A week or so before the RT convention in April, I started packing.  At my mother’s advice, I tried on the dresses I was taking.

Left to my own devices, I wouldn’t have bothered.  These things already fit me, right?  Wrong.  I’d put on a few pounds and they all showed at the worst places: right above the decolletage on my strapless frocks.  Ack!  How can someone who doesn’t even have boobs have overboob squish-age?

So immediately I took a look at the Master Cleanse–the lemon-juice-plus-red-pepper-flake-fluid-diet I’d heard my friends talk about–and immediately jumped away from my laptop in fright.  That @#$% ain’t for the faint of heart, and I am nothing if not faint of heart.  After I recovered my will to live, I went to read GOOP, Gwyneth Paltrow’s newsletter.  Because my gossip lady is always talking about Ms. Paltrow, I occasionally take a look at GOOP and remembered that a while ago Ms. Paltrow posted a one-week cleanse of her own.

Remember what I said about being faint of heart?  I didn’t manage Gwyneth’s cleanse either.  But I did come away with a great recipe for a quick, nutritious, and pretty tasty breakfast shake.

You will need:

• 1 cup of blueberries, blackberries, or raspberries
• 1 cup of unsweetened almond milk (or just enough to cover the berries in your blender)
• 1 scoop of your favorite protein powder (I used my husband’s Muscle Milk)

Pour everything into a blender and blend to your preferred consistency.  I like mine smooth, Senior Kidlet prefers his berries to be chunkier.  His Hawtness likes milk so we make his with milk.

(If you are a careful examiner of pictures and wonder what is that green substance, it is a scoop of Pro Green powder.  Ms. Paltrow specified it.  I bought a canister in a moment of weakness.  It tastes like grass powder on its own, but kind of disappears in the shake.  But I chose not to include it here because it’s hella expensive and now that I’d finished with the one at home, I most likely won’t be buying it again.)

That hand is not mine, by the way, but belongs to Sr. Kidlet.

It makes a big old glass of smoothie, gets my energy up, and get me to actually ingest all those gargantuan Costco containers of berries I can’t help buying when they are in season.  If you are on a low-carb diet–hi, Meredith–it’s pretty perfect.  If you are on a vegan diet–hi, Janine–with a soy-derived protein powder, you are good to go too.  If you are me, who doesn’t like to eat anything healthy, low-carb, or low-fat, but will make an occasional sacrifice to get rid of overboob squishage, this is SPARTA!

Bon Appetit.

I am a pretty decent cook. But more importantly, I’m a pretty fast cook. His Hawtness once jokingly said that I get only half credit for cooking since I do only the simplest dishes.

And then one day I said to myself, you know, these dishes are pretty simple but they hold up pretty well. I’ll bet there are other readers/writers out there who wouldn’t mind a few of those recipes–more time for reading/writing, right?

Except, well, our inaugural recipe is really simple but it isn’t exactly fast–not to mention it is also highly calorific.  So I held onto it for a long time until I had a book signing recently. And used it to lure folks to my table. I can’t speak to its success as a promotional product for my books, but one teenage boy came around five separate times for the cake pops. Ha!

The original recipe can be found at food blogger Bakerella’s website.

Here’s what you need: 

Ingredients:

• One box Red Velvet Cake Mix plus the oil, eggs, and whatnot to bake it with
• One 16oz can cream cheese frosting
• Chocolate bark/coating
• White chocolate chips (I used Nestle because it has directions on the back for how to make dipping chocolate)
• Vegetable shortening to combine with the white chocolate chips during metling (not pictured)
• Popsicle sticks (not pictured)

Steps:

1. Bake the cake according to directions.  Let it cool completely.

2. Crumble the cake.  (I did mine in my food processor.)

3. Combine the frosting with the cake crumbs.  (I used about 3/4 can of the frosting.)

4. Form the cake crumb frosting mixture into popsicle-size balls. And stick the popsicle sticks into them.  Now put them in the fridge or the freezer for a while so that the cake spheres firm up a bit.

5.  Now melt the chocolate bark/coating according to directions.

6.  And melt white chocolate with some vegetable shortening, according to directions.

7.  And dip!  (And drizzle, if you feel like.  I drizzled with a spoon.  I  have no talent for food decorating, but I don’t think anyone cared.  And in case you are curious, the cake pops are standing on a block of florist’s foam.)

The chocolate bark is rather heavy.  But chocolate morsels, once melted with some vegetable shortening, is really easy to work with.  So this past weekend, for Junior Kidlet’s birthday, we did an at-home chocolate fondue with my teeny tiny crockpot.  Yum.  And impressed the heck out of the kids. 

(And here you thought the shea butter was an isolated instance of crazy.) 

But I promise, next recipe will be really, really superduper simple.  And healthy too.

And in other news, HIS AT NIGHT is finally released into the wild today.  Phew.  That means I’m almost done with publicity stuff and can go back to just writing.  What a relief.