Donut Peach Crisp

I know.

You thought for a minute there that I was a culinary genius and had come up with a way to turn Krispy Kremes and fruit into the end-all-be-all of desserts Actually, I just made a peach crisp last night with some weird little peaches from Whole Foods called donut peaches. Local AND on mega-sale. Win! So these peaches. They were like peaches but squished flat and looked like apples when cut up. They tasted not quite like apples and not quite like peaches but the dessert was tasty anyhow. Even better, now having written this post, they may have inspired me to come up with a dessert that involves glazed donuts made into crust.

Maybe I AM a genius!

What else? Modest goal update= FAIL. Total fail. A few times it wasn't my fault and a few times it was, but all in all I can count my recent coffee-free days on one hand. Actually 2 fingers...

I am on about a 4 day cycle of wedding stress. Every four days or so I totally freak out (on the inside only of course--I am cool and collected and totally together on the outside! *hairflip*) about the fact that I know nothing about my own wedding. Not where, not when, not anything! And I have been engaged for 5 months! (Whoa...five months...) So every four days I go on an online rampage trying to find something to settle on that is within in my control and not dependent on the when or the where of the wedding. Usually this is just me hunting for dresses on used wedding dress classifieds. Which we all know is pointless because I am not going to drop several hundred bucks sight unseen, no returns allowed. Anyway.

That's what going on with me.

By the way, sorry this blog has become totally boring. Even I am bored. I had big plans to post pictures of the progression of the peach crisp a la Smitten Kitchen, but alas, she has a way better-lit kitchen than I do, because none of my picture attempts turned out.

Big Day

I had no caffeine today! At alllllll. Success of my modest goal. I also ate a super healthy salad for lunch, which was also delicious (love you, Trader Joe's!), but I was sad because it was spicy and caused my random asthma to flare up, so I can't buy it again. I think I am allergic to capsaicin. I can't breathe properly when I eat foods with too much chili pepper. I swear. I never have normal problems.

Anyway. That's really all I have to say.

Modest Goals

So I had big plans for this summer.

Before I knew how many hours a day I was going to work, I thought that I would have this chic adult life wherein I woke up early and went running on the mall, came home to make myself delicious food, worked for my outside job several hours a week, and was generally healthy, wealthy and wise. Or, more like--healthy, not broke, and wise.

But these plans were quickly derailed. There are many, many external factors that contributed to the dissolution, but I also accept that I could have and should have overcome more of them. Because I have never been running on the mall, I have cooked my own dinner all of 4 times, and I am just now starting on the outside job.

Fail.

In an attempt to make a small, but important improvement in those healthy-wealthy-wise measures, I have decided to....

Replace coffee with sleep.

I have yet to adjust my bedtime to my wake up time. Which results in a desperate need for a cool caffeinated beverage each morning to the tune of $1.29 (pretty good for iced coffee, but an unnecessary $1.29 nonetheless). So I am disallowing myself from purchasing coffee during the day. I think I will learn my lesson pretty quick about the bedtime. And I will be healthier and have more $$ in my pockets as a result! So it seems like the wise thing to do.

Perhaps all is not lost for this summer quite yet.

Things Going On

1) Eric was here this weekend. It was very fun. But now he is gone. Which makes me sad. Because I love him. And he has sparkly eyes. Also, he now hates me for saying he has sparkly eyes on my blog. But he DOES. And now they are gone. Boo.

2) Went to fireworks on the mall this 4th of July. I made a strawberry/blueberry trifle and made it look like a flag. Temporarily forgot whether the stripes were red and the stars were on the blue or vice versa. Got very made fun of and called a communist, which I found unfair because--hello, I was making a dessert in a flag design. This was the most American thing I have probably done all year.

3) No pies have been made recently. Chocolate chip zucchini bread was made for an office party. People liked it. Almost certainly because I over-did the chocolate chips and under-did the zucchini. Tips of a master chef, people!

4) Job is great overall, had a bad day today.

5) Summer is flying by with the speed of...something really really fast. But I kind of wish it would fly faster only because today it was 100 degrees and humid. That is just not okay. I realize I complain a lot about the weather, but you must remember--I am from Tucson. It is a strange land. I have grown up with expectations of sunny, dry days and the occasional torrential storms. I am not well suited to extreme conditions other than sauna-style heat.

6) I think we need to go back to the days of WWII-style propaganda. Saw a poster in the American History museum this weekend that encouraged carpooling. The message? "When you ride alone you ride with HITLER!" With a chalk ghost of Hitler sitting next to this non-eco friendly man. Where is that kind of oomph today in our carpooling PSAs?

Metro Music

So everyday at Farragut North someone is playing music as I get off the metro in the morning. I have paused to think about it, mostly because I wonder how the street musicians divvy up who goes when where. Because almost always, its only 1 musician and a different musician daily. Which seems very well-organized and very convenient for us office drones getting off the metro to have that musical variety in our mornings. But beyond that, it didn't occupy too much of my mental space.

However. Today, there was no music.

No music! It made me sad.

I think this means I have to bring some cash tomorrow to tip them.

Maybe this is part of the uber-organized Street Musician Association's plan, taking the NPR Fund Drive tactic of taking away your entertainment so you realize you miss it and donate. You never know.

Friends, awhile back I posted about how I loved Cary Tennis' column on Salon. Because I do. But sadly Cary took a break from Salon while undergoing cancer treatment. But while I was on vacation these last weeks: voila! Cary is back! Still writing in the crazy way I love so dearly because it is just not what you can read anywhere else. I think Cary is a bold writer. He always has these intense thoughts about who we are and why we live and how we act out our anxieties and these ideas are so far removed from what most of us think about on a daily basis but he just writes them down. Doesn't bother to temper them with doses of the quotidian or justify how abnormal they may be. So anyway, go read Salon.

The other blog news of the day is that I am sadly becoming un-enamored with Smitten Kitchen. The photos are still great, but I have now made 3 of her recipes and none of them came out very good (asparagus and goat cheese pasta, blackberry crumb bars, and baked rigatoni with tiny meatballs). I may just not be quite advanced enough in the kitchen, and to be fair I did have to do some adjusting of the recipes based on what I had in my fridge/pantry at the time. The real trouble came today though, when I attempted the rigatoni dish. Friends, I had only minor mishaps, but the thing took THREE HOURS. Three. Hours. Of. Cooking. And it was decent. But if I spend 3 hours in the kitchen ever again I better come out with a Thanksgiving dinner or a gourmet dish. I think the Bon Appetit short rib sandwich took a really long time too, but at the end of that endeavor I ate the best sandwich of my life (except for that Craftwich one).

Okay, off to bed.

Marriage

Probably the best thing so far about being engaged is that it has been a catalyst for me to start reading and thinking a lot about marriage. This is kind of obvious, in a way, but also not, because sometimes I worry that people forget completely about marriage until they are actually married, having been distracted by the wedding in the mean time.

And who can blame them? In all the wedding frenzy that exists in our culture about 5% is at all related to the groom and about 1% says anything about actually being married. But somehow before I got engaged I stumbled upon OffbeatBride.com. Which led me, post-engagement, to apracticalwedding.com. Which is awesome.

Marriage is really fascinating. I have been so interested to read about how it changes you to actually stand up and say vows. Before I started to read from people who had been married, I assumed getting married was for fun and family and for a party and to get the legal stuff sorted and to be official, but that the fundamental relationship would be unchanged. And in many ways I still think the relationship will stay the same. But I also think it will be better somehow. It will be more solid and it will run deeper. That's what the people say, anyway. And I actually feel this way about being engaged. We have already had big, serious talks that didn't seem necessary before, and they definitely were not fun but somehow they intensified something. We are building our lives together. It's hard to do that, but also awesome.

The other day I was talking to a new friend (who I have decided is the big sister I never had) about her marriage. And how very very very hard it is. Managing two people's distinct needs and careers and dreams. And it was great to be able to talk about that in an honest way. It is hard, but that doesn't mean the end is nigh or you are with the wrong person or you love each other any less. In my experience, people either say 1 of 2 things about marriage 1) I love my hubby and our life is perfect! or, more commonly 2) Husbands! Ugh! Hahaha. It's time we start being more honest about what it's really like. Though admittedly there should always some sacred space in the relationship.

The point is this: a wedding is 1 day, a marriage is a whole lot of days if you are lucky. And I'm glad that somehow the webosphere has focused my attention on the latter, especially in these first few months. I think it will help me keep perspective once the wedding planning phase kicks into high gear. (By the way, if I DO lose the plot when the planning kicks into high gear, feel free to set me straight. But be nice about it. Methinks weddings stack the deck against you keeping your sanity. K thanks.)

Oh and I would be remiss if I didn't say that this post was inspired in part by the most recent post over at Suburbalicious Living. Which I found through A Practical Wedding. The joy of hyperlinks!!

Also P.S. thanks to my parents for being good at being married and showing me how that works.