Tag Archives: adulthood

Blue Ribbon Macaroni and Cheese

28 Feb

 

Did you think Lollipop Tuesdays had died?

They haven’t.  If you’re confused about why Lollipop Tuesdays aren’t every Tuesday anymore (or for that matter, why I don’t post every day), or you don’t even know what a Lollipop Tuesday is, you should probably check out the handy dandy “What’s Lollipop Tuesday?” header at the top of this page.  Now relax and strap in.  Because this week I entered a recipe contest.

As a homegrown mountain gal from Central Pennsyltucky, I felt like even though I’d never entered a cooking contest before, I could at least avoid embarrassing myself.  After all, when you’re raised in the roots cooking is just one part of a three-part formula for the perfect wife that some crazy hermit made up decades ago and is still being widely circulated in small towns with forks in roads: cooking, cleaning, baby-raisin’.  Hunting is optional.  I only ever really took to the cooking.

It also just so happened that the recipe contest was for Macaroni and Cheese, which was convenient since I just had my own Jackie Blog hunt for the Best Macaroni and Cheese in the Universe in December.  So I threw together my favorite parts of my favorite recipes and came up with a Jackie Blog concoction of cheesy awesomey goodness.

I wasn’t really sure what the rules were.  I went online and registered but I didn’t really get anything saying it was received and no one ever sent me criteria.  I didn’t even know what the prizes were.  I just knew that I had to cook up a vat of smokin’ hot mac and smack and take it to the venue by 1pm.  So I designated Dave my Transportation Manager, who threw me and my casserole in the car at 12:40pm and dropped us off while he parked.  With only 5 minutes until the entry deadline, I willed the elevator down with my mind, scurried into the judging room and plopped my casserole down: Entry #11.   It was precisely 1:00pm.

We then proceeded to wait ten full minutes for any late arrivals.    My tale of down-to-the-wire shenanigans weren’t quite as epic as I’d hoped.

Finally, it was time to begin.  We met the judges: 2 owners of 2 prominent food businesses in the city and 1 genuine lover of pasta smothered in cheese.  We also heard the judging criteria: appearance, taste, and-I-have-no-idea-what-else-because-I-was-stuck-on-appearance.

Appearance.

How could I have watched Iron Chef so many times and not have anticipated this as a determining factor?  I should have had a custom-built shelf above my dish that had three beautifully-prepared plates with perfect Macaroni and Cheese portions specifically for the judges.  They should have had firecrackers shooting out of them and have some sort of beautiful font displaying the name of my creation.

But I didn’t.  In fact, I didn’t even remember to bring a serving spoon.   And as my eyes stretched down the rows of the competitors, I saw beautiful thermal Pampered Chef totes, shiny and new casserole dishes that had fancy lids, and classic foil holders with wired burners beneath them.

I had my mother’s hand-me-down casserole dish that she let me borrow once when I was in college and I never returned.

At first I was nervous.  I didn’t consider appearance at all.  And what were the judges supposed to do without a serving spoon: paw it out of the cheesy vat with their bare mits?  Yes.  I decided yes they would.  In fact, I decided that casseroles should only be served in secondhand stolen dishes and reminded myself that I was there to write a blog post, not to impress judges.

Still, I was nervous.  I know this because when the first judge approached my dish and began to fish out a taste of the pasta with her pathetic plastic spoon, I winced as she lost the battle to the broiled parmesan and bread crumb finish, which was settled happily on the top of my concoction.  I grabbed Dave’s arm and clenched it hard as a huge piece of parmesan hung on her spoon and she had to contort her tongue to lap it into her hungry mouth.  I analyzed every nod, every dart of the eyes, every stroke of the pencil on paper.

I had lost.  I surely had  lost.

Dave laughed as my sanity slowly unraveled before him and tried to distract me with Bejeweled on his iPad.  I was sure to pause the game each time a judge approached my dish.   When the judges were finished testing, the audience was allowed to serve themselves buffet style.  I watched to see who took bites of mine and was disappointed when I saw much of my dish remained by the time I reached it.  I returned to my seat and saw a flyer that had been placed in my absence: it was an advertisement for a catering company.

…I was competing against catering companies?

I had talked myself into a deep, dark loss when one fellow jumped up and B-lined to my dish to get himself a hefty helping of seconds.  I was so happy I almost squealed like a freshly born piglet.  I had my victory: someone wanted seconds.  I told myself perhaps I would jest for third place.  That’s when the judges returned and announced there was a tie for first and second and they needed to retaste the top dishes to determine the tie-breaker.   The host of the event promptly walked over and grabbed my mother’s hand-me-down dish.

I freaked.

I freaked so hard that I had little tiny tears in my eyes.  I tried to hold back the excitement from my body but I only bottled it up and shot it out of my eyes like laser beams at poor supportive Dave, who feared me a serial killer and tried to coax the crazy out of my pupils.  It was me versus the Pampered Chef Super Awesome Casserole Tote.  I was so thrilled to have third place locked up.

After what felt like hours of the judges lobbing around more cheesy goodness in their mouths, a winner had finally been determined.

It was me.

I was so surprised to be announced first place that I let out a sort of strange yip in front of everyone and tried to tone it down for a casual walk up to the front to claim my winnings: a gift card and a certificate, deeming my recipe officially award-winning.  The judges looked pleased with the cheesiness I bestowed upon them and the audience all got in line to finish up what was left of casserole #11.

I waited for everyone to get their fill, truly amazed that I had just shown up for a Lollipop Tuesday and taken the top prize from a room full of hopefuls.  I felt like an imposter.  If only they knew it was all for a post.

On the way out of the venue, I called my mom to thank her for raising me right and Dave got a hot dog at the stand outside.  The fella inside asked who won and I said I did.   He asked me what the story was behind it and I explained Lollipop Tuesdays to him and that I run a blog but it’s nowhere close to a food blog.  He seemed pleasantly surprised and for indulging me and acting like he would tune in to read, I tipped him a dollar on the hot dog.

Sometimes you have to pay for publicity.

That night I sat around basking in the phrase “Award Winning”.   I referred to myself as an award-winning cook and my macaroni and cheese as a first-place dish.  And just then I remembered telling my coworkers I was entering a recipe contest that weekend and being laughed at by someone.  They made a joke about Kraft mac and cheese and said I was too young to cook well. I told her she didn’t know the power of being raised in the sticks.

And just then, I took out  my phone to send a proper foot-in-mouth-inducing text.

“Boo yah.”

Signed, First Place Chef. ♣

Before you ask, here’s the recipe.  Thanks to thesinglecell, who provided most of the recipe for thejackieblog recipe contest:
 
1/2 lb pasta of your choice, cooked and drained
2 tablespoons butter, divided
2 tablespoons flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons dry mustard
5 oz. sharp cheddar, shredded
3 oz. Raclette, cubed
1/4c. Parmesan, grated (plus some for sprinkling)
1 3/4c. heavy cream
3/4c. milk
Paprika for sprinkling
Cinnamon for sprinkling
1 cup white bread crumbs cut into 1/2 in. squares
 
Preheat oven to 375. Spray a 9×9″ pan (preferably a hand-me-down) with cooking spray. Pour al dente, drained pasta into 9×9″ pan. Melt 1tbs butter and pour over bread crumbs.  Set aside.  Blend flour, mustard and salt together in a small bowl. In a saucepan over medium-low heat, melt 1tbs butter. Add flour, salt and mustard and stir until blended. Add milk and cream, stirring or whisking until dry ingredients are dissolved and liquid is hot, but not boiling. Add Raclette, stirring/whisking occasionally until cheese melts. Repeat for cheddar and Parmesan, stirring/whisking often so the cheese doesn’t stick to the bottom and burn.  Sprinkle in cinnamon.
 
Pour cheese sauce over pasta; add bread crumbs and sprinkle with Parmesan and paprika and bake at 375 for 25 minutes. Then broil until top is golden.
 
Eat with bare hands.

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A View from the Fence

14 Dec

I’m afraid that I’m spending my time in the present telling myself that it won’t be my future and that in the future I’ll look around and realize it’s still my present.

Isn’t that what we’re all afraid of? I’m squishy, I bite my nails, I’m a slave to the corporate machine, I want to go to grad school, I want to travel somewhere fantastical, and I want to accomplish something truly amazing in my lifetime.  I drug myself through my everyday experiences by telling myself that someday, these things will change.  

On a small scale, I’m working on them.  A few of them.  Truly working.  But I’ve worked on them before and failed, which is why I’m working on them now.  And so every day I have this tiny little voice in the bottom of my toes that cries up to my tiny heart and says go do something drastic.  Just go.  The Appalachian Trail, backpacking in Europe, starting my own business, walking to California, writing a novel – the voice has had a lot of time to think up suggestions.  And my brain follows right behind, touting that the important things in life are experiences and that there is no point to paying bills and having a roof over my head and fulfilling traditional adult expectations if I’m not doing those things in order to fuel a passion or fulfill a purpose.  It whispers real-life examples.  People who throw away everything normal about their lives to fulfill a dream or take an epic adventure or start a journey they feared they’d never plunge into unless they jumped on the spark in their stomachs. 

And then it tells me to get serious and that I can’t spend my life as a dirty, starving hippie, wandering the earth without a clear cause.

Sometimes I think the plan is to, well, plan.  For x amount of years, I’ll try such and such.  For y amount of years, I’ll do this and see if it works out.  By [insert year here] I will accomplish the things on this list I put somewhere but never look at.

Other times I think I’m making it all too complicated and that I need to just keep an open mind and take opportunities as they come, constantly being sure to simultaneously seek them out. 

There’s something inside me that won’t allow me to live an average life.  I don’t want to spend it in a slumber.  I don’t want to have a steady, predictable job so that I can buy a place to put the things I buy in and then invite everyone over and show them my place where I put my things and give birth to little versions of me who grow up to learn that jobs and places to put your things are what life is about.

Have you ever thought about how little of the world you’ll see in your lifetime? You can travel all you want, but there are so many places to go.  The world is so huge and the experiences it has to offer are so numerous.  There are going to be things you never see, places you never step foot in, and adventures you never embark on. 

I just can’t figure out if that means that I should go do as many of them as possible or that it’s just reality and we live where we live in the means that are allowed us, and we must make small adventures into big ones.  If I pick either and dedicate myself fully to it, as I am wont to do, I could make a huge mistake taking either path.  With one, I risk spending my life in a slumber; with the other, I risk throwing away everything to go on a journey that fails miserably and makes everyone think I’ve lost all shreds of sanity.

Or, I could live a life on the fence where I am currently perched: not willing to choose a side but not wanting to look back at a life that was lived just on the cusp of a decision. 

That’s surely no life at all. ♣

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Marvin <3

12 Dec

Meet Marve.

Yesterday I sat in my brand new (used) car for the first time and found it difficult to contain my raging joy.

I freaked out.  About everything.  Dave, who had a few days to bond with the car (let’s call him Marvin), smiled amusingly while I tinkered with all the bells and whistles and peed my pants. 

In order to put this in perspective, you have to understand that never, in my entire life, have I owned a car where everything in it worked as intended.  There have been leaky oil tanks, falling fabric ceilings, windows that couldn’t be rolled down for fear they never go back up, sunroofs that wouldn’t shut,  doors that could not be exited through, trunks that could not be opened, and broken gas gauges – which made for many a problematic outing.   

That doesn’t even take into account issues with body rust, major dents, color mismatches, or the car actually running. 

The struggle of the poor commuter is both arduous and exciting.  I remember one of the cars my family had growing up spontaneously caught on fire.  It caught on fire. I spent most of my life in fear that a trip in the car to get groceries was willfully plunging toward my death.

But now I have Marvin.  Marvin has working windows.  And lights and a horn and a fuel gauge and a rear defrost and a ceiling that isn’t falling down and a trunk that opens and closes and a sunroof that works and plastic parts that stay in place and I cannot contain my raging, raging joy.

When I turned around to check out the row of back seats, I noticed the middle one had a big kid seat belt instead of just a lap belt and tried to abstain from peeing with glee all over the beautiful, relatively unstained interior.  Marvin has no major dents, is all the same color, and turns on when I want him to.  It’s like I’ve won the Showcase Showdown.

There’s a part of me that can’t shake the feeling that something awful is going to reveal itself soon.  I’ll be driving it around, singing Pumped Up Kicks, feelin’ like a fly little white girl, and then my front bumper will fall off, or my ceiling will fall and encase me in its flowy fabric, or the entire car will just spontaneously burst into flame.

I suppose until I die in that fiery, tragic death I’ll just have to distract myself from fear by playing with my power windows and sunroof. ♣

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The Thrills of Adulthood Part II: My Palace of Filth

4 Dec

I’m protesting adulthood right now. 

My sink is absolutely chock full of dishes that have actually begun to take on a distinct smell, which I don’t like so I have a large Yankee candle lit in my kitchen to help me forget about it.  There are papers on the floor in my living room, evidence of a recently-rehearsed monologue, which my cats have deemed important and have therefore sprawled themselves across.  At one point yesterday there were so many cups on my coffee table in the living room that I began to think I was actually in the kitchen.

I just simply don’t feel like doing anything.

Sometimes I like to embrace being a grown-up in strange ways.  No one can tell me to clean my house, and that’s awesome.  No one can tell me whether or not I can blow a bunch of money on something completely stupid, and that’s awesome too.  I can make a blanket fort any time I like in any corner of the house I please, and I can blast music and dance around in my pajamas until 3 in the afternoon if it’s what tickles my fancy.

And lately, doing nothing at all has tickled my fancy quite fine.

I keep telling myself I’ll come out of it.  Either that, or Dave will get so tired of it that he takes over the entire house with adult sparkle magic one day.  That would be totally awesome.  I’ll promptly make a blanket fort in the newly cleaned domicile.

If he doesn’t give in soon, I’m going to have to eventually buck up because it’s highly likely that my parents will be in town next weekend and I’d hate for them to think I’ve given up on life or something (hi mom – thanks for reading).  Not even running out of dishes can stop me – I’ve already given up drinking anything except water from the bathroom faucet (because I keep a cup in the cupboard, constantly clean and ready for such an occasion), and I’ve taken to eating things that don’t require pots, pans, or anything more than a paper towel to handle.

I don’t know what happened to me.  I took off work on a bit of whim last Friday, had a 3-day weekend right on the heels of the 4-day weekend from the Thanksgiving holiday, and now I’m stuck in ‘off’ mode.  Which, relative to where I’ve been the rest of the year is a pretty excellent place to be.  I noticed that I’m a day behind on blogs (I used to post early in the morning and now I post late at night, to be read the next morning), that all I do when I have free time is watch movies and that going to work is just what I have to do until I can come back home and watch more movies.

Maybe it’s a December thing.  I decorated for the holidays, decided to not be so uptight about taking time away from the job, and now I’m so in love with it that my brain has found a permanent setting here.  I can’t bring myself to be bothered with the frivolties of adulthood.  I’d rather roll around in filth like a little baby piglet.  

Well, hopefully it’s more of a semi-permanent setting.  Eventually, I might have need of a clean dish. ♣

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The Thrills of Adulthood

21 Nov

I’m excited for electing dental coverage with my employer for next year and that reality makes me very, very sad.

I don’t want to be excited for such lame things.  It makes me feel all gross and grown-up inside.  In fact, I drooled over my benefit elections for open enrollment like a kid in a candy store.  I got to shop for the adult goodies that I wanted to cash in on in 2012 and it was thrilling.  Medical, dental, retirement, tuition assistance, buying time off, and even child care assistance.

I don’t need that last one even a little bit but I still worked up a good saliva at having the option.

I remember back when I was a tiny tot, I looked up to an older friend of the family as a sort of role model for a short time.  I remember going out with her somewhere one day and her having to stop at the post office to mail out some bills first.  I thought it was so cool that she was so mature.  “Are you officially a grown up now?  Do you feel like an adult?  I’ll bet that’s so cool,” I said like a stupid little kid. She furrowed her brow and shot me a crooked, almost fearful smile.  “I guess you could say that – I don’t know,” she responded. 

She was a little younger then than I am now and I can only imagine how that inquiry must have made her feel; I know what it would do to me.

I’m finding that more and more often I’m excited for stupid little things that aren’t actually fun at all but I get thrilled for nonetheless.  You know, like adult things. 

Not those kind of adult things.  Stay with me here.  Things like dental work and finding a car with an engine that isn’t already waltzing toward the grave, or a cheap ticket to another city or good customer service.  I get excited for bargains and good budgeting and direct deposit.  I don’t want to like those things – but I can’t deny that I am truly thankful for them because being an adult sucks sometimes and when things can be made even slightly less awful it’s hard not to feel a thrill in the pit of my stomach.

I’m still being shocked by the reality of adulthood every single day.   There are all sorts of little things here and there that aren’t at all like I imagined them.  Or rather, I never thought to consider them so they take me by surprise.  Like when my brothers had babies and got bills from the hospital. I was shocked.  Shocked! It cost so much just to get a human out of your body.  That’s a serious medical condition, having someone in your body.  And you won’t get any help with it unless you can pony up the dough.

Of course, I imagine those things tend to take care of themselves even when unassisted.  But that can’t be pretty.

When people say kids are expensive, they didn’t just mean clothes and food and education.  They mean that having one in the first place requires you to take out a loan.

Maybe that’s why parents resent their children.  Man, everything is coming together.  You really do understand more when you’re older.  I guess I just that I thought when I understood it all, I’d be excited.  But I’m not, because it’s all pretty depressing.

Except dental coverage.  That’s pretty sweet.  ♣

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Christmas in Excel

22 Aug

It begins.

Yesterday I officially started my Christmas list.

Not my Christmas list, but my Christmas list for others.   You see, as the Type A portion of my brain grows into an insatiable monster and begins to eat away at the only bits of Type B that remain in my brain squiggles, it has begun to pour over into every single area of my life.   I don’t really know when it all started.  I remember one time being incredibly Type B.  My room was constantly a mess, I never showered, I was always doing things last-minute and pulling all-nighters to complete tasks, and couldn’t ever find anything I needed.

And then somehow, one day, I began to change.  I got a dry-erase board and mapped out my months.  I started working up a loose idea of a budget every few weeks.  I started keeping little to-do lists on post-its.  And I began to track my Christmas gift ideas in an Excel spreadsheet.

No joke – straight up Excelin’ it like a nerdy nerd.

Last year, I made a table for each member of my family in Excel and color coded each.  I had a column for gift ideas, a column for ones I had secured already, and a running total of how much was spent out of how much I was willing to allot.    And while it was lovely and organized, and almost too-devised, apparently my Type A brain monster is growing this year and isn’t satisfied to simply have an Excel sheet, but wants me to start the game 5 months in advance.  5 months in advance! 

It seems to be a familial trait. My grandmother shops for Christmas gifts 11 months in advance and my mother has begun to do the same. Or maybe it’s just an old person trait.   Perhaps this is just another example of my rapidly advancing age.   

I’m a little frightened to know what the Type A monster will be like in even just five years.  If I graduated from Christmas Excel spreadsheets to buying 5 months in advance in only a year, it’s just a matter of time before I’m making my bed, regularly doing my laundry, and making something more than a bowl of Frosted Flakes for dinner. Maybe…I’m actually becoming an adult?

Gross. ♣

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