Obviously, the best way to make the most of these last few days of summer is to leave work early on a beautiful 85 degree day, make a pitcher of lemon drops, slather on some sunblock and sit on your patio in your bra (What? It actually covers more than my swimsuit top does, incidentally.) and sunglasses reading a book.

Hence, A Recipe for the End of Summer: The Lemon Drop

The first thing you need for a fresh Lemon Drop is real lemons. I only make this recipe when I have big attractive lemons from my parents house in California, about 5 or 6. From my experience, that will give you approximately a cup of lemon juice which I squeeze directly into my quart sized measuring cup to facilitate easy and precise mixology. The ratio for this drink is 2:2:1 lemon juice, vodka and triple sec, then sugar to taste. Ergo, one cup of lemon juice means a cup of vodka and half a cup triple sec. Add the sugar about a quarter cup at a time, stirring thoroughly and tasting after each addition, remembering that you will be drinking out of a sugared glass, so you want the drink to be slightly tart still. When you've reached desirable sweetness, rim your glass by pouring sugar onto a coffee saucer, moistening the edge of your glass and placing it firmly into the sugar. My favorite way to drink these are out of a pint glass over several cubes of ice.

Additionally, with August 2008 rapidly approaching its close, I feel like I can definitively state my most recent 5 Years of Summer Jams.

2004: Ratatat - Seventeen Years

2005: Gorillaz - Dare

2006: Lily Allen - Smile

2007: Justice - D.A.N.C.E.

2008: Little Jackie - The World Should Revolve Around Me

Times when I spit water all over myself and it is clear to those around me that I am not getting anything accomplished:



More at The Guardian.

I was pretending to be too cool, but watching the Blue Angels swoop and swerve from the 54th story deck of my office building was surprisingly impressive.

As of last night, I have officially suffered through an entire unbearable season of "How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria," the Canadian version. I still don't really understand why I stuck it out, other than the fact that I never cancelled the DVR recordings of the show, so every Sunday and Monday evening, without fail, new episodes would deposit themselves into my cable box, daring me to delete them just in case this was the week that the show became a worthwhile use of human energy. I know why I started watching the show; I love The Sound of Music. I am the kind of person who gleefully attends "The Singalong Sound of Music" every chance I get, and a reality show dedicated to singing the songs of my favorite Rogers and Hammerstein musical sounded like a great way to spend an hour every week. Unfortunately, this show was not a genius melding of the best parts of American Idol and musical theater. It was just a low-budget, vapidly stupid mess connected to the saga of the Von Trapps in only the very barest sense. Much like Season 4 of Project Runway, it was shockingly clear from the first episodes that one contestant was heads and shoulders above any of the others, and most of the season was devoted to maintaining the charade that Janna wasn't the best contestant when she obviously was. The only truly inspired performance in the entire series was when, on "Canada" week, Janna somehow and against all odds turned Nelly Furtado's "Turn Out The Lights" into this crazy, awesome call-and-response musical theater anthem. Other than that, it was shocking how tone-deaf and boring the other contestants were, how small and orange the judges and host were (see photo above), how utterly inept the entire sound, lighting and camera crews were, and mostly, how annoying and egomaniacal Andrew Lloyd Webber is. I had placed my faith so blindly in Canada and CBC, trusting them to show the world how to do a reality show singing competition right. Sadly, it looks like the unwashed masses in Canada rest around the same lowest common denominator as they do in the United States (I'm looking at you, Brooke Hogan!). And I guess that helps to explain how Little Mosque on the Prairie happened.

Savory Sausage Bread Pudding

Seeing as I love things that are starchy and eggy and substantial, bread pudding is a no brainer. Rice pudding, for that matter, is also a long-time favorite of mine. Both can be eaten with lots of cinnamon and are uniformly palatable anywhere along the hot to cold spectrum. I was introduced to the universe of a savory bread pudding by Heidi of 101 Cookbooks with her recipe for Asparagus Bread Pudding and have made it several times over the last year. I love Heidi's website, and I enjoy the way she talks about cooking and living in San Francisco, but it drives me slightly crazy that all the recipes she posts involve three or more ingredients that not only do I not keep stocked in my (fairly extensive!) pantry, but would require a trip to a specialty grocery store to acquire. It might be a personal shortcoming of mine that I don't have 6 different obscure colors of rice in my cupboard, but I just don't. Because of this, I've enjoyed every recipe I've pulled off her site and recreated at home, but I can count the number of times I've done so on one hand.

Bread Pudding is a good thing to make when you buy those delicious two loaves of crusty French Bread at Costco every single time you shop there, even though you know there's no way you can eat both of them before they go stale. I'm not great at learning from experience; I usually make it 2/3rds of the way through one loaf before the outside becomes rock hard. With over a loaf of bread to use up in a short period of time, Heidi's recipe came immediately to mind, but not only did I not have asparagus, but asparagus falls into the category of vegetables that my boyfriend will not eat. What I did have lying around however, was delicious homemade sausage from Idaho. A little clicking around the internets landed me on this recipe from Cooking Light which I used as a basis for my dish. The awesome thing about improvising off an already "lowfat" recipe is that instead of my standard substitutions (less oil and butter, low/nonfat milk instead of whole, etc.), I don't feel naughty adding more delicious things to the basic recipe. For example, in this recipe, I probably used two or three times as much cheese as I was directed to, but overall it was less than three cups, so whatever.

My Sausage Bread Pudding started by browning about a pound of amazing Idaho sausage in a pan over medium heat. I chopped one and a half Granny Smith apples into bitty pieces and added that and one chopped white onion to the sausage, covered the pan to keep all that good vegetable sweat in, and cooked that on low for 10 or 15 minutes until the onions were translucent. In a big ole mixing bowl I whisked together 2 cups of milk and 4 eggs, grated some cheddar cheese in there, and salted and peppered the wet ingredients. Carefully, with your serated knife, cube the stale bread into pieces about an inch to half inch square. With this bread, I found it was easier to slice the bread a half inch thick and just rip the slices in to little pieces. There's no need to make this part pretty or uniform. Throw your bread cubes into the wet ingredients, add your sausage mixture to the bowl and stir until everything is wet. I added some extra milk and one or two more eggs during this step, because you want all the bread to be moist. Let the mixture sit for at least 10 minutes, and pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Spray a 9x12 baking dish with Pam and dump in your yummy soggy concoction. Now is the fun part: I grated three different kinds of cheese on top. For some reason, I had a ton of cheese in the fridge last week, so I just went nuts. Cheddar, mozerella, and parmesan, all yummy and sprinkled on top of the pudding like a generous coat of freshly fallen snow. Cook on the center rack for 45 or 60 minutes until your pudding is fluffy and set and the cheese is bubbly and browned. Remove the pudding from the oven and let it rest for 15 minutes before serving.

I ate this plain for dinner the night I made it, but when I packed it in tuppers for lunch on the subsequent days, I put a good sized square of pudding and then stuffed the rest of the space with fresh spinach. Two minutes in the microwave to warm up the pudding is the exact right time to steam the spinach and get some extra iron and vitamins into your meal. Obviously, Cody's lunch portions did not include the extra vegetation, but he concurred that it was especially delicious the next day.

I'm learning that one of the things about loving books in a heartbursting way is coming to terms with the fact that there is no possible way I can read everything good and worthwhile being published, nor can I hope to ever consume the entire cannon of past amazingness. And that is ok and normal. Obviously, this is going to be especially important to keep in mind in September when I start grad school and will have to stop sleeping and possibly forgo casual pleasure reading altogether. The great news is that because I can't know everything in its immediacy, I will continue to discover "new" writers for the rest of my life, and each time I will sigh as I drop the completed novel and feel as if I am looking at the world in a slightly different and more complete way.

The newest author that I'm embarrassed I've only been reading for two months is Jhumpa Lahiri. My mom and I had the nicest drive back from Idaho in June listening to The Namesake on cassette tape in my little car. 369 miles from Cottonwood to Seattle only got us about halfway through the story so I rushed out to bookstore back in Seattle to pick up the novel and, oh my god, I loved it all so much. I don't know if I connected so fully with that book because the immigrant, ethnic experience in America makes me imagine what it must have been like for my Greek grandmother to move to Seattle in the 50's or if it is just because The Namesake is seriously that good. Shortly thereafter I devoured The Interpreter of Maladies, and have Unaccustomed Earth on my hold list at the library, but there are still 342 people in line in front of me, so I'm thinking I'll probably just break down and buy it.

This week I watched the film version of The Namesake, which I thought was pretty good. It's difficult to give an opinion of an adaptation of a book you love, because obviously the book is able to do so much more than the movie. You lament the places where nuance and backstory were sacrificed because it is entirely impossible to shoehorn all that into two hours, and yet you love the screenwriter and director for knowing how good this work of fiction is and desiring to give it a face. This book is so anecdotal and the sheer 30 year breadth is just so staggering that the entire time I was watching the film I was wondering if anyone who hadn't read the book would understand the leaping in years and perspectives, and realize that as a whole, the facets of stories actually fit together seamlessly and poignantly. Kal Penn's performance earned him a slot on my list of crushes, and his role in the film was unique from the other (excellent) actors in that his portrayal of Gogol Ganguli brought something new and sharp to the character that didn't exist or wasn't as fleshed out in the novel. Incidentally, I admire Mira Nair's adaptations of novels. I was one of the few people in the world that didn't hate her film version of Vanity Fair. I thought it was clever, pleasurable to watch, and didn't abandon Thackeray's main themes while shifting the focus and tone. Similarly, with The Namesake, I can't really imagine a different treatment of the material that wouldn't have turned the wonderfully complex and convoluted story into a trite, feel-good cliche.

Once upon a time, three months ago, I was under the impression that there was no way for me to love the visual imagery associated with Feist's "1, 2, 3, 4" any more than I already did. I mean, the video. Rainbow sequins? Choreographed goofy dancing? Magical. It's like she made that up in my favorite dream.

But then, oh then, last spring Feist visited the Colbert Report and not only made me squeal by interacting with total crush Stephen Colbert, but gifted him his own sequined jumpsuit before performing, and that miraculous image has been happily burned into my brain. And I thought: "Surely, this moment in time is the happiest that this lovely song will ever make me."

And lovely universe, sometimes you like to show me how very very wrong I can be about things, because on Monday as I was clicking around on the internets, I found this:

And if Leslie Feist bopping around with monsters and penguins and chickens in sunglasses isn't the greatest thing to ever happen ever, then, well, I guess I better work on getting out more.

Below: The Big Krassowski

(our namesake is the one in the plaid pants.)

I don't really have a good explanation for the way that I have been gravitating towards recreational sports this summer. I am neither coordinated nor particularly athletic, and all I'm really bringing to the table strength-wise is a wardrobe full of knee-socks and a vocabulary of shockingly creative swear words. And yet, I agreed to play on a friend's softball team, and signed up for my own office's softball team later this summer. On Fourth of July, I lead the charge to trek to the park and play badminton before retiring to the hot tub with dessert. For the last three weeks, I've been playing Miniature Golf in an official league on Wednesday nights. Currently we are in 16th Place (out of 19, ouch.), but the leaderboard does not yet reflect our strong showing from this week. I can't really take credit for the low stroke count part of this week's strong showing, but I like to think I was partially responsible for the spirit points we were awarded. All this is fun, of course, but has reminded me that I am much better at dressing up and yelling than catching, putting or hitting balls.

Deviled Eggs - (I just found out that another name for Deviled Eggs is Eggs Mimosa. I wish I would have been aware of that fact earlier so I could have been calling them that all along.)

If you would like to make your friends love you, I recommend bringing these to a barbecue, party or gathering of any sort. Peoples' responses will help you differentiate between the awesome people you like and the dogmatic vegan types. Just kidding. Sort of.

Boil six (or more!) eggs. My procedure for this is to place the eggs in the bottom of a pot, cover them with cold water, and heat the water on high until it boils. Once the water is boiling, wait 6-8 minutes, remove from heat and stop the eggs from cooking further by putting them in cold water. What I usually do is pour as much of the boiling water as I can out into the sink and run cold water into the pot. Let the eggs cool as much as you can. Ideally, you'd let them rest for half hour or so, but the time will obviously be dictated by whether or not you've planned ahead and if you were supposed to be at your barbecue 45 minutes ago.

Once the eggs are cool (enough), shell them, slice in half lengthwise and dump the yolks into a mixing bowl. Mix the yolks with a few tablespoons of mayonnaise, some mustard, a teaspoon or two of white vinegar, salt, pepper, paprika, and about a tablespoon of sugar per six eggs. Dude, the sugar is the secret in the recipe, it makes these eggs magical. You want this mixture to have the consistency of toothpaste, so add the wetter ingredients slowly and sparingly until you figure out what you're dealing with. Taste and adjust seasoning.

At this point, you can spoon the filling into your egg white cups with a little spatula and a spoon. Or, if you are too much of an over-achiever for your own good, as I tend to be, you can transfer the mixture to a pastry bag fitted with a large star shaped tip. Pipe the filling into your egg cups in a circular motion, arrange prettily and give the whole plate a sprinkle of paprika. Practice smiling graciously for when people tell that they have determined that you that you are a wizard disguised as a regular person for crafting these eggs.

Last week, because I am possibly a creep who reads too many blogs, I made a recipe from Emily Gould's "famous secret blog" Heartbreak Soup. (I'm not going to get into it, because that's weird, but Team Emily, duh.) I know that the saga is over-exposed and that she got a lot of flack for the extremely long and confessional story she wrote for The New York Times magazine, but I thought it was fascinating and well crafted. Also, I adore a good overwrought food metaphor, and girlfriend is full of them. I deeply understand the impulse to connect what you eat and what you feel in a personal and convoluted way, because it appeals to my passive aggressive desire to communicate in symbolism rather than words. I also like talking about cooking in a way that is experiential and non-technical, because that is how I operate in the kitchen.

I followed Emily's recipe for chicken soup pretty closely, whole bird and all, except I went running while the delicious ginger broth was simmering instead of doing my laundry. Also, I subbed out some vegetables and added fresh carrots and celery and noodles to the strained broth before shredding and reincorporating the chicken meat. I added so much stuff during that last step that by the end the soup was so thick that I couldn't effectively skim the frothy fat off the top, which made delicious soup, because, man, there was a lot of olive oil in there. I loved the ginger in the broth and I made the soup Tuesday night and ate the very last of it for dinner on Friday, which was noteworthy because I hardly ever like a soup recipe so much that Cody and I don't need to freeze at least a few tuppers of it for later.

Chicken soup last week seemed frivolous and wasted on the healthy by this recent Monday night, however, when I truly was deathly ill with something evil tight in my sinuses and rough in the back of my throat. I reprised the chicken base of this soup to make myself some comfort food, Avgolemeno soup. Too sick to feel like stopping at the grocery store on the way home from work, I just used frozen chicken breasts. I didn't even defrost the chicken before browning it in a little olive oil and five cloves of garlic, and then dumping in four carrots, half a bunch of wilted celery, a chopped shallot, a quarter of a red onion, and two bouillon cubes, covering everything in water and letting the mixture simmer for an hour while slumping on the couch and watching my DVRed episodes of "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" and sending Cody out for a lemon for the next step of the soup. Think about how this television show would be much cooler if they actually sang more than one Sound of Music song per episode.

After your mixture on the stove is brothy, 1-3 hours, remove the chicken and strain out the vegetables. Say thank you to the vegetables because you are sick and talking to inanimate objects, and put them in your yard waste bucket. Return the broth to your stove and turn the heat to medium high. Add 1 cup rice. While the rice is cooking, shred the chicken breasts with your hands into little bite sized pieces. Juice one lemon into a medium sized mixing bowl and use the microplane grater gifted to you by your best friend to grate a few teaspoons of zest into the lemon juice. Whisk four eggs and a teaspoon of flour into the lemon juice until everything is frothy. Return the chicken to the broth and wait for the rice to soften(approximately 15 minutes). While you are waiting for the rice to be ready, you can dramatically fling yourself onto the couch or the floor to make a point about how sickly you are feeling, because now Cody is back from the store and ready to be impressed by the severity of your discomfort. You can also adjust the seasoning of the broth with salt and pepper.

Next is the tricky part: temper the egg mixture. Scoop a cup of simmering broth out of your soup pot with a measuring cup and pour very slowly it into the egg bowl while quickly whisking with your other hand. This warms up the eggs so that they will not scramble when introduced to the hot broth. Take your whisk and the tempered eggs and pour that mixture slowly into your broth on the stove, whisking the soup in the big pot. At this point, the soup will turn from a brothy color to an opaque creamy white. Continue to stir the soup with your whisk for three to four minutes while everything gets thick and yummy. It is not necessary to bring the soup to a boil.

Once your soup is done you can serve in a big bowl with a piece of toast. I also recommend watching all those episodes of Battlestar Galactica that you've been missing because you've been out town every weekend for the past month, which is probably the reason you're exhausted and got sick in the first place. If you're lucky, when your boyfriend went to buy the lemon for the soup, he will have also bought two single serving pieces of red velvet cake, which is the perfect dessert to almost any meal, but especially Avgolememo Soup.

After all this is consumed, take a big glug of NyQuil. Be sure to put the extra soup in the fridge before the NyQuil step, because I'm pretty sure that what the apothecary gave Juliet was actually NyQuil, and you will undoubtedly pass out approximately 34 seconds after the sweet potion passes your lips.

Seeing as I wasn't present in the courtroom, I don't have much to add about the R. Kelly trial and acquittal that isn't presented more accurately and cleverly than this excellent article from Slate, except to say that sexual abuse of 13 year old girls aside, I'm mostly disappointed that we won't be getting any Trapped in the Closet updates prison-style.

Today, a little more than a month shy of our four year anniversary, Cody told Facebook that he is "in a relationship" with me.

The internet is weird.

Another thing that should reassure me that I am firmly planted in my own generation is the fact that I am less scandalized and annoyed by the infection carrying whoring sea-donkeys on A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila and Rock of Love than I am by the waxy, dead-eyed, Stepford zombies on The Bachelor. I've studiously avoided The Bachelor franchise in all its incarnations, mostly because it doesn't seem very interesting. Cheesy rose ceremonies and prom dresses pale in comparison to giant novelty clocks, challenges involving roller derby, complete whack-job sociopaths and the careful dance that is maintaining the illusion that Bret Michaels is not going bald. For the last week or so, however, Vh1 has been running various iterations of the Bachelor pretty much non-stop, so while running on the elliptical at the gym yesterday I subjected myself to exactly 45 minutes plus cooldown of NFL quarterback bachelor Jesse and his quest to find true love on major network television.

I guess what offended me so much about the entire production was the sickening earnestness of it. The fact that a doe-eyed boy from Florida really thought that ABC would present him with his heart's truest soulmate, and he just had to be smart enough to correctly pick her out of a lineup of 25 identically manicured women. I would rather watch Flavor Flav, who I know for a fact has an existing long term girlfriend, pretend to seek a relationship with one or several insane skanks, because at least it is an honest sham. And the very worst thing, on this particular bachelor show, was it was the episode where the bachelor's "best friend from home" (a woman who looked exactly like every other contestant) revealed her identity to the remaining bachelorettes, and, dude, that was so annoying. The "best friend from home" spent a full ten minutes in the beginning of the episode crying about how sorry she was that she had lied to the other women on the show, and that she wanted to be forgiven, and that "there is no peace in deception." And while I might agree with her, come on, did you really not think about this scenario before it happened? Quit crying about it now. Holy crap. It's just tv, it's not like a real life relationship will result from this. Effing idiots.

I generally don't worry about the cashiers in the checkout stand at grocery store judging me by my purchases, but that is probably because I usually buy sensible and non-remarkable assortments of groceries. Fruits and vegetables and 10 kinds of yogurt and sundry dry goods that do not become magical and fabulous until I take them home to my little cubby of a kitchen and squirrel them away in my pantry to eventually be turned into soups and casseroles and baked items. I'm getting to a cranky point in my 20s where I'm tired of most of the restaurants I used to love and nothing will please me like my own cooking does. I sometimes worry that that means I am slowing turning into my yiayia, which is obviously a terrifying concept.

So, the majority of the time my grocery basket looks like the shopping list of an old lady, albeit one who really likes seasonal beer, and I don't think that is anything to cause me considerable shame. However, last night, I must admit I was a little sheepish as I went through the checkout line with a little under a pound of asparagus, three tomatoes, a can of chocolate slim-fast powder and a box of red wine. I wanted to stop and reassure the cashier that I wasn't going to make a slim-fast shake for dinner to wash down my asparagus and wine, but of course that would have called even more attention to the combination. I guess all that means is that I am still firmly planted in my twenties and not in any danger of premature octogenarian status.

Close call, that one.

OMG, I absolutely need for these people to be living in the White House right now.