I would have guessed hunger and exhaustion would have sharpened that edge, actually

The other day I was told that my blog has been lacking its normal sarcastic edge of late, leading me to believe that snark is in fact fueled by carbohydrates, just like BRAINS and HAPPINESS and EVERYTHING IMPORTANT. So if any scientific journals want to discuss this significant breakthrough with me, hit me up in the comments.

In the meantime, I tried to redeem my recent undercooked tian with a tian made almost entirely of cheese and oil.

Much better! All part of my plan to edge out the diabetes with some good old-fashioned heart disease.

Also, Smitten Kitchen has basically never failed me in the past, and applying this recipe to a chuck roast turned out just fine. And I guess the green onion slaw wasn't a failure exactly, but whoa is she lying about two serrano chiles not being too spicy because mother of mercy was it too spicy.

Why are you so angry at my mouth, pile of cabbage?

These five-spice turkey and lettuce wraps are only notable for being the first example of ground turkey that Anna has ever voluntarily eaten.

She just wanted Chinese five-spice powder. It's so obvious in retrospect.

Anna was actually so excited about decorating for autumn that she did her best impression of a "human smile."

It's getting better, but I think you can detect the lack of practice.

That effort was pretty exhausting though, and she quickly retreated.

Maybe we can lure her out again with Christmas decorations in a couple of months.

Walden 2: The Reckoning

Well, I had yet another weekend of being fed by someone else (thanks Mom!), so my only recent attempt at low-sugar, not-too-meaty, tastes-like-food meal is Friday night's bean and veggie burritos. "You can't go wrong with burritos, unless you are Prevention magazine" --me, all the time.

Seriously, I'm not sure I could make them not-tasty without carefully following their recipe.

It was also another weekend of grandparent-fun-times for Anna. Hey Anna, it's finally nice and cool outside and you have acres of land to frolic about! Yay!

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

She did eventually get into the spirit, beating the crap out of communing with nature for a while.

Nothing says communing can't be violent, I looked it up.

When we got home, Anna indicated that she was ready for me to start decorating for Halloween.

And yes, I only put that outfit on her ironically.

Pretty sure the best thing for lack of sleep is a huge amount of sugar

It has occurred to me that there are plenty of people out there in the world who avoid caffeine, alcohol, and refined sugar voluntarily and it's not exactly the worst fate that could befall a person, but come on, it IS KIND OF. Plus there's a difference between being happy and smug about what a disciplined, well-oiled machine you are and being an achy, waddling mess whose only current desire in life (entire gallon of ice cream) is being thwarted by the threat of birthing a 12 lb DisasterBaby. Also, when I spend too much time thinking about how few things I have to genuinely complain about, it completely takes the wind out of my sails. No fun!

For example, I consulted my big green Mark Bittman and managed to have a significantly less meat-heavy week.

Chickpea and spinach soup.

Salad with pear, walnuts, gorgonzola, and tofu croutons.

Spicy autumn vegetable burgers with squash in parchment.

Those veggie burgers weren't bad, but when I heated one up for lunch the next day I couldn't help but think there was an element missing.

There it is.

And this, my one meat dish of the week, which also happens to be part of my Sometimes Delicious Things Look Like Gross Mush series.

Slow cooker chicken, spinach, broccoli and pasta. Hey, remember when I attempted this very simple dish last year?

Anyway, my diet has now progressed from "I'm Not Sure This Food is Actually Food" to "Okay This Tastes Fine But Ow My Arteries" to "This Is All Reasonably Well Balanced And Edible." So what am I supposed to complain about for the next six weeks? This is a serious negativity crisis OH WAIT I HAVE SOMETHING.

My toddler has become even more ridiculous than normal about sleeping. I think she's trying to prove that she will dominate the new baby in every category, including sleep interruption and unaccountable wailing.

This happened at 5:30 pm, after I had spent a full three hours attempting to get her to nap in any of the various beds in our house.

So, serious question, 2-year-olds can survive on broccoli, yogurt, sullen glares, and four hours of sleep a night, right?

Asking for a friend.

I'm totally bored of my blood sugar too, I swear

We were out and about all weekend, so I had to rely on others to accommodate my tiresome dietary restrictions. Everyone did a bang-up job, aside from their failure to dramatically jump in between me and that english muffin on Sunday morning. Seriously, where's the support? I might need to hire a full-time carbohydrate bodyguard. Anyway, big thank you to my mother-in-law and also the fine folks at Kerbey Lane. Blood sugar = stable. This pregnancy = taking forever, I'm not even kidding.

Speaking of, welcome to yet another Sober October! Here's hoping I can make it through this eighth month in a row! Who's with me? Yeah, I know, no one. It's Texas Wine Month and there's pumpkin ale everywhere and hard cider and Oktoberfest and football is on. It's generally a ridiculous time for sobriety. The good news is, October might be my favorite month of the year, so the fact that it will go by ridiculously slowly is sort of a bonus? Silver lining. Look how much my mood improves when I stuff myself with almond butter before posting!

Anyway, Anna had a great time at Grandma and Grandpa's house this weekend. She spent a lot of time playing with blocks, really honing her signature architectural style.

It does not lack focus.

Interestingly, she applies the same principles to her meal planning.

This should get us to noon.

Carnivore blues

The good news is, Bon Appétit continues to provide recipes for food that is actually edible.

Lamb tagine with tomatoes and caramelized sweet onions.

Spice-rubbed steak with white beans and cherry tomatoes.

The bad news is, I am suuuuuuuuuper tired of eating meat. Even nice-tasting meat. I'm a little concerned that seven more weeks of this will cause me to emerge on the other side as a vegetarian, which I am also not really in the mood for. I know it seems like there's no pleasing me, but I'm pretty sure that's because all this protein is making me SUPER CRANKY AND MAYBE ALSO SORT OF AGGRESSIVE, AT LEAST WHEN IT COMES TO TYPING. I'm going to go lie down and think about the days when I ate sugar and was happy.

In the meantime, Anna has requested the day off from her job as jokey-caption subject.

Fine, but you're clocking in that much earlier Monday morning.

The dinosaur whisperer

Operation: Eat Real Food Again is going pretty well. Turns out my blood sugar does not run wild at the first sign of food that doesn't taste like wallpaper paste (just used wallpaper paste for the first time a couple of weeks ago, I know what I'm talking about). This is fortunate, since my food-fantasy daydreams (That's a thing, right? Totally normal.) had gotten pretty pitiful. Like...small, unadorned bowls of multigrain cereal pitiful.

Anyway, I really mangled this Jacques Pepin recipe for stuffed pork tenderloin, but it still tasted like food intended for humans, so it was a winner.

Even very small portions of any Homesick Texan recipe are worthwhile, this King Ranch chicken casserole (slightly fancy-pants version) included.

Seriously, four bites of this with a huge spinach salad is so much better than Sadness Burritos.

I went to the Bon Appétit recipe clipping vault for this pasta carbonara, and then I smiled for like an hour, because: pasta.

This is as close as I'm going to get to a bowl of ice cream until about 2012.

Saturday was Austin Museum Day, so we went to the Children's Museum to take advantage of the lack of admission and presence of dinosaurs. Anna loves dinosaurs, so naturally I was prepared for her to find this experience miserable, or at least exceedingly tedious. But it wasn't so bad this time around!

First, communication:

"Talk to me, small dinosaur. Tell me your secrets."

Then, domination:

"You are mine now. This way, to the tunnel slide."

Of course, she wasn't really happy until she found something to line up.

After the chaos of the dinosaurs, she needed about half an hour of ORDER.

And then eggs saved my sanity. Again.

Feel those cool autumn breezes? (High of 93 today! Don't, uh...don't look at the forecast for the next few days. SUMMER IS OVER, THE CALENDAR SAYS SO.) Anyway, I think they have snapped me out of my Prevention-magazine-spproved-neutral-flavored-food-paste trance. I realized that I am still facing eight weeks of pregnancy, which translates to over 50 meals (What? How do you mark the passage of time?), and something had to be done.

Step 1: Eggs for dinner. How could I not have thought of this before? I must've been in quite a state of shock to forget that putting an egg on it fixes everything.

Also: salt.

Step 2: Potatoes in a salad.

Like a regular salad, but more tuber-y.

Step 3: Any form of chili.

Sorry purists, if it's a stew with chili powder in it I'm going to approve.

So maybe I'm starting to have a handle on things and won't be reduced to slowly going crazy until I am just eating the actual pages of the Prevention cookbook because it doesn't make any difference in terms of flavor. Especially good since it's an electronic copy.

Hey, looks like those autumn breezes have had a similarly invigorating effect on Anna!

Her games of Blanket Pile have gotten a lot more lively.

See if you can tell that World War Z is on my nightstand

So, of chicken tenders with sweet bean dipping sauce and steamed broccoli, which element would you guess the two-year-old would go for?

(Review: NEEDS SALT. And ice cream.)

Haha, suckers!

If I can get her to do this with cauliflower, she's totally going as a zombie this Halloween.

I finally ventured away from Prevention magazine and their hatred of taste buds to see if I could manage my own balanced meal. Look how pretty this vegetable tian is!

Unfortunately, I think obsessively stable blood sugar is having a negative effect on my cooking ability, because these veggies were both undercooked and underseasoned. It's like Prevention has gotten into my head and zombie-chomped the part of my brain that believes in food having flavor.

On Sunday Anna had her very first trip to the zoo. She spends a lot of time talking about animals, so we were pretty sure it was going to be a hit. I mean, what are the chances that she would react to this fun-for-all-toddlers-everywhere experience with the same skepticism that she has reacted to every other fun event in her life so far? Pretty low, I bet!

I think the reptile house was her favorite.

But posing on the elephant was a close second. Don't know if I can fit in a zombie joke here, I'm guessing they don't have this capacity for bored annoyance.

Anyway, another exciting childhood rite of passage endured! Good job, everyone!

Only 4,216,967 days to go

Prevention Magazine presents Cooking with Cardboard: Day 1,473. Wait, I meant 7. Day 7. Let's see what Prevention can do with the concept of "burritos."

Oh, terrible cardboardy things. Cool.

This salmon with white beans and citrus was actually the best thing so far, probably because it wasn't attempting to be anything other than a pile of health. I guess the lesson is that I should stay away from "burritos" and "burgers" and "pizzas" in the diabetic category.

I totally won't though. I could really go for a "burger" right now.

There are exciting things afoot around here, though. We finished Anna's big girl room, complete with escapable big girl bed. Let's see, she's been quiet in there for a while, maybe we should just sneak a peek...

Naptime: a portrait.

It's also World Series of Poker season on ESPN 2, which Dan and I completely seriously watch every week, so we've been trying to interest Anna in the game. So far she seems pretty focused on chip flair.

Most exciting of all, it's currently 86 degrees in the middle of the afternoon. Time for a warm and cozy duck suit!

Gotta keep those autumn winds at bay.

You don't even want to know what would happen if I looked directly at a bagel

Okay, Prevention magazine cookbook. Time for you to earn your four and a half stars on Amazon. What further delights do you have in store?

Barley salad with black beans and butternut squash. I took some initiative on this one and added grilled chicken, broccoli, and roasted red peppers. My parts tasted good.

Scallop-asparagus linguine.

Southwest chicken salad.

These were all ooooooookay. I think this cookbook is for people who don't understand the instruction veggies + carbs + protein and need it laid out in the simplest form. Maybe that's me, though! I experimented with some oatmeal this morning and it was a failure, so I will probably continue to go by the book until I can be trusted in the presence of carbohydrates. Man, this is a sad situation you guys. My small plain bowl of oatmeal was a wild, unrepeatable binge. Let's all try so hard not to get diabetes, is my advice.

Anyway, I took Anna to the playground this morning. It was great! She ran around with other kids and got lots of fresh air and exercise. Haha, just kidding, she sat in one place and poured rocks on herself.