Happy Kitchen-ween!

Since my amazing wedding guests (mostly my second cousins and beloved friends) blessed me with "flame" (read: bright orange) le creuset cookware for our wedding, I decided to celebrate halloween by using ALL OF IT. On one meal. Challenge: accepted!

As a side note, this burst of kitchen productivity is mostly due to the impact of getting a part time job. For one, I hate to cook after I've been on my feet at a retail job all day, so I save cooking for days off and then re-heat, re-heat, re-heat. The Grige doesn't do anything but re-heat at school these days anyhow, so it's no harm, no foul.  I like to make big dishes like stew, soup, pot-pie and casseroles. Then we can take them easily for lunch as well.  Secondly, having days that are "on" at a job, makes me appreciate off days so much more, and motivates me to take on big projects, in and out of the kitchen. This is one of my top arguments for getting a part time job in retail or at a restaurant while you're looking for something full time. It gives you a ridiculous amount of clarity on how to spend your down-time.

Pot Pie Filling... If I told you I don't lick the bowl after this goes into the casserole dish, I would be lying. 

So, back to my orange cookware challenge. Just one Halloween challenge wasn't enough, so I took on a second one from my life list: make the Grige a layer cake. It's a midterm cake - he's swamped right now and feeling pretty down, so hopefully this will pep him up. For those of you who know me well, I'm sure you're aware that desserts are not my thing. I gladly leave them out of event menus, I would have happily gotten married without cake or pie, if I ran the zoo. However, the Grige loves dessert, and one of my outside goals for our marriage was to make myself more "in tune" with his meal preferences, therefore learning to cook for both of us, instead of just myself +1. Since he hasn't been cooking at all lately, it's probably an opportune moment to work on dessert.

I chose the cake for "beginners" from the October 2012 Bon Appetit Mag. It's a chocolate-banana cake with peanut butter frosting. it has 2 layers, is square and involved way more cake-pertise than I personally possess. All things considered, I think it turned out pretty well, though I had to hide my uneven layers with frosting. If you want the recipe, either go buy the magazine or visit their website www.bonappetit.com. One of my biggest qualms with desserts is that I don't want to be tempted to eat food that is bad for me. This idea is brilliant, because the Grige is at studio all night with his classmates, so I can just bring the cake up there and be a hero while not having to deal with leftovers. BOOM! I listened to Cake (the band) while I made it and felt very cool. Even better, I listened to "I bombed Korea" off of Motorcade of Generosity while I bombed the cake with chocolate chips. Appropriate, no?

Frosting was definitely the major challenge for me, considering my lack of coordination. I highly recommend putting your frosting in the fridge for at least 30 minutes before attempting to put it on a cake. Also, definitely let your cakes cool for as long as you can leave them alone before stacking and frosting them. I'm sure these are basics for most people, but following those rules really made my life easier today.

In order to use the rest of my cookware, I tackled our favorite chicken pot pie, and switched the playlist to some vintage, angry Ben Fold Five. This recipe was in the October 2011 issue of Bon Appetit, and I took it on as a cooking challenge last winter. Every time I make it, I tell myself that I'm never making it again because it is so hard, and yet, I can't resist, because it is so freaking delicious. So good, that if I smelled it from a neighboring apartment, I would totally go knock on the door and invite myself to dinner. I prepared it using a skillet, a dutch oven, a large sauce pan, a tea kettle, a rubber scraper a ridiculous amount of mixing bowls. I get faster at making it every time, but it was still a four hour endeavor. I have to say that it was totally worth it - it's a one crust wonder and was absolutely delicious. It will also serve up about 5-6 meals for me and 3-4 meals for the Grige, so it's a lot of bang for your buck. I would post the recipe, but I don't want to violate the copyright, and it's very long, and I've spent a lot of time looking at it today already. If you'd like it, shoot me a message and I'll send it your way.

Cake & Pie

I'm hoping that my kitchen challenges will culminate in some killer additions to my Thanksgiving meal spreadsheet. Today's work taught me that I'm going to ask someone else to bring pie and gave me a brilliant plan for beefing up my gravy. We're hosting my parents and grandparents this year, which will be a blast. I already have a 3-sheet, color-coded excel document outlining what-when-where's of the meal. I can't wait!

So what does everyone else do with their days off? Tomorrow, I think I'm going to tackle homemade bagels, hanging the mirror over our dresser and cleaning out the front room to get ready for our new couch.

A Question

Today, internets, I have just one question. But first, some background:

I had a job interview yesterday, which I think went pretty well. Yay. The next step in applying for this job was to fill out an online "psychological" evaluation. The evaluation consisted of 2 sections of about 100 multiple (a or b) choice questions and 1 section of short answer questions. I don't generally mind doing these things... they are more tedious than difficult and certainly a good indication that the employer cares about their company culture.

So in this particular evaluation, there were a number of questions that really surprised me. Namely: questions about excessive drinking. Now, I can absolutely understand why an employer would want to screen for potential drinking problems. You can give a drug test to find evidence of illegal drugs, but a confession would be the best way to find out about alcohol use.

What I can't figure out, is what person in their right mind would ever, ever answer a question (honestly) about their personal drinking habits in an evaluation for a potential employer. That question cannot possibly have ever done anything useful for them in identifying a person whose alcohol habits might negatively impact their work performance, so why ask? Unless of course, the person was drunk while taking the evaluation.... Perhaps I've answered my own question.

In any case, I stuck with peppermint tea while I took the evaluation. Boy did I need a drink afterwards though!

1 Wedding, 1 Funeral, and The Office Space Conundrum

Sorry for the brief pause, I was out of town all last week running the gamut of human experience. I attended the wedding of my childhood best friend to a wonderful man, organized and attended a memorial service for my Grandfather and got hit in the head with a lot of black walnuts tossed by a vengeful tree in West Michigan that is trying to ruin my Dad's life.

Imagine these bastards flying at your face while you are trying to rake! EEK!

The Grige is working his little behind off on a project right now, so I came home to an apartment in what can only be described as total and utter chaos. We brought home some more wedding stuff, so there were boxes everywhere, unpacked suitcases overflowing with dirty clothes blocking my side of the bed, dishes in the sink, and a week.5's worth of trash in the trash closet. Ick. Also, nothing but rotted casserole in the fridge. I've just about dealt with the mess, but it took me all. damn. day. It doesn't help that our trash deposit is in siberia (read: about 0.15 miles from our door, up a big hill).

While I was cleaning and organizing and discovering evidence of termites in our window seat I realized a few important things:

1. Keeping house by yourself is a lot of mother flipping work.

Honestly, I could stay unemployed and still be busy every second of my day making dinners, cleaning, buying groceries and doing laundry. I really could. And if we were to add kids to that equation some day? Holy Hell Raisers. I wouldn't even be able to break for lunch. I'm kind of missing our tiny apartment in new and different ways.

2. I like being busy.

There is a scene in Office Space where Lawrence asks Peter what he would do if he had a million dollars. Peter says he would do nothing. I didn't say it to my guidance counselor, but I always sort of felt like I was in the same boat. I like to read, I enjoy sporadically writing this blog, and I like to be outside, but I can't really tell how all of that fits into a career (hint: it doesn't). I can tell you this for sure: doing nothing is not equal to not being busy. I'm a very busy unemployed person. When work doesn't give me projects, I make them for myself. Sometimes that includes applying for jobs, and sometimes it doesn't. So I think I get the point now, and I wish I could apply for construction jobs.

3. Dear Mario Batali: Your recipes cannot be considered "simple" if half the ingredients are not available in a midwestern grocery store.

I had to look up pretty much everything for one recipe on the cook's thesaurus before I could complete my grocery list. I'm all for authenticity, but don't tell me it's "simple" when it's going to take me 2 hours to find acceptable ingredients.

I'll be back with more on last week once my black walnut induced concussion heals.

That's Not Very Zen...

We have a little bit of a spider problem in our new home. The Grige insists that it's not really a problem so much as a really aggressive "other bug" solution. So far, I've only seen one or two on the floor of our bedroom, which is okay, but the rest of the house is a freaking spider free-for-all. They're not too nasty - just mid-size, bug-eating, brown guys - and I'm learning to deal with them.

I do wish that Toby Maguire could come hang out with us instead.
Photo: http://www.meltingpotinternational.com/news6.html 

Earlier this week, I was in the bathroom doing my business (like you do) and one came flying out from under the tub like a bat out of hell and kept coming straight at me despite screeching, bath mat kicking, and what can only be described as "leg flailing". I ended up killing it with my bare foot, and thus began the "always wear shoes" rule. I hope you're laughing, because I'm banking on the comedic value of this story being greater than my humiliation at sharing it. The Grige thinks this was the funniest thing that has ever happened.

After that, I have been (understandably) a little bit jumpy. I was taking the trash out (filled with the dripping remains of soaked hops and wort - homebrewing is not really winning my heart this week), and a bottle cap rolled out from under it. I screamed bloody murder, jumped a mile and spilled a combination of coffee grounds, nectarine pits and beer soaked brewing remains all over the kitchen floor. So, you know, improvement! At least it wasn't bodily fluids this time, though I did still have to change my pants afterwards - there are few things more disgusting than running shorts drenched in sweat and beer. Luckily, I had just returned from a run and needed to shower anyway.

The front sun room, my yoga mats are in the corner, the Grige's crap is everywhere else

The worst infestation of spiders thus far has been in the front sun-room. This is mostly because it has been neglected, filled with boxes and random musical equipment since we moved in. We are planning to use it as a guest bedroom/reading room once our new couch arrives and we can move the evil futon of decoration death in there. However, that won't be until early November. Filled with the determination-that only unemployment and spending a year in a 500 square foot apartment- could inspire to use every square foot in our apartment, I decided to turn the front sun room into a yoga room.

One of the things the Grige and I agreed not to compromise on as we planned for our new, depleted financial condition was fitness expenses. We're both much happier people when we get our exercise, so a yoga membership for me and gym membership for him were non-negotiable. However, I've been reluctant to actually get started at a studio before I've figured out some income, so I've been writing my own practice in addition to running. Using a kitchen timer and a notebook, I have to say it's going pretty well.

Another sunroom shot, so you can understand the extent of spider dwelling area

So back to the spiders. It's not that it didn't occur to me that I was trying to set up a zen space in a place that was filled with spiders and messy things for them to hide behind. I brought a few pairs of shoes and a roll of paper towels in with me and hoped the scent of my incense would deter them. What I didn't expect is that one with a rotund body the size of my thumb nail would crawl torpidly, like Shelob out of her lair, across my mat while I was in headstand. No shoe or paper towel could save me, frankly, I think that even a sledgehammer would have been unequal to the task.

Luckily, the beast's worst was to stroll across my mat like she owned it while I lost my shit, grabbed a shoe and waited, heart pounding, for her to vacate my mat and meet her doom. Which she did, with much squelching on her part and screaming on mine. Not very zen.

So instead of Shavasana, I killed a box of wine and tried to recover for the rest of the evening. I don't yet know what the lesson here is, only that St. Louis is finding new ways to challenge my sanity every day, and I'm probably going to just go ahead and get that yoga studio membership. 

My Awesome Un-Job

I came to two startling realizations last night:

1. Grad school parties are exactly the same as undergrad parties, only nerdy-er and more selective. But not in a bad way! We went to a CMYK party last night, everyone was very welcoming, fun and dressed colorfully. Maybe it's because the Grige is endearing and did a good job of getting people excited to meet me, but I felt very welcome.

Cool-ass graphic via Tough Little Spider blog

2. I am way more comfortable talking about being unemployed than I ever was talking about my last job. Where are you in your career when you feel more confident and in control talking about how you sit on your couch and blog all day than you feel talking about your very well paid work as a legal recruiter?

I think I felt so much better talking about my plans for unemployment because I have a plan. In my job, I just sort of let things happen to me. My boss was generally in charge of my work flow, and every time I tried to invest and make myself essential to the completion of some facet of our work, I was told to "not worry about it" and just go home on time and that someone else would deal with the nitty gritty.

I'm not saying that wasn't nice. It was! I worked decent hours, didn't spend much time worrying about work and was very well paid. However, at this stage in my career, it really started to get to me to not feel "needed". While I was constantly thanked for my "hard work" and knew that what I did was helpful, I still had little to no control over how my work got done and felt like any one of the thousands of jobless recent grads out there could walk in and do exactly what I was doing.

That is a really good lesson to take into the job hunt with me: I'm not going to do my best work or enjoy my job if I don't feel "needed": Like I offer something important and unique to my work that is useful in the overall function of the company. It also re-affirms my decision to hold out for a job I really want. I don't feel like I'm wasting my time at all on my shorter-term unemployment goals.

What can you take away from this? If you're having a hard time talking about your job (and in a city like DC, I had to do this A LOT), something probably is wrong, and it may be worth your time to stop what you are doing and figure out what it is. Because even unemployment can have a positive spin. 

It's Fall! And Architects are Crazy.

It's fall! Guess how I know: It's not because the weather is cooler. It's not because all of my favorite stores keep sending me updates about sweater sales. It's not even because the main feature of my days is being reminded that school is in session.

I know, because in the last week, I have made 2 batches of pumpkin muffins and a batch of the most complicated (but also the most delicious) chicken pot pie recipe in the world (bon appetit, October 2011 issue - THANK YOU).

So. Much. Pumpkin.

I am also very excited for pumpkin beer, which is apparently going to happen in my kitchen this weekend. I couldn't really wait.. so I might have maybe, perhaps purchased some already...

Also, I would like to start a stereotype. After working in a law firm for 2 years, and in international disaster relief for 2 years, I can comfortably say that the stereotypes about those types of jobs are mostly true. Perhaps not in the greatest extremes that they are sometimes portrayed in, but lawyers do work extremely hard, almost always wear suits and are generally enslaved to the billable hour in some fashion or another. And international disaster relief attracts the rag-tag bunch of mostly cynical, insanely dedicated booze swilling nutcases that you might imagine.

However, the sterotypes about architects are not getting the story right. And as someone who has been deeply let down in the preparedness department by that missing cultural narrative, I would like to set the record straight. Architects are crazy. They. Work. So. Ridiculously. Hard. Do you remember those people were on campus who walked around like zombies who subsisted on panda express instead of human flesh and didn't sleep all semester? I always assumed they were law students or engineers or med students or homeless people who were trying to stay warm in the library. But no, they were future architects. 

They possess crazy of an artist with the attention to detail of an engineer and the work ethic of a junior lawyer at a Biglaw firm. I always imagined them walking around their buildings, wearing all black with a colorful scarf and saying things like "the columns are so very ethereal, don't you think, hmmmmm?". Instead it's more like my husband just slammed the door and face-planted in to bed with his clothes on a mere 20 minutes before my chicken pot pie that I spent six hours cooking him for dinner was done because he hasn't slept in 2 days. And then asks me if I'd like to attend an optional guest lecture with him the next day. 

And that's the last time we were ever awake in the same room  until the Grige graduated from school.
Photo: Summer Jean Photography

I'm sure I don't have to tell you other liberal arts flunkies the laundry list of things I would be doing instead of attending an optional guest lecture if I hadn't slept in 2 days, had barely seen my new wife in 8 weeks and could smell that amazing pie wafting from the kitchen. Duh.

But no, I married an architect. So here it is ladies - these dudes deserve the same warning stickers that lawyers, doctors and future presidents receive: Do not date unless you love spending time alone and being supportive in the face of the sheer madness that is expected of them at work.* 

*note - I aimed this at the ladies, or gentlemen, considering dating an architect instead of aspiring architects themselves, because I'm sure they already know how hard it will be. The rest of us need to catch up.  

Never mess with a feminist with a power drill

That means you, exterior brick wall. Watch your mother flipping back.

Yesterday was not great. I started the day with a little run and then directed myself firmly to drive to the bank, because if I don't make myself drive the car, I will continue to be terrified of driving the car. Well, I had to parallel park, and I don't do well under pressure and there were tears, and honking. I did better with the rest of my errands, driving without GPS and enjoying the blessed joy of parking lots as opposed to street parking.

I came home and made my first ever attempt at hanging pictures that required more than a finishing nail.  And then I learned something very valuable about exterior walls: Don't hang anything on them. Ever. Especially if the screw hole you are trying to make is slightly above eye level when you are standing on the nightstand. I am so sore, all the yoga in the world cannot fix the muscles that ache right now.

Evil exterior walls

I went to be a little upset, not least because the Grige was in studio until 3:00 am and I am oh, so very lonely. So I finished reading How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran, went to sleep, and got up this morning ready for another try. A successful try, if you will...

It's odd, when the Grige and I first moved in together, I was a little sad that I never really had the chance to live on my own. I had lived with roommates, housemates, in dorms, on pull-out couches, but never truly by myself. It's not really a feasible option in a city like DC, and only ever regretted that opportunity a little bit.  But now, in my first year of marriage, I get my chance. No Grige to hang things, or hang out with me, and I am 100% in charge of dealing with the apartment.

So I fired up the old computer, and downloaded sketchup, took the first few tutorials and drew a mock-up of our kitchen wall. Three hours later I turned four crumbling nail holes into actual hanging pictures in our bedroom and our kitchen wall in to a montage of art that doesn't really work anywhere else. I'll share a better picture once I get one more frame delivered.

Fun Wall!

The thing is, I never expected to be dancing around to The Boss alone in my apartment with a bandana on my head, a beer in my hand and a hammer and a drill hanging off my belt. I thought my chance for this experience had passed my by when the Grige popped a ring on my finger. So yes, things aren't ideal right now. But so far, our marriage is the gift that keeps on giving, just so long as you can sort through the frustration to find them. 

Unemployed.

So here I am, on our futon, ready to take my Netflix experience to the next level. Just kidding. Kind of. It's a scary thing to leave your job in this economy, and it's further complicated by the fact that I don't really know what career I want. It's hard to look for a job when you don't know what you are looking for.

What I do need, is maybe not a job, but is a series of non-loafing related goals to start moving me in the right direction. So, let's take a look at EFF's strategy for a productive unemployment:

• 1 blog post every week day. Writing every day will give me a physical accomplishment to show for my time. It is very satisfying to see each new post pop up, and that is validation that will keep me motivated
• Start studying for the GRE. This won't be an everyday endeavor, but it will sharpen my math skills and get me thinking about what's next. Pick a test date by December
• Get the house into shape - hang our photos, break down the boxes, get the closet working functionally.
• Cook dinner each night. Eating in is not only financially sustainable, but it will give me a schedule to stick to. Dinner takes place around the same time each day, which means I have to get off my behind and be productive on a schedule. It will also give me a chance to use all my fancy new kitchen tools. 
• Run 15 miles a week
• Contribute financially to our household in some fashion by mid-October.

I think that the rut a lot of people get into is making their goal list too focused on finding a job. Yes, that's important, and you should work on it. But tying a goal that you, ultimately, have no control over to your self-esteem is a dangerous thing. I've done it before, and it can make you feel pretty terrible when things don't work out for whatever reason. So, keep your goals focused on things you can control, keep applying for jobs, and things will fall into place. 

Another point to remember is that you don't have to find your ideal job to have a job. It doesn't always look like you thought, but bringing in a paycheck and having the structure of a schedule can do a lot for you. If I haven't landed on anything good in a few weeks, I'll be walking my behind right down to the nearest Crate & Barrel or j.Crew to apply for sales jobs. 

So stay tuned, You'll be hearing from me a lot moving forward.