twenty ten pounds heavier

We're four days into 2010, and any hint of a resolution to lose weight has been squashed into submission by the 8 pounds of cookbooks I got for Christmas.

Yes, I weighed them.

And then I weighed myself and the scale's cries reverberated throughout NAS Lemoore.

And then Jason got me a happy yellow bookshelf so I can keep said 8 pounds of cookbooks in the kitchen instead of having to haul my cookbook-heavy butt down the hall to get them off of my office bookshelf (which would take my time away from churning out peanut butter ice cream pies).


I've noticed that a lot of recipes these days call for a food processor. I am Amish behind the times and do not have a food processor. You may have noticed that there's a peanut butter-covered potato masher in the measuring cup above. That is because my blender did not take kindly to being asked to combine two cups of peanut butter with a quart of soy ice cream, so I had to scrape all that gooeyness out of the blender and combine it the old-fashioned way: with ingenuity and elbow grease. As a result, my pie turned out to be peanut butter chunk ice cream pie. I love peanut butter, so to me it is almost better with the unblended peanut butter pockets in there, but that's not what the recipe intended.

I also used a premade Oreo crust rather than making my own--the recipe says to process vegan chocolate cookies (like Oreos, minus the filling) into crumbs, but... no food processor. I suppose I could have put them in a plastic bag and used a rolling pin to crush them, but there's only so much DIY assembly I can take before I reach my manual labor quota for the day. I have to save some energy for my fork-to-mouth bicep curls.

For my next recipe, I'm thinking I'll skip the middleman and make something I can stuff in my mouth sans fork: chai spice cookies.

Oh, and in a sign that the apocalypse is approaching... Crazy Navy Wife came up to me on New Year's Eve while I was unloading rum and paper towel groceries from the car, informed me that they were having a party and that we were welcome to come on over, and then semi-apologized for being such a heinous monster. We didn't go, despite her promise of "plenty of alcohol"--I'm not trying to do anything irresponsible in front of someone who has already threatened to call the police on me for driving down my own street. Next time I see her patrolling the block, though, I'll smile and wave. It can't hurt to feign pleasantries.