KERF Recaps: Kathy Puts Sauce on a Squash, Lists Food, Pretends to Like Tea, and Makes Us Think About Her Foot Blisters

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.

In Tuesday’s post, Kathy repositions her random red yard-berries for the sake of photography and invents a brand-new recipe —

— that one of her readers actually brought to her attention two months ago:

Thanks to Sarah’s uncredited idea and the sponsorship of Celestial Seasonings, Kathy is able to come up with a story that goes, Once upon a time, there was a diet blogger named Kathy, and she couldn’t resist combining her two favorite things. Really. She calls Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride her “Long time favorite tea” and says, since oats are her favorite breakfast,

How could I not!?

Aside from being an idiotic question, let’s consider, for a moment, what value Kathy is bringing to the Celestial Seasonings brand. She’s just told the world that their product is her favorite kind of tea. Not one of her favorites — her favorite. Now, if I were trying to get bloggers to be ambassadors for Conchshell’s Franzia-Soaked Ham (patent pending), I’d hate to see them say that it was the best kind of wine-drenched pork product they’d ever had if just a quick glance over their archives showed that they’d enjoyed a variety of products combining booze and pig over their blog’s life.

Or maybe Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride really is Kathy’s favorite, and that it’s a coincidence that it’s been her favorite only since her sponsorship started, and that it’s also true that her “favorite tea” is also Zhena’s Coconut Chai, as she said in 2008, but also an Adagio blend called Almost Pumpkin Pie Ice Cream as she said in 2011:

Of course, it might be a little much to expect consistency from someone who also wrote in 2011

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

Love: black, creamy, minty, vanillay

Hate: Fruity, citrus, watery, spiced”

I mean, considering Earl Grey’s flavor comes from citrus oil and all.

Anyway, this recipe involving Kathy’s now-favorite tea is so great it doesn’t even need the oatmeal. At least, I think that’s what she means by following this photo with this sentence, because after that, she goes into the steps of the recipe:

And, okay, some of those seasonal teas are pretty good (as long as you don’t ever attempt Bigelow’s Eggnogg’n tea on its own, because it is sadder than Willie Nelson singing “Blue Christmas”). But you can’t expect anyone to think a mug of tea is breakfast — especially not on Christmas. I don’t think you can get away with setting down six boxes of sponsor-gifted tea down in front of anyone and calling that a “Christmas morning breakfast” unless you’re broke, on drugs, consumptive, or all three.

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

Maybe I’m just being nitpicky and Kathy is saying, in her post from Dec. 9, 2014, that a bowl of tea-containing oatmeal would be good on Christmas. She’s actually correct! The blogger over at “Chocolate Covered Katie” actually made oatmeal using Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride tea and has a whole post about coming up with it in 2011. (Katie’s post, which is not sponsored, also includes the nutritional breakdown of her recipe, garners 177 comments, and shows Katie answering reader questions with useful information and being gracious when someone notes things that need correction.)

All that is fine and good, but what Kathy has that’s different and special is…. a photo of every single step of her process, either because she thinks her readers like looking at how she can put glitter on parts of herself and make it look dull, or because she thinks there’s someone out there who doesn’t know what a goddamned pinch of salt is.

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

She also writes the stiffest two sentences ever penned about sweet ingredients:

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.

I know she majored in history, but, at her subsequent public relations job, was she literally trained by a box of Kashi crackers and a scandal-embroiled public servant flustered by a TV news crew?

Besides, that’s not all she thinks the oatmeal needs. Kathy also suggests topping oatmeal with three kinds of non-meat fat and gingerbread cookies.

After writing out her list of ingredients and directions a second time, Kathy awkwardly references the tea-in-a-recipe sponsored post at “Healthy Tipping Point” —

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

— and writes her own bizarre attempt at ad copy:

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

Huh? I’m pretty sure sponsored posts about tea that tastes like cookies shouldn’t seem foreboding.

In the comments section, we learn two more pieces of information. The first is that Kathy believes in “quality.”

The second is that “quality” means whatever Kathy thinks it means at the moment at which she was asked:

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.”

The January post above is the same post where she responds to another commenter questioning her promoting canned and boxed soups containing “natural flavors” by saying to them, “And I guess it’s good that I promote Great Harvest bread…no preservatives there.” (She’s right, as long as you don’t consider the sulfur dioxide and calcium chloride in the dried fruits, tomatoes, and peppers used at Great Harvest locations that post their ingredients. She would not have been correct if she’d said Great Harvest doesn’t use “natural flavors,” since their Apple Crunch — one of her favorite things to make fake French toast from — has natural and artificial vanilla flavor in it. You know, the delicious stuff that can be made from beaver exudate and wood polymer.)

On Wednesday, Kathy puts some fucking meat and tomatoes on half a spaghetti squash, because I guess she missed the last 30 years where people have been doing that.

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!

She even has the nerve to say, twice, that it looks “fancy.” It doesn’t. It also uses “Italian seasoning,” “home-jarred tomato sauce, but store-bought is fine,”

and zero onion, though she allows the use of, “if you like those kind of things.”

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” —

Via the Toledo Free Press

— 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.

• A restaurant lunch with Bath Matt’s mom. She got a salad and ate her toddler’s leftover beans and macaroni and cheese.

• More of her toddler’s leftovers:

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.