I'm practically Minnesotan now. Take me away, Midwest!

On Saturday, Derek was complaining of fatigue, and just feeling kinda off. Saturday is our big house cleaning day, where everybody does their big chores so the house can be nice and neat and ready for destroying through the next six days, and he wasn't feeling particularly up for that. So instead we ran errands. Not a great alternative when someone isn't feeling their best, really, but here we are. 

Sunday, Derek comes down with muscle aches. Not tooooo serious, but enough that he pretty much stayed in bed through the day, and the plans we had for our anniversary fell through. Derek had a lovely day planned for us...a nice dinner that we'd make together, getting into our new 2,000 piece puzzle that we haven't had time for yet, and taking a tub, having a drink, and doing a crossword puzzle (which is our favorite way to unwind and connect, we do it all the time. Jetted tub + whatever boozy drink we choose + NYT Sunday crossword puzzle = how we keep the fires burning). We did not a stitch of that, he laid in bed all day, and I sat in the living room, quietly resenting him. 

On Monday, Derek was full blown ill. Obvious chills, muscle aches bad enough that he was moaning all day. I was starting to get worried that maybe he had covid. Derek still mostly wears his mask, but I know when he's teaching, he's a lot more cavalier, so who knows what germs he's partying with on his on weeks. I told Derek I thought maybe he had covid, and he laughed it off (as best as he could, given that he's been a joyless puddle since Saturday) and said he had a run of the mill cold. I made him take a covid test, it was negative, and he went back to his holding pattern of whining, sleeping, and shivering. 

Tuesday night, he has not improved. I made him take another covid test, because muscle aches and chills and slightly off tummy are pretty current through all of the cases of people I know who've had covid. Derek is still very insistent he doesn't have covid, but I am relentless about him taking a test. A couple of my girlfriends have had negative tests when they knew they had covid, as well, so I took Derek's crowing about his negative tests with a large grain of salt. Tuesday evening rolls around, and Derek is feeling worse than he's felt in days. He makes a rare exit from his moaning cocoon in bed to go to the bathroom, and as I was sitting in the room working on a paper, I heard him make the frustration noise in the bathroom. 

me: Is everything ok, honey? Can I help you with something?

Derek: You can't help me with this.

me: What is this?

Derek: I'm just having extreme difficulty peeing.

me:....uh. Maybe we should go to the doctor. 

Derek: nah, it's been going on since Saturday.

me: .....what.

Derek: It's just my prostate stuff, I doubled my meds, it'll get better. 

me: Derek. Are you kidding? Scale of 1-10, how extreme is your difficulty in peeing?

Derek: Extreme.

me: we're going to the fucking ER. This is why ciswomen live longer than cismen. 

Derek: Why? It's fine.

me: Uh, no. Why didn't you tell me this days ago? If you had told me days ago that you had trouble peeing, I wouldn't have thought you had covid, I would have known IMMEDIATELY you had some kind of bladder infection or a severe UTI that was turning into a bladder infection. Or maybe you have a kidney stone. But whatever it is, get dressed, we're going to the ER.

So we went to the ER. And after a few hours, some bloodwork, and one negative covid test later, we find out that Derek DID have a bladder infection. A very severe bladder infection that was moving into his kidneys. And he was severely dehydrated. So they gave Derek two IV bags of fluid, one IV bag of antibiotics, and sent him home with a week long course of antibiotics to treat his infection, and a fuckton of pain medication. 

It is Friday now, and yesterday Derek had his first day getting out of bed. I hadn't slept in the room in days, because he had been sweating in his pain cocoon, and the room smelled deeply unpleasant. But yesterday he took a shower, we washed the sheets, the comforter, everything. The room smells like a room again, and Derek smells like a person again, and things are mostly right with the world. He's functioning at about 60%, which is so much better than he's been since Sunday. 

I may have made this clear in here, but I just fucking LOVE to cook for people. If you're feeling down, I want to cook for you. If you're happy, I want to cook to celebrate. If you're feeling ill, I want to make your favorite comfort food. A few months ago, when Derek had his last procedure, I asked him what he wanted to eat during his convalescence, and he was like, I want hot fill. 

What the fuck is hot fill. 

I had no idea. I had never heard the term. So I messaged my mother in law and got a recipe for the dish Derek was talking about. 

Oh, I remember thinking to myself. It's a casserole. A midwestern casserole. 

Fast forward to Thursday night, I wanted to make Derek something hot, filling, and midwestern adjacent. Those are his roots, baby! He's from Indiana, so he grew up around all manner of things that are legally considered food, but in reality have no respect or decency for the people that consume them. 

Rewind to when I was 14: my great grandfather had passed away, and I went to Ithaca for his funeral. As is customary when someone loses their spouse, my great grandmother's rotary club friends all brought over their finest one pot dishes for my grandmother to freeze, refrigerate, and eat at her leisure, ensuring she didn't have to bother herself with cooking. One of those meals was a casserole. 

Casserole is what we call hot fill...which is actually called hot dish...in New York. And I think most people understand this as a casserole. It's a one pan meal you bake in the oven, comprised of a mish mash of ingredients that are just...rude. When I looked up hot dish to see what the difference between hot dish and casserole was, I was informed by a great many blogs from midwestern folk that CASSEROLE is the vessel in which a HOT DISH is served. So to midwesterners, casserole is just an empty hole, waiting patiently to be filled with hot dish. Casserole is not a dish you eat, it's a thing you serve your midwestern slop bucket innards in. 

Fast forward to when I was 16-17: I went back to Ithaca to care for my great grandmother, and I decided I wanted that casserole for us. It was easy, it made a lot, and I could just reheat it for a few days and not have to worry about making new stuff. Now, I was never given the recipe for this casserole. I don't even know which one of my grandmother's friends had made it so I could ask for the recipe. So I had to figure it out from memory. I had to ask my great grandmother about what the base to a casserole usually was, and she told me, I was appropriately icked out, but I forged ahead, recalling the other ingredients, and then...just...shoving them into a pan, baking them, and waiting to eat it to see if it was close to the original. 

Whether or not it was close to the original from several years before I cannot say. What I CAN say was the mess I had made was absolutely fucking DELICIOUS. I cared for my grandmother for a month before I ended up leaving and going back to Vegas...I think we ate this casserole...er...hot dish....50% of the time I was there. I brought this dish with me when I returned from New York. In Vegas, my dad wasn't really around, so I pretty much had license to do whatever the fuck it was that I wanted to do, and it also meant I didn't have someone cooking for me a lot, so I had to fend for myself. I turned to this casserole a LOT. I'm sorry, midwesterners. I know I'm meant to call it a hot dish, but I really am struggling with the change. If I osscilate between hot dish and casserole, I think you all know I'm not saying that we were eating our pyrex serving dish. Anyway, I made this hot dish a lot. Steffie and I ate it constantly. When I got pregnant with Rhyann, and I was living in California and Steffie came out to visit me a few times, each time she came we made my chicken casserole. My chicken hot dish. My chicken abomination that shouldn't be delicious, but is. 

Back to present day...well...back to present week, circa Wednesday. I wanted to make a new hot dish casserole for my Midwestern husband. My poor, suffering midwestern husband. So I texted Steffie, asking if she still had the recipe for this casserole, did she remember it at all? And I absolutely LOVED hearing that Steffie has, in fact, been making this hot dish casserole for her family for years. It's not necessarily a staple, but it is common enough that she rattled off the recipe, telling me she had changed it a lot over the years and didn't remember my original version, but I was welcome to try  her version of it. 

When I say delighted, I mean it. I was thrilled to my very fingertips that this disgusting lie of a meal had made its way into the food repertoire of one of my best friends. Because...this dish is truly my Frankenstein's Monster. I scrapped it together from hideous details, stapled them together and hoped for the best. I emulated something that I ate ONCE when I was 13, surrounded by grief, and look at this absolutely ridiculous path my food mess has taken! Twenty years later, it's a common family meal for a dear friend, and I was also about to embark on making it again. I was filled with warmth at the thought of this, which may sound silly, but I don't particularly mind sounding silly over this. 

Because that warmth and glee had to do a lot...and I mean a LOT...of heavy lifting to muscle through the absolute fucking disgust and revulsion I felt buying up all of the ingredients to make this monstrosity. I am going to share the recipe, for two reasons:

Reason 1: I do not want to forget it ever again. Steffie's recipe was fine, and it was close enough to my original recipe that I could use it in a pinch...or use it to jog my memory once again...but why do that when I can just post it here and never again need to rely on her version? 

Reason 2: I want to urge anybody who reads this to make it...exactly as stated...and tell me it isn't delicious and comforting and filling and exceptional, in spite of the ingredients. 

Because I truly believe that there are only two ways to react to this recipe. You either look at the ingredient list in absolute disgust and food paranoia, with utter disbelief that these ingredients will turn into something delicious, or you're a midwesterner that knows I'm preaching some seriously delicious gospel. 

I have no problem admitting how fucking furious I am about this hot dish. Legitimately, I am repulsed. Because I could not stop laughing every few minutes in that way you laugh to get you through a disgusting task. It was a defense mechanism. Everything about this grossed me out. And it smelled AWFUL. Have you ever just...smelled mayonnaise? It is repugnant. And yet...once it went into the oven, I was in olfactory heaven. It smelled like my late teenage years, it smelled like nostalgia. It smelled fucking DELICIOUS. When I took it out of the oven, I laughed again, this time in response to how much my body wanted to house the entire fucking thing. It smelled so. fucking. good. 

Alright, recipe time.

Ready for this? Here we go. 

2 cups mayonnaise

1 can cream of celery soup (condensed)

1 can cream of mushroom and garlic soup (condensed)

1 single serving package of Mahatma Yellow Rice, prepared as directed

2 cans sliced water chestnuts, drained and roughly chopped

1 can of corn, drained

4 hard boiled eggs, chopped

half a pound of matchstick carrots/shredded carrots

half a container of French's fried onions (reserve other half for later)

2 ounces of bacon bits

1 cup slivered almonds

4 ounces shredded cheese of your choice (I used colby jack, but the world is your dairy oyster) (reserve other 4 ounces in typical 8 ounce package for later)

1.25 pounds cooked, shredded chicken

Cornflakes (reserve for later...DO NOT MIX THESE IN)

Ok, ready for the directions?

Preheat your oven to whatever temperature your favorite tater tots need to cook. What's a midwestern hot dish without some kind of potato side? I wanted to use tater tots, but I felt compelled to make Checker's Fries instead. For those fries, the temperature was 425. 

Mix all of that shit together. There is  no right or wrong way to do this, though if I  may make a suggestion, incorporate the two cans of condensed soup into the two cups of mayo first, THEN mix in everything else. Stir it all up, make sure everything is good and mixed, with even access to every god forsaken element of this texture nightmare. 

Throw your food goop into a 9x13 pan, and spread it out evenly. It should fill to the very brim of the CASSEROLE, but it will not bubble over. If you are so inclined, you could absolutely place the CASSEROLE on a baking tray in case there is spillover and I just got lucky. 

Once your goop is good and smeared flat, evenly cover the top with the rest of your french fried onions. then generously cover the top with cornflakes. Like, you want a carpet of cornflakes. You don't even want to see that there are fried onions underneath. You forest floor that bitch with cornflakes. Be aggressive. 

A side note about the cornflakes: Cornflakes used to be the only topping. I decided on a whim last night to add french fried onions to the mix, because they are delicious and I love them, even though I can't eat this hot dish. What I used to do was crush the cornflakes up, then mix them up with...I shit you not...an entire stick of butter...then I would spread that shit on top. Steffie is the one who changed it up in the way that I'm about to give as a direction, with the cornflakes and the cheese. But if you want to JUST do cornflakes and butter, go for it. Nobody will judge you, it isn't like omitting an extra stick of butter makes this healthier. 

Cover your cornflakes with the remaining 4 ounces of cheese. 

Bake for however long it takes for your potato side to be done. Those Checker's Fries were a little soggy after almost 30 minutes, so we took them out and Derek and Alex ate them with soft little middles. If you're not making a potato side and just need to know how long to cook the casserole, there is no wrong answer. Since everything is already cooked, if you only want to throw it in the oven for as long as it takes to melt the cheese, that is A-OK. If you want to blast that bitch for thirty minutes like we did so the top is one crusted sheet of crunchy, cheesy goodness, do it up! No wrong way to make this casserole. 

Derek advises topping it with ketchup for that perfect midwestern flavor profile, but I don't think it needs it. I think, if anything, a fuck ton of hot sauce would be delicious, but when I suggested that to Derek, he said, "NO! That's too spicy for midwesterners! Ketchup. It needs ketchup." So I will defer to his better judgment. 

And that's the hot dish. I joked to Derek that I almost almost ALMOST bought the stuff to make ambrosia, because what else could you logically serve as a palette cleanser after a hot dish meal? There is no other thing. It's ambrosia or nothing. But we went with nothing, because I wasn't sure my texture sensitive brain could manage two mouth feel nightmares in one day. 

Another note about the ingredients:

I bought everything pre-made. The matchstick carrots? I bought in matchstick form. You can do those carrots any way you want. Chop them, shred them yourself, buy canned carrots, it doesn't matter. I like the crunch that raw carrots give, but if you want big, massive hunks of carrot that are soft when they go in, do it up. Cook them first and then chuck them into the mess. 

The chicken? Frozen, pre-shredded, pre-cooked. I did fry it up in the pan before putting it in the gloop. And that is important...do not put raw chicken in this. Or if you opt to put raw chicken in this, you do so at your own risk, because I do not know what the cook time on this should be if you put in uncooked chicken. Back in the day, Steffie and I used to boil the chicken and cut it up into big ol' chunks, but I think shredded is the better way to go. So if you don't want to buy a bag of shredded chicken (it is cost prohibitive if you're aiming to keep this cheap), buy your chicken in bulk and cook it however you'd like. Same holds true for the chicken: shred it, chunk it, or fuck, you could even put a few cooked breasts on top before you cover it with your topping. This is a recipe that is easy to make your own, considering I completely fucking made it up. 

I bought pre hard boiled eggs, but again, it's cheaper to hard boil your own eggs at home. 

Frozen corn? That's fine. 

And the measurements are just a guideline, too. Put in more mayo, put in less, I do not care, it does not matter. Want more carrots? Do it! Want less water chestnuts? Fine! This hot dish is so fucking flexible. Buy pre-fixed everything for convenience, or do everything yourself, it does not matter. There is no wrong way to make this abomination. 

Just make it. I beg you. Because it's like the meanest culinary trick you'll ever play on yourself if you didn't grow up eating this shit, like I didn't. But I had it ONCE as a kid and I was so obsessed with it that I recreated it and it is now a staple in my best friend's household. 

I have a feeling it will become a new staple in mine, as well. 

Because I know what I'm talking about, and Jan is full of shit.

I have spent the last week reading all of the old entries I reverted to drafts years and years ago, and turning them into posts again. I don't know how it took so long, bit my blog is back to about...65% of what it used to be. My primary takeway from this escapade is how terrible I used to be at photography. Likw, I genuinely cringed looking at my early photos. I cringed reading my accounts of people telling me I should get a website and charge people. I know everyone has to start somewhere, but I just wish I hadn't started there. Yikes. 

 I had oral surgery almost two weeks ago (two weeks ago on Wednesday), and I go in to get all of the fun sutures out of my face on Wednesday of this week. It has been an absolute fucking nightmare not being able to brush my bottom front teeth...the front six teeth. I have no been able to brush or floss. I feel fuzzy and gross in that section of my mouth, and when I sneezed in my mask the other day, I caught a little whiff and almost gagged. Derek said to me the other morning, "I can't wait until you can brush all of your teeth again". You and me both, but way to pile on. 

Yesterday was our seven year wedding anniversary. We did nothing because I think Derek has covid. I made a batzina (on the very precipice of delicious...I think it's a little too minty, but that is hardly my fault as the recipe called for "bunch of mint". That is very vague, but also suggests the use of mint is to the taste) and I also made roasted root veggies with an orange goat cheese dressing. Derek barely ate and then went back to bed. He is in bed now. He's taken one covid test that yielded a negative result, but I also know people who knew they had covid and also got negative results (I think Amber's negative results were the most drastic...if memory serves, she didn't get a positive covid test until she felt almost 100% better). His symptoms sound on brand for covid, but he has been keen to remind me that they are also on brand with just a run of the mill cold. I guess we'll see in a few days, but it was bad enough today that he stayed home from work. 

I did not get the internship with MAST, and I want to write an entire blog about that, including the personal letter of interest I sent in. I am certainly thrilled with my consolation prizes, though, and my gut says that if I were not so laser focused on queer youth, I would have easily had that internship. I think, given the scope of my consolation prizes, I was their second pick, someone else just edged me out. I didn't even know internships gave out consolation prizes to people who didn't get placed. My advisor said that she didn't, either, and it is a testament to me and how impressed the research center was by me that they are offering me the things they are (one of those things is a stipend, and of no small amount!). So I was disappointed, but I am still coming away from the experience with, ironically, everything I wanted to get out of the experience in the first place. So I still win. 

Photography has shut down for the year. I was both busy and not busy this year...busier than I thought I would realistically be, but not as busy as I wanted to be. I will, in the next week or so, be doing my yearly photo dump of my favorite photos from the year. I am hoping to burst into legit advertising next year. I already have a few mershoots scheduled (four at time of this blog being written) for spring when the weather warms up, and I have another model mershoot set up because I need couples, and this is a model couple. Cool by me! I also want to get a big ass boudoir weekend going, where I book an AirBnB for four days and do nothing but shoot, shoot, shoot, but that is presenting problems for me logistically. I want a mix of about 80% clients, 20% models, but I have no fucking clue how to go about marketing this. I know I have one client that wants a boudoir shoot in late spring of next year, and I'm wondering if I can build the weekend around that. Lots of shit to plan out. 

Perhaps most frustrating to update is I may not be able to graduate until fucking summer now. I have one class that went from being available all year to only being available every fall and summer. I did not sign up for it this semester. My advisor and I are supposed to discuss this the next time I can attend office hours, but I missed the last two because I was recovering from having dead people shoved in my face and my mouth sewn in. She says there's a way I can still graduate in the spring, which is what I have been planning on doing. If I hadn't needed a mental health break over the summer I would be graduating next month. If I can manage to get a waiver for this class and be put in another class instead and STILL graduate in spring, I would much much MUCH prefer that. I am fucking tired of school, and I just want to get it over with. Everybody knows this about me, which is why it's so frustrating to have people like Derek tell me I need to get my PhD. I did end up asking my advisor about it, and she gave me some insight, but ugh. I fucking hate academia. It's so fucking biased, it borders on caricature.

I'll write about the internship another day, I'm sure. I'm worried I'm starting to catch whatever it is that Derek has, because I feel...off.

But they never expected an Italian ghost!

 It has seriously been a blur the last few weeks. I've been slipping between extreme bouts of depression and inability to function...I am so close to winning an award for "longest time between showers by a person with full access to a shower and clean, running water"...and cooking. Cooking a lot. 

So let's talk about what exactly it is I've been cooking, because today's outing really was hilarious to me, but it made me remember that I've been meaning to blog about all of the yummies I've made over the last few months...for...well...months. 

Now I can do it all in one gigantic post. Hooray, efficiency! Depression has its benefits!!

Several months ago, circa the spring, I was foraging every chance I got. I learned so much this year about what's edible in my yard if I just...don't make my daughter mow it. I've got purslane, plantain, clover, yarrow, dandelion, two varieties of nettle, the list goes on and on. We had an abundance of violets this year, so I wanted to do something with them. I took Alex with me to grab about a quarter of our violet population...gotta leave some for the pollinators and other critters!...and I made violet syrup.

Look how pretty!

LOOK HOW PRETTY!!!! That was after steeping overnight. I boiled it down with sugar after that, and it turned a truly ugly shade of grey. So it's been hiding up in my cupboard. Derek also reported that it didn't even taste like violet, it just tasted like syrup. Well. So much for that. I'll double the amount of flowers next year. Or triple them. I picked my flowers late in the spring, so I didn't have as many to grab up, but we really did have a bounty this year. I'll easily be able to triple the flowers without starving my other yard visitors. 

I also attempted to forage a fuckton of dandelions so I could make dandelion soda, and dandelion syrup, AND dandelion jelly...at one point early this spring, our entire lawn was blanketed in dandelions. But I also went about dandelion collection too late in the season and I couldn't forage enough to make one thing, let alone three. So no dandelion goodies were made this year. Next year for sure. 

My next big make this year came after we got home from Ithaca. In one of my Ithaca recap posts, I wrote about the irresponsible amount of vodka we bought in Ithaca, and I cannot recall, but I feel like I mentioned wanting to make limoncello with them. So.

I spent 100 smackers on sorrento lemons. The real deal. The tasty yummers that are prized in limoncellos across Italy. 

In case you can't tell, these are what scientists refer to as, "honkers". Check it:

My brutishly large hands for scale. 

I made a LOT with these lemons. First, and most importantly, I made limoncello:

This batch contains vodka made from grapes from Six Mile Vineyard right outside of Ithaca.

This batch is from the Ithaca is Vodka vodka. Made from NY corn! What a treat. 

And I made a third batch, but I made that one with Grey Goose, and it did not need to be photographed. The other things I made I did not think to photograph, but I made a gallon of lemon basil switchel with basil from my garden. I made a gallon of standard lemonade. And I made about a pound of lemon curd that Alex and Derek ate on various store bought cookies. I love to bake, but I only have so much energy to expend. And those lemons really took it out of me. It takes HOURS to peel them, for real. 

When we went to Six Mile Vineyard, Derek and Caryn (those fucking traitors) both tried the orangecello that was made in house. I couldn't let that stand, so I made my own arancello with three different kinds of oranges, though it's meant to be made with blood oranges. I just couldn't get access...affordable access...to any, having blown my citrus wad on lemons from the Sorrento Peninsula. 

I also ALSO made liquore di basilico. I'm not sure why it isn't just called basilcello like the rest of the citrus liqueurs, but whatevs. I did not take a picture of that while it was steeping, because it looked fucking disgusting. Just like....sewer water. I put about a half pound of my sweet basil from my garden in it, and I am adult enough to admit that I added green food coloring when it was done, just because it needed to be green. Not grey. It isn't like, hulk green or anything, it's a very pleasant tint. It has a few more months of aging before it's ready, though it has been strained and emulsified already. All of my cellos from this year have. Now they just need to mellow for two years, and they're ready to go. My last year's batch isn't so bad, Derek and I tried them a couple of months ago when Allen was here. They need more time to deepen into themselves. Anyway, I have made a fuck ton of alcohol in the last year. I made a big ass bottle of gin from shit I foraged last year, and I should have written about that, but whoops! I didn't. I want to do it again in the spring, with different ingredients that I know more about now. so I'll document that next year. 

Moving on!

Alex had a birthday party in late July, and I made her and her friends cupcakes, but with all of the trans flag colors. I learned how terrible I am at filling cupcake liners to the proper line, and also how terrible I am at putting three different frosting colors into one piping bag. 

I wanted them to be all marbled, but instead they were messy. 

I love to bake, but I never promised that the things I bake are beautiful. They aren't. Aesthetically pleasing bakes are clearly not my calling. 

It's me! Wearing a shirt that SHOULD have said "more girls should kiss me", but oops. 

This isn't baking, but it is worth mentioning: Derek and I took a trip to Keakuk to go geode hunting. Which...if you haven't been, is a wild experience. It's where you go to a creek bed, you pay someone to be there, and then you spend hours and hours doing fucking back breaking physical labor to MAYBE get some geodes. Real white people shit. 

Our dig site!

I realize that it is going to look like Derek is the only one doing any hard work...I assure you this is not true. I took photos every time I took a water break, which was every seven seconds, but during those other seconds where I was working, I was working hard, ok? Real hard. 

You can't see the left side hole in that photo, but I dug out that ENTIRE thing. I was fucking sore for days. 

I  hit a REALLY great vein, which is why I excavated so much of this geode cubby. I couldn't stop finding geodes. 

My muddy grabbers for scale. 

We have since carved through almost all of our geodes, but my photos of those are lost, I guess. They aren't on my phone anymore. Actually, thinking while I type, I think I just moved them to another folder in my phone. But I am too lazy to check. They're all very  nice geodes, though!

Here is Derek's haul:

This is Derek's haul before he took over the vein I found. I had been hammering and chiseling and digging away for like, two hours, and my arm was tired, and I needed a break, so I was benevolent and offered him my area. In the picture below, you can see the position that I  had been in for literally hours, hammering and chiseling and getting rained on and finding geodes. Derek had been digging around right behind my blue bucket, and having none of the good luck I had had. 

I do not have a pitcure of his bucket AFTER he dug through my vein, but he got a lot more geodes. And he's since cut through them and polished them up beautifully. We are aching to go back, but we have so many other places we want to explore for great rocks a lot closer to home. We were going to go up to Haunted Ridge this weekend, but I got a few last minute shoots, so no dice. 

About...uh...a month and a half ago, Derek and I went apple picking. I haven't gone in years, and I really wanted to pluck several bushels and immerse myself in the kitchen for several days, making all kinds of delicious apple fuckery. 

"Grab as many bags as you need" is delightfully non-specific for an apple hoarder like me. I can't even fucking EAT apples and I was glee ridden at the challenge. I will take ALL of the bags, thank you. 

Isn't there something so wonderful about sun warmed, freshy apples right off the branch? 

My forever hot man piece, being an apple connoisseur, roaming from tree to tree looking for the finest Missourian apples.  

This was the lane I gathered the most apples from. Jonagolds. 

We only ended up picking two bags. Forty dollars worth of fresh apples, minus the ones Derek ate while we were picking. The orchard lanes were littered with fallen apples, and all I could think about was grabbing them up, washing them off, and making cider and butter with them. I hope that's what they do to minimize waste. Either that, or they let the deer and critters come in and eat all of the lovely floor goodies. Though I suspect it's the former, as there was an abundance of apple butter and apple cider in the little market you pay for your apples in. 

So Derek and I took our twenty pounds of apples home, and I got to work. First, I made apple butter.

I slathered six pounds of various apple varieties in sugar, cinnamon, and a proprietary blend of spices, mixed them up real rough, just like I like, and then put them in a pressure sauna for three hours. 

BEHOLD!

Mushy and spiced and truly a wonderful smell. Next, I blended the ever living fuck out of the mush with an immersion blender. 

Ta da!! Apple butter!!! 6 jars, canned and wonderful.

Alex reported it as being scrumptious. Derek reported it as being mmmmmmm. I cannot report any of it, because I cannot eat real sugar. Sad face for me. 

Next, I made pickled apples. I fucking LOVE pickled apples. Derek was not a fan, Alex didn't want to try them, and Alex's bestie Kailani did not know how she felt about them, so I'm left with a gorgeous jar of pickled apples that I can only eat one slice every few days, and that is a travesty. They're fucking bursting with flavor, they are complex and sweet and sour and punchy. They should be on everything. Like as I write this, I'm eating some kimchi jjigae and it would be gorgeous with some pickled apples and my chili oil. I just had oral surgery, though, so nothing too spicy for me. And also no sugar for the last four years and until forever, so no pickled apples either way. Booooooooooo.

I used the honey from the apiary in Ithaca for these pickled apples, too. Hooray!!

What did I make next? I made hand pies. A fucking metric fuckton of hand pies. 

 Now. 

I have been keto since November of 2018. I was SUPER STRICT for the first three years, I counted every fucking macro with precision. I wing it now, and I stay between 20 and 40 carbs per day. I am a vegetarian, but I eat vegan more often than not. 

I miss baked goods. Like, there are keto dupes for various baked goods, sure. Some of them are even good. But when it comes to fruit pies, I hadn't yet found a keto dupe that was easily made vegan friendly. When Derek and I were still on island, I saw a video about a keto apple pie using chayote, and an almond flour crust, so I splurged on chayote (they were like, 5 bucks a pop on island, and I needed three. That's a LOT of money to gamble. AND we should talk about the criminally high rate of groceries in places like Hawai'i and indigenous lands...), came home, and made my pie. It was...alright? I wasn't wowed, and for the money I spent making that pie and the time it took, I just wasn't impressed enough to try it again, or even tweak the recipe, to make it worth the cost. So I ate the pie over the course of a week and a half and felt not terribly great about the experience, and I tucked apple pie away as something I just couldn't eat anymore. 

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when we picked all of these gorgeous apples and I knew I wanted to make hand pies for Derek and Alex. I took to the internet and started digging for keto apple pie dupes. I didn't have to dig very far, I found one for zucchini. I had read about zucchini being a dupe for cooked apples, but after my chayote experience, I hadn't been enthused to experiment again. Time makes fools of us all, I guess, so I was like, fuck yeah, let's give these green monsters a try. 

You. Mother. FUCKERS. 

Zucchini hand pies fucking slap. They slap HARD. I could not tell for one fucking second that I was eating zucchini. It looked like apples, it smelled like apples, it tasted like apples. Derek and Alex were both completely fooled. We have a fucking WINNER!!!!! Oh I was so excited!!! But I needed a crust. 

So I really scoured the internet for a crust that sounded like it would be sturdy. It took me awhile to find, but on this weird little corner of the internet...the christian keto corner...I found a crust that is just god damn life altering. It's firm. It's not mealy. It tastes and bakes just like a laminated crust would. And I was gagged over it. 

That doesn't look like zucchini. It looks like chopped up apples. 

Look at my little hand pies!!!!!

Derek is folding his arms because he's so mad that it's zucchini that tastes like apples. 

These were seriously fucking amazing. I've made three batches of them since, and another batch of the crust was used for keto pumpkin pie that I spent two glorious weeks eating for breakfast every morning. Adulthood RULES. Did I take any pictures of those? I think I did, I need to check my phone. Oh delightful! I did!

Look at these little ANGELS! Except angels aren't real, and these keto pumpkin pies are. Eeeeeee!

They even have that good sink in that I look for in an excellently made pumpkin pie. Don't give me some aesthetically smooth pumpkin pie...looking at you, Costco...give me the sink in that tells me it was made with love. 

Eat your heart out. That perfectly crisp, firm bottom is everything I want in a pie. I really cannot overstate how fucking impressed I am with this keto pie crust recipe. It is fucking amazing. 

Look at that. Perfect texture. Perfect size. Perfect breakfast. I love pumpkin pie. 

Back to the apples. Obviously I made Alex and Derek hand pies, too, though Alex and her friends ate almost all of them. I made them two versions. One was apple chai, and the other was caramel apple. I was told that both were delightful. What they weren't was aesthetically pleasing. 

I didn't use an egg wash to close the pies, and I also overstuffed them. I was experimenting with different ways to seal the crust, going for ease and efficacy over looks, and succeeding at neither thing. They look like pale biscuits that someone kicked into the dirt and then spit on. Yikes. Not my finest showing, but again, they are said to have tasted lovely, and that's what counts. 

Alex's friend was spending the night one night and saw me cooking, and asked if she could help me. So Kailani and I made apple jelly together! 

Another few pounds of apples, cooking down into juice. 

Et Voila! Apple jelly! Kailani got to take home the little jar on top, not because I'm too stingy to give her a big jar, but because I couldn't taste it and I was worried it would be bad and I didn't want to send her home with gross apple jelly and then have so much of it go to waste. Thankfully, everyone said it was truly tasty. Hooray! I'm the  best. 

My next big cooking project was keto cinnamon rolls made with ChocZero "honey", and this was an absolute fucking undertaking. I believe I called it a saga when I told Amber about it. I took about fifteen minutes worth of video while I was making the cinnamon rolls and I can't lie about this: I was positive they were going to be an absolute fucking disaster, because I fucked up the recipe. I put the fake honey in where it didn't belong. 

But they were a smashing success, and I ate them for breakfast every day for a week. It was meant to be twelve servings, but again, I am an adult, and I get to define what that means. SEVEN FUCKING SERVINGS IT IS. Well, eight, because I ate one the night I baked them. I want to make them again, but I am still on the mend from oral surgery. The tail end of the mend, but the mend just the same. I don't quite have the energy. I worked out today and it was a chore. I'm amazed how like, connected my face is to the rest of what my body goes through. I felt the same way after I broke my arm. The things I couldn't do after that were astounding. The things I STILL can't do, all these years later. Thanks, I hate it. 

I have also been tinkering with tiktok copycat recipes made keto and having a great deal of fun. Mostly with macaroni and cheese. I was obsessed for a bit with jalapeno popper mac and cheese, though I kind of accidentally stumbled on that recipe myself more than I copied it. When Derek and I go and have a day in STL, we try and center it around a meat cheat day for me so we can it up Salt and Smoke. I want to like Pappy's so bad, but the brisket at Salt and Smoke is superior. I am so sorry, Pappy's. Anyway, I order two pounds of brisket, take it home, then make make and cheese with it. I add jalapenos to it, and the keto mac and cheese bechamel uses cream cheese, anyway, so bam! I'm ahead of the curve, tiktok! But I just saw french onion soup mac and cheese and immediately had to try it. And I did that Saturday, and holy fucking holy. It is absolute divinity. I don't even want to imagine my life before french onion soup mac and cheese. 

I tried to explain it to my dad and he was very confused, but he also wouldn't stop talking over me long enough to hear my explanation of it, so h e can remain in the dark. I'll make it for him in a few months. 

Cooking is a thousand percent my love language. Cooking for people and creating for people. I painted this on Rhyann's wall in their room:

It isn't perfect, or finished the way I personally wanted it, but Rhyann said they liked the blue band without anything in it, so I left it the way they preferred it. After all, it isn't ME sleeping in there. The door is still in need of finishing, and now I've only got about four weeks to finish it. Yikes! That's pressure. 

This, and school, is everything I've been up to lately. I suppose I should do an update on what's been going on with school, but I'll save that for another blog. This has taken me literally days. Maybe weeks. Time to publish this and be on my way. I can't fucking believe it's almost time for a photo rundown of the year's sessions. Where the fuck has the time gone. 

Speaking of, I think I've had this blog for ten years now. I put a lot of them into drafts, mostly because they were silly, and others because they were about Dan and how much I was pining over Dan, and I feel a deep sense of shame about those particular blogs. I am thinking about resurrecting them, just because like...I shouldn't be ashamed of how I felt, or how I needed to write about it, or how I expressed myself in my mid  to late twenties. I've grown a lot, and I hiding the things I've grown from doesn't make them any less real, it just like...perpetuates the idea that we should hide the things we consider bad, even though it can definitely be a tool in showing others that growth happens and we're all human, nobody gets it right all the time. 

But uh. I will be re-reading all of those blogs to double check. I think a lot of them also have just like...startlingly bad photography in them. From a time when I thought I was so good and I was just...really not. I wonder what I'll think of my photography in another ten years.