sugar cookie christmas

Rapid -fire post this morning before I’m off to run errands with the momma!

Got home from vacation last night- had an amaaaaaazing time

Found and quickly snatched up this little gem at TJ’s the other day-(only 4.99!)

Can’t decide whether I’m going to make these or Cindy/Ameena’s Magic Bars…which seem outrageously appealing, especially for a gluten-free product ;)

I reunited with my baby I mean my camera this morning and was played around a bit in the kitchen.

Gave Willy some peanut butter but it accidentally got on his head/nose…he couldn’t seem to figure out why his face smelled so amazing but he couldn't find any food?!

 

Tested out our ancient Christmas Carol VHS (wow- that term is going to be antiquated very, very soon) to make sure it was still working.

Now off to shop for all our lovely necessities for our (jewish, two-person) Christmas Eve dinner.

We're going all-out tonight and taking on quite a challenge for two novice cooks (well, i mean...if you can even call my mom a novice- more like one non-cook & one novice-ha sorry, mom, i love you!)

i'll most likely be back to show you either our beautiful foodie creation or a lovely kitchen disaster.

hope all who celebrate have a good christmas -eve- day!

xo

rose

A Much Needed Break

I havent' posted in a week because my life has been crazy lately! Next week is the last week before winter break and i think everyone is just about to burst at this point. I've haven't even opened my computer once in the past four days because i've been so busy with school-work and everything that i've barely had time to sleep or breathe, let alone write a blog post!

Tonight though, i decided that i really need a mental break and so (sorry, Mr. P!) i'm putting off studying for my latin test for a half-hour to pop in and say hi.
P.S. It's the last night of Hannukah!
In honor of which, i thought i'd share some festivity-related photos

What's a girl to do in order to celebrate the holiday season?
Bake a Chocolate Chip Cookie Pie, of course!
(recipe courtesy of How Sweet It Is)

my cookie dough and i wanted tosay hi...

don't you just wanna eat it raw? i know---me too.

Who the hell came up with Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Pie?
If anyone knows this individual, would you let them know that i'm single and definitely up for marriage?

the final remnants (blueberry pie was necessary, too, obviously)

 now that i've  probably just lost all my readers by sending them off to the kitchen in search of some chocolate, wanna know what the other best part of hannukah is, aside from baking?


Huh?


Any guesses?

Yes, you're right Noah, presents! (Although i'll pass on the buzz lightyear gun, but thanks for the offer!)

mmm. jewelry AND love? What else could a girl want?

A picture i fell in love with from Charmaine Olivia

                                                       
Alright guys, it's late and i'm tired and have Cicero (quite rudely) calling my name, so i unfortunately don't have the time to prove (via meaningful ramblings) to you that I, am not, in fact, a highly superficial person just because i said that the best part about Hannukah is the presents. :) In any case, its not about the presents, however pretty they may be,  yadda yadda yadda *insert sentimental story about the importance of family here*
I hope you all had a lovely week and I can't wait until this week is over so i can go back to breathing and sleeping and blogging properly like a normal human-being!

In the meantime, for all you nerds out there, i saw this video and thought it was awesome so if you have a few minutes to spare or are at all interested in little known, possibly useless but cool facts about math (and other things) watch away, if not, good night!
xo
Rose

My Foodie Holiday

had a majorly cozy weekend in my country house with the 'rents

which, naturally, involved some baking, or half-baking, i guess

oh, yes i did.

made some of Mama Pea's Cookie Dough Balls :)

pre-bake:

those were the only two balls (lol. sorry can't stop myself) "officially" eaten by moi. i probably ate about 6 or 7 in actuality.

The Best Balls you'll Ever Have  :P

I basically just used Mama Pea's recipe and switched margarine to butter, pb to almond butter (it's all i had but it turned out sooooo well) and peanut butter chips to butterscotch chips (which were AMAZING)

                                               hey, it's mah face! vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

this one does NOT need to be Extra Large

I thought i'd take a pic of myself enjoying one just so you guys know that i actually exist (and that i'm not actually a forty-year-old man pretending to be a teenage girl...ew) ha i like never put pictures of myself on here :)

i saved a little bit of room for dinner, of course. my dad made this delicious butternut squash soup. so yummy (and photogenic)

my parent's friends came over and brought Gingerbread!

I usually dislike gingerbread but this was so good. It just tasted like a brown-sugary cake, not too tangy.

my adorable dessert plate.

before...


and after.

isn't food so much more fun when it's cute?

I also picked up this edition of Newsweek. Has anyone else read it?

it's really fascinating. Miller talks about how what we eat reflects our social class. She says that "17 percent of Americans—more than 50 million people"are "food insecure"- aka don't necessarily have enough money to adequately feed themselves and their families on a day-to-day basis.

   (http://www.newsweek.com/2010/11/22/what-food-says-about-class-in-america.html)

While it certainly may not help someone who is still entrenched or actively sick in their eating disorder to ask them to think about statistics like this, I think that in recovery opening your eyes to the reality and harshness of situations around you can really make worrying about food and weight seem pretty trivial and ridiculous.

   (http://www.newsweek.com/2010/11/22/what-food-says-about-class-in-america.html)

That is, of course, not to say that having an eating disorder or that struggling is "ridiculous", but rather that sometimes it can be really motivational or eye-opening to step outside of ourselves and look at other things in the world which can easily make the-ever-worried- about -calories seem like not so big of a deal.

  chestnuts roasting on an open fire...

On that note, i watched The Cove on Sunday and was throughly moved/disturbed by it. It's about the murder of dolphins in Japan. Has anyone else seen it? As soon as i finished watching it i went to the website that they give a link to, because i really felt touched by it and wanted to do something. Again, it's that internal passion that i feel so intensely as of late. But really though, when there are so many other things to feel excited/passionate about, who has time for an eating disorder???

So guys, i apologize because i was going to write a more important and involved post but i got busy and then i missing y'all and really wanted to post/say hi tonight so i'm just gonna go ahead and post this, insignificance and all.

Hope you all have had a good start to the week thus far!

P.S. Can you think of any ways in which you (personally, on a day-to-day basis, or maybe even in a larger sense) see how the food that "we" eat is reflective of social class? What else does it reflect, do you think? Is this a touchy topic for some?

xo

rose

White Houses

alright guys, in keeping with my mission to try to teach myself to break habits that i don't like,

i decided to rattle off a post today, even if it's not going to be the greatest or most exciting, just because i don't want to get into an anti-blog rut ;)
Well i got my camera back which is exciting because i have some photos to share with you...
first of all check out what came in an urban outfitters package in the mail today for me

my Diana lomography camera! I asked my brother for it
and i'm so happy it's here. How cute is it?!

He ordered the special redscale film from Amazon too. swoon.

i know, i know. you all must be getting sick of hearing about my birthday by now. 

it's almost over i swear it's only been going on for two weeks! ;)

here are some pictures from my b-day dinner with my fam. We went to the restaurant of my choosing, Flex Mussels. It's amazing. It's like all these different ways you can have mussels and then the desserts are to die for.

One of the deserts we got were the Flex Donuts. They are delicious
and each come with their own filling : fluffernutter, pb&j, chocolate, lemon...
Oh and they had this incredible vanilla bean dipping sauce that i would've
just eaten on its own had their not been doughy goodness to go with it

                                                                                   

Check out that little face! Isn't he adorable.
That's Noah, my nephew, aka the cutest little man alive.
And see those chocolatey fingers? Who do you think he learned that from?!

Anyway so that was my birthday dinner on friday night. I was exhausted as I always am on Fridays and ready to just go to sleep but I did have a pretty good time and the food sitch wasn't too anxiety-provoking or anything considering it's basically just delicious mussels and some dessert to go with it.

This weekend I was dragged out to my country house with my parents.

It actually wasn't really that bad. The weather was beautiful and I really just had a good time relaxing. Took the chance to take some pretty photos...

I don't actually like apples (never have, i was a weird baby)
but i thought they just looked so autumnal and pretty.

                                                  

hot cocoa, obv.

and since it got really cold at night we had to put the fire on.
so cozy, right?

anyway i really need to go eat dinner and get my history on because i have this huge paper on the american revolution due at 12am tonight (wtf...why did i leave it till the very last minute- yep that's going on the Rose's Habits She Wants To Change list..) and i need to get cracking on that because i really don't know very much about the Boston Tea Party and all that jazz and i need to re-learn how to do footnotes so i'm thinking it might take me a little bit.

Before i go though...

Do you ever do that thing where you hear a song for the first time and fall in love with it and absolutely have to have it on replay for like the next, say, month or two of your life?

Well, i do.

And that song, a few years back was Vanessa Carlton's White Houses. I re-discovered it last night and was feeling inspired and added some of the lyrics to a photo that i found on Flickr that i thought is beautiful and sent it to a friend of mine who i knew would appreciate it... thought i'd share.

xo

rose 

                                                                                      

I like my muffins tasty, thanks.

i'm so tired. I think i need to go to the doctor/psychiatrist. My fatigue is getting to be chronic and its annoying, because i wanted to be productive and do work tonight, but all i can think about is sleep!

I was going to post tonight, and i had a ton of pictures for you all, but it took forever (read: at least 20 minutes!) to upload all of them and then i pressed something and they all deleted so now i'm frustrated and just going to go to sleep.

i'll post more tomorrow, i swear.

i don't want to leave ya'll with nothing, because that, i think kind of defeats the purpose of my challenge, to post every day for a week, because i don't think just an excuse really qualifies as a post, so i think i'll share some tidbits of my day with you. 

Well, first off, I baked! I baked (or attempted to bake) double chocolate sour-cream muffins. this was a fail for a few reasons:

1) We (my dad and i) forgot to add the water. I just tasted some of my delicious-LOOKING muffins, and they're hard as rocks. the only good part is the top, with the chocolate chips that are still gooey.

2) They're not actually sour-cream. We used 2% greek yogurt instead. Why, oh why did you violate such a cardinal rule of baking (follow the instructions!), you may ask? My dad, it turns out, is a serious fat-phobic, borderline-anorexic, fucking pain-in-the-ass & triggering asshole. That's why. He refused to let me use sour cream. And got mad when I questioned him about it, and told him how unhelpful it was for me that he was afraid of sour cream and was saying how "bad" it was for me. He is such an asshole. No surprise there.

Let's not even go into the fact that i get so triggered by my parents all the time. And they fail to notice. No matter how many times i tell them that it is NOT OKAY to say things about food around me (aka "that was bad"  "this is fattening" , "i ate too much today" "let's not use butter" ), they, without fail, always are insensitive dumbasses about it. there's no sugar-coating it. 

My dad and I got into a fight while we were baking and it just totally ruined the experience for me. Note to self: bake ALONE. so that you can a: listen to music rather than garrison freaking keiglher and b: HAVE A GOOD TIME and use whatever full-fat ingredients the recipe fucking calls for.

The rest of the day was not as disastrous as the baking was...(thank god!)

I went on a run! With my dad. (this was before the baking disaster). It was actually really nice, and I felt really accomplished (disregard the fact that when asked by my mother how the run was my dad replied that I was "not doing well" because I got a cramp half way though...as if that qualifies as a disaster.)  because I actually ran for a good 20 minutes straight without stopping. And even then I think we ran most of the way. Yay!

I also just slept really late and relaxed and had a good time. I needed the rest, I think.

Anyway, sorry for the lack of photos, perhaps i'll post them tomorrow! Hope everyone had a good saturday!

xo

rose

P.S. Do any of you have parents with eating disorders/ disordered eating? and also...Does anybody have any good baking/cooking mishaps they'd like to share, to relieve poor rose of her shame ;) ?

Rainy Days and Mondays

always get me down...


too bad yesterday fit both of those criteria!
Yesterday was not. fun. 
Lets just put it that way.
I was super exhausted at school and hence not very pleasant to be around/felt bad about being "anti-social"/was having a terrible body-image day and basically wanted to disappear or for no one to even glance at me.
I had a really hard therapy session (which I should make a post about at some point) and then came home, slept, binged & purged, cried, and then finally got back on my feet after spending some time watching Mad Men with my parents.
It's always surprising to me that my parents tend to be the source of comfort that I am looking for when I am having days like yesterday. 
Even in their newly-about-to-get-a-divorce-want-to-rip-each-others'-heads-off kind of way of acting around here lately, last night, it was still really therapeutic for me to just spend some time with both of them, together.
Maybe I haven't really put enough weight (no pun intended) on the fact that my parents have just recently decided to get a divorce into my thoughts about how i am coping/all the stress in my life. I don't know.
I don't like to think about them much. It's kind of upsetting. Hence why i never got around to formally mentioning it on the blog a month ago when all hell broke loose/ the shit hit the fucking fan and my entire house was in shambles and we are now in process of moving those shambles elsewhere.


Okay. I didn't intend to talk about my parents marriage (or lack thereof) right now. It's just complicated and messy and boring, I'm sure, so i'm gonna go hit the books now.


Hope everyone had a better start to the week than I did. At least Tuesday has been a big improvement :) (How could it not be?!)
xo
Rose

Body Image & the Weekends

I'm just gonna put it out there.

Weekends tend to be tough.

I know this is not just the case for me but also for lots of others (eating disordered or not).

Whether it's just the break from the normal routine, or the under-current of pressure to be doing something "interesting" "exciting" "cool", "productive" or "active" , or because we are not all distracted by the business of the work-week, for whatever reasons, as longed-for as they are, (especially apparent in the surge of TGIF posts, tweets, statuses, heck- t- shirts these days) Saturday & Sunday can be rough.

That being said, this weekend has been rather typical, but not terrible for me.

A weird pattern that I'm, noticing, however, is that my body-image tends to plummet on the weekends.

sundays, particularly. This is also true of my symptom-usage, sometimes.

I think part of it is the fact that my weekends recently have been super boring.

Not that the inherent couch-potato & TV lover in me has any problem with this.

My ego has a serious issue with it though. I always feel awful and loser-ish when I just don't do anything "cool" on the weekends. I mean, come on, I live in the city that never sleeps! I'm seventeen! Shouldn't I be out & about, painting the town green and bar-hoping with adorable random boys all night? Should I be out to brunch because it's Sunday and then down to SoHo for the new boutique opening? Should I have spent yesterday morning going for a jog and then the afternoon frolicking &being crazy on the Great Lawn with some cool hipster friends?

I don't know.

In reality, i spent most of the weekend either hanging out with my mom or in my room.

I didn't do nearly as much physical activity as I "should have", and I barely accomplished anything (save spending hours looking in my 2010 Fiske College Guide and creating a colored-post-it system to keep track of the schools that I okay-ed, liked, or adored...yes, i'm a major nerd who wants to get out of high school very, very badly.)

With all of this self-judgement flying around and lots of time to think about all of the things that i feel bad for not doing, I guess it's no wonder that my eating disorder seems to "flare-up", so to speak, on the weekends.

Today was no exception to this weekend-itis.

I woke up ravenous, ate breakfast, watched tv, read my Fiske Guide (lol@me), and napped. A few hours later, I was even more ravenous, so I went into the kitchen to make lunch. I ate. And then I wanted more. And then more. And then I threw up. Meh.

It was the only time i've thrown up this week, which I am really proud about, considering transitions tend to be hard & stressful, and stress increases my urges to either restrict or overeat/purge, blah blah blah, et cetera et cetera.

After that little 'party', i showered and then it was time to get dressed.

dum dum dum.

*enter dramatic music*

Yeah so my body image sucked. I couldn't find anything to wear. And my once tidy room is now in shambles.

Le sigh.

But, never fear, blogging saved the day!

I stumbled upon this (embedded below) video on forever_hopeful's blog, and it literally just made my bad body image crawl into a hole, shrivel up, and die for the time being.  WOOHOO! Rose: 1 ED: 0 cha-ching!

Seriously though, watch it.

I'm not usually one for semi-sappy, quasi-meaningful 'love yourself' videos or whatever, but this literally made me cry (maybe it's my vulnerable state ;) ??? ) and I just really recommend it. So, here it is. 

Hope it touches some of you the way it did me.

xo

Rose

Letter to my Body from Ally Marks on Vimeo.

The long-awaited end of summer

Hey all!

So i want to start off by apologizing for falling off the face of the earth these past couple of weeks. 

I'm back- hopefully to stay. 

I've had a lot lot lot going on. With the start of school (on Monday, eek!) , and all that's been happening @ home and such, i just haven't had very much time or energy to blog.

My entire life is kind of under construction right now. This has been a long, long summer. Here's a list of all the things that have happened this summer:

• I started this blog!
• I finished Day treatment after i got home from my RTC
• I "broke-up" with my old therapist
• Started practicing yoga (more) regularly

'Cause meditating on train tracks is like totally normal & safe

• I re-discovered my lovely New York City, even after I was sure LA was the place for me (probs still is...)
• I got my nose re-pierced!
• I learned how to bake

These are what we call "Joel Cookies" in my family. Named after my dad, and they are much more like a blondie than a cookie...

This delicious Cookie Dough Ball doesn't actually require baking! It's amazing! Got it from Joy, the baker

• I went to L.A. and had an amazing time- seeing people who i LOVE and looking at some colleges 
• I tried some new foods (sweetbreads, almond butter, chocolate dreams pb!) 



Don't forget the Montaco Truck! I went here with my brother and his girlfriend last weekend. It was great, fresh, Mexican food


• I rediscovered my favorite book ever, "The Catcher in the Rye"
• I spent a LOT of time with my family, more than I wanted to, and probably more than most would consider to be psychologically healthy

A pic of me and Jake (my bro), chilling on the steps at our beach house

Aside from all of those activities that I did, I really accomplished a lot this summer.

I survived New York City heat, which is no small feat, especially for a girl like me, who tends to wear tank tops in the dead of winter. I also did a lot of really intense things, too. I transitioned back home after a long stay in residential treatment, back to an environment that I was terrified of re-entering. I made a big decision about school and education and the next two years of my life. I re-learned how to live in my home, but this time, without the safety of my eating disorder to fall back on. I binged and purged, but figured out, for the first time ever, how to pull myself back out again, even when things are rough. I learned how to be real with people, especially with myself. Most importantly, I lived my life this summer and although it wasn't the best, I'm thinking (well, hoping) it can only go up from here.

xxx

Rose