We've been sewing like madwomen for days~ more results coming up!
Friday, August 28, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Big, Fat, Brown Sugar Disasters
Brown Sugar Muffins:
Sounds good, doesn't it? Tuesday morning my cousin Cami and I woke up already salivating for these delectable morsels of sugar-rushing starch.
Cami took care of most of the not-flour part. Soda, butter, egg (catch that shell), vanilla, salt, milk and grimace at an entire cup of brown sugar. Then she handed me the bowl for my magical gluten-free replacement skills.
Yeah, sure.
I substituted about a half cup of tapioca starch, three fourths of a cup of sorghum flour, some corn starch, a tiny bit of potato flour and of course xanthum gum for the two cups of flour. Then I dumbly handed the bowl back to Cami to stir.
I said NOTHING about "make sure they're thick enough before you put them in," or "the consistency of GF muffins should be the same as gluten muffins." Oh, the pain that we could have avoided!
So Cami fills the muffin tins to the brim with too liquidy-muffin liquid, I turn on the oven, and she pops them in. They look great for a few minutes...
Until...
They bubbled up and over the sides, then (somehow?!) sank in the middle of each muffin. The result was a delicious but DENSE and GOOEY inch of brown-sugar mixture in each muffin tin and a burned crust on the top of the pan. We ate what we could,
then gave up and made eggs.
Oops. Oh well, we were about due for a disaster.
.
Sounds good, doesn't it? Tuesday morning my cousin Cami and I woke up already salivating for these delectable morsels of sugar-rushing starch.
Cami took care of most of the not-flour part. Soda, butter, egg (catch that shell), vanilla, salt, milk and grimace at an entire cup of brown sugar. Then she handed me the bowl for my magical gluten-free replacement skills.
Yeah, sure.
I substituted about a half cup of tapioca starch, three fourths of a cup of sorghum flour, some corn starch, a tiny bit of potato flour and of course xanthum gum for the two cups of flour. Then I dumbly handed the bowl back to Cami to stir.
I said NOTHING about "make sure they're thick enough before you put them in," or "the consistency of GF muffins should be the same as gluten muffins." Oh, the pain that we could have avoided!
So Cami fills the muffin tins to the brim with too liquidy-muffin liquid, I turn on the oven, and she pops them in. They look great for a few minutes...
Until...
They bubbled up and over the sides, then (somehow?!) sank in the middle of each muffin. The result was a delicious but DENSE and GOOEY inch of brown-sugar mixture in each muffin tin and a burned crust on the top of the pan. We ate what we could,
then gave up and made eggs.Oops. Oh well, we were about due for a disaster.
.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Betty Crocker Brownie Mix Possibilities
Gluten Free Chocolate Chip Berry Brownie Cream Cheese Deluxe Torte!
Best-Bet-Intructions:
Betty Crocker brownie mix
8 oz cream cheese
some eggs
some oil
some vanilla
some milk
some sugar
some chocolate chips
some raspberries
some nuts
some flexibility, courage and 3 AM giddiness
Make the brownie mix.
Beat an egg and mix it with sugar, milk, vanilla and the cream cheese.
Put those together in a 9 by 13 pan.
Add whatever else your little heart desires / your cousins throw in without your knowledge.
Cook it for about half an hour.
.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
BETTY CROCKER GLUTEN FREE?!?!
Ahhhhh! SO exciting: Betty Crocker cake/brownies/cookie mixes that are totally, completely GF!
GF girls beware: it is coming to the point when a GF cake made by an admirer is NOT a reason to marry him! It's becoming, dare I say it, EASY!
But still about 5 times more expensive than a normal cake mix, so maybe there IS still some significance within GF baked goods...
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Hem, Hem: A Literary Essay about, You Guessed It... FOOD
Forgotten Fruit
The falling fruits,
Through the still night, forsake the parent-bough,
That, in the first grey glances of the dawn,
Looks wild, and wonders at the wintry waste.
–James Thompson
It was on a recent ward temple trip that I realized that no species of food has lately been so much multiplied as the extent of pizza restaurants. Once again, the committee for the planning and accomplishment of activities forwent the possible intricacies and new delights of an extended taste pallet, instead choosing the always-safe marinara reds, limp greens and crusty browns of an always appreciated, never novel restaurant choice. Again, our limited perspective was reinforced by the mores of ease.
The college experience is an Eden of forgotten fruit. Sustenance, sleep, studying and socializing are the four necessities at college, but it is widely believed that the industrious scholar can only really focus on two or three of these objectives at a time. Nourishment’s nutrition and diversity are the first martyrs to the college cause—not only is it more time consuming to plan and create healthy meals, it’s also considered more expensive. As students count pennies and minutes, cheap chow and mindless meals are first endured, then pitied, then embraced.
Oft times, a student’s only contact with the sweet flesh of an earth-grown item is through the straw of a Jamba Juice cup. Even Emerson had a passing relationship with the vegetable, however odd (it nods to me, and I nod to them??). Though unexcited eaters are perhaps not aware of their denial of the body’s relationship with the intellect, the consequences are fixed: both mental and spiritual capacity to create and invent are crippled by a dull diet.
What good are the mental powers given man if our senses are degraded to the point at which we cannot tell Splenda from the healing dew of honey? Ease, price, the quickness of preparation—each specter with a pleasant face denies poor students the joys of taste and the rapture of real food. Months of Easy Ramen, burnt eggs and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on store-bought bread do more than bore the body senseless; they stunt the common college student’s taste buds from a spring of growth to lifeless winter. Ah, smooth is the descent and easy the way to a damnation of taste’s progression!
What hope have we to awake slumbering students from their sleep of snacking sameness? What chance can we cherish to save students from their troubles of tide-me-over tedium? What actions must we take to alert and divert these wanderers from their paths of repetitive rations, minute-meals and green-less groceries?
Few who chew comfortably on their Hamburger Helper think what others undergo who have perhaps been as tenderly educated and have as acute sensations as themselves—but who are incapable of enjoying the same easy pleasures because of allergies, sensitivities or other disruptions of the digestive system. Could it be that these seemingly cursed consumers are blessed with the teachings of the school of experience—an institution which teaches by first exposing the student to everything they do not know?
A knowledge of good food must be bought dear by knowing ill baked goods. Only when we have experienced the absolute dark can we begin to recognize day again—and to appreciate the intricacies of light instead of stumbling around, blinded, in a bright haze of tasteless and empty foodstuffs. Desperation is the mother of all experimentation and nutritional expansion, for really, what well-fed fellow would ever look at a cow and decide to drink whatever came from …it?
For this reason, my tongue may envy the Ho-Ho thoughtlessly sucked down by some oblivious passerby, but my intellect is untouched. Though seemingly innocent Little Debby’s baked confections bestow delicious sugar rushes and delights to the purchasing student, the ease of acquisition cheapens the joy acquired from negotiations with this she-devil—and as Faustus warns, she shows herself to certainly be a hot ho (ho).
Ah, but we may well say that all the schools of cuisine are already catalogued carefully into numberless cookbooks and food magazines; nothing remains to be learned about the subject. So quothe the followers of Ptolemy and the priests before Martin Luther or Joseph Smith—the heavens are still open!
Menus are not dead. They live and change under the hands of those who would dare to experience their pages. Those who have much leisure to cook will always be enlarging the stock of recipes. Creativity surely has its costs: predictability, comfort, ease, even reason, logic, sanity and previous epistemologies—but the price is worth the product, and, more crucially, is much less than the cost of inaction.
Milton’s blossoming ambrosial fruit surely pales in comparison with my fresh banana pancakes—a product of invention, desperation, need, creativity, time and the willingness to laugh in the face of danger.
Repeated experiences may be the stuff that creates wisdom, but new experiences give new knowledge—which, when allowed to develop and evolve, becomes wisdom. Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it. As a newly politically correct Cookie Monster rapped in the nineties, “Me promise that when you eat varied menu, you get more out of every meal— You need balanced diet, come on and try it, not believe how great you'll feel! Word up.”
The falling fruits,
Through the still night, forsake the parent-bough,
That, in the first grey glances of the dawn,
Looks wild, and wonders at the wintry waste.
–James Thompson
It was on a recent ward temple trip that I realized that no species of food has lately been so much multiplied as the extent of pizza restaurants. Once again, the committee for the planning and accomplishment of activities forwent the possible intricacies and new delights of an extended taste pallet, instead choosing the always-safe marinara reds, limp greens and crusty browns of an always appreciated, never novel restaurant choice. Again, our limited perspective was reinforced by the mores of ease.
The college experience is an Eden of forgotten fruit. Sustenance, sleep, studying and socializing are the four necessities at college, but it is widely believed that the industrious scholar can only really focus on two or three of these objectives at a time. Nourishment’s nutrition and diversity are the first martyrs to the college cause—not only is it more time consuming to plan and create healthy meals, it’s also considered more expensive. As students count pennies and minutes, cheap chow and mindless meals are first endured, then pitied, then embraced.
Oft times, a student’s only contact with the sweet flesh of an earth-grown item is through the straw of a Jamba Juice cup. Even Emerson had a passing relationship with the vegetable, however odd (it nods to me, and I nod to them??). Though unexcited eaters are perhaps not aware of their denial of the body’s relationship with the intellect, the consequences are fixed: both mental and spiritual capacity to create and invent are crippled by a dull diet.
What good are the mental powers given man if our senses are degraded to the point at which we cannot tell Splenda from the healing dew of honey? Ease, price, the quickness of preparation—each specter with a pleasant face denies poor students the joys of taste and the rapture of real food. Months of Easy Ramen, burnt eggs and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on store-bought bread do more than bore the body senseless; they stunt the common college student’s taste buds from a spring of growth to lifeless winter. Ah, smooth is the descent and easy the way to a damnation of taste’s progression!
What hope have we to awake slumbering students from their sleep of snacking sameness? What chance can we cherish to save students from their troubles of tide-me-over tedium? What actions must we take to alert and divert these wanderers from their paths of repetitive rations, minute-meals and green-less groceries?
Few who chew comfortably on their Hamburger Helper think what others undergo who have perhaps been as tenderly educated and have as acute sensations as themselves—but who are incapable of enjoying the same easy pleasures because of allergies, sensitivities or other disruptions of the digestive system. Could it be that these seemingly cursed consumers are blessed with the teachings of the school of experience—an institution which teaches by first exposing the student to everything they do not know?
A knowledge of good food must be bought dear by knowing ill baked goods. Only when we have experienced the absolute dark can we begin to recognize day again—and to appreciate the intricacies of light instead of stumbling around, blinded, in a bright haze of tasteless and empty foodstuffs. Desperation is the mother of all experimentation and nutritional expansion, for really, what well-fed fellow would ever look at a cow and decide to drink whatever came from …it?
For this reason, my tongue may envy the Ho-Ho thoughtlessly sucked down by some oblivious passerby, but my intellect is untouched. Though seemingly innocent Little Debby’s baked confections bestow delicious sugar rushes and delights to the purchasing student, the ease of acquisition cheapens the joy acquired from negotiations with this she-devil—and as Faustus warns, she shows herself to certainly be a hot ho (ho).
Ah, but we may well say that all the schools of cuisine are already catalogued carefully into numberless cookbooks and food magazines; nothing remains to be learned about the subject. So quothe the followers of Ptolemy and the priests before Martin Luther or Joseph Smith—the heavens are still open!
Menus are not dead. They live and change under the hands of those who would dare to experience their pages. Those who have much leisure to cook will always be enlarging the stock of recipes. Creativity surely has its costs: predictability, comfort, ease, even reason, logic, sanity and previous epistemologies—but the price is worth the product, and, more crucially, is much less than the cost of inaction.
Milton’s blossoming ambrosial fruit surely pales in comparison with my fresh banana pancakes—a product of invention, desperation, need, creativity, time and the willingness to laugh in the face of danger.
Repeated experiences may be the stuff that creates wisdom, but new experiences give new knowledge—which, when allowed to develop and evolve, becomes wisdom. Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it. As a newly politically correct Cookie Monster rapped in the nineties, “Me promise that when you eat varied menu, you get more out of every meal— You need balanced diet, come on and try it, not believe how great you'll feel! Word up.”
Monday, May 25, 2009
Restaurant in Provo!
Los Hermanos has a DELECTABLE gluten-free menu!
Their rice and beans have wheat in them, but they'll make you different beans in a jiffy and hold the rice without blinking.
It's on Center Street in Provo. YUM.
Their rice and beans have wheat in them, but they'll make you different beans in a jiffy and hold the rice without blinking.
It's on Center Street in Provo. YUM.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Bike Trails
Do you ever feel like life is maybe a little too cushy?
You've been slouching around in your pajamas all day... snacking on leftover cheese sticks and the remains at the bottom of potato chip bags... the basement is so dark, you think you're losing your eyesight... you can't find your left slipper... you've watched three hours of homestarrunner.com straight... your milk's gone bad...
What to do?!
BIKE TO THE GROCERY STORE! Duh.
I was feeling a little disgusted at my inactivity last Saturday. The weather was just perfect--cool, humid, windy and beautiful, and I stared out the window in self-disgusted disgust at myself (?).
"Jennnn!!" I whined, "What am I going to DO tonight? I feel so boring!"
"I don't know," Jenn replied patiently.
Ah hah! I had just brought my bike, Henry, down to Provo. PERFECT!
I decided to bike to Buy Low and purchase cheap and healthy produce--despite my lack of bike clothes, a map, previous biking-in-traffic experience, or even a helmet.
Whatever! It would be a great wake-me-up! I put on my shorts, grabbed my wallet, and ran outside... where it was now sprinkling.
No matter! I just grabbed my highlighter-yellow hoodie ("This will keep me safe from cars!" I hollered to Jenn, who tried to care) and headed back out!
"Bye, Jenn, I'm going to go have an adventure!"
"Ok, Dia..."
My bike seat was already wet, and the pedals were a little slippery. My running-on-stupidity brain didn't care--this will be fun! The rain started really, well, raining after about a block. I threw my hood on and kept on a-riding, as the internal dialogue (well... "internal" as in, I was talking to Henry) began in earnest.
"Ummm...
This way?
...
Sure! I'm pretty sure it's in this general direction; I'm sure I can get there just fine."
"Hey, Henry? Do you think the rain is getting harder?"
"And colder?"
I was passing the duck pond and the rain was now, at least by Utahn standards, "pouring."
It's an interesting feeling, really, the sting of rain droplets on your hands and face as your feet keep slipping off the pedals and your brakes start squeeling on wet tires.
"This is kind of fun!"
I'd made it about six blocks when my brain finally kicked in.
DIA. THIS IS STUPID.
"Henry, did you hear that?"
Unfortunately it took four more blocks before I started to listen.
DIA. THIS IS STUPID. GO HOME.
"....
Uhhh, Henry? I know you're excited and everything, but, I'm thinking we should maybe turn around. I don't have a helmet on. Annnddd... I don't know where we're going. Or... where we are. And it's really cold. And wet."
Henry complained, but we turned around and made it back to the house in record time. I drove the car to Buy Low like a sane person, and got back into the now-deserved sweats when I finally got home.
"Sometimes you just gotta live a little, Jenn," I reminded her, sipping hot cocoa and searching for my left slipper.
"Sure, Dia."
You've been slouching around in your pajamas all day... snacking on leftover cheese sticks and the remains at the bottom of potato chip bags... the basement is so dark, you think you're losing your eyesight... you can't find your left slipper... you've watched three hours of homestarrunner.com straight... your milk's gone bad...
What to do?!
BIKE TO THE GROCERY STORE! Duh.
I was feeling a little disgusted at my inactivity last Saturday. The weather was just perfect--cool, humid, windy and beautiful, and I stared out the window in self-disgusted disgust at myself (?).
"Jennnn!!" I whined, "What am I going to DO tonight? I feel so boring!"
"I don't know," Jenn replied patiently.
Ah hah! I had just brought my bike, Henry, down to Provo. PERFECT!
I decided to bike to Buy Low and purchase cheap and healthy produce--despite my lack of bike clothes, a map, previous biking-in-traffic experience, or even a helmet.
Whatever! It would be a great wake-me-up! I put on my shorts, grabbed my wallet, and ran outside... where it was now sprinkling.
No matter! I just grabbed my highlighter-yellow hoodie ("This will keep me safe from cars!" I hollered to Jenn, who tried to care) and headed back out!
"Bye, Jenn, I'm going to go have an adventure!"
"Ok, Dia..."
My bike seat was already wet, and the pedals were a little slippery. My running-on-stupidity brain didn't care--this will be fun! The rain started really, well, raining after about a block. I threw my hood on and kept on a-riding, as the internal dialogue (well... "internal" as in, I was talking to Henry) began in earnest.
"Ummm...
This way?
...
Sure! I'm pretty sure it's in this general direction; I'm sure I can get there just fine."
"Hey, Henry? Do you think the rain is getting harder?"
"And colder?"
I was passing the duck pond and the rain was now, at least by Utahn standards, "pouring."
It's an interesting feeling, really, the sting of rain droplets on your hands and face as your feet keep slipping off the pedals and your brakes start squeeling on wet tires.
"This is kind of fun!"
I'd made it about six blocks when my brain finally kicked in.
DIA. THIS IS STUPID.
"Henry, did you hear that?"
Unfortunately it took four more blocks before I started to listen.
DIA. THIS IS STUPID. GO HOME.
"....
Uhhh, Henry? I know you're excited and everything, but, I'm thinking we should maybe turn around. I don't have a helmet on. Annnddd... I don't know where we're going. Or... where we are. And it's really cold. And wet."
Henry complained, but we turned around and made it back to the house in record time. I drove the car to Buy Low like a sane person, and got back into the now-deserved sweats when I finally got home.
"Sometimes you just gotta live a little, Jenn," I reminded her, sipping hot cocoa and searching for my left slipper.
"Sure, Dia."
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
That Kind of Mom
" Losing one's mother would be like losing the sun" --Life of Pi
"My tummy feels funny, Mom. I'm hungry,"
I declared to a too-busy mother from the comfort of the front passenger seat. Ian was still too little to sit here, in the regal, glorified throne of antiquity from which this majestic six-year old could command armies, direct trade routes, and roll the window ALL the way down.
However, the view from the heavens contrasted a little too sharply with the usual expanse of blue-ish polyester that usually met my eyes, and all the reveling over my kingdom made me feel… besieged. Mom could empathize, as she had two minutes to get two kids to two lessons and felt a little too frantic to listen to me.
She made time to grab Cheetos at Wal-Mart. When combined with the Spaghettios we had hurriedly eaten for lunch, the chester-cheetah-emblazoned treats were a history-making carte de jour. Such treasures were unheard of in a realm where sugared cereal was outlawed and decrees like “if it didn’t come from the garden, it better be toilet paper” dealt almighty justice. The “if it rhymes with no, then guess what? NO” edict absolutely banned such treats from our menu, but today mom was just too busy. Now this, I thought whilst sucking orange fingers atop my blue-polyester perch, is paradise.
The Cheetos were scarcely chomped, however, when the bourgeoisie of my stomach decided to revolt. “I don’t feel very good” escaped my lips right before the amber remains of my dear spaggecheetos. I stared at the mess dripping from the front dash and—typical of ruling elite—started bawling. “How am I going to clean this up?” the sore-tummied child wailed—for I knew that if you did nothing else in life, you cleaned up your own mess.
“That’s what Moms are for, sweetheart”.
A dozen years later, I’m all grown up. Now I sit in the driver’s seat, I find my own food, I clean up my own messes. I’m responsible for myself! I’m going to college, I can’t have MOM coddling and babying and feeding me from 2000 miles away!
And yet, at the end of senior year I found myself bawling on my bathroom floor with a doozy of a tummy ache. This is what you want, right Dia? Independence, I think to myself just a little tiny bit sarcastically. Woot.
Right on cue, Mommy’s knock and a tray of thermometers and love came to my bathroom door.
“This is what Moms are for.”
This story isn’t finished, because I still need her. Whether she’s around or not, her lesson will always stick with me. Mom’s are for loving even if you’re messy or smelly or ugly or alone. They’re for giving all they have, all the life they have to give and then watching it walk away, telling them that they can make it on their own now, thanks. They love all the same, that’s what moms are for.
So please don’t make fun when I tell you my plans after college. Sure, I’ve always wanted to be a princess and a firefighter and a surgeon and an architect. But when I’m finished pretending, I want to do the hardest thing of all.
I want to be that kind of mom.
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