Mileposts on the Road to Adulthood

About a week after my twelfth birthday I was standing in my empty bedroom. The furniture I'd owned since I graduated to a big girl bed was downstairs in a moving truck, waiting to be taken to my mom's rental home. The new bedroom set I'd picked out with my dad a few weeks earlier hadn't arrived yet. I traced the butterfly pattern around the wall and declared myself an adult

When I got my driver's license, the first thing I did was take myself for a long drive through the winding mountain roads that led from my dad's house to my mom's house. I put in my Britney CD, turned the volume all the way up, and reveled in my new-found freedom.

Somewhere in the summer between high school and college I accidentally stayed out all night with a guy I had almost dated a few years earlier. I stumbled home as the sun was rising and entered the kitchen to find my dad brewing coffee. He wasn't happy, but I was eighteen. I was moving out soon. There wasn't any punishment he could inflict on me, and we both knew it.

On my twentieth birthday I had a bit of a breakdown. There was a huge party happening, one that actually had very little to do with my birthday. I sat against a wall in shock as the clock rolled past midnight, and I wondered if I'd be able to handle trading in part of my identity. Was I ready to be a twenty-something instead of a dumb teen?

The final Harry Potter book came out shortly after I turned twenty-one. I read it in a few days, tucking it in between other things I had to do. It wasn't quite like The Goblet of Fire, which I read in a single sitting while my dad put food in front of me so I wouldn't starve. But it was as close as I could come to replicating that experience now that I had other responsibilities. When I finished the book I, along with an entire generation, bid goodbye to my childhood. Harry was an adult, and so was I.

Graduation is a bittersweet time for everyone. I was so glad school was over, ecstatic to be done with homework and tests. I was devastated that my boyfriend and I were breaking up. I was terrified that I didn't have a job lined up. Not knowing what came next, I spent three days driving from LA to Denver all by myself, listening to the Dixie Chicks and sobbing the entire time. So much for wide open spaces.

I was cleaning my small apartment, like I did every Saturday morning when I locked onto my gaze in the bathroom mirror. For a second I didn't recognize myself, and I spent a few moments staring at my reflection. Here I was, spending the weekend scrubbing my toilet. I had a job and an apartment. I was paying my bills and taking care of myself. Was this adulthood? Had I really made it?

There's nothing quite like being responsible for another life. My head was killing me, but the dog needed to be walked. So I rolled out of bed, pulled on a pair of pants, and took her to the park. Amazingly enough I felt a lot better when I got home than I had expected to. Responsibility had trumped my hangover in more ways than one.

The moments that I feel like an accomplished, confident adult come more frequently. They're also becoming more mundane. It's forgoing just one more episode of television because I really should wash the dishes first. Waking up to dog shit on the carpet and starting to clean with barely a grumble. Doing research in order to make informed decisions about my money.

The moments that I'm sure I'll find out it was all just a big joke come less frequently, though I've stopped hoping that they'll just disappear altogether. Is that another sign of maturity?

We're at a happy hour with my work colleagues when I find myself talking to my boss's boss. He mentions that he's heard great things about me, and my fiance smiles and says "She's a smart girl". I wait until we get home to correct him. I know it was meant as a compliment, but I'm a woman. It's taken me too long to feel comfortable claiming that label for myself, and now that I do no one is going to take it away from me.

New Year, New...Something

This year, as we have for several years now, we rang in the New Year at Zach and Sarah's house. This was the first time all four of us were living in (practically) the same city, so it was really easy. I even had dreams of going home after the party to sleep in my own bed. This was mostly because I wanted to do things on New Year's Day and I knew it would be easier to accomplish those things if I woke up in my own bed. But then I fell asleep sometime between the pouring of the champagne and the drinking of the champagne and those hopes were dashed. My massive hangover, compounded by riding the train early in the morning, did nothing to help my productivity. Instead of shopping, doing laundry, and making turkey stock, I sat on the couch and dozed my way through many hours of TV.

All in all it wasn't a very auspicious start to the new year. But it's not like that actually means anything beyond the fact that two games of Rage Cage in a single night is too much.

This is the part where I'm supposed to make a New Year's Resolution in order to better myself. But honestly? I'm in a really good place. This time last year I felt like I was in limbo, but now my life is pretty stable. I'm having fun learning to cook and cooking more often. I've been decent about going to the gym (well, until I hurt my knee). Work is good and I'm planning a wedding.

I guess that in the new year, I just want to continue doing these things. Keep cooking and cleaning and going to the gym. Keep reading and watching TV and hanging out with Kevin. More of a continuation than a resolution, I suppose. Life is pretty good right now, and this year is shaping up to be every bit as awesome as the last year was. Here's to 2014.

Local Friends

By the time we got back from vacation, three of our friends had moved to DC. Jen actually moved in July, and Zach and Sarah moved while we were still in California after the wedding. It's exciting to have them all here, and my social calendar has absolutely exploded because of it. I used to make plans once every two or three weekends; now I have something going on nearly every weekend for the foreseeable future. It's fun, but it's also exhausting.

I'm finding that I need to readjust and do a better job of carving out time to just sit on the couch and recharge. I got good at this in college, when I made sure that I took an hour every day to sit in my room and watch TV by myself. Of course that never ended up being enough alone time. After every semester I would collapse on my mom's couch for a week, unable to even think about making plans with my high school friends until I was too bored to stay in the house anymore. And it takes me a while to get really bored.

I overdid it a bit the first week everyone was here. We spent an evening down in the city helping Zach and Sarah unload their UHaul. Then Kevin's family came over for dinner Saturday night and everyone went out to brunch on Sunday. Somehow the rest of the following week was completely nonstop until I accidentally snapped at Kevin out of exhaustion. Then I spent six hours reading The Hero of Ages on Friday and felt much better.

Since then I've been better about pacing myself. I have to turn down the occasional invitation, even if I really want to go, so that I don't overextend myself again. I'm also trying to slightly adjust my weekday evenings so that they're more relaxing, resulting in more energy on the weekends. So far this has been pretty successful. I miss out on some of the fun, but it's worth it to fully enjoy the time I do spend with my friends.

Family Dinner

Over the last year I've had more and more occasions to feel like an actual adult. Everything from taking care of a dog to saving money to finding a new, better job have contributed to my realization that I may be able to pull off this grown up thing after all. The most recent such moment was a week or so ago when we had Kevin's family over for dinner.

The amazing part about all of this was that we were serving twelve people and I didn't get stressed at all. Somehow I'd figured out things like how to put together a menu and time the food. I'd also managed top internalize the fact that it ultimately doesn't matter. The food will probably be good, but even if it isn't the evening won't be a total disaster.

Kevin roasted a leg of lamb and cooked his family's rice pilaf recipe. I glazed some carrots and roasted some asparagus. We served this with wine and rolls (though we forgot to put the rolls out). It was actually all really straight-forward. Mostly because we chose simple recipes that were easy to double (or quintuple in the case of the carrots). We also let our guests handle appetizers and desserts. The one tense moment when everything seemed to be done at once was made much easier by Kevin's uncle lending a helping hand.

The dinner was an unmitigated success. The food was delicious and the company was easy-going. If you'd told me a year ago that I could successfully throw a dinner party, I wouldn't have believed you. Honestly, you should have seen how stressed I was about our first Thanksgiving. But now that we have a couple of successes under our belt, I'm feeling more confident about the whole hosting thing. It makes me wish my family lived closer so I could start hosting dinners for them, too.

In case anyone is interested, here are my super simple veggie recipes:

Carrots:
Per pound of carrots, you need: 1 cup water, 1/3 cup brown sugar, 2 TBSP butter, dash of salt, lots of pepper (I keep wishing I'd put more pepper in these, but it's really to taste). Throw everything in a pot and bring it to a boil. Then simmer until the carrots are tender (~20 minutes)

Asparagus:
Coat the asparagus with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, and pepper (I'm still figuring out more complicated spices, but feel free to add those, too, if you think it's a good idea.) Heat the oven to 400 and put the asparagus in. They need to cook for 5-20 minutes depending on how thick they are, but ideally you want them to still be bright green and crisp. I usually overcook mine a tad, but no one complains. When they come out, sprinkle with parmesan cheese.

Mint

About a month ago, I signed up with Mint.com. This was in an effort to a better sense of my financial situation. I want to start saving more money and possibly pay off some of my loans a little quicker. Mint is great at giving you an overall picture of your finances. It also has several other features. I've really liked some of them, and I'm still learning to use others. Mint is pretty customizable, so I can always change settings when I don't like the defaults. But I've been laughing at some things.

The best thing about Mint is having everything in one place. I can see my checking and savings accounts, my debt (credit card, student loan, and car loan), and my 401k. By far my favorite thing is being able to play with my 401k. Mint provides several features that aren't provided by the 401K itself. For instance, I can see the value every day, instead of simply receiving quarterly statements.This allows Mint to build graphs that let me see performance over time and compare my own performance to the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones. It has me excited to start some other investments, though I still need to do some more research on that.

Mint also adds up all my assets and debts and lets me know my net worth on any given day. I was really excited to discover that this is a positive number. I can also see how it changes month to month. Mint is all about the graphs, which is probably my favorite thing about it. I can see spending or income over time and break spending down by category or merchant. It's pretty handy for looking at where all my money goes.

There are a ways to set budgets and goals, which I'm still playing with. Mostly I use the goals to calculate how quickly I could pay off a loan with this or that payment amount. But since they don't integrate well with the budgets, I decided not to actually set up any goals. For example, my required student loan payment each month is $211, but I've been paying $300 to pay it down faster. When I enter in the budget and the goal, Mint decides to allocate $511 for student loans which isn't right and skews the budgets I have set up. So I just allocate the $300 right off the bat and forget about the goal.

I also haven't been able to figure out how to make budgets work for things I don't buy every month. I can say that I want to spend x amount each month and break that into categories. Mint builds little bar charts to show how much I've actually spent in relation to what I'm planning to spend across the categories. But if I make a one-time purchase in a different category (like a Father's Day gift), the amount doesn't show up in my total spending. It just disappears into the ether. I have to keep remembering to add my "uncategorized" spending to my "total" spending to get the actual total. I wish there were an easy way to integrate the two.

Mint also occasionally has problems categorizing things correctly. When I transferred money from my checking to my savings account, it got recorded as additional income. According to Mint I'd earned that money twice. I've also had some problems with credit card purchases getting recorded twice. My card doesn't get charged twice, but it looks like it was. This mostly happens at restaurants, when the card is initially charged for the meal amount and then a second time with the tip added in. Even though this overrides the initial charge, Mint doesn't always figure that out. It led to me thinking I'd spent significantly more while visiting a friend last weekend than I actually had. It's easy enough to delete or recategorize transactions once you figure out what's going on. But figuring out what happened can lead to some stress.

There are other features that are probably helpful to many people that I just find funny. On the mobile app, mint shows your net cash flow every month as a simple income - spending calculation. Since I get paid on the last day of the month, this is always negative and doesn't end up being very useful for me. There are also a lot of alerts I've had to turn off. Over the weekend I had to stop at a gas station ATM to get money for the tolls on the Pennsylvania Turnpike because I'd forgotten to do this before leaving home. Mint immediately emailed me to let me know that the ATM had charged me a fee, something I was perfectly aware of. It also let me know when my rent check got cashed with a warning that "someone" had cashed an exceptionally large check.


All in all, the features I like make up for the ones that I'm finding less useful. There are a lot of customization options with Mint, and it's taking me a while to get it to the best state for me. I would definitely recommend it. Seeing the big financial picture has been a big help for me. Although I have yet to see if I actually succeeded in spending less this month than in months past.

Stuffed Peppers

I cooked again! And I'm posting the recipe here mostly for my own future reference. Because it was relatively simple, pretty cheap, quite healthy, and easy enough to alter depending on my mood. Not to mention that it actually resulted in leftovers. I've been eating stuffed peppers all week long.

The first thing to do is cook the rice. The recipe told me I should have 1 cup of cooked rice per pepper. I missed the word "cooked" and ended up with roughly twice as much rice as I needed. But that's okay because rice is cheap and it made the leftovers last longer.

While the rice was cooking, I chopped up an onion and some mushrooms and sauteed them with garlic. Then I chopped up some tomatoes and shredded a bunch of Parmesan cheese. You can add anything else you want to the stuffing. I may try putting in some nuts next time. Or throwing some chicken or beef in with the onions and garlic.

Mushrooms and onions

Tomatoes and cheese

I also prepared the peppers at this point. This is pretty easy. Cut off the top, just like a pumpkin, and remove all the seeds. Give them a good rinse to make sure you get all of the seeds out.

Cleaned peppers

When the rice is done, throw it in a bowl with all of your veggies and mix it all up.

Stuffing!

At this point, you can either throw everything in the fridge to be cooked later, or you can proceed. The most appealing part of this recipe to me is that you can get all of the heavy lifting out of the way hours before the food actually needs to be cooked.

When you're ready to go, spoon the rice stuffing into the peppers. Push it down to get all of the air out. Then stick the peppers into the dish you'll use to bake them (I actually used a pot. It worked. But I'll probably buy some corning ware in the nearish future). Once the peppers have all been stuffed, dump the extra rice mixture into the pot around them. You can definitely tell that I made way too much rice.

Stuffed peppers, plus all the extra stuffing. I think there was more rice around the peppers than in them

Now throw a bunch of mozzarella cheese on top (if you want) and grind some pepper on, too.

mmmm, cheese

Bake at 375 for 10 minutes per pepper (so I baked this for 40 minutes).

Then serve! This is so much more food than it looks like. I ate about half of what I put on my plate.

A deceptively filling meal

These keep pretty well in the fridge and heat up nicely in the microwave. Next time, I think I'll want to add some protein to the stuffing so that I don't have to worry about that part of the meal during the leftover phase. I'll also remember to use less rice.

Is This What Growing Up Looks Like?

I was going to have a marvelously lazy Sunday. Kevin's sister was in town and the two of them were going on a 55 mile bike ride in the morning. Then his mom was coming over in the afternoon for a mother's day BBQ. There was nothing I really needed to do, and I was looking forward to a lazy morning spent in front of the television.

Even a year ago I would have been able to do this. I would have spent hours on the couch with a stack of DVDs. But somehow I wasn't capable of the much laziness yesterday.

After a single episode of Angel, I began to seriously crave a shower. Then I came downstairs and realized that the dishes needed to be washed and I should probably clean the bathroom and clear off the dining room table. Suddenly I was scrubbing the toilet, folding laundry, and sweeping the floors I had just swept the day before. Between the mud the dog tracks in and the amount of hair she sheds I'm having a hard time keeping the floors clean. (Kevin: They don't seem that much dirtier to me. Me: Because I clean them.)

By the time Kevin and his sister got home, the house was clean and I was about to enjoy a beer and a book outside. The amazing thing is that even with all the cleaning (and later cooking), Sunday still felt like a perfect lazy day. In some ways, it felt even more relaxing (or possibly rejuvenating) than spending all day on the couch would have been.

All of this responsibility has got to be a side effect of growing up. I just hope it doesn't slip away from me again (though ten straight hours of Supernatural can be enjoyable in its own way).

First Thanksgiving

I hosted Thanksgiving for the first time ever this year. Despite all the stress we'll pulled it off and, everyone had a wonderful time.

Since we were out of town the weekend before Thanksgiving, all of our prep got condensed to the day before and the day of. It definitely contributed to my stress. Thankfully, Boyfriend had managed to delegate a lot of the food to our guests, so I didn't have a ton of cooking to do. But getting the house clean was no small feat. I was definitely driving Boyfriend bonkers by the fifth time I asked him to vacuum the stairs and was refusing to let him put dishes in the dishwasher. Ultimately, I managed to get the house up to company standards in time.

Boyfriend was in charge of the turkey and I was on stuffing duty. Since we were cooking the turkey on the grill, we opted not to stuff it, which gave me a lot more time. And that's definitely a good thing. I was chopping ingredients for over an hour, which just goes to show that I'd never make it on Top Chef. It didn't help that when Boyfriend saw how much I'd chopped, he asked me to double the recipe because he didn't think we'd have enough. we ended up having more than twice as much as we needed, but that meant I got to eat stuffing for breakfast all weekend.

Boyfriend told me that people would be arriving around 2. In my family, that means that people show up at 2. In his, it apparently means that people start trickling in around 3. On the plus side, I was good to go an hour before everyone arrived and actually had some time to relax a little - and listen to Alice's Restaurant Massacree.

Dinner was a wild success. Everything was delicious. Everything except the cranberry sauce made it to the table on time, and I remembered to grab that shortly after I sat down. The eight of us went through 14 bottles of wine while we ate and talked and generally had a great time. It's a good thing I didn't have to drive anyway afterwards.

Holy Crap, I Cooked!

Yes, I actually cooked something. From scratch. And here is the photographic evidence for homemade, from-scratch, ricotta gnocchi. Because it turns out that ricotta gnocchi is a whole lot easier to make than potato gnocchi. And by a whole lot easier, I mean Holy crap, that was easy!


So first you mix most of the ingredients together in a bowl. Here's what you need:

• 1 15 oz thing of Ricotta cheese
• It should be noted that ricotta is, in fact, a dairy product. And it makes up the majority of this dish. If you're lactose intolerant, like me, make sure you take a lactaid pill before consuming the gnocchi.
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp olive oil
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 10 grinds of pepper (I hope you have a pepper grinder. I don't know how to translate this to teaspoons)

So you mix all of that together and you get this:

Yes, it's very exciting. I know. Technically you're supposed to whisk those ingredients together. But I don't own a whisk. Like I said, I don't cook much.

Anyway, once that's all mixed together, you start adding flour, 1/2 cup at a time, until you get a "soft dough". I'm not entirely sure what a "soft dough" is, so I went with the recommended 3/4 cup of flour, at which ponit it became difficult to stir and looked like this. Note that you are supposed to use a spoon, not a whisk, for this step. Which means that I actually saved on the cleanup part of this experiment.

Once you have your soft dough, put another 1/2 cup of flour on your cutting board and put your dough on top of it. Then knead it, adding flour, until it doesn't stick to your hands anymore. I don't think I added the right amount of flour, it was either too much or too little, but the end product tasted good. My advice is to not worry too much about this step. Knead and add flour until you feel it's right. Make sure to drink wine during this process. It helps with the end result.

Now things get tricky. Slice your blob of dough into six equal parts. (That was the tricky part, especially after all the wine.) Then, roll each section into a snake, just like 1st grade art class with the clay, and cut the snakes into bite-sized pieces.

This is what it looks like when it's been all sliced up. Mmmmm, raw gnocchi

Boil some water (actually, you should start the water boiling back when you start kneading the dough. I hope you read through this whole thing first. If not, don't worry, it's not the end of the world.) Then dump the gnocchi into the water. My pieces actually all stuck together, so I had to pull them apart and toss them in a few at a time. This resulted in a splash of boiling water each time that usually landed on my skin. It hurt. But it was a temporary pain, and the gnocchi made it all worth it, in the end.

Gnocchi floats when it's done cooking! It's nice like that. When all your gnocchi is floating, wait 30 seconds or so and then drain it. That 30 seconds is to make sure it's actually all cooked.

Let's be honest, this is all just a vehicle to get pesto into my belly. You can freeze the cooked gnocchi, but this recipe only makes a few servings, so that seemed kind of silly. I added pesto to all of the gnocchi, because I've found that pasta dishes keep a bit better in the fridge when the sauce is already mixed in. So I'll eat some tonight and refrigerate the rest for tomorrow. Hopefully it works out

Here's a tip: don't dump the freshly cooked gnocchi into a metal bowl. Metal transfers heat really well. Also, that's not the same metal bowl as the earlier pictures. It's a much smaller metal bowl.

Start to finish, this all took me about half an hour. It might go faster if you actually know how to knead dough. Or it might go slower, if I didn't knead it for long enough. Who knows?