Outrage

I saw today that the Emmy nominations are out. And can I just say . . .

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?

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.

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.

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.