Photo courtesy of Bakers Royale

Saturday, I applied a popular exercise mantra — “No pain, no gain” — to cooking.

The gain — delicious Mini Pommes Anna — was totally worth the pain.

I had purchased the entry-level OXO mandoline slicer several months ago, partly so I could make some version of pommes Anna, which is simply very thin slices of potato layered and baked with butter. (And if you’re one of those people who can make paper-thin slices of veggies with a knife, congratulations. You have mad knife skills. I do not.) I was in the middle of my final semester of grad school, however, so the mandoline has been resting in the gadget drawer.

The semester eventually drew to a close, and Pinterest pointed me to this intriguing recipe for smaller, individually sized versions of Pommes Anna, courtesy of Naomi at Bakers Royale. The mandoline finally made its debut.

And boy, was it angry.

Seriously, I underestimated the danger of the mandoline (and found out that just about everybody has a story about somebody taking their fingertip off with one). Having failed to keep the potato attached to the finger-protecting holder mechanism, I ran it across the blade by hand, which worked great right up until the moment I cut my thumb.

I immediately initiated Standard Operating Procedure for kitchen injuries:

1. Don’t bleed in the food.
2. Evaluate the injury.
3. Wash the injury with soap and water.
4. Wrap the injury with paper towel to try to stop the bleeding, or at least keep the blood out of the food.
5. Soldier on. You’re not going to make more blood by starving yourself.

It was a minor cut, although it was a heck of a bleeder.

The potatoes were simply divine. The mandoline had cut them into sheer little circles that, when tossed with butter and layered with kosher salt and pepper in a muffin pan, baked up into a luxurious side dish. The husband commented more than once on these buttery and creamy little stacks of goodness.

And yes, there were only four ingredients: Yukon potatoes, butter, salt and pepper. I cut the recipe in half, so it made six. I figured two stacks per person was about right (they compress while baking, so each one ends up being about 1.5 inches high). We each ate a third stack, partly because they were so delectable and partly because they didn’t seem like the kind of food that reheats properly.

And one of us was making replacement blood, after all.

They were definitely a welcome change from mashed potatoes, which is what I usually serve with meat loaf (and more on that fabulous meat loaf later).

As for the mandoline, I think I should probably upgrade to the model with non-slip feet (seems like an upright model might be safer than one that “hooks” over a bowl). Also, a couple of friends pointed me toward Kevlar gloves made for use with mandolines, so those might be showing up in the gadget drawer, too. (Actually, when the first friend, Crafty Kristen, mentioned Kevlar gloves, I kind of thought she was joking — LOL Kevlar gloves for the clumsy cook, very funny. But no. They are real. And possibly a necessity.)

Photo courtesy of blinc

My Birchbox subscription has taught me a lot about the cosmetics industry.

For example, a lot of women will apparently pay $18 an ounce for a “molecular mist” purported to do everything from keeping skin hydrated to protecting it from “ionizing radiation” emitted from the sun and cellphones.

I thought it smelled like that one perfume that every lady over 75 is contractually obligated to wear, so I tossed it.

Come at me, ionizing radiation.

I’ve also learned that oil-based moisturizers, even those containing lavender-scented unicorn tears of happiness, make my eyes swell, which I guess puffs the tiny wrinkles right out.

Overall, the Birchbox experiment has been loads of fun, especially when the $10-a-month box of samples includes makeup. My first box held a full-size container of Laura Geller Baked Blush N’ Brighten blusher/highlighter, and this month I received stila’s Smudge Stick liner in Lionfish (that’s a coppery brown for those of you unfamiliar with hilarious names for cosmetics shades).

The Birchbox item that’s changed my makeup routine, however, is blinc mascara (and no, the cosmetics industry absolutely CANNOT afford to purchase uppercase letters for their company names).

I had been having trouble with mascara for a while. L’Oreal either stopped making or stopped distributing my favorite mascara, FeatherLash, a few years ago, and while other varieties were certainly waterproof, they weren’t anywhere NEAR smudgeproof or flakeproof. By midday, especially in the summer, I was almost guaranteed to have light black smudges under my eyes. Of course, I couldn’t remove waterproof smudges without removing any foundation or concealer that I might be wearing, so sometimes I would just skip mascara in the morning, especially if I was planning on wearing makeup on an evening outing and didn’t want to start over.

The blinc sample promised to form smudgeproof tubes of color around my lashes instead of painting them. It also pointed out a DUH factoid about waterproof mascara: Your skin’s oil makes it smudge because it’s waterproof, not oilproof (oil is a central ingredient in many of the very products that REMOVE waterproof mascara, after all).

So how DO you remove mascara that’s waterproof AND oilproof? It turns out that blinc is actually water-resistant rather than waterproof. Sweat, rain and tears shouldn’t affect it, however, since it requires a combination of water AND pressure for removal. I’ve found that a few concentrated splashes of warm water, followed by gentle tugging with my fingertips, takes it right off. This method actually results in fewer lashes getting tugged out, too.

So, yeah, I totally spent $25 on a tube of mascara for the first time ever. Wonders never cease.

This was never what I would call a nightmare, since Dream Me would just sort of sigh and start picking her way through snakes, but it always occurred during stressful times.

After Hurricane Katrina flooded my home, my hometown and a boggling number of other places I loved, my subconscious traded snakes for water as an expression of anxiety.

Again, these dreams aren’t nightmares. The problems encountered — usually water rising where it shouldn’t be rising, or me somehow falling into a deep body of water — aren’t so much scary as they are irritating.

During one particularly active dream sequence a couple of weeks ago, I found myself seated at a table that was really part of a boat that plunged over the side of the dock when the driver gunned the engine (I never said my dreams obeyed the laws of mechanics or physics). I swam back up to the dock and climbed into a dockside restaurant, which immediately began to turn sideways since it turned out to be a huge boat that was rolling over. As I kicked my way out of a window into the water, Dream Me really couldn’t believe she had to swim all the way up from the bottom of the ocean AGAIN.

I mean COME ON.

I totally get it. My subconscious gets overwhelmed with anxiety and takes it out on my dreams. It takes what I’m apparently scared of deep down and releases it at 2 a.m.

My everyday way to cope with anxiety is to constantly analyze how to fix problems. I’m on to Plan C before most people even realize that Plan A is done for and Plan B is just ludicrous.

It’s the same in my dreams. Instead of waking up in a cold sweat when the boat plunges beneath the surface of the water, Dream Me is concentrating on swimming horizontally before trying to head up to the surface in case the sinking boat creates a whirlpool (apparently my subconscious thinks it just might, no matter what the Mythbusters say).

Healthy? You’ll have to ask my theoretical psychotherapist. But it makes sense to me that working through dream anxieties rather than simply having them scare you half out of your pajamas has to be pretty good self-therapy.

Photo courtesy of Budget Bytes

That was fast.

Just a week after I took up the pursuit of an easy homemade alternative to store-bought pasta sauce, I think I’ve found my go-to recipe.

Over at Budget Bytes, Beth posted a recipe for a slow cooker marinara sauce in November (gotta give kudos to Pinterest for helping me find it). She noted that the long, slow cooking process (eight hours on low) carmelizes the sugar in the crushed tomatoes. Carmelization gives the sauce a depth of flavor that jarred pasta sauce simply cannot replicate. It’s got the hint of sweetness that a good tomato-based sauce should have without the artificial, overpoweringly syrupy sweetness offered by most manufactured sauces these days.

It was a cinch to make, too. I diced an onion and a couple of cloves of garlic the previous night and dumped everything into the 4-quart slow cooker crock the next morning. The husband texted me at lunch to let me know that it smelled delicious.

I browned a little ground beef to make a simple meat sauce and served it over two small servings of penne. (And while I’m talking about pasta, let me recommend that you cook half the recommended serving size listed on the box. The suggested serving sizes are obviously calculated to make you buy more pasta, not maintain a healthy weight.)

I might add some crushed red pepper next time for a more piquant sauce, but other than that, I’m very satisfied with this recipe. Like other tomato-based sauces, it’s going to freeze well, meaning that I’ll now have ready-to-serve pasta sauce in the freezer instead of the pantry.  It’s going to be versatile, too: Besides meat sauce, it’s going to be a great topping for ravioli and a good dipping sauce for the husband’s homemade calzones.

Next goal: A go-to, not-too-salty soup recipe to keep in the freezer.

I’ve been trying to reduce the amount of processed food in my family’s diet for the past few years. I was unemployed for a few months when we first moved to Huntsville, so I started cooking a lot to try to save money and fill time. And not Hamburger Helper-type cooking, either. I’m talking from-scratch cooking, as in grate your own cheese (melts so much better than pre-shredded) and making your own meatloaf spice mixture (because have you READ the ingredients on those little flavoring packets?). The salad spinner became a permanent resident in the fridge, always filled with fresh (and local, when available) greens.

We didn’t give up EVERY processed food, mind you. There may or may not be a multipack of frozen pizzas from Costco in my freezer right now. The peanut butter that the husband eats every day is incredibly hydrogenated (I’d go bankrupt trying to feed him the real stuff). I don’t make my own mayonnaise, although I should make my own salad dressing.

So I’m not claiming that we’re dietary saints. But we’ve both maintained our weight for the past five years despite some substantial lapses in workouts, and we’ve put a significant dent in the number of colds and other odd viruses that haunt so many households. Coincidence? Maybe, but I’ll take it.

We find ourselves in the middle of the Real Food Movement. Come on in. It’s delicious.

I rescued a copy of The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite from my mom’s Goodwill box a few months ago and just got around to reading it. Author David A. Kessler explores, among other things, how utterly processed the average American diet is. The food industry exists to sell us cheaply manufactured goods that make us want to eat more, no matter how much sugar, fat and salt it takes to get us hooked.

I spotted a title at Barnes & Noble this weekend that actually distracted me from the Harry Potter table: Skinny Chicks Eat Real Food: Kick Your Fake Food Habit, Kickstart Your Weight Loss. Author Christine Avanti explores factory food addiction and how her move to fresh, real foods helped her lose weight and, more importantly, maintain her weight. I didn’t pick up the book because, I told myself, I’m not trying to lose weight OR fill up my bookshelves right now, but I’m very curious to read Avanti’s findings.

The thing about (who knew?) being part of the Real Food Movement for the past couple of years? I can now often taste the difference between processed foods and real foods. For example, I can taste the excessive sugar in jars of spaghetti sauce — there’s only one variety I can really stand to eat now, and the husband’s not fond of it. The flavor of salt in canned soup is getting overwhelming — heck, I can taste salt in one variety of CHEESE now, prompting me to replace it with another.

So, as anticlimactic as it may be, my New Year’s Resolution is to keep following the Real Food path. I’ll also be changing up my exercise routine (more on that later), but mostly I’ll continue figuring out how to feed the husband and myself quality, delicious foods and get further away from the “better living through chemistry” theme that has overtaken our food industry for the past few decades.

To that end, I’m afraid the pantry is about to lose two longstanding residents. You’ve been handy, jarred spaghetti sauce and canned soup, but I can taste your additives, and I can make you better without them.

Not that I’ve spent my life in search of the perfect Bloody Mary, but I found it at the Todd English P.U.B. in Vegas.

A mix of tomato juice, horseradish root, sriracha sauce and olive juice, Todd’s Sssinful Bloody Mary had the perfect amount of kick to it. Meaning that it’ll be too spicy for some people.

The few Bloody Marys that I have consumed inevitably got their spiciness from a dash of Tabasco sauce. The flavor never made me come back for more, perhaps because Tabasco is the go-to hot sauce of the Gulf Coast and the flavor simply begins to blend into the background after a while.

The sriracha sauce (better known as rooster sauce to many fans) in this concoction, however, gave it a bold, unapologetic heat that I am compelled to try to reproduce. I haven’t been able to find any Todd English-specific Bloody Mary recipes, so I’m going to start with the Sriracha Bloody Mary Recipe published on the White on Rice Couple blog.

Since the Bloody Mary is, after all, a breakfast drink, I ordered a brunch dish to go with it: corned beef hash, poached eggs on toast and asparagus. (Full disclosure: I ordered the brunch mostly because it came with the Bloody Mary, which would have cost $15 by itself. For only $7 more, I got food too — a bargain basement price on the Strip.)

Delicious. The eggs were poached to perfection (again, compelling me to tell myself that I should really learn to poach eggs), and the corned beef was surprisingly delicious. Apparently, the corned beef that I had several times as a teenager, which was so overseasoned that it almost made me gag, is NOT the norm.

Even the asparagus was delicious. (And I say “even” as if properly cooked asparagus isn’t one of the tastiest things ever.)

I will test and update. In the meantime, if you have any tips on making an awesome Bloody Mary, send them my way.

And be sure to check out The Oatmeal cartoon illustrating the glory that is sriracha sauce.

The husband and I spent Christmas in Vegas this year, and when I spotted the bags of Gingeroos on the shelf at TJ’s, I knew it was the perfect time for a taste test since we had just polished off the last of this year’s Triple Ginger Cookies a couple of days earlier.

The verdict? My cookies are actually BETTER than Gingeroos. Either I originally gave these cookies more props than they deserved, or the recipe has changed over the last three years. They were lighter than I remembered, more like a basic gingerbread than the spicy cookies I’ve been making. The big chunks of candied ginger that I recalled simply weren’t there.

Don’t get me wrong: Gingeroos are still one of my favorite store-bought cookies (granted, this is not a long list). They served as a delicious impromptu hotel snack and got us through the last 30 minutes of a long flight home.

The revelation that they’re not the best cookies in the world, however, has made me realize that I not only can make foods that are just as good as store-bought, I can make them BETTER.

End-of-the-year ego boost? I’ll take it.

Kat offers delicious-looking recipes for everything from versatile shortbread cookies to peppermint brownies, all submitted by a variety of bloggers. Recipes from Entirely Adequate include my favorite treat, spicy Triple Ginger Cookies, and the troublesome-to-make but scrumptious Glittering Lemon Sandwich Cookies.

Head over to the swap and check out all the recipes if you’re looking for a new holiday baking project.

Literally, the minute that I was supposed to be leaving for graduation last week (which was literally about 10 minutes after I was really supposed to be leaving), it struck me how sad it was that my dad wasn’t going to get to see me walk across the stage for my master’s degree.

(It was also sad that my mom couldn’t come to graduation, but as the parent who did not die in 2002, she’s still at a decided advantage in the current activities department.)

I’m not one to wallow in melancholy, however, especially when I’m busy, so I quickly formulated a fix: I would wear something that belonged to Dad, sort of in memoriam, sort of as a good-luck/don’t-trip charm.

I had his old college class ring, his wedding ring and a turquoise ring, pictured above, that I had given him when I was in college the first time around.

The class ring is huge, heavy and just plain cumbersome. And toting around a wedding ring from a divorced man seems a tad unlucky.

Turquoise it was. Only my dad was a big, burly sort, and this ring didn’t even fit on my thumb. I pictured it flying off my hand when I was midway across the stage before noisily rolling an embarrassingly long way under the assembled chairs.

So I was all, OK, I’ll put it on a chain around my neck. But my necklace supply is meager, and a quick dig through the jewelry box yielded nothing suitable.

Time was getting on. I did a mental check of everything I was wearing. No pockets.

The only contender: my watch. I quickly unlatched it, slid the ring onto the band and latched it back into place.

All of this took place in the span of about 30 seconds.

That’s how I took a little piece of my dad across the stage with me. And I didn’t stumble, although I did almost get my crazy-wide gown arm caught on the metal railing around the stage.

Afterwards, I texted mom a couple of photographs. It all felt sort of balanced, parent-wise.

Sometimes it’s best to just go with a crazy urge, especially if you’ve only got one shot at it. Better to do something now that may seem a little kooky than to later regret not doing it.

Normally, I would be on my second carton by now.

When I first spotted cartons of eggnog in the dairy aisle a few weeks ago, however, it just didn’t seem worth the calories.

Part of this attitude, admittedly, results from attending boot camp at 5:30 a.m. three days a week. I’m not negating that much hard work with 6 ounces of sugar and fat.

Part of it, though, is the realization that eggnog is simply a nostalgic food for me, a trip back in time to childhood.

When I was a child, eggnog was something that I drank only at my grandparents’ house, and only in the days leading up to Christmas. We drank it out of these fabulous Santa mugs:

As my friends Kristen and Harold have noted, however, nostalgia can be burdensome. I can’t re-create those Christmas scenes, and I shouldn’t want to. Every day of the year gives us another chance to create NEW memories. Trying to redo the past, even the little pieces of it, can only lead to bitterness and disappointment.

My brother’s kids are going to remember that Tia always made red velvet cake pops for them at Christmas, and Tia’s going to remind them that, for little girls under 50 lbs., they ate an impressive number of the rich morsels. And in 20 years or so, I hope they come up with their very own tradition, leaving cake pops in the dust if that’s not really their thing anymore.

I’ll give them the Santa mugs, though, if they decide that eggnog is their thing.