Elyse Tries her Hand at Recipe Blogging; Poor Results

I'd like to say right from the get-go that I blame Pinterest for this crap. I tried to make an interesting step-by-step guide to cooking a recipe and it just didn't work out. Below is an account of what I SHOULD have done. 




Attempted Recipe: Pasta with Sausage 
Repurposed Pinterest-Approved Female-Friendly Recipe Because All Girls are (or should be) Trying to Get Skinny by Eating Food Pictured on the Internet : Skinny Whole-Wheat Pasta with Low-Fat Free-Range Chicken Sausage (Cruelty-Free! Gluten-Free! No MSG!)

"I'm so happy to be cooking this food, I can't stand it." -not me

Scene: The kitch. 7:00 p.m., post work-day. 


Step One: Take pictures of all of your kitchen tools that you will be using, as well as pictures of the ingredients. Everybody needs to know what a Rubbermaid teaspoon and a box of pasta looks like. Cluster them all together so it looks like a little pre-cooked food family portrait. If you have a potted plant of fresh herbs, use that as a backdrop. 




Step Two:  Give a backstory on this recipe. It was passed down from generation to generation, undergoing revisions for decade diet-crazes and paranoias (bird flu, swine flu, olive oil malaria, pasta tuberculosis, etc.) Now we're ready to begin...


Step Three: Make sure you take a picture of oil in a Calphalon frying pan. This is very important because college students in their dorms, familiar only with microwave cooking, don't know how this works. (This step sponsored by Calphalon.)


Step Four:  Cut up all the vegetables. In this step, be sure to say something about how playing classical music enhances the cooking process. Bonus points awarded for obscure composers and undertones of douchiness. 


Step Five:  Get your iPhone out, because it's INSTAGRAM TIME!! Capture those frying vegetables in a nice sepia tone, or make it black-and-white, like a newspaper headline. "PEPPERS HAVING AN AFFAIR WITH HOT OIL!" Post, upload, read comments. Move phone away from oil pan. 


Step Six:  Make a comment about your choice of Ragu over Prego. Don't say "because it was cheaper" or "because it was in the pantry. By the way, does pasta sauce expire?" 


Step Seven:  Obligatory comment about how the men in your life like the recipe. "My hubs LOOOVES this sausage dish b/c he also adds bacon, LOL!" Men hungry. Men eat bacon. Bacon good. ((If I ever refer to the future Mr. Elyse Granger as "hubs" please press my face into a pan of hot oil.))


Step Eight: Cook the sausage, or whatever meat your dish will include. You MUST include an alternative for non-meat eaters, or you'll get angry backlash in your comments. ("Shut up, tofu-breath" is not an acceptable response to these comments.) Humor the vegos and pretend for a second that mung beans and sausage taste exactly the same. 


Step Nine:  Toss everything together in one pot. Decide that it looks borderline-inedible. Google some stock photos of the recipe and post that instead. 


Step Ten: MOST IMPORTANT STEP: Posting the nutrition facts. We're all nothing if not registered dietitians, right? We all know the exact number of calories in food that we just throw together. In case you don't, here's what they are (applies to every recipe, everywhere, always.) 


(copy & paste) 
Calories: 175
Serving size: 4 ounces (we all know what this looks like, obviously.)
Sodium: 100 mg
Carbs: 6 g
Fat: *0-6 g (*depending on mung bean usage.) 






You're done!!!! Now enjoy, and keep refreshing your post to read all the glowing comments and SPAM. Pretend to care about what substitutions people would make, and their various food allergies. ("Little Tommy is deathly allergic to salt, so we substituted granulated agave extract and it tasted great!") It didn't, probably. 






Sorry to disappoint everyone who thought this was going to be a real recipe post. Takeout exists for a reason. 

The Best Kind of Blackout: Reflections from a Camp Weekend Devoid of Technology

In this thrilling installment, we find our heroine once again gearing up for a 4-day summer camp in the wild, unpredictable suburb wilderness of Hanover, VA. For those of you unfamiliar with my story on why I go to camp, you should probably stop stalking me. Or keep stalking me and read the abbreviated Twitter-approved version: 


- My best friend lost her mom to breast cancer while we were both in college at #Elon. I found this summer camp for children who have had a parent or sibling loss. We volunteered together and have been doing it ever since. #longstoryshort 



You should know up-front that I had a really deprived childhood; I never went to a summer sleepaway camp. My negligent parents made us do things like go to the beach and take family vacations to Yellowstone National Park. We had chores to do in the morning. CHORES! And we couldn't even ride our bikes to the pool until they were done. While that's not exactly the kind of depravity that would make for a mopey Eminem song, best believe that a part of me always felt like I should have gone to camp. I love the 'ruggedly self-reliant' thrill of it all. It's daring and safe all at the same time. The fact that I was probably 14 years old before I could spend the night at a friend's house without calling my mom to pick me up is irrelevant; I missed out on camp and I love that I have a second-chance to drink the bug juice now that I'm 26. 


At Comfort Zone Camp, the volunteers are matched 1-1 with a "Little Buddy" camper; mine this year was the same one from last year. I'll call her Z. She's phenomenal and after camp I really had to suppress the urge to throw her in the back of my Jeep Liberty, take her to get Slushees at 7-11 and be BFF's with her every day. From last Thursday afternoon until Sunday evening, I silenced my Droid with the stroke of a finger and prepared for a weekend without feeling the pervasive 'buzz, buzz, PING!' of my phone. (That's the sound it makes when real people call me, I bet.) 

"It's 'I Hope We Never Part', now get it right or pay the price!!!" 

 Here are some things (for better or worse) That I got to skip out on this past weekend: 


- Since I didn't go to work on Friday, I didn't get to play my favorite 10:30 game "Am I Bored, or Am I Hungry?" (Spoiler alert: I'm usually both. The cure seems to be Diet Coke. Which I also didn't have this past weekend.) 


- Literally 196,209 important news stories happened and I missed all of them. At the top of MY news desk was "Saturday Night Dinner: Will this taco meat cause me and my entire cabin indigestion, or will it be the 5 boxes of stale, damp Oreos that I parceled out as a snack? Find out at 11." 


- The only Super-Pac I was concerned with was my backpack, which WAS super in every sense of the word: it held my waterproof Uno cards, lanyard craft string, giant scissors, stale damp Oreos, a Buzz Lightyear flashlight, band-aids, 6 tee shirts, a sticky roll of lifesavers from LAST camp, bug spray, hand sanitizer, and 5-Hour Energy (which BTW kills spiders. Take that for what it's worth.) 


- Saturday night came and went, and I didn't get to play my OTHER favorite game: "Is This Shockoe Party Girl Wearing a Skirt, a Tube Top, or a Really Stretchy Bracelet?"  


- For four days, I didn't once look at or inquire what ingredients went into the food/beverages I consumed. I told myself that SOMEWHERE in nature there had to be a berry that would produce electric- blue, lemon-flavored juice and just drank it. 


- I got all hot & bothered last weekend, but it had nothing to do with vodka, losing my debit card, or crying in the bathroom of Cha-Cha's; I was putting everything I had into coming up with the perfect skit for "silent charades." Oh, and it had to include 16 people, 8 of them kids. And it couldn't be inappropriate. 


- No ice. I had no ice in my drinks all weekend. So...


- A trillion cute/memorable/life-affirming moments happened over the course of 4 days, but nary one tweet was twit about them. But I know they happened, and I remember them. They're as real to me as anything Facebooker T. Overshare would Instagram. 




So, to "debrief" (a new buzzword I learned that means "quietly hand your Little a handful of Chex Mix so they don't fall asleep, get restless, or ask what time it is") I LOVED taking some time off from adult life. Turns out, I don't have to be Buzz-Fed every day in order to survive. I had the most generous, happy, engaging people boosting me up every second of every day. Maybe if EVERYONE had that, we wouldn't need as much battery-powered crap. #pointstoponder. [sent from my iPad]


To everyone out there who thinks that a 4-day camping trip might be just the thing you need, may I suggest a giant group excursion to the wilderness, maybe around the Election weekend? We can bring our own Super-Pacs, maybe some vodka, and since it's also the weekend of my birthday, I'll even chip in for some stale, damp Oreos. 






Think about it and get back to me.