt went to the soft opening of South Street Brewery, which was bought out by “Blue Mountain.” I think she means the Virginia brewery, but I suppose she could be referring to the greeting card company. Kathy drinks some beer she thinks was on the old menu and eats her way through a “great” free dinner: “heirloom” popcorn, cheese curds in sriracha, salad with “cuc …. and a molasses-malt dressing,” bacon macaroni and cheese that was “AMAZING!”,  and lasagna that was “So fresh!!”

7. There are these cards that cost $4 and have the nutritional information for kale printed on the back, you know, for all the times you want to send someone a card that conveys that you’re enthusiastic about the trendy superfoods and overused phrases of the last decade?

Future card slogans surely include Much Cronut, Sriracha 2.0, Keep Calm and Quinoa, and Gose Fuck Yourself, for the Bath Matts of the world.

8. Kathy has only found 28 interesting things to stick on her “Slow Cooker Board” on Pinterest. Funny, she has no problem coming up with cookies and shit to put on the board she inexplicably calls “Soul Food.”

9. Kathy and Bath Matt also went to the place that makes Bold Rock Hard Cider

to celebrate the opening of the brand new “Apple Chapel” 

and eat “delicious” barbecue, “so good” grilled oysters, and apple cobbler.

Kathy calls this sweater “hoodish.”

Kathy calls the place “great,” its interior “gorgeous,” and patio “big” and “perfect for outdoor concerts,” which is rare, because most patios are stupidly built for indoor concerts. After being “mesmeriz[ed]” by watching cider being bottled, Kathy “enjoyed lots of cider tastes” and listened to the state agriculture secretary talk about how cider with booze is really fucking popular.

Thursday’s post is one of those dreadful lists of food she’s eaten recently, which I’d hoped she might have given up after skipping it the week before. Kathy doesn’t seem to keen on writing these posts either, since — on November 20 — she’s posting about what she ate on October 31: “Halloween oatmeal with festive sprinkles” and that Noosa yogurt that has as much sugar in it — 28 grams — as the average cup of ice cream.

What else has she eaten?

• Leftover lentils, “roasted roots,” and leftover restaurant cornbread.

• Leftovers of that oatmeal she put coffee in. She had to put chocolate peanut butter on it to hork it down, and ended up giving the rest of it to “hungry friends.”

• Leftovers of that horrible grits sushi, which she insists was “sooooo good.”

• French toast her husband made that she ate in bed.

• Pepperoni pizza and salad at a restaurant with Bath Matt’s mom.

• Salad and more pizza that Bath Matt made. Kathy insists it “rules!”

• Leftover pizza when she “was starving for lunch.”

• An oat bar her friend gave her at the gym, kale chips, ketchup, and cheese: “Great combo  ; )”

• “A dreary morning of eggs, pear and toast with jam.”

• That not-quesadilla she makes and “homemade soup topped with parmesan.”

• Vegetarian stuffing for a sponsored post and decidedly not dainty pork:

The pork was called “side meat” and was like giant bacon! A little too much fat for me, but still tasty.

• Salmon and salad at a friend’s house during “a Matilda Jane party,” even though it takes until a commenter asks “who” Matilda Jane is before Kathy explains that it’s a clothing brand. One that totally seems like it has its shit together, in between “lovingly made in China” on their tags —

— and having to post a cringe-worthy amount of apologies on their Facebook.

And, you know, the rusty needle someone found in her 3-year-old’s dress:

“Found a 3.5″ rusted sewing needle sewn into the inside back of a brand new dress for my little girl. It was poking her in the back. It had a hooked end and a little spur under the hook and was rusty towards the bottom.” — Via the Consumer Product Safety Commission

• Salmon, rice, broccoli, and chimichurri from Whole Foods. I guess she’s resigned herself to never being sponsored by them, because she’s not shy about shitting on their sauce:

Not good – homemade is best! (Obviously…)

Her commenters aren’t too happy about seeing the return of the “Lately” posts, it seems:

Four other commenters echo Elise’s remarks, but all Kathy has to say is the above — thanks, but no, but thanks.

On Friday, Kathy ends her week with a post sponsored by the Grain Foods Foundation in which she types up a recipe she calls “fresh,” modern,” and “classic”: vegetarian stuffing made with butternut squash, “shitake” [sic] mushrooms, and kale.

As is the case with her son, Kathy is confused by her creation:

Stuffing?….Dressing?  …I think the official word is dressing because there was no turkey involved.

And by its preparation:

roast the squash and sauté the veggies…er, veggie and fungi!

And by its cooking container:

Way to make your wife look like an idiot, Bath Matt.

And by whether it’s a good thing that the resulting stuffing/dressing is healthy, saying “alas,” it is.

What she’s not confused about is how much she wants to sell that healthy fakery bread, which is “pumped with whole grains” and “packed with nutrition!”

When most of the dishes on your Thanksgiving table are loaded with butter and bacon (nothin’ wrong with that…just sayin’!) this dressing will bring both healthy and delicious to the table.

But instead of universally responding to her angelically healthy pot of bread or the comment-bait asking what their favorite stuffing is, Kathy’s commenters finally attempt to talk to their host about why 40 percent of her posts have been sponsored for two weeks:

Yeah. Settle down, readers. Kathy knows about the BUSINESS INDUSTRY.

Kathy knows that, even if she doesn’t sell things, even if readers aren’t charged a monetary amount to read her posts, even if people are complaining that they don’t like her product, not that the non-existent price is too high, that she would only be doing something wrong if people weren’t complaining.

She knows this September New York Times article about her heroes, the Petersiks, on hiatus from their blog “Young House Love,” is wrong.

She knows that Pam Kueber, of the Retro Renovation blog, quoted in the New York Times article, is wrong. She knows that even companies in the business of sponsored blog posts, like Contently, a self-described “company that works with publishers and brands that create sponsored content,” were wrong when they surveyed 542 people in July and found

And she knows that Fortune magazine was wrong when they reported on the findings and warned that, sponsored content can work as well as ads,

Either that, or she’s just digging in her heels, ears plugged with a free-shrimp sushi roll on one side and an Aeropress plunger on the other, because she has a compliment document that’s 35 pages long —

— and she knows best.

The week of Thanksgiving on Kath Eats Real Food was a stellar, five-part miniseries on doing the holidays better than anyone could ever even imagine.

Monday’s regularly scheduled description of the previous two days imparts the following information about Our Heroine, a social butterfly with a steam mop in one hand and a fitness shackle on the other:

• The weekend before Thanksgiving is “calm before the storm!!” but Our Heroine is not about to buckle under the pressure, and accomplishes “household stuff” and two gym classes, and she deems the two-day period “nice” with another exclamation point.

• She and mother-in-law Karen went to the Greek Festival for

good food – and amazing pastries! …. On then [sic] menu: Greek salad, pastichio, spanakopita, Greek-style green beans, and a roll. Glass of wine was extra!

I’m not sure what she means by “extra,” but at least she didn’t spell the dish “pistachio” and try to describe it like she did in 2012, when she called it “INSANE!” and a “lasagna-looking stack …. The top layer was something that I couldn’t decide on – either mashed potatoes or a custard – plus ground lamb (I think?) and noodles.”

Or, as Kathy would say, I’ll decide on later.

Instead, Dainty Kathy, who has the tiniest, sugar-nibblingest appetite ever and makes sure to note that the pastries were “shared,” turned her adorable confusion about ethnic food to the dessert tray:

My favorite are the “nests” as I call them, but their real name is kataifi.

• On Saturday, Kathy fought back against an evening of Greek pastry by being at the gym at 8 a.m. for a class that

….kicked my butt. Literally – I felt like someone had!

and then eating a pre-packaged plastic thing of “overnight oats” the gym serves at their food place. Inquisitive Kathy was full of questions she couldn’t be arsed to actually ask anyone:

This one was all chia and flax!! I’m not sure if there was actually apple in it – maybe apple sauce? But I could taste plenty of cinnamon and nutmeg!

• Kathy came home and “played …. trains, blocks and tea party” with her toddler until mother-in-law Karen finally relieved her, taking the child out for adventures and food, although why he would want to leave this shoved-in-a-corner immaculate table top mostly covered with sponsored plastic crap his mom earned for his sponsored birthday party is beyond me:

• Freed of her awful resp-mom-sibility, Kathy turned bathroom closet-cleaning into a way to mention a sponsor, how much free shit she is given, and what an irritating amount of vacations she goes on:

….so many hotel shampoos and beauty samples! FYI, BirchBox boxes make great storage boxes!

She also tries to make some sort of tsk-tsk joke about why there’s a plastic spider in the shot:

I have no idea who put it in my make up!!

Yes, Kathy, we’re all very proud of you for buying a perfume no one on Fragrantica or Basenotes has ever heard of that takes its name from the late sweater designer.

• Kathy, who is busy and totally in control of her hunger, ate lunch “really late”: a Whole Foods salmon puck inside a fakery roll, salad, fruit, and

Hot tea allthetime!

Well, “allthetime” or at least when Celestial Seasonings (or Tazo or The Tea Spot or Lipton in the past) is paying her to do so.

• Speaking of sponsors, Solo Kathy then faffed off to Pottery Barn for “Thanksgiving supplies.”

• Upon her return, “we” made a quiche, which seems to mean Kathy had fuck-all to do with it, especially since it’s Bath Matt’s terrible recipe previously discussed on Smugnom here, the one “combining the rigor of baking with the craft of cooking satisfies both the scientist and artist within!”

I mean, as long as your idea of “rigor” means not using cold butter in the crust like you’re supposed to because, in Bath Matt’s words, “I’m lazy – nobody will notice.” Philosophical master Bath Matt is merely being coy — not noticing is what Heidegger might call a sublime demonstration of the quiche crust’s Zuhandenheit.

Kathy reports that the horrible crust was “extra thick” this time, and that the quiche was made in the first place because their inconsiderate, chicken-raising neighbors have been giving them too many free goddamn eggs:

We are getting eggs from our neighbor and had an overflow! 

Thanks for the photo, Kathy, so that we all know your slice of quiche is just a scuffin’s breadth wider than the slice you serve to your toddler.

• Kathy’s Saturday night is as exciting as that of a depressed college sophomore beginning to come down with a cold and not feeling like the transfer to the new school is going too well:

Saturday night = We heart Portlandia – that is all!

• Sunday morning’s breakfast was an enforced group activity:

family French toast!

Whoever cut the lemons that way is wielding a knife and selecting fruit all wrong.

• Productivity includes canceling out one’s intake of calories with exercise and chores, and thus, Kathy

hit the gym for athletic conditioning #2. All I have to say is that my legs are realllllly tired now!!

forced herself to gag down more poorly crusted surplus egg wedge

finished up another season of “Survivor”

10 seasons down, ~16 to go!

as though she were plowing through Discworld instead of a game show where tan people behave like mopey cunts by the firelight.

babysat for a neighbor, and ate pasta with pesto — probably the wretched, undead stuff they made two summers ago.

Tuesday’s post is one of those roundups where Kathy lists six random gifts she’s been given, bought, or scrounged together recently, and two things she just has to give away:

1. A $16 Pumpkin Souffle-scented candle “from Anthro” that “a girlfriend” gave her for her birthday that smells

SO good!! Like everything pumpkin pie and not toooooo sweet.

2. Two free necklaces from a collection of something Kathy calls “higher end design jewelry.”

Do you remember me writing about Bama + Ry when Jasmine sent me a cute Mazen necklace?

No, because you never wear it, Kathy. She goes on about how she’s come around to gold (ahem, free gold) and how she totes identifies with Maya Angelou now.

Kathy writes:

I remember when there was a time when I thought gold was for grandmothers, and now my taste is “all gold all the time!!” I just love these two pieces, and wear them all the time. Both are in the Maya Collection and were named for poems by Maya Angelou.

Kathy, smirking like she’s got gold mines/ diggin’ in her own back yard.

I hope Kathy’s wearing the pieces named after the poem that starts,

When I think about myself, 
I almost laugh myself to death, 
My life has been one great big joke, 
A dance that’s walked 
A song that’s spoke, 
I laugh so hard I almost choke 
When I think about myself.

3. Holiday cards a company called Pear Tree did for her “in exchange for a shout out.” Knowing what an admirable trait it is to brag about being ahead of everyone else in the marathon of superficial tasks during a time of year whose challenges can frequently come from focusing on such showoffy bullshit instead of the humility, gratitude, kindness, and warmth we see only in gold foil script on cheap Homegoods canvases and greeting cards, Kathy takes credit for being on top of Christmas:

My goal this holiday season was to have all the Christmas “chores” done before the season even started.

Wow, Kathy. You really tried hard and succeeded at Having Random Businesses Offer To Do Things For You. Is there a special subscription scouring pad for that?

To make things worse, she included the photo of her child bawling from within the confines of his Halloween costume, which she calls “the famous dinosaur photo,” as though she were some sassy VJ counting down infamous MTV moments and she just got to the time Vanilla Ice trashed the set of “25 Lame.”

4. A $50 pair of made-in-China rain boots, perfect for any resident of a city that gets 219 days of sun per year — 14 more than the average American town. Kathy says these boots are “so comfortable” and seems to think she’ll be sporting them in the middle of a Virginia summer.

The rubber is really soft, so they bend easily and are easy to walk in. I also love that they don’t come up to my knees, so they are not so hot in warm weather and fit well over my calves. Bring on the rain!

5. A Nespresso machine Kathy doesn’t get to even use — just give away on behalf of Gourmesso, a company that puts coffee in pods. Unlike bloggers Let Stalk Mommy and Steamy Kitchen (tagline: “Eat Real Food!”), Kathy couldn’t tell her flock how tasty the decaf pods were after being adulterated with cream and sugar, and the company wasn’t about to give her a machine:

Gourmesso asked if I’d like to review some, but I don’t have a Nespresso machine, so I asked if I could give some away to you guys! They offered to giveaway [sic] Nespresso Inissia machine and 10 boxes of our coffee (which equals 100 capsules)!!!

6. Branches from a bush in her yard and more branches she “found” at the farmer’s market stuffed in a hand-me-down 5-gallon glass jug from her mother.

This was the easiest fun table centerpiece …. I am loving the wild look!

7. A $100 gift card to “a really cool business” that sells chains attached to lobster clasps for pregnant women “swelling out of their wedding rings.” The business is run by her “friend” Jamie, who

couldn’t fathom not being able to wear my ring, especially when I was expecting.

Jamie also sells a “line of charms that snap into [the necklaces] when they can have their ring on their finger!” You know, because you’ll want to keep wearing this when you don’t have to:

The fact that someone’s selling awkward lobster clasps attached to $5/foot silver cable chain for hundreds of dollars isn’t the worst part, though. The worst part is the tackily clueless name. Guess we can expect Jamie Waller’s next ventures to be custom eyeshadow from the Blacken My Eye line? Seasonal corn gift delivery from Box My Ears? A plug-in home fragrance from Slap Some Scents Into You?

Awesome imagery, Jamie.

I totally want to buy some jewelry now.

8. The last thing is free “holiday flavors” of whatever Talenti is. Ice cream, frozen yogurt — it’s some kind of frozen thing with sugar in it, and what Kathy cares about is that

….all I can say is YUM!!  The pumpkin pie is awesome – very spiced with real pie crust pieces – and the eggnog is like the real deal in ice cream form! Also in the limited edition group: peppermint bark! Caramel apple pie and fudge brownie are year round festive flavors.

She also introduces a brand new thing she’s going to do: a newsletter, which I’m sure is going to go as well as her app did that one time.

Top secret news: I have another giveaway in my first ever KERF newsletter next week!!

Wednesday’s post is one of the ones Kathy calls “Lately,” even though it’s just a list of food she ate a long time ago. To try and make it seem timely, she wedges in an intro paragraph about Thanksgiving, even though it doesn’t lead into any of the foods she ate forever ago, which include these abominations:

• “Pumpkin oat fun!”

The “fun” comes from “orange sprinkles.”

• “Two little pancakes …. were on the menu the next day.” Simmer down, Hunca Munca. It’s flour and binder and stop trying to style your peanut butter.

• A “bowl” that “was cottage cheese oatmeal with baked apples on top.” Which is weird, because it looks to me like a bowl that had that stuff in it, but I guess the very matter of the container was also constructed from foodstuff.

• Pancakes at BFF Sarah’s house, except that Kathy calls them “cakes.”

• Leftovers she begins mentioning without ever giving the reader any context what they’re left over from, like the very sudden “Leftover chili mug.” There is also, allegedly, “jicama slaw” on top of that salad, which leads me to believe Kathy has no idea what either of those words mean.

• Leftovers from something she says she made on the weekend, even though we’ve just read what she made over the weekend, and it doesn’t match. In any case, the leftovers are merely conveyances for what Kathy calls

A hidden puddle of ketchup in the middle : )

• More leftovers of, or from, whatever or wherever Continental Divide is, with messy specks of beans and rice on the side.

• A “tiny piece” of sweet fakery bread and a salad Kathy calls “efficient” because it mimics that gross McDonald’s Salad Shaker from George W. Bush’s first term:

She then orders:

add your dressing (or in my case, deconstructed dressing components) and shake! Plus leftover salmon, fresh veggies and goat cheese. 

• Grapes, double that amount of grape stems, and leftover pizza

• Mushroom ravioli from the farmer’s market, broccoli, and leftover chili on top, because Kathy couldn’t be arsed to use her home-canned tomatoes or her homemade pesto.

She insists:

It was actually really good!

• Grilled fish tacos. Since mother-in-law Karen came over for this dinner, one assumes she paid for and brought the mahi mahi and Kathy merely contributed the farmer’s market tortillas and the insistence that the tacos resemble a smoothie and contain “jicama apple slaw, avocado and crème fraîche.”

• A “marg,” nachos, and bean and cheese burritos at the long-awaited Continental Divide, which, we discover, is a Mexican place that pregnant BFF Sarah took Kathy to for her birthday. Which was in October.  Since it was Sarah’s treat, I guess she was okay posing with a virgin “marg” —

— and letting Kathy order two extra days of food on her dime. Or, as Math Professor Kathy describes:

I only ate about 25% of this and had 2 meals more out of it!

• Salmon, “half a roll,” leftover grits, chard (actual chard, not Chardonnay referred to in a stupid way), and “the Cook Smarts raisin marinade,” a reference I suspect we’re supposed to understand without explanation.

Run away, little raisin hero! You can make it!

Kathy ends her “Lately” post with a photo from Toddler Carbz’s art class, which I hope doesn’t mean she’s been snacking on paste. Predictably, Kathy’s thoughts on her child’s art class are all about herself:

Toddler art class: just as fun for the adult as it is for the child. I loved getting my hands in that play dough – so soothing!

I know, right, Robert Downey Jr.? Kathy’s commenters are on the same page as you:

Kathy’s post on Thanksgiving was a tale about how she and her toddler popped up to Maryland to see sister “Larbs” and their mother’s mother — the one who creates those freaky (but kind of awesome) paintings and is always joyously knocking back Manhattans.

Kathy writes:

We have so much to be thankful for this year.

What she shows, however, is

• A child she prevented from making terrible marker messes by limiting his activities to stickers on coloring books.

• Her child looking away from her in three photos and her mother looking away from her in one.

• Kathy and Larbs, neck and neck in the competition for Laziest Attempt at Making Blonde Hair and Long Jewelry a Look.

• Kathy hoping everyone else will take care of her child’s entertainment so she doesn’t have to do it, reducing the kid to playing with an antique dollhouse built by Kathy’s grandmother’s grandfather and wind-up mice Kathy’s grandmother purchased for him.

• Booze, because she doesn’t have to get its permission to photograph it. She writes:

Uncle Chris always makes a great Manhattan!

Of course, there’s no explanation about why Chris himself — whose Memorial Day appearance was quickly yanked — doesn’t want to be photographed, making both sides of her family now completely anti-KERF photography at the closing of the year.

• Booze, because it’s easier to make

The ends of champagne + Chambord cocktails

look festive than it is to make Bath Matt, who met them for dinner one night, look like he’s not Had It Up To Here With This Food-Blogging Shit.

Scuffing back to the Charlottesville-bound train with her inconvenient toddler, her rubber boots, and a memory card devoid of family photos, Kathy ends the post wishing her readers well:

I enjoyed reading all of your comments about your Thanksgiving plans on my giveaway post! Hope everyone has a lovely holiday, whether you are with family, traveling, caring for others at work or stuffed silly already.

Good on Kathy for the kind words, and for reminding them of the value of being thankful for family, generosity of spirit, and plentiful food. It would be nice if those values were the focus of her own post about Thanksgiving.

In reality, Friday’s post starts out with Kathy wishing her readers

Happy Black Friday!!

— as though a “lawless shitshow” known for shoppers basically winding razorblades in their hair like Pam Grier preparing for a fight in “Coffy” and camping in front of electronics stores for days for a shot at a discounted laptop is a proper holiday.

In other words, probably the most perfect greeting from a woman whose time with her family was sponsored by Birchbox, General Mills, Pottery Barn, Talenti, Gallo wines, and that vague, existential sense of ennui.

Kathy continues her Friday check-in by describing how virtuous she plans to be (her plans Friday, she says, “involve working out – and I’m excited about that!”) and has already been. First off, she won Thursday’s battle of not being a fatty fat fat-fat because she was careful not to eat all the pie.

Thanksgiving dinner was a big success, and we are all still digesting.

Really? You checked in with your husband’s mother, your parents, and your brother-in-law to see where in their intestinal tract your Whole Foods kale bake was lodged? Go on. Tell us more about what a “success” Thanksgiving was.

(Actually compared to years past I didn’t eat thaaaat much but it was still a lot!)

She also managed her time so perfectly that she could work out as well as prepare for the meal:

I took an hour off for a turkey trot on my own, but most of the effort was spent setting the table and cooking.

Really, Kathy — table-setting is about as involved an activity as preparing canned cranberry sauce, which is why you can usually get a child or a well trained cat to do it. Either way, her preparations paid off handsomely. No one could have noticed the chalkboard she couldn’t be bothered to wash, what with all the drunkenly margined promises of “But” salad, “ChipoHe” potatoes, and “Cranberry Sauce Rolls.”

Despite having her parents, her child, Bath Matt’s mom, and his brother at the table, Karen is the only one who gets caught in a photo. It’s typical for photos of members of different generations to prompt observations of how similar the relatives look, but that’s not usually because they both look so utterly irritated by the photographer.

Having chilled the porch, Kathy returns inside to take ten photos of the table with all her Pottery Barn crap on it, with no tempting, calorie-containing food or photo-avoiding family members to mess up her shots.

Kathy describes the table-setting as “rustic” and “modern,” with hand-made place cards she apparently reuses every year, “red berries from our yard” in a “vintage jug” belonging to her mother, and a silver gravy boat (empty every time we see it because there was no goddamn gravy at this Thanksgiving). Overall, Kathy says, putting shit on her dining room table was

a dream come true because I partnered with Pottery Barn to make it extra special. We already had tons of Pottery Barn things since it’s one of my very favorite stores and was my favorite pick for our wedding registry.

Jamming the post with affiliate links, Kathy links to the blanterns, featureless blandware, white blandkins, and, uh, cake bland she and Bath Matt received for their wedding, and some “so chic” flameless candles with “really cool looking ‘flames’” Kathy has bought since then:

I LOVE flameless candles! I let them burn all day and never worried about fires or dripping. Karen and Andrew were both totally fooled when I told them they weren’t real flames! They are great when you have small children at home too.

Wait, they were fooled when you told them the truth? For the love of empty silver gravy boats, Kathy, stop writing like a GPS that gives up two miles from the destination. Maybe then you’ll score a Pottery Barn sponsorship that pays for more than a $39 made-in-China table runner, some $12.50 “crystal” candle holders, and some 4-for-$20.50 napkin rings, about which she comments that she “loved the bling.”

Pottery Barn isn’t the only sponsor Kathy is thankful for this holiday season. At 2 p.m., with her guests starving, Kathy drags out the NatureBox snacks we haven’t seen since July, adds about 26 green beans, a bowl overflowing with a haphazard selection of carrot sticks, another bowl in which, like, two tablespoons of hummus are languishing at the bottom, a bowl of honey peanuts she bought at a neighbor’s school “funraiser” [sic], and a dozen chunks of “dairy cheese” (presumably meaning cheese from “Everona Dairy,” not that she can learn capitalization rules).

The “snack platter,” she reports proudly, “was devoured.”

Oh! But who’s that at the door? Why, it’s another sponsor! This time, it’s a present from General Mills: a “special” beer made using the cereal of conscious foodies everywhere, Count Chocula.

Kathy writes:

I hear the rumor is that the brewery bought all the Count Chocula in Fort Collins in order to make it!

The “rumor”? Good grief, Kathy. You quoted from a media release written by a “social engagement specialist” at General Mills.

Anyway, appetites whetted with free cereal-flavored beer and dry vegetables and nuts, Kathy breaks down how she, her husband, and his mother

split Thanksgiving dinner 3 ways – well, 4 of you count Great Harvest’s contributions!

One assumes she means the preparation of Thanksgiving dinner, as it’s a sad thought to imagine Bath Matt’s brother and Kathy’s parents and child fighting over pickled beans and “funraiser” peanuts.

Bath Matt was in charge of preparing “turkey,” which we see in a carved state —

— as well as a “big hunk of meat” in “a special blend of herbs and spices from The Spice Diva” (Kathy describes the result as “perfect”) —

— and “awesome!” sweet potatoes

smashed with a chopped chipotle (in adobo sauce) pepper and topped with goat cheese (plus the usual half and half and a little butter) …. The chipotle added such a nice kick.

Karen made a mushroom bread pudding Kathy called “rich and tasty,”

which I’m guessing is Squiggly Line Code for OMG 616 calories per serving and it has onions in it.

Karen also made a beet salad that Kathy somehow considered a personal victory, cheering tackily:

Plants represent!

Kathy’s contributions were cranberry sauce (“a must for me!”) that her mother had to help her make (Really? I could fucking make cranberry sauce from memory, and I have less confidence in my ability to boil water without scorching a kettle), and a Whole Foods recipe for swiss chard gratin she changed by using kale instead:

….and it turned out great.

Doubtful. The recipe directs you to make a roux, and no one abhors a roux more than the author of Paella Mac & Cheese: The Sponsored Recipe That Was, the Queen of Fuck-It-Who-Needs-Cold-Butter-In-This-Crust-donia.

Still, the important thing is that it was 160 calories per serving, and, in Kathy’s estimation,

A delicious way to get a green vegetable on the table!

Oh, thank goodness for you, Kathy, you sneaky mummy, you! Sorry that Count Chocula beer has a welcome spot at the table but that Karen’s beet salad couldn’t contribute enough fucking folate to your bountiful table, Vitamin Asshole. Too bad your dish looks like pine shavings and wilted weeds.

I hope you kept an extra stick of red berries from the bush in your yard, by the way, because the cranberry sauce you needed help with is drowning and might need help out of that bowl.

Our Hostess, who has held actual employment in public relations requiring her to know how to capitalize proper names for businesses, also notes “Great Harvest’s contributions.” Those would be rolls, pies, and 

pumpkin oh

“pumpkin oh”

Finally, there was a “special” bottle of Benchmark she got as swag at William Hill Estate (part of Gallo winery, whose expertise in wine is so rarefied that it bought 18 million bottles of merlot and shiraz) gave her on her OMGSonoma trip, saving her the $95 us non-food-blog-having folks have to pay to drink it. Kathy declares it

Fancy enough to get decanted.

Thus thoroughly fancified, Kathy proudly boasts that she

didn’t go back for seconds on anything despite it all tasting amazing – crazy!

She also mentions that she “proposed a trivia question” in which she made her family guess which pop song was identified quickest in a survey. If you follow the link, you learn that the song is the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe,” which people take an average of 2.29 seconds to guess, which I suppose makes Kathy’s dad a master of “trivia,” since, after 26 years of failed estimates, he finally guessed how many pickles were in a jar and won some free relish a few years ago.

Model dieter Kathy “waited a bit” for dessert, and then logged a few more steps on her Lime Green Fitness Cuff by putting out her uncapitalized “pumpkin oh” and those unsold fakery pies on her two cake stands, which, guys, you will NOT believe this, are from POTTERY BARN:

(see how perfect of a fit this challenge was!)

Kathy quaveringly puts the tiniest portions ever of pie and previously mentioned Talenti gelato on her Pottery Barn Great White plate —

— saying the molecules of pies she allowed herself were “delicious!” and that her brilliant husband

made all 200+ pie crusts by hand last week.

I’m sure they were amazing and that no one minded whatsoever that Bath Matt doesn’t care about making the crusts properly at all, and I’m sure that laziness had nothing to do with the fact that there were leftover pies for the Younger-Smugsons to take home.

Nothing says this is the best Thanksgiving ever and I’d be proud to appear on your diet blog like a man in a wrinkled T-shirt caught trying to fall asleep on his feet.

At some point, Kathy notices she never got any photos of her family, blames it on the fact that “we were so busy,” and posts three photos of her child smiling and laughing as her father — face cropped entirely out of the shot — rests his hands on the boy’s shoulders and snuggles him. She ends the post by saying she hopes her readers “leftovers are a’plenty” and — to fulfill the FTC’s disclosure requirements she hates ever so much — writing far more words about how tender her heart beats for Pottery Barn than she did about her family:

I partnered with Pottery Barn to celebrate Thanksgiving this year because I love them lots. The included links are affiliate links. Mwah!

Congratulations, Kathy. Your writing has reached level: Emoticon.

Despite all their hostess’s backbreaking work taking photos of napkin rings, candles, and twigs in bottles, Kathy’s commenters are not a wholly pleased bunch and, even on Thanksgiving, they dare to call out her lackluster efforts typing words about decorations, alcohol, food, and sponsor disclosure:

You can almost sense the white-knuckled restraint of the Pottery Barn representative who must be checking in on the relatively disastrous results of Kathy’s sponsored post, wishing they could jump in and make everything better with a monogrammed channel-quilted velvet stocking or a quince and pepper berry wreath, knowing they can only sit there and watch a sliver of the company’s social media budget (retail price: $73 plus tax) burn instead.

As usual for her Monday post, Kathy shares some brand new information that she had “such a lovely …. really, really nice” Thanksgiving — not only for all the reasons she gave thanks for on the previous Friday (chief among them ice cream and Pottery Barn) but also because

This is the only weekend of the year that we all get a few days off in a row just to hang out at home

I guess most of us can identify with that.

(and we aren’t on a vacation somewhere).

Oh, hang the fuck on. This year alone, Kathy spent

• a “party week” vacationing with her family and Bath Matt’s family in Key West in February

• a four-day family trip in March to Marco Island, Fla., for the fakery convention

• an anniversary weekend in Alexandria, Va. in June

• a July weekend in Pennsylvania at a family reunion

• one week in July on the beach in North Carolina

• another week in August on Bald Head Island, NC

Why didn’t you put this one on the Christmas card, Kathy?

• a four-day vacation to California wine country in September

• and two-day trips to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, to Miami in May, to Pennsylvania in July, and to Colorado in October, courtesy of the National Dairy Council, Nokia, Hershey, and Celestial Seasonings, respectively.

Yes, I suppose Kathy’s life is clearly lacking in time at home and time with her family, apart from her four family vacations, two couples’ vacations, four all-expenses-paid jaunts, and the 48 other weekends a year she spends with them.

Suddenly, there’s a sandwich that appears out of nowhere in the post!

Kathy informs her readers that it contained leftovers from Thanksgiving and was

pretty epic …. Toasted warm. Yum!!

Um, okay? Was there a reason she had to get all POV with the sandwich but couldn’t clean up the fakery dust or cranberry clot? There’s no time for answers, as Kathy wants to talk about a cocktail party at BFF Sarah’s house. Kathy knows she’s going out of order, but doesn’t care:

Rewinding back to just before the holiday, we went to a cocktail party at my friend Sarah’s.

With her boundaries as typically lopsided as her full-sized lentil pucks on sliced-in-half fakery rolls, Kathy shares that she and Sarah “wanted our parents to meet,” but doesn’t say why or show any photos of KERF’s parents overjoyed at getting to meet the parents of the girl their daughter wants to be (in addition to gestating an OMGsecond baby, Sarah also knows how to wrangle real live candles AND set a table so that there’s room for food) or BFFSarah’s parents thrilled to meet the parents of the girl who keeps putting their daughter and grandson on her diet blog and talking about her appetite for tacos.

Kathy and Bath Matt “were in charge of bread, alcohol and dessert,” because Sarah is smart and knows that those are the only three things the Younger-Smugsons can get excited for/have in cheap abundance.

Sarah’s seen what happens when Kathy pretends to feed guests, and it results in the cheese and sausage plate at lower left. And pumpkin beer. And nothing else.

Kathy’s narration then takes us to the Friday before the weekend, which includes the following stupid things:

• A reminder that while you were probably shopping, Kathy was “hitting the Black Friday….gym!”

• Being put out about a sick child who was allowed at the dining room table to take his cup of pink amoxicillin on Friday: “we were also dealing with double ear infections that were thankfully much, much better on Thanksgiving Day.”

• A gross salad for lunch:

I made a cranberry sauce salad dressing with olive oil, dried rosemary, and Dijon mustard. My salad also had goat cheese and honey toasted peanuts. Plus more cranberry sauce! 

• A Friday evening outing with the stupidly nicknamed “Uncle Brain” to a free city tree-lighting thing to see “Matt’s BFF Jeff” (the former employee who inexplicably makes them jambalaya).

She includes a crappy, blurry photo and says,

He’s the trumpet in the middle!

No he’s not, even though I have no doubt that a brass instrument could make better jambalaya than Our Kathy.

This has spinach and Greek yogurt in it. In other words, it’s “dip.”

• “Margs!!” at Kathy’s “new favorite” taco restaurant. The self-proclaimed “foodie” tells us why it’s her favorite, saying the food she ordered was “delicious!!!” and the food she ordered for her kid and ate some of herself was “quite yummy.” She also posts a photo of her toddler chewing tentatively on a chip, and calls him “The chip monster.”

Adding exclamation points and a smile doesn’t change the fact that you’re this guy, Kathy.

• A juice-box-sized Saturday breakfast she actually made for her family and their guest: “cranberry sauce smoothies” that she “loved” and decided produced “one of the best smoothies” she’s ever had, probably because it has actual non-hidden sugar in it.

• A holiday day with a guest in which she demonstrated how much she enjoyed his company and wanted to treat him to a special vacation by “watching many hours of Survivor!!” on Saturday.

• Serving her parents leftovers from Thanksgiving. Even in the kibble-sized cubes Kathy’s deigned to put on her plate, the meat appears to have succumbed to something during what I can only speculate was a T.E. Lawrence-style crossing of the Nefud Desert since Thursday’s holiday.

• Uselessly saying  “Easy does it” about having eaten eggs and toast and a clementine on Sunday.

• A feast-obliterating walk listening to “Serial,”

“Cool thanks!!” The new “No awesome”?

followed by “a family hike” where she goes all Joan Crawford-racing-her-daughter-in-the-pool on Toddler Carbz, saying he couldn’t make it through the whole 2-mile trail and “got quite tired after a while : )” but walked “a good bit,” because it’s not like a trail has ever winded Kathy before.

Never attempt a strenuous hike without pearl earrings.

• A salad Bath Matt made out of goat cheese, honey peanuts, fakery croutons, and “leftover meat.”

• These two sentences:

We skipped nap in the afternoon and headed to Pippin Hill for a wine tasting and playing outside. Loooooved Jacob Allen’s old school country tunes!!

The discomfort gene: passed on from both sides of the family.

At least one commenter thinks the winery was a stupid thing too:

Tuesday’s post is supposedly about how Kathy really thinks that an “ideal” salad is all about balancing “nutrition and flavor.”

A whole grain. Like, one oat, or a lentil?

Whatever. It’s not. It’s a typical post in which going on about “nutrition,” “macronutrients,” “healthy fats,” “long-lasting complex carbohydrates,” and how she “go[es] super healthy with local greens” is used only as a carrier for sugar, resulting in candied almonds and salad dressing that she says tastes like a Creamsicle ice cream bar:

If Kathy were more transparent, she would be a Japanese skeleton flower in the rain.

In any case, sugar livens up her writing, and she giddily calls her resulting double-sugar-topped salad

this one smashing Hugh Jass salad!

Do tell us how you did it:

Though it lacks the “bonus points” of the first recipe, it’s her recipe for candied almonds that’s truly innovative, in that she introduces the one sixteenth of a teaspoon measurement — you know, for when you feel like you have to include some sort of herb or spice, but you really, really don’t want to.

As for the method, which is so important it’s included in the title, she says you don’t have to make candied almonds in the microwave, but that it’s helpful to do so when you’re “impatient.”

Kathy shares a caveat on her two ways to make salad more sugary:

I don’t believe you have to have a diet completely void of sugar to be healthy – I just think it needs to be in small doses or on special occasions.

You know, special occasions like when you’re “impatient” for candied almonds.

In the comments, Kathy leaps at the chance to be a salad snob of 30 years ago:

The result is that she has nothing to say to people like Jeanie:

Sorry, Jeanie. Next time, maybe comment about “Survivor,” so you can have a conversation as well as learn about “eBay and things.”

On Wednesday, Kathy got a day off, as her “Guest RD” series continued with an entry about getting enough protein by someone who’s not a blogger, Bryana Piazza.

Kathy introduces Piazza by saying she

loves Bryana’s devotion to plants …. [and] drooling over her stuffed mushroom recipe below!

Her devotion isn’t just to plants — Piazza actually pops up in the comments section and addresses a ton of reader questions about her guest topic, giving thorough, cheerful, non-defensive answers about protein requirements for people who are trying to lose weight, making sure one eats “complete proteins,” and what happens if you really do eat too much. Piazza’s responses are also properly punctuated, unlike this rare Kathy sighting in the post comments:

Yes, the conservative Newsmax that sells the anti-vaccination, soy-products-may-lead-to-breast-cancer “Blaylock Wellness Report.” (The American Institute for Cancer Research says that’s bogus.)

Piazza greets Kathy’s readership and explains that, while she’s been a vegetarian since 1994 and is now a vegan,

I want to start off by saying that this post is not intended to shame people into adopting a vegan lifestyle, as I believe that everyone is entitled to their own dietary preferences and personal beliefs.

Oh, good. Because your validation matters enough to fill all the If You Care-brand baking cups in the world, Piazza. I totally paused at the possibility that you might not believe in my right to freebase this Slim Jim Zesty Garlic Monster Stick.

In fact, she says, she calls her diet “plant-based” instead of “vegan,” to be an equal-opportunity shamer of both people who eat meat and the similarly disgustos who

….barely eat any plants at all. Their meals include processed and pre-packaged foods such as mock chicken, with long ingredient lists and little nutritional value. I prefer to fill my plate with fresh fruits and vegetables, nut and seeds, whole grains, and legumes.

Piazza says she tells her clients not to follow a vegan diet like her, but to “make the star of the meal the plants, not the meat.” (In this, she’s sort of like Kathy, if Kathy had clients and she nudged them towards her own way of eating by encouraging them to make sugar — preferably harvested from local wedding cake — the star of their diet.) But Piazza says the main thing people worry about is getting enough protein, which is ridiculous because firstly, she eats plenty of tofu, nuts, seeds, and lentils, and secondly, because the RDA for protein is .8 grams per kilogram of body weight —

— and thanks to this awesome graphic from PopularVegan.com, it’s obviously “relatively easy to meet your protein needs by eating plants!”

Wikipedia says anything can be a complete protein. Bring me my chips.

Piazza ends with a recipe that sounds and looks pretty good:

It’s portobello mushrooms stuffed with just-wilted spinach and artichoke hearts, topped with a dressing that includes yellow miso and apple cider vinegar. Unfortunately, it involves dirtying a skillet, a baking dish, and a food processor (two too many implements for impatient-for-candied-almonds Kathy), includes garlic (albeit the powdered kind) and features “a Creamy Hemp Dressing,” involving actual raw hemp seeds. Kathy can “drool” all she wants — apart from her dalliance with vanilla hemp milk and sponsor-provided hemp-containing granola when she lived in Charlotte years ago, we’re never going to see Kathy get on that superfood train any day soon, no matter how many tablespoons of maple syrup you entice her with.

Also, I doubt eating hemp would make her very popular with her new sponsors over at Newsmax, whose articles about acid reflux are basically softballs for commenters to talk about how President Obama makes them puke, and whose online store sells this sort of stuff:

Moving on, Thursday’s post is another freaking post about how to make salad dressing, and it’s almost the same exact lackluster-results recipe Kathy posted on Tuesday.

I guess it’s a new opportunity for her to talk about how much she doesn’t like using more than one dish —

• “….when I come home starving from the gym at lunchtime I try to get my salad on the table as fast as possible. This ritual has almost become a game to me to see how fast I can assemble lunch while dirtying the least number of dishes.”

• “I put my ingredients in the bottom, whisk with my fork, add the greens on top and toss as best I can without too many leaves jumping ship. It works quite well, and it has increased my salad enjoyment one serving at a time – no extra bowls or jars required!”

• “Call me lazy, but I like to think I’m efficient “

— or garlic.

• “I don’t know if they use too much onion or garlic or if it’s the preservatives that taste off to me, but many bottled dressings literally leave a bad taste in my mouth long after the salad is gone.”

• “I’ll also add that I often use garlic powder instead of raw garlic because I don’t like any meal that sticks with me all afternoon. However, I totally agree that raw garlic gives a salad dressing an extra layer of delicious! I save it for fancy dinner parties.”

Demonstrating a similar level of time commitment to both her graphics and her attempts at humor, Kathy inserts what she calls this “oh-so-beautifully-designed (=sarcasm)”

three-font graphic “formula” for creating a salad dressing.

I refuse to believe that anyone out there, first of all, needed Kathy to tell them how to make a salad dressing, and, secondly, is further enlightened by Kathy’s further instruction on the topic:

• The “magic ratio of oil to vinegar is 3:1.”

• “oil is what brings the luxurious richness to your salad”

• To prevent “a soggy salad,” one should “use 1 tablespoon of dressing for 1.5 cups of greens.”

Having said that, Kathy’s readers encompass a group that includes someone who has so many salad dressings they go bad, someone who thinks the mere use of bottled dressing is “sad,” and someone else who thinks there’s a chance Kathy would ever try even a relatively sweet hot sauce like sriracha in her salads.

Kathy’s said even the Huy Fong sriracha, which has sugar as its second ingredient, is “super spicy and garlicky. Not the best for breath, but it sure adds a kick.”

Kathy ends with her second salad dressing invention of the week, one that sounds lovingly created, one totally worthy of sharing and enriching the lives of the readers she cares so much about, one she

threw together recently to stretch for a few days in a jar

Kathy ends with an appropriate sign-off for a post about thickened liquid:

Happy Crunching!

Friday’s post is the predictable list of what Kathy calls “cut back” foods, which Kathy says was super awesome because she asked herself if healthy foods were what she wanted — and the answer was yes.

Yikes.

Poor Grandma Buzz doesn’t even get a response back from her daughter, who is busy mangling her intros and thus, asking herself how she ate.

Was this week a little lighter after the big Thanksgiving festivities? Mine was! Squiggly line, all in …. Cravings for pie are low and cravings for kale are high. I love it when my body wants to be totally healthy!

Of course, she follows that with a photo of a breakfast she couldn’t even wait to photograph before tearing into its sweet parts like the titular chomping fish in “Piranha 3D.”

Kathy writes,

What happened to the inside of this toast, we will never know. Unless you were a fly on the wall in my kitchen and saw me eat the gooey inside before it even went in the toaster!

Oh, but that’s just a tiny taste of Kath Tries to Be Kute this week. We also have her attempting sincere children’s programming narration:

Breakfast of eggs, toast and fruit is my very favorite for feeling my best these days.

Then, there’s her trying to write copy for oatmeal commercials:

Of course oatmeal is …. delicious in totally different ways. Stick to your gut and warming you up ways!

Wait, what?

No way did Bath Matt’s mom ever mix up the common expression “stick to your ribs,” which almost 1.8 million search results agree refers to a filling meal, with either the condition of sticking with one’s gut or sticking to one’s guns. The pigheaded manner in which Bath Matt insists “sticks to your gut” is a thing, however, is a fitting example of the latter expressions.

Kathy then runs out of current photos and decides to talk about how she made several meals from her leftover pancake and leftover pancake sandwich from Brookville:

leftover Big Fat Pancake from Brookville for days. Served with a green smoothie for a balancing effect ; )

This leads to a rarely seen Kathy segment I like to call Pre-Google Stoner Thoughts:

I think more pancake sandwiches need to be invented. The key is to get your pancakes firm enough that they don’t crumble apart in hand. I’m not quite sure how to do that!

Yeah, Kathy. It’s a shame no one’s figured that out, apart from The Food Network, Betty Crocker, Serious Eats, Food Republic, Nom Nom Paleo, a site that doesn’t even DO regular pancakes, Jimmy Dean, and McDonald’s for the last 11 years.

Aside from dinner leftovers, Kathy had lunch with “friends” at a restaurant:

Tamale day! I have been wanting to try these for a while, and sadly it left me a bit underwhelmed.

as well as ate a thing of $4 chili from a food truck and a “side salad,” and put croutons on that loathsome “curdled-but-still-tasted-good broccoli soup” to choke it down.

Kathy shares photos of three dinners at home — a “delicious winner” of a kale salad she got from The Daily Garnish, squash with tomato sauce

Watch out, world. There’s a recipe coming.

and chicken, bell pepper, cheese, and yogurt “tacos” that were “Pretty delish!”

I sure love my tacos with a side of pumpkin souffle candle smell.

She also had a “big night out!” by seeing a Rolling Stones cover band and having chips, “margs,” tacos and chorizo

at the taco place that just opened that Kathy keeps calling “Yearbook Taco” even though its actual (and even more irritating) name is “Yearbook Taco Bar.”

Kathy ends the week with a reminder that, not only has she been good, you’re probably not doing nearly as well, and she’ll just be bouncing out the door thinking about that:

Hope you guys are settling into the holiday season well. I’m off to the gym!

Kathy’s post on Monday delivers the surprising news that she had just the greatest weekend. Here is what we learn from the post:

• Kathy has fought a battle of unspecified details against an unknown foe in the effort to “get into the spirit” of Christmas. She illustrates this with a single photo of a wreath on her front door, and says:

I blame distractions, but we are ready now!

My guess is that you can’t tell, but the wreath is actually made out of hornets and frosting, and in between being repelled by repeated, hive-defending stings, Kathy was compelled to chew on it.

Yes, my crappy Photoshopping is why Smugnom is late this week.

That’s the only way I can see her taking longer to complain about Christmas preparations than it takes to actually hang a wreath.

• She went to an unspecified “friend’s house” to eat pizza, salad, soup, and “vino!!” on Friday,

Beer koozies and paper napkins? I hope Kathy shit a nubby sea glass Pottery Barn brick.

while her husband and child took a free trolly to a separate pizza place:

They had a blast.

• Kathy ate sponsored Cheerios and “two cups of joe!” on Saturday morning, which Kathy complains “was dreary and gray.” She “played around” in her pajamas “for a while” while her husband was at “a slicing event,” because it’s important to share details about activities that can’t even be explained.

I think Toddler Carbz probably just needed a driver to a Buñuel screening and neither of his parents understood what the hell was going on.

• Kathy “finally rallied” and went to the gym, and returned to eat “a quick small soup lunch to tide my hunger,”

Few things are as appetizing as brown streaks on the inside of a white bowl, are they, Kathy?

Do you have to eat food that sticks to your “guts” to “tide” hunger, or is that just another made-up expression that Kathy occasionally knew was incorrect in 2007?

October, 2007. Highlights of this post also include Kathy describing how she got up before sunrise one Sunday to read in bed: “Husband always BEGS me to read in bed on Saturdays and not desert him to my computer, so I thought he’d be pleased. But the second I turned on the lamp he was grumpily muttering “What the heck are you doing getting up so early on a Saturday turn off that light!” …. I made him put on a sleeping mask.” Once up, the couple “argued over the meal plan for the week” before going to the Charlotte farmer’s market, where Kathy complains, “I am NOT a fan of this market. It’s in a pretty inconvenient location and doesn’t have that organic glow that you hope to find.” She also ends up “disappointed” by the bread Bath Matt chooses.

Conclusion? As the years go on, the more loathsome little tidbits about her opinions and personality she obscures, the worse her writing gets. (Although “could have ate” is pretty fucking awful.)

• The best part of Kathy’s Saturday was going to BFFSarah’s baby shower.

• BFFs are there for you at the important times in your life, like when you’re having a shower for a second child, or when you’re listening to your friend talk about all the comments she deleted from her blog when you said that weird thing about eating “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!)”:

Kathy helped “put together” the event by making Grandma Buzz’s punch:

(ginger ale, cranberry, frozen lemonade and sherbet) which we spiked with wine glass-by-glass to suit both drinkers and non drinkers.

Those are some precise instructions. One cranberry?

Her work over, Kathy was finally ready to be paid in the preferred currency of children and ants everywhere, sugar, even though she has to specify that she “nibbled” on other foods as well — like “amazing chocolate cake pops!” and “different kinds of candy”

• Kathy hates having to zip her mouth —

We all went around the room to celebrate Sarah and give her advice for being a mom of two. (And those of us with 0-1 children listened! Ha!)

— especially when the topic is something so cold and clinical that she can only recite the bullet-points later, exam-cramming style.

• But she turns into the motherfucking Kool-Aid man when the cake comes out:

THAT CAKE! It was from local bakery Chandlers and the frosting was plentiful : ) …. I was in charge of cutting the cake!! Oh yeah!

• Few things can force Kathy out of Wine & Cake House and into the be-dough-ed arms of her husband, but the promise of free babysitting and more food she doesn’t have to cook is at the top of the list. Bath Matt’s mom came over to babysit Toddler Carbz, and, in Kathy’s words, they “cooked dinner together,” a description that seems fair when you look at how many meals her husband makes that Kathy thinks she contributes to when all she’s done is exist near a room with a functioning oven.

“I’m a kid and even I know how to use roux!”

• Living close to something prohibits you from both driving there and parking there, and Rihanna songs from 2007 will never stop being relevant:

It was raining, but we live too close to the mall to drive and park, so we just braved the elements under an umbrella-ella-ella.

• She can pretend to laugh it off all she wants, but it’s kind of pissing Kathy off that she can go to a sushi place at the mall three whole times and when she trudges in, bedraggled from walking tipsily in the rain, on her fourth visit, she still has to sit at the bar:

This was our 4th visit and we have YET to get a table!! Each time we sit at the bar, which is actually pretty fun. I must remember to make a reservation for our 5th visit : )

• Kathy is the epitome of sophistication, pairing red wine with picking off her husband’s sushi combo meal:

tempura haricots verts, miso soup and 3 rolls (I wasn’t terribly hungry, so Matt ate most of the rolls)

• Kathy, her grown-ass husband, and their growing child “shared these two plates 3 ways, plus Matt got a small omelet” at Whole Foods for breakfast, and then bought their Christmas tree.

No word on whether a sponsored robot that hangs the ornaments and vacuums up needles has arrived on her doorstop yet.

• Kathy still thinks that halving a few bunches of Brussels sprouts counts as “lots of food prep for the upcoming week” and that taking “all afternoon” for “a blog recipe” counts as work:

I have had so many social occasions lately that we haven’t cooked a full week at home in ages. I’m looking forward to it! We’re doing Cook Smarts the whole week through!

Way to simultaneously humblebrag and shit on the sponsor that tries to make cooking at home convenient sound completely inconvenient for someone whose classroom of life consists of 26 periods of independent study, Kathy.

It does not.

How could I not!?

Earl Gray! [sic] One of my favorite teas. I’m so weird about teas:

Love: black, creamy, minty, vanillay

Hate: Fruity, citrus, watery, spiced”

Or one of the cast members of “The Young Ones.”

In comments, Kathy lucidly answers a reader asking what nail polish she’s using: “It’s an Essie gray with sparkles glitter on top!”

Because bananas were not involved, I added a teaspoon of maple syrup for a little sweetness. And a teaspoon of vanilla for an extra punch of aromatic flavor.

Oh, and on the topic of tea Caitlin recently made cupcakes with Candy Cane Lane!

Their teas are the perfect way to share the “warmth” of the holiday season with your loved ones. ( <—heh heh!)

Don’t hold your breath on an answer, Sara Caldwell, especially since Kathy has already addressed this point in a way that makes her sound better than all of us:

Kathy’s all about being realistic until she sees someone eating a salad made of iceberg lettuce, tomato, and carrots, and wants “to cry.”

Spaghetti squash and I used to be madly in love. I have never been a huge lover of pasta, so I was thrilled to find a lighter alternative during my weight loss days.

Those of you who are sticklers for definitions would probably argue that this isn’t “a slowly cooked sauce”… involving “several techniques, including sweating, sautéing and braising.” (Thanks Wikipedia.) You’re right – it’s the pretend version. So let’s carry on with a short-cut version in our minds involving beef, carrots, peppers and tomato sauce. Darn, if I’d only thought to use some red wine!

The instructions also say to let the sauce “simma down.” She doesn’t say if you have to brag about how awesome you are at dieting, but she does so:

….it’s very low calorie for the amount you get to eat, but I still didn’t finish my whole boat!

Thursday’s post sees Kathy being sponsored by a company that offers her readers a 20 percent discount and goes perfectly with the theme of her “real food”-themed diet blog.

This is how Kathy presents the tale of being sponsored by Bombas, a company that makes socks. First, she takes more than 900 words to talk about how back-assedly she fucked up the simple task of putting socks and shoes on so she could play cutesy co-ed community soccer:

• She spent $10 on cleats. Used ones. BOYS ones. And wore them for half a year.

• She bought new Diadora cleats and tried “breaking in” methods like “leaving them in my hot car, jumping on them, etc.” but they caused “HORRIBLE blisters.”

Band-aids would start on my heel and end up on my toes, leaving my blisters totally exposed! I tried athletic tape, which shifted all around, and mole skin with a hole cut out for my blister that did nothing. I even tried duct tape without much luck. It was a really frustrating and painful time.

I wonder why that is, Kathy. It’s almost like every guide to breaking in soccer cleats recommends putting on the new cleats, putting your feet in warm water for 20 minutes, keeping them on as they dry, and applying petroleum jelly or leather softener.

• A salesman at Total Soccer “felt bad” for her and sold her a new pair of Adidas Predators “marketed as ‘women’s comfort,’” which sounds more like a tampon than a pair of shoes to this unathletic ham. Hideously, her second game “broke everything open again.”

I knew it was time to bring out all the stops, so I literally combined every tactic that I could think of and scoured the internet for blister solutions.

She then prepared herself to fight what she calls her “Blister Revolution” with the following adorable graphic —

— which included a “Second Skin” [sic] set of bandages, a new pair of socks, a pair of “soccer socks,” a tube of “Run Goo” [sic], another thing she seems to have invented a name to call”2nd Skin gel pads” —

— the colored tape she calls “prewrap,” (and then, “pre wrap”) of which she says,

I also wear these as hair bands as a nod to my high school soccer days!

a second and third thing out of the first bandage set, “athletic tape,” which she doesn’t describe except to say that the “prewrap” helps it “stay put,” and yet another pair of socks. She also repeatedly recommends a thing called “mole skin,” which neither moles nor Google approves of.

By the end of this numbered graphic explanation, Kathy is wearing three pairs of socks:

a friend recommended I try two layers of socks and get some really nice athletic socks, and I think that was my lifesaver.

This is the first time she mentions her sponsor, saying — not that she ever used them, but that (in theory, perhaps) that they “are great for this.” She then refers to the seven things in the graphic as a “routine,” even though they sounded more like things she bought and then discarded in frustration. She also calls the ends of her feet “beautiful,” which, ew:

I can’t say enough good things about how much this routine saved me. It was an investment in both time and money, but I went from not being able to walk at the end of each game (one time my sock was STUCK to my blister and I had to pull it off skin and all!) to having beautiful heels again.

I think the two things that made the most difference were the proper layers of protection from the Second Skin and the extra layer of proper athletic socks.

Oh, so, yeah. This is where she talks about the socks she’s still never said she actually used:

That’s where the Bombas come in! These socks….are the bomb!

Kathy rewrites some of their ad copy about how the socks are made, adds some of her calorie-free exclamation points and a smiley emoticon, says she “love[s]” the logo, and says:

The best part about Bombas is that for every pair you buy, the company donates a pair to someone in need (think Toms for socks!). Bombas has donated over 150,000 socks to those in need since launching in Oct 2013.

As her comments show, Kathy is not quite so generous:

And thus, Kathy ends her post with a coupon code and a warm feeling that she’s bought some (stinky) Toms and promoted some do-good socks and done well, even though, really, in this case, fuck her. Why? Because, for every pair of Bombas socks sold, the company donates a pair of socks to Hannah’s Socks, a company created in 2005, by a girl who was 4 years old:

If you might recall, and I hope you do, Kathy’s experience with soup kitchens involves being forced to go there for a class, eating a salad from an organic market instead of sharing in the soup kitchen meal, and, most egregiously, snarking on the size of, transportation for, and number of sandwiches taken by the soup kitchen patrons:

We were disappointed to see bologna as the sandwich meat given its low nutritional profile compared to other meats, but when that’s all you have, it’s all you have. Some people had foursandwiches and soup and cake! I wonder if this was their only meal of the day, or if they were hungry for other reasons (or just eat a lot in general)?

Good thing Kathy didn’t donate a pair of socks for every comment she deleted on that entry, or Bombas might be out of business.

In any case, Friday’s post is Kathy’s (usually) weekly list of food she’s eaten within the last week, month, or cycle of Daylight Savings Time. For some reason, she leads by talking about her “favorite shows of the past few years”:

LOST, Mad Men, Survivor (clearly), Nashville and…. So You Think You Can Dance!

and how she “immediately snagged” tickets to see the “tour” of the latter show to “see everyone dance in person!” The point of the television sidebar, I suppose, is so she could say that she and Ellen, the friend who went to see the show with her, went to Pasture in Richmond and, to cater to Kathy’s profession and exquisite eye for detail were given

one of their house-made candy bars for dessert.

Unbelievable – especially the crunchy pecan-honeycomb stuff on the side!

Stuff, huh.

The rest of the meals she lists are even less detailed:

• Another blog’s recipe for enchilada soup

• Food plan subscription service cabbage and fish tacos:

• Food plan subscription service “Wedding Soup,” but with turkey meatballs, and couscous.

• A restaurant “date night” dinner of shrimp bisque for her and $26 “seared tuna entrée” for Bath Matt, as well as “mussels and frits” [sic] at

Rocksalt, which is our new favorite restaurant at [that mall] Stonefield.

Sweet tilted shot of an empty plate, Kathy.

hamburger with a side salad, cheese and clementine.

Not adorable. Learn to plan better.

• More martyr-licious leftovers:

A mix of all kinds of delicious leftovers – chicken, spinach, cheese.

Yeah, Kathy. You had half a custard cup of salad. You totes weigh 26 pounds and should stop dieting before you wither away.

• Oatmeal and nut butter. And, one hopes, a good liquid bleach and a stiff scrubbing brush.

• More oats, served with a side of impractical burlap.

• Eggs, the tiniest dieter’s toast ever, and grapes.

• A piece of crockery, apparently:

This bowl was a mash up of yogurt, chopped pear, granola, raw oats and peanut butter. French press a la Perfect Coffee!

Why is there a Cabbage Patch doll butt imprinted in her bowl?

• Yogurt with some shit on it:

blueberry sauce, banana and peanut butter. Coffee always on the side!

AS OPPOSED TO IN YOUR POCKET? Seriously, Kathy.

Kathy ends the week before the week before Christmas saying she hopes “y’all have a great week!” and asking for readers’ “favorite current shows,” because she clearly has a shit-ton of unoccupied time worrying her in the way any list of required and recommended reading for in-progress Registered Dietitians never did:

I know I need to watch Homeland…and I started Orange Is The New Black but am so sucked into Survivor that I can’t find time to watch it!

Fighting for the foreground: Crappy pizza and eye-rolling disdain for one’s child.

I’m hoping to wrap stuff up at my coffee-tossing urb-pro day job early enough to get back to posting timely recaps before 2016, my dear, hilarious, compassionate, amazing hams.

In case I don’t, though, let it be on record that your (and PartyPants’) patience these last few months has been almost as steadfast and superb as Kathy’s stubborn inability to improve her published life in any meaningful way. Eat all the cookies, or not, or go on all the relative-escaping runs, or don’t, or work all the time-and-a-half, or just keep your heads above water amid the too-often-concentrated horrors of this season. No matter what, know that you didn’t have to monetize your blisters, or figure out how to turn your holidays into a sponsorship opportunity while your family’s meals got cold — so YOU WIN.

The rest of the December recaps are coming as surely as another year of banal typing from America’s least-ambitious diet-blogger, but in the meantime, here is my latest attempt to cobble something together using Photoshop instead of rubber cement and old copies of Sassy: the 2014 Sadvent Calendar.

Probably best consumed in nibbles and sips, with Greek yogurt on top for spice-neutralizing calm. Contains no perfection, no flows, and no nutrients.

I’m listening to Baby It’s Cold Outside as I write this, but ironically we had a really warm weekend!

You never know how that’s going to go, but this was the first haircut he seemed to enjoy!

From left: Quaker Oats, Hershey sugar, someone who is awesome without soccer, a Teddy Graham steering a marshmallow covered wagon, and old-timey cake-icing.

Karen, patiently enduring this shit in 2010 and 2011

From 2010

Her Kaption: “Riiiight before soup dribbled down his new vest…”

• With the Keswick gorge complete, Kathy and Bath Matt head to their gym’s weird Friday Night exercise-and-drink thing where her class “won!!” over the group who exercises at 6 a.m. This was all the more meaningful to Kathy because of her functioning ovaries, of course:

Since we’re viewed as the “mom class” by some, we were super proud of our hard work : )

• Since she’s high on the glow of victory and the appetite-suppressant effects of food you enjoy eating, Kathy had some wine and “a small plate of salad and a few bites” she says were “delish!”

• The healthiest couple ever

made green smoothies and then showered up before headed [sic] out to the market

where Kathy beelines for sugar: Apple Pie Jam from alleged friend Becky and a “special order” from the Sweet Sandies ice cream stand: “birthday cake WITH FROSTING inside.” She then brings out the noble, Votes For Women language and links to Sweet Sandies’ Kickstarter:

If you feel a calling to support small businesses, then please consider pledging a few bucks for the love of gourmet ice cream!

In honor of my enthusiasm for Sweet Sandies and the launch of the Kickstarter, Stephanie is giving away a set of four of her holiday pop-tarts to one of you!!

All that honoring seems to have paid off, and the stand’s campaign for “Artisan Ice Cream Sandwiches & Pop Tarts” was funded Jan. 2. Way to make your voice count for good in this world, Kathy.

• Sugar-obtaining makes way for more shaming of her “rather nervous,” “shy” toddler, as they headed to visit their gym’s Santa Claus. With her maternal intuition, Kathy realized that she just needed to motivate her son with photos and freebies — the same things that drive her in life:

…. [A]ll of his normal stranger anxiety melted away when he realized he might get James the train out of this lap sitting business …. A little nervous at first… But then he saw the camera and performed his usual CHEESE!

“Santa, did that Lincoln Navigator ad just pop up over these photos of my first Christmas?”
“Ho ho ho, I did, little fella. Guess it’s another lump of coal for your mom then this year.”

• Kathy heads to another party, this one for “our mom group.” She brings a pecan pie that “a blog friend” sent her, seemingly in exchange for her shilling their company and a coupon code, and she and Toddler Carbz open presents.

• Kathy hands off the child to Bath Matt and Karen, and goes out with a friend for community theater and “bites and sips” at The Alley Light: “juicy vino,” a $6 chorizo and chickpea appetizer, a $7 sardine appetizer —

(for my weekly dose that I keep forgetting!) They tasted so fresh! Loved the tomatoey lemon olive tapenade underneath.

— all atop a side of IKEA sponsorship.

Via Forbes. (Since the deal, Campbell’s has been hit with a class-action lawsuit about the genetically modified corn in 37 kinds of “100 percent natural” soup. Fun!)

Candy canes, bourbon balls and ‘nog get all the attention this time of year, but it’s just as important to feel your best while you celebrate the 12 days of Christmas! Thus, don’t forget to balance out the fun with a healthy dose of holiday veggies.

Oh, shut up, Kathy. You have eaten literally all those things for breakfast (I’m serious: “Bourbon Ball Oats,” “Candy Cane ComfOats,” and “Deck The Blog With Nog For Oprah” are all recipes of hers) If you’re not trying to lose weight or being paid, you don’t give a bourbon ball-sized shit about vegetables.

In advance of her recipe being “featured” in a “Twitter party,” Kathy’s post on Tuesday shares a recipe that uses her sponsor’s orange and carrot juice and the literal grain of salt you have to take when you consider who would even make any of Kathy’s Kreations:

Some poor Bolthouse Farms employee still earning their stripes had to make Kathy’s recipe legible — in her copy, at least, Brussels sprouts are capitalized and “shiitake” is spelled correctly.

Of course, Kathy still sneaks in Things She Likes and Dislikes, as though it makes for interesting reading:

‘shrooms + butter are a match made in heaven!

I hate it when Brussels aren’t cooked in the middle

You have all been there – you stare into the fridge and think “What am I going to make for dinner?!”

She’s so busy she can’t even consider a pesto recipe for half a year.

Obligatory mention of how difficult the ridiculous small person in her life makes things.

• Reminding her readers that she’s usually much better than them:

Sometimes I have weeks where I have a meticulous meal plan and all ingredients prepped in advance.

• Describing things meaninglessly: Frozen pesto is used for its “flavor,”

olives for their “extra punch of flavor,”

and parsley for its “final layers of flavor.”

Kathy chooses spaghetti because it is a “pantry-friendly base,” as though any of her dinners focus on pantry-aggressive bases like sides of beef, trampolines, and 572 big-block Chevy engines.

She also mentions that the parsley was “found in the produce drawer,” as though we’d expect to find it in the linen closet, the mailbox, or on gym-Santa’s lap.

• Congratulating her choice in ingredients: garbanzo beans are “perfect,” frozen pesto’s convenience is “perfect,” olives and cheese are “healthy fats,” and the result of all her last-minute faffing “fresh as can be,” “nutritious,” and “made with real food.”

• Not actually knowing which ingredients she’s used, though:

She also mentions her “love” for Whole Foods’ store brand stuff. Yeah, dude. We’re aware. They’re aware. They’re not sponsoring you for a reason.

Kathy’s next post, on Thursday, Dec. 18, is a “holiday gift guide” she wrote, which is a nice opportunity to kiss up to more successful bloggers and companies she wants to give her more free stuff:

• A $9 bag of mix you have to add beans and stuff to in order to make 12 brownies, sold by someone called Kylie who blogs at “ImmaEatThat.” Kylie made a version of Kathy’s “overnight oats” once and has said,

Some night I can’t even sleep because all I want to do is get up and eat this breakfast. 

Um. I hope she’s gotten better since then.

• Jewelry from two Etsy stores she’s done sponsored giveaways for: Girls Day Out, an actual local vendor that actually fits the mission of the Charlottesville farmer’s market, and Bama + Ry, where Kathy bought that necklace with her son’s name on it she said was “obviously my favorite piece of jewelry now!” even though we haven’t really seen it since 2012.

• Kathy manages to stuff five Amazon.com affiliate links in her paragraph about the $18 Thomas the Train toy called James she’s getting for her son and the two other pieces (called Toby and Victor) Bath Matt’s mom is getting him.

• Subscription boxes from companies who have all sponsored her: meal-planning service Cook Smarts (which Kathy has been too busy to use most of the time), mailer-of-$25-hairspray-that-just-smells-good Birchbox, Stitch Fix (sweaters made from counter wipes!)

and Naturebox and Kiwi Crate, who sent her child some felt and googly eyes:

I hope Baleful at the Beach back there had a good holiday season and got the badass black motorcycle jacket he’s been wanting all year.

She also mentions the La Crema wine club she joined on her last wine-tasting trip and “Bark Box for dogs,” even though she doesn’t have a dog. Despite La Crema being one of Kathy’s favorite sponsors since the BlogHer days,

From 2010, when Kendall-Jackson gave a bunch of bloggers a limo, a cocktail party at the Hilton Manhattan East, and a dinner at Capital Grill as part of “Wine In the City.”

neither of those merit a link in this latest post of hers, but I hope the latter’s inclusion means a dog is in the family’s future.

And a dog would be a better pal to Carbz than those insufferable bears.

Notably missing are nods to a ton of other places that have sent Kathy free stuff (Scentsy, Lumi juice, those awful-sounding “Ring My Neck” necklaces, the Etsy shop that sent her the #EatRealFood towel, the Brady headband that Kathy said “tears at [her] heart”) and Quarterly, the partnership that shall not be mentioned since Kathy’s failed attempt at sending out her own $50 subscription boxes of granola, napkins, and a poster of what oats would look like in space.

Via MySubscriptionAddiction.

• A “Journal Bracelet” she’s giving away from Chelsea Clark. There are gold-dipped beads, and you can move them

to track health goals like daily glasses of water, fruit and vegetable servings, weekly workouts, [and] interval training sets

It’s the jewelry equivalent of when Kathy puts stuff on spaghetti, and instead of cultivating a taste for the olives or parsley, appreciates only their ability to count for vague, guilt-assuaging, women’s magazine diet concepts like “healthy fats” and “nutrition.” If you receive one of these, know that your loved one thinks you are a shut-in who’s dehydrated and eats too many Cheetos. There’s also an $88 “bride” version, if you’re itching for a fight with a loved one who’s already stressed about the head-count for her rehearsal dinner.

• Shit from that “Quirky” place that sent her the “gorg” turquoise thing she plugs her other things into and the other thing she puts her cords in:

My ideal home would be totally automated and filled with their smart products. Their products make a great gift for that person that has everything!

Nice way to say she thinks she’s one of those people who has everything, but is also lazy as shit.

At least this “Lazy Susan” brings chips closer to me.

• “Art Supplies,” a category that includes

sticker sets, activity books and paints

and half a pound of this weird shit called Kinetic Sand.

Kinetic Sand is made from 98% sand and 2% polydimethylsiloxane, a fascinating, biologically inert polymer that’s used in Silly Putty, shampoo and condom lubricant (the Environmental Working Group’s cosmetics database rates it as “low” in concern), as well as artificial skin, caulk, and fryer oil:

Via Snack Foods Processing, a book I am very interested in.

The sand sells for $13 per half pound, videos of it make me question whether I’m actually on acid, and Kathy recommends it very highly because it’s something you can pass off as a kid’s toy and keep for yourself when you’re feeling all jumpy:

For that two year old you love…this stuff is SO COOL! Very soothing for adults and very neat for kiddos.

She was just saying this in November: “Toddler art class: just as fun for the adult as it is for the child. I loved getting my hands in that play dough – so soothing!” Art would be a great addition to Kathy’s life, but isn’t her entire world pretty calming as it is?

• Some gold trays and a $99 aluminum branch to put jewelry on.

Both are affiliate-linked through sponsors Pottery Barn and its cheap-o cousin West Elm, source of all Kathy’s favorite made-in-China linens, rugs, lights, benches, and fake lanterns.

Perfect for taking your jewelry off before settling in with that Leon Edel volume on Henry James, right?  I AM JUST SO SURE.

• That olive oil she got paid to promote earlier this year by this company, who, it turns out, is a member of this group:

At the end, she finally discloses the existence of affiliate links and weakly whimpers her own tiny Christmas desires:

Kathy’s post on Friday, Dec. 19, is her usual week-ending list of things she’s eaten. There’s also a shot of an indoor clothesline of Christmas cards, and another of her husband holding their 2-year-old in front of his first full-sized tree…. two images that are obscured by a pop-up banner at the bottom advertising ski packages in Banff.

So what’s this all about? Clicking on the “i” button brings up a new pop-up:

Awesome.

For Kathy,

It’s so nice to look up at my beautiful friends during meals

but it’s even nicer for her to look at her website and see her holiday scenes earning some extra money for aluminum branches.

Anyway, Kathy’s trying to be “as healthy as possible” on weekdays so she can “splurge” on the weekends, and usually doesn’t have any respite from even “weekday parties,” she moans. She congratulates herself for succeeding in having one week of “really healthy” meals:

• Oats “stuffed” and “packed” in a nut butter jar with pineapples.

• Oats she made in her rice cooker, which all of a sudden suck:

Steel cut oats in the rice cooker never turn out as good for me as they do for other people as a nice porridge (that’s the setting I use). I wonder if I’m not adding enough liquid? That must be it.

• A mere pear, container of yogurt, and her phony coffee, because she was “rushed” taking her 2-year-old to preschool.

• Eggs, a roll, and grapes when she wasn’t having to attend to her child’s transportation.

• Lunch at the fakery with “a group of our friends.” She magnanimously points out toddlers eating free slices of bread and says she ate “Apple Scrapple” bread with soup because it’s “soup season.” She had different leftovers of different soup another day and decided that leftover soup was now her “favorite” lunch, which I suppose calls for the Congressional Library of KERF to update their encyclopedia now.

• Forcibly horked-down leftover juice-sponsor Brussels sprouts, eggs, and bacon.

• Meal-planning service baked salmon “with lentil, mushroom, spinach ‘cream’ sauce,” whatever that means. Was it cream? Melted flan? Hand lotion?

• Meal-planning service kale, lentil, and “root veggies” in a bowl, which was “on the light side,” but lasted for three days, when it was only palatable “jazzed up” by cheese one day, and added to the leftover salmon the next.

• Meal-planning service macaroni and cheese with broccoli and chicken, which was “so easy and really good!”

• Something from the meal-planning service that she claims is a taco:

No matter what it was, Kathy adored this sparse disc:

I love anything topped with cheese + guac!!

We enter the week of Christmas with the usual Monday post about Kathy’s super weekend:

• She opened some wine-trip wine, turned on Christmas music, and made (or rather, Bath Matt made) pizza with a meal-planning service sauce.

• She spent Saturday morning getting “red-faced and tired” at the gym while Bath Matt’s mom watched her child, and returned to “delicious” pizza leftovers and broccoli.

• She watched “Nashville” on television, and then went to Meg and John’s holiday party in the evening. I don’t remember who they are, but John is apparently a brewer at Starr Hill and Meg is apparently a chick from Kathy’s “mom group” who opened up her family home on the Outer Banks to a bunch of families, and then had to endure a week of Kathy On Boxed Wine.

Kathy brought sherry cheese dip her mom makes, ate “way too much” toffee, drank wine and “spiked egg nog,” but doesn’t appear to have had any of the beer her husband and the host brewed together.

• They went to another party because, Kathy noted:

Gotta pack ‘em in!

• She and Bath Matt had Sunday brunch at MarieBette, a newly opened place that has Kathy “pumped for another brunch + lunch spot in town!” She had cappuccino and a croque-madame (“Loved all that melted cheese.”) and they split a basket of croissants and

a cranberry muffiny thing with a French name that slipped my mind!

While it’s been a long time since I visited France, I can say that if the croissants there are as good as these I need to go back soon : )

When the fuck did Kathy go to France? Does she mean Le Pain Quotidien in Alexandria?

• They then stopped by Karen’s house to help her move things, and Whole Foods, and Kathy revealed that Karen has been staying with them and emptying her house because she’s moving to San Diego.

• After “Sunday chores,” they “all” went on a bus tour of holiday light displays hosted by their gym, which Kathy called “the famous gym + social club hybrid.” They returned to the gym so that Toddler Carbz could see Santa and his parents could see some alcohol in plastic glasses.

• They walked home, bought a pizza with actually melted cheese, drank more wine, and ate “massaged kale salad.”

The news that Karen was headed to her beloved San Diego provoked a lot of heartfelt outpouring of good wishes — at least, from Kathy’s commenters in the Monday post:

Seems like Kathy has a lot less to say about San Diego than she did in August, when Karen went there for a month, and Kathy Instagrammed this:

The backstory behind “banana” is that Kathy and Bath Matt and Karen went to the 2012 fakery conference in San Diego. Karen earned a paralegal certification from the University of San Diego in 2006 and was happy to return, Kathy wrote at the time:

Throughout the weekend, she likes to just stop and remind us how much she loves it here. She ended up coming back to the East Coast because she missed all of her family, but if none of us existed, she would live right here on this island.

Kathy could only take her mother-in-law being “THRILLED” about the location for so long.

We decided instead of her saying over and over “Gosh I just love it here. Can you believe this weather…” and all the other things she loves about San Diego that whenever she is thinking wonderful thoughts about it she will just say the code word banana out loud so we know exactly what she is thinking. It has turned into the joke of the weekend!!

Things were different back then, and Kathy actually addressed a critical comment about “banana” in a follow-up post in which she complimented a sign in a cafe that read “Work Hard and Be Nice,” sulkily noting, “BE NICE. What a simple concept that I feel like so many don’t take to heart these days.” A commenter in that post responded:

Anyway.

In her post on Tuesday, Dec. 23, Kathy uses a sponsorship by Moto X (who? We’ll find out…. eventually. Sort of.) to talk about how she needs even more weight loss motivation than we already thought, what with her “squiggly line” philosophy, her lime green Jawbone fitness shackle she’s logging 26 million steps a day on, her soccer and personal trainer and strength class and athletic conditioning class and running and walking, her massaged kale, her healthy meal-planning subscription service, and her bracelet with the gold-dipped beads you can move around to track how many times a day you punished yourself for thinking about frosting, or something.

I’m going to be completely honest with you –

I am struggling a bit with my weight. Without flashing numbers about, I’ve been yo-yoing the same 5 pounds since Mazen’s birth. Well, technically since about 9 months after his birth : )

Before you start to think I am setting unrealistic goals or coveting a weight that isn’t within reach, let me clarify that I’ve been at that weight many times. And when I’m there I feel my absolute best – comfortable in clothes and bathing suits alike.

Why is she having such a hard time when the meals she makes herself “are healthy and clean”? It’s “parties” and “social life”! Ugh! Her motherfucking friends, those  bastards! These days,

it seems like I have a party to attend every other day and I just can’t say no to the delicious food, wine and desserts. 

She tells herself that,

as a 32-year-old-mom I look pretty good …. [and that] I’m very fit and healthy. Who cares!? And in those moments, amidst the Zinfandel and the buttercream, I gain 5 pounds, little by little.

She regurgitates the standard holiday diet tips she has no problem throwing out the window like a cocktail onion passing as a bourbon ball…. and admits it’s hard to put them into practice when faced with the Keswick Hall dessert buffet and her mom’s sherry cheese. Her answer? Regurgitate even more weight-loss slogans —

think about health as a bunch of choices

[keep] up the momentum of your healthy tipping point.

every choice I make adds up

Uh, so what does this have to do with the phone people who paid her to write this post? Apparently, they have “embraced” the “concept” of “Choose Choice” because you can pick

the back color, the frame style, trim choice, memory and engravings, you can choose everything.

God, I keep waiting for her to go full-surreal performance art and start in with Mark Renton’s “Choose Life” monologue from “Trainspotting,” but I know that’s not going to happen.

In the end, Kathy designed a blue and gold phone she calls “classic” and programmed her wake screen to read something she’ll surely sit and pause and think about rather than swiping it aside to begin checking the weather, reading email, and pinning photos of wedding cake to her all-dessert Pinterest board she’s inexplicably titled “Soul Food.”

She also had them engrave “Eat Real Food” on the back. She chose not to choose cake: She chose a catchy slogan and a free phone. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got product sponsorships.

Kathy ends the post with a few hasty sentences and half-sentences that don’t have to do with getting back to 126 pounds:

The Moto Voice feature that serves as a virtual secretary to the widgets that have me hooked on Android, this phone is really impressive. I love its feel too – the curved back and the screen vibrate upon touch is great.

None of which is earning her many fans in her comments section (although Kathy does meekly try to offer up her own brand of tech punditry to a question: “So far the MotoX voice and ‘feel’ of the MotoX are my favorite parts.”)

This very first season was about the murder of a teenage girl in Baltimore fifteen years ago. During the podcast, the host, Sarah Koenig, interviewed Adnan, who was charged with the teen’s murder and has been in prison for almost half of his life …. It’s all soooooo interesting …. I promise at the very least Serial will make you think.

Somewhere in the middle of an episode, Adnan mentions that he is a cook at the prison and has a breakfast club where he makes delicious apple + cheddar omelets. And thus, swirl of a craving began.

Here’s my take on apple + cheddar omelets. Mine turned out great, but something tells me that Adnan’s are even better

Kathy chops an apple (“I never peel anything!”) and half a cup of cheddar (for its “tangy bite”), puts the apple and some water in a pan until they’re tender, starts on her inane jar-and-water routine of egg-scrambling for an omelet, lets us all know she doesn’t know what she’s doing —

(FYI this recipe serves 2!)

— reminds us again that, really, she doesn’t know what she’s doing —

I have horrible luck cooking eggs in stainless steel pans, so if you only have one of those, use a TON of butter!

gets around to cooking the omelet and adding the apple and cheddar and serving and eating the damn thing.

Enjoy the sweet savory combo!

For some reason, Kathy doesn’t stop here, and decides to weigh in about the murder case as though it’s a fucking season finale of “So You Think You Can Dance?”:

Soooo….those of you who have listened to Serial. Let’s discuss!!

I think Adnan is innocent in about 80% of my brain, but most importantly I think there is reasonable doubt that he didn’t do it, so I think he is wrongly in jail. I do think there is a chance that Adnan killed Hae out of passion, but I think it’s unlikely …. I thought the ending was as satisfying as it could be, and I’m eager to follow the story as it continues to be in the news in real time. I saw that [attorney] Rabia [Choudry] has a blog and will be posting anything new, so that’s one to follow for the latest updates. And THIS timeline [on the blog, "The View from LL2"] – while really long – is really a game changer for me. Why didn’t Serial go into this kind of detail?! I am super curious to know what comes out of the UVA professor’s [presumably Deirdre Enright, head of the Innocence Project at UVA School of Law] research…

What did you think!?

I haven’t listened to the show. I don’t know if Syed, now 32, (“Adnan,” in Kathy’s first-name-basis world of friends) was wrongly convicted, and neither does Kathy. If a wrongfully convicted man sits in prison half his life, it is an injustice, yes. It’s one that can be undone, however. I do know that Hae Min Lee died a horrible, violent death. I do know that nothing can undo that. And I do know that when another young woman disappeared outside your own neighborhood in September, you didn’t give a shit about even logging some community search party steps on your pedometer to help look for her. Too bad Hannah Graham didn’t have a gripping podcast about her, huh?

Sept. 22, 2014, days before any arrest, and weeks before Graham’s body would be found.

Enjoy your fucking omelet, Kathy.

Thursday’s post, on Christmas, is mercifully brief, probably because Bath Matt was sick, Kathy’s parents were in town, and the Gruesome Twosome were trying to jet out of town on a not-so-secret trip to the Dominican Republic.

Where even is this hungover college brunch photo being taken and why is a 2-year-old chaperoning?

Kathy’s Christmas plans were all jacked by the arrival of Influenza, the Shitty Elf, and she had to go to CVS to retrieve Tamiflu for her husband on Christmas Eve. Our Heroine subsequently slept “on an air mattress underneath the Christmas tree, which was kind of fun!” It looks like Kathy only meant she had her feet near it, which is too bad, because I was picturing her head stuck straight in the branches, lights twinkling through her sleep mask as she exhaled grumpily into the tinsel.

There are some cute kid-opening-presents photos and a photo of a rubber bee sitting on a kid DVD, and apparently, Bath Matt’s dad and stepmom sent some “pumpkin lager soap.”

Kathy and Bath Matt bought their son some nice hams for Christmas. Aw.

Kathy’s parents decided to show up at the last minute, and brought Grandma Buzz’s “famous breakfast cinnamon hot milk cake,” which Kathy can’t be arsed to explain. (Buzz shows up in the comments, helpful as always, and points Kathy’s commenters in the right direction.)

There was also

sunshine in addition to presents – happy day!

which Kathy was very pleased about, because she hadn’t gotten back to the Universe about its sponsorship offer for life-sustaining light.

On Friday, Dec. 26, Kathy ends the week of Christmas with her weekly list of tedious food she’s eaten somewhat recently. She starts with one of her favorite prologue themes, Complaints About Her Healthy, Happy Child:

Breakfasts aren’t quite the same big event they once used to be. Back in the days before baby, I used to LOVE my breakfast ritual: brew the coffee, spend time making something special, enjoy it slowly it with an episode of House Hunters or a good magazine. Perhaps some blog reading. Even in the days when I worked and had to be somewhere early, I made breakfast something special.

Sorry, kid. Watching you be 2 years old? Compared to reading HGTV Magazine or watching “House Hunters,” it’s just not “something special.” She goes on:

These days it’s quite chaotic. Preschool days especially. I am up and down constantly, grabbing milk or a towel to wipe hands or picking up spilled oatmeal off the floor. Yes, I still make stove-top oatmeal and French toast and pancakes, but I do long for the days when breakfast could be savored. It’s really a miracle that I have managed to take a photo everyday!

What Kathy dreads even more is her child growing up:

….Fridays (when I don’t have to be at the gym until 10) feel luxurious! I’m not looking forward to the days when school starts before 8am… we will all have to go to bed early again.

So, on that woe-is-her note, here’s what Kathy ate during an awful-hard week when she had to transport her child to the place she begged for so she could have time to read her magazines again, and had a meal-planning service telling her what to cook to save time:

toast for carbs, added some nut butter for fat and had a Siggi’s for protein. Done and done.

pumpkin, yogurt, oats, milk and banana in the last bit of my Good Spread Peanut Butter jar. Man was that stuff good!

Eggs/toast/fruit – this is the easiest breakfast for me to make these days because I can get Mazen started on one component before finishing the others.

pumpkin oats with banana and chia seeds and some chocolate Nutty’s butter!

Pumpkin pancakes …. with clementines dancing around.

Can someone please remind me never to buy a canned soup again? I got a chicken chili from Whole Foods (365 brand) that was just soooo meh.

salad with Bar Harbor sardine on top plus cheese and almonds and an olive oil dressing. Gotta get in those sardines!

[A friend] made turkey chili that was amazing along with salads topped with artichokes [sic] and avocados.

freshly baked S’mores cookies (Averie’s recipe!) I ate mine with a spoon – SO gooey good!

Marinated chicken thighs with Brussels sprouts and brown rice. Pretty tasty!

Green curry with shrimp, mushrooms and udon noodles. I love green curry paste! Rocky Mountain Sriracha on top.

Brazilian fish chowder that was one of my favorite Cook Smarts meals ever. We used cod and red pepper and mixed brown rice in.

Cook Smarts fish chowder! Gobbled up with a grapefruit on the side.

J&P BBQ from the freezer with salads and Popeye bread on the side.

The last week of 2014 started off with Kathy showing her readers how she invented pouring pancake batter in a cookie cutter she brought home, which she calls

a fun little trick for those of you with kids…or those of you with nieces, nephews, young friends…. or who are young at heart : )

Expectations for Kathy’s whimsical pancakes are high from the start:

While these didn’t turn out perfectly, they are nice and bus shaped.

Unfortunately, the cookie cutter she bought is shaped like a bus, presumably so you can decorate your cookies with frosting and stuff to indicate windows, wheels, and the huge bus-long ad for hemorrhoid cream. The shape of the pancake is only one of her problems, though, which also include:

• Spraying cooking oil all over her counter

• Not knowing how to make or write about batter:

Prepare your pancake better [sic]. We obviously love the Great Harvest mix in our house, but use any mix you like. Kodiak cakes, make them from scratch, add pumpkin!

• Unevenly slopping butter everywhere rather than wiping the pan evenly with oil (which leads to burning and undercooking) and using a regular pan even though they have a proper griddle.

There’s a reason your dumb pancakes at least used to look like pancakes, Kathy.

• Not really knowing how much “better” to put in the cookie cutter, because you can see it oozing under the sides in a decidedly not-bus-shaped pattern:

Pour your batter in – keep it on the lower side. …. Actually, use even less than I did in these photos!

• Steaming to make the pancake “cook through faster.”

Is she using the recipe for 4-hour pancakes?

• Saying that this is the proper level of cooking a pancake needs to be flipped:

Hey, wasn’t there a pancake shaped like a tea kettle in there originally? Well, there was, but Kathy says it was Judy Winslow-ed because it had too many curves, which is why “A star probably wouldn’t work.” Uh huh.

YouTube user loveequalsjesus proves Kathy wrong.

Kathy declines to respond to someone who links to this adorableness, but she’s more than happy to take criticism in the comments if it makes her look like the world’s sufferingest mom:

That’s pretty rich, coming from a woman who lacks even the filling quality of wasted edges.

Tuesday’s post is a guest post from two enthusiastic “blog partner/fellow RD/ best gal pal” bloggers providing a 2-day meal plan showing how “protein needs are easily met with plants” while pregnant. Kathy says she wants to make the “Apple Pie Smoothie” they detail “stat!!”

All of which makes me think Kathy is scraping the bottom of the guest RD barrel harder than her last smeary jar of desiccated almond butter.

Yes. Really. She really wrote that.

Why? Because the last Guest RD post she had on followed the exact same format: guest blogger telling us all how you can get all your protein needs from vegetables, and Kathy saying she was “drooling” over the freebie recipe from the guest blogger, a compliment every guest blogger with a recipe receives from Our Heroine, unless it’s that rice pilaf with the spices and the onion. If any other guest blogger had a post waiting in the wings, she’d post that rather than going with almost the exact same topic (vegetarian protein) she’d done in the same month, especially when even the prenatal nutrition topic was covered seven months earlier.

Anyway, Michelle is an RD who works in a women’s health clinic, where she has been surprised about so many crazy things, like that “not every woman craves pickles with ice cream.” Once, she had a 6-week-old baby fart in her hands:

And seriously, who knew noises like that can come out of something so tiny?!

But enough cute stuff! Michelle says vegetarian moms totes get bullied into giving up vegetarianism even though they “desire” it:

I have seen some crack,

Uh, sorry. I read that comma wrong. Let’s start over.

I have seen some crack, give in, and start eating meat despite their genuine desire to continue to eat a vegetarian diet. A lot of this fear can also be attributed to societal pressure and from your own personal support group. I know everyone has that one family member or friend who always exclaims, “You don’t eat meat? Are you like, on a diet or something?”…they just don’t get it and they certainly will not get it now that you are supporting yourself and your growing fetus.

There are then recipes that provide for two days worth of meals for this mythical pregnant vegetarian lady who can’t resist the peer pressure of one random idiot making diet comments.

Also part of the myth? Said pregnant vegetarian lady probably doesn’t have a job (aside from being fertile and making sure enough of her meals sound like indulgent dessert items, which is, I guess, how we define femininity in 2015 in America) because in between the fruit-slicing, the tofu-dicing, the lunch at home, the snacks, and the Lord of the Quinoa trilogy for dinner, cooking these meals is her job.

Breakfast on the first day is “Chocolate Peanut Butter Oatmeal.” Instructions include “mix it around to combine.” You top your oats with a fourth of a sliced banana. There are four snack ideas, and in three of them, I guess you can use the banana that’s been browning since breakfast. There’s “Greek Yogurt Parfait” you top with fruit; half a banana and 2 tablespoons of peanut butter; cottage cheese, fruit, and honey; and two hard-boiled eggs. I can only imagine that there are no photos of the first-day meals because all the piles of unused, halved and quartered bananas in the background rendered them stomach-turning.

Lunch is a black bean and “Tofu Scramble” burrito with “a yummy Mexican-type flavor.” There’s a whole grain tortilla and black beans that come out of nowhere at the end, either from a can or a bag of dried black beans for crunch — it’s not specified. There’s no onion, cheese or sour cream or even Greek yogurt pretending to be sour cream in this one, and our blog gals really don’t want you to forget to slice the shit out of the tofu in this one:

Measure ½ cup of diced firm tofu, then finely dice. Sautee [sic] in pan: finely diced tofu….

For dinner, you get a quinoa salad. The quinoa comes out of a “package” — always a favorite of bloggers who can then pawn off cooking questions to “package directions” — and you have to deal with cooking it before you can even get around to massaging the kale and cooking some vegetables and going back in time to cook some more stuff:

Toss Brussels sprouts in olive oil, salt and pepper, roast in a preheated oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for ~20 minutes. Ten minutes before, add the mushrooms, toss, and finish cooking.

You’re also supposed to top with dressing. They suggest a “balsamic glaze drizzle.”

Breakfast on the next day is an “Apple Pie Smoothie” that requires an apple, a cup of tofu, some spices, 2 tablespoons of maple syrup, and a heaping serving of blender shame:

If you have a good blender like a Vitamix, process the apple until it resembles applesauce. If not, just use applesauce :-).

Serve on the most sun-damaged wood deck you can find.

Bob Vila wept.

While you’re wondering what kind of monster brings an infant into a world where its mother can’t get her shit together enough to acquire a “good blender,” hey! Lunch time is here! You will have already obtained a salad — where? No one knows! — and all you have to do is add some almonds and boil some frozen edamame. After you dump it into cold water, the rest of the lunch assembly is up to you.

By dinner time, hopefully you’ve sorted out that cold pot of edamame in water and eaten your hard-boiled eggs, because it’s time for lentil tacos. You’ll cook some lentils, an onion, garlic, and spices in a Dutch oven and grab your trusty whole wheat tortillas:

Next step is to assemble your tacos and enjoy!

Incidentally, these tacos will just serve yourself and be for you to “enjoy!” so let’s hope you’re alone (and paying for the roof over your head and your health insurance with, perhaps, some sort of penny-shaving scheme) or that any second party with an interest in you and your tofu-enriched womb takes care of his or her own meals during the commute.

For dessert, you and only you will be enjoying three “Chocolate Protein Bliss Balls,” made by blissfully blending almonds, cashews, dates, coconut oil, cacao powder, and hemp in a food processor, then blissfully rolling your balls and blissfully making sure you moisten your fingers from a bowl of water, blissfully coating the balls in a mixture of chia seeds, sesame seeds, and cacao nibs, blissfully eating a fifth of the recipe off a fine china plate in a flower garden —

— and blissfully storing the rest in the fridge in a blissfully air-tight container. Some people may find their skull works well for this purpose.

For being a folksy, friendly post about desserty breakfasts and farting babies, there are a shit-ton of warnings in this post.

Has Kathy even been to yoga since buying that 20-class pass to the place where she discovered “downward dog feels juicier than ever” in March, 2013?

Since having a baby, I am really lacking the energy for high intensity exercise. I can walk till my legs ache, and I enjoy short runs, yoga and weight lifting. I have no trouble motivating myself to work out. But I can’t stand the thought of getting really out of breath in an athletic conditioning class or running a 10K race as fast as I can.

I don’t have any metrics to share, but I’m waaaay stronger than I was a year ago. My arms are so much more defined. (My legs are stronger, but also a little bigger!)

Kathy being punished with free personal training last year.

I recently did some one-armed tricep pushups (but for some reason I still totally suck at side planks!)

Do you even lift, Kathy?

Kathy selling out her mother-in-law in a post from 2011.

Has to be a good instructor and a day when Matt isn’t at the bakery. I also walk 2 miles to and from the gym most days, so that counts for something, and I do the stairmaster for 10-20 minutes before class half of the time.

Running is…meh. I still haven’t gotten my love for running back. I think that’s mostly because I don’t run that much!

Walking is where it’s at! The older I get the more I love to walk. Not because my joints are tired or anything, but I can just feel how much walking a mile here or there affects my life.

I’m playing indoor this winter and am really excited for the season to start! I’ll have played a whole year in a row when I get to the spring season! (PS. Soccer is the #1 reason I’m still not ready for baby #2 : ) )

There are no photos of her actually doing any of her current exercises, and, instead, we’re treated to a handful of blurry photos where Kathy is wearing Toms, a drapey plaid sleep shirt with a lace panel on the back, and black pants that suck all the light out of the room, and rolling around on her wood floors and, I think, trying to teach Toddler Carbz made-up yoga poses inspired by oats in jars and smoothies in bowls.

This is either Upward-Facing Smug, Inverted Scuffin, or Awkward Pose.

Kathy ends the post by wishing her readers a happy new year and posting some photos where she has Toddler Carbz on her back and does mommy martyr pushups:

35+ pounds of weight – quite challenging! But he loves it!

From 2013. The answer is “I’m pretty sure never,” Kathy.

• Kids jingle-belling: none that we know of, unless Toddler Carbz bravely enduring paparazzi and the indignity of gym-Santa counts.

• Gay happy meetings when friends come to call: family came to call for Pottery Barn Presents Thanksgiving, but Kathy was mostly happy about getting some portrait-time alone with her chintzy napkin-rings.

• Everyone telling you “Be of good cheer”: I’m sure plenty of people wished holiday cheer upon Kathy and all the Younger-Smugsons. She mostly reciprocated by telling people to eat their “veggies.”

• Holiday greetings: Aside from an unknown number from obligated store clerks, Kathy doubtlessly got a lot of these. She returned the favor by sending out sponsored Christmas cards with a picture of her child crying on them.

• Parties for hosting: No no no, you don’t understand. The parties are for hosting by other, fancier people, who Kathy will then become friends with and succeed on the social ladder one day with a sponsorship for free personal training without obligation to write about it, Junior League seat (one she doesn’t have to bleach-pen), designation as Keswick Hall’s official cake-taster.

• Marshmallows for toasting: Hershey paid her to make s’mores once, and Kathy also put in a “special order” for Toasted Marshmallow ice cream from the lady who runs Sweet Sandies, and she did declare that it “wins for BEST ICE CREAM EVER!” But the lady who runs the store is the one who has to fuck around with the marshmallows, not Kathy.

RIP Kathy’s pillow stuffed with $5.49 Method Marshmallow Rice milk dryer sheets

• Caroling out in the snow: Thankfully for Kathy’s neighbors, this has never happened.

• Scary ghost stories: That tale about her wearing $10 used boys’ cleats and trying to sell her blister-inducing socks on eBay was pretty fucking terrifying.

• Tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago: She linked to the other times her mother-in-law had treated her to fancypants lunch at Keswick Hall. Does that count?

• Much mistletoe-ing: Kathy has never mentioned mistletoe on her blog, probably out of some misplaced fear that it is part of the Allium genus.

• Hearts glowing when loved ones are near: If sponsors count as loved ones, okay. Oh, also that Chris guy at the gym.

Most of her adult life has been lived in public, so Kathy usually has a yearly resolutions post.

Let’s take a look back at them, shall we?

In 2008, Kathy was all about trying to create less waste, support local and environmentally friendly business, and use less electricity:

Here are some things the husband and I are working on:

1. We have started to use our nice cloth napkins (for a few days – unless they get really gross!) instead of paper ones at meals.
2. We’re committed to taking our re-usable bags to the grocery store every week.
3. We switched our banking bills to e-bills to save paper.
4. We always keep our heat off when we’re gone and turned waaaaay down at night. We bought a programmable thermostat.
5. We only drink bottled water in emergencies.
6. We walk whenever we can, seriously.
7. We use washable tupperware when we can instead of plastic bags.
8. We recycle more than we throw away each week.

Some things we need to keep working on:

1. Use less electricity.
2. Keep up our compost. We really only compost big things like huge squash skins and watermelon rinds.
3. Be smarter about buying organic food (when appropriate) and shopping at the Farmer’s Market when it opens in the spring to support local farmers. (My favorite grocery store, EarthFare, actually sells a lot of local produce, so that helps when we can’t get to the farmer’s market).
4. Make an effort to support companies and buy products that are environmentally friendly, etc.
5. BORROW, don’t BUY books! Use the library! (We both prefer to read books we own, which I know is totally stupid and a waste of money and trees!)

In December, 2008*, she wrote,

I love the arts and don’t get to as many performances as I wish I could because of the cost, but going to see more community theater is a New Year’s resolution of mine. And I am thinking about auditioning for a summer musical if my schedule allows!

Looks like that didn’t happen, thank goodness.**

And after her birthday in 2009, she went to yoga and resolved to lose a few pounds:

I just started a new year of life and made a few new year’s resolutions as I flowed. I reflected on year 26 and how I approached my healthy habits. During the past year I’ve really embraced intuitive eating. I eat whatever I want. That includes both sides of the spectrum – salads and oatmeal and beer and chocolate. I love exercise as much as I love frosting. I make choices based on how things will make me feel. I try to live with no regrets.

However, I feel like there is still a piece missing to the puzzle. As evident from both my clothing and my reflection in the mirror, I’ve put somewhere between 3 and 10 pounds. I’ve asked myself is it worth it to be able to eat whatever I want and be a little heavier. The answer> is yes, it is. But on the other hand, it would be so easy to just tone down the partying a little and molt out of those party pounds. I’m not unhappy with my body, but I’m not as happy as I used to be.

I have no plan for changing anything moving forward to year 27. I’m just going to go with the flow with the mindset of living lighter. If anything I just need to drink less alcohol and keep my hand out of my dark chocolate drawer. And not have a birthday for another year 

In 2011, she decided to stop fucking around on the computer:

2011

Kathy decided she was perfect in 2012. She’d just discovered she was pregnant, and was celebrating with bikini photos and mocktails in Jamaica:

I have no resolutions for 2012. I make resolutions when I wake up every morning!

2011 was one rockin’ year and I hope 2012 will be too.

In 2013, Kathy made sushi and curled her hair for New Year’s Eve. Okay, the sushi was falling apart and so were her curls, but she was clearly a superwoman who was on top of everything.

In 2014, Kathy’s list was full of things she looked forward to doing for her family’s home, with and for her husband and her son, along with a trip with her friends, all decorated with pretty wretched emojis (why does “preschool” warrant one that looks like a Windows OS box?):

On Friday, Kathy begins 2015 with a post of reminders for each of the months ahead…. none of which include any photograph of anyone aside from herself and her toddler. She talks about a possible second baby — but mentions not a word about Bath Matt’s birthday this month, their 8th anniversary in June, or any kind of “getaway” shared with anyone.

• January and February: Kathy needs to “get rid of the winter blues that come this time of year.” She slowly gets less and less relatable with the rest of her suggestions. She recommends listening to “summery music,” going on “a brisk walk,” eating kale and drinking “fresh green juice” instead of numbing herself to the tedium of her life with “cocktail hour.”

Okay. What else? She also orders herself to buy a sled, because —

If you’re knee deep in snow, make sure it involves some sledding.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a woman in her 30s prodding herself to get out and relive the joys of sledding, especially a woman with a child with a man she fell in love with while sledding during winter break in their freshman year of college. From Kathy’s engagement story on The Knot:

They spent the whole night sledding down the hills of what would be their rehearsal dinner location. The night ended with a kiss, and a romance unveiled. Matt taught Katherine to play the guitar, they finished reading Lord of the Rings, and spent hours talking about every subject imaginable to find that they wanted similar things out of life. 

But in Kathy’s world, re-introducing herself, and no one else, to the fun of winter, is something she’s been whining about for years, with no mention of her old sledding partner….aside from when she roped him into having “The Bears” go sledding in their driveway:

She also commands herself to indulge by using her gym’s heated pool and hot tub and going to the hot vinyasa class she’s been “dying to try” (read: waiting to be offered to attend, free-of-charge, on a day that aligns with her child’s preschool schedule, no doubt).

These are all lame substitutions for what Kathy really needs, by the way:

the best thing for the winter blah’s [sic] is …. a vacation to to the tropics.

Because she hasn’t had one of those since…. 96 hours ago.

• March: Kathy is maybe gonna run the Charlottesville 10-Miler, which is scheduled for March 21, and includes a photo of Kathy’s Garmin Forerunner 305, which she once wrote “changed the way [she] ran” and “live[d] on [her] stroller handlebars” before it disappeared. Kathy tells herself:

Take the pressure off. You are not going to run as fast as you did in 2010. Too much in your life has changed. Instead focus on the friends you have trained with and the high you’ll get at the end of the race (even if it takes you 2 hours+!)

She might want to focus on a bit more than that, as taking more than 2.5 hours to run the course isn’t allowed:

• April: With a photo of her pushing Toddler Carbz to go down a step at a playground, Kathy uses this note to herself to remind herself to ride her bike, play outside with her child, and to re-strap herself into her lime green fitness shackle:

If you’re not still wearing your Jawbone, get it back out and start up your warm-weather walking.

• May, June, & July: Kathy knows she’ll be spending most of the summer faffing about on the beaches of North Carolina and Virginia, as she did in the previous year — all year, really — so she reminds herself to “feel awesome” for “bathing suit season,” to eat all the fruit salad, smoothies, and berries she can, and to “REALLY unplug” at Bald Head Island — with a photo of some produce on a lawn, another of a paperback book, and a third of her and her child on the beach. She writes:

This is your favorite vacation of the year and you don’t need your phone on the beach! Blog comments can wait. Emails are not that urgent. Take a paper book instead and get in a good novel.

• August: This month brings with it a photo of Kathy with Newborn Carbz, as well as the possibility that Kathy “could be pregnant,” which means — joy? Excitement? More like an extra dose of martyrdom:

If you are [pregnant], do your best to put your feet up a bit. You might never get the chance again. Your blog friends will understand if you can’t get a post up everyday.  If you’re incredibly nauseous [sic] this time, I am so sorry. Remember juice puts you back to sleep at night, and those stretches Jen taught you work wonders. And if you’re not ready to have another baby (or making one has proved a challenge the second time through) try to relax. There is no ideal timeline for spacing kids, and it will happen when the time is right.

Her commenters are pleased about the news:

• September: With a photo of her child alone on a walkway at the beach. Kathy reminds herself that he’ll be turning 3 and, while it’ll be hard to top his chilly Mason Jar-themed first birthday and second birthday party sponsored by cheap inflatable dinosaurs and plastic cups from China, that she should spend at least a few minutes thinking about what he likes:

Are you doing everything you can to nurture him? Take some time to reflect on the past 3 years and plan some activities for his birthday month to make it extra special.

Or maybe a “birthday month” just means she can treat herself to more cake.

• October: To go along with the cheerful picture of her and Toddler Carbz in costumes for Halloween, Kathy…. literally has to give herself a pep talk for enduring what’s usually her favorite birthday-cake-and-pumpkin-beer-filled month. What’s wrong, Kathypants?

I know you don’t love odd numbers, but turning 33 is kind of fun because of the double digits!

She also tells herself to lay off the pumpkin beer this year, making it sound like her 32nd birthday party with 17 kinds of pumpkin beer might have been a bit much. Also, that she might “have to abstain anyways” if she’s knocked up. Thanks, Not-Yet-Inconvenient Second Baby — maybe your nickname can be “Antabuse.”

• November: This month’s to-do item is to donate clothing she hasn’t worn “all summer or fall,” and I’m sure it has nothing to do with the endless stream of subscription-plan clothing, accessories, and jewelry coming into Kathy’s house. There’s a photo of her shirts pushed over to the side of her closet to accompany it.

Long gone are the days of Kathy’s third bedroom, a.k.a. the “Queen Room,” which she used entirely as a closet for herself. (Not joking.)

She also plans to “declutter” so that she can “surround [herself] with the items [she] truly love[s].” Aluminum branches and gold chevron dishes from Pottery Barn for days!

• December: As in October, Kathy will be trying to stay away from the spiked egg nog. She posts a photo of two glasses of wine and a plate of crackers, and writes:

….remember how amazing you felt after Meg + John’s party last year? That’s called being mindful and it was a good example of how focusing on how you FEEL is what’s most important.

That’s one explanation, anyway. The other is that Kathy heard “butterscotch” when one of her hosts said “partyflocks.”

Not exactly dinner mints.

Also in December, Kathy will be trying to do her holiday shopping, “party gift buying,” Christmas card “writing,” and “meal planning” as early as possible. Part of this involves pawning off some of her gift duties on her then-3-year-old:

Next year: have Mazen make homemade crafty gifts for his grandparents!

Hopefully, all her early holiday preparations will mean she can court Williams Sonoma for a new table runner, sweet talk Campbell’s into sending her something to put in her empty silver gravy boat, and find a second disgusting swiss chard recipe she can pretend is stuffing all before Thanksgiving, so that she “can sit back and relax and enjoy the season.”

I guess there’s just one problem with having a great year sledding and exercising and eating berries all by herself — her Scooba mop robot and her Moto X better be ready to take all the photos.

* Also in that post? This weirdness:

I can totally tell that chemicals are making me feel so cranky – some kind of anger chemicals in my blood related to anxiety/stress over [a stove delivery problem], or perhaps PMS? Either way, I can tell something’s not right up there in an out-of-body observation kind of way. I’m just not myself. So sorry to be so melodramatic about this – blame the chemicals!

** Although, man, it would be a hoot to imagine Kathy tagging along with the theater kids to a midnight “Rocky Horror” showing. She’d totally offer to bring the toast, but it wouldn’t be toasted, and she would spend the whole night with her eyebrows raised so high the lipstick V on her forehead would paint her roots red.

Monday and Tuesday’s posts are a special Kathy Takes Real Vacations Edition of our regularly scheduled show, Kathy Puts Nut Butter on Everything (also known as 6 Workouts for 5 Vanity Pounds, also also known as The Sound of Zac Brown Band Because Mama Needs Summery Music).

And so, Kathy heads to a week of “living it up” and having “such a great escape” at an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic!

Well, not just Kathy. Her mother-in-law, Bath Matt’s mother Karen,

organized the trip, and we met Matt’s brother Andrew there.

Andrew, a.k.a the dude who appears because his brother apparently isn’t interested in being a part of his wife’s food blog anymore.

“Organized,” huh? About a year ago, after that dumb fuck cancer flared up again, Karen looked at her priorities and decided to spend her own money to see her whole family together for a week in Key West.

It’s not a huge leap to imagine that, at the end of 2014, she shelled out for this trip as well. When Kathy cooks something or pays for something, she makes damned certain you know it — and when someone else foots the bill, suddenly the “we prepared” and “Karen organized” is the only way she can describe stuff.

Bath Matt made sure to pack his Anatomy of Homebrew shirt just in case anyone felt like hearing him talk about gose (look it up!) for half an hour in broken Spanish.

First, lest anyone think this was just an all-family trip to an island, the likes of which few people in the world or the history of humanity, really, get to experience, let’s remember that the hotel is on fucking notice:

….I will lightly review [the resort] at the end of tomorrow’s post for those of you planning trips in the future. Overall the resort was very nice!

But her recounting of her time at the Iberostar Dominicana doesn’t seem “very nice.”

Instead, it seems like a mix of space-filling things she managed to remember before slipping back into the pumpkin soufflé candle-scented oblivion of the normal life she apparently spends 51 weeks out of the year thinking she needs to “escape” from, easy complaints, and things that were okay through gritted teeth and rolled eyes:

• The inconvenient travel. Kathy, Bath Matt, and Toddler Carbz had to leave “very early,” arrived “starving for a very late lunch” and went looking for pizza, fruit, and booze:

Cocktail hour starts early in the tropics : )

• The not-heated pool. Even if it didn’t bother her toddler, the following bugged the shit out of Kathy “by the end of the week.” They wanted to go swimming, but the pool was

FREEZING 

• Her child’s demands. He wanted toys, ugh! And to go see things that appealed to him — and that didn’t include “pina [sic] coladas.”

We spent our days sprinting between the baby pool and the beach.

We ended up buying a sand truck and shovel set at the resort that was a priceless purchase.

….Every morning we had to first visit the flamingo pond, which was a bit hit!

• The non-restrictive eating. Kathy “tried to focus on seafood and veggies” but succumbed to a buffet, even though it was “not amazing”:

Gah the desserts! It’s no secret that dessert buffets are a huge temptation for me. I had to try everything!

…. I went a little wild the first day with an omelet with jalapeno and cheese, pastries and fruit.

….And I couldn’t resist the donuts a few times! And the mango – I ate so many mangoes!! The decaf coffee, which was instant, was quite miserable.

• The eating that was restrictive, but not what she wanted. It was “difficult” to get a reservation at a non-buffet resort restaurant, but she and Bath Matt finally got one

at the “Gourmet” restaurant (which I believe was supposed to be French themed?)

Karen and Andrew had planned to go out another night but they ended up canceling due to disappointment in our experience.

Kathy elaborates on the “disappointment” by saying it was hard to get a reservation, but the restaurant was empty, and that she ordered “veggies and Provolone” and fish:

Sad to say that everything was really bad. Mealy and flavorless.

Even the desserts were disappointing and we both left bites on our plates. An apple tart and tiramisu.

• The not-satisfying other buffet they went to:

….I made a big salad full of bits and pieces of everything. One thing they always had plenty of: cheese!

I also found fresh coconut, which I ate pretending I was a Survivor contestant : )

The alleged “salad.”

• The tedium:

….our resort (Dominicana) was allowed to visit the neighboring Punta Cana resort. There really wasn’t much difference….

There were shows every night and we went to several of them. 

• The merely “decent” beer:

I had a cup with lunch a few times : )

• The grill at the beach buffet, which is what Kathy ends Part 1 by describing. Well, describing is a generous way to put it. She says there was “always something good cooking” and that the food there was their “favorite,” and one day included “steak and vegetables, which tasted great!”

I’ve seen better descriptions on middle school lunch menus.

• OH GOD JUST LET HER GET THROUGH THIS TRIP. Kathy can’t even look back to what she posted the previous day when continuing her list of Things of Note:

We left off with some swimming in the ocean, I believe!

Not really, but go ahead.

• She remembers that her child enjoyed the waves, and some of the food,

like mangoes when he was in the mood.

• The sickening food was sickening, and not in the eye-flaringly awesome way. Kathy just did NOT like it. Mostly, because it was there, and so she wasn’t able to avoid it:

A few days in of heavy eating, I was ready for some healthy, refreshing food and was excited to find spinach juice in the juice bar! Mixed with a little banana juice it was just like a green smoothie ; )

With yogurt, fruit and peanut butter!

• The vaguely pleasant memories of being somewhere with her child:

We did lots more playing in the sand and the pool. It was fun to go for a walk on the beach with Mazen hand-in-hand!

These two German boys were digging a big fort and Mazen wanted to play. The older boy took one look at him and said “NO!” (Universal language!) It was sort of cute.

….There was also a playground that was fun to visit a few times.

• The vaguely pleasant memories of opening a book:

I read the book Spring Fever and enjoyed the light-hearted read.

• The vaguely pleasant memories of getting to be on the beach all fucking day:

I love the feeling of being gritty with sand all day and then taking a hot shower and dressing up! It made the evenings so much fun.

• The passable experience at another resort non-buffet restaurant:

The house wine wasn’t terrible, but this was still very refreshing!

We started the night at the salad bar

….this grouper….was pretty tasty

Followed by a hazelnut cake that tasted nothing like hazelnut! Oh well.

• The need to get out of the fucking sun on New Year’s Eve. The sun, ugh! AMIRITE?!

The thatched hut umbrellas were LIFESAVERS for shade! I wish all beaches had them!

• How the vacation thwarted Kathy’s desire to exercise, because she really did want to. Promise:

I did fit in 4 workouts during the trip (I would have loved more but just didn’t get around to them.)

• The “great job” the resort did in putting on something for New Year’s Eve, including champagne, appetizer, and “extra special” food. Kathy and Andrew — everyone else went to sleep early — didn’t get any photos at all, but her “favorite part” was an ice sculpture:

It was fun to count down the New Year in Spanish! Balloons feel [sic], noisemakers were passed out and it was a full-on jumping party. Such fun!

• The way she was able to chill out enough to make voice-to-text good enough for her purposes of documenting her diet:

We had a great time overall, and he’s [sic] a short review of the trip:

• The way the resort was okay, mostly:

….it could get competitive to get a chair if you waited until 11 to get out there). The ocean in front of the resort was nice enough, although rough at times. Lots of people swam in it.

• The foreigners smoked a shit ton!

There was a good bit of public smoking, which I wasn’t a fan of, but it wasn’t excessive.

• The rooms weren’t perfect:

We requested adjoining rooms and because they were all taken they upgraded us to small suites that were big rooms with a couch. We tried to get Mazen to sleep on a trundle bed and had some trouble. He slept with us most of the time.

• Neither were the “amenities,” with the hot tubs being “secluded” from them — “that wasn’t great,” and the gym warranting a “not huge,” and the pool getting a “freezing.”

• The entertainment didn’t cater to Kathy enough:

We didn’t do any excursions, but there was a lot to choose from (for extra $) The restaurants were all very nice …. The shows were good, although they were a little late for our group. I never went to the casino or disco, but Andrew and Matt did and enjoyed both. The pool area always had a workout class or dance lesson going on. There was a beach party one night that was very impressive with a live band and big stage. I only wish I had stayed out later to enjoy it longer!

• The booze wasn’t boozy enough:

Some of the wine was pretty good and other times they had different bottles that were quiet bad [sic]….

….The Manhattan I had at the lobby bar was great, but some of the fruity drinks were just meh. Not much alcohol to taste.

• The FOOD WAS TERRIBLE ARG!

Here’s the downfall. The food was just not that good.

If I had to put my finger on what was off I’d say it all tasted like it had been cooked and reheated. The selection and presentation was great – no complaints there – but the taste was just a bit off. We felt the food at other resorts we’ve been to was better. I also thought the desserts were lacking a bit. The a la carte restaurants just weren’t up to par, but the buffet was decent. They served fancy food like sushi, lobster, carved meats, and lots of seafood and the variety of other foods from salads to pate to fruit and cheeses was great. We just felt overall the food was a little bit of a let down.

At the end of Kathy’s “review,” she asks,

Did I cover it all?

This is your job, Kathy. How about you read over your writing and stop asking the world to hold your hand while you play at urban professional?

Overall, we all decided we probably wouldn’t recommend Iberostar Dominicana to friends, but if you’re already planning a trip there you will have a good time! There wasn’t anything too negative, but it didn’t impress us enough to return either.

Thanks, Kathy. How about this review: You make it seem like all you hoped for was a visit to a foreign country whose natives would be foolish enough to charge you pennies for some kind of vibrant, juicy fruit bar from the Whole Foods of your dreams. You got drunk, but not drunk enough to turn off the voice in your head that complained about the perceived cheapness of the wine. You didn’t go anywhere and you didn’t do shit.

Most shittily, you didn’t give a fuck about the fact that this might be the last time a woman born during the Truman administration  the last time Karen could look at a grandson and see him grinning and splashing in the sun in winter and know that, even if his memories of her ended up coming from a beach, that at least, for that one week before she left him, she could imagine the glimmers of a future she might not ever get to witness, could disregard the shadow of uncaring, random death.

As far as the world can tell, Karen is a woman who wants to be well enough to take her sons, her family, on vacation, for as long as that’s possible. And Kathy? She just wants to avoid spending money and gaining weight. Maybe someday she’ll learn that they don’t typically put She Got Back To Her Pre-Wedding Weight of 126 Pounds So She Could Finally Be Happy Again on someone’s headstone. For now, though, she’s just going to act like a dick.

Before we get started talking about a book Kathy got for free from a fitness blogger (Wednesday’s post), some stuff that’s not nachos but she calls it nachos (Thursday’s post), and a list of other shit she’s acquired (Friday’s post), make sure you head over to the Official 2015 GOMI Awards at the main page, if you haven’t already been voting once an hour since Friday.

While Our Heroine failed to earn a nomination in “Lifetime Failchievement” or “Most Irrelevant,” La Belle Lame Sans Onions snagged a nod in the Biggest Decline category and inspired what’s far-and-away the favorite in the Best GOMI Username category, Sarah Ate Two Tacos But I Only Ate One.

Vote here until Thursday.

Indeed, Kathy’s been nearly breaking a sweat on Instagram angling for a win in the former category with her child-shaming selfies of late.

The perfect flow of nutrients and cluelessness.

Wednesday’s post covers Kathy

….celebrating the release of my good friend Gina’s book: HIIT IT! (Fitnessista’s Get More From Less Workout and Diet Plan to Lose Weight and Feel Great Fast).

HIIT apparently means “high intensity interval training,” whatever that means.

Kathy says Gina Harvey is “an inspiration,” and “super cool!” and mentions, as proof, Harvey feeding her dinner and “Cookie Dough Cereal” during Kathy’s stupid trip to the fakery convention in 2013, in Tucson:

her ‘clean eats’ were more than delicious

Already out of words, Kathy deems Harvey’s book

no less inspiring …. packed with both fitness and clean eating information

Why’s that? Because Kathy can interpret it as meaning she exercises really, really hard:

The good news is that I’m pretty sure some of the classes I go to during the week classify as HIIT.

Kathy says Harvey’s book details how one can get

….a really efficient workout for less time in the gym. I am all about that! …. I probably could put a bit more oomph into my non-class gym workouts. *Raising hand for lazily reading magazines on the stairmaster – guilty as charged!* Reading her book has inspired me to make sure every workout I do is worth my time.

Yes, I’m so sure.

Anyway, Kathy recommends the book by saying there are lots of workouts and photos in it, one of which she managed to attempt during her Christmas bitchfest to the Caribbean:

When I was on my Dominican Republic trip I gave this one a try (using a pretend jump rope) and loved the bang-for-my-buck it gave me when I would rather have been at the beach! Gina gave me permission to share it with you.

Kathy also approves of Harvey’s KERF-reinforcing “food part of the book”:

I found all of the information in line with what I believe …. I’m eager to try her Nana’s Frijoles in my slow cooker!

She then calls a recipe for a “breakfast cookie” (oats, nut butter, protein powder — Kathy used whole wheat pancake mix instead, milk, a mashed banana and “mix-ins” that are all sort of mashed around onto a small plate) “famous.” Twice:

I am totally embarrassed to say that I have never tried Gina’s famous breakfast cookie!! While the book is packed with new recipes, this is one that is famous from her blog. Since I love oats and breakfast, it seemed like a great dish to enjoy for today’s book tour.

“Book tour?” You’re typing some thoughts about a book you got for free that required you to break a sweat on vacation once and make a cookie when you came back and describe it in five excruciating brain-bending words:

Delicious!! So fun to eat. 

It also serves as a useful medical test for color blindness:

Hey, wake up, princess pancake. Your readers have questions!

Moving on, there’s Thursday’s post, about “Mediterranean Nachos.”

First of all, they’re not nachos. Second of all, the grossest thing about whatever these are might be that she tries to blame them on Bath Matt’s mom Karen:

We were brainstorming a meal plan one morning and stumbled upon this gorgeous recipe for Mediterranean Nachos. Kristy’s version is vegan and uses tofu as feta cheese and pita as the base. Karen and I adapted the recipe into our own by using both feta and tofu (two is better than one!) and layered a bunch of Mediterranean flavors onto crunchy sea salt pita chips.

Kathy claims these would be “perfect” for the Super Bowl, because what goes better with copious American beer and cheese dip and chips than tofu tossed in “Italian seasoning,” red bell peppers, hummus, artichokes, “cucs,” vinegar, “more Italian seasoning,” and “sea salt pita chips” from Whole Foods, and spread out on a gigantic baking pan when it doesn’t even need to be baked?

After chopping some of the ingredients and cooking the tofu in a pan, Kathy writes:

Then the fun happens – spread your pita chips out on a baking sheet (or other big platter!) and spread out your hummus in dollops all around. 

Get your own gravity-defying capers at Whole Foods.

Kathy says “the best part!” is putting feta on top of this uselessly panned, crunchy, Dead Sea assemblage:

And then, my friends, dig in!! …. Eat with fingers, but a fork is also recommended for all the bits that are bound to fall off ; )

Yeah, that sounds impossible.

Finally, Kathy’s poor husband and mom are even enlisted to show up and support her terrible recipe within two hours of its posting:

Friday’s post is Kathy’s first list of things she’s acquired (a.k.a. “New Finds”) for 2015.

In 2014, when she started typing regular lists of “New Finds,” she’s mentioned the following:

• Things she got for free for review: MilkMade ice cream, Talenti “ice cream,” Sun Cups candy, TastyMakes granola, Lumi juice, Bobalu nuts, Ernie’s salsa, Salt Revolution salt, the Oh She Glows cookbook (which she hasn’t made a damn recipe from since reviewing it), Wünderbars moisturizer, a Lilypad scented candle, a Scentsy light and three kinds of scented wax, Bama + Ry jewelry, Brady Band headbands, Pear Tree custom photo Christmas cards, a Quirky dock station and cord organizer, and a Samsung Galaxy S5 that she describes for 440 words before even mentioning it’s a phone.

• Things she picked out and purchased her damn self: Blue Hill butternut squash yogurt, Snowville Creamery yogurt, Stack Wines, Dawn dish soap that smells like “Mediterranean Lavender,” a seersucker drying mat, anti-aging face goop from Paula’s Choice, Lock Laces, regular shorts from Gap, more athletic shorts from Gap (in a different post), Chooka rain boots, Comcast Xfinity cable television service, a first session with Dr. Tate the incredulous chiropractor, and a second session with Dr. Tate (in another post) that she probably mentioned so she could talk about getting injured during something that sounds like diapers for female warriors “GI Jane pull-ups.”

• Things she paid for through a subscription: LAQA lip pencil and Supergoop CC cream, both of which she describes wearing without posting a photos of her wearing them, even though I’m sure she just looked GORJ in them.

• Things she doesn’t say she bought or received for free: Rocky Mountain Sriracha, Martin x Martin smoked salmon, JD’s salsa seasoning mix, Peg’s Salt, and Sundra soap.

• Things she just mentioned but hasn’t bought or received for free: A book by Rachel Hofstetter called “Cooking Up a Business,” that awful Ring My Neck jewelry, and a Nespresso coffee machine and coffee “pods” from Gourmesso, which she sounded really upset about not being given for free to review, leading one to wonder if maybe all her Kathy-focused self-care New Year’s resolutions were less about a serious disconnect from her not-mentioned husband, and more about how she’s quite possibly pissed that Bath Matt didn’t get the hint and buy her the Nespresso for Christmas.

Anyway, let’s see what products Kathy is accepting for free and never using again or buying in hopes of larger corporate sponsorships in 2015:

• Plumeria-scented “Hawaiian” shampoo and conditioner by Alba Botania,

Alba says the line is for “for “over-processed or damaged” hair, which I guess means Kathy’s sticking to the 3-hour highlighting visits to the salon whose name she can’t spell.

Kathy includes a money-earning affiliate link but no price (each 12-ounce bottle costs about $10). She says she “came home …. with” them after her free trip to Celestial Seasonings, but doesn’t say if that means she bought them, was given them (probably, since Alba is owned by the same parent company as Celestial Seasonings), or shoplifted them from a Walmart in Boulder. Her review is, as usual, ad copy spun gold:

Gah the smell is DIVINE!!! And for a natural shampoo without synthetic fragrances, parabens, phthalates, sodium lauryl sulfate or sodium myreth sulfate, it foams really well and makes my hair look and feel great. Best shampoo I’ve tried this year!

Well, for only a week into 2015, that’s a ringing endorsement.

Kathy doesn’t seem to care that the shampoo and conditioner each contain 3 “high hazard” ingredients and a handful of “moderate hazard” ingredients (9 in the shampoo, 7 in the conditioner) as rated by the Environmental Working Group (all the same “high hazard” and “moderate hazard” ingredients listed here for the shampoo and here for the conditioner appear in the current ingredients lists).

It might look weird that she took Alba’s exact list of what they don’t include —

— but left out the first two, except that the only time Kathy has given a public shit about animal welfare is when she tries to come off like some kind of localganic superwoman who demands “pastured pork” from barbecue joints (and then complains that a $7 sandwich “isn’t cheap”), or sniffing disdainfully at a conference’s lack of “humane protein” or at non-pasture-raised, conventional “eggs that are most likely from that other kind of chicken.”

And then there was this shitstorm of ignorance.

Oh, and the time there were yellow jackets under her table:

She later figured out that it wasn’t even a nest and they weren’t even bees.

• Oribe shampoo and conditioner she ordered from Birchbox on the recommendation of sister Larbs, even though they are “so pricey.” (She doesn’t say, but the 1.7-ounce travel size costs about $13 for the shampoo and $14 for the conditioner.) As usual, she’s great at describing why she likes them:

I just bought the travel size because this set is $$! For totally different reasons from the Alba, the smell is amazing, and my hair is transformed after using them.

• Noir “Underliner.” I can’t find why the hell she’s calling the eyeliner “underliner,” but I think she’s talking about $15 eyeliner that she got in her Birchbox subscription makeup box. Kathy says she used to think even “higher end” eyeliner was just “black chalk” but that now, eyeliner is “the one thing [she can't] leave the house without.” She includes a helpful photo of the pencil sitting in a mug.

In the comments, she tries to explain: “It’s creamier and a darker black so it stands out more and is really easy to put on”

• Slippers by Toms. It was 4 a.m. and she was fucking around on Instagram (or, as she calls it, “up with insomnia in the middle of the night”) and saw that Emily of The Daily Garnish had purchased some $49 slippers, so SHE needed some too.

She “didn’t remember [her] credit card number,” so she waited until she woke up to complete the purchase, by which time, they were sold out, so she had to buy the Tin Man’s Grandma version.

She calls them the “best slippers ever,” mostly because there are no laces to come untied. Because if you can’t get up and dig out your credit card, you sure as hell don’t want to be messing around with decorative slipper laces.

I guess we should just be thankful she didn’t try to get a pair of used boy’s slippers for $10 though, right?

• A $15 book about enlisting wildebeest and otters in your own homebrew basement. “Goodnight Brew” is a book Bath Matt’s dad and stepmom sent them for Christmas, which Kathy mentions so that she can stuff another Amazon affiliate link into her post.

I’d be much more impressed if Kathy could handle “Go The Fuck To Sleep,” but I guess we have to settle for her calling the beer book “a hoot!” and “a must buy!” instead.

• “Blog School with Rita, the Blog Genie.”

You guys. Apparently, Kathy has been signed up for “Blog School” since last year.

Rita provides “great information” on topics including

Foundations, Design, Content, Growth, Social Media, Money & Media and more.

And it

….combines monthly lessons, detailed worksheets and an active community to help you plan, grow and profit from your blog.

….I can’t emphasize enough how much this program helped me figure out what I wanted out of KERF (and am still debating!) It really makes you think about your goals, reflections, readers and future. Rita’s writing and information is clear, and there are so many tips and links that she shares that have changed the way I blog.

Even this Bill Cosby gif knows Kathy’s need to change is understated.

I don’t know, Kathy. I don’t see any dissatisfied sideways glances or denim jackets yet. Are you really finding satisfaction?

• The book from the blogger at “Chocolate-Covered Katie.” Kathy calls Katie her “blog friend” and “a dessert diva!”

Kathy gives away a copy of the book by recommending two recipes: one made with garbanzos, peanut butter, chocolate chips, and oats, and another based on coconut milk, vanilla extract, and peppermint extract:

I’ve made Katie’s Cookie Dough Dip – yummmm! And frosting shots made with coconut anyone!?

• Some things that she might have bought, or been given — it’s completely unclear — from some website:

Lucky Vitamin invited me to poke around on their site and share some of my favorite new finds with you guys. They are like a virtual health store and have everything from aromatherapy candles, to healthy snacks, awesome shampoo (!!), essential oils, natural toothpaste, and of course, vitamins. Anything in the health arena you might need, they will have. 

Anything? Huh.

“More crunch.” Piss off if that’s a priority in your life.

Sorry, Lucky Vitamin. It looks like all you have is some $1 Thai Sweet Chili bar from KIND, a $1 travel-sized tube of Tom’s Simply White toothpaste, 3 ounces of kale chips for almost $8, 13 ounces of OGX acai berry and avocado shampoo for $8, a 12-ounce lavender and rosewood scented candle for $18, and a 4-ounce bottle of tea tree oil for $18. (Prices from Amazon because they’re easier to navigate and don’t bug me with pop-ups.) Too bad I’m looking for some Rogaine foam, an enema bulb, a 1 quart sharps container, dissolving tablets of codeine, and a nose hair trimmer.

• A set of 8 flash cards that retail for about $25 on “clean eats” and nutrition sent to Kathy to review by “Nourish Schools.” Kathy calls the cards

a great set of healthy eating information! Everything someone would need to know to get started cooking real food.

The cards feature how-tos, tips and information on different healthy food categories – from greens to beans to whole grains. 

Seems like the most boring goddamn thing on the list, except who the hell is Nourish Schools? Here are some things that probably seem innocuous, but raise flags as red as Kathy’s cheeks at her sister’s wedding to your humble narrator Conchshell: Their website calls them only by their first names, even though — as they note — they write under their full names for a Washington Post parenting blog, and have done so for several years.

So, wait. Why would a pair of “certified nutrition counselors” not proudly list their credentials, yet take time to cite apparent examples of using food to fight disease — one of them told a spouse with an autoimmune disease “to embrace nutrition” and the other “changed the way she fed her family” to get rid of a child’s diseases?

This “Mighty Ducks” gif included because I love ducks and for no other reason.

There aren’t any answers on their site, but the Post calls Nourish Schools “a D.C.-based nutrition education company,” and if they’re a company, they must be making money somehow, especially since they’ve only been selling flash cards since last fall. Over the years, it looks like they’ve earned money on a lecture circuit at capital-area schools, where they talked about nutrition for kids. Their site used to advertise 8 hours of lectures on how nutrition , for $300. Here’s another typical one:

But hold the allegedly detoxifying mung beans — why would Seidenberg and Sumner take down their last names, their “testimonials” and “facts” pages, and their “BCHC, AADP” credentials from their own sites? What do those mean? Why is it that no there’s no reference to either of them earning the first of those credentials — it stands for “Board Certified Holistic Health Counselor,” according to Sumner’s LinkedIn profile — at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (Sumner in 2008 and Seidenberg in 2009)?

And what does “AADP” mean? Well, according to its own public relations, graduates from IIN

receive a certificate in health counseling from Integrative Nutrition and are qualified for national certification from the American Association of Drugless Practitioners.

In a damning 2007 investigation by the Seattle Times (“Teen’s death hastened by practitioner who had bogus diplomas,”) the AADP was described as one of the biggest

….seemingly independent health-care credentialing organizations …. [that are little more than] mail-order factories that issue professional titles and hand out accreditations to more than 100 schools ….

Its founder, Joshua Rosenthal, the Seattle Times continues,

BUT HE BELIEVES THAT “VITAMIN L” IS LOVE!

If you read any other “Healthy Living” bloggers besides Kathy, you might have heard of IIN before, because that’s who bestowed the title of “health coach” on Clare (Fitting It All In) needs to STFU and Eating Bird Food.

Nonsense like this seems like it promotes only healthy food and really turns out to be something that promotes fear of vaccines, vague toxins, and prescription drugs, but Kathy never gives a shit who she’s accepting things from. It’s laminated? It has a picture of kale on it? It’s FREE? Motherfucking sign her UP!

But say what we will about General Mills and Kathy, at least we know that the former makes its money through selling sugary shit, and at least we know that Kathy Younger went to Davidson and Winthrop to earn her undergrad degree and her registered dietician certification and that she makes her money reviewing products and contracting out her three stuffed bears on clandestine, international hit jobs.

A dramatization.

If you can’t provide that level of honesty, keep your schemes out of the public schools. They’ve got enough problems without your balderdash about mung beans and spirituality.

Speaking of honesty, okay. Here’s some honesty: Kathy is a stupid lunk.

She shouldn’t just never casually mention obsessive-compulsive disorder again, she should stay away from any conversation about any kind of thought.

Kathy starts out the week by greeting her readers, whom she calls “weekend warriors!!” She’s talking to people on a Monday, and not implying that any of them participate in an activity mostly done on the weekends — reservist training, or riding a motorcycle — but, hey, she had a phrase rattling around in her head that contained the word “weekend,” and catching it and typing it makes her clever.

After making an allusion to her mother-in-law, who’s now joyously fucked off to San Diego away from her paparazzi daughter-in-law,

basking in warm weather on a sailboat!? Wink wink Karen.

Kathy describes her own weekend as “pretty low key,” aside from it being “a little wild!” on Friday.

Her definition of wild?

The boys when on a father-son date to Citizen Burger, and I joined some friends at Mono Loco for girls’ night.

She went to Mono Loco, a restaurant that describes itself as “nouveau-Latin,” where she usually gets something called a Spice-a-Rita. These are pictures of actual Spice-a-Ritas from the Internet:

Here is the “tasty!” drink she had:

She also ate a seafood “burrito bowl,”

and then “went out partying.” What does that mean?

Kathy says only that she

stayed out way too late!! Fun times.

On Saturday, Bath Matt went to the fakery, and Kathy started opening boxes to a $213 Martha Stewart hutch (in “picket fence,” a.k.a. white) that was made in China, contains 32 different kinds of panels, screws, and other bits — 241 pieces to keep track of, in all — and specifically says in the 14 pages of instructions that if you don’t assemble it with two people, you’ll damage it.

Saturday morning Matt went to work and Mazen and I enjoyed eggs, orange and toast before embarking on a massive furniture assembly project …. An organizer’s dream!!! …. I’m hoping to put this in the basement and use it for arts + crafts and things plus files, obviously.

The hutch’s companion piece, a $453 base, hasn’t been delivered yet, but takes 22 pages of instructions. So that should be fun. Bath Matt eventually came home, at which time it appears the hutch was finally assembled. Kathy says she is “pumped for all those little cubbies!” and experienced unimaginable “excitement when I realized my vintage cheese box fit perfectly inside : )”

I’d say that cheese box looks about 4″ too short to fit “perfectly,” but whatever geckos your hutch, Kathy.

Kathy went on a run in weather

so cold that my muscles froze and I was so stiff and sore when I got home

posted these photos of herself —

and says,

See – it really was a low key weekend: sweat pants and wet hair all day long!

The vest is from Land’s End, by the way, and it might mark the only time she wears the same thing as Jordan “Ramshackle Glam” Reid, who got hers for free.

The inspiration for “Babby Forming Despite Life Threatening Heels,” for which I love her. Tenuous connection to “Always Sunny”? Not so much.

She ate a sardine “salad” and “crackers and chips” for a “late lunch,” before allowing her child to play outside “in 15 minute increments” because it was cold. That evening, she posted a photo of beer in a wine glass — or, as she says,

we cracked this guy open

— and cooked Thai Shrimp Curry she’s going to write about “in a few weeks” because it’s part of a deal where that food delivery service Blue Apron pays her for it, I think. Kathy says,

It was delish and packed with flavor. Everyone agreed!

This is supposed to be curry.

On Sunday, she ate oats with pumpkin, peanut butter, and a muffin on top for breakfast, “mac and cheese” sent to her by General Mills-owned Annie’s Homegrown for lunch,

and took time for

chores, an indoor soccer game (we lost this time  ) and relaxing

In comments, she responds to a question about how the “grass-fed” macaroni and cheese tasted with her typically charming lack of spell-check and punctuation:

Though [sic] it was good! Same as regular. ThiS was leftovers so the sauce was all soaked

In Tuesday’s post, Kathy announces a change to her blog since she said she was going to reboot it to “slow” her work two years ago to focus on “adventures and meals.”

Nay! Not a change! A RENAISSANCE.

2013′s “Adaptation” post:

Five years ago I started an online food diary to share with friends and family how eating healthy could be enjoyable and delicious. Never in a million years could I have imagined what KERF would become. If you told me someone would document every meal she ate for over five years, I would tell you she was crazy. Yet here I am — the crazy person!!

And, on Tuesday, she wrote:

It’s been nearly 2 years since KERF went from a thrice daily food and lifestyle journal to a 5x a week blog with lifestyle posts thrown in. I’ve done a lot of thinking about my work flow, my interests, your feedback and where I see KERF years from now.

2013:

You guys have followed me from a desk job to Chemistry 101, from California to Africa, from cafeterias to hospitals, from Charlotte to Charlottesville, from books to bread, and from morning sickness to a new member of the family. Plus every meal along the way. I thank the thousands of you who check in daily from the bottom of my heart for your support and friendship.

She returned to this at the end of her post, signing off with,

Thank you all again – you are the best!

Just a note: She got about 300 comments in the first week after she posted about her “Adaptation.”

2015: Not a damned word about her readers.

It’s been almost a week, and there are 71 comments. One of them praises her for being a survivor :

Why is she cutting down on her posts again?

This is how she blamed her baby, er, what she said in 2013:

I find myself at a crossroads now. Mazen not only needs a lot of my attention; he deserves it. I have loved sharing the “day in the life” of a newborn these past four months, but I know as he becomes more mobile, social and interactive, I’m going to want to spend even more time with him as well as my friends and the friends Mazen will make. I also would like to pursue some other interests and projects and need a bit more time in my day to do so.

Thus, I need flexibility. And the time has come to change gears.

And this is how she blamed her toddler, er, what she said on Tuesday:

….life became so unpredictable with an infant. There were days when I literally had zero minutes in my day to even look at the computer, and I didn’t want the stress of not having a post up and you guys wondering where I was if I couldn’t fit one in.

I’m a very consistent person!

One of the key ways she’s consistent has been in refusing to take any reader feedback, especially when it has to do with her admitting that she’s not the tiniest-meal-eating, perfect-sponsor-having food blogger of her dreams:

So, she “can think about doing a post” about her “very small,” “tiny bite”-sized snacks — which are really just “bites.” Which doesn’t even mean that she will put in the effort to think about them. But she could. If she wanted to.

What would she rather focus on? Getting money to write about free boxes of cereal and macaroni from General Mills:

So, what should we expect from her blog in the days ahead? In 2013, she said it would be

A less frequent posting schedule, some day-in-the-life posts and topical posts….

Look. I understand that some people’s parents might pay a little extra to know that their kid is going to a college where the kid doesn’t have to do their own laundry, like Davidson, because maybe they want their kid to be taken care of in the way they’ve been accustomed to at home. Paying more for a laundry service is sort of like paying extra for your kid to get a meal plan, right? The kid could take care of it on their own, but maybe it would be an easier transition if they didn’t have to live off ramen microwaved in a closet-sized “kitchen” down the hall and they could eat a salad and have a glass of orange juice every now and then, no?

But I think you’d want to make sure that the place at least taught said kid that etymology isn’t about words just meaning what they sound like in the context of 21st-century English. To wit — topical doesn’t mean ABOUT TOPICS.

Kathy thinks that’s what it means, though, so let’s plow ahead.

Topics, she said at the time, would include things that, yes, she’s followed through on — recipes, “selected” meal recaps, “day in the life” posts, “Products I love,” “updates” on her exercise, beer reviews, and restaurant recaps. She did, a month after her “Adaptation,” post something about “Top 10 favorite nut butters,” (which she did the month after her reboot). Her promised “series on Real Foods” ended up being posts from guest RDs who had blogs or shakily credentialed merchandise to shill. Her “Adventure recaps” with photos of her child ended up just being braggy shit about her weekend when Bath Matt was probably too hungover to pose for photos — or he forgot his fedora.

And I don’t think she’s said shit about gardening, which she promised, other than the summer after her Adaptation, when she complained about how she “LOVE[S] fresh herbs but don’t cook with them much because they are hard to manage in the kitchen.”

MOTHERFUCKING MARJORAM!

At the time, she said this would be easy:

I don’t have a plan, but I have hundreds of ideas of posts I can write that don’t require me to document my daily life. Posts that were I not writing about daily meals and going through so many life changes these past five years, I might have written a long time ago.

It seems that the reality of turning those “hundreds of ideas of posts” into a reality got on top of her, according to Tuesday’s post:

…. to be honest, they aren’t as fun and take twice as long to prepare as writing about my daily life and meals! People used to ask me how I blogged three times a day, and I would reply that my content was auto-generated by my meals so it didn’t feel like work. I didn’t have to come up with anything to write about….

Oh, the thing you do to earn money isn’t “fun”?

Anyway, Kathy says she’s been

….craving a more casual tone of posting for a while, but you can’t really write about topics and get that same vibe. In one of my surveys, 80% of you guys asked for more informal posts, so that’s the direction I’m headed.

I want (and need) to continue to do topical posts as ideas come to me because I don’t want to put the pressure of having the whole week wide open with nothing planned [sic]. Plus some posts work better as formal topics anyways. I also want (and need) to continue to do sponsored posts, as they are what keeps this blog running.

Thus, moving forward I am hoping KERF will be a hybrid. (But don’t hold me to anything – I might change my mind!)

She finally gets around to saying she’s not going to do those awful “Lately” posts where she writes about every damned thing she’s eaten in a week, and that

Maybe I’ll even come back with 2 posts in one day at times! I know it’s taken me a while to put your requests into action, but I haven’t been ready until now.

In conclusion, Kathy says that since she wasn’t ready to be more informal until now, we should now “Expect the unexpected,” and that she might “disappear” or post late, except don’t hold her to any of that, because she’s so consistent — except when she’s not.

Wednesday’s post is about how she wants to write about some dinners she ate in the week before her post, and also how she wants to write about how she bought a new dining room table:

We’re getting a new one from Restoration Hardware – their 1900s Boulangerie Table – aka a French bakery table!!! {How appropriate!}

She took food photos for Wednesday on their kitchen-turned-porch table, saying,

….I’m not sure how I feel about food photography on it! The color is just so different. But since our new table is lighter wood as well (to fit the beach house theme) I’m excited for the new look. Things will be better when the sun is out at 6pm!

The dinners she mentioned earlier are described in a section called “Mystery Meat.” She says that she cooked 

a random…. sausage

and

tasso …. another mystery meat!

because Bath Matt

brings home meats that he trades for bread at the farmer’s market

They ate the first one with whole wheat linguine, garbanzos, kale, and frozen tomato paste and frozen chipotle peppers:

Since you usually only need a little bit of each, we always freeze the rest and just break off a chunk to add to a dish. Served with some vino, this dinner was great!

The second “mystery meat” dinner, Kathy said,

….sure took a simple vegetable soup to the next level! To our big pot we added a box of chicken broth, 2 cups of frozen peas and green beans, a few dried herbs and then the sliced tasso and let it simmer for 30 minutes or so. 

For the last dinner she felt like recapping, she mentions that she bought some more of that fresh Mona Lisa pasta they get locally. She bought a lasagne for “a new mom” and bought herself one as well, she writes:

The cheese lasagna was ready in an hour. Mazen loved it and called it “Anya” like our neighbor! We made a salad with avocado, red pepper and a homemade dressing on the side. Kombucha to drink!

She ends by wishing her husband a happy birthday in all caps. We’ll see how Kathy celebrates her husband — and, presumably, it’ll be in a way that completely complements her 26,000 Kinds of Pumpkin Beer 32nd Who Gives A Fuck About That One birthday.

Last Thursday’s post is about what an amazing effort Kathy, the impromptu newscaster, put in for her husband’s birthday:

We are live from Charlottesville this morning!!

How did Kathy make Bath Matt’s 32nd birthday so “smashing”? First, she “showered” him with a bounty of presents:

….new shirts from GAP with breakfast along with celebratory French toast – topped with coconut butter “frosting” and sprinkles!

Our favorite weather girl also announced Charlottesville’s first “snow dusting,” which she said was “quite exciting.” Bursting with the thrill of it all, she went to the gym for “workout and play time” before heading to the fakery to eat a free salad and a free slice of something called “Raspberry Swirl —

MY FAV!

That evening, after Bath Matt got home from his full day working at the fakery, “a playmate … aka a babysitter” took care of Toddler Carbz so that Kathy and Bath Matt could go to a Wednesday-night beer tasting at Market St. Wine Shop. Somehow, she managed to not describe this as a variation on the word “play,” although she did caption a photo of her husband “Beer Nerd,” some term to which they aspire, and said they brought one of their latest California wine trip bottles of wine

Yummy Roth Pinot!

to the C&O restaurant, where she didn’t have to cook or clean a damn thing.

Do tell us, food blogger, about the bread:

GAH! Like a doughy pretzel with that salt crust on top!

Let’s continue. How did Bath Matt enjoy his birthday meal?

Matt got pick of the menu and chose a cheese plate as an appetizer.

Wait, that’s something worth noting? That he was able to pick his own order? Is he a child? Actually, scratch that. Even children — especially on their birthdays — can generally pick what they want to eat, right?

It’s especially dumb to be royally handing out menu pardons when Queen KERF can’t even describe the food that came to the table in an adult fashion:

For entrees I had the sea bass with mushrooms and root veggie puree. Pea shoots on top! Delicious.

Matt had duck, his favorite, with a sweet potato + blue cheese layer stack that was awesome.

We also ordered a side of butternut squash with crispy sage – divine!

So, someone who makes her living writing about food just described two dinners by saying they were “delicious,” “awesome,” and “divine,” and that one of the ingredients was “crispy”? I’ve gotten hungrier reading Cheez-It coupons*.

The dessert:

And finally…the warm chocolate tart with peanut butter ice cream. Matt likes to say that he doesn’t really care for dessert, but he proclaimed this the best dessert he had ever had!! Good timing for his birthday ; )

How nice that a grown-ass man was allowed to choose his own meal for his own damn birthday.

Kathy posted a second entry on Thursday by accident, saying she “pushed publish too soon.” This one was about how she registered for that 10-mile race she was dithering about a few weeks ago. Her reaction?

Yay!!

and

YIKES!

Oh, why’s that, dear?

Well, it has to do with a lack of, ahem, forests near Kathy’s neighborhood:

I haven’t been in a good running grove [sic] since…2011 maybe?

Back in the day I used to run outside a lot, and consistently 6 miles or so at a time. Once time I did 8 for fun (imagine that!) I used to sign up for races more often, and my greatest distance was the Racefest Half Marathon in Charlotte (at an 8:41 pace!)

Why won’t that happen now? Well, her absurdly geriatric age of 32 means she’s “older,” and she’s supposedly interested only in training “for the fun of it!”

 I don’t believe that, but maybe it’s true. She says she runs 4 miles in one burst every week, or maybe 5 miles — which she can do in 48 minutes — but that 10 miles shouldn’t be too hard:

I’m sure I could run them tomorrow if I needed to.

She complains that the cold has been holding back her running times, but that she’s on track with a training plan she’s “discussed” with a friend called Nelle, described as “a speed demon runner.”

Who’s Nelle? Well, Nelle had her kid about half a year before Kathy had Toddler Carbz. Here she is with her newborn child and with Charlottesville’s top inspiration for hair, makeup, and taco-eating, last Halloween:

Kathy says she would like to run three times a week, but her kid is not going to make that “feasible,” so she wants to do a weekly 3-mile run indoors at her gym and a weekly 4-mile run outdoors.

Well, only if Bath Matt can change his work schedule to accommodate her, since her gym won’t allow her to drop her child off so she can prance around the streets of Charlottesville

….and it’s too cold/dark to run outside with him this time of year. I’m also going to have to plan around soccer games. I shouldn’t run the day after a game because my legs are usually really sore, and our games come and go on random days.

She also says that she’ll be aiming for a time of an hour and 45 minutes, since her top speed for a 10-mile course was 90 minutes, pre-Inconvenient Toddler:

Maybe it’s a little too easy of a goal, but again, this is for fun! I have a handful of friends who are also running it, so we’re hoping to do some of the training runs together.

Kathy’s also given herself a perk: a new pair of running shoes. She’s “dusted off” her Garmin — as well as some photos of herself from more than half a decade ago —

From 2010, when she described coffee as her “ergogenic aid and laxative ;)” so that she could let her readers know she had taken a shit — or, in her words, was “totally digested and ready to go” — by whatever time.

Another one, from the Healthy Living Summit (RIP) when she yelled in the middle of the guy from “Biggest Loser”‘s talk.

— and her Camelbak Charm, so that she can “do another batch of [her] homemade sports drink”:

This time of year though, I hope the water doesn’t freeze in the tube! I’ll probably do another batch of my homemade sports drink for the longer runs since that worked so well last time.

She ends the post by asking for “suggestions from any hard-core runners out there!” There are a couple recommendations that she join the Charlottesville Track Club’s program that’s specifically geared towards training for the 10-miler —

— mixed in with some general encouragement and some Who Cares, Just Go Have Fun sentiment. Look, Kathy — there are things where I, too, talk about wanting to throw up (as she used to do) that end up being fun, but they’re generally confined to roller-coasters. And I don’t have to tell anyone about what I do in the bathroom.

 Kathy posted a sixth weekly post on Friday, thanking her readers for “all the wonderfully nice comments” on her post about returning to a more informal, less informational format for her blog:

I am loving bringing back these little chatty posts!

I am also back using my Vita-mix full time. I decided that I like having less parts and it sure does make a fluffy smoothie.

We have a sunny day on tap, and it should be a little warmer than usual, so M and I are hoping to meet up with some friends for a playdate.

As for Kathy’s weekend plans? She went to the Florida Georgia Line concert with Sarah (the one who ate two tacos that one time, when Kathy only ate one).

I was unfamiliar with “Florida Georgia Line” being anything more than something one crossed while driving up and down the East Coast on I-95, but Wikipedia describes their style of music as “bro-country.”

 Why are they sitting like that? Do they need donut pillows?

We end by saying goodbye, this week, to Kathy’s sister’s blog, “Taking Back My Twenties.”

Larbs apparently found her twenties. This whole time, it turns out they were under that Guanaja Chocolate Coulant Daniel Boulud made at the Speiser-Skipper wedding. Who knew?

Well, more accurately, Larbs said that she finally realized she “was in denial about being an adult” when she started her first blog in 2010.

You think?

From 2011:

I’m so mentally ready for spring break next week. And then I remembered I probably will never get a spring break again. Sad. I was telling an older woman at work about my blog today and used the term quarter life crisis, and she said ‘quarter life crisis....ha, get a life.’ I can’t decide if her response was mean or if I deserve that reaction…

More from 2011:

You see, I’m not adjusting well to working 9 hour days and I’m totally wishing away the weeks (something I vowed not to do). As you know from my almost daily complaints, I’m tired and never feel like doing much (despite 8+ hours). I’m just assuming this is a normal part of the transition to full-time work? I don’t know how people can spend so many waking hours in an office and feel fulfilled. I went to regular spinning today (I’ve been doing SYNC Cycle), and during an awesome song, I realized I haven’t felt energized or inspired by exercise in weeks. …. I just dream of the summer or a time when I’ll be free to just be. But with only ten days off a year, there is no extended time to just be. And that feeling is suffocating. I keep thinking to myself I miss my life -it’s been taken away from me, and I need to take it back! …. the idea that I have to spend an hour preparing for the next work day and get in bed at 9:30 haunts me.

From 2012:

Since graduation I feel like, as an adult, I’m supposed to just work, exercise, eat healthy meals, and save money during the week. I think the thing I miss most about college is the feeling that the only thing I’m really supposed to be doing is learning. Anyway, I got home from work and decided to protest being an adult. I skipped my workout, ate cookies that arrived in the mail (thanks to Matt’s mom!!), fell asleep on the couch at 5 o’clock, avoided my to-do list with five episodes of House Hunters, and ate cereal for dinner.

Fucking “House Hunters.”

When she started the blog, she writes in her I Found Them They Were Under The Long Layer Of My High-Low Hem Dress This Whole Time post, she longed for college. Then, life “seemed easy” —

….Aside from attending classes and completing homework assignments, there was time to exercise outdoors, eat lunch with friends, participate in clubs, volunteer or work off-campus, watch TV, play on the internet, go shopping, party, or (my personal favorite) just sit around and enjoy the company of interesting people. Because of this, I was very very sad to have to leave the college community and enter the real world.

Yes, I’m sure it was a veritable Algonquin Round Table at Davidson, Larbsie, where the conversation sparkled with stories about how you caught your future husband’s eye with your retainer.

While that still sounds nice “sometimes,” Larbs writes,

….I realized I no longer needed to be like a younger version of myself to be happy….I have so many things going for me that I didn’t in my mid-twenties – a job I’ve always dreamed of, financial independence, a loving husband, and now a house of my own. II’ll [sic] be turning 30 this year, and if this is what 30 looks like, then I’ll take it!

 Being a natural blonde is really and truly one of the least exciting things that can happen to you in life.

The next paragraph is like a deconstructed burrito bowl of Shit Larbs’s Sister Will Never Say:

To my faithful readers, I’m sorry that my content has suffered over the past year. I should have written this post a long time ago. I still very much enjoy blogging, and I’ve loved being part of the blogging community. Selfishly, I also cherish this space as an online journal. However, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more private and you’ve probably noticed that my writing has focused primarily on food, travel, and more food.

While it’s not Larbs found the Ebola vaccine in between her marscapone ice cream and blue cheese grits or anything — and those actually sound pretty fucking delicious — her ability to take an even slightly mature and critical look at the purpose of maintaining a diary in public for a specific purpose is laudable in comparison to her older sister’s increasingly stunted schtick. It’s also laudable once you reach the comments at the end of her post:

Because, holy shit. Larbs’ mother and her older sister seem to wish they, themselves, could cling to their own idealized “twenties” — the exact idealization Larbs realized was sad and limiting, rather than gleeful and girlish.

No, Larbs, they seem to say. Don’t let go. You said you’d never let go. Come back to your twenties. You can eat all the frosting you want here!

*It’s too bad they’re not actual Cheez-It ads, because I’d totally buy the Cheez-It dust.

Monday’s post is about how great Kathy’s weekend was, as usual. She went to a concert!

The highlight of my weekend was most definitely the Florida Georgia Line concert!

Oh, okay. Cool. I’m not familiar with the duo, because they seem like a pair of insensitive, smirking asses, but at least it’s not some pseudo-virtue night of jumping jacks and shit wine out of plastic glasses under the guise of virtuefun at the expensive gym. Tell us what you liked about the concert, Kathy:

I just love country music. Rather than trucks and fields (which do take me back to high school), country brings out feelings of small towns for me. Relationships, parties with friends, and living life in the moment – soaking up sunshine, the lake, or a good beer.

Wait…. huh?

What? What does any of that mean? Let’s take a closer look. Kathy starts out saying she loves country music. This is up for debate, but let’s accept her premise. Okay, continue. Kathy says that the country genre “brings out feelings of small towns” for her, rather than evoking “trucks and fields,” even though, on a tangential note, both the concept of trucks and that of fields do conjure up thoughts of high school. To explain the difference, I think she lists “Relationships, parties with friends, and living life in the moment – soaking up sunshine, the lake, or a good beer.” In conclusion…. no, I have no fucking clue why “trucks and fields” have everything to do with high school and nothing to do with relationships, parties, sunshine, lakes, and “good beer,” while “small towns” have everything to do with those things.

Exactly, Nelson.

In any convoluted case, Kathy says that the group is “one of [her] favorite bands!” even though Bath Matt makes fun of her by sending her links that point out how generic and tired their shit is. (Thanks, Bath Matt. What the fuck do you listen to? Gruit-core?)

In the lead-up to bro country evening, Kathy says she, herself at least partially participated in feeding her family:

….I made stuffed shells. This recipe was a wing-it success! We stuffed the shells (after they were boiled) with ground beef, sun-dried tomatoes, Parmesan, frozen spinach and basically all the ingredients in this meatball recipe.

No shit, Kathy? I totally thought there was a method of stuffing meat into DRIED PASTA. Also, the meatball recipe she links to is her own, where you use 1 pound ground beef, 10 ounces frozen spinach, 1/3 cup of sun-dried tomatoes in oil, 1 cup panko, 1/2 grated cheese, 2 eggs, salt, pepper, and the world’s smallest teaspoon of garlic powder. How are Kathy’s meatballs? Let’s ask Sponsored Thanksgiving, who made them. Or, you can take Kathy’s unreliable word:

With sauce poured on top, they turned out great!

The red meat must have come out because poor, long-suffering, jambalaya-making Jeff, came over for dinner. He had to bring salad.

They also ate ice cream.

Kathy says it’s “worth noting” that they split only half a cup of ice cream scraped from the bottom of two containers and that hers was the really nice custom-made one, which I’m sure she felt rich generosity for giving away because it was her special snowflake stash, when she should have realized she was being a gross miser because who the fuck gets stingy about ice cream? This isn’t Little House in the Big Woods, where obtaining sugar is a perilous journey through panthery woods to obtain gingham and rock candy.

The PB Cup was Karen’s and it ended up in our freezer when she moved – yum!

Guess what, Kathy? Not worth noting. Also? Don’t give your fucking guests ice cream from almost four months ago. That’s disgusting. Go to the store and get fresh stuff, and get more than a pint, so that your guests can have as much as they want. If it’s even possible that your guests might want more of anything and you’re not making it available for them, it’s not hospitality, you stingy bint.

On Saturday, Kathy and her child ate oats, and then went to fancy gym, and then left fancy gym so they could run six miles.

Post-baby PR baby! We ran quite slow (per Nelle’s 13 miler training plan) and I felt good for most of the run. It wore me out for the rest of the day though!

Oh, look at you, Kathy, graciously accommodating Nelle’s speed. We know you would totally run faster if it weren’t for her, wouldn’t you?

After the run, she had

After Mazen and I got home, I proceeded to eat All The Chips. But I paired them with a healthy sardine salad. It’s been my post-run craving these past few weeks!

Kathy trying to wedge Hyperbole and a Half into her blog is as awkward as when she wears that band-leader jacket.

Kathy then went back out and took her child to the children’s museum and then went back home “for nap.”

When she woke up, she was ready to go to the concert, so she put two ounces of wine in a glass and set it on her bathroom shelf and took a picture and posted it on Instagram. Or, as she calls it, she engaged in

A little pregaming!

She and her four friends went to something called the Sedona Taphouse for an “awesome” dinner of wine, “a nice salad,” and a “pretty darn awesome!!” main dish:

The five pre-gamed, bro-countried ladies then ate chocolate cake with ketchup, I guess —

— but Kathy had the tiniest portion of all:

Just two bites – perfect!

How was the concert? Well, Thomas Rhett opened:

love him!

Then, the main act played, and Florida Georgia Line was

awesome. Love their style!

I think Kathy would fall down blue on the floor if she’d had to write this entry without using the words “awesome” and “love.” She then posts this photo:

Kathy’s caption: “Blondes like to have fun!!”

Get your shine on!

I don’t know what that means and I refuse to look it up.

Next, she posts this photo:

With the caption, “Guess it’s pretty clear everyone has a smart phone these days ; )”

Yes, because “smart phones” are the only ones with light-up displays. And yeah, wow, Kathy, even the poors who shop at PetSmart and don’t go to happy hour gym and who don’t have NERD on their license plates are capable of obtaining the same technology.

Kathy was out “very late,” so Bath Matt brought her pancakes with chocolate peanut butter on top in bed. She was awake at 7, though, so that probably means she didn’t get to bed until 10:27 p.m.

Swinging back to penitent and healthy from her supposedly wild night of fun and wine, Kathy says she did “work around the house” on Sunday, finished assembling her $500 of particle board —

— ate soup and kombucha, went grocery shopping at Whole Foods, and served her family

Garlicky kale + catfish + veggies + the last of an open bottle of vino.

She ends by saying something else I don’t wish to know the meaning of:

Hope y’all had shining weekends too!


Tuesday brings with it Kathy’s tentative venturing into the world of shorter posts about what-the-fuck-ever. The neighbors who have the baby and the chickens came over on Monday, and Kathy was excited about it because it was an excuse for chocolate, shortbread, and alcohol:

Company always makes for a fun Monday : ) What normally would be a boring night turns into a celebration with wine and dessert!

She left the boxes out from that diaper-change-crafts hutch monstrosity, so at least Toddler Carbz and Neighbor Girl had something to play with aside from rusty baskets of rubber ducks from Grandma Buzz’s attic.

The pop-up ads on Kathy’s site are now literally working to protect the privacy of her child and her child’s friends, at least.

Who cares that the instruction manual says to wash all the dust and crud off of all the 260 pieces of the hutch after taking them out of the boxes? If Toddler Carbz can handle a little yellow spray paint and chardonnay in utero, mystery dust and petrochemical smoke from picturesque Guangdong* is nothing.

I am really sorry for my shitty Google Translated Chinese. It’s supposed to say “Are you supposed to change diapers on this shelf? How idiotic.”

While the children were playing in, I don’t know, the perfect flow of aerosolized melamine or whatever, Kathy “and” Bath Matt made meal-planning-service dinner:

….chicken thighs with rice (which I pesto-fied instead of pilafed) and cabbage. The cabbage was a lovely delicious surprise with great garlicky flavor! Cook Smarts recommended lemon and greek yogurt, and they were great additions to the meal.

WHY IS POISON IVY‘S PUSH-UP BRA LITERALLY ON THE TABLE.

I’m guessing that “pesto-fied” means she plunked a frozen cube of pesto from 2013 onto the rice instead of using the obvious onion that would have been required for rice pilaf, but leave it to Kathy La Misteriosa to not explain any of that. She then decides to tell us both how fancy she was on Tuesday morning and what an inconvenience her child is, by saying they

dined on scrambled eggs (which he requested and then wouldn’t touch)

I would rather have whatever the “Pub Diet” from Crapplebee’s than whatever made that bread look like carbception.

In addition to recording, for posterity, yet another time when she’s decided to see something her 2-year-old son has done as inconvenient, Kathy capitalizes “Pomegranate,” which is dumb because she always says “greek yogurt” and “french toast” and the shift key exists for a reason. However, overall, this new format where she talks about whatever for a few paragraphs is as bracing as a cold smoothie in a bowl tipped over one’s head, to which I offer a sincerely slow-clapping thank you to Our Kerfiness. The emoticons and exclamation points are still freaking everywhere, but trying not to treat every day’s entry like it’s a fucking book report on The Andromeda Strain, and forcing Guest RDs and endless lists of everything she ate in a given week has put a magazine-walking pep in Kathy’s written step and a Bare Minerals glow on her selfied cheeks. Or maybe I just like being able to recap shorter posts.

*No, I have no idea where in China that ugly hutch in which her stupid cheese box does not fit perfectly was manufactured.

The meals at Blue Apron are chef-designed recipes that you can make at home, and they definitely step up the fancy a notch. Plus since all of the ingredients you need are shipped (for free) right to you, there is never any need for planning or waste at the end.

For years I made dinners flying by the seat of my pants. I rarely ever used a recipe, and didn’t actually know what we were having until I started to get hungry.

But, as you’ve heard before, when you have a child (or a busy job or a change in lifestyle) winging it just doesn’t work.

She then says that, in 2014, she and Bath Matt “worked hard to get organized,” because such a thing has always been impossible with the hectic madness of Bath Matt working a walkable mile away at a franchise bakery and getting home at 5 p.m., Kathy maintaining a blog, going to the gym, and attending to the basic needs of a single, healthy child who was born in late 2012, Kathy’s parents a state away, Bath Matt’s mom in town, and the ability to pay for house-cleaners, day care, and the occasional babysitter. Having a subscription to that other service that sends her meal plans for a week has been great, Kathy says, and that she’s been so surprised that the services has been

bringing in a lot more diversity into our meals. From technique to flavor, cooking other people’s recipes has pushed me out of my comfort zone. I’ve also learned quite a bit!

None of those things she’s learned have been about using onions, putting things in the refrigerator for a few hours, or the appropriate use of cold butter in crust-making, but Kathy says the recipes have resulted in

additions to my cooking repertoire that have resulted in extra delicious meals this year

The tips she has supposedly have learned have been: prep stuff and read the damn recipe —

I can’t tell you how many times I have planned something for dinner and not looked at the recipe until after I’m super hungry and ready to eat! Meal planning and prep has forced me to mentally prepare for our dinner recipe all day and sometimes before that.

This isn’t the Olympics, Kathy. Why are you “mentally prepar[ing]” for a recipe that someone sends you and you don’t even have to think about?

The second tip is to use lemon and lime when the recipes call for them:

This is a step I almost always used to skip. “Meh, you can’t taste it,” I would think.

You’re an idiot, Kathy.

Your readers agree.

But following recipes has made me question that mentality and switch to the “if they say I should I probably should” one. FOMO = fear of missing out!

What does that bullshit FOMO have to do with not using almost the world’s most simple ingredient?

I’ve started keeping lemons and limes on hand for use in my own recipes too. And yes, you can taste it!

She then says that the meal-planning service that’s paying her to write about stuff has taught her the very important lesson of using the “right oils for the right things.” She links to a chart to explain what she means.

The next tip is that people should spend money on stuff. Fuck all of you guys who can’t afford to purchase these things.

Freshly baked bread. Flavored olive oils. Fresh pasta. Tomatoes canned at their peak. Local jam. Invest in the good stuff! If you’re saving money by cooking at home, then at least bridge the gap a little by investing in ingredients that will make your food taste restaurant-worthy.

That includes herbs:

Herbs are annoying to buy at the grocery store. You pick out a bunch, sometimes pay a lot for it, use a few pinches and then it rots in your fridge. This has happened to me many times!

Maybe it should also involve investing in spellcheck.

“Cococnut”?

She ends by providing a link for 2 free meals for 100 customers who order something through her link, and by saying that the company that’s paying her to write her post provides meals that are

the perfect bridge between a date night out and a date night in.

Her commenters range from flattering link-bait to her mom,

to criticism:

 Criticism she’s not going to respond to, of course. Guess that’s part of the ultra-boring, post-adaptation new way.

The recaps are two weeks late again, so let’s punish ourselves by jumping straight back into Kathletic Conditioning without stretching OR remembering our Camelback —

— as we return to her entry from Thursday, Jan. 22, “Easy Freezer Vegetable Soup.”

Ever since deciding she was going to dumb down her posts, not publish them to the web in the morning, and not stick to a weekday schedule, everything’s gotten even more dumbsy-turvy than usual in Kathy’s world. This post is a “recipe” where she uses up a bunch of leftover shit and makes something that looks terrible, but starts off and finishes up trying to be chatty and casual, using up her allotment of punctuation to make emoticons:

Oooo I’m up late!! Rather, I’m writing late : ) And probably heading right to bed after this.

She published around 7:30 p.m. that night. If I had a nana, she’d be brightly side-eyeing Kathy over a bridge hand and a glass of Scotch.

Did you guys watch Downton Abbey and The Bachelor this week? The first half of the week gets all the good TV. But don’t worry – Survivor fills up the rest

Shit, I spoke too soon. I guess Kathy really WAS exhausted after what was probably a day of Stairmastering for 26 minutes and eating half as many tacos as pregnant ladies everywhere! Are you okay, Kathy?

I LOVED the story line about Mary + her hotel stay in Downton and Whitney is my current favorite for Chris. Kaitlyn is pretty fun too, but I can see Whitney as his wife. Kelsey needs more time with him!

I think I’m more confused about what she just said than when Kathy was calling the show “Downtown” Abbey, unless Whitney is an impertinent village nutritionist, Kelsey and Kaitlyn are dashing scullery maids, and Chris is some rapscallion Seventh Marquess of Milford Haven.

If she could move beyond her distaste for meat, Kathy might have done well as an RD back then.

Stupid “The Bachelor.”

Anyway, on to the completely unrelated topic of what the post is supposed to be about. Kathy had half-used frozen vegetables and frozen cooked lentils in the freezer, which is awesome, because she didn’t want to have to chop anything:

While I totally agree that fresh vegetables taste best, frozen are 97% as good in soup form and sure save a lot of chopping time!

I mean, do you guys know how much time she saved not have to chop those lentils? At least 26 seconds.

Into a pot of water, she dumps about three cups of frozen vegetables (er, four once people point out in the comments that she didn’t mention green beans), about two and a half cups of frozen lentils, a box of chicken broth, one clove of garlic, one cup of uncooked barley, a single teaspoon of paprika, and salt, pepper, and Parmesan “to taste,” brings the whole mess to a boil, and simmers it until the barley is cooked (and the vegetables are crap).

I’m almost certain the out-of-focus blob on the left is the greater Malacca toad, a cute little bugger Kathy really shouldn’t eat because he’s being threatened by production of one of sponsor General Mills’ favorite asshole ingredients, palm oil.

This nearly fatless pot of corn and peas, she says,

made about 6 servings – 4 if you have a hearty appetite!

And of course everything was super nutritious.

Oh, OF COURSE. Of course it was, Kathy. I mean, you made it! How could it not be? We would never entertain such an idea.

It didn’t taste good —

The Parmesan cheese and hot sauce made the dish!

— but at least there was enough hot sauce to numb everyone’s tastebuds to that.

She ends the post with a “lifestyle tidbit to note” that she “CANCELLED” her order of that $700-1900 (on sale) pretend “boulangerie” table from Restoration Hardware.

Why? Well, because she didn’t want to read the literally only one page of product information that says, after repeated mentions of the circa-1985 pine being “unfinished,” that you should probably throw on some clear furniture wax, at the very least:

Kathy says she

….loved the feel and color, [but] started to freak out about oil and water stains.

And she doesn’t want to hear any suggestions about what she should do instead, thank you very much! In addition to suggesting the usual furniture retailers, Kath’s commenters share stories about how a husband made a table from reclaimed cypress, supporting locally made furniture from Concepts Created and Carolina Farm Table, going to the wonderful Habitat for Humanity ReStore, or purchasing a less-expensive and better-made table from Amish craftsmen (“Come take a trip to Intercourse, PA the next time they invite you to Hershey!” suggests a delightful commenter called Beth) and she ignores them all. Thanks, Kathy!

No chance of Bath Matt following up his porch critter with a full-sized dining Gump then?

Not that “stains” were a potential problem when she decided to re-upholster her living room furniture in white (“inspired” by “Operation Beach Cottage”) with a 20-month-old in the house, but hey, Kathy’s as inconsistent as her definitions of “soup” —

— so I’m sure no one’s surprised.

*and also because I’ve been trying to actually attain more than the roughly 50% of Kathy’s daily sleep time I’ve been subsisting on for the last two and a half years. What can I say? The thought of fritters on salad is more terrifying than the evil bicycle clowns in “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.”

It’s time for another installment of Conchshell Had Too Much Regular Work Shit To Do And Couldn’t Do Smugnom For Forever On A Regular Basis Because Then Her Cats Would Be Eating Her Fingertips Batman Returns-Style.

Which is to say, for everyone on a mobile device, I’m sorry for the gifs.

So, Kathy’s Jan. 23 post is called “I Love Things In Bowls,” and it’s about how Kathy’s discovered a new way to get her 10.26 hours of sleep a night — buttah-filled, chocolatey, buttercreamery marijuana edibles.

Just kidding. If that were the case, it wouldn’t be taking me two weeks to drag myself around to recapping the latest entries on Kathy Consumes Things That Aren’t Imaginary. Instead, the entry is actually about how she ate granola one morning, and then she ate soup for lunch. Get this — both of them? She ate them out of bowls.

We learn a lot of amazing information from this post.

1. Kathy gave away some of her possessions because she is constantly evolving into a better person:

Did you know I actually gave away a lot of my bowl collection?

No. Why would we know that?

At one point I probably had 100 different bowls in every color and size, and now I am down to just my very favorites – including all of our wedding Pottery Barn Great White bowls.

Or rather, the Great White bowls from Pottery Barn she received as wedding gifts. Which, yes, the average intelligent reader could deduce — if that were the way intelligent writing worked. But this isn’t James fucking Joyce, and Kathy doesn’t have nearly enough thoughts to coffin her in mummycases, embalmed in smoked paprika and unmanageable herbs.

Kathy’s talking about owning pieces of white, made-in-China-in-2006 crockery, and how concentrating on those makes her a better person as she grows ancient and wise:

The older I get the more I feel the need to simplify the things my life!

Nah. You want things to be easy. That’s not the same.

2. Kathy has superhuman willpower, and can only allow herself “crumbs” of her favorite things, as she does for her breakfast:

Cville Cluster is the best granola ever, but it’s so good that I can’t keep it around. Every now and then Matt brings me the crumbs and small clusters from the bottom of the giant mixing bowl when they make a fresh batch at the bakery, so today’s topping was a nice treat! …. FYI, no nut butter today because the ‘Cluster is quite high in fat! It’s about as dense as peanut butter.

3. Her toddler is still irritating the shit out of her to the point that she needs to call him out on a regular basis:

This was the first time Mazen got the concept of “cereal with milk” and he was quite a happy camper!

In her defense, that boy who got Most Likely To Succeed at Kathy’s school who works in the White House now probably “got the concept of ‘cereal with milk’” when he was five months younger than Carbz.

4. Kathy is super skilled at using her power with words to describe what makes food appealing. Her lunch of soup, for instance, was topped with

cheese because it’s freakin’ delicious.  

and leftover sweet potatoes because they were

a nice touch!

5. Almost as skilled as she is at describing joyful interactions among the members of her family, saying that, since her parents are headed to town for the weekend, Carbz is

flipping out with excitement and has been counting down the days….as only a two year old would know how to do ; )

What does that mean? Are there other ways to flip out? How would a toddler possibly count down days? Why the winky face? Either take 10 extra seconds to explain yourself or just go with saying the kid smiles every time you mention their visit. On a scale of bowl-simplifying to herb-managing, that has to be closer to the former, right?

The comments are filled with chicks with their own blogs to promote saying, basically, OMG I eat things out of bowls too! And, there’s this one weird one:

No, it’s not lame. It’s lame that you think you need a scolding or affirmation from Katy for it. Eat two tacos out of a bowl with a handle, for fuck’s sake. Go crazy.

Last Monday’s post — yes, we’re all the way back to January 26, ugh — is another half-assed attempt to talk about what an exciting, relaxing, replete-with-exclamation-points weekend she had after a hard week of providing food for herself and her child.

• She had a “great time” with her parents, who were visiting from Hillsborough: 2 exclamation points.

• Kasual Kathy free-wheeled it without her fancy camera and shot all her weekend photos on the phone she can’t even name-drop the brand of even through she got it through a sponsorship deal: 1 exclamation point.

• She ordered pizza for her parents and made a salad and called it a “pizza party”: 2 exclamation points.

• She and her parental babysitters visited a toy store, the free children’s museum downtown — and the fakery, which all adds up to “pack[ing] in a full day” for her child: 0 exclamation points.

• They all ate lunch at Bodo’s Bagels (which she just calls “Bodos,” as though we should know) for a bagel.

She describes the bagel as “big honkin’,” making sure to note that she only eats such a thing “a few times a year” and that hers was whole wheat, but that she should have added “a leaf of lettuce for a bit more nutrition”: 2 exclamation points and one smiley-face emoticon.

This looks delicious until you remember that there’s no thin slices of red onion, and probably no capers on it either.

• Her child “was totally melting down” because he’d skipped his nap, so her “grand plans to go to World of Beer,” not that she bothers telling us what that is, had to be canceled. Kathy and her mom stayed home and “opened a bottle of Thomas George Estates wine from Sonoma while we chilled” and waited for Bath Matt and Kathy’s dad to finish their “glorious time”: 0 exclamation points because she missed out on this:

• Bath Matt and Grandpa Pee Paw finally dragged their asses home, bringing take-out salmon, pork, potatoes, and succotash so Kathy could eat dinner.

It was “worth the wait”: 2 exclamation points.

• Sunday breakfast was a bagel from the shop and fresh mango eaten “‘off the rind,’” which she says is a “trick” from her recent trip to the Disappointment Republic: 1 exclamation point.

• She did her chores in her “jammies” and then ate more leftover stuff “the guys” brought from the night before, salad, cheese, and “buttery” Marcona almonds: 1 exclamation point for the almonds.

• A few words about how she, but especially her kid, hope her parents return: 2 exclamation points and one smiley-face emoticon.

• Queen Kathy wishes her minions a “Happy 26th” to celebrate being 8 months away from her actual birthday: 1 exclamation point.

In the comments, there’s a boring discussion where someone asks Kathy about smoothies without milk, and Kathy says she tries not to eat protein powder, but gives a few recommendations for protein powders she sometimes buys (not that her readers ever hear about them) and then recommends “plant protein” and has to clarify in another exchange that she means those protein powders. She also gives an even-more useless, dismissive answer, though, when one of her regular commenters — a girl in high school whose own blog’s “about” section describes a pretty shitty early life of physical abuse and eating disorders — asks her what kind of camera Kathy uses:

Thanks, Kathy. Glad to know the Olympus E-M5 and the Canon Powershot, C100, 5D, and 7D, all of which have “Mark II” models, are all equal in your mind. Linda, while admittedly imperfect, is at least more consistent with her readership than Kathy is with her support of the companies who pay her for her phony enthusiasm — throw a teenage aspiring healthy-living blogger a fucking bone once in a while, will you, Kathy?

Last Tuesday’s post, on Jan. 27, is about how it was snowing in Charlottesville:

We are getting a few flurries here, but nothing to write home the internet about. 

and how Kathy ate breakfast:

….a quarter of a crumbled Whole Wheat Blueberry Buttermilk muffin from the bakery. Matt brought it home after a test bake and we gave it four thumbs up! Served over Snowville Creamery yogurt with a slice banana and coffee.

To which a commenter asked:

The post also covers how she ate a salad with trendy almonds, ranch dressing that her mother-in-law (thankfully fucked off to San Diego to live in happiness instead of lady-in-waiting status for unnecessary chores) “left in our fridge,”

leftover cornbread, pimento cheese from Whole Foods — which, according to her photo is “smoked gouda and pimento cheese”. She describes the dip as “amazing” and fauxyouthtastically exclaims, “Smoked everything all the time.” Ugh. She also had a $1.36/ounce, onion-containing No Bull Burger and some other stuff on top of some additionally other stuff.

LONG TIME NO SEE! I actually forgot about No Bulls for a while (I know)

We know…. what?

No.

We don’t know. Does anyone? Kathy spent all last year eating meatless lentil pucks. I had to look that up to make sure, because no one keeps that kind of supposed information in their heads, and how are you supposed to tell if there’s been a break? Kathy feels like this should be notable, though, because

….the nutrition info has dropped the calories from 170 to 130. I’m not sure if they are smaller (they look the same to me) or if they were re-evaluated, but I’m pleased with the update.

Yes, Kathy. I’m sure No Bull did that just because they heard about your diet and wanted to speed things up. 40 calories is going to make all the difference, Kathy. All the difference. Where’s that thinspiration Pinterest, Kathy?

In the comments, there’s a weird exchange where she’s asked about her child’s transition from crib to toddler bed, and says that she wishes she could still keep him “contained.”

Last Wednesday’s post, on Jan. 28, titled “Snips + Jumps,” is about how Kathy and Toddler Carbz had

SUCH a fun morning together!!

Why’s that, Kathy?

• Kathy “started the day with a special breakfast” of oatmeal and shit that she made the night before, so she was super happy to not have to spend any time on the day when she ate it. She admittedly fucked it up a little bit, but she and her kid “gobbled it down!”

• Then, she got to go to Target “to empty my wallet of all its dollar bills.”

• She then had someone cut Toddler Carbz’s hair,

(which went sooo smoothly this time!)

Kathy also referred to the hairstylist using “styling product,” which required the use of a smiley-face emoticon.

After the haircut, she gave her son “a special treat” by going to an indoor jumping area —

— where she let her kid have fun while she made veiled comments about her calorie-burning and her breasts —

talk about a workout! Wear your sports bras ladies : )

— and then to the fakery, where she shamed her child for dipping his peanut butter and jelly sandwich in her dressing:

Ew!

Oh, shut up, Salad-Fritter ’12.

Last Thursday’s entry, on Jan. 29, titled “Last Night’s Dinner,” is another post about how awesome the meal-planning service that has occasionally sponsored Our Kathy is, even though whenever she mentions it, it’s always in the context of how she’s stopped using it and has subsequently become overwhelmed.

Why has she stopped using it? No one knows. What is she doing that’s made her too busy to use a thing that says Buy This, Prepare This, and Make This On This Day and This Day and This Day and This Day and This Day? She’ll never tell. Which is why you start out reading a post that opens like this —

Whenever I start to feel overwhelmed about all of the things I must do everyday to get healthy food on the table, I turn to Cook Smarts. Cook Smarts doesn’t pay me to say that – I truly love the service! When I’m running late for the grocery store on Sunday morning I have someone else do the thinking for me.

— and are liable to react WHY THE FUCK. It’s not that we don’t entirely believe Kathy’s busy, it’s just that, sometimes, it’s hard to understand why she’s “overwhelmed” and “running late” and needing someone else to “do the thinking” when she doesn’t tell her readership.

“What’s for dinner?” is a surprise each night. We have had several great dinners lately – including this one made with cauliflower rice! 

It was my first time trying it (this falls into the “I would have never tried this on my own” category.

Why? Why, with a service that purports to tell you what you’re going to be eating for the entire week ahead, are you’re going to be mystified by your nightly dinner? Does CookSmarts send you envelopes sealed with wax that you’re not allowed to open until the evening of said dinner? Do you need to complete some kind of Midnight Madness scavenger hunt before you can learn what you’re going to eat at 7 p.m.?

This isn’t the case, apparently, but the system still seems to be throwing Kathy for a lumpy, made-at-home-Cheerios-loop. For instance, the “cauliflower rice” exhausts and terrifies her:

It was very much like real rice in size and shape, but I think I prefer the real deal for its texture.

So…. eat a bowl of rice?

As a second example, Kathy made pork-stuffed cabbage rolls….

except that she used beef, because she had beef.

…..and they turned out delicious. Another lightened up meal for the win! (Unlightened by red wine two nights in a row <3 )

Kathy, why are your dinners unenlightened? Or “unlightened”? Or…. is that even a word?

I’m so confused.

Kathy moves swiftly on, though, talking again about meals as though one is equivalent to a battle-like “front” —

On the dessert front, Carpe Donut is trying out a new smaller version of their Frodo, a donut ice cream sandwich (yes!!) I love anything that comes petite sized, so this was perfect split and shared in two. They are hoping to sell these in grocery stores!

— because her fight against ingesting calories is a life or death struggle:

Kathy ends her post with a weirdly blurry photograph over the shoulder of her husband and her child where they’re talking to her mother-in-law and said mother-in-law

says HI via Google Hangouts!!

Er, thanks.

Her readers are as fuzzy as her photos, with the first one saying she’s “confused” —

— another commenter saying blogging daily about “similar” meals is quite “tiresome,” and yet another saying that Kathy should really let people know how much the meal-planning program gave her in terms of payment and free services:

And yet another links to a This American Life episode about Internet trolls, in which Lindy West is harassed by someone who takes on her late father’s name, a variety of females on NPR are criticized for their voices, and the guy who maintains a camera focused on an osprey nest receives critical emails when the osprey mom starts attacking her babies.

Last Friday’s entry, on Jan. 30, is about a “cozy” “lunch date” with Bath Matt that Kathy had at a place called Court Square Tavern. The lunch is, in Kathy’s words,

now a week old, but I wanted to share it before it is forgotten!

Why would it be forgotten? I mean, in Kathy’s words, the restaurant is a place she’s been walking by “for years” at lunchtime on her way home from the gym. She says “the best cooking smells imaginable” waft out the door:

Garlic, sizzling seafood, bacon, bread. You name it. (Onions too I’m sure!)

So, what happened?

Kathy

warmed up with a cup of decaf tea before perusing the menu and specials board. Cream + sugar too.

Oh. That was well phrased.

Next, she and Bath Matt looked at the menu, and Kathy described what she found there in language she usually reserves for posts where she’s invited to someone’s wedding and is allowed to both eat cake there and take cake home:

The menu was so tempting and full of comfort foods – from smoked salmon to soups to lots of kinds of bratwurst. It felt very much like the pubs I went to in England. (Matt says they have a good beer selection in the evenings.)

Oh! Tell us more about how that summer in college when you studied in England has stuck with you, Kathy:

Klassic 2007 Kathy.

Vintage 2008 Kathy, geographical genius.

Anyway, back here in 2015, Kathy kontinues:

Matt and I couldn’t decide what to order and were both tempted by the smoked salmon, so we shared the smoked salmon plate to start. Loved the assemble-it-yourself style.

In the end, Kathy orders some pea soup “with chewy bites of ham” and toast, and Bath Matt ordered sausage and mustard because he orders meat whenever he’s allowed out to a restaurant, since there’s none to be found in the frozen-lentil steppe of the home freezer. Kathy claimed that his dish was served with “the best mustard ever!” and that it was a “Must buy!”

Which, almost surely, means we’ll never see it on her blog, given the history of the Vosges peanut butter bonbons (“One of THE BEST chocolates ever!!!”) which she raved about needing to purchase more of in all caps in 2010, the roasted tomatoes Kathy insisted she had to make herself after having them at that Forage dinner club in 2013, and the Recipage-honored “Nutty Vanilla Sweet Potato + Kale Soup” Kathy made for a contest at NCsweetpotatoes.com in 2009 (improbably winning $100 with it)

that she called the “best soup we’ve ever made,” promising that she and Bath Matt would “be making this one again!” (she seems to have done so once, in 2011).

And the fact that, well, “Black Forest mustard” by Dietz and Watson doesn’t seem to exist.

Hey there, Shadowy Clique!

You might have noticed the disappearance of ads in the last few days.

The reports from GetOffMyInternets HQ are that the traffic (or as Bath Matt might say, PAGEVIEW$) coming into Smugnom isn’t worth advertisers paying much per click anymore, apparently, and while I love writing Smugnom — and, even more, being a part of the exchanges, criticism, anecdotes, and gifs in the comment section — I’m doing it both because it’s fun and because it’s paid writing work. So, for now, the KERF recaps will be on hiatus, and perhaps we can see some of the other talented GOMI-ers step up with some recaps of the rest of the pantheon of kale-eating nutters whose Healthy Living Blogs have always been the focus of Smugnom.

There’s an amazing audience here on Smugnom, and I’m not only honored to have been able to provoke a laugh or two, I’m immensely grateful that this place has given me and others a spot where we can roll our eyes at someone who whines about the quality of her vacations and the drudgery of her easy life. Smugnom and GetOffMyInternets distracted me and made me laugh until I needed my inhaler during the hardest, most hellish years of my life.

I don’t like the thought of suspending this thing we’re all part of, but hopefully, we can figure out how to make the ad-money again flow like a freshly punched box of Franzia soon — without having to resort to sponsored posts about radish matchsticks, diet cranberry cocktails, and charity headbands.

In the meantime, I hope to see you all over on the forums — don’t forget to bring the Idris Elba gifs!

Love and Franzia,

Conchshell