eat me gluten!

Oh right!  He went on a 9-day canoeing trip with some men because he’s a man and periodically needs to shake off the feminine cobwebs of our love nest, AKA The Menstrual Castle.  

Let’s talk about gender for a second: I know Pixar recently came out with this “new take on the Disney princess story,” which involves a red headed Scottish lass discovering that sewing is the answer to all her problems—but the real story about men and women is that once a year, my boyfriend runs into the woods to grow a beard, and meanwhile I come home from work and put on a bigger pair of pants and watch HGTV for like ten hours while thinking to myself, “Wow I’m so glad that no one except for the pedestrians walking by my living room window which has no curtains can see me right now.” 

And then I watch all the Nora Ephron films and become the heroine of my own life and think to myself, “Good, I hope they’re looking.”

Boyfriend circa 2007, fresh from the forest.

Anyway, the point is that while my knight in shining armor is gone, I’m in charge of feeding myself.  Basically every relationship has its highs and lows and my low is that my boyfriend left for the wild without first gifting me any gluten-free snacks.  

He did however leave me with a beautiful bouquet of flowers, which was delicious*.

*Flowers are gluten-free.

Bridal Shower!  PS: I think I’m farting in this picture.

In an attempt to compete with Lesley, or perhaps because I’d recently come back from a bridal shower wherein I’d gone pseudo gluten-free and he had seen the consequences (read: inhuman amounts of farting and then me laughing at my own farts even more than usual because I was drunk), my boyfriend went on a gluten-free cookie shopping spree!  Yay!

Below I have mercilessly ranked what was meant to be a sweet gift:

Nana’s No Gluten Chocolate Crunch Cookie

If gluten-free snacks are in and of themselves questionable, then diet gluten-free snacks are particularly abhorrent.  Also, why do people even make nutritious cookies isn’t that what salads are for?

In case you need a more detailed exploration of how something devoid of both calories and gluten might taste, here’s a conversation that my boyfriend and I had about Nana’s Cookies:

Me: (Poking thoughtfully at cookie) I remember playing with cow shit once while I was little and it had this same appearance and consistency.  (Shrugs) Well anyway let’s put it in our mouths.

(Both take bites of cookie and chew)  

S: (Spits cookie into hand and flings it at the wall) There isn’t enough water in the world to erase that.  You would have to drain the oceans.  

Me: What is even in this? (Inspects package) Ugh, sweetened with fruit, what in God’s name does that mean?  

For the record, my boyfriend would like me to emphasize that he would never have bought these cookies had he seen that instead of sugar they were sweetened with equal parts prune juice and banana peels from a dumpster.

Conclusion: Out of a scale of 1-10, this one gets a -50.   

Liz Lovely Gluten Free Chocolate Fudge Cookies

Absolutely terrible, but it would be an insult to compare it to the prior.

This one at least has real sugar, and lots of it.  It also has a cute story on the back about how Liz started making these cookies and her boyfriend thought they were so good that he convinced her to quit her job and do it full time!! So hopefully she’s on LinkedIn because these cookies taste like a ginger bread house that’s been locked in your damp attic for the past two years.  

Conclusion: I would rather eat this pen.

Second to last:

Mariposa Truffle Fudge Brownie

I’m torn about Mariposa.  I like the pretty butterflies on their logo, and the few times I’ve been at their bakery at the San Francisco Ferry Building tons of people are all lined up buying whole cakes and stuff, so it seems like if I don’t like them, I’m probably in the minority.  

A few weeks ago, my boyfriend was sweet enough to buy me a bagel there, which was super exciting because it’d been like infinity bazillion years (five months) since I’d had a bagel and bagels used to be my favorite food (see below pictures for documentation of Mariposa bagel experience)

Boyfriend at Mariposa bakery stand thing at San Francisco Ferry Building.  Important aspects of photo have been circled.

Me making the best of an okay situation.

Gluten-free bagel conclusion: the consistency was weird.  Like, squishy/soggy, not to nitpick.  And then this brownie comes along claiming to have truffle something in it, which is not something you lie about around me because I am like an actual pig when it comes to truffles.  Like, I can smell them and want to dig them up and taste them, and if you are leading me around on a leash to help you get them because you’re some kind of truffle farmer, then by God I will eat them up until you hit me on the head with my own leash and rip them out from under my snout to sell for billions at the farmer’s market.

Anyway I tasted no truffles in this weird brownie.  And I thought it tasted stale, too, with that distinct chalk stuff happening in my mouth afterward that is probably some combination of corn/rice substitute, or simply whatever poison they’ve started putting in gluten-free products to euthanize those of us who fart too much.

Let’s end on an up beat, shall we?

Wow Peanut Butter Cookies

Not just saying this to sound positive after hinting at a euthanasia plan targeted at gluten-free weaklings, but these are THE BEST COOKIES EVER, SERIOUSLY, HOLY JESUS, AND NOT EVEN IN A RELATIVE SENSE - I ATE THEM FIRST THING BEFORE ALL THE OTHER COOKIES AND SO HAD NOTHING BAD TO COMPARE THEM TO -  OMG THEY TASTE LIKE REAL PEANUT BUTTER COOKIES, PACK THE CRUMBS BETWEEN MY TEETH AND LET CAVITIES GROW TO NESTLE THEM BECAUSE I WANT TO TASTE THEM FOREVER, I LOVE EVERYONE

Conclusion: I whispered thank you’s to my boyfriend from like this far away so that he could smell the peanut buttery goodness he had bought me but not gotten to try because I ate the whole thing in like five seconds.

I feel like it’s probably necessary to write an addendum to my Redbridge post, in which  I emphatically lauded Anheuser Busch’s gluten-free beer for basically being the solution to all of my problems. 

This is the situation: after finishing the first six pack, I bought another six pack, which has gone pretty much untouched.  Like, I think I opened one of the beers but ended up pouring it down the sink after a couple hours.  Because after opening it I was sort of just happy sitting there beside it, the two of us blankly taking in whatever episode of Storage Wars was on, like some boring couple that has gone without more intimate congress for quite some time, and actually abhors the idea of tasting one another.

In other words, I think that maybe it’s time to admit that Redbridge tastes like Bud Light.  Which makes sense when you consider that it’s made by Anheuser Busch.  

“Oh but you’re being a beer snob!” ~possible thing you might say to me if we were sitting together right now and you’d had enough Redbridges to challenge someone as physically intimidating as myself, which is to say you’d have had like ten Redbridges, because another sucky thing about Redbridge, in addition to the fact the it tastes like contaminated water and conjures memories of vomiting upside down into the nozzle of a keg, is the fact that it has an alcohol content of 4.8 percent.

Also: Some Thoughts on Eos Lip Balm

So, my smartest uncle recently got in touch with some feedback on my blog; namely, that all the “huggy boyfriend love stuff” was pretty nauseating.

At first I was like, “Darn!” and figured I better stop being so earnest so people would think I was intelligent.  Then I remembered that most people are disdainful of genuine expressions of love because they have chosen relationships that are both painful and humiliating…so my relative happiness was probably going to upset them regardless.  

Does this photo make you angry because when you try to sit on your partner’s lap, he/she hulks out and attempts to throw you through the nearest window?

Still, I try to take all critical feedback seriously.  So that night, instead of going home and giving my boyfriend a hug—and saying the usual, “Ugh, babe, I missed you…Seriously where were you all day?…Hold me closer, tiny dancer, etc.”—I experimented with a look that spoke of rage and negativity.

I am filled with rage and negativity!

Filled.

And then I attempted to strangle him.

My uncle also mentioned that my blog could use more negative reviews.  So I’ve taken it upon myself to talk about Eos gluten-free lip balm in a bad light:

It smells okay—sure, fine—but you can’t have it for breakfast or anything.    They’re shaped like eggs but they’re not real eggs.  Basically I ate a bunch of it yesterday morning and it tastes like shit*.  

*I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the publicity people at Eos for sending me some free samples of their lip balm.  Despite being less nourishing than actual eggs, they are okay as actual lip balm, especially the blueish one, which is mint-scented and tingles (refreshingly) on my mouth.  Also the egg shape is cool looking.