Clean Slate or The Week I Tried Not To Drink Or Eat Anything

Hey Ya'll

It's drunk book review time! We're in the presence of another free book from bloggingforbooks.org: Clean Slate, A Cookbook and Guide, Reset Your Health, Detox Your Body, and Feel Your Best.

Side note, I used to work at Martha Stewart's magazine Body + Soul, or Whole Living, which is what it became after I left. There was this 21 day action plan where you basically cut out anything that tastes good, and I had done it then. This cookbook follows that idea, so why not the fuck try it again.

So, this cook book suggests you detox the shit out of your life. There's a 21 day plan wherein the first week you eat only fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, oil and seasonings. The second week you add in fish and gluten free grains. The third week you add in soy and eggs.

My life has been shitty lately. All I've done is work. When I say that, I mean that. I wake up, go to work, leave work, and go to sleep. I hadn't worked out in weeks so when I got this new cookbook in the mail, I decided to take it to heart. A 21 day detox seemed like the best way to get my life in order.

T-minus 1 day: I go to the grocery store and get shit for the first week. These are the recipes I picked out:

Apple Cucumber and Lemon Smoothie (Perfectly Fine)
Coconut Cherry Smoothie (Good!)

Beet, Avocado, and Arugula Salad with Sunflower Seeds (Good!)

Baked Sweet Potato with Greens (Not bad!)
Cauliflower "Rice" Stir Fry with Pumpkin Seeds (Good at first!)

Most of this stuff was super easy to make. The most difficult was the cauliflower rice, but it was really just throwing that into a food processor. Everything was pretty good for the most part. I was basically just eating smoothies and salads so there's not much to report here. I also was working about 15 hour days, so I can barely even remember what food (or anything) was at this point.

People kept asking me how it felt to give up all this shit and detox. Basically coffee is the hardest to give up cold turkey. I obviously missed getting wasted, but I could handle it. Being tired for four days until I got used to not drinking coffee, that was hard. Otherwise, I was so busy at work that by the time I got to eat, I didn't give a fuck what I was eating. That made for an easy detox. The first week flew by!

Second week though, that's where we are now, and clearly I'm drunk. I couldn't take it. I don't know if the food was bad, or it was week two and I just couldn't handle the food any more, but I hard core quit this shit.

Week two, I made:

Cardamom Quinoa Porridge with Pear (FINE.)
Roasted Vegetables with Quinoa (The worst thing I've ever tasted ever, I basically just threw this away every time I tried to eat it)
Buckwheat Noodles, Bok Choy, and Sweet Potatoes in Miso-Lime Broth (I admittedly fucked this up, and it was super terrible. Although, I don't believe this was a good recipe to start with. Did you know there is a such thing as white sweet potatoes?? I didn't, and I accidentally bought them. They're TERRIBLE. They're basically regular potatoes that are slightly sweet. This might have been better, had I used what the recipe called for. I will not blame Martha for this one.)
Black Cod with Herbs, Zucchini, and Whole Wheat Cous Cous (OMG, AM I EATING GARBAGE?!)

This shit was fucking terrible. Nothing I made this week was worth eating and I felt like dying anytime it was time to eat. This is why I quit. Not because I couldn't handle giving things up, like I said, I've done this detox before. No, I couldn't do it because the thought of eating this garbage from week two made me want to kill myself. I basically just threw everything I made this week away. BONUS, it's easy to lose weight when your diet plan is to make garbage and then just throw it away and eat nothing.

I don't know if I'd consider this cookbook a good one. This morning, I made another recipe from it, Fritatta with Spring Vegetables, but I improvised hard. Basically, I think this book is a good base, but if you stick to the recipes, it's garbage.

So would I recommend this book when drunk? No. No I wouldn't. I didn't enjoy anything I made from it. I wanted to vomit while eating most things. I don't think this is something the author of this book strived for.

Have I talked about this book while drunk? WELL THIS IS A TOUGH ONE. I didn't drink while using this book because I WAS ON A FUCKING DETOX. So I guess the answer is no. Had I been able to drink, would I have talked about this book? Well, the world will never know...


Oh, and here are some pictures of the food I made and what I looked like while eating it (not happy):

Spring Cleaning (Is It Spring Yet?)

We're going to make this VERY brief. It's 2:13am, I'm drunk, and I am not about to get super ranty.

So, I finished a bunch of books so far this year, and I've been very lazy about getting drunk. This is not to say that I haven't been drunk yet this year. The issue is that I've gotten TOO drunk and not been able to accurately discuss these books.

I have two more books to discuss here:

Pastoralia by George Saunders

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbably by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Let's discuss Pastoralia:

This collection of short stories was pretty great. They're all super weird, which I was not suspecting. The first story takes place in this weird, futuristic museum where these people pretend to be cavemen. There's another story that has this weird airplane strip club and a dead aunt that comes back to life and just wants to fuck. There's another that reminded me a lot of Scientology. I laughed a lot while reading these stories, and also felt really alone and sad inside.

I am not doing this collection justice, nor am I making an sense. I finished this book over a month ago and I'm also exhausted and wasted.

Let's cover the main parts here: Pastoralia was great. I'd recommend it drunk or sober and I've talked about it a bit, both drunk and sober. This boy I like, he also read this book recently and I tried to make him talk to me about it, but pretty much failed. I blame it on the fact that I don't think he cares much to talk to me in general though and that this has nothing to do with the book. GEORGE SAUNDERS THIS IS NOT YOUR FAULT.

Anyway, I'm excited to read more of you, Georgie Boy. A+.

Onto Black Swan or The Impact of the Worst Fucking Book I've Read This Year. Oh man. I fucking hate this book. Not worth my time or energy, that's for sure.

The theory itself is very cool and makes total sense. Basically, this dude is all, "You can't predict shit!" His theory is based on the fact that throughout time, everyone always thought there were only white swans in the world. And then one day, OH HELLO BLACK SWAN. And how all of life is like this, that you cannot predict anything because there's always something that you hadn't planned for, some big life changing fact. Yeah, I agree with that. We are not very good at guessing what comes next. Life is unpredictable. Okay, cool Nassim. He talks about how we use history to try to predict the future, but that history is not a good indicator of this. He uses this analogy about turkeys. Like, if for 355 days, a turkey was fed every day, on the 356th day, the turkey would assume that it's going to be fed again. Except that it's Thanksgiving so this turkey is going to be totally murdered. The turkey doesn't know this, this is an unexpected event, yadda yadda. Okay cool, Nassim I'm on board. I get it. And yet, 400 pages later, he's still using these little anecdotes and stories to try to convince me of this theory, even though I was on board from the beginning.

Imagine being at a party, and you're stuck talking to this lame ass dude. Let's call him Nassim. Nassim only has one thing to talk about, and while you agree with him, he just won't shut up about it. He goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on about it. He finds about 200 ways to tell you about it. This idea is not like, SUPER REVOLUTIONARY EITHER, but he spends HOURS trying to convince you of something you basically already agree with because you're not a fucking idiot. That's what reading this book is like.

At one point in the book, Nassim is like, "Hey, if you're not interested in the technical aspect of this theory, skip ahead!" And I was like THANK FUCKING GOD. Any time he suggested I skip part of his book, I did. Because I was miserable. All I wanted to do was find an excuse to leave this party and stop listening to him talk because OMG I GET IT. BUT YOU KNOW WHAT NASSIM, PEOPLE LIKE TRYING TO PREDICT SHIT. PEOPLE LIKE TO PRETEND THEY KNOW WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT. PEOPLE LOVE TO BE RIGHT. AND BEING RIGHT ABOUT SHIT GET'S PEOPLE OFF, THAT'S WHY THEY DO IT.

OMG, readers, I'm sorry. This book makes me get super capsy, so let's cut this short. I've already lost one friendship over this book (RIP, Andrew. It was good while it lasted.), I don't need to lose anymore. (Side note: If you want to remain friends with me, only recommend good books. Don't be an asshole. Life is too short to read garbage).

Suffice to say, I will not be talking about this book while drunk (I'll mostly be yelling) and I will never ever ever recommend this book. This book is my Jake Gyllenhall. We are never ever ever getting back together, like EVER.

Knock Knock! Who's There? Moosewood Cookbook. Moosewood Cookbook who? Moosewood Cookbook Drunk Book Report!

WOAH READERS!

So here we are, another night, another drunk book report. I got another new cookbook! AND I MADE TWO WHOLE RECIPES FROM IT THIS TIME!!!

The first of the two recipes, I made SUPERBOWL SUNDAY (or let's call it LAMEbowl sunday because the worst team in the history of sports won and we're just going to gloss over that fact (especially because they're cheaters).).  This recipe was for SAMOSAS OMG.

The second of the two recipes I made a few nights ago for MOVIE NIGHT WHAT!!! (Movie night is this great thing where my BFFs come over, we randomly select a movie from a long list using a number generator and an artificial drum roll. This week the movie was BIRDMAN! (Let's just pretend that it's out on DVD so we can gloss over the fact that it was an illegal download.)) This recipe was EGGPLANT CURRY! (Less OMG.)

Let's start with the cookbook though. Moosewood is pretty cool. It apparently is from the 70's (Caution: Not fact checked). It's like, the definitive vegetarian cookbook from those times. All the recipes are hand written (or use a lovely faux handwritten typeface) and there are several illustrations throughout. This is a very lovely touch.

Overall though, I'm not crazy impressed with the food. Both dishes were FINE with a capital F (and I, N, and E). I ate them, but would not add them to the rotation or even recommend them to anyone else. The samosas were absolutely better than the curry, but I don't think that's saying much.

So let's talk process.

Lamebowl sunday, my BFF Jerrsica came by and I started making these little pockets of food. The dough was super easy and so was the filling. Once all that was ready, it was time to construct. I had to buy a FUCKING ROLLING PIN FOR THIS and roll out little balls of dough, fill with the mashed potatoes and then construct the samosa. This was a lot of fucking work. I don't think the juice was worth the squeeze.

Oh, and I kept calling them empanadas the whole day, because I'm a stupid drunk.

So yeah, constructing these little assholes was not fun and I felt exhausted by the time I finished.

We ate them and it was kind of a resounding, "These are fine, but not worth the effort put in. I'd rather just get a samosa at an Indian restaurant."

Next up is Eggplant Curry. After a long day at work, I rush home to make this food before my friends come over for movie night. Warning: this made a fuck ton of food. I had to beg my friends to eat it once they got there.

The recipe was pretty easy to follow. Basically just had to chop some shit, saute it and then was done. It was pretty good, Jerrsica seemed to like it. I enjoyed it eating that night. But then the next day, I ate it for lunch and ended up throwing it away. I don't know if it's the fact that my whole apartment smelled like curry for 36 hours and I just was sick of it, or what, but I don't care for this food. I have two more containers in my fridge that I gag thinking about. This is not a good sign. 

So yeah, overall, I have not been blown away. It's a shame because the book is BEAUTIFUL and there are a lot of delicious sounding recipes, but I'm just not impressed thus far. Maybe I didn't pick correctly (But you know, I don't want to blame myself here.), and I'm sure that I will try another thing from the book at some point, but MEH. 

So have I talked about this book while drunk? Nah, not really. I haven't really talked about this book at all though.

Would I recommend this book (while drunk)? This is, I think, the first book in the history of drunk book reports that I'm going to say: nope. Sorry, Mollie Katzen. I think we found a dud. I don't care WHAT the New York Times Best Seller list says. (Just don't tell them that. I really love the NYTimes and I don't want to disappoint them.) 

So there you have it. If I could sum this cookbook up in one phrase it would be: A basic cookbook for a basic bitch. 

OH I FORGOT: PHOTOS!!!

        

               

(This formation of images took be like, 25 minutes to make. I don't care how it looks.)