I Am A Bad-ass

Ghastly IPhone lighting, but still.
Impressive, right?

So, early last week, I made a cake.  From scratch.  As in flour, butter, eggs, the whole shebang.  And it was awesome.  Cream cheese buttercream.  Lemon curd filling (more on that later).  Almonds on the side to cover up the really hideous frosting job. And it was awesome.  Not everyone liked the cream cheese frosting.  Not everyone liked the lemon curd.  Not everyone had a leftover piece at lunch and at dinner for three days.  What?

And then later last week, T and I finally made the leap into the cash-only-everything-accounted-for-beans-and-rice-hard-core-like-when-we-lived-in-an-Airstream-trailer-because-we-had-no-money budget process that we like to call getting ready to pay for college.  And let me tell you that every $18 purchase you ever made because it was only $18 makes you feel really, really stupid.  It is amazing how much money I was spending on absolutely nothing.  They were nothings that I thought I really wanted/needed, but they were nothings nonetheless.  So, in less than a week, I have become an obsessive, miserly shrew. "No, you can't have new Vans, we don't get clothing money until November 9." "Okay, I've bought five bags of candy for Halloween, but we're only opening them one at a time.  I need the $7.50 if we can return the ones we don't use."  I'm not wearing this at all well.  Financial discipline is not my color.

But the short of this long story is that the budget COMBINED with this project is turning me into some kind of Depression era loony, as if the massive amount of canned goods in my pantry weren't enough evidence.  The cake recipe called for 5 eggs -- one whole and four whites.  Now, I buy the organic eggs from chickens with beaks and access to sunshine.  It's important to me, not as much to others.  I don't judge.  I merely point this out because those eggs are almost $5 a dozen, which translates to roughly 41 cents per egg.  Which means that for the four eggs that I'm only using the whites for is a waste of 82 cents, if you assume that the white is half the egg.  And 82 cents is almost a refill of a Diet Coke at the Sac-N-Pac.  I just couldn't let that kind of waste happen.  It is also possible that I desperately need a job.

So, unlike Washington, I took steps to achieve full utilization.  I made lemon curd.  And no ordinary lemon curd, either.  I made Martha Stewart's lemon curd.  Now, this link isn't the exact recipe in the original bible that is the 1995 Martha Stewart Cookbook (don't hate), but it's close.  And if I were better at math, I could actually verify that it's the same recipe increased by a third.  Potato, potato-ah.  It was good.  Dangerously good.  Heart-attack good.

And this isn't even why I am a bad-ass.  Can you believe it?  All of above was performed in the line of duty as part of my job as amazing, freaky, wheat bread and granola, no-baggies, composting mom.  It doesn't even count.

I am a bad-ass because I discovered today that if you stir one little teaspoon of lemon curd into your low fat Greek yogurt, which you don't even like but are required to eat because you get no dairy and therefore no calcium and because you need the protein, it transforms said yogurt into a culinary masterpiece of untold delight.  And I have convinced myself that such a little tiny bit of cholesterol-laden, sweetened fat droplets is totally okay.

If I'm wrong, I don't want to be right.