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!

My Left Foot and a Pancake Update

Before I get to the Pancake Update, first I have to show you this hilarity.

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!

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.

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).

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:

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! :)

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.

my Writing Wall of Fame


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!

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!

hello from an uber-dork

So here's the deal. In order to understand the things I say in this blog, you have to understand something about me: I am a huge dork. And not just a dork about one thing. I contain multitudes and multitudes of dorkness. I am an uber-dork. Let me count the ways:

I'm an English dork. I recently graduated college with a BA in literature, and am starting a Master's program in the fall, also in literature. This leads to me often quoting bizarre selections from books that no one else understands and that I therefore have to explain. For example, two things I said in the above paragraph are quotations. "I contain multitudes" comes from a Walt Whitman poem (I kind of hate Walt Whitman, but it's still a good quote). And "let me count the ways" comes from an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem (who I love, for reasons I'll explain later). Also, a young, single guy recently moved in across the street from my parents' house. When my mother informed me of this, along with a sly wink and elbow-poke, I responded by quoting the beginning of my all-time favorite book, Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife." (see the sidebar to answer a poll about the movie versions of P&P)

Thank God that my best friend, who I'll call MA (like, M.A., not ma), is similarly dork-like in her love of Jane Austen, literature, and the Celtic lands, because otherwise I would be a very lonely person.

Yes, I also love the Celtic lands. The Celtic lands are Ireland, Scotland, and Wales (which is in England, as in Prince of). Scotland is my favorite. I love Scotland with a deep, abiding passion, and if I ever get my butt over there I swear I will kiss the tarmac. MA recently found a singer named Loreena McKennitt, who puts old poems to music. The two of us pretty much jumped up and down and screamed in delight because she did the poem "The Lady of Shallott" (Anne of Green Gables fans, let me hear you scream too!). I have now listened to the song so many times that my CD player is wilting from over-use.

Uber-dork.

I am also a food dork. By this I do not, by any means, want to imply that I am a gourmet chef or anything like that. In fact, I pretty much suck, cooking wise. However, as the name of this blog says, I am gluten-free. If you've never heard of gluten, let me quickly explain. It's a protein in wheat, barley, and rye. I have celiac disease, which is an autoimmune disorder. That basically means that my body attacks itself whenever I eat gluten. In your small intestine, there are all these kind of finger-like things (gross, I know) that wave around and pull all the nutrients from food as it passes through. Gluten makes the finger-things (called villi) squish flat, so that food passes through without ever getting its nutrients pulled out. So basically, I eat, but I don't get any benefit from it. Once thought to be extremely rare, 1 out of 100 people are now estimated to have celiac disease, but most of them don't know it. It can be diagnosed by a blood test or an endoscopy (like a colonoscopy, but down your throat--gross, I know).

So anyway, long story short, I can't eat anything with flour in it, and lots of other things that don't have flour in them but do have things like barley malt or modified wheat starch or whatever.

This means that when I go out to eat or go grocery shopping, I tend to act like Meg Ryan in the movie When Harry Met Sally. This is an analogy a lot of gluten-free people use, because sadly, it's true.

Uber-dork. Thankfully my friends and family don't blush too much when we go out to eat.

I am, however, moving into an apartment for the first time, because of the whole going-to-grad school thing. I'm pretty stoked about this because despite the fact that my kitchen barely has room to turn around in, it's freaking adorable, and I'm hoping to teach myself to cook. I know, I know, a graduate program is a lot of work and a lot of studying and paper writing. But I think that on weekends I'll have enough time to practice cooking. I have been inspired to learn how to cook by one person: Shauna James Ahern, aka the Gluten-Free Girl. Her blog is AMAZING and I am completely addicted to it. Not only are her posts funny and eloquent and mouth-watering, but she creates and posts all kinds of delectable gluten-free recipes. I've tried cooking on my own, trying to adapt regular recipes to be gluten-free, with moderate success. But these recipes I can make without having to adapt! Woot! I am so excited to try all these recipes that I actually printed them all out and put them in a pretty pink binder with little tabbies to seperate the different sections (I also decorated the section, like this one below:

Again, uber-dork! But hey, at least I have fun, right?)

Anyway, I am also addicted to the blog of Meg Cabot (author of the Princess Diaries books). She is hilarious, and as I am writing my own young adult book series, a huge inspiration to me. In a bizarre twist of fate, she was also recently diagnosed with celiac disease!!! What the heck, right? I love it!

This YA series of mine is one of the main reasons I decided to start blogging. It's about a girl going off to college for the first time, whose name is Felicity (this makes the title of my blog a play on words: her name, plus the word felicity, which means "happiness." Again, consult Pride and Prejudice). She's overweight, a Mathlete, and always sick. During the course of the first book, which is called "Gluteus to the Minimus," she is diagnosed with, of course celiac disease. I realize I'm biased and everything, but I think the book is hilarious. Right now I'm sending it out to agents, trying to get it published, and also working on the next book in the series. So, needless to say, none of my family/friends are working on books that they're trying to get published (don't forget, I am the uber-dork). I need a place to vent, to record my trials and tribulations and highs and lows. Hence this blog.

Of course, I'll also be venting/sharing about my burgeoning cooking skills (if they do, in fact, burgeon), what Felicity is up to, if I hear from any agents, how the big move is going, restaurant reactions to my gluten-freeness (which can range from wonderfully caring to hilariously mean), and how much of my hair I'm pulling out due to the insane workload of graduate school.

One last facet of my uber-dorkness. I said before that I love Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I love her because she's just like me. See, Elizabeth had all kinds of health problems. She was pretty much bed-ridden, she was so ill, but she still wrote beautiful poetry from bed and became famous. I, too, am sick a lot. Not just the whole celiac thing; I also have asthma and wicked allergies for which I have to get shots. If it weren't for modern medicine, I would totally be bed-ridden just like Elizabeth. She probably just had asthma and/or allergies, just like me, but because she couldn't get treatment for them she was near death for a huge portion of her life. I'm just lucky I was born in the twentieth century.

Elizabeth had something I didn't, though: her father was way psycho, and didn't want her to have any kind of social life outside their house. She wasn't allowed to meet anyone and couldn't go anywhere, even when she did feel up to it.

She also had a happy ending. Robert Browning, who was also a famous poet, read her poetry and fell in love with her. They started exchanging secret letters, and she fell in love with him, too. They arranged to elope, and he helped her escape from her father's house. They ran away to Italy and married, where the warm air (much better than damp, cold England's), made her lungs better, and she led a full, happy, active life. She and Robert even had a baby.

I love stories like this. Shauna, the Gluten-Free Girl, has a fantastic love story as well (you can read about it here, and there's an extra-beautiful part to the story in the epilogue of her book, which is also called Gluten Free Girl. Read them both immediately and you'll find yourself curling your toes and cooing in delight). I love real life love stories. Everyone always says that the idea of "the one" or "true love" is a stupid myth, or whatever, but it's not. Stories like this are proof positive and are encouragement to all of us singles not to waste our time on a bunch of losers. If it's not right, don't try to fool yourself into believing it is. Otherwise you might be so busy fooling yourself that you miss the real thing when it comes! So hold on, fellows. The real thing is worth waiting for.

So anyway, yay to Shauna and yay to Elizabeth for being strong, independent women who were also uber-dorks (one a literary giant and one a great writer AND amazing cook), who also found true love. May we all take a page from their books!