Grace's Guide Read online

  At the end of the day, I’m still a lady and I want to try to convince myself that I’m putting decent edibles into my body. Cue: salad!

  Ingredients:

   Hot dogs (regular or veggie)

   Hot dog rolls

   Salad fixings (whatever you like, I don’t know you)

   Olive oil

   Honey mustard dressing

   Pickles and/or relish

  This is basically like a deconstructed hot dog. “Deconstructed” is a neat, pretentious word that all those fancy food people like to use. First, you’re going to cook your hot dogs however you prefer. Grill, George Foreman, boil, oven, whatever. The world is your oyster dog. While that cooks, chop up the hot dog buns into cubes as best you can and cook them in a skillet with some olive oil–we’re making croutons out of them! EXPLETIVE! While both are cooking, prep your salad any way you prefer. When the hot dogs are done, chop them up and add them to the salad with your croutons and toss the whole thing with honey mustard (BECAUSE MUSTARD GOES ON HOT DOGS) and relish (optional–just thought it kept in line with the theme, but MAYBE I’M WRONG, Jesus Christ). Enjoy!

  Macachos

  This recipe is a classic. It’s one of the first cooking videos I ever put up on the Internet. It’s the simplest of stupid meals. And perfect for those who have not yet developed digestive issues. Fundamentally, it’s nachos with mac and cheese as the cheese. When I conceptualized this I thought to myself, How can I make a terrible meal more terrible? Add more carbs and dairy! Done! Yay, creativity! Boo, arteries!

  Ingredients:

   Mac and cheese

   Tortilla chips

  Whatever you like on your nachos–including but not limited to:

   Beans

   Tomatoes

   Jalapeños

   Onions

   Corn

   Cilantro

   Salsa

   Sour cream

   Avocados/guacamole

  Cook your mac and cheese according to the box’s directions. Unless you want to make some from scratch so the rest of us look like incompetent fart factories. Thanks. Let the mac and cheese cool while you toast your tortilla chips. This is the sneak-attack part of nachos–tortilla chips with burnt edges. Sweet deity in a Babybjörn, they’re good. Feel free at this point to heat up your beans if you’re a hot beans person. Hot Beans is a great name for a child. Once the mac and cheese and tortillas have had a chance to cool, start assembling. This is up to you, but I usually layer the chips, mac and cheese, beans, and the rest of the stuff that’s going to blow out of my butthole. Butt appetit!

  Charade-uterie

  I’ve only recently learned this, but “charcuterie” is basically a plate of fancy meat that a lot of swanky restaurants serve. According to Wikipedia it’s prepared meat products, such as bacon, ham, sausage, terrines, galantines, pâtés, and confit, primarily from pork. Yes, those are actual words that mean something and not just hands slamming on the keyboard to produce a series of letters. Very sophisticated. But it’s easy to create the poor man’s pseudo-charcuterie, or the charade-uterie.

  Ingredients:

   Meat (any meat you want from your grocery store’s deli section; it doesn’t have to be cured; bologna, pepperoni, honey-glazed ham, smoked turkey, etc., will do)

   Mustard or dipping sauces

   Olives or pickles

   A tray

  Take all of the ingredients and slap them onto a tray in a way that doesn’t look like it fell on the floor and then you tried to pick everything back up in a hurry. Perfect.

  DINNER

  Palzone

  This dish will always be there for you. It has a lot of the things you want in a pal: it’s simple, but has layers, it has great taste, and is always a little saucy. It’s a calzone full of pasta. Cue the Spice Girls: when two become oooooone. It promises to be a crowd favorite, especially for a crowd about to participate in an Iron Man competition, because it’s a WHOLE LOTTA carbs.

  Ingredients:

   Pasta (whichever you prefer)

   Sauce (again, whatever you prefer)

   Cheese (SERIOUSLY, whatever you prefer)

   Protein (optional/OMG IT’S WHATEVER YOU PREFER)

   Pizza dough (prepackaged or look up how to make your own–how helpful of me)

   Flour

   Olive oil

  Preheat your oven to about 450 degrees. Boil your water, add your pasta, cook through, drain, and let cool. If you’re using protein, cook it to your liking while you heat your sauce. After they’re all done, mix the pasta, sauce, and protein together. Spread out your dough on a flat, floured surface and add the pasta mixture to one half of the dough (leaving about an inch of crust on the outside). Add your cheese on top of the pasta. Fold the crust over the mixture like a doughy sleeping bag and crimp the ends together with a fork. Add a little olive oil on top and place it on a floured baking sheet or pizza stone (that thing you’ve had for five years but haven’t used yet!). Let it cook for ten to fifteen minutes or until the dough is golden brown–like a sixty-year-old divorcee in Key West. Bring it out of the oven, let it cool, and see if it tastes like food! God bless!

  Mashed Potstickers

  This is maybe the easiest and most stoner-appropriate recipe so far. I didn’t intend on it being this way, but it’s going to be delicious. I think. This is something I actually haven’t made before, but in my head it sounds pretty neat. This isn’t necessarily a full dinner, more of a side. But it’s probably not the best for you (even though there are some vegetables in there!) and you might end up eating more than you originally thought, so let’s assume it’s a dinner and call it a relatively guilt-free night (even though we both know you’re going to wake up in the middle of the night and eat the cold leftovers–treat yo’self!).

  Ingredients:

   Frozen potstickers (or make your own, hippie)

   Instant mashed potatoes (or make your own, yuppie)

   Soy sauce (optional)

   Sriracha (optional)

  Heat the potstickers according to the directions on the packet. Or however your homemade-loving butt makes them. Allow them to cool while you make your instant potatoes (or first start by boiling your potatoes to make mashed potatoes from scratch before you make your potstickers, if you’re one of those). Once your potatoes are finished and cooling, mash up your potstickers as much as you can and blend them into the potato mix. Add soy sauce and Sriracha to taste! You did it! You’re a cultural icon!

  DESSERT

  Ice-Cream Bamwich

  This is a savory sweet treat that’s sure to satisfy the mature child in all of us. It’s pretty simple, and guaranteed to please even your most uptight foodie friend, Eben (with a b), who thinks any type of “sandwich” for dessert is juvenile. F you, Eben.

  Ingredients:

   Cookies

   Bacon

   Vanilla ice cream (or whatever you want–have you not gotten this by now?)

  Feel free to make cookies or buy cookies. Whatever you prefer. Cook the bacon to a crispy, fatty finish. God, bacon is the best. While the bacon rests, warm your cookies in the oven (if they’re premade). Then construct your sandwich. In between two warm cookies stack vanilla ice cream and bacon, and BOOM, GODDAMN, SEE YOU TOMORROW, EBEN!

  HOW TO

  DECORATE LIKE AN ADULT

  I’ve been obsessed with interior design since I was in middle school. I would binge-watch TLC’s Trading Spaces and anything on HGTV until my eyes couldn’t take another crown molding face-lift. When I was growing up, my mom would let me redo my bedroom once every five years or so and I would go nuts. Cue the makeover montage!

  I would sift through pages and pages AND PAGES of a JCPenney’s catalog to find the PERFECT wall unit with a twin bed frame attached. I would experiment with floral and cheetah-print bedding to complement my extensive (but sophisticated) stuffed animal and porcelain doll collection.

  When I was a seni
or in high school I thought it would be super “rad” to paint my walls neon green. It was also the year my parents gave me my first used desktop computer, so I LIVED on the Internet in my room. I spent an entire year living in a green screen, convincing myself it was chic and edgy and wasn’t the reason I couldn’t sleep at night.

  The most exciting part about going to college wasn’t picking my major or making new friends; it was choosing my DORM DESIGN SCHEME! And trust me, if you’re shopping for your dorm room gear, Target will ruin you. They know exactly what they’re doing. My dorm rooms were usually around two feet by two feet. Did I really need that tiny bean-bag chair that matched my mouse pad? No! But YES. They got to me.

  My style was restricted in college, because I knew I’d be moving into a new space with new rooms and new area-rug possibilities the next semester. That philosophy traveled with me after I graduated and moved into a series of crappy apartments in Brooklyn with my college roommate. Those terrible apartments let our terrible design skills shine.

  In our first apartment, my roommate’s bedroom theme was pink. She had two pink curtains, a pink duvet, and in the daytime when the light shined in, it turned her whole room pink. My boyfriend at the time thought her theme was Inside of a Vagina. Meanwhile, I was rocking a twin-lofted bed with a small desk underneath. You can take the girl out of college but you can’t take the space-saving furniture out of the girl, because Brooklyn apartments are tiny and expensive.

  When we moved to our next apartment with overly embellished, brownish laminate-tiled floors, we thought we could paint the walls dynamic colors to distract from the faded flooring and popcorn ceiling. The more stuff we hung, the worse it looked. It was a disaster from the start. But it was fun!

  I ended up moving many more times in the next year and adopted an if-I-got-it-at-IKEA-it’s-part-of-a-purposeful-design philosophy. The place I finally ended up staying in for about three years was a true post-college, freshman-year-of-life apartment. It was a great space, but there was no design scheme. I bought a few bold pieces from IKEA and mixed them with some free stuff people left in the lobby of my building and tried to complement that with what I thought were “quirky” self-drawn art pieces to create a bohemian chic feel. It was more like bohemian-ick. In the back of my mind I still thought that I’d move out of this place at any point and I shouldn’t invest in furniture or real decoration. Yeeeah, that’s what I thought. Suuuure.

  When I moved to Los Angeles I ended up finding a place that had so much potential for coolness that it would have been an affront to the design gods if I didn’t at least try to make it look kewl and neat and hip. So I got rid of almost everything I had in Brooklyn and started fresh. I filled the place with flea market finds and throw pillows and a taxidermied hamster butt.

  After visiting a lot of friends’ and strangers’ places out in LA (and on Pinterest), I’ve gotten a handle on decorating like an adult–simply and cheaply. So here are some of the tips I’ve picked up over the past few years. Take them or defecate on them, I don’t care.

  Flea Markets

  So much better than real fleas.

  When I was younger my mom used to take us to flea markets so we could get specialized T-shirts that said something like YOU KNOW YOU’RE ITALIAN WHEN . . . or YOU KNOW YOU’RE A GYMNAST WHEN . . . (I really wanted everyone to know I was a gymnast) and the shirts would list a bunch of HILARIOUS stereotypes like, YOU KNOW YOU’RE ITALIAN WHEN YOUR COLOGNE IS MARINARA SAUCE. Solid gold. God, I’d love to meet the person who designed those shirts. But that was my only flea market association until I became an adult.

  As an adult I think flea markets are THE SHIZZ (you say that, right?). It’s like when you’re a preteen and you realize you can get Calvin Klein jeans at Ross Dress for Less in your price range and you’re all like, Look at me, fellow tweens, I’m sophisticated as hell. That’s what flea markets are for adults.

  I’ve been able to find so many cool things for a cheap price that make it look like I’ve been visited by a CB2 fairy in the night. The best part about flea markets is that (usually) you can negotiate the prices. So even for the softest of hearts it’s a fun environment to pretend for a moment that you’re a hardass. “Fifty dollars? I’ll give you forty-eight.” Done deal, you ruthless, money-sucking vampire who covets mid-century furniture. Good for you.

  What your candle scent says about you

  Fresh laundry: You hardly ever do your laundry.

  Lavender: One time like a bunch of years ago you read something in a book you can’t remember or someone that you can’t remember told you that lavender, like, really relaxes you. It’s a fact.

  Vegetable scents: You really, really want to be interesting (but seriously, a tomato vine candle smells GREAT–I hate myself).

  Most fruit scents: You have three children and love appletinis.

  Coconut: You’ve had a threesome.

  Vanilla/other sugary scents: You’ve never tried it up the butt but if you got drunk enough you’d probably do it.

  Grass/wood scents: You’re a man but are curious about candles.

  Peach: You’re constipated.

  Any drink scent: A half glass of Arbor Mist gets you blackout.

  Ocean/weather/seasonal scents: You were cool in high school and now you kind of suck.

  IKEA

  More like Ike-duh!

  Sometimes you just can’t beat it. They have everything. And they have it in a price range you can probably afford. Yes, it’ll take years off your life putting it together, but afterward you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment right before you realize you somehow have three leftover screws that shouldn’t be left over. But at least now you have that lime-green dresser you’ve always sort of wanted!

  I used to try to decorate my apartment with almost all IKEA furnishings–and you could tell. Now I find it’s fun to mix and match IKEA products and flea market finds with a couple of more expensive splurge items. Also, that sentence is the intro to my new HGTV show Re-decor-GRACE. It’s a working title.

  Scents

  Candles, candles, candles!

  I’ve become obsessed with candles. I can’t help it. The Bath and Body Works two-for-$20 deal always gets me. And they have so many scents! Yes, inevitably they all smell like sugar, but some of them are different. I’ve even done the thing where I look for coupon codes online just to get more of a discount. TLC has really started to affect me (the television station, not the girl band).

  I feel that candles and pleasant scents give the illusion of a clean home, even if your area is a scum palace. Same for food: if it smells good, you’ll probably eat it. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe that’s why my stomach is a horror show with no intermission. Anyway, candles are an easy, relatively cheap way to trick people into thinking your place is chicer than it is. Also, I think I heard one time that candles are cool for relaxing, specifically if you’re a person who enjoys taking baths and soaking in your own human soup. Cool for you.

  Hang It

  Give your walls friends!

  Posters were a key part of my style when I was younger. I put posters on my bedroom walls, in my locker, in my dorm room, and all of my friends had posters, too. It was a cheap, easy way to express myself. As an adult, I’ve graduated to using actual picture frames. Whoa. Who knew? Some people knew.

  I can still express myself by hanging what I consider to be “art,” but now it looks more expensive and purposeful. I recently bought three posters when I was up in Portland and collectively they cost ten dollars. What a steal! USA! USA! USA! Also since they’re from Portland, they’re especially weird and kewl. Humble brag. But putting them on the wall by themselves looked kind of tacky, so I went to–you guessed it–IKEA and found three simple wood frames for ten dollars each. Now the posters look expensive and stylish. Or at least I think so. At the end of the day, you can only please yourself. But seriously, try frames.

  You Could Make That

  DIY is very “now.”

  There’s a lot of stuff sold at
ridiculous prices in stores that can be made on the cheap. Curtains and decorative pillows are definitely easy DIY projects. I made a decorative pillow out of a Boy Scout uniform one time. It’s cute and creepy.

  Even though sites like Pinterest and Etsy are sometimes over the top, they’re great for inspiring your own creativity. Sometimes I impress myself with my DIY skills and sometimes I look back on a project and think, Da fuq? Like the time I drew a cartoon Mona Lisa thinking of a hamburger and put it in a frame made of pool-noodle foam I found in the children’s section of IKEA. Some DIY ideas become DI-WHY?

  Green Things

  Plants!

  Plants make a house feel like a house with plants in it! They’re great! I’ve only recently learned their value after moving to California, where “lush” isn’t just a store that sells soap–everything grows here. I used to think plants were like children, cool in theory but just a pain in the ass to keep alive, until I found succulents and cacti! They’re almost impossible to kill! It’s opened up a whole new world of possibility for me. They look cool and come in a ton of different shapes and sizes and colors. And you can use your DIY imagination to plant them in all sorts of unusual objects and place them in clusters and groups. They’re a boring person’s fail-safe decorating tool.

  If you’re better than the rest of us and can actually keep some plants alive, go for the hard stuff. Adding green to your space is calming and makes people think you’re stylish and functional. Decorating, as most of the rest of life, is all about appearances. And the Benjamins, or so I’ve heard.

  Rugs

  Give your floor a hat!

  Just like frames, rugs are a great tool to spice up your space. Think of them as floor frames or floor hats. Even an inexpensive rug can help express your personal style and tie the other elements in the room together. Oh, what’s that? YOU JUST GOT RE-DECOR-GRACED! It doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as I’d hoped.