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.
• 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.
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:
It’s so nice to look up at my beautiful friends during meals
• 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 : ) )
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.
RIP Kathy’s pillow stuffed with $5.49 Method Marshmallow Rice milk dryer sheets
