Mac and Cheese

My favorite food group is probably pizza, but when we are talking about comfort food, my heart and stomach go straight after a piping hot bowl of macaroni and cheese. Growing up we were fed a healthy diet of “the boxed stuff” and to me there’s no shame in that. But, my mom also makes her own homemade version, and I’m sorry to say I really don’t like it. Everyone else in my family does, but to me it’s missing a rich creaminess that is so integral to the radioactive blob that comes out of a space packet.

Adam refuses to indulge me in my lust for boxed whack-and-cheese so I’ve taken to making my own version from scratch. It’s been a long time since I attempted a homemade interpretation, but this week’s dreary weather had me aching for a bowl of stick-t0-your ribs, -hips, -thighs, -underarms and anywhere else that jiggles delight.

My internet search (because, seriously, at this point I’m addicted to finding most of my recipes online) offered up a lot of options. So many of them (a horrifying amount, really) encouraged you to add caramelized onions or spinach or green onions or tomatoes or even bacon. Folks, that’s not macaroni and cheese, that’s a casserole. Listen, mac and cheese has noodles, an ungodly amount of butter, cheese, and a Béchamel sauce. Boom! Roasted! That is it. I mean it.

I guess I’m just a purist.

I am talking to you right now, though, and telling you to get this recipe on your radar, uh, like, now. You can see it above, and you can see how much of a dent two people can make if they put their minds to it. Consequently, we have humungous butts now, but that’s 100% not the point. (That’s a 3-quart pan so you do the math). This isn’t fitness food and I don’t recommend coming to the table in your skinny pants or really anything without an elastic waistband. You know what, do yourself a favor and just get in a robe because we all know you’re about ready to get comatose after this. Treat yourself.

I *may* be exaggerating. But I also may not. It’s really such a good recipe and it’s all in the ratio of cheese sauce to noodles. It’s insanely creamy and doesn’t congeal too quickly and offers the right amount of gooey-ness to bring me back to my childhood without shaming my husband. I do need to note, however, that she suggests maybe heaping some bacon on at the end. I think we all know how I feel about this. Don’t. Do it.

Bon appétit!

(also, super sorry for the iphone photos, but with so much cheese sauce and drool around I was too nervous to bring out my nice camera)

(lastly, I don’t really feel comfortable rewriting someone else’s recipe so I would rather just link to it. hope that’s ok with everyone : )

Tuesday Book Club: Martha Quest

ugggghhhh.

I finished the book. Finally.

I sort of hate how angsty-teen I’ve been about this book, but I suppose it’s fitting since the semi-autobiographically novel is about a remarkably angsty teen. Doris Lessing did for young, adolescent women what J.D. Salinger, John Knowles, William Golding, and more were doing for adolescent men, i.e., giving them a voice and a friend with which to identify. Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature for this work because of her ground-breaking subject matter. That matter being the thoughts and feelings of women. Oh my, I’m so glad much has changed since 1952.

Martha Quest isn’t a terrible book; it just didn’t suit me. I love introspective novels, I really like semi-autobiographical novels, and I am very much drawn toward female narrators. I suppose it just felt so repetitive (yet another fight with her mother, yet another night when she gets unhappily drunk at the Sports Club) and woefully self-indulgent that I felt supremely bored and thus became distracted. So I was happy to put the book down when it was finished. I unfortunately very rarely stop reading a book before it’s finished. It’s just a tic. Anyone else do this?

One way in which I did identify with Martha was through a love of reading. Early in the novel, Martha asserts, “there are two ways of reading: one of them deepens and intensifies what one already knows; from the other, one takes new facts, new views to weave into one’s life. She was saturated with the first, and needed the second.”

Me too, Martha. I read so many of the same types of books. For example, I read all kinds of memoirs. Unless you are Kris Jenner, or anyone else in the Koven for that matter, I want to read your story, hear about your youth and learn why you function the way you do. This sort of self-awareness is so important to me and integral to the way I function that I love to learn how so many individuals approach it differently.

Similarly, bring on the contemporary fiction! Hear ye, hear ye, anyone born before 1940 need not apply! No, but seriously. David Foster Wallace, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan, A.H. Homes, you guys, let’s do this! It’s basically all I want to read. Just look at the beginning of my 2014 reading list. I could really use some new books with new facts and new viewpoints.

What about you? What are you reading? Are you also in a rut, or are you always mixing it up?

Empathy

 

Dr Brené Brown presents a beautiful and insightful difference between empathy and its more selfish cousin, sympathy. I’ve always thought of sympathy having positive connotations, but when she explains that sympathetic statements often come from a place of judgment or self-righteousness it totally made sense. She says that so many sympathetic statements begin with “at least.” It immediately cuts a person’s problem down and discourages that person from experiencing or sharing their full emotions. Empathy, rather, forces us to be at our most vulnerable. We must bring ourselves down to the lowest point and expose our weaknesses and faults with others, thus deepening our connections with them.

It’s a short and sweet video that’s certainly worth your time today.

 

(via A Cup of Jo, via Swissmiss)

Happy New Year, Friday!

 

According to the New York Times‘s dialect quiz, “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk,” I most identify with central-southern Kansas and Nebraska. Ehh, close enough. Some of the questions are a bit mystifying (“How do you pronounce Mary, merry, and marry?” Uhh, the same?) but many of the usual suspects are in there as well (e.g., “What do you call a sweet, carbonated beverage?” Pop!).

It’s certainly worth taking the quiz especially since it’s a Friday and rainy here and probably freezing where you are. Mostly, though, it’s just fun to read what other regions of the country are calling a roly-poly and whether or not you have a name for the phenomenon of rain occurring while the sun shines (I do not). Anyway, take the quiz and tell me where you’re “from.”

And if you’re still in a procrastinating mood here are a few links that caught my eye this week:

In the name of maps, here are 40 maps that are supposed to help you make sense of the world, but that I found sort of nonsensical.

Adam and I need to decorate our third room, which is the office-slash-guest room. Here are some great tips on putting together a functional office (at home or in a more professional setting where jammies and spando-pants are not de rigueur)

Movie adaptations of books can be tricky to reconcile, but this list of upcoming flicks gives me hope.

Winter soups: Spicy Black Bean, Creamy Cauliflower, White Bean Chicken Chili, and Sausage and Tortellini. I made the last one about a week ago and can confirm it was tasty. It actually was better a couple days later, but one must be able to handle the very soft noodles by that point.

Are you also working out indoors? Here are five new routines to try at home.

This would be me.

Are writing and alcoholism still inextricably linked?

Pig intestines being served as calamari?! Say it isn’t so!!

Adam and I are researching honeymoon destinations (taking all tips!) and this will be first on the packing list. Joining the masses it seems…

Just discovered the prints of Clare Elsaesser. Really love this one in particular.

Shoes.

College in a nutshell.

Admittedly an abbreviated list, but I was up to other goodness this week, specifically the devouring of Scandal on Netflix. Anyone else watching this show?

What are you up to this weekend? Not sure what our plans are exactly but I know that we will be deliberately avoiding contact with basically everyone because it seems like this whole city is sick. Sick as a fox as Liz Lemon would say…

This comes from my favorite episode of 30 Rock, by the way (season 6, episode 8). A-n-y-w-a-y, I think we are making curry and possibly buying some much-needed furniture, but other than that it should be pretty relaxed. Whatever you get up to, I hope it’s grand!

 

Happy Birthday, Courtney!

Courtney’s probably real tired of me pulling out this pictures every time anyone says something about her or youth or faces. BUT, I just love this picture so much, and not only because of our Amish-looking attire (I’m sorry, but is that a lace dickie?!)

Courtney (pictured on the left) made that same face for, like, her first five years of life and I love it. Looking through our baby albums it is uncanny how many times that grin (?) has shown up. Thankfully she doesn’t do this face so much any more; it has blessedly been replaced by an incomparable repertoire of fascinating facial manipulations–that’s a mouthful, but there really is no other way to put what that girl gets up to. That ethereal halo of hair around my head, however, has never disappeared.

Anyway, this wee babe is 26 years old and basically making a killing at all things life related. I so wish I could be home to celebrate with her and our family (at Rye, no less), but we’ll just toast to her birth when I get back in February.

Happy Birthday, little squirrel! xoxo Gossip Girl

 

Blackfish

Pretty much everyone who knows me knows that I am in no way sports inclined. I obviously have a love of fitness, including yoga, running, dumbbell tossing and more, but sports are so not my thing. I’m not competitive so that’s why I was a dancer growing up; not quite the contact sport like soccer or basketball. ::shudder::

So while others where collecting baseball cards or other sports-related paraphernalia I was sifting through my animal trading cards. I remember nights sitting at my desk looking through facts and figures on a broad range of representatives in the animal kingdom. My very favorite animal for a long time was the beluga whale. The name itself is highly enticing but it’s smooth, ethereal coloration, round head and relatively compact body made it an instant classic.

In fact, whales still fascinate me to this day. My answer to “which animal would you most like to be” is almost always whale. (Whenever I’m feeling especially like a badass I might say tiger or something equally intense.) They are just so majestic and serene and I would really like to know what it feels like to be that humongous.

I would not, however, like to know what it feels like to be that huge and trapped in a glorified bathtub for the rest of my life. Blackfish, the recent documentary darling, gives us a frightening glimpse into what that life is a like, though, and it is a grim picture. The movie certainly makes SeaWorld look like the Bad Guy, but dang, the evidence sure is damning. I was moved by what gentle giants Orca whales are and their naturally calm disposition in the wild, far away from captivity. That seems to be the key phrase since evidence shows that whales develop harmful psychoses when trapped for nearly their entire adult lives and in fact live to half their projected life expectancy when caged.

I know I won’t be stepping foot into a SeaWorld, oh, ever again (I’m not even sure I’ve ever been there… Growing up in Kansas doesn’t really provide for much whale watching), because it’s filled with liars and frauds. As you can tell I’m a bit worked up over it, but the documentary is fascinating and heart-breaking. Variety called it a “psychological thriller” and that’s such a spot-on descriptor. You can watch it for free on Netflix or download it from iTunes, but do beware that some parts are pretty graphic and there is detailed footage of attacks on humans.

Have you already seen it? What did you think? Are you also more in love with whales than ever?

Reading List 2014, Volume 1

So far this year I’ve eaten three clementines and two apples so I can definitely say I am making progress on the “eat more fruit” resolution and that is a bonus. (I also bought blood oranges at the store this morning–no scurvy for this household!) This morning, at the bookstore, I made the beginning steps toward progress on the slightly more demanding resolution of “read 40 new books.” I say “new” because to read a book every week, on average, is a lofty yet achievable goal and one that gives me wiggle room for rereads, which are an inevitable part of my literary appetite. I am slogging through Martha Quest right now and believe me it is slow-going. Like, I can only read it in cafes because every.single.time I start reading it I fall asleep. Even on the train! So I have to read it in public or I will still be talking about it in a year. And, consequently, be narcoleptic.

Martha Quest is for book club at the end of the month so I certainly have time to read it, but this morning I picked up a book I am actually excited about: Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld. I read her debut novel, Prep, twice about a million years ago and loved it for its painful and hugely embarrassing, and in turn honest, portrayal of youthful angst. I know she is more well known for her second novel, American Wife, about a fictional First Lady, but I actually haven’t read that. I’m just going to jump to her next book and hope that proves as well written and insightful as her first.

In addition, I’ve listed a series of books that I am very much looking forward to reading in 2014. They are, in no particular order:

• Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon
• The Circle, Dave Eggers
• The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
• The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton
• Levels of Life, Julian Barnes
• Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, Clive Thompson
• Stories II, TC Boyle
• Beloved, Toni Morrison
• Oblivion, David Foster Wallace
• Dear Life: Stories, Alice Munro
• Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, ed. Sari Botton
• The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
• Elements of Style, William Strunk and E.B. White
• Half Broke Horses: A True Life Novel, Jeanneatte Walls
• The Liars’ Club: A Memoir, Mary Karr

Not a bad start to the list. I truly hope to get to all these books, and obviously quite a few more this year. Help hold me accountable, okay? Are there any books on here you can vouch for? And, better yet, are there any titles you’d care to recommend? I’m always up for suggestions!

I’ll try to keep track of my progress on the Book It page, which has become woefully outdated. Happy reading!

First Walk

 

One of my favorite episodes of The Office is Season 7, Episode 13, “The Ultimatum.” Michael, desperately in love with Holly, is dismayed to find out that she has not broken up with her boyfriend, as she promised to do, if he didn’t propose by New Year’s day. Pam, in an effort to motivate the office, makes a resolution board to encourage everyone to make healthy decisions and work hard to achieve them. During one of the office’s ubiquitous meetings, Michael’s frustrations come to a head as he implores everyone, namely Holly, to work as hard as he has to keep their resolutions. The best line of the episode (and there are many) is when Michael says, “I made a resolution to floss and I did it: 12:01, January first, BAM! blood everywhere.”

One of my resolutions was to take more pictures and when Adam and I went out for a walk yesterday (with what looked like the rest of Bern) he asked if I wanted to take my camera. “Ugh. No,” was my lazy response. Instead he wisely wielded the camera and came away with some nice shots. It was a beautiful 45-degree day and the walk was a great way to recharge between nearly finishing House of Cards and making a hugely satisfying pizza.

I only wish I had the determination of Michael Scott.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

^^i’d really like to be able to make a nice closed-mouth smile, like Adam does so well, but I usually end up dissolving like this…

^^ at the top of the hill of our street you kind of come around the corner and, on a clear day, see a pretty incredible view of the mountains. I got to show it to Adam for the first time yesterday and he appropriately appreciated it, expletive and all. You really can’t see it in these photos, but we at least tried to capture what is there.

I hope your first day of the year was equally as pleasant : )

 

Resolutions

 

They may be coming at you a day late, but it’s all good since punctuality is nowhere on this short list. What are yours?