I’m aware that What-Did-You-Eat Wednesday is not really a thing, but things don’t become things until people try to make them things – you know?

Anyway, in lieu of the column that was printed in The Clifton Courier last week, I’ve decided to instead give you a detail illustrative documentation of what I ingested today.

Why? I felt like drawing, but mostly because I anticipate that I’ll be in no state to write an anything coherent whatsoever on Sunday, as I’ve signed up to a fun run tat morning. The real kicker is that I also decided to go to a ball on Saturday night; a decision made with the kind of deluded self-confidence that comes with a few after-work drinks on a Friday night. And so, I’ve decided to give you a dose of my printed column on Sunday – a pledge that is of course reliant on my being able to muster the strength to copy and paste some text into WordPress on Sunday.

Stay tuned.

Until then, please enjoy this gastric recount of my day.

Breakfast

I know I have written about my boiled egg breakfast before, but I’ve had to give that up. My housemate’s room is right by the kitchen and I feel this breakfast would be far too loud at 5.43am.

So I’ve made the switch to one of my favourite foods: bran.

I get a handful of All Bran and chuck it into a bowl. I usually go for one of the two red bowls in the collection is mismatched bowls in the cabinet, as it makes me feel like I’m one of those fancy weight-conscious career women in a Special K ad.

Then I grab some walnuts and crush them into said glamour bowl, crushing them into smaller pieces with my bare hands. I like to think of this nut crushing as a metaphor for my status as a ball-busting career woman. I use full fat milk after making the switch from low-fat when I realised that low-fat milk did actually just taste like white, milk-flavoured water – like if there was such thing as a milk cordial and it had been watered-down, that’s what low-fat milk tastes like. Then I chuck in some strawberries and a big old dollop of Greek yogurt and enjoy five minutes of fibre in the dark silence of an apartment before the sun is fully up.

Lunch

This was something I’d whipped up the night before. It sounds quite healthy when you list the ingredients: eggplant, kale, brown rice, skinless chicken breast, artichoke and beetroot hummus. But when you consider that everything has been cooked in about a litre of oil, the clean eating tag starts to disappear, like a serviette going translucent when  used to wipe grease off my face.

Afternoon tea

Because of said ball on Saturday night, I have been trying to keep a relatively healthy eating schedule in the hope I’ll lose a few cheeky kilos in 3.5 days. But this cake was a lemon meringue cake. I find it hard to justify saying no to a lemon meringue cake, but I wanted to have abs you could grate cheese on for Saturday.

So I compromised: I scraped the lemony goo and meringue off the cake and left the carbs layer of cake untouched.

Essentially, I just had fruit and egg whites for a snack.

Dinner

Not only am I trying to be healthy, but I’ve got about two days left until pay day so I’m super stingy on the dollar front too. This means I’m in use-everything-in-the-fridge mode.

As such, tonight’s dinner was the dregs of my artichoke, the leftover chicken, a bit of eggplant and two tiny carrots, eaten to make myself feel like I’ve eaten a salad.

And this approach wasn’t too bad, it was a fast, reasonably tasty dinner and I was surprised by an extra cube of feta that was in the dregs of my artichoke oil – which was comprised of the artichoke juices and the leftover oil from some Danish feta I bought a while ago.

Dessert

I didn’t need to have a piece of avocado toast, but I impulse-bought an avo the other day and the bastard was ready to roll. I had to capitalise on its primo green flesh while I had the chance.

Life hack: If you buy two pizzas, the people who work at the pizza place won’t know that you’re going to eat a whole pizza to yourself alone while watching three hours of a show featuring Nicole Richie.

Life hack: Watch three hours of Great News(featuring Nicole Ritchie) instead of doing anything productive because you’re too hungover to move and really, really can’t be alone with your own thoughts. The show has enough colours and zingers to fill the void where your heart should be.

Life hack: Go grocery shopping after you go to the gym, as you’re less likely to buy junkfood because you’ve just experience how fucking hard it is to work of the equivalent to a single Tim Tam and you don’t want that to be for nothing… also because you don’t have a car and the gym is in the same building as the grocery store, which means you don’t have to make two trips.

Life hack: Have a father who personifies the regional Queensland bloke stereotype but with enough heart and personality quirks to be the likeable kind (because we all know at least one Unlikeable Stereotypical Queensland Bloke and they ain’t great). Be sure to post pictures of him on Instagram with wordy captions for a cheeky dopamine boost before bed.

Life hack: Always keep butter in the house. This is probably more of a life commandment than a life hack, but I think it’s important. If you have butter, you always at least have a delicious, buttery piece of toast to turn to. And, if you keep a decent stock of the dairy delight, you are always eight minutes away from having a whole batch of raw pie crust dough you can eat straight from the bowl with a spoon.

Life hack: Brush out the knots and hair clumped together with dried beer out of your mane before you shampoo and condition, so it’s easier to brush your hair after your shower, so you can emerge from the bathroom as if you’ve rinsed off all your problems.

Life hack: Write down appointments and activities in your diary, colour-coding them into: work, bills, health/exercise and fun/social activities.  Even write down the phone conversations you had that lasted longer than five minutes, highlighting them in the “fun” colour. That way, your weekly call with your grandmother can be classed as a “fun/social” event and makes you look like you’re a woman in demand.

Life hack: Put your face over a freshly-boiled kettle while your tea steeps. I know I’ve covered this before, but it’s a really, really good one. I mean, not only does taking the time of steam your face mean your tea will steep for longer, resulting in a stronger, more satisfying brew, but it keeps your skin form being as terrible as it could be. I mean, I actually have reasonably manageable skin but, when you become a wine-drinking adult, you need to take special care of your body’s natural Glad Wrap. And, because I drink a fair bit of tea, it means my skin’s gettin’ a good steamin’ a couple times a day.

Life hack:Always have the film clip of Beyoncé’s Formation open on a tab on your phone’s internet browser, so you can be reminded that you’re a strong, fierce woman at any given time.

What everyone says about social media acting like a drug with all its dopamine highs is true.

I’ve just come back from a weekend at home, returning to stinky old Sydney town hungover, riddled with guilt over the amount of cake I consumed and freezing cold. Heck, it was drizzling when I walked up the footpath to my door after getting off a bus, a train and a plane just to get “home”.

I should be staring blankly at the ceiling right now, praying for sleep to come for me and put an end to my melancholy.

But instead, I am buzzed.

Because, you see, I just posted a whole bunch of stuff on social media.

Usually I only post the odd photo of an eggplant in my pocket or some snarky comment about Sydney. They’re always the kind of posts you need to take time to read and they often have a depressing air about them. And I rarely use Facebook for anything other than sending birthday greetings to distant acquaintances. As such, there’s never that much action on my social medias.

But my sister had a birthday party over the weekend and, because I revert back to my newspaper days of “taking pics for socials” after a beer or two, I took a metric fucktonne of happy snaps.

And that equates to a whole bunch of people tagging themselves in photos, commenting on photos and making said photographic masterpieces their display pictures.

Not only that, I posted photos of my parents embodying the regional Queensland stereotype and generally being adorable, which always attracts attention.

I mean, I posted a photo of the video cassette of the Slim Dusty movie, for shit’s sake.

You better believe I’m doing numbers.

I opened Facebook before and had 44 notifications. Forty-four.

I mean, that might not sound like much, but last weekend the most exciting thing to happen to me was realising the pillow case I’d been missing for weeks was actually inside the other pillow case, still on the pillow. Yep, the pinnacle of my weekend was discovering I’d double-pillow-cased a pillow.

So getting a few red boxes on that Facebook globe in the top right corner is like fireworks to me.

And holy crap am I feeling good.

I just keep checking my phone, feeling the rush of validation with each new notification. All I did was upload a few photos, but I feel like I’ve achieved something truly spectacular.

And it was so easy.

My sister had the party. I took photos. I posted them. I’m reaping the benefits.

Look, I know the likes will slow down, the buzz will wear off and I’ll crash into a crushing comedown where my only notifications after invites from people I barely know asking me to like their new jewellery business’ Facebook page, but I don’t care.

Right now I am flying and I intend to ride this high for as long as my droopy, sleepy eyes will allow.

It’s a very special day today.

No, it’s not just the day I changed my sheets after an ungodly amount of time, it’s National Potato Day.

I was informed of the occasion by an email from a food delivery service encouraging me to order all kinds of potato-based treats: chippies, wedges and waffle fries. I must say, it was an alluring email. I adore potato in all its forms. And I love having food arrive at my door.

This email was a slam-dunk from the marketing team.

However, I’m also living in Sydney and direct most of what I don’t spend on rent towards domestic flights so I can return to Queensland to restock enough love to get me through the long, NSW months. To cut a sad story short: I’m strapped for cash. And the biggest drain is ordering food to come to your house.

I mean, I love eating food and the convenience of having it come to your building and cry out for you to come down like the dreamboat you used to dream would call for you in the pouring rain when you were a teenager/young adult/in bed the other night.

But good golly is it expensive. And, I don’t want to diminish anyone in the hospitality industry, but it’s a terrible investment. I mean, tonight’s order of chippies is going to be tomorrow’s poo (depending on how effective your digestive system is).

So I decided to pick up some supplies on my way home today: two potatoes and a loaf of bread.

I will say that I rarely keep potatoes in the house. They’re like family-sized blocks of chocolate or $6 bottles of wine; they only get consumed. But today was a special occasion. I couldn’t just let this one slip by.

Potatoes just mean too much for me. I had to honour the day.

I decided the only way to celebrate such a sacred holiday would be to have a potato sandwich.

And, in the spirit of National Potato Day, I’ve decided to share my recipe for one of the best sandwiches humanity has ever known.

Step 1: Select a potato at the supermarket, opting for something about the size of your heart for poetic reasons.

Now, folklore suggests that one’s heart is the size of one’s fist, so perhaps that a good yardstick for the selection process. Alternatively, you could also go through a rigorous set of medical tests to determine the exact weight and proportions of your ticker. Up to you.

Step 2: Upon returning home, place said potato on the counter and take a moment to appreciate  what a gift this starchy vegetable is.

Step 3: Peel and wash your starchy idol, trying not to think of what it would feel like to have your skin flayed with a veggie peeler.

Step 4: Slice into large, irregularly-shaped chunks, using diagonal motions with your knife.

Step 5: Line a baking tray with aluminium foil and drizzle with olive oil. Yes, this might seem like a controversial move, particularly if you were raised in a strict Glad Bake household like I was. Foil was only for lining the griller try or, very occasionally, wrapping baked fish. Everything else was baking paper.

And maybe it’s just me rebelling from my strict upbringing, but I truly believe that foil makes the potato crispier and crunchier on the outside.

Maybe one day I will come crawling back to baking paper, but for now, I’m walking on the wild side and you can’t tell me what do anymore.

Step 6: Drizzle more olive oil over the potato, tossing gently and lovingly, with an expression on your face that is usually reserved for new, clean mothers bathing their newborns.

Step 7: Place in a moderate oven, about 200 degrees.

Step 8: Turn after about 15 minutes, depending on how big your chunks are.

Step 9: In about 10 minutes, the potatoes should be golden brown all over and look like chunks of heaven.

Step 10: Grab two slices of fresh bread and lavish with butter according to your tastes. If your tastes include using so much butter it looks like slices of Kraft cheese singles rather than a spread, so be it. This is a special occasion.

Step 11: Load up one slice of bread with the steaming potatoes, sprinkling with a pinch of salt.

Step 12:Take one last, loving look at the potatas before gently blanketing with the second layer of bread and butter.

Step 13: Take a bite and let your veins clog with the warming feeling of cholesterol and love.

Step 14: Glow, from the inside out.

Happy Potato Day, everyone!

Ok, so I’ve just spent two hours having breakfast, feeling a little unsettled and unproductive, wary of the long to-do list I wrote out for myself to achieve this weekend.

I’ve just returned to my bed, laptop balancing on my crossed legs.

And, because I’m someone who actually talks to themselves more than they realise, I uttered what I was thinking out loud. However even I, someone who wears lion claw slippers around the office and is extremely vocal about their distain for Daylight Savings Time in NSW, has enough self-awareness to know that, when talking to yourself, it’s best not to so loudly. No, despite unconsciously vocalising my thoughts aloud, I apparently still have the subconscious restraint to at least keep this to a low volume.

Anyway, I whispered “what am I going to do?” to myself, then tried to Google JB HiFi to look at DVDs to send a soul sister a cheeky gifto (it’s on my to-do list, you see, and it the item that requires the least amount of effort).

But I’d like to point out that my typing is extremely lazy these days because I know that spellcheck and predictive text will pick up the slack for me, so I don’t even really bother with getting all the characters in, much less in the correct order.

The first time I typed my query into Google, I accidentally wrote “jibhi”, which is, by the looks of the image, a really lush foresty place in India that was referred to as an “unexplored jewel in the Himalayas”.

The second time I tried, I just typed “jbi”, which brought up a bunch of ads for psychotherapy, counselling and wellness courses.

So, I suppose you could argue that the Internet was telling me to climb a mountain, return to nature and become a life coach.

I decided to try again, just for shits and gigs. Again, I aimed to type “JB HiFi” but let my lazy fingers do the walking. This time I came out with “bjfi”, which brought up a youth empowerment program in India.

I know, right?

And, I shit you not, I did this search at exactly 11.11am. Now, if you follow Paris Hilton across multiple social media platforms like I do, you’ll know from her Twitter posts that 11:11 is a time when you should make a wish.

If I were someone who was perhaps a little less cynical and a little more in touch with my spiritual side, I would absolutely view this kind of shit as fate – or at least a message from the Internet gods. I mean, this would be a flashing neon sign from the universe screaming at me to find myself and then help others on their own journeys.

But I’m not quite at the Eat, Pray, Love stage of my life just yet; I’m just someone who wanted to buy a moderately-priced movie over the internet without having to change out of my pony pyjama pants or put on shoes.

Look, the first suggestion was bang-on – I’d bloody love to go climbing Indian mountains and be outdoors in a place where there’s no construction noise or 17,000 people in navy blue puffer vests talking about Sydney house prices. But I’ve currently got minus zero dollars in m bank account and nothing of value to pawn for money that doesn’t require surgical removal, so that’s out.

Furthermore, I’m really not the kind of person who should be in a position to coach people about how to succeed life and boost their wellness – I mean, my overwhelming sense of meaningless, lack of business cards and that half-wheel of blue cheese that I ate for dinner last night demonstrates this pretty clearly.

As such, I’m especially ill-equipped and far too pessimistic to be guiding ambitious young people to their bright futures.

And, let’s face it, if I were turning to a search engine for answers about how to transform my burning compost head of a life, I’d hope for more of a quick-fix answer to flash back at me. Like maybe something along the lines of “wanted: sugar baby who has to in no way interact with their mysterious sponsor besides sending the occasional postcard from the exotic locations they travel to on the rich moron’s dollar” or “click here for obligation-free gelato samples, sent directly to your door – and not just the door of your apartment complex because the courier can’t work out the buzzer system, but your actual front door”.

Sorry universe, try harder.

Right, so I know that Wednesdays are usually for reposting Clifton Courier rants, but today I’ve decided to do something a little different.

And by that I mean, “last week the glob of sweet potato mash that is my brain was unable to conjure a column so I had to re-jig a recipe blog post just to send something to print”.

And because a repost of a repost of a recipe would be poor form even for me, I’ve had to come up with something fresh for you today.

However, the old think box is a little bit yeah nah at the moment.

I’m running on the smell of an oily rag, and that rag bloody stinks.

So, in this clinically yeah nah state of mine, the best I’ve been able to come up with is a description of my dinner tonight – which perhaps might better communicate the funk I’m apparently in.

I started out my meal with four fig and black olive crackers I bought yesterday, smeared with raspberry jam and thick slabs of Mersey Valley cheese. The plan was to eat these slowly as I pretended to be a modern career woman, going through her emails and preparing an impressively high tax return estimate. In reality, I scoffed the bickies down in about 47 seconds and apparently owe  the Australian tax department at least $12.

I then realised I needed to prep myself some lunch for tomorrow, and ate myself another jam and cheese cracker while I sautéed some ambitious greens.

So, all up, I had five crackers, about a tablespoon of jam and like 5cm of cheese.

I then decided I would keep my biscuity dinner theme going, rolling it on to dessert. There was only one choice – the last two choc-backed Digestive bickies that had been taunting me from the pantry for days. These came into my life two weekends ago, and have been tormenting me ever since.  I mean, I know the name “digestive” makes these bickies sound like the kind of fodder designed to open old fogies’ bowels, but they’re probably my favourite biscuit. They have that rough, bran-y vibe that appeals to the cereal girl inside of me and the chocolaty goodness that answers perhaps the most difficult of calls to ignore. 

But, while I would have liked to have neatly ended my biscuit dinner on the high that was a few wheaty treaties, I felt the pang of guilt in my gut which, incidentally, feels just like the feeling you get when you eat too much cheese. And so, since I was frying some up for lunch anyway, I had a bit of kale to round things out. It was coated in oil so it was actually quite tasty, but I am disappointed I didn’t find a way to incorporate a bickie or a cracker into the mix. I’ll try harder next time.

So today I completed a 14km in a fun run.

Now, that might make me sound like quite a put-together person who spends their Sundays being active, enjoying the outdoors and sculpting their killer rig.

And I suppose I could leave it at that, humble bragging about my athletic achievements and coming off as a reasonably impressive grown up person.

But while I did go for a lengthy jog this morning, I also spent the afternoon sinking beers and being a general stain of a human being. To clarify, I was drunk by about midday, I drank beer though a mini luge that was my racing bib and got lost trying to make the short journey home.

As such, I found myself in the very familiar position of being unable to compose a smart, funny Sunday blog post.

So I did what any girl would do: I turned to my female friends on Snapchat. I put out the call to my nearest and dearest uterus-possessing friends for questions which I could answer in another one of my classic “pretend to be a celeb in a magazine” sessions.

I mean, that’s all I’m capable of at the moment and I do really enjoy grilling myself about trivial matters while imagining who I would look in glamour shots. And as I get older and less supple, I find my chances of appearing in a tell-all Cosmo spread are becoming slimmer and slimmer. I think my only hope is to appear on a reality TV dating show, but I don’t have the rig for it. So this blog is really the only place where I can indulge my self–obsession and delusions of importance.

And if I’m going to so pathetic as to pretend to be in a glossy magazine interview,  it is fitting for me to do so while wearing a pesto-splashed pony jumper while half cut in bed.

So, if you’re still reading, please enjoy my answers to the questions I begged my friends for. Feel free to play along and answer the questions yourself; it’s such fun.

What’s your opinion on deep-fried vegetables? Look, there are many things that shouldn’t be deep-fried. Video cassettes and human hair feature on that list; vegetables do not. I’ve just spent a bit of time trying to work out what veggies shouldn’t be deep-fried and I’m drawing blanks. I mean, I don’t know who a deep-fried beetroot would turn out, but I would be open to putting one in my mouth.

You can only eat three foods for the rest of your life – what are they? This is tough, because I know that restricting your diet means depriving yourself of nutrients and minerals. I’m well aware that a balanced diet is necessary for a healthy, thriving bod.

But, if I had a guarantee it wouldn’t give me scurvy or make me the size of a townhouse, I would say: hot chip sandwiches, steak and raw pie crust.

Of course, that selection is purely reflective of my yearnings today; it may be different tomorrow.

What’s your opinion on re-wearing bras? A sniff-test policy is the most effective approach for this.

How do you feel about puppies in prams? Look, I may cop some abuse for this, but I don’t really see the need for pram puppies. The whole idea kind of makes me cringe. But, interestingly, I’m perfectly amenable to wheelbarrow puppies.

Perhaps this says more about my attitude towards motherhood than puppies.

Could you consume a 1kg long cream doughnut? Um. Yes. Obviously. I’m not a moron.

Pancakes or crepes and why? Another controversial opinion, but I’m going with crepes. I mean, I love banana oat pancakes, but the standard pancake is just not my mate.

Pancakes – and by this I mean the pikelet-like flour clouds that go around these days – are just too heavy for me. After one-and-a-half plain pancakes, I feel as though I may as well have sat in a darkened pantry feeding myself flour straight out of the bag in the same manner Winnie the Pooh eats honey.

Crepes aren’t just lighter, but they often come with a filling more substantial than maple-syrup-flavoured nectar. Crepes don’t try to hog the limelight like pancakes do – they let their fillings shine.

Best occasion to whip out a scented candle? Any occasion is the best occasion to whip out a scented candle.

Were you offered a promotion? Go home and light a scented candle. Didn’t get that raise? Go home and light a scented candle. Did a glob of your spit land on someone’s face while talking to them? Go home and light a scented candle. Did you buy a scented candle? Go home and light a scented candle.

How would you feel if all carrots got a carrot disease and your could never eat another carrot again? Sad. Deeply and all-consumingly sad.

What is the worst ice cream flavour imaginable? Two-day music festival knickers.

What are your darkest desires? To be mysterious enough to have dark desires.

What is your favourite drunk food? Nuggets.

Who do you want to be when you grow up? A modern-day Bonnie Hunt character. I feel like she always plays the perfect balance of wholesome and sass. I mean, she’d obviously need a few updates – such as a less 90s haircut and a more pronounced career – but the essence is there.

Are we already grown up? Um. That’s rude.

Is you being drunk on a Sunday night content enough for a column? Yeah, probs not.