No food pics this time! I did make creme brulee for the first time last week. It turned out tasty and the kitchen torch is fun to use. Also don’t shop at Jewel or Dominick’s for vanilla beans! 1 vanilla bean was $12 at Dominick’s and I went to Cost Plus World market and 2 beans were $3 there.

I came to the conclusion that I just really like tasty food. I like cooking, going to new restaurants, trying new flavors. Maybe if I worked in the food industry, I wouldn’t like food as much. Just like how I don’t have any interest in being a therapist now that I have clients. It’s not really as dramatic as it sounds. I’m just having a hard time with a client and wake up on the days I play therapist, hoping my clients have canceled. I don’t want them to stay sick, I just want them to get well with someone else.

I have a client that is draining me and she has a type of mental illness that doesn’t usually have a great recovery. So she is going to stay like this for a long time, maybe forever. If I had my own private practice, she would be mine to deal with for years. I may have mentioned it before, I was talking to my supervisor about keeping my clients after my supervision hours were finished. I said I would be OK seeing my clients for a few months but it’s not like I wanted to keep them on for a year. He looked surprised and asked why not. As a private practice therapist, he wanted a client that would come regularly for a year. I’ve worked in so many short term treatment settings that I forget that this is what some social workers do. They see the same people long term. They get to know clients so well that when they bring up a random friend’s name, you don’t have to stop and ask what their relationship with that person is like.

I told my supervisor that this client was difficult and he acknowledged that she is and that there is nothing I can do about it. She is difficult in a way that I have to keep pulling her back in. I have to reassure and engage her in therapy. I have to make extra effort to be supportive. If I wouldn’t do these things, she would probably stop showing up. And there is where I’m torn! She is still coming back so obviously I’m doing my job but I’m also starting to dislike my job. All of this makes me question why I’m getting my clinical license to begin with. I know part of this is just anxiety over being a new therapist.

I realize this blog (the interesting parts at least) is kind of turning into a food blog. Eventually it will turn into something like This is why you’re Fat.

This cake actually wasn’t supposed to be very fattening. My friend asked me to make a rainbow cake for a potluck at her house. Most of my creative food stuff is for potlucks. She sent me this recipe from The Omnomicon (love the name and I’m pretty sure the author is a SA goon.) There is no rainbow cake recipe, just a white cake of your choice recipe plus tips on making it rainbowed. This cake just called for soda and cake mix.

It’s all lumpy but I was afraid to use an electric mixer because of the carbonation. It doesn’t matter in the end because you stir it a lot more when you add food coloring.
So I divided out the batter into 6 bowls and used my pretty gel dye. I thought the dye would be brighter with less. I felt like I was using a ton of dye. I was scared to make the red an actual blood red because of the amount of dye I would have to use. Isn’t red dye poisonous to children? Oh well, no kids died at the potluck. That I saw.

Then I poured the batter in to the pan, one color on top of the next. One of my friends commented that the batter looks like fake food in the movie Hook.

And then I baked it according to the box instructions plus a few more minutes like the rainbow cake directions say. Its a very squishy cake because of the soda. I took the cake out when the yellow started to look dark.
I let the cake cool while I tried my new dino muffin tins with the leftover cake batter. I set up my cooling rack and tried to get the cake out with disastrous results. The entire middle of the cake stuck, one of the sides started to slide off the rack and I started to make howling noises. No way to repair with frosting. Oh the agony of a broken cake.
No pictures of the broken cake, it was too hard to look at. The dino cakes didn’t turn out well either. The cake didn’t want to come out of the tins. It was the first time I used the muffin pan so I may not have properly greased it.
So I didn’t want to make a new cake and I didn’t want to waste the already made cake. So I made some pudding, used the whipped cream my boy made the night before for dessert, some leftover berries and made a rainbow parfait.

And it was good! It was tasty and still rainbow and kind of pretty.

I had a no-baby shower last weekend. I think it was the best shower I’ve been to. Drinking, cheese filled foods, cupcakes, a fish hat and lots of friends and some family. I got some baby showed decs from the party store and tacked NO onto them but apparently it wasn’t clear enough what we were celebrating because the people at a table near us asked if I had a boy or girl. At least they were nice enough to assume I already had the baby if I was drinking. A little vodka in the breast milk is good for baby!
I registered as a not-the-mama-to-be and got some awesome gifts. My grandma took the opportunity to ship me half of her kitchen. I think she is afraid she will never see me or my female cousin get married and she doesn’t know what to do with all of these kitchen things.

Work has been fucking depressing. We have more budget troubles and we did not apply for either of the research grants I was working on. One of the grants would have been a revival of a project we worked on with a local university. For some reason, no one decided to ask the professors at the university if they were also applying until the day before the grant was due. Surprise, they were and they were upset that we didn’t tell them we were applying, too. Maybe if we had called earlier, we could have collaborated again and submitted the damn app.
So now the next round of applications aren’t due until early summer and I keep telling my boss “we have to start early” and she keeps..doing nothing. This is something she really has to start because it’s a collaborative grant and she has to initiate the collaboration because no one knows little research assistant girl!

I e-attended a NASW CEU presentation. I’m happy that they have developed this in person/online CEU workshop series. They’re not terribly expensive and they have a good range of topics. They still have some kinks to work out. The sound went out on the presentation for a while and the mic didn’t pick up questions the audience asked. The presentation was on holistic therapy which sounds good but it was a little too new age for me. Past life regression? Really? So much for evidence based practice! I was hoping for a little more accessible topics, not some woman selling her book.

Also, I am adoring Amanda Palmer’s post on her song Oasis. I think we need more upbeat songs about abortion. Let’s dance.