top secret!

I think I've figured out what I want to be when I grow up!

Now let's our cross our fingers & hold our collective breath to see if I can make it happen in the next year & a half.

veggies: week 4 (or so)

Today!!!

- lettuce

- spinach

- broccoli

- arugula

- parsley

- collard greens

- kale

- Hakurei Japanese turnips, which, according to the CSA are "fruity-sweet...[and] great raw or lightly cooked. Even if you're not crazy about traditional turnips, give these a try...you'll be surprised."

Tonight is Russell J's turn for dinner & he is cooking up a shepherd's pie with chicken, carrots, celery, broccoli, & a potato/turnip mutant topping (However, he is prohibited from using my fruity-sweet turnips, in case they really do outshine "traditional" turnips).

P.S. NO RADISHES!!!

P.P.S. Russell likes to listen to NPR while he's cooking. Nerdy adorable!

confessions

Confession: I have yet to start my taxes. I mean, how hard can they be, right? Hard enough for me to avoid them like the plague. Or the plaque, which I am also attempting to avoid after not seeing the dentist since who knows when.

But here is what I am doing. Making veggie gumbo.

I am not cleaning, I am not applying for jobs, & I am nowhere near accepting that Kaylee is gone, but I am making some killer (bad choice of words?) comfort foods.

Confession again: I bought Jillian Michaels: 6 Week Six-Pack well over six weeks ago & have yet to start. But I did do some yoga tonight. Clearing my head is not at all easy right now.

Confession the third: I didn't even take a tiny little taste of the Sweet Pickled Onion Watermelon Radish Salad that I made last night. When I took it out of the fridge, it smelled like mildew, so I decided to pass. Russell J took a bite and also decided against eating it. We also lit an orange blossom candle in the kitchen to exorcise the smell. So that's how it's going with the radishes.

"radish recipes that don't suck"

Also, "how the hell to eat kohlrabi".

This is the way that I talk to Google.

I spent most of today flipping through cookbooks and have decided that a) my cookbooks have left me ill-equipped to cook these CSA veggies and b) I hate cookbooks without indices.

Tonight, dinner was wok sauteed mizuna with leftover orange roasted chicken, roasted broccoli & kohlrabi with green garlic (that I burned nearly to a crisp), & arugula salad with beets, walnuts, & goat cheese (I hate hate hate arugula). Well, one out of three.

Tomorrow, I once again attempt to conquer radishes.

quarter life crisis

True to form, I've hit it about two years early. Or maybe I'm not making it to 100.

After 12 years of school, five (or four and a half, not counting my stint as a foreign exchange student) years of college, and almost a year as a real, live nurse, I am burnt out. I'm blaming most of it on two exhausting years of nursing school and a year at a job that makes me want to crawl back into bed every morning as soon as I get there. Somewhere between seventeen and now, I lost a whole lot of my spark and I miss it dreadfully.

So someone, somewhere, please tell me what I enjoy, what I'm good at, & how in the world do I make either one of those into a career?

it's a sweet, sweet life

Literally.

Russell J made me the most amazing cherry clafoutis with a shortbread crust as a late Valentine's Day present. I'm not saying I could eat it every day for the rest of my life, but I have eaten it multiple times a day for the past two days. He's definitely a keeper.

And....drumroll please...after two years of paying interest on trains that I took across Europe and clothes I shouldn't have bought....I finally paid off my credit card. Unfortunately, this kind of feels like a birthday: I don't feel any older (or more financially secure), but I guess I am.

We got veggies yesterday! Spinach (always a hit), kohlrabi (looks like an alien), green garlic (hope it's a good as regular garlic), broccoli raab (also always a hit), watermelon radishes (the fact that they are named after my favorite summer fruit gives me the teensiest glimmer of hope), turnips (old news), lettuce (bummer), carrots (yum), & broccoli (double yum. This broccoli is far superior to any broccoli I ever bought at the store). And, even better, Russell J is making PIZZA tonight!

Life is hard & unexpected & crazy all day long, but damn, sometimes it's so, so sweet.

helllllllp meeeeee

So. In news that won't make you all want to cry, I got a killer summer job as a camp nurse. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay! No, seriously. Yay. I'm so excited.

However, I have to fill out one of those horrible "getting to know you" forms. And they stress me out. So if you feel like helping me out, below are the questions I'm totally stuck on. Please help. Most of my current answers center around things like the movie Titanic, Grey's Anatomy, & the Oakland A's. Helllllllllllp!

Who is your hero?

If you could have a superpower, what would it be, and why?

What camp activity are you most looking forward to?

What are you most looking forward to about summer 2011?

And finally, what is something that you are willing to share, but may make you stand out from the crowd?

back on the wagon

I made this tonight. That, my friends, is a roast chicken with oranges under its skin. After blood (his), sweat (mine), & tears (also mine...did you know that chickens don't come with a giblet bag? Seriously. All their parts are intact!), this was my dinner tonight.

I fell off of the cooking wagon. I was tired of leafy greens. And I was tired of my job. And then one of my best friends died. Not much cooking has gone on in my house in the past two to three weeks.

But I decided that today was the day. Roast Chicken Day. My name is Katy, I am twenty-three years old, and I can cook a whole chicken at one time.

Kaylee's death has hit me hard.

...

I want to follow that up with some sort of profound statement, but that's all I've got. I'm shocked. I'm heartbroken. I'm angry. I'm not sure that I'll ever fully believe that she died at twenty-four of an aneurysm.

I want to make a grandiose gesture to tell the world how much she meant to me. I want to launch some sort of aneurysm awareness campaign for young women. But that's ridiculous, because the chance of her having had an aneurysm was so slim that if she'd gone to the ER with her symptoms, they probably would have thought that she had the flu or food poisoning and she would have been sent home. I want to film a documentary about this girl that never let me stop laughing. But without her, what's the point?

Those who didn't know her won't ever understand what she meant to me. She was my friend, my confidante, my partner in crime, my cheerleader. She was going to plan my bachelorette party & she was going to be an honorary aunt to my babies.

So I'm starting with the small things. Russell & I are going to give blood this weekend. He's not excited. But even if I have to bribe him, we're getting up bright & early on Saturday to save lives in memory of a girl who made me who I am today.

And I'm going to roast whole chickens & take cross-country road trips & drink in all of the sights that she never got to see. Because as small as those things are, I know that 50 years from now, or whenever God calls me, the people who love me will look back and know that those were the big things. I would give just about anything to hug her again, to hear her laugh, to listen to her make a risque joke.

Kaylee was my most sincere, most generous, most irreverent friend. And none of my words can describe how exquisite she was or how deeply I miss her.

"I wore Spanx to your funeral."

That's the thought that keeps running through my head.

That, and "There's no way that you can actually be dead."

I can't even manage to think, "I can't believe she's gone". That's what I keep saying to everyone who asks me about you. But I don't believe it. I sat in your room & looked through pictures of us at fifteen & I just kept thinking that you were going to walk in. God, we were so much younger and so much more beautiful than I remembered.

People don't just drop dead at twenty-four.

Except when they do.

I'm more angry than I am sad. Because we had fifty more years of memories to make. Because we were supposed to get married. We were supposed to raise our babies together. We were Katy&Kaylee, Maverick&Goose, TomSawyer&HuckFinn.

Except Tom Sawyer shows up at the end of his own funeral, alive & well. That's not what happened last weekend.

On Saturday, Meagan & I sat in the Episcopalian church where I'd seen one of my best friends get confirmed the morning after junior prom. We were whispering, laughing, saying catty things about people we hadn't seen since graduation. A hush fell over the room. We turned around and simultaneously burst into tears as your brothers and friends brought in your casket. There was no time for my breathing to increase or my lower lip to quiver; I tried to sob as quietly as I could. Shouldn't we have been at your wedding? Shouldn't you have been sitting next to me? Or next to Taylor?

I don't know how long it's going to take me to believe this. I just know that it's hard. I know that I cry myself to sleep and that I don't want to get out of bed in the morning because if I do, I have to acknowledge that you died eight days ago.

I just know that for the foreseeable future, all we're asking each other is: "What now?"