all white, i say!

I have an intense and extreme love/hate relationship with one Ina Garten.

For starters, I absolutely love everything about her to the point of Biblical coveting of her life. Although I have zero prior experience in a leisurly life in the Hamptons, I feel like I would be awesome at it. The riches and hot gay BFFs aside, I mostly adore her ALL WHITE kitchen. ALL WHITE, I SAY!

I would literally run around that beautiful, giant island in sensible pumps, a poofy dress with matching apron, and a Donna Reed wig til my knee caps fell off.

Also, she's SO graceful and well spoken. If you've ever heard me tell a story in person after three glasses of wine or laugh at something unfortunate happening to an obese person on YouTube, you can attest to the fact that my voice sounds something like a dying cat being forced to mate with an asthmatic Fran Drescher. A lot of Ina's charm could be for the camera, and she could swear like an Italian mob wife in real life, but in my heart of hearts she is her TV personality through and through.

Finally, the thing I'm the MOST jealous of Ina is her relationship. I mean I want a nice, loving guy that is almost NEVER around. That way I can cook and bake all day while getting drunk with my gay friends. It's nice that every once and a while she cooks a nice meal for her man or he makes a cameo appearance at the end of the episode just to remind all the viewers that she does in fact have the perfect life.

Now on to the stuff I hate...

Ina, as I have already mentioned, I don't live a fabulous life in the Hamptons. I do get a lot of joy out of cooking, but it started and continues to be a way to save money. Would I like to eat out at fabulous restaurants every night drinking wine served out of glass bottles? Of course I would! But the kids need new shoes and my car is being held together by the hopes and dreams of a boy who would rather eat a box of nails than have a car payment.

Furthermore, take it easy on the bougie ingredients. We don't all have a pirvate duck butcher or our own organic gardens we can just go grab shallots out of. If I can't find it at my local and super disgusting, yet convenient, Kroger, I'M NOT COOKING IT.

She's always like "Really any mild cheese will do in this recipe. But I prefer a nice locally raised, free-range virgin goat cheese. Oh, look, a goat! I'll be right back."

All that being said, almost all of my most favorite things that have come out of my kitchen came from Ina. I would add links to the recipes, but that's A LOT of button pushing, y'all.

Restaurant style filet mignon.

French apple tart.

And my most favorite thing of ever: boeuf bourguignon.

20%

Photo via The Bloggess. Profanity neccessary.

This picture so appropriately sums up how I've been feeling. Except I'm not baking souffles...

I've identified probably 80% of what is bothering me. There is no way around it, and I don't feel much like explaining the why portion of it. This week will simply have just have to come and go, and I'll hopefully be 80% better next week. Maybe it's one of those things that just acknowledging it's pressence is enough to avert disaster. Like quietly giggling when you have broken wind in a public place.

Anyway, the other 20% is a bit of mystery to even me. I mean, surely other perfectly 'normal' people go through these funks. Even Beyonce must have times where she doesn't feel like throwing on a leotard and running the world...
Funk or not, luckily, these greeted me this morning when I got to work.

That possibly lesbian or at least bi-curious Asian girl has been on the
Tagalongs box as long as I can remember. This permanence makes me happy.

Other than the cookies themselves, this is exactly what I LOVE about the Girl Scouts. Think about it, one day, I impulse purchase diebetic bliss when approached by some mom doing her daughter's dirty work and weeks later out of nowhere there they are, and on a day where fat girl food therapy is just what I needed.

It's like pre-ordering yourself a deep dish meat lovers pizza at 1 o'clock on a Saturday afternoon for delivery at 3 A.M. when you know your future drunk self will need it and want it the most.

Speaking from personal experience, ordering a pizza drunk is probably the hardest thing you will ever have to do. 1) you want EVERYTHING, 2) the waiting is the closest thing to torture an average middle-class person will experience in his/her life, and 3) the lady at Pizza Hut taking your order at this very late hour is wishing you would fall off a very tall balcony as you slur your credit card number on your dying iPhone.

Finally, I would like to apologize for the vague 20% sadness/weirdness/funk mentioned before my paragraphs detailing the joy of cookies and pizza. It's like that facebook status that is just a sad face or 'everything's the worst' sort of bulls**t that I try to almost always 'like.' I am actively hating myself for being that brand of Internet pitiful today. Later I might even have a tweet like 'get these cookies away from me, my pizza will be here in 20 minutes. #emotionallyeating.'

But for real, I'm gonna so legitly get down with those Tagalongs later, one of us should probably take a pregnancy test the next day...

PS - I know things will get better, because we live in a world where some whimsical genius named a box of childhood obesity causing cookies 'Thank You Berry Much.' (This is the ONLY reason I bought them. You win this round, puns.)