family

Thankgiving Reflection: That Time I Ran An Illegal Baking Service

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Guys, I don’t mean I sold pot. But I did intend to sell my wares to those who were using pot.

It was years ago, and an entrepreneurial friend of mine came up with the idea to start a late-night dessert delivery service and asked me if I wanted to help. I said sure. (Okay, fine, I totally wanted to date him and thought this was my chance. Whatever, get off my back). The idea was to bake desserts at his apartment, then be available to deliver them to Williamsburg-ers from 10pm-3am. (I really don’t need you to tell me how dumb this was, I knew it then. I know it now). Not only is it illegal to sell food made in a non-commercial kitchens, why I thought delivering desserts to strangers at 3am would be a great way to start a successful bakery business with zero knowledge of baking from scratch is beyond me. Maybe I didn’t watch enough “Shark Tank.”

We came up with some recipes – half we Google’d, some I’m pretty sure we winged (oatmeal-flax-chocolate-chia cookies? Again…Williamsburg. I don’t know), and one recipe we definitely stole from someone who said they’d bake for us, then bailed after one night realizing how non-profitable this was. I think we had 6 menu items total. This required us to bake pretty much every-other night (we might have been illegal, but dammit, if we weren’t fresh), then stay up all night holding the burner phone we bought as the business line. My astute business partner also paid $200 for promotional cards that we handed out in the afternoons, trying to drum up business. (I DID have a job during this time, by the way, which makes this whole charade even more ridiculous). I think we called it “Foodie Call” or something equally pun-y and derivative. Again…knocking it out of the park.

I think the business (and I use this term loosely) only ran for a month before we called it quits. We probably only made 10 deliveries the whole time, I didn’t even make more than $20, let alone get a boyfriend out of it. Total waste.

As it happened, Thanksgiving fell right after our shoddy business closed it’s apartment door, but I was ready to show off my “new found baking mastery” to my family. I’m the youngest child, and obviously the slightly-forgetful-doesn’t-really-contribute-much sibling. Well…I was about to show them! We made a plan that the night before Thanksgiving, my sister would make dinner, and I – the baker! – would do dessert. Even though I really hadn’t improved much during my stint as an Underground Dessert Pusher, I thought I was a regular Dominique Ansel (“The Cronut Guy” for you non-bakers), so I decided to make the most convoluted dessert I had sort-of learned to make, but by no stretch of the imagination perfected: a Peanut-Butter-Banana Chocolate cake with Peanut Butter frosting. I sent my parents the list of ingredients I needed, which was an obscene list that included semi-sweet chocolate chips, unsweetened chocolate chunks, and god-knows what else, but my sister told me it cost like $60 to get everything. Whatever, Mom, this cake was going to be SO worth it!!

I spent about an hour and a half in the kitchen whipping up the cake batter, melting the chocolate, prepping the frosting, and making a huge mess. But don’t worry, family-who-looks-terrified, I’m your newly grown up daughter and I’m going to blow your socks off so hard you’re going to offer to send to me culinary school, so it’s going to be SO worth it!

Well, you see, the thing was, I never figured out how to bake banana chunks INTO the cake without them becoming rock hard…but I figured that would magically work itself out. But then there was also the small detail that I could never remember if I was supposed to add baking soda or baking powder. I think I used baking soda. Although I don’t know. Who can remember such things. Again…lessons very much not  learned.

I put the batter in the oven and kept yapping about how good this huge cake was going to be. About 15 minutes in, I go to peek at my cake and see how she was doing. The following happened in slow motion: I turn on the oven light. I look in. The cake is bubbling up like a goddam active volcano. Huge dollops of my precious cake that was supposed to prove years of worthlessness wrong were just plopping onto the bottom of the oven. The cake on the bottom of the oven was beginning to smoke and burn. the cake was still bubbling over. My cake was ruined. I tried to think of how I could save this cake, but then it started to really smell. I walked over to my dad and said: “I think I fucked it up.”

I still don’t remember which was the wrong one, but I THINK the baking soda was wrong. I think that’s what makes it explode. Or I was supposed to use both? I don’t know, I have never tried to bake that fucking cake again because it was totally scarring to have to tell my family – as a 22-year old ADULT – that I messed the cake up and the majority of that $60 worth of ingredients now had to be scraped and burned off the oven floor.

I think what made me the most upset wasn’t that I screwed it up and there would be no dessert/redeeming of myself. It’s that my family didn’t seem at all surprised that the cake literally blew up in my face. Why did I tell you this story as I prep to go home for Thanksgiving again this year? I guess the lesson I learned that year was…if you’ve never been the one to help in the kitchen, don’t start now. Don’t try to impress anyone. Just offer to roll up those Pillsbury Crescent Rolls and call it a day. Holidays aren’t for showing your parents how much you’ve grown. They are for you to revert to your 14-year old self and whine all weekend, then try and sneak out after your parents fall asleep so you can meet your friends, get drunk, and spy on the loser who still works at the local Pick N’ Save.

Gobble, Gobble, underachievers!

A Dog Mom Is Still A Mom (And Other Fears)

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If you’ve ever met me or my Instagram feed, you know that my greatest aspiration in life is to be a stay-at-home-dog-mom (some of us dream bigger than others, okay?). I always had dogs growing up, so I was always “a dog person” as they say. I never cared for cats – who likes an animal that pees and poops inside? Yes, humans poop inside, but at least we use something that flushes. Luckily, I developed a cat allergy in college, which I believe my body may have spontaneously willed, to make hating cats easier and more socially accepted.

But it was when I adopted my first dog, Brooklyn (a hand me down from my future sister-in-law who decided a spastic, needy, obsessive buddy was not the ideal furry friend right after having a baby), I immediately fell in love as I am equally needy and obsessive. This bundle of joy wasn’t just a family dog that I barely took care of, except let it go on the furniture when my mom wasn’t looking. This was my dog, my responsibility, my BABY. She was all I talked about. “I can’t go for a drink after work, I have to let the dog out.” “I can’t have you over, she gets upset when she has to share me.” “I can’t wear black, she sheds at an alarming rate.”

A year later, I got scammed into adopting another dog the day before Thanksgiving. He was a little black and gray thing and they claimed he would be 100-lbs fully grown – perfect for a studio apartment that we’d already outgrown! Long story short: don’t go to the ASPCA “just to look,” and don’t go with a person who is adopted and claims “they don’t have a real family,” so “they need this puppy, especially because it’s Thanksgiving”. We named him Melo (after Carmelo Anthony, which later backfired when someone asked “why, because he’s black?”) I hated him at first because as soon as I took it home (my fiancé conveniently had to run to work immediately after the adoption process was over), it took a giant shit on my carpet. Granted, it was a $20 IKEA rug, but do you know how annoying it is to to go to IKEA without a car? You have to carry the giant rolled-up, no-handle rug to the ferry, then to a train, then you have to drag it the 6 blocks to your walk-up apartment. It’s very sweaty, very Ellis Island. I wasn’t doing that trip again. But then, exhausted from his massive bowel movement, the little guy fell asleep and curled up his little paws and he had me.

A mother of two children under the age of 2, my schedule was packed. I literally became an Upper East Side mom, frantically scheduling my life around them. I had them both in obedience class – but separate ones, because of their age difference, so I was shuttling them to different classes at different locations on different days. I had to find them a proper daycare facility and Melo came with a lovely set of worms, so he was on medication and I had to inspect his poop every day to make sure those fuckers were getting passed. Thank god I was in between jobs, I don’t know how I would have done it if I had an actual job. I would have been forced to hire a nice Trinidadian nanny, something I’ve sworn I’ll never do. Not because I’m racist (remember my African-American dog?), but because what if they call her mommy??).

Once they were both pooping normally (and outside) and were marginally obedient, I begrudgingly went back to work (ah, the plight of being a new mom!). But I missed them terribly! I still do. I am completely obsessed with them. My fiancé has taken a backseat. I get home from work and it goes: greet dogs, give them kisses…say hi to fiancé and that he’s in Brooklyn’s spot on the couch. I leave for a few hours and I miss them and wonder what they’re doing (probably just sleeping, but I don’t know. What if they’re eating their blankets, or crafting?) I thought about getting a nanny-cam to watch them all day. I still don’t like going out – how can I go out to a bar when I have those furry faces with sad Sarah-McLachlan-Please-Love-Me eyes, pleading with me to snuggle them?

Now that I’m a grown-ass lady and don’t live with my mother, my dogs are allowed on all the furniture. Which…I regret a little now. Not because of the hair situation, but because they take everything over and I don’t have a place to sit. It’s like having Dom Deluise and John Candy as roommates. We had to upgrade to a King-sized bed because we didn’t fit on a Queen. I got a chair for the living room for more guest-seating, but Melo commandeered it as soon as I got it inside and hasn’t left since. One time I tried to sit on the chair (BECAUSE IT’S FOR PEOPLE) and he jumped on top of me, so he could sit on it. Which would be cute if he wasn’t now 70-lbs and caused substantial leg bruising (not all his fault – I’m pale and bruise like a banana).

Everyone thinks their dog is the cutest, but…my dogs are the cutest dogs. If you looked through my phone, you will not find a nudie pic, but you will find thousands of pictures of my dogs. I signed up for this thing called GrooveBook, where they take your photos each month and send you a book of 100 printed photos. So basically every month, we get 100 photos of our dogs sleeping in various positions. And yes, each month I add a new one to my cubicle. And no, I am not embarrassed.

The point is, I don’t know if I can have kids. Don’t get me wrong, I love kids. I want a whole army of them. But I’m afraid that I’m going to be a totally crazy mom. If I’m this obsessed with my dogs, what am I going to be like with an actual child that looks like me? (Well, hopefully they get my fiancé’s eyes and skin tone, and my nose and red hair. Worst case would be his nose, my under-eye circles and a boy with red hair – not cute). You can put a dog in a cage for 6 hours, and I still hate leaving them. You can’t put a kid in a cage, unless you want to get them carted away by CPS, and they’ll probably still turn out like “Dexter”. How can you ever go anywhere alone? Are kids allowed in my Kickboxing class?

I fear I’ll be one of those moms that refuses to leave their children with anyone else and starts to resent their husbands. My fiancé already thinks I won’t let him hold his own children (likely). Or even worse…what if I like my dogs more than the baby? Most babies come out super mushy and weird-looking, which means my dogs will be cuter for at least the first two weeks. Will people think I’m a terrible person if I post more pictures of my dogs for that two weeks than my misshapen offspring? (I’m 87% kidding).

Furthermore, if I’m overly-protective of my dog, I think I’d put a hit out on anyone up who did anything to my kid. A few months ago, Melo came home from daycare with a scratch, and I called them screaming and crying asking how they let this happen (never mind the waiver I signed that said whatever happens, too bad). After demanding to speak to the manager, then the owner – well after hours – I was granted a free Veterinary consultation first thing in the morning just to get me off the phone. When the scratch healed by the morning, I was too embarrassed to even call and cancel the appointment. If my child ever comes home with a scratch I’ll totally be that mom that calls another parent to tell them what an asshole kid they raised. I can’t imagine how many PTAs I’ll get kicked out of.

Listen, before my parents think I got knocked up before my wedding, let me clarify that I am not currently with child. But every time I look into Brooklyn or Melo’s eyes and tell them they are the most perfect, precious angels in the whole world, these are my fears. One good thing I remind myself of is the fact that having thousands of photos of your child is more socially acceptable than dog photos. And my kid will be allowed on the furniture, but won’t shed as much. Unless it gets my fiancé’s Italian body hair genes.