Carrots: The Orange Menace

Note: The following is partially excerpted from the essay that got me into UVA. There was going to be another joke here about it keeping me out of a university that had a carrot as a mascot, but there aren't any. 

Well, folks, I'm having a just wonderful start to my semester, what with it being 22 degrees outside and all. According to my roommate, it was negative seven last night, which made me worry until I realized that she measures everything via the metric system. 

But I'm back at school now, and I'm so, so, so exited to be learning things (almost as exited as I was to get my cavities filled!) For all you poor southerners who get MLK Day off, I thought I'd slip a little tidbit of education your way. Did you know the orange carrot was cultivated in the 17th century by the Dutch as a tribute to William of Orange? If only they'd just started growing, like, actual oranges instead, my life would be so much easier. 

You see, I hate carrots. Whenever I'd get ramen noodles at those chilly spring track meets (only after racing, I swear), I would pick out the dehydrated 'carrot' chunks and flick them onto the bleachers with a plastic fork. Neesha, our team captain, was the only person I ever actually hit. Her and some Lake Braddock sprinters, but they decided to rub our loosing record in our face, so whatever.

 But the carrot problem's gotten to the point where whenever my mom makes stew, she makes me a separate portion without the carrots. This is slightly embarrassing, because I like to pretend that I'm a mature adult. Mature adults don't need their mommies to make them special dinners. However, she's realized that if she gives me carrots, I will pick them out and put them on the side of the plates.

Taylor, naturally, tells me that I need to grow up and stop acting like a baby.  

This video is me, as a baby, refusing to eat carrots. Note the way I eat the applesauce when my father offers it to me, but keep my mouth shut when it's carrots on the spoon. 

I hate carrots. I have hated them all my life. I will hate them until the day I die. Unfortunately  my friend Sarah (the brunette Sarah from high school) is one of the sweetest, kindest people in the whole wide world. She loves nothing more than serving her fellow man--which sometimes leads to her serving her friend carrots. 

So I'm over at her house and her mom asks me to stay for lunch. I say sure and ask what I can do to help. She relegates me—novice cook that I am—to tasks that in no way, shape, or form involved the oven. Set the table, pour the drinks, and prepare the family’s favorite vegetable.

            Carrots.

Taylor says the way I do anything in the kitchen is wrong, but Sarah, for some reason (like manners) didn't comment on how long it took me to skin the carrots. Which is a good thing, because I was about to gag the whole time. Then we sat down and I filled my mouth with water before shoving in a carrot and chowing down as quickly as humanly possible. Of course, when Sarah read the award-winning* essay I wrote on my ordeal, she was quite upset: “Dear Liz, you shouldn’t have felt obligated to eat them!” Of course, it's a nice attitude like that which explains why I felt obligated to eat them.

Of course, Taylor makes me eat carrots, too. One night, I came over to her house to watch a movie. I even called ahead first, which I don't always do, so she really should have been in my debt. We made (she made, I nearly ruined) a delicious Asian stir-fry with tofu, peppers, and—you guessed it—carrots. All was well until about halfway through the movie, when she noticed that my plate was covered in uneaten orange cubes.

            “Why aren’t you eating your carrots?” Her eyes narrowed into reptilian slits. Her pupils flashed red. This was probably just my imagination. 

            “I don’t like ‘em.”  I mutter, staring down at my lap.

            She wrinkled up her face in the same way she does when my stupid dog tries to put her tongue in Taylor's eye. “Are you crazy? Everyone likes carrots!”

            “Not me. You’re not my mother!”

            "Eat them!"

            "No!" I fold my hands over my chest. "I'm not eating them. And that's final."

            Yeah, I ended up eating them. To be fair, she did bribe me with one of her cupcakes, so it wasn't actually that bad or anything. I mean, I've driven that girl all across Northern Virginia for a cupcake.

           Of course, she bakes me carrot cake cupcakes for my birthday. The ironic thing? They're the best cupcakes I've ever tasted.

            *By award-winning, I mean it won me a place at a college I didn't go to.

Special guest blogger Taylor Reffett: A rebuttal

We need to clarify some things. Yes, you and me. Liz doesn't talk to you much, does she? Too busy talking about herself and making fun of me. But let's get one thing straight: I am not the person Liz portrays me as. I am not bossy or pushy or angry. Well, I'm angry when Liz does something stupid, which is more often than you may think. Like when she tried to make cake balls.

Liz and Katherine, another friend from the cross country team, had a breakfast club in their Geosystems class where people brought in food every class. Every. Single. Class. I imagine they got more done in Geosystems than my class did, since I just napped.

Back to cake balls. Don't ask me why they were making cake balls for breakfast. Probably because muffins are just bald cupcakes, so by the transitive property, cake balls are just spherical muffins. Katherine went over to Liz's house after track practice the night before, and I went home, safe from the horrors of baking. How much could go wrong, I figured. Despite Liz's complete and utter incompetence as a baker (and cook in general), surely Katherine would compensate and prevent any egregious mistakes.

Sometimes I assume too much.

These are Liz's favorite cupcakes. They are carrot cake. She hates carrots, so I made them as a joke. Don't ask me why  she loves them.

The phone calls started during dinner. What flavors should we make? Can we use canned frosting? Baking soda and baking powder are different things, right?

Liz lives five minutes from a grocery store. And by five minutes, I mean a five minute walk, max. But, after many hours and too many questions, they refused to go to the store again when it came time to coat the cake balls in chocolate. After talking them through how to melt the chocolate, clearly stating to melt it on low to medium heat, I got another call.

"What now?" I asked.

"Um," Liz began. "I think the chocolate caramelized."

Caramelized? Onions caramelize. Bananas caramelize. Caramelization is a type of non-enzymatic browning, a chemical reaction that happens when sugar molecules are heated extensively. But chocolate? Chocolate does not caramelize, and if it does, it takes either superb skill or impressive stupidity.

"It--what?" I asked.

"Well, it's solid and kind of brown. And it smells kind of bad."

"It's burnt, Liz." Could she really be that naive?

"Um...how do I fix that?"

I sighed and told her to give the phone to Katherine. I told her to go buy more chocolate and melt it on low heat. Low.

Somehow the cake balls ended up edible. I think. I don't actually know since they weren't vegan, and TJ students aren't known for being picky. But no one died (or choked, like with her first attempt at vegan cookies in the fall).

The fiend and me. Plus Apples to Apples in the background.

I've been putting up with Liz for four years. For the first year, I never thought I would be friends with her. She was weird and outspoken, embarrassingly so. Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan spoke at our high school my freshman year. After a circuitous speech on how to fix education in America, he opened the floor to questions. Liz immediately stood up and rushed to get in line for the microphone.

Her turn came. "Do you really think that other schools measure up to us?" she pompously asked. The jaws of everyone in the auditorium dropped in unison. How could she have possibly said that? Our high school is the "brain drain" school, where all the nerds go. Yes, we are smart. But we are also (usually) humble about it and don't brag. But Liz said it.

Secretary Duncan scrambled together an answer. But no one remembers the answer, just the question and, more importantly, the asker.

I first met Liz in French class on the first day of high school. To preface, let me just say that Liz is terrible at every language except for English. The random unpronouned letters that characterize French only made things worse.

As expected, our teacher spoke exclusively in French. I was able to pick up most of it and was feeling pretty confident in myself. At one point, Madame made a joke that most people didn't catch but chuckled along anyway, but Liz burst out laughing. Madame asked her to explain the joke. Everyone stared at her as she fumbled for words. She clearly didn't know even know what the joke had been, nonetheless how to explain in French. After an awkward minute, Madame sighed and explained the joke.

That was the not altogether inaccurate view of Liz I held for the rest of the year.

Liz tends to exaggerate me on this blog. But everything I have written about her is completely accurate. When this gets out of hand, I'll be back to set the record straight.

How to honor your track career . . .

Who remembers this day?

That thing in the middle we're all holding on to is a baton and the costumes are for the 4x400 relay ran just moments before. It wasn't a record-breaking occasion, but jaws dropped all the same as we stepped out onto the track, braving the wrath of our coach and the freezing cold weather to celebrate four wonderful years of running as friends.

Taylor, of course, sat in the booth and told us how silly we were.

I guess the problem started a month before senior night, when we showed up at another team's senior night. In one race, a dude dressed as a chicken chased a dude dressed like an egg. Funny, right? The moment we heard, we all sat down to make plans for our own senior night--and so did our coach. Growling to himself about how some people 'don't take track seriously', he glared down at us one day at announcements and said that we'd race in costumes over his dead body.

Or so we heard from the underclassmen, since we'd stopped going to announcements in September. 

The always devious Katherine pointed out that since none of us had actually heard him tell us not to race in costume, we could always just do it and say we didn't know. And the wonderful Rekha pointed out that even if coach got in our faces and told us no, we should just do it anyway. And I was on board because, firstly, I love running in costume, and, secondly, with Katherine and Rekha, it would be the fastest relay team I'd ever been on.

One problem? It's a 4x400 relay. And we had four senior distance runners on the team. And one of them was Taylor. 

"So I've got a fun idea," I said, sitting down with her at lunch.

"No," says she.

"Remember the meet with Madison?" Katherine says. "The chicken and the egg race? We were thinking we should do the same thing on our senior night."

"Was this the same thing coach told us all not to do?" she asks, staring at me and Katherine with a look that I've seen her use while cooking--she can boil water with a glance. 

"I mean," Katherine says, "yeah. But we're thinking--"

"No." She bites ferociously into a leaf of spinach. "Besides, I have to keep score."

Taylor likes keeping score. She likes organizing the little pieces of paper.

That afternoon, Katherine and I related our failure to Rekha. "Damn it," she says. "Maybe we can get one of the sprinter girls to do it?" And at that point, the beautiful blond known both as Wonder Woman and Sarah (another one of my four friends named Sarah) pops out of the soccer lockers and swoops in to save the day.

"You need a fourth for a relay? I think my name's still on the roster." And we all kind of mutually agreed that it probably couldn't make Coach any angrier. 

So as senior night finally rolls around, we've got cars stuffed full of costume pieces and roll up to the bleachers just as Coach completes his final slew of announcements. As we sneak our costumes up into the press box, we run into a bunch of underclassmen who tell us Coach warned them again about wearing costumes. No sooner have we stuffed the costumes into the press box, under the bench where Taylor sits, disapproving of our choices with her eyes. 

Coach sees us as we walk out. "Hey, guys!" he says, somewhat surprised. "I didn't see you at announcements!"

We exchange nervous looks. He continues. "Sarah! Good to see you again!"

"Good to see you, Coach," she mutters without meeting his eyes. 

"Hey, I just wanted to remind you guys about the uniform rules. Remember--" and then he launches into a long speech, reminding us of the tyrannical rules governing high school sports that have absolutely no purpose and are not followed in college or professional track. No earrings. No necklaces. No rings. No piercings. No rolling down shorts. The kind of rules Taylor has no trouble following. He finishes by saying, "--and no costumes. Understand? This is a serious sport."

As he walks away, Sarah makes this face:

She makes a little noise when she does this, too, like 'nnnnnnngh'

We return to the press box. Rekha stomps her foot and declares, "okay, I don't care what he says, we're still doing it." 

Sarah looks at us. "I don't care. I'm not on the team."

"We have to do this!" I said.

Katherine bites her lip. "Yeah."

Taylor rolls her eyes. "Whatever. I'm not involved."

Two hours pass. Score sheets fly. Taylor takes note after note, scribbling down times and places. Occasionally, she asks me to help, but then I screw something up and she lets me go. Finally, the 4x400 approaches. 

Rekha pulls on her Freshman Lock-in shirt that's been turned inside-out and painted with the Batman symbol. She passes the Wonder Woman tee-shirt and blue spandex shorts to Sarah. I don my jungle princess costume. Katherine dresses up like Princess Jasmine. Taylor rolls her eyes. 

After a brief argument about who's going to walk out first, we descend from the press box and into the infield where Coach is waiting. I'm walking in front of everyone. Coach sees us and walks over, a frown on his face. 

"Didn't I tell you guys not to do this? You're dishonoring the whole sport!"

We freeze. Coach takes another threatening step forward. I find my voice. "Coach, if we wanted to dishonor the sport, we would have quit four years ago. We're doing this to honor the sport we love."

And this was the result right here. 

STOP! It's vegan time

As some of you may know, one of my best friends happens to be a vegan. Tomorrow is her birthday, so I'm making her muffins as a present. This is very exiting, since I haven't been allowed to bake since The Tapioca Incident last fall.

I'm not vegan. She knows that. What she doesn't know is that I'm not just following a recipe--I'm improvising. I'm doing something new. Heck, every time I follow a recipe, it blows up in my face (that's The Tapioca Incident again).

Step one: Gather ingredients. I'm missing baking soda, white vinegar, and one and a half lemons. Proceed to Google substitute ingredients and dig around in refrigerator some more

Step two: Pre-heat oven. I don't screw this up at all.

Step three: Cut up fruit. Google zest a lemon.

Step four: Mix ingredients. Bake. Blog while waiting for muffins to cook. Eat leftover batter. Love vegan baking. Love batter.

Step five: Post pic.

As you can see, they actually manage to look like muffins! Now comes the big test . . . taste.

Hey! It worked!

Happy Birthday, Taylor!