Okay. So it's been almost a month since I've posted. I'm sorry! But for those of you that really care, that Devil's Food Cake really should have kept you company while I've been gone. Because it is DELICIOUS.
Anyway, I don't have much to say right now because I've been doing nothing but homework for the last month. I could rhapsodize about a few things, but to be honest, I have more homework. (I know. It's a sad state of affairs.)
But I do have something to rant about. Namely, the scale in my doctor's office. (cue booing and vegetable throwing)
Here's the thing. I've been overweight for a long time. I've tried exercising, but after a few weeks when I don't see results I usually get discouraged and quit. I've tried dieting, but with the sheer amount of crappy gluten-free food I have to eat, I have trouble denying myself anything that tastes good that I can eat, no matter how bad for me it may be.
I'm nothing if not a spectacular rationalizer.
But, started about a month before I moved out, I somehow started losing weight. I don't know how. I always had a slight suspicion that once I quit hating my body and started loving myself for who I am, I would finally start losing weight. I achieved that sort of psychological calm over the summer, and suddenly the pounds started floating off. I lost ten pounds in one month. No joke.
Then, I moved out. And if you read my previous post, you know that I took it pretty hard and was basically incapable of eating for about two weeks. More pounds, gone. Then, once I was able to eat, I found that I just didn't eat as much anymore. Probably because I'm so busy; but I find myself eating only three meals a day and one snack at night. That's it. Plus, I walk all over campus all day.
Final result? Twenty pounds and two pants sizes in two months.
On the one hand, I'm over the moon about this. On the other hand, I'm a little pissed because I just bought myself a whole new wardrobe before school started, and while all the tops still look okay, the pants/skirts are now too big. As are my shoes. (yes--I lost a shoe size. Who knew that happened??? It seems so wrong!) And I mean, who would ever have guessed that I'd be pissed about losing weight? What the hell? The whole thing is insane.
But anyway, I had an appointment with my general practitioner yesterday, and since he's been on my case for like, EVER, to lose weight, I figured he'd be doing a dance of joy. Perhaps a jig. With jazz hands.
But when I got on his scale, that atrocity had the gall to say I've only lost NINE POUNDS.
NINE POUNDS.
ARE YOU SERIOUSLY TELLING ME THAT TWO PANTS SIZES ONLY EQUALS NINE POUNDS??????
What the hell, right?
I can only come to the conclusion that the scale in his office is of the nefarious nature and somehow knows the hopes and dreams of the women step on it, and then proceeds to crush those hopes and dreams while manically laughing within it's plastic-and-steel head.
If it has a head. Whatever.
Thankfully, his nurse concurred with me. She says it always adds ten pounds to her weight and that she never goes near the thing unless she's weighing a patient. And even then she makes the sign of the cross behind her clipboard.
Adding insult to injury, while my doctor was happy about the nine pounds, and was starting to tap his feet a little beneath his desk, when he found out that I didn't lose the weight by diet and exercise he immediately planted his feet on the ground and began lecturing me.
Yeah. Lecturing me. Because who cares that I lost 20 pounds if I didn't lose it the right way?
Sigh. Whatever. On the one hand, I want to start exercising to prove his dumb ass wrong. On the other hand, what would that really prove? Wouldn't it piss him off more if started GAINING again?
So now I don't know what course to follow. What's a girl to do?
(of course, this is purely rhetorical. Despite the bizarre foot-loss and giant pants, I do want to keep losing weight. And--this is so a sign of my new mental health--not because of cosmetic reasons. Really. I've found some kick-ass plus sized clothes lately that I actually feel good about myself it, and found a tailor who can alter clothes to make them kick-ass. Right now it's more about the health thing--losing weight will help with all my other medical problems, and then maybe I can go off some meds and then switch to a lower cost insurance)
So that's the rant for today. Now that you've sat through all my bitching, let me also share with you the two videos that helped me see the light again. They're really short and trust me, hilarious. The first one is Denny Crane from the TV show "Boston Legal" kicking almost as much ass as my new clothes. The other one is a clip of the SNL mock of the VP debate. I love McCain and Palin, but considering that just yesterday I threatened to throw my TV out the window if I heard either of them say the word "maverick" one more time, I basically laughed until my face turned purple.
So that's it for today. I'll try to be back sooner next time, but until then . . . stay off of scales. For my sake.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Little Life Lessons and Devil's Food Cake
Here are some of the things I've learned in the last two weeks of graduate school and living alone:
1. DO NOT keep a candy dish full of Life Savers Wint-O-Greens in your office, no matter how cute, pink, and heart-shaped said dish is, or you will find yourself with a ragingly wicked addiction to said Wint-O-Greens and will constantly walk around with minty fresh breath, deadened taste buds, and crinkly plastic wrappers falling out of your pockets at odd moments.
2. Within two weeks you will stop caring what you look like for your classes, especially when you have to dress up for teaching/shadowing other classes, and will resort to t-shirts from your undergrad alma mater, rubber bands in your hair (the coated kind from Scrunchie, though, because real rubberbands totally get stuck in your messy bun and then you have to cut huge chunks of your hair out and you cry), and no makeup. If you should happen to feel like looking a little "nice" for class, you will use a claw clip instead of rubber bands.
3. You will bond with fellow grad assistants (aka GAs) over dorky jokes such as someone saying, while an extremely vocal crow is practicing his opera outside your window, "Quoth the raven, 'Nevermore.'" Yes, one of my fellow GAs actually said this, and yes, I actually burst out laughing and immediately decided I wanted to be her best friend.
4. You will come to love and appreciate the orchestral sound of fifteen students clicking closed their clicky-top pens in tandem when the professor ends class.
5. You will find that people you thought were going to be incredibly annoying at first are, in fact, some of the funniest people you have ever met, and the people you thought could be potential friends are the REAL annoying people (this particular rule has burned me several times over the last couple of weeks; my instincts were only right about Quoth the Raven Girl--henceforth dubbed Raven, because it's funny--and the professors. Apparently, my professor-reading skills are bulls eye, while my peer-reading skills are sadly lacking).
6. If the people who live above you have bizarre tendencies, you will become intimately acquainted with them. Hypothetically speaking, say the person above you likes to move her furniture around her apartment at two'o'clock in the morning. You will hear every single moment of furniture feet scraping across the floor. Or, also hypothetically speaking, say her shower pipes run parallel to your bathroom/bedroom wall. When she turns on her shower every morning at six'o'clock in the morning, the sound of gushing water akin to Niagara Falls right by the headboard of your bed, or near your toilet so that you race into the bathroom thinking the toilet is overflowing, will also wake you up.
These hypothetical situations would earn such a person the nickname of the Clomper, and cause you to mock her to all your GA cohorts while guzzling coffee in order to make up for being woken up twice in the middle of the night.
If, of course, such a person really existed.
7. Homesickness can cause actual physical distress, such as an inability to swallow food or have your body process it in a normal way. For two solid weeks, I haven't eaten more than two meals a day (and the two-a-day estimate is generous). For someone who is generally a stress-eater, this has been quite a reversal. And I'm not going to lie; just the thought of food often makes me sick. This must be what morning sickness is like, and let me tell you: NOT FUN. It's a wonder so many women have second children.
I have had a box of really yummy, premade chocolate chip cookie dough in my freezer at H2 since Labor Day. Said cookies are usually consumed within 12 hours of their purchase.
It's been FIFTEEN DAYS. I finally just made them tonight because my stomach feels up to it and my stress level is up.
On the other hand, I could make a fortune selling the Homesickness Diet to millions, because I've lost ten pounds.
8. You will realize that after spending fifteen days doing nothing but going to class, talking to professors, doing homework, sleeping fitfully, and occasionally eating, you will be exhausted. Today is actually the first free day I've had (last Wednesday was also technically a free day, but I cleaned H2 from top to bottom because I was bouncing-off-the-walls anxious and homesick), and I've got to tell you, I feel so lethargic. And really, it's only half a free day, because I worked this morning and then went grocery shopping with Raven.
I was planning to spend today giving H2 a mild cleaning (just because some of the floors are scuzzy and I want to keep on top of the bathtub so that I don't get any nasty mildew issues) and then do some serious getting ahead on my homework, but when I got back from grocery shopping I was too tired to even think about anything. So I thought back to how difficult the last two weeks have been (not just with the workload, but with the hardly sleeping/eating and emotional stress on top of it all), and I thought, "Honey, you need a break."
So I put on some sweatpants and a pajama shirt and have been reading "Bitter is the New Black" by the fantabulous Jen Lancaster for the last two hours.
It would have been longer, but I kind of dozed off for a while.
Then I made myself those frozen cookies, and here we are.
I will, of course, being the industrious woman that I am, do some homework after I eat my cookies.
After. Because you can't eat cookies while reading "The Obedience of a Christian Man." It just doesn't work.
9. Despite said vicious homesickness, emotional upheaval, unplanned for weight-loss (none of my new clothes fit! Why did I spend $300 on a new wardrobe if I was going to lose weight and none of it would fit me right anymore???), the Clomper, and exhaustion, you will find yourself feeling inexpressibly content. Even though your body is in an uproar, your schedule is so full that it doesn't all fit in your date book, and one of your professors is completely sadistic, you will feel, without a doubt, that you are in the right place, doing the right thing, and that you couldn't possibly love it more or be happier that you're doing it.
And that, my friends? That makes it all good.
Now, I believe that some weeks ago I promised you a rockin'-Devil's Food Cake recipe, so here it is. Make it, and you will enjoy it. (just don't forget the xanthum gum, like I did. It'll still taste rockin', but it will be a little dense). It's really easy to make, and an interesting point the cookbook mentions is that Devil's Food cakes get their name because of the "slight red hue cast by the cocoa powder." And, of course, it's "sinfully delicious taste."
Devil's Food Layer Cake, adapted from "The Ultimate Chocolate Cookbook"
2 1/4 C cake flour (make your own by adding 1 teaspoon of corn starch to every 1/4 C GF flour)
1 C cocoa powder
1 t baking powder
1 t baking soda
1/2 t salt
1 t xanthum gum
1 C butter, softened
2 C light brown sugar, firmly packed
2 t pure vanilla extract (the imitation kind isn't GF, so please use pure!)
3 eggs, warmed to room temperature
1/2 C milk, warmed to room temperature
1 C water, boiling
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line the bottom of two 9-inch layer cake pans with parchment paper. Lightly coat the sides of the pans with butter and flour.
Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and xanthum gum. Set aside.
Cream together the butter and brown sugar, using an electric mixer on a medium-high speed, until light and fluffy. add the vanilla. Adjust your mixer to a medium speed and add the eggs, one at a time, beating until thoroughly blended.
Adjust your mixer to a low speed and alternate blending in the flour mixture and milk until lightly blended. Mix in the hot water just until smooth. The batter will be thin.
Pour into the prepared pans and bake for 30 to 40 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted in the center of the cake. Cool on wire racks.
Makes 10-12 servings.
1. DO NOT keep a candy dish full of Life Savers Wint-O-Greens in your office, no matter how cute, pink, and heart-shaped said dish is, or you will find yourself with a ragingly wicked addiction to said Wint-O-Greens and will constantly walk around with minty fresh breath, deadened taste buds, and crinkly plastic wrappers falling out of your pockets at odd moments.
2. Within two weeks you will stop caring what you look like for your classes, especially when you have to dress up for teaching/shadowing other classes, and will resort to t-shirts from your undergrad alma mater, rubber bands in your hair (the coated kind from Scrunchie, though, because real rubberbands totally get stuck in your messy bun and then you have to cut huge chunks of your hair out and you cry), and no makeup. If you should happen to feel like looking a little "nice" for class, you will use a claw clip instead of rubber bands.
3. You will bond with fellow grad assistants (aka GAs) over dorky jokes such as someone saying, while an extremely vocal crow is practicing his opera outside your window, "Quoth the raven, 'Nevermore.'" Yes, one of my fellow GAs actually said this, and yes, I actually burst out laughing and immediately decided I wanted to be her best friend.
4. You will come to love and appreciate the orchestral sound of fifteen students clicking closed their clicky-top pens in tandem when the professor ends class.
5. You will find that people you thought were going to be incredibly annoying at first are, in fact, some of the funniest people you have ever met, and the people you thought could be potential friends are the REAL annoying people (this particular rule has burned me several times over the last couple of weeks; my instincts were only right about Quoth the Raven Girl--henceforth dubbed Raven, because it's funny--and the professors. Apparently, my professor-reading skills are bulls eye, while my peer-reading skills are sadly lacking).
6. If the people who live above you have bizarre tendencies, you will become intimately acquainted with them. Hypothetically speaking, say the person above you likes to move her furniture around her apartment at two'o'clock in the morning. You will hear every single moment of furniture feet scraping across the floor. Or, also hypothetically speaking, say her shower pipes run parallel to your bathroom/bedroom wall. When she turns on her shower every morning at six'o'clock in the morning, the sound of gushing water akin to Niagara Falls right by the headboard of your bed, or near your toilet so that you race into the bathroom thinking the toilet is overflowing, will also wake you up.
These hypothetical situations would earn such a person the nickname of the Clomper, and cause you to mock her to all your GA cohorts while guzzling coffee in order to make up for being woken up twice in the middle of the night.
If, of course, such a person really existed.
7. Homesickness can cause actual physical distress, such as an inability to swallow food or have your body process it in a normal way. For two solid weeks, I haven't eaten more than two meals a day (and the two-a-day estimate is generous). For someone who is generally a stress-eater, this has been quite a reversal. And I'm not going to lie; just the thought of food often makes me sick. This must be what morning sickness is like, and let me tell you: NOT FUN. It's a wonder so many women have second children.
I have had a box of really yummy, premade chocolate chip cookie dough in my freezer at H2 since Labor Day. Said cookies are usually consumed within 12 hours of their purchase.
It's been FIFTEEN DAYS. I finally just made them tonight because my stomach feels up to it and my stress level is up.
On the other hand, I could make a fortune selling the Homesickness Diet to millions, because I've lost ten pounds.
8. You will realize that after spending fifteen days doing nothing but going to class, talking to professors, doing homework, sleeping fitfully, and occasionally eating, you will be exhausted. Today is actually the first free day I've had (last Wednesday was also technically a free day, but I cleaned H2 from top to bottom because I was bouncing-off-the-walls anxious and homesick), and I've got to tell you, I feel so lethargic. And really, it's only half a free day, because I worked this morning and then went grocery shopping with Raven.
I was planning to spend today giving H2 a mild cleaning (just because some of the floors are scuzzy and I want to keep on top of the bathtub so that I don't get any nasty mildew issues) and then do some serious getting ahead on my homework, but when I got back from grocery shopping I was too tired to even think about anything. So I thought back to how difficult the last two weeks have been (not just with the workload, but with the hardly sleeping/eating and emotional stress on top of it all), and I thought, "Honey, you need a break."
So I put on some sweatpants and a pajama shirt and have been reading "Bitter is the New Black" by the fantabulous Jen Lancaster for the last two hours.
It would have been longer, but I kind of dozed off for a while.
Then I made myself those frozen cookies, and here we are.
I will, of course, being the industrious woman that I am, do some homework after I eat my cookies.
After. Because you can't eat cookies while reading "The Obedience of a Christian Man." It just doesn't work.
9. Despite said vicious homesickness, emotional upheaval, unplanned for weight-loss (none of my new clothes fit! Why did I spend $300 on a new wardrobe if I was going to lose weight and none of it would fit me right anymore???), the Clomper, and exhaustion, you will find yourself feeling inexpressibly content. Even though your body is in an uproar, your schedule is so full that it doesn't all fit in your date book, and one of your professors is completely sadistic, you will feel, without a doubt, that you are in the right place, doing the right thing, and that you couldn't possibly love it more or be happier that you're doing it.
And that, my friends? That makes it all good.
Now, I believe that some weeks ago I promised you a rockin'-Devil's Food Cake recipe, so here it is. Make it, and you will enjoy it. (just don't forget the xanthum gum, like I did. It'll still taste rockin', but it will be a little dense). It's really easy to make, and an interesting point the cookbook mentions is that Devil's Food cakes get their name because of the "slight red hue cast by the cocoa powder." And, of course, it's "sinfully delicious taste."
Devil's Food Layer Cake, adapted from "The Ultimate Chocolate Cookbook"
2 1/4 C cake flour (make your own by adding 1 teaspoon of corn starch to every 1/4 C GF flour)
1 C cocoa powder
1 t baking powder
1 t baking soda
1/2 t salt
1 t xanthum gum
1 C butter, softened
2 C light brown sugar, firmly packed
2 t pure vanilla extract (the imitation kind isn't GF, so please use pure!)
3 eggs, warmed to room temperature
1/2 C milk, warmed to room temperature
1 C water, boiling
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line the bottom of two 9-inch layer cake pans with parchment paper. Lightly coat the sides of the pans with butter and flour.
Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and xanthum gum. Set aside.
Cream together the butter and brown sugar, using an electric mixer on a medium-high speed, until light and fluffy. add the vanilla. Adjust your mixer to a medium speed and add the eggs, one at a time, beating until thoroughly blended.
Adjust your mixer to a low speed and alternate blending in the flour mixture and milk until lightly blended. Mix in the hot water just until smooth. The batter will be thin.
Pour into the prepared pans and bake for 30 to 40 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted in the center of the cake. Cool on wire racks.
Makes 10-12 servings.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Tom Thumb Tiny
I'm not going to lie here. Graduate school is A LOT OF READING.
A LOT.
My eyes hurt.
But yes, I am getting a MA in literature, so yes, I should have been aware of the massive amounts of reading. Which I was.
But still. Eyes. Hurt.
So, as usual when I am a) bored with what I'm reading, or b) about to jump into a telephone booth, don my costume, and become Procrastination Girl (able to stop an assignment in its tracks with the flick of an eyelash), I turned to TV.
Of course, I'm home this weekend, and my TV is at H2.
So instead I turned to YouTube for more kitty videos.
Here are the picks of the day:
Christian the Lion (which will make you cry. I swear. It's so freaking adorable that you will shed fat crocodile tears)
and Kitten vs. RC Mouse (which will make you laugh. How can she jump so high? It's a marvel of nature, is what it is)
Sorry this post is a little light on content and a lot heavy on YouTube links, but seriously, unless you want to hear me rant about Marat/Sade (which you can look at in the Sidebar under "What I'm Reading Now" if you're really interested) or the Short History of Writing Instruction (which I find fascinating but I'm guessing would make you normal folk start cranking out zzz's), then this is basically all I have to say.
Graduate school makes your world very, very small.
On the bright side, I found some vanilla flavored hot chocolate mix the other day, and it's just about hot chocolate season. Woot!
(like I said, very, very, small)
A LOT.
My eyes hurt.
But yes, I am getting a MA in literature, so yes, I should have been aware of the massive amounts of reading. Which I was.
But still. Eyes. Hurt.
So, as usual when I am a) bored with what I'm reading, or b) about to jump into a telephone booth, don my costume, and become Procrastination Girl (able to stop an assignment in its tracks with the flick of an eyelash), I turned to TV.
Of course, I'm home this weekend, and my TV is at H2.
So instead I turned to YouTube for more kitty videos.
Here are the picks of the day:
Christian the Lion (which will make you cry. I swear. It's so freaking adorable that you will shed fat crocodile tears)
and Kitten vs. RC Mouse (which will make you laugh. How can she jump so high? It's a marvel of nature, is what it is)
Sorry this post is a little light on content and a lot heavy on YouTube links, but seriously, unless you want to hear me rant about Marat/Sade (which you can look at in the Sidebar under "What I'm Reading Now" if you're really interested) or the Short History of Writing Instruction (which I find fascinating but I'm guessing would make you normal folk start cranking out zzz's), then this is basically all I have to say.
Graduate school makes your world very, very small.
On the bright side, I found some vanilla flavored hot chocolate mix the other day, and it's just about hot chocolate season. Woot!
(like I said, very, very, small)
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Outrage
I saw today that the Emmy nominations are out. And can I just say . . .
WHO LEFT NATALIE DORMER OFF THE LIST???????
WHO LEFT NATALIE DORMER OFF THE LIST???????
For those of you who may not know, Natalie Dormer played Anne Boleyn on the Showtime series "The Tudors." This series has been under some fire because it's pretty explicit (with the sex and with the torture). But, okay, for Tudors fanatics like myself and my friend M.A., who cares?? It's the Tudors!!! You can't make up a story line that's as fascinating and bone-chilling as these people's lives were. You don't even need to embellish it because it's way more soap-opera than Days of Our Lives could ever hope to be.
The Tudors rock.
Okay, and granted, the first season I wasn't too sure about Natalie Dormer as Anne Boleyn. Anne was such a dynamic, amazing person that the actresses they hire to play her generally fail. Natalie Dormer seemed like another link in the chain.
But then. Season two. Holy crap. There aren't even words to describe how well she pulled it off. There were two scenes in particular (where she miscarries her last baby and her execution) when I turned the M.A. and said, "She's going to win an Emmy for this." We compared forearms and found that we were rife with goose-bumps. The latter episode, where she was killed, we both cried.
Apparently, whoever decides who gets nominated has a shocking incapability of goose-bumps and is devoid of any sort of emotion. I suggest that these people seek medical attention immediately, because something is clearly very wrong.
I tried to find both clips for you, but the miscarriage one is nowhere to be found. And this clip, of her dying, goes two whole minutes into the next scene. So you can skip those parts.
But watch her last minutes and tell me: should we send some doctors over to the Emmys, or what?
Friday, August 29, 2008
T-minus 2 Days
I'm feeling a wee bit melancholy tonight . . . my official move-out day is Labor Day (and no, the irony is not lost on me. I'll be laboring, carrying boxes and unpacking crap, on Labor Day). While I'm excited about my lovely H2, and excited/nervous (read: ready to throw up yet also giggling with glee) about starting classes, and equally excited/nervous about shadowing Karen (an adjunct prof who is going to be my Jedi master for the next four months), I am also incredibly sad that there are only three more nights left to hang out with my Mom watching movies until 2 am. It's a sad, sad day.
Especially when my Dad stays up until 11 watching whatever is on Dateline or Sports so that we hardly get any TV time. The Sportscaster is screaming in my ear about football as we speak.
Like I care about football. I am so not one of those girls who cares about sports. Once, at a restaurant, my dad decided he was going to embark on the noble task of Helping Me Understand Football. It was one of those places where you could draw on the tablecloth with crayons, and he was totally making Xs and Os everywhere (I'm guessing the Xs represent one team and the Os the other, but I'm still a little hazy on that point). The table was so covered, and his voice was rising with such distress at my inability to understand the difference between a full back and a tailback (again, still a little hazy), the the waiter was like, "What's up dude?" Next thing you know, the waiter had grabbed a crayon and was in on the whole thing.
An hour and half and a tasty meal later, we left the restaurant. The waiter was still laughing, my dad was still frustrated, and the only thing I learned was that there are four downs to a touchdown.
Maybe? I could be wrong.
Long story short, I'd so much rather be watching That Thing You Do with my mom than listening to the annoying sports guy on the local news holler about football.
P.S. Why do they always yell? Don't they know there's a microphone on their lapel? They're not standing in a crowded stadium with a megaphone. They're worse then televangelists, I swear.
So yeah, I'm feeling pretty low. Even though the sportscaster just cried, "Give me more cowbell!" (Hilarious, but not sure what that has to do with football)
My entire bedroom is filled with boxes, which is depressing, and I keep thinking all these maudlin things like: "this is the last time I'll change the sheets on this bed" and "this is the last time I'll get to use this pillowcase" and "this is the last time I'll rent something from the Blockbuster on the corner." I know I'll be home on weekends and holidays or whatever, but it just won't be the same.
And vis-a-vis the boxes, I'm sad to say that I accidentally packed my cookbook, and for the life of me I can't remember what box it's in. What this means to you is that you'll have to wait for the Devil's Food Cake recipe until I unpack on the Day of Labor.
So, to cheer myself up, I watching two of my favorite, most adorable videos ever on YouTube. If you need cheering up, then check this and this out. A better mood is instantly guaranteed.
However, when I logged on to YouTube, this video was recommended for me. I'm not sure how YouTube could possibly know about my ongoing love affair with popcorn, and I'm pretty sure that this whole thing is somehow an elaborate ruse, but still it's vaguely entertaining.
One thing that did make me let out a "whoop whoop" in this weekend of melancholia was John McCain's veep pick. I lovelovelove it . . . I think Sarah Palin is so smart and tough, and she's exactly what his campaign needed to galvanize voters. Before I was kind of like, "I don't really know about McCain, but there's not another choice . . ." Now I'm like, "McCain/Palin ROCKS."
If you have any thoughts about puppies, kittens, dollhouses, popcorn, or Sarah Palin, please feel free to let me know . . . I need something to distract me from my room of cardboard and dwindling movie time.
Especially when my Dad stays up until 11 watching whatever is on Dateline or Sports so that we hardly get any TV time. The Sportscaster is screaming in my ear about football as we speak.
Like I care about football. I am so not one of those girls who cares about sports. Once, at a restaurant, my dad decided he was going to embark on the noble task of Helping Me Understand Football. It was one of those places where you could draw on the tablecloth with crayons, and he was totally making Xs and Os everywhere (I'm guessing the Xs represent one team and the Os the other, but I'm still a little hazy on that point). The table was so covered, and his voice was rising with such distress at my inability to understand the difference between a full back and a tailback (again, still a little hazy), the the waiter was like, "What's up dude?" Next thing you know, the waiter had grabbed a crayon and was in on the whole thing.
An hour and half and a tasty meal later, we left the restaurant. The waiter was still laughing, my dad was still frustrated, and the only thing I learned was that there are four downs to a touchdown.
Maybe? I could be wrong.
Long story short, I'd so much rather be watching That Thing You Do with my mom than listening to the annoying sports guy on the local news holler about football.
P.S. Why do they always yell? Don't they know there's a microphone on their lapel? They're not standing in a crowded stadium with a megaphone. They're worse then televangelists, I swear.
So yeah, I'm feeling pretty low. Even though the sportscaster just cried, "Give me more cowbell!" (Hilarious, but not sure what that has to do with football)
My entire bedroom is filled with boxes, which is depressing, and I keep thinking all these maudlin things like: "this is the last time I'll change the sheets on this bed" and "this is the last time I'll get to use this pillowcase" and "this is the last time I'll rent something from the Blockbuster on the corner." I know I'll be home on weekends and holidays or whatever, but it just won't be the same.
And vis-a-vis the boxes, I'm sad to say that I accidentally packed my cookbook, and for the life of me I can't remember what box it's in. What this means to you is that you'll have to wait for the Devil's Food Cake recipe until I unpack on the Day of Labor.
So, to cheer myself up, I watching two of my favorite, most adorable videos ever on YouTube. If you need cheering up, then check this and this out. A better mood is instantly guaranteed.
However, when I logged on to YouTube, this video was recommended for me. I'm not sure how YouTube could possibly know about my ongoing love affair with popcorn, and I'm pretty sure that this whole thing is somehow an elaborate ruse, but still it's vaguely entertaining.
One thing that did make me let out a "whoop whoop" in this weekend of melancholia was John McCain's veep pick. I lovelovelove it . . . I think Sarah Palin is so smart and tough, and she's exactly what his campaign needed to galvanize voters. Before I was kind of like, "I don't really know about McCain, but there's not another choice . . ." Now I'm like, "McCain/Palin ROCKS."
If you have any thoughts about puppies, kittens, dollhouses, popcorn, or Sarah Palin, please feel free to let me know . . . I need something to distract me from my room of cardboard and dwindling movie time.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
2008 Summer Pancake Games Come to a Satisfying and Delectable Finish, despite the Chairman
Oh my goodness, people. Perfection has been achieved.
And I only have one thing to say:
Gluten-Free Girl, will you be my best friend?????????
I made her pancake recipe (as solemnly vowed to you), and they were fantastic. They looked and tasted like REAL PANCAKES. And get this: they totally looked like restaurant pancakes.
I am not even kidding.
Plus, as an added bonus, they're made with teff flour, which is a whole grain. That means that it's completely healthy to eat these pancakes. Like eating whole-wheat ones, except gluten-free whole-wheat. It's a miracle!! Here are my only issues: 1) because of the teff flour, which is brown, the batter is brown instead of the yellowy color it usually is. Don't be freaked out by this. It will still taste fantastic.
2) because of all the baking powder and xanthum gum, the batter is extremely puffy (this is good because then the pancakes are light and fluffy). So that you don't come out with pancakes ten stories tall, smooth it around a little in the pan to make it thinner. Trust me, it'll puff back up plenty.
That's it! The recipe is below. Make and enjoy!
Other than the pancakes, I have been on a baking spree this week. I made Irish Soda Bread (also from a Gluten-Free Girl recipe, also with teff flour, and also fantastic), and Devil's Food cake, which was like heaven. I made it for my birthday so that we wouldn't have to get ice cream cake, and it was even better than pancakes. I'll give you the yummylicious recipe for that too, but next time. This post is long enough as it is!
Despite my many successful forays into baking, tonight my mom and I were making spaghetti, and AFTER I had boiled my water and made my garlic bread, I realized I had no gluten-free noodles.
This necessitated a last-minute drag-race to the grocery store. Not the good grocery store that has an entire aisle of gluten-free goodies and is a few towns over, but the stupid grocery store a mile away that decided to merge all of it's GF stuff with the regular stuff, so while I was searching fruitlessly for corn noodles I had to be taunted by shelves and shelves of bright yellow egg noodles. I was about to leave the store in the midst of a huge hissy-fit at their lack of GF noodles when I spotted an odd colored bag peeking out of the bottom shelf. Odd colored bags tend to mean GF, so I knelt down. There, under all the other shelves and a bit of dust, were the noodles I was looking for. Well, they were and they weren't. There was only one brand, and they were made of brown rice.
Like palm kernel oil, brown rice is one of my old enemies. The first GF bread I ever bought was brown rice, and it tasted like I'd cut up a refrigerator box and spread peanut butter on it. So I thought, maybe it's just the bread. And tried some brown rice noodles. This time it tasted like I'd shaved a refrigerator box into little curly-cues, boiled them so that they were mushy enough to not need chewing, and slathered them with tomato sauce.
Needless to say, I swore off brown rice immediately and haven't let one morsel pass between my lips since.
But what was I going to do? It was a total Hobson's choice situation. (I learned that phrase from dictionary.com, which sends me a Word of the Day every day. If you don't understand why I have dictionary.com sending me a Word of the Day, or why I'm giggling with glee because I actually got to use a Word of the Day in conversation, please consult my very first post). I had to buy the dreaded brown rice noodles. I tried to tell myself, "Hey, it's been five years. Maybe they've improved their brown rice recipes. Maybe it won't make me feel like I'm eating at recycling facility turned restaurant." Plus, I had garlic bread, which would help disguise any cardboard-esque tastes.
So I optimistically went to the self-checkout lane (read: stomped my way over with a One-Glance-My-Way-And-I'll-Mow-You-Down-With-My-Car look on my face). And as the cherry on top of the whole experience, I saw that Chairman Mao was in the checkout lane right next to mine.
Chairman Mao is the nickname I gave this guy who was in my Middle Eastern History class last semester. I loved the class. It was really interesting, and since beforehand all I knew was that the Mid-East was somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic and that we're at war there, the class was also quite informative. For example, I now know where Iran and Iraq actually are and can discuss (not at-length, but somewhat) the origins of the issues between Israelis and Palestinians. All well and good.
But there was this guy . . . pale, pasty, with the reddest hair I've ever seen, and the biggest mouth on the face of the planet. He was always arguing with the prof, acting like he knew more than her (in which case, why the hell was he taking the class in the first place?). And to make matters worse, he was a raging Communist and used every pause to breathe the prof took to acquaint the rest of us with Communist principles. Sometimes (read: 99.9% of the time) his comments didn't even gel with whatever we were talking about in class. They were just completely out of the blue.
Hence the nickname Chairman Mao for the red-headed freak (and no, the fact that he has red hair was not lost on me. That's the kind of irony you couldn't make up if you tried).
Anyway, I kind of hated him (read: loathed him with the burning intensity of a thousand desert suns). He ruined every class session he was in and, I think, really detracted from what the prof had to teach us because he ate up so much of her lecturing time.
Here's the worst thing he did. One day, when we were talking about the Palestinians and their lost homeland, he actually made a comment about "our persecution."
"Our persecution." As if he were Palestinian.
The boy couldn't be more white if he tried. He looks like a copper-headed Pillsbury Dough Boy.
I realize that anecdote has nothing to do with Communism, but it does highlight his complete, total, and utter stupidity. He's the kind of guy I just wanted to smack and say, "Listen, I know that right now you're full of arrogant, pretentious and pompous assumptions you honestly and passionately believe are true, but in a few years you'll be out in the real world and they'll all get smacked right out of you. So do me a favor and SHUT UP SO I DON'T HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM."
And this was the guy I had to confront in the self-checkout lane.
Read: paid with my head down and then ran as fast as my flip-flops could propel me so that he wouldn't recognize me as the girl who shot daggers and flames at him with her eyes all semester long.
Oh, and the noodles? Totally slimy and mushy. Thank God for garlic bread or I would have spewed.
So, long story short, don't get too cocky just because you bake a few things and they turn out completely yummylicious. Otherwise brown rice and Chairman Mao may raise their ugly heads . . .
P.S. I know my posts have been extra long lately, but now that the Pancake Games are over and there's no pressure to finish a specific recipe before I post, I promise from now on they'll be shorter and more frequent. That's my new solemn vow to you.
Gluten-Free Pancakes o'Yummyliciousness (from Gluten-Free Girl--see here)
¼ cup sorghum flour
¼ cup teff flour
¼ cup sweet rice flour
¼ cup tapioca flour
½ teaspoon xanthan gum
½ teaspoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons organic cane sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder1 cup rice milk
2 eggs
3 tablespoons sour cream (or goat’s milk yogurt)
Combining the dry ingredients. Put all the dry ingredients into a large bowl and stir them with a wire whisk. (I have found this is like sifting the flours, without having a sifter.)
Combining the wet ingredients. Pour the rice milk (or whatever kind of milk you are using) into a different large bowl. Add the eggs and sour cream. Whisk it all together. Making them one. Add the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, ¼ cup at a time. Stir well between each dry addition.
Patience. Let the mixture sit for at least thirty minutes, at room temperature, to settle into itself.
Cooking the pancakes. Turn a burner on medium heat. When it has come to temperature, add your favorite greaser here — canola oil, butter, or non-dairy spread — just enough to coat the pan. Using the ¼ cup measurement you pulled out of the drawer to measure the ingredients, dollop the pancake batter into the pan, from the height of a few inches. Allow the pancake to cook. Don’t be over eager to turn it. When bubbles have formed and mostly popped on the surface of the pancake, turn it. The second side always takes half the time to cook as the first, so watch this carefully. Remove the pancake from the pan and serve. Makes six small pancakes.
And I only have one thing to say:
Gluten-Free Girl, will you be my best friend?????????
I made her pancake recipe (as solemnly vowed to you), and they were fantastic. They looked and tasted like REAL PANCAKES. And get this: they totally looked like restaurant pancakes.
I am not even kidding.
Plus, as an added bonus, they're made with teff flour, which is a whole grain. That means that it's completely healthy to eat these pancakes. Like eating whole-wheat ones, except gluten-free whole-wheat. It's a miracle!! Here are my only issues: 1) because of the teff flour, which is brown, the batter is brown instead of the yellowy color it usually is. Don't be freaked out by this. It will still taste fantastic.
2) because of all the baking powder and xanthum gum, the batter is extremely puffy (this is good because then the pancakes are light and fluffy). So that you don't come out with pancakes ten stories tall, smooth it around a little in the pan to make it thinner. Trust me, it'll puff back up plenty.
That's it! The recipe is below. Make and enjoy!
Other than the pancakes, I have been on a baking spree this week. I made Irish Soda Bread (also from a Gluten-Free Girl recipe, also with teff flour, and also fantastic), and Devil's Food cake, which was like heaven. I made it for my birthday so that we wouldn't have to get ice cream cake, and it was even better than pancakes. I'll give you the yummylicious recipe for that too, but next time. This post is long enough as it is!
Despite my many successful forays into baking, tonight my mom and I were making spaghetti, and AFTER I had boiled my water and made my garlic bread, I realized I had no gluten-free noodles.
This necessitated a last-minute drag-race to the grocery store. Not the good grocery store that has an entire aisle of gluten-free goodies and is a few towns over, but the stupid grocery store a mile away that decided to merge all of it's GF stuff with the regular stuff, so while I was searching fruitlessly for corn noodles I had to be taunted by shelves and shelves of bright yellow egg noodles. I was about to leave the store in the midst of a huge hissy-fit at their lack of GF noodles when I spotted an odd colored bag peeking out of the bottom shelf. Odd colored bags tend to mean GF, so I knelt down. There, under all the other shelves and a bit of dust, were the noodles I was looking for. Well, they were and they weren't. There was only one brand, and they were made of brown rice.
Like palm kernel oil, brown rice is one of my old enemies. The first GF bread I ever bought was brown rice, and it tasted like I'd cut up a refrigerator box and spread peanut butter on it. So I thought, maybe it's just the bread. And tried some brown rice noodles. This time it tasted like I'd shaved a refrigerator box into little curly-cues, boiled them so that they were mushy enough to not need chewing, and slathered them with tomato sauce.
Needless to say, I swore off brown rice immediately and haven't let one morsel pass between my lips since.
But what was I going to do? It was a total Hobson's choice situation. (I learned that phrase from dictionary.com, which sends me a Word of the Day every day. If you don't understand why I have dictionary.com sending me a Word of the Day, or why I'm giggling with glee because I actually got to use a Word of the Day in conversation, please consult my very first post). I had to buy the dreaded brown rice noodles. I tried to tell myself, "Hey, it's been five years. Maybe they've improved their brown rice recipes. Maybe it won't make me feel like I'm eating at recycling facility turned restaurant." Plus, I had garlic bread, which would help disguise any cardboard-esque tastes.
So I optimistically went to the self-checkout lane (read: stomped my way over with a One-Glance-My-Way-And-I'll-Mow-You-Down-With-My-Car look on my face). And as the cherry on top of the whole experience, I saw that Chairman Mao was in the checkout lane right next to mine.
Chairman Mao is the nickname I gave this guy who was in my Middle Eastern History class last semester. I loved the class. It was really interesting, and since beforehand all I knew was that the Mid-East was somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic and that we're at war there, the class was also quite informative. For example, I now know where Iran and Iraq actually are and can discuss (not at-length, but somewhat) the origins of the issues between Israelis and Palestinians. All well and good.
But there was this guy . . . pale, pasty, with the reddest hair I've ever seen, and the biggest mouth on the face of the planet. He was always arguing with the prof, acting like he knew more than her (in which case, why the hell was he taking the class in the first place?). And to make matters worse, he was a raging Communist and used every pause to breathe the prof took to acquaint the rest of us with Communist principles. Sometimes (read: 99.9% of the time) his comments didn't even gel with whatever we were talking about in class. They were just completely out of the blue.
Hence the nickname Chairman Mao for the red-headed freak (and no, the fact that he has red hair was not lost on me. That's the kind of irony you couldn't make up if you tried).
Anyway, I kind of hated him (read: loathed him with the burning intensity of a thousand desert suns). He ruined every class session he was in and, I think, really detracted from what the prof had to teach us because he ate up so much of her lecturing time.
Here's the worst thing he did. One day, when we were talking about the Palestinians and their lost homeland, he actually made a comment about "our persecution."
"Our persecution." As if he were Palestinian.
The boy couldn't be more white if he tried. He looks like a copper-headed Pillsbury Dough Boy.
I realize that anecdote has nothing to do with Communism, but it does highlight his complete, total, and utter stupidity. He's the kind of guy I just wanted to smack and say, "Listen, I know that right now you're full of arrogant, pretentious and pompous assumptions you honestly and passionately believe are true, but in a few years you'll be out in the real world and they'll all get smacked right out of you. So do me a favor and SHUT UP SO I DON'T HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM."
And this was the guy I had to confront in the self-checkout lane.
Read: paid with my head down and then ran as fast as my flip-flops could propel me so that he wouldn't recognize me as the girl who shot daggers and flames at him with her eyes all semester long.
Oh, and the noodles? Totally slimy and mushy. Thank God for garlic bread or I would have spewed.
So, long story short, don't get too cocky just because you bake a few things and they turn out completely yummylicious. Otherwise brown rice and Chairman Mao may raise their ugly heads . . .
P.S. I know my posts have been extra long lately, but now that the Pancake Games are over and there's no pressure to finish a specific recipe before I post, I promise from now on they'll be shorter and more frequent. That's my new solemn vow to you.
Gluten-Free Pancakes o'Yummyliciousness (from Gluten-Free Girl--see here)
¼ cup sorghum flour
¼ cup teff flour
¼ cup sweet rice flour
¼ cup tapioca flour
½ teaspoon xanthan gum
½ teaspoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons organic cane sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder1 cup rice milk
2 eggs
3 tablespoons sour cream (or goat’s milk yogurt)
Combining the dry ingredients. Put all the dry ingredients into a large bowl and stir them with a wire whisk. (I have found this is like sifting the flours, without having a sifter.)
Combining the wet ingredients. Pour the rice milk (or whatever kind of milk you are using) into a different large bowl. Add the eggs and sour cream. Whisk it all together. Making them one. Add the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, ¼ cup at a time. Stir well between each dry addition.
Patience. Let the mixture sit for at least thirty minutes, at room temperature, to settle into itself.
Cooking the pancakes. Turn a burner on medium heat. When it has come to temperature, add your favorite greaser here — canola oil, butter, or non-dairy spread — just enough to coat the pan. Using the ¼ cup measurement you pulled out of the drawer to measure the ingredients, dollop the pancake batter into the pan, from the height of a few inches. Allow the pancake to cook. Don’t be over eager to turn it. When bubbles have formed and mostly popped on the surface of the pancake, turn it. The second side always takes half the time to cook as the first, so watch this carefully. Remove the pancake from the pan and serve. Makes six small pancakes.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Hello Friends!
Hello, hello, hello! I have missed blogging so much this past week, I can't even tell you. Well, I probably could. But then I wouldn't have the time to catch you up on everything that's happened these past sad, lonely, blogless seven days.
I believe, when we last talked, that I promised the second recipe of the Pancake Games was imminent. I lied. Yes, good people, I lied.
But not on purpose, I swear! The thing is, last Saturday, I moved out of my house. But not to H2. To the house of some friends of mine, who were going on vacay to North Carolina (I cannot believe I just used the word vacay. Someone, slap me, please!). They have the cutest little cocker spaniel ever (she's black and white and named Oreo!! How cute is that?), and so they needed someone to stay in their house and keep the cutie-pie company. So that's where I've been for the past week.
"But Em," you ask, "don't these friends of yours have the internet?" Yes, they do have the internet. But because they have teenagers, they also have parental controls. And sadly, they did not leave me all the passwords necessary to override the controls (thankfully, they did leave me the code to get past the controls on the TV. Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to watch, for example, My Cousin Vinny on TNT, which is one of the best movies EVER. Although my favorite cable show is What Not To Wear, which isn't blocked, so I think I would have survived. I've only been home for five hours and I already miss Stacy and Clinton. I wish they'd take me to New York . . .)
So that, dear people, is why this has been a blogless week. It is also why this has been a pancakeless week. Because despite my best intentions, I was simply too lazy to make a complicated pancake recipe involving numerous flours and sour cream when there was a pool and What Not To Wear tantalizing me in the background. I really don't know why I thought things could be any other way.
Plus, I found this show on the Food Network called Everyday Italian, and shockingly, many of the dishes made on this show are gluten-free or can be easily adapted to be gluten-free. Total score! I've downloaded about a million of Giada's recipes and can't wait to try them.
But now that I am back in the non-cable, no-pool environment of my home, I promise the Pancake Games will be my first priority. I swear. I won't even do Giada's recipes first. This is my pledge to you.
Plus, it wasn't just the Pancake Games that suffered due to my laziness. I wrote nary a word on my book, and nary a word on my query letters. But hey, I was on vacay (argh! Did it again! I've been watching way too much Legally Blonde). That's my excuse. Vacay all the way.
Just before I left to go hang with Oreo, we went out to H2 and did an enormous, crazy, all-day push to get things going. My furniture was delivered, I washed all my dishes and put them away, my dad hooked up my TV and DVD player, and the place looks pretty fantastic. There's still a bunch of little stuff to do, and I still have a TON of crap in my room to pack up and move over, but things are looking great. While I was showering and doing other bathroom-type things, and sitting around watching WNTW for hours on at Oreo's pad, I kept thinking, "This is what it will be like at H2, only BETTER, because my stuff is cuter (no offense to Oreo's family intended)!"
Here are some pictures of the rooms that look completed (the bedroom just has the bed, and the kitchen is basically done but everything is in the cupboards, so that's kind of boring):
Clearly I have to get some decorations or posters or something for the walls in the living room, but isn't the bathroom the cutest thing ever? What you can't see is that the soap dispenser and the garbage can match the shower curtain. That just takes it to a whole 'nother level (can I just say how awesome it is that you can look up "whole nother level" on Google and it leads you to a Wikipedia page about Eugene Struthers? You can find ANYTHING on Wikipedia!)
Now all I have to do is finish packing up all my junk. Let me tell you, it is shocking how much junk one person can accumulate in 22 years, eleven months, and 9 days. Seriously shocking. I mean, what is all this crap? Where did I get it all? And it is all so dusty due to sitting around on my shelves for months/years without being touched (because, of course, it's junk that I don't need), that I'm kind of afraid to start going through it. It's an asthma attack waiting to happen, people.
So instead of packing things up the way I should be, I've been playing around on Blogger, looking at other people's blogs. I think some of that WNTW laziness is still in my system, because that's honestly all I've done since I've been home. And here's what I've discovered: a blog's name is by no means an accurate representation of what it is. It's true. For example, I found this blog called Queen's Crap, which sounds pretty cool, right? Like it's secret dish on Elizabeth or whatever. Or maybe a bunch of funny pictures of queens around the world. No. I am sorry to tell you that this blog is just a bunch of whiny complaining about Queens, New York. Not to say that bad things don't happen there. I'm sure they do. But unless you're an outraged citizen of Queens, why would you care? Not living anywhere near Queens, myself, and having expected to see some sparkly pictures of tiaras or diamonds or something, I was hugely disappointed. And their logo? Who came up with that little piece of . . . dare I say it? . . . crap?! Although it is kind of cool that the contact email for this site is QueensCrapper. Nice play.
Then, in the opposite direction was this blog, which is basically pictures of real estate. BOORR-ing, right? Turns out, it's actually pretty funny. No joke (wow, I'm really sorry about all the puns). The pictures are all really bad ones, so the blog is kind of mocking people who post nasty pictures and then think their house will sell (I, personally, love the castle one best). This blog is great when you're in a crabby mood and feel like mocking something. Or if you're in a mocking mood and feel like laughing. Or if you're in a bad-day-I-hate-stupid-people-mood and need validation that people really are stupid. This blog totally has you covered.
Then there's this blog, which I didn't have time to read, but left a lake of drool on the floor just from looking at the pictures (the first one looks kind of gross, but scroll down. They get infinitely better). I'll definitely be hitting this one again in the near future. YUMMY!
Also, in response to the clamoring from all of you, wanting to know how Lane and Zach's date ended, here's your answer.
Okay, there wasn't any clamoring. I made it up because I really love this clip. Plus, you know, I couldn't leave you in suspense. So enjoy.
Okay, since this post is now inordinately long, I'll sign off. But I'll be back . . . and I'll be bearing pancakes.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Home Sweet Bookshelf
In the words of one Lane Kim of Gilmore Girls, I am a fanatic bibliophile, and there are obligations that go along with that (except she was a fanatic audiophile. The principle still totally applies, though).
Because of those heavy obligations, I haven't yet bought the sorghum flour needed to make Pancake Games Recipe #2. You have my deepest and sincerest apologies, but there's nothing I could do. My bookshelves arrived from Wal-Mart via UPS, my brother D and I cataloged all my books and packed them into boxes, and from thence my responsibilities arose.
It has been a crazy week and half of taking carloads of my junk out to H2 (my apartment, in case you missed that post) and setting it up. Last Friday, I built two bookshelves, a TV cart, and pretty silver shelves for my kitchen (I have basically zero counter space, so my microwave/mixer/etc needed a home). It was ridiculously fun building all that stuff. I've never actually built anything completely by myself before. I mean, yes, my dad had to help me when I accidentally hammered a thingie in crooked and couldn't attach it to the other thingie because it didn't line up right. But other than that, I did it all on my own. It was, as Princess Mia would say, a very self-actualizing experience. Very "I am woman, hear me roar," and all that stuff. I had a screwdriver and I knew how to use it!
Anyway, once the bookshelves were vertical, OF COURSE my books had to be put away. For years they've been suffering, stacked on one bookshelf (the regular way and then all kinds of crazy ways, on top of others and in front of others and diagonal across others . . . it was pandemonium) and some under my bed (where sadly they have gathered so much dust/cat hair that I couldn't read most of them, being severely allergic to dust and moderately allergic to cat hair). The poor babies! Now, however, at H2, I have TWO WHOLE BOOKSHELVES for them to live on. So on Sunday I spent the day unpacking them and arranging them onto the shelves (after, of course, I moved the shelves all around, trying to find that exact right, feng shui spot for them). There's one shelf for my "fun" books: aka books I buy just for fun. The other shelf is for my school books: aka books that are also fun but are slightly more scholastic in nature, like Norton Anthologies (I have, like 8 of those), or come from a distinct literary period (in case you were wondering, they go like this: Old English, Medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, Victorian, 20th Century, Modern). The "fun" shelf is already almost full. Four out of five shelves have inhabitants. The school shelf only has two full, but once I start shopping for my textbooks for this fall, that will be very quickly remedied.
As you can see, this clearly took priority over the Pancake Games. My books are my babies. I actually got a little teary as I tried to decide which ones to send over to H2 now and which to keep at home with me until I leave. Yeah. It's true. You can ask my brother D if you don't believe me (I offered to pay him $2 if he helped me pack them up. It took us four hours just to do the one bookcase in my room at home--we haven't even started the ones under the bed or in the garage. He demanded more money about halfway through, and given the insanity of the workload I had to acquiesce).
H2 actually feels like a home to me now, with my books in position. I have no furniture, no appliances except the fridge and stove set up, and nothing hanging on the walls, but with my dear friends standing on their shelves, bold and free with their spines actually on display, it feels like home.
(I also got my DVD holder/shelf/thingie from Wal-Mart/UPS, and put all my DVDs in it--except Gilmore Girls seasons 1-7, Monk seasons 1-6, and various others like "Miss Potter" and "X-Men," because clearly I can't live without those for another three weeks--but that isn't part of the whole bibliophile deal. They do, however, look exceptionally nice, because they used to be stacked on the floor of my closet.)
So now I feel like H2 is actually a live-able space, as opposed to a bunch of rooms with some giant ants crawling around and that weird apartment smell. That, my friends, is progress.
Tomorrow we are going back (for the fourth time in seven days, people. Even for someone newly converted to the Bob Villa way, that is a lot of times) because my couch, chair, ottoman, and mattress/box spring are being delivered. While we're waiting:
-My dad is going to build my bed frame and scour my bathroom with this super-
powerful germ-killing stuff he got
-My mom is going to continue with her previous job of contact-papering all the shelves
in the place (which is a really tedious job that she says gives off crazy glue fumes)
and then set up my bathroom
-I am going to wash and put away all my dishes and set up everything in the kitchen,
i.e. the microwave, mixer, coffee pot, etc.
H2 is very needy and a lot of work. Thankfully, I am house/dog-sitting for some friends of mine from this coming Saturday to next Saturday. They have a pool, cable, and the cutest dog ever, so it will be like a little vacation for me. I won't be going out to H2 at all because I can't leave the dog alone all day (that would totally defeat the whole purpose of me being there), so it will be a beautiful week of swimming, dog walking, and What Not to Wear.
But the good news is that today I finally got my butt up to the store and bought some sorghum flour, so the next pancake recipe is right around the corner. Not tomorrow, of course, because I have to get up early to go to H2 and do all the aforementioned stuff. But maybe on Friday or Saturday, to kick off my little final vacation before the grad school madness starts.
Ahh . . . vacation. So quickly coming to an end. Like sands through the hourglass are the summers of our lives . . .
P.S. To find out what all the types of "philes" are in the poll to your right, go here. (just scroll down a little to get to the list) There are so many good ones that I had trouble choosing which to put in the poll! If you are a different kind of phile than the ones I have listed, let me know!
Because of those heavy obligations, I haven't yet bought the sorghum flour needed to make Pancake Games Recipe #2. You have my deepest and sincerest apologies, but there's nothing I could do. My bookshelves arrived from Wal-Mart via UPS, my brother D and I cataloged all my books and packed them into boxes, and from thence my responsibilities arose.
It has been a crazy week and half of taking carloads of my junk out to H2 (my apartment, in case you missed that post) and setting it up. Last Friday, I built two bookshelves, a TV cart, and pretty silver shelves for my kitchen (I have basically zero counter space, so my microwave/mixer/etc needed a home). It was ridiculously fun building all that stuff. I've never actually built anything completely by myself before. I mean, yes, my dad had to help me when I accidentally hammered a thingie in crooked and couldn't attach it to the other thingie because it didn't line up right. But other than that, I did it all on my own. It was, as Princess Mia would say, a very self-actualizing experience. Very "I am woman, hear me roar," and all that stuff. I had a screwdriver and I knew how to use it!
Anyway, once the bookshelves were vertical, OF COURSE my books had to be put away. For years they've been suffering, stacked on one bookshelf (the regular way and then all kinds of crazy ways, on top of others and in front of others and diagonal across others . . . it was pandemonium) and some under my bed (where sadly they have gathered so much dust/cat hair that I couldn't read most of them, being severely allergic to dust and moderately allergic to cat hair). The poor babies! Now, however, at H2, I have TWO WHOLE BOOKSHELVES for them to live on. So on Sunday I spent the day unpacking them and arranging them onto the shelves (after, of course, I moved the shelves all around, trying to find that exact right, feng shui spot for them). There's one shelf for my "fun" books: aka books I buy just for fun. The other shelf is for my school books: aka books that are also fun but are slightly more scholastic in nature, like Norton Anthologies (I have, like 8 of those), or come from a distinct literary period (in case you were wondering, they go like this: Old English, Medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, Victorian, 20th Century, Modern). The "fun" shelf is already almost full. Four out of five shelves have inhabitants. The school shelf only has two full, but once I start shopping for my textbooks for this fall, that will be very quickly remedied.
As you can see, this clearly took priority over the Pancake Games. My books are my babies. I actually got a little teary as I tried to decide which ones to send over to H2 now and which to keep at home with me until I leave. Yeah. It's true. You can ask my brother D if you don't believe me (I offered to pay him $2 if he helped me pack them up. It took us four hours just to do the one bookcase in my room at home--we haven't even started the ones under the bed or in the garage. He demanded more money about halfway through, and given the insanity of the workload I had to acquiesce).
H2 actually feels like a home to me now, with my books in position. I have no furniture, no appliances except the fridge and stove set up, and nothing hanging on the walls, but with my dear friends standing on their shelves, bold and free with their spines actually on display, it feels like home.
(I also got my DVD holder/shelf/thingie from Wal-Mart/UPS, and put all my DVDs in it--except Gilmore Girls seasons 1-7, Monk seasons 1-6, and various others like "Miss Potter" and "X-Men," because clearly I can't live without those for another three weeks--but that isn't part of the whole bibliophile deal. They do, however, look exceptionally nice, because they used to be stacked on the floor of my closet.)
So now I feel like H2 is actually a live-able space, as opposed to a bunch of rooms with some giant ants crawling around and that weird apartment smell. That, my friends, is progress.
Tomorrow we are going back (for the fourth time in seven days, people. Even for someone newly converted to the Bob Villa way, that is a lot of times) because my couch, chair, ottoman, and mattress/box spring are being delivered. While we're waiting:
-My dad is going to build my bed frame and scour my bathroom with this super-
powerful germ-killing stuff he got
-My mom is going to continue with her previous job of contact-papering all the shelves
in the place (which is a really tedious job that she says gives off crazy glue fumes)
and then set up my bathroom
-I am going to wash and put away all my dishes and set up everything in the kitchen,
i.e. the microwave, mixer, coffee pot, etc.
H2 is very needy and a lot of work. Thankfully, I am house/dog-sitting for some friends of mine from this coming Saturday to next Saturday. They have a pool, cable, and the cutest dog ever, so it will be like a little vacation for me. I won't be going out to H2 at all because I can't leave the dog alone all day (that would totally defeat the whole purpose of me being there), so it will be a beautiful week of swimming, dog walking, and What Not to Wear.
But the good news is that today I finally got my butt up to the store and bought some sorghum flour, so the next pancake recipe is right around the corner. Not tomorrow, of course, because I have to get up early to go to H2 and do all the aforementioned stuff. But maybe on Friday or Saturday, to kick off my little final vacation before the grad school madness starts.
Ahh . . . vacation. So quickly coming to an end. Like sands through the hourglass are the summers of our lives . . .
P.S. To find out what all the types of "philes" are in the poll to your right, go here. (just scroll down a little to get to the list) There are so many good ones that I had trouble choosing which to put in the poll! If you are a different kind of phile than the ones I have listed, let me know!
Monday, July 21, 2008
My Left Foot and a Pancake Update
Before I get to the Pancake Update, first I have to show you this hilarity.
Two days ago I made the batch of Betty Crocker pancakes, and the thing is: cake flour is magic.
Oh, and then there's this adorableness. Check out "Drawing a Kitty with my Foot." Can that cat (the real one) be any cuter?
Okay, now that that's taken care of, let's get on with business.Two days ago I made the batch of Betty Crocker pancakes, and the thing is: cake flour is magic.
golden and delicious
They weren't restaurant-like, so I still haven't achieved my goal, but they tasted like normal pancakes. They had only the slightest aftertaste common to gluten-free baked goods. They smelled delicious, they were the right texture (not grainy or doughy), they were thick yet fluffy, they were golden, and they were positively yummy.
Since, however, my tastebuds are used to gluten-freeness and therefore cannot be trusted to determine if food tastes normal, I asked my mom and my brother J to weigh in as judges.
Mom: said that she gave the cakes a 25 out of 10, because they didn't stink up the house like the old recipe did, and they were good. Said that she would actually eat them, whereas she'd rather eat her own hand than eat the old ones.
J: said that he gave them a 7 out of 10, because of the aftertaste. Otherwise thought they were good.
I'd give them an 9, purely because I hope I can make them even better. But they were definitely the best GF pancakes I've EVER EATEN. I had the leftovers for breakfast this morning.
fluffy and delicious
The only real issue I had was that the cake flour had the unexpected result of making the batter very thick and sort of gelatinous. I think this was because of the corn starch; the batter seemed kind of gravy-like. But once the batter was in the pan it cooked up with no problems and they came out tasting, as I said, really good. So don't let that throw you off if you make them.
Also, in the original recipe I stupidly left out xanthum gum, which is a crucial ingredient of GF baked goods. I used about 1/4 of a teaspoon and they came out just right. I've gone back in and added it to the original post, but if you already wrote it down then you should add the xanthum gum. Otherwise they'll be flat as . . . well, a pancake.
And now I have a pancake recipe I can make for non-GF people that won't make them puke. Yay!
In other news, I went to Target today to pick up more stuff for H2, and in a bizarre twist, I ended up buying all pink things. What are the odds of that? Our cart looked like some sort of little-girls'-birthday explosion. I got: a pink phone, pink sheets, pink curtains, a pink plastic case for odds and ends, a pink date book, and a thing of neon dry erase markers with a pink one in it.
That's a lot of pink. Woo-hoo! I love pink.
Having been crazy busy with packing and moving things into H2, I caught up on my blog reading today. And I have to add my own protestations to Meg Cabot's July 12th post:
What is with parents taking little kids to movies that are way beyond their maturity level? I went to see "The Incredible Hulk" last week in the theater (Edward Norton is the only reason I went to see this movie, and he absolutely delivered. I LOVED this movie. It was amazing, and can I just say that Edward Norton totally has the market cornered on soulful eyes). Anyway, there was this dad with, like, a six year old little girl sitting down the aisle from us. He let her watch the brutal carnage, he let her watch Edward Norton turn into the Hulk (which looks a little freaky, with all the giant wiggling muscles), he let her watch the guy who turns into Abomination while he was all bloody and torn to shreds in the hospital, and he let her watch Abomination run around and fight the Hulk (let's face it, Abomination kind of looks like an enormous, muscular skeleton made of snot). All this passes on the screen and Daddy Dearest doesn't once say anything to the daughter. But during the so-called sex scene between Edward Norton and Liv Tyler, which was basically G-rated, he reaches over and covers the little girl's eyes.
What is up with that? What do you think is more likely to give a six-year-old nightmares, a snot skeleton or a little bit of kissing? Yeah, I'm gonna go with the snot skeleton.
Why wouldn't you take your six-year-old daughter to see "Kitt Kittredge" or "Wall-E," or whatever? Why "The Incredible Hulk?" Is he taking her to see "The Dark Knight" this week? Is the dude seriously that cheap that he couldn't cough up ten bucks for a baby-sitter? I was completely appalled at the whole thing.
But you don't want to get me started on a stupid-parents rant, because I've worked at two day care centers and one summer camp, and worked birthday parties at a store in the mall. The stupidity of parents is shocking.
Of course, I also met a lot of really good parents. So I really can't complain too much. But that guy at the theater fully deserves all my wrath. And yours. So send him any mental waves of wrath you may have to spare.
Now, as far as the Pancake Games go, I'll be making this recipe next (scroll down to the October 29th segment for the recipe). It might be a few days because I have to go out and buy the special flours, but I'll keep you posted!
Friday, July 18, 2008
The 2008 Summer Pancake Games
Today we (meaning my family: Mom, Dad, brother J and brother D) took two enormous carloads of stuff out to my new apartment, which we've dubbed "H2." We had to dub it something easy to say, because we were getting sick of saying "the apartment" all the time. That is a lot of syllables, and let me tell you, when you're having a twenty-minute conversations about your plan to go to "the apartment" and you have to say the words "the apartment" a gazillion times in that twenty-minute period, you get kind of sick of saying it. It's exhausting! So we named the place "H2," which stands for "Home #2" and is infinitely easier to say.
Anyway, the most important, most precious, cargo in those carloads was, of course, all my books (because I am a complete and utter bibliophile, which is a fancy way of saying book lover, we could only take about half of them on this trip. The others will go sometime next week).
The second mose important/precious cargo was the window air conditioner. That's right, folks, my new pad has no A/C. Well, it does now. Because my poor dad spent, like, two hours setting it up in the 90 degree heat. I was incapacitated and unable to help because I very foolishly decided to help my mom clean, in the 90 degree heat, without ever using my inhaler. About an hour in my chest started to hurt because my lungs couldn't take in enough oxygen and I started to get kind of heat stroke-ish (another thing I am very susceptible to). So then I had to sit down under the ceiling fan with a cold bottle of Gatorade under my neck so that I wouldn't pass out and have to be rushed to the ER.
I kind of felt like a heel, sitting there chilling with my Gatorade pillow while everyone else was working their butts off to set up MY apartment.
But of course, when it was time to go out to lunch, they unintentionally got me back!
There is this fantastic little restaurant like, three blocks from H2. It's called First Watch and is a "daytime cafe," so it's only open until 2:30, and they serve all kinds of great breakfast and lunch specials. The place is all bright and cheery, the waiters and waitresses are super friendly, and it has free Wi-Fi. Plus, major bonus, if you click on the link to their website, they have a "Gluten-Free" page, where they list every menu item that us gluten-less people can eat. All their meats, even their bacon and ham and sausage and stuff, is GF. Awesome, or awesome? We first discovered this little gem when we went apartment hunting and found H2, and so every time we go out to H2 with a load of stuff, we go have lunch at the daytime cafe. (See how many times I just said H2? Can you imagine how much more cumbersome this paragraph would have been if I'd had to say "the apartment" all those times? Yeah. You know what I'm talking about.)
So anyway, we go there for lunch today. D gets french toast. Not really knife-in-the-heart material, because I can make my own french toast that tastes pretty decent using my Glutino bread (this is the best store-bought gluten-free bread I've ever tasted. When you toast it, it practically tastes normal. Not corny at all). So that doesn't really bother me. But then J, who is of course sitting right across from me in the booth, sees that the description of their pancakes says that they are "as big as we can make them and still have them fit on a plate." To J (who also bought the ten-pound bar of chocolate from my last post), this was a personal challenge. He ordered the pancakes.
And I'm not going to lie: they were amazing. They were seriously at least 8 inches in diameter, and he got the tall stack (three cakes). He only ate about a third of them. And this boy is a black hole, my friends.
They were this perfect, buttery yellow on the inside, and I could tell just by looking that they were light and fluffy, just like pancakes should be. And the smell? I haven't smelled pancakes that good since the last time I was at Bob Evans (which I never go to anymore, just because I can't take the pancake smell. No joke. I've had to give up Bob Evans because it just smells too damn good in there).
I wanted a bite of those pancakes more than I wanted my next breath.
So what do I do? Thankfully, I didn't eat any. I stayed strong. But I did torment myself further. Ds french toast had come with a bowl of blueberry compote, which he refused to eat. I say to J: "why don't you put some of that on your pancakes?"
So he did.
I believe the puddle of drool I left under the table was comparable to the Atlantic.
Pancakes are incredibly difficult for me to make. I mean, I can make them, but they're kind of rubbery or kind of doughy or kind of flat. Sometimes they taste good, but they never taste like real pancakes. It's extremely distressing. Especially today, when I wanted restaurant pancakes so desperately.
Therefore and hence, I am issuing myself a challenge. I am going to make good, real pancakes this summer. Now I know, this summer is half over. But I don't care. I am going to make restaurant-quality, gluten-free pancakes.
I have already collected a variety of recipes. First I'm going to try the standard Betty Crocker recipe that I've used in the past. I always just substitued GF flour for regular flour, but this time I'm going to use the magic ingredient that I discovered a few weeks ago: cake flour. I don't know how this is going to work; the pancakes may come out like some abomination (I just saw The Hulk, sorry). But it worked so well for my cupcakes/cake that I have moderate hopes.
If that doesn't work for me, there are three recipes on Gluten-Free Girl's website that I'll try (look under "Breakfast Foods"). I will, of course, keep you posted. For now, I'll include the Betty Crocker recipe below. If you decide to try it and it works for you, or if you have a recipe that would adapt well, or if you can con a restaurant into giving you their recipe (I have yet to acheive this feat), please let me know!
And so, the Pancake Games torch is lit . . . Godspeed!
GLUTEN-FREE PANCAKES (taken from Betty Crocker's Cookbook)
1 egg
1 1/2 C flour (I'll be using cake flour, which is 2 tablespoons of corn starch for every cup of flour)
3/4 C milk
1 T shortening, melted, or vegetable oil (I usually use oil, because I'm lazy and it's easier, but this time I'm going to use Blue Bonnet margarine. My mom swears by it in her baked goods; she refuses to use any other brand)
1 T sugar
3 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
Beat egg with hand beater until fluffy; beat in remaining ingredients just until smooth. Pour batter onto hot griddle in 3-tablespoonfuls. Cook pancakes until puffed and dry around edges. Turn and cook other side until golden brown.
Makes about nine 4-inch pancakes.
Anyway, the most important, most precious, cargo in those carloads was, of course, all my books (because I am a complete and utter bibliophile, which is a fancy way of saying book lover, we could only take about half of them on this trip. The others will go sometime next week).
The second mose important/precious cargo was the window air conditioner. That's right, folks, my new pad has no A/C. Well, it does now. Because my poor dad spent, like, two hours setting it up in the 90 degree heat. I was incapacitated and unable to help because I very foolishly decided to help my mom clean, in the 90 degree heat, without ever using my inhaler. About an hour in my chest started to hurt because my lungs couldn't take in enough oxygen and I started to get kind of heat stroke-ish (another thing I am very susceptible to). So then I had to sit down under the ceiling fan with a cold bottle of Gatorade under my neck so that I wouldn't pass out and have to be rushed to the ER.
I kind of felt like a heel, sitting there chilling with my Gatorade pillow while everyone else was working their butts off to set up MY apartment.
But of course, when it was time to go out to lunch, they unintentionally got me back!
There is this fantastic little restaurant like, three blocks from H2. It's called First Watch and is a "daytime cafe," so it's only open until 2:30, and they serve all kinds of great breakfast and lunch specials. The place is all bright and cheery, the waiters and waitresses are super friendly, and it has free Wi-Fi. Plus, major bonus, if you click on the link to their website, they have a "Gluten-Free" page, where they list every menu item that us gluten-less people can eat. All their meats, even their bacon and ham and sausage and stuff, is GF. Awesome, or awesome? We first discovered this little gem when we went apartment hunting and found H2, and so every time we go out to H2 with a load of stuff, we go have lunch at the daytime cafe. (See how many times I just said H2? Can you imagine how much more cumbersome this paragraph would have been if I'd had to say "the apartment" all those times? Yeah. You know what I'm talking about.)
So anyway, we go there for lunch today. D gets french toast. Not really knife-in-the-heart material, because I can make my own french toast that tastes pretty decent using my Glutino bread (this is the best store-bought gluten-free bread I've ever tasted. When you toast it, it practically tastes normal. Not corny at all). So that doesn't really bother me. But then J, who is of course sitting right across from me in the booth, sees that the description of their pancakes says that they are "as big as we can make them and still have them fit on a plate." To J (who also bought the ten-pound bar of chocolate from my last post), this was a personal challenge. He ordered the pancakes.
And I'm not going to lie: they were amazing. They were seriously at least 8 inches in diameter, and he got the tall stack (three cakes). He only ate about a third of them. And this boy is a black hole, my friends.
They were this perfect, buttery yellow on the inside, and I could tell just by looking that they were light and fluffy, just like pancakes should be. And the smell? I haven't smelled pancakes that good since the last time I was at Bob Evans (which I never go to anymore, just because I can't take the pancake smell. No joke. I've had to give up Bob Evans because it just smells too damn good in there).
I wanted a bite of those pancakes more than I wanted my next breath.
So what do I do? Thankfully, I didn't eat any. I stayed strong. But I did torment myself further. Ds french toast had come with a bowl of blueberry compote, which he refused to eat. I say to J: "why don't you put some of that on your pancakes?"
So he did.
I believe the puddle of drool I left under the table was comparable to the Atlantic.
Pancakes are incredibly difficult for me to make. I mean, I can make them, but they're kind of rubbery or kind of doughy or kind of flat. Sometimes they taste good, but they never taste like real pancakes. It's extremely distressing. Especially today, when I wanted restaurant pancakes so desperately.
Therefore and hence, I am issuing myself a challenge. I am going to make good, real pancakes this summer. Now I know, this summer is half over. But I don't care. I am going to make restaurant-quality, gluten-free pancakes.
I have already collected a variety of recipes. First I'm going to try the standard Betty Crocker recipe that I've used in the past. I always just substitued GF flour for regular flour, but this time I'm going to use the magic ingredient that I discovered a few weeks ago: cake flour. I don't know how this is going to work; the pancakes may come out like some abomination (I just saw The Hulk, sorry). But it worked so well for my cupcakes/cake that I have moderate hopes.
If that doesn't work for me, there are three recipes on Gluten-Free Girl's website that I'll try (look under "Breakfast Foods"). I will, of course, keep you posted. For now, I'll include the Betty Crocker recipe below. If you decide to try it and it works for you, or if you have a recipe that would adapt well, or if you can con a restaurant into giving you their recipe (I have yet to acheive this feat), please let me know!
And so, the Pancake Games torch is lit . . . Godspeed!
GLUTEN-FREE PANCAKES (taken from Betty Crocker's Cookbook)
1 egg
1 1/2 C flour (I'll be using cake flour, which is 2 tablespoons of corn starch for every cup of flour)
3/4 C milk
1 T shortening, melted, or vegetable oil (I usually use oil, because I'm lazy and it's easier, but this time I'm going to use Blue Bonnet margarine. My mom swears by it in her baked goods; she refuses to use any other brand)
1 T sugar
3 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
Beat egg with hand beater until fluffy; beat in remaining ingredients just until smooth. Pour batter onto hot griddle in 3-tablespoonfuls. Cook pancakes until puffed and dry around edges. Turn and cook other side until golden brown.
Makes about nine 4-inch pancakes.
Monday, July 14, 2008
A Chocolate Castle in the Sky
I cannot begin to tell you how much I love chocolate. It is possibly the most wonderful food on the entire planet. You know in the Johnny Depp version of Willy Wonka when Willy tells about the Oompa Loompas, and how their entire culture was based on the cocoa bean (well, and nasty caterpillars, but I'm not talking about those)? That is my ideal culture. I would so live with the Oompa Loompas (again, without the caterpillars and as long as I could bring my inhaler or an air conditioner or something, because I have a feeling that that jungle humidity would kind of make my asthmatic lungs implode, or something equally painful and horrifying).
(Okay, so he has the same haircut as Suri Cruise and Katie Holmes, but he's still Johnny Depp. Nothing can change that!)
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Or, remember when they tell the story about Willy building the chocolate castle for that guy? I would so commission a chocolate castle from Willy Wonka, and I would NOT make the mistake of thinking it was for living in. Clearly, a chocolate castle is meant for one thing and one thing only: EATING. LOTS AND LOTS OF EATING.
In fact, I would marry Willy Wonka if he exisited. As long as it was the Johnny Depp Willy Wonka, and not the Gene Wilder one. I'm kind of head-over-heels for Johnny Depp anyway, so if I could marry Johnny/Willy it would kind of be a dream come true for me. Throw in the chocolate castle and some Oompa Loompas and that's pretty much my dream life.
(Okay, so he has the same haircut as Suri Cruise and Katie Holmes, but he's still Johnny Depp. Nothing can change that!)So you can imagine my complete and utter delight when my brother, who recently went on vacation and visited Amish country, brought back a ten pound bar of dark chocolate for my mom.
Yes. A TEN POUND BAR OF DARK CHOCOLATE. Here is a picture of my mom holding it:
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Amazing, right? And she promised to share. Hello, heaven!
Until I read the ingredients.
Is there anything more depressing in the world for a celiac than an ingredient list? Because I don't think there is. A movie like "Terms of Endearment?" Piece of cake (preferable chocolate, haha). The part in "The Godfather" where Appollonia dies? Absolutely nothing to an ingredient list. You hold your breath as you begin to skim. You pass the first few items without incident, and your hopes start to rise. You get through a few more, and you actually let the breath out and take another one. It's all good . . . it's all good . . . and then it all plummets. Your stomach clenches, you let out a groan, and you want to rip the wrapper into a million little pieces, except you're usually in the store and then you'd have to buy the item even though you can't eat it.
It sucks.
Gluten can hide in so many unexpected places. Sometimes you even make it through the whole list, but find one or two questionable items, like natural flavorings or modified food starch. And then you think, "I'm almost home free!" So you find the toll-free number on the package, call the company, and the whole thing starts all over again while you sit on hold.
Guess what the ingredient list on the ten pound bar of chocolate said? Palm kernel oil. The silent killer.
Palm kernel oil is an old, old nemesis of mine. The first time I encountered it in all it's evil glory was in microwave popcorn, which is my second-favorite food. I couldn't get my hand on my usual, gluten-free brand (Pop Weaver, for those of you who are wondering), and I decided to just get some Act II. Since Pop Weaver is gluten-free, I foolishly didn't bother to check the ingredients on Act II. After a few nights of eating it and oddly feeling sick a few hours later, I decided figured out the common denominator and checked. Sure enough? Act II is made with palm kernel oil. Pop Weaver is free of the deadly stuff.
And sadly, that lovely, perfect, delicious ten pound bar of chocolate is infested with it. I was heartbroken. All that chocolately goodness, never to be mine. Never were my tastebuds to delight in that bittersweetness.
Bittersweet, indeed.
P.S. For those of you who are now desperate for chocolate fix and are gluten-free, I can tell you, the absolute best gluten-free chocolate out there--completely palm kernel oil free--is made by Dove. Smooth, creamy, rich, and absolutely melt-on-the-tongue fantastic, it beats any other chocolate out there, even the fancier kinds. Plus, you can buy it in any drugstore. And if you go here, you can even download a Dove Chocolate Screen Saver . . . yum . . . almost as good as Johnny Depp! :)
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Here kitty . . .
So I just started reading "Bad Kitty" by Michele Jaffe (sadly, I am behind on this bandwagon; the sequel to "Bad Kitty" was just released. But in my defense, studying English requires A LOT of reading. And heavy reading, like Nietzsche and Thackeray and Dickens. And while, yes, I love Nietzsche and Thackeray and Dickens--well, maybe not Nietzsche, but the others for sure--I also have a deep addiction to chick lit and teen novels. But because during the school months I am reading so much Nietzsche/Thackeray/Dickens, I don't have the brain power to read ANYthing else, not even chick lit or teen novels. So I am just now catching up on all the wonderful stuff I've been missing since last summer). And it is really good. I'm actually kind of glad that I'm just starting it now because this way, I can start reading "Kitty Kitty" (the sequel) as soon as I'm done with the first one, instead of having to wait a whole year or whatever for it to come out.
I tell my friends and family that I enjoy reading these kinds of books because I like to know what else is "out there," since I write those kinds of books (I also write fancy historical fiction, which I love just as much as chick lit/teen novels, but in a completely different way). But I only say that because I feel kind of embarrassed for loving them with the deep abiding passion that I feel. I'm a student of literature; I'm supposed to love books like "Vanity Fair" or "Middlemarch," not books called "Bad Kitty."
Again, I do love "Vanity Fair" and "Middlemarch" (which was totally the soap opera in print of its day). But I just can't stop reading books like "Bad Kitty" or the Princess Diaries or "Conversations with the Fat Girl" (see my sidebar for more on this delectable morsel). I love them!!!
My father recently expressed concern that by reading so many teen novels, I run the risk of Stifling My Voice. By this he means that I'll start to sound like Michele Jaffe or Meg Cabot or Liza Palmer when I'm writing instead of like me.
But I completely disregard this advice, because I LOVE CHICK LIT (my creative writing prof would probably have a coronary and an aneuyerism at the same time if he read that last sentence).
So, literary pretensions and the Stifling of My Voice be damned. I love "Bad Kitty" and I'm not ashamed! (Actually I'm not really concerned with Stifling My Voice. I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and while that may have been an issue back in my earlier writing years, my Voice is pretty solidified. There's really no danger of it being lost or stifled or whatever).
Anyway, I am loving this book. I too, have a cousin who is constantly trying to show me up and make me look like a giant moron, so I can definitely relate to Jasmine (who is the main character of "Bad Kitty." I also like Jasmine because the Disney princess Jasmine was always my favorite. I loved her black hair and I desperately wanted a pet tiger just like Rajah when I was little. So the name Jasmine has a lot of positive associations for me). Jasmine's friends are hilarious, and even though I never hung out in bars in Vegas when I was seventeen, I enjoy a good--aka ridiculous--pickup line as much as the next girl. And I may have to start making "That is so Mastercard" a part of my regular, daily conversation (sorry, I can't divulge the hilarity of this; you'll just have to read the book. Don't worry, it won't be a hardship for you).
I do, however, have to confess I'm a little jealous of Michele Jaffe, because her book is so good and so funny and is, of course, published. I think my book is also good and funny, but I'm also, of course, biased, and when I read a book that is as well-done as "Bad Kitty," I find myself thinking, "Who is ever going to want to publish my books when someone like Michele Jaffe is already out there, doing it so well?"
These are the kind of moments that make the unpublished life pretty dark.
But this week a friend of mine told me something very inspiring. You might have heard it before, but she said "Don't doubt in the dark what you believed in the light." This is an extremely fantastic quote, and I've been repeating it to myself all week (it's been a pretty trying week in other ways, besides the whole unpublished thing, but that's a whole other can of worms). I just keep reminding myself that I'm just as good of a writer as other people who have been published; maybe better than some, definitely worse than others. And that "If you don't have the determination to go along with your talent, you're washed up." (This is another very excellent and inspiring quote, said by Jenna Blum, that I have posted on my wall near the desk that I write at. I call this wall my Writing Wall of Fame, even though there's nothing really famous on it. Just a lot of quotes and comics and cartoons about writing.) So I just need to suck it up and keep plugging away.
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Re: plugging away, I've spent the last few days combing through "Jeff Herman's Guide to Book Publishers, Editors, and Literary Agents" for agents who may be interested in "Gluteus" (which, in case you missed the post where I mentioned it, is the title of my book. Actually the full title is "Gluteus to the Minimus"). So the next step is to brush up my query and then send it out to the agents I hi-lited. And then it's nail biting time! Eek!
Now, before I sign off, I have one more thing to say: Many thanks to Mimi, who has posted the one and only comment on this blog so far. Mimi, you rock! Here's a little something just for you--enjoy!
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Marble Cake = Happy Me
One of the things that I miss the most about gluten is marble cake. You can find decent GF mixes for chocolate cake. Yellow cake is yummy but I can live without it. Spice cake isn't really my thing (unless it has cream cheese frosting, but then I just tend to lick off the cream cheese frosting and ignore the spice cake part).
But marble cake! Chocolate and yellow combined, and it's so much fun to swirl them together. Every year for my birthday, I picked marble cake. Every year I begged my mom to let me swirl the batter around with a knife. And okay, another facet of my weird nature is that I will only eat one food at a time. I'm not a total freak--the food can be touching each other (although I prefer not get, say, spaghetti sauce on my green beans). But I'll eat all the spaghetti and THEN I'll eat my green beans. When I used to be able to eat black-and-white cookies, I ate all the chocolate parts first and then the vanilla. Unlike Jerry Seinfeld, to me the point was to keep the two flavors completely seperate. Oh, and those Pillsbury slice-and-bake cookies with the little holiday pictures in the middle? I think you know how I handled that: I ate all the plain cookie part so that I was left with just the little picture part, and then ate that last.
Oh yeah. I eat like a two-year-old.
But marble cake was the one exception to this rule. I never tried to keep chocolate and vanilla apart; I just loved the soft, yummy combo. It's true. I allowed the two flavors to comingle on my taste buds, and I LOVED it.
Alas, I have been bereft of this singular beauty since I was diagnosed with celiac. Until today!
I recently got a cookbook from the library called "The Everything Chocolate Cookbook." Being, of course, a chocolate lover, I immediately had to get the book. Especially considering that it included a recipe for chocolate chip cheesecake (which needs its own post, so I won't go into that lovliness here). Anyway, lo and behold, in the cake section, they had a recipe for . . . drumroll . . . marble cake!! Woohoo!!! And it's pretty simple; I don't know why I didn't just think of making a chocolate cake and a yellow cake and then swirling the batters together. But whatever, I was totally jazzed to try out the recipe.
Until I saw that it called for cake flour.
Now, gluten free flour I can handle. I have a flour recipe that you can pretty much exchange for regular flour anywhere you want. But cake flour? What the heck was cake flour and was there a GF alternative?
This is where Google comes in. I found a page explaining cake flour here, and voila, I could make my own.
I made the cake this afternoon, and let me tell you, this elusive cake flour seems to be the key to GF baking. Moist, light, and fluffy, the finished product had absolutely none of the heaviness and grainy texture that all my from-scratch bakery has had up til now. It's amazing! Even my mom, who is not gluten-free, said that it tasted like real cake. High praise, my friends, because my mom generally hates everything I bake unless it's from a mix (she says she likes the stuff, but you can totally tell from her eyes that she's just humoring me and really can't wait to go wash her mouth out with Listerine).
Anyway, I had to change the original recipe a little. It didn't call for any milk and the batter definitely wasn't liquid-y enough, so I added some. And I added that other magic GF ingredient: xanthum gum.
I also had a ton of chocolate batter left over, and so I made some chocolate cupcakes (I owe this brilliant suggestion to my mother, who may humor me when she tastes things but always comes to my rescue when I inevitably freak out over some small mistake). Those came out of the oven already and like I said, taste normal. The cake just came out of the oven and so was too hot to taste test, but it looks just like the cupcakes (except, you know, swirly with vanilla), and so I'm expecting a truly yummylicious taste.
One of the cupcakes, hilariously, looked like it had a little mouth on top, so I walked around making it talk to everyone. I took a video of it for you, but sadly am having trouble uploading it. Apparently my computer hates my camera. I'll try to have it for my next post
So here's the recipe. Happy baking!
GLUTEN FREE MARBLE CAKE, adapted from The Everything Chocolate Cookbook
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
chocolate cake dry ingredients:
3/4 cup gluten free flour plus 2 T corn starch
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/16 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon xanthum gum
1/4 cup nonalkaline cocoa powder
Sift all ingredients together. Set aside.
yellow cake dry ingredients:
3/4 cup gluten free flour plus 2 T corn starch
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/16 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon xanthum gum
Sift all ingredients together. Set aside.
liquid ingredients:
1 stick butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (make sure it's GF!)
3 eggs, warmed to room temperature
2 cups milk
Using an electric mixer on medium speed, cream together the butter and the sugar. Add the vanilla. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating until thoroughly blended.
Divide the egg batter into two equal parts. Fold the yellow cake mixture into one and the chocolate cake mixture into the other.
Grease and flour an 8x8 square pan or a 9" round pan. Pour one of the batters into the pan. Carefully place spoonfuls of the other flavor on top of the first, in equal increments. Gently swirl the batters together using the tip of a knife.
Bake for 30-40 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted in the center of the cake. For cupcakes, set oven temperature to 375 degrees F and bake for 15 minutes.
Frost and enjoy!
But marble cake! Chocolate and yellow combined, and it's so much fun to swirl them together. Every year for my birthday, I picked marble cake. Every year I begged my mom to let me swirl the batter around with a knife. And okay, another facet of my weird nature is that I will only eat one food at a time. I'm not a total freak--the food can be touching each other (although I prefer not get, say, spaghetti sauce on my green beans). But I'll eat all the spaghetti and THEN I'll eat my green beans. When I used to be able to eat black-and-white cookies, I ate all the chocolate parts first and then the vanilla. Unlike Jerry Seinfeld, to me the point was to keep the two flavors completely seperate. Oh, and those Pillsbury slice-and-bake cookies with the little holiday pictures in the middle? I think you know how I handled that: I ate all the plain cookie part so that I was left with just the little picture part, and then ate that last.
Oh yeah. I eat like a two-year-old.
But marble cake was the one exception to this rule. I never tried to keep chocolate and vanilla apart; I just loved the soft, yummy combo. It's true. I allowed the two flavors to comingle on my taste buds, and I LOVED it.
Alas, I have been bereft of this singular beauty since I was diagnosed with celiac. Until today!
I recently got a cookbook from the library called "The Everything Chocolate Cookbook." Being, of course, a chocolate lover, I immediately had to get the book. Especially considering that it included a recipe for chocolate chip cheesecake (which needs its own post, so I won't go into that lovliness here). Anyway, lo and behold, in the cake section, they had a recipe for . . . drumroll . . . marble cake!! Woohoo!!! And it's pretty simple; I don't know why I didn't just think of making a chocolate cake and a yellow cake and then swirling the batters together. But whatever, I was totally jazzed to try out the recipe.
Until I saw that it called for cake flour.
Now, gluten free flour I can handle. I have a flour recipe that you can pretty much exchange for regular flour anywhere you want. But cake flour? What the heck was cake flour and was there a GF alternative?
This is where Google comes in. I found a page explaining cake flour here, and voila, I could make my own.
I made the cake this afternoon, and let me tell you, this elusive cake flour seems to be the key to GF baking. Moist, light, and fluffy, the finished product had absolutely none of the heaviness and grainy texture that all my from-scratch bakery has had up til now. It's amazing! Even my mom, who is not gluten-free, said that it tasted like real cake. High praise, my friends, because my mom generally hates everything I bake unless it's from a mix (she says she likes the stuff, but you can totally tell from her eyes that she's just humoring me and really can't wait to go wash her mouth out with Listerine).
Anyway, I had to change the original recipe a little. It didn't call for any milk and the batter definitely wasn't liquid-y enough, so I added some. And I added that other magic GF ingredient: xanthum gum.
I also had a ton of chocolate batter left over, and so I made some chocolate cupcakes (I owe this brilliant suggestion to my mother, who may humor me when she tastes things but always comes to my rescue when I inevitably freak out over some small mistake). Those came out of the oven already and like I said, taste normal. The cake just came out of the oven and so was too hot to taste test, but it looks just like the cupcakes (except, you know, swirly with vanilla), and so I'm expecting a truly yummylicious taste.
One of the cupcakes, hilariously, looked like it had a little mouth on top, so I walked around making it talk to everyone. I took a video of it for you, but sadly am having trouble uploading it. Apparently my computer hates my camera. I'll try to have it for my next post
So here's the recipe. Happy baking!
GLUTEN FREE MARBLE CAKE, adapted from The Everything Chocolate Cookbook
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
chocolate cake dry ingredients:
3/4 cup gluten free flour plus 2 T corn starch
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/16 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon xanthum gum
1/4 cup nonalkaline cocoa powder
Sift all ingredients together. Set aside.
yellow cake dry ingredients:
3/4 cup gluten free flour plus 2 T corn starch
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/16 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon xanthum gum
Sift all ingredients together. Set aside.
liquid ingredients:
1 stick butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (make sure it's GF!)
3 eggs, warmed to room temperature
2 cups milk
Using an electric mixer on medium speed, cream together the butter and the sugar. Add the vanilla. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating until thoroughly blended.
Divide the egg batter into two equal parts. Fold the yellow cake mixture into one and the chocolate cake mixture into the other.
Grease and flour an 8x8 square pan or a 9" round pan. Pour one of the batters into the pan. Carefully place spoonfuls of the other flavor on top of the first, in equal increments. Gently swirl the batters together using the tip of a knife.
Bake for 30-40 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted in the center of the cake. For cupcakes, set oven temperature to 375 degrees F and bake for 15 minutes.
Frost and enjoy!
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