It's beginning to look a lot like pizza... Everywhere we go...

Well tonight marks the end of Jason's and my week without starch!!! We made it successfully with neither of us fainting and falling to the floor from lack of pasta.  We have, however, talked a LOT about pizza and bread and things we wish we could eat. There were times we were tempted, there were times we were tried, but we stuck to our guns and came out victors in the end!!!

We tried a bunch of new recipes this week and some definitely will become staples while others ended up a little... well... meh. In case you are interested, our two favorites were Sweet and Spicy Salmon and Creole Shrimp and Sausage Stew.  They were DELICIOUS and made us want to eat 18 pounds of it.

We had a lot of green beans, squash, zucchini, and sweet potato fries this week, too, because one of our goals was to eat more veggies. One of us did moreso than the other. (I'll let you guess who ate more veggies. Hint: me)

We even had a date night on Friday and went out to eat at Panera while successfully adhering to our dietary rules! It was really nice because we both tried something new, which we NEVER do at Panera.  I got the Fuji apple and turkey salad with broccoli-cheese soup and Jason got the BBQ chopped salad with broccoli-cheese soup (the ONLY way he will eat broccoli ever. And he still gives me his large broccoli chunks).  They were really delicious! They did come with a baguette, which we forgot to tell them we didn't need, so we just had to stare at the bread while we ate our soup with nothing to dunk in it.  It was difficult. We almost faltered, but we didn't eat the bread!

All in all, I'm pretty proud of us this week.  It's been a real eye-opener to realize how much I eat starch on a daily basis and I've even lost a few pounds this week. I won't tell you how much, though, because I'm afraid they might come back. The Beetlejuice Effect and all... (I first tried to write Betelgeuse, but then realized thats the star, not the movie. I guess I'm just too darn sophisticated for such base movie choices)

In other astronomy news: If you are a human in North America, you too can view the Transit of Venus across the sun on (this!) Tuesday the 5th! It should happen around sunset, but I haven't figured out an approximate time yet.  If you do, make sure you use some kind of eclipse glasses or pinhole configuration so you do not stare directly at the sun. Apparently this will only happen once in our lifetimes? Jason discovered it in an astronomy book yesterday at Barnes n Noble, and a google search confirmed it! Go forth and view Venus crossing the sun!!

This is why I love my family

Today my Sister and I were texting about my upcoming birthday. Our conversation then turned in a fashion typical to my wonderful family. My strange, hilarious, sweet, kooky, wonderful family.

Me: "18 more days til my birthday!!!!!!!!"

Sister: "Nooo it can't be!"

Me: "I'll be 22! I dont know how I feel about this. I'll just stay 21 please. Kthanks"

Sister: "What's wrong with 22?"

Me: "It means I'll turn 23 and then 24 and the madness will continue until I'm 60! I'm not ready to be 60!"

Sister: "Heck, I'm not ready to be 30. I'm there and I'm still not ready! That means I'm halfway to 60!!"

Me: "Ahh!!!

Sister: "Whatever you do, no not order a DQ ice cream cake"

[Side Note: I have had tragic experiences with Dairy Queen ice cream cakes in the past few years. On multiple occasions they've comepletely messed up the decoration/name/writing and scraped it off to haphazardly re-write/draw it. Once there was no fudgy chocolate layer (the best part! I mean, come on!). Once it was all vanilla ice cream instead of half vanilla and half chocolate. And once they screwed up the design so badly my Sister had to re-do it. And she did a fabulous job piping UCF's Pegasus]

Me: "I feel like I need to, though, just to keep the tradition of horribly messed up cakes alive."

Sister: "No... Because if it actually turns out right... Well, then you'll be filled with false hope and a desperate longing to do it again. So you'll test fate. You'll order a Labor Day cake. And that one might be right. Then you'll order a Thanksgiving cake and a St. Patty's Day cake and an Arbor Day cake. This will continue until your 60th birthday bash where the cake will be a wreck of epic proportions, rendering that birthday and every previous birthday a lie. You will go mad with grief and start carrying around large quantities of spoons who you will "talk" through as you warn perfect strangers of the dastardly deeds of the vicious DQ."

Me: "Bahahahahaha you are completely right. I can't tempt fate that way. What a miserable 60th birthday that would be! I'm declaring it now - when I turn 60, no one is allowed to get me any form of ice cream cake!"

Sister: "I'll make you an 'Older Than' dirt cake"

[Side Note Again: dirt cake is something Mom would make for ours and other peoples birthdays sometimes when we didn't feel like cake (which was most years. we had lots of alternative cakes) and it involved pudding and ground up oreos and probably other tasty things in a big flower pot with gummy worms on top and through it and plastic flowers sticking in it. Delicious and grody! Perfect for kids.]



Don't you wish your family were more like mine? You should. You don't know what you're missing.

And don't get me a DQ ice cream cake. My future sanity depends on it.

Things I ponder...

Why is a baby cow a calf AND the lower, back portion of my leg is called a calf? What is the connection between the two? Which came first? The calf or the calf? Were baby cow calves named after my leg calves, or were my leg calves inexplicably named after baby cow calves? And while we're on the subject, why is the plural of calf calves? And why does it start to look like an alien word or a foreign language after you've written it or seen it too many times?

Tartlet.

There are the things I ponder when I read Pioneer Woman and misread when she's talking about the baby cow calves that they're working and instead think she's talking about her husbands calves. Hey, don't look at me, she's talked about forearms before. It's entirely plausible.

And it's all her fault.

Pioneer Woman strikes again!

Seven Starchless Sunsets

Hello. My name is Lauren and I love bread. Rice. Pasta. Potatoes. And did I mention bread?

Jason and I are going for one full week without any bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, or anything else we deem to starchy.  I don't think I'm going to dramatically lose weight or miraculously cure my ailments (this is only a week, after all) but its enough to give my poor body a break for a bit and teach myself to eat more veggies. I don't really remember what prompted me to do it, but last week I decided that, by golly, I was going to go an entire week without bread/starch.  I told Jason of this fact and he said "okay, I'll do it too" and I said "really?" because I had expected him to say "okay, you have fun with that sweetie. I'll eat your pizza and garlic bread for you."  He likes to surprise me sometimes.

Anyway, we started yesterday (because of my traveling and going home and needing to compulsively eat as much nostalgia-inducing lasagne as possible) and it was really hard. I didn't give myself much of a chance after coming back to plan out a meal, so I had to scrape together a lunch for Tuesday with whatever I had already prepared. That ended up being.... wait for it.....

1) A can of green beans
2) A colby-jack cheese stick
3) Honey-drizzled walnuts (Heaven fell out of the sky. I could eat these all day long)

Lets just say lunch left a lot to be desired yesterday. Like more food.  Dinner, however, was tasty. We made teriyaki salmon and sauteed green beans and zucchini. The green beans were good... but I still prefer them not crunchy. I didn't grow up eating crunchy green beans and crunchy green beans give my mouth the memory of things like undercooked pasta. But for undercooked-pasta-green-beans, they were pretty delicious. Zucchini was amazing. Sauteed zucchini always is. It rarely disappoints, that wonderful veggie.

Anywhoozle, today has gone a lot smoother. I planned out breakfast and lunch and we're going to have pork chops with apples and onions and sweet potato fries for dinner. Very excited. (And we decided sweet potatoes were acceptable since they are much healthier than white potatoes and exceedingly delicious.)

One thing that has hit us both already is the sheer amount of bread/starch we consume.  I can look through my fridge and cupboard and see bagels, sandwich bread, hot dog buns, rice, pasta galore, pizza. Mountains of bread!! And while I don't ever plan on cutting bread out of my life, I think already, my eyes have been opened enough to cut way back on it.  I do not need a bagel for breakfast, dirty rice for lunch, spaghetti for dinner with garlic bread on the side. No matter how good it sounds to my cramping tummy. (tmi? sorry.) And, I'm sad to say, I've had days just like that.

So my goal this week is to conquer the power of the Starch Side and use it for good. Wish me luck in battle. 

Donuts for Breakfast, Cinnamon Rolls for Lunch!

I very much love where I work.

I (up til today) have been the only girl working in an office of four men and two occasional male interns. They are some of the sweetest men on the planet. I know they would do anything for me in a heartbeat.  They are also silly, strange men sometimes and I've grown accustomed to their manly strangeness.

The atmosphere of my job is best illustrated by the way Bubba (boss man) introduced our new Girl Intern (our only one!) to the office. He took her around to each cubicle and introduced her to everybody in turn, and then as soon as he introduced her to the very last person, he said, "Now I'll show you where the water is."

The water is in the fridge. This is clearly just under knowing who you work with on the Work Priorities Scale. 

Then he turned to the mostly-empty box of Publix donuts and near-demolished box of cinnamon rolls(Publix... I shall miss you dreadfully when I move to the Northern of the Carolinas!) and said "Vic brings in lunch every day, so you can always have lunch here" and just moved on like that was that and we all eat donuts for lunch everyday. (Really, Bubba, we all know its breakfast)

Now, to clarify the donuts thing... We do have bakery goods rather frequently. For the first month I worked here, we literally had a baked good almost every day.  (Have I mentioned this is a horrible place to work and we're all health food nuts?) Lately, though, its tapered off to once or twice a week. It just so happened that today was a donut day for Girl Intern. 

It was really all I could do to not laugh out loud when he kept on with his little tour and she was left perplexed about the lunch habits of her coworkers.

It's the little things, really, that make this job so great.


Not to mention I get complimented ALL THE TIME on my speedy phone answering skills. Mostly by the people calling in. It's hilarious every time.

Ode to a Chai Tea Friend

Today, while the internet was down at work for literally the entire morning, I was pondering these Chai cookies I'd recently shown to my dear friend Elizabeth (they sound super delicious, okay?) and I decided that if our friendship were a cookie, we would be an Iced Chai Tea Cookie. (I renamed it from “frosted chai tea cookie”) – As if any real persuasion is necessary, here is why:

1)      Iced chai tea is the most wonderful drink known to man. Hot chai is equally as wonderful.  We are the most wonderful girls and friends known to man.

2)      It is a cross between a cupcake and a cookie. Which to me says fluffy, warm, inviting, delicious, and soft.  We are warm, inviting, and fluffy/soft in that we are approachable and loving.

3)      It has icing. Chai Icing is sure to be the bomb. Clothes are like icing and we are stylish in our own ways and thus, the bomb(s).

4)      This cookie is almost certainly sweet and cinnamon-ny and nutmeg-y and delicious. Chai Tea is one of the sweetest ties that bind us! (From our Joffrey's days, where I introduced her to the, now, infamous drink)

5)      Like Iced Chai Tea Cookies, our friendship has depth. At first you taste the sweetness, but then you notice the many different delicious savory notes that give it it’s unique flavor.

6)      Chai Tea is a gift from God. Our friendship is a gift from God!

7)   Cookies are delicious. We both like cookies. This one seems pretty self-explanatory.

8)   I can never have Chai without thinking of Elizabeth, and now I will never be able to see/eat these cookies without thinking of Elizabeth.

Elizabeth and I really met when we became twins of our big, Ashley, in Sigma Phi Lambda, but I think the place where our friendship was really tested and grew was at sweet Joffrey's.  I made her her very first Iced Chai Tea and started her training and she became PRO and now has coffee making skillz running through her veins.  Now we're graduated and off in different states doing non-coffee jobs and the friendship forged in mid-morning rushes, and late night zyrtec filled Bible studies, and patience-teaching Senior Tuesdays, and yoga classes, and sweet retreats, and Gainesville trips, and parking garage heart-to-hearts, and Chai Tea dates is still ever so sweet. But with just enough deliciously subtle savory notes to give it depth and make it unique. ;)

Visions of PW Eggs Benedict danced in her head...

Do you ever go through phases where you see or partly experience something new and it becomes idyllic and wonderful in your mind and you want to do it SO DARN BAD? And then later you come to your senses and realize just how awful that thing would be if you lived it every day?

I like to call that The Illusion/Disillusionment Cycle, my friend.

I liken it to a child who, for example, wants to be a teacher when she grows up but when she gets older she realizes that she wants nothing more than to NOT be responsible for a group of 20-30 snotty kids who all would much rather be anywhere in the world but in her classroom. It's suitable for others, but definitely not for her.

For grown-ups though (and I use the term loosely) (the word loosely looks so strange regardless of how its spelled. Loosely, loosley, loosly.) I imagine the process to be much quicker. The disillusionment comes in a matter of hours or days. 

I bring all this up and discuss my theory because I have recently gone through the Illusion/Disillusionment cycle myself.  And it's all The Pioneer Woman's fault. 

Now, before you lambast me for blaming my problems on the Pioneer Woman, let me first explain that I love her blog and, since discovering it not really that long ago, I read it all the time. Seriously, if you haven't read her blog before, go read it now. She has a multi-faceted blog about various aspects of her life on a cattle ranch, and my favorite sections are Confessions and PW Cooks.  She is absolutely hilarious and everything she cooks makes me want to immediately reach into my screen and eat whatever horrible-for-you-but-oh-so-deliciously-good-looking thing she created. Sometimes she even makes me want to try things I don't like, and I know I don't like - like mushrooms. (blech! ick! ptooey!) Thus is the power of the Pioneer Woman.

Now back to the blaming.

It all began when I started reading her blog and saw her cute photography from the ranch and could catch a glimpse into the life of living in the sticks and doing the cattle thing.  Horses and gardens and a pond to fish in and fish kitchen utensils out of (read her blog) and autumn and lots of land and a pretty ranch house all trapped me in Illusionment.  I began daydreaming of how much fun it would be to live on a ranch and raise a family on a ranch and sit on my porch in the fall with a cup of hot chocolate, looking out at my ranch.  It sounds so peaceful, idyllic, lovely.

And then I realized what a horrible horrible idea it would be for me to live on a ranch. Me - who hates camping and outdoors and outdoors coming indoors. Me, who would love a garden but doesn't want to tend to it becuase there are bugs in the dirt, you know.  Me, who can't keep house to save my life and certainly wouldn't be out tending to cattle or whatever was going on on my ranch.  Me, who can only imagine the wild buggy creatures who would sneak into my house in the middle of the night and terrorize me in my spice cabinet and bathroom and on the back of the couch, when I least expect it.  Not to mention the fact that I simply cannot be more than 5 minutes from some sort of civilization and grocery store. Mostly the store. Preferably a Walmart so I can get other stuff too.  Also, cell reception. I'm just assuming cell reception on a ranch isn't the most ideal. Not to mention, waking up early in the morning to tend to whatever is on my ranch. That sounds horrid.

Thus, Disillusionment.

So thank you, Pioneer Woman, for reminding me that, while ranch life can be awesome for the right people, I am not the right people.  Now, console me and my lost dream with your tasty looking food. Amen.