Month: August 2014

cakes

No-Bake Coconut Icebox Cake

No-Bake Coconut Icebox Cake
No-Bake Coconut Icebox Cake

Since I started my teaching career at a low-income, inner city school, I’ve been on a journey to understand my own privilege. I’m a white, middle-class Christian in a place and time when that identity confers benefits on me that I didn’t need to work for. It’s not my fault, per se, but then again this isn’t about blame: it’s about educating myself, making the inequities transparent, and being purposeful about correcting them. It’s not my fault the system is flawed, but if I ignore it and continue to profit from it, I’m complicit. That doesn’t sit well with me.

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other

Taco Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms

Taco Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms
Taco Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms

School starts tomorrow. Pls send help. And earplugs. And Pringles. And easy weeknight meals.

Taco Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms

Okay, okay, I’ll provide the easy weeknight meals. I promise more stories soon, when I recover from the whirlwind that is this week. In the meantime, please accept this recipe for amazing, low-carb, excruciatingly easy Taco Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms.

And don’t forget to send the earplugs!
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cakes

Easy Carrot Cake with Whipped Icing

Easy Carrot Cake with Whipped Icing
Easy Carrot Cake with Whipped Icing

Trigger Warning: While I’ve tried to make the details of disordered eating behavior mentioned in this post very vague, they still may be triggering. If you’ve struggled with disordered eating and are vulnerable to that, you may not want to read.

I read an article yesterday that made my blood boil to the point where I could barely sleep a wink. Instead, I stayed up all night processing. What was so bad about the article? Why did it bother me so much? Why did the website’s flippant, patronizing responses to readers’ criticism on their Facebook page bother me so much?

I won’t link to the article, 10 Mistakes Women Make in the Gym, because T-Nation seemed particularly proud that it was one of the most popular articles on the website and I don’t feel like giving them anymore traffic. Instead, I’ll summarize: it’s a list of things women “should” change about how they exercise written in your typical peacocky fitness-website tone. It takes for granted that women should prioritize appearance above all else in the gym, mixes in some body shaming and triggering language, and ticks all the SEO boxes for the post to do well on the internet.

Particularly offensive highlights include:

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cakes

Easy Coconut Sheet Cake with Whipped Coconut Icing

Easy Coconut Sheet Cake with Whipped Coconut Icing

Thanks, PAM, for sponsoring this post!

I’ve shared my social media confessions. Now it’s time for some cleaning confessions. I am a really, really terrible housekeeper.

I can deep-clean — things like disinfecting the whole kitchen, swiffering the floor — but it’s keeping things tidy that feels like climbing up a mountain during an avalanche. I’ll regularly leave a pile of papers sitting on my coffee table for a month, a pile of clothes in the dryer waiting to be folded, a pile of blankets in the floor “for Byrd to play in” (read: because I’m lazy.)

And then there are some chores around the house that I cannot wrap my head around. For instance, dusting eludes me. I’ll promise myself I’m going to dust every week, but by the second week, I find I’ve stopped believing in dust. Not enough will have accumulated in a week to convince me of its existence. Obviously, I tell myself, it has been eradicated forever. So I’ll stop dusting for 6 months or so only to open the blinds one day and feel like I’m a character in The Grapes of Wrath.

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pies and tarts

Strawberry Pop-Tart Pie

Strawberry Pop-Tart Pie
Strawberry Pop-Tart Pie

I wrote this post as part of the Plugrá Butter Brigade. Thanks, Plugrá, for sponsoring this post and for making my favorite butter!

One of my blogger friends recently asked, “If you drink milkshakes, what’s your favorite flavor?” on her Facebook wall. It was a happy conversation until someone chimed in just to note how disgusting she felt milkshakes were. My friend responded, “Please don’t yuck my yum.”

Strawberry Pop-Tart Pie

What great advice, right? Since then, I’ve noticed people doing this EVERYWHERE: you mention loving hot dogs and someone has to pop out of the woodwork to let you know that hot dogs are nasty. You mention you’re going to see a movie and someone has to pop up and tell you they hated it. You mention that you can’t wait for the next book in a series to come out and they let you know that they just can’t get into it.

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