What’s Making Me Happy This Week
One of my favorite podcasts in all of the land—NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour—does a segment at the end of each episode called “What’s Making Me Happy” in which everyone goes around and says the thing(s) that are making them do a happy dance in that particular week. It’s a fun way to celebrate mundane, weird, ridiculous, and silly things that just make the week that much better. But, even if the thing that is making the person happy just isn’t for me, I still love hearing how happy it made them.
So, in an effort to spread the joy and good cheer I’m going to follow in the footsteps of my beloved PCHH hosts and do this too. Feel free to check out what’s making me happy, after the jump.
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Orange Rolls.
Lately I have had a serious craving for orange rolls. In Arkansas you can just go to the grocery store and buy ready-to-cook orange rolls in the refrigerated section, next to cinnamon rolls and biscuits and the like. But in New York? Not so much.
I’ve gone to every grocery store in my general vicinity and can’t find them anywhere. So, I decided to stop being lazy and just MAKE the dang things myself. I found a recipe that seemed do-able, except for the whole making your own dough business. Not that I’m opposed to doing that, but 1) I’m really impatient and 2) I’m even more impatient in the morning, which is when I’d most likely be making orange rolls. (I like sweet breakfast foods.) So I modified the recipe a little to make it EVEN EASIER.
Ingredients
1 can crescent rolls
For Filling
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 stick butter
1/2 an orange peel, grated
For Glaze
1/2 an orange, juiced
powdered sugar, to taste
Directions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Instead of making dough, I just bought a can of refrigerated crescent rolls. I popped that sucker open and laid the triangles on a baking sheet.
To make the filling* I grated half an orange peel, and combined it with 1/2 cup of sugar and 1/2 stick of softened butter. After that was mixed together I spread the filling onto each of the triangles, rolled the dough up, and then put them in the oven for 15 minutes. (Or follow the directions on the crescent roll can when it comes to baking time.)
While these were baking, I made the glaze. I cut my orange in half and then squeezed the juice of one half of the orange into a bowl. Then, I added powdered sugar until the glaze was thick enough for my liking. It was really just an add, stir, add more, stir more, etc. until I was happy with it sort of thing.
After the crescent rolls were done in the oven, I took them out and immediately poured the glaze on top. And voila! Orange rolls to nom. And, y’all, they are GOOD.
*If you don’t like filled things you absolutely do not have to make the filling. Just icing the crescent rolls with the orange juice icing is enough to give them a nice citrus flavor. In fact, I probably will skip the filling next time I make these.
Change.
This blog has taken quite the journey with me over the years.
I started it back in January 2009, when I was assigned to blog for a journalism class my senior year in college. Back then it was purely my academic blog—how was I expected to have time to blog when I was writing a thesis and living up my last months of being a college senior? And even though I paid this blog only the minimum amount of attention I needed to give it in order to get my A in the class, there was something about blogging that stuck with me.
So when I moved to Syracuse, NY, for graduate school—also in journalism—I realized the value of blogging. It’s fast, easy, conversational, and much more experimental that print media. You can add photos and video and audio and add a lot of personality. You can publish whatever you want, be it a impassioned treatise defending the vampire genre or a comparison between SEC and Big East dance teams or a clever screen cap of an animal. There are no rules to blogging, and I learned to love that freedom as I was also begrudgingly learning to love the (many) rules and styles and expectations of journalistic writing.
I started blogging a lot.
Then after I had my master’s degree in hand, I headed down to New York City to see what was what down there. And then this blog sort of fell to the wayside. I started other, more niche blogs that explored one topic rather than whichever aspect of my life I felt like typing up and publishing on here. A couple of them got quite the following. But eventually I realized that what I was doing was fragmenting my interests and my curiosities and, in a way, my person, into different categories, instead of just letting them all be a part of me. I learned to become a different person for the audience I was trying to identify with and reach, instead of just being 100% me, 100% of the time.
So now that I think I’ve figured out, at least a little bit, who I am and what I like, this blog is going through yet another transition. I warn you, it’s going to be a little bit all over the place. Movie clips, songs, ramblings about books and TV shows, recipes, things that peak my interest, pretty photos, funny photos, perhaps a “come with me as I try to learn about typography and letterpressing and how to make infographics (Is it better to use Photoshop or In Design?),” and a “here is what happened as I tried to can” that will eventually come to pass this summer. (I’m going to do it, y’all. Really. I found a website with fun, customizable labels and everything!) But mostly this blog is going to reflect me, exactly as I am.
Well, at least for now.
In Which I Explain My Blog Negligence
So, back in September I started dating this guy.
This guy is great.
Things were going well. I was constantly shocked he kept calling me since I’m such a spaz and he’s, well, not. But he did keep calling. This was a good sign.
Fast-forward to the week of Thanksgiving. He came over to my apartment and we were watching Castle (because Nathan Fillion is The Best.) and then said, “I have some news that’s going to upset you.” He then proceeded to tell me that he’d be moving to Singapore for a (kick-ass) new job. He’d be there for a year. He’d leave in January.
Now, sometimes I have this curious problem of overreacting. And y’all. I seriously overreacted. I turned into Bella Swan for about a week and a half. That lead to a lot of wallowing and not a lot of reading.*
Then after Thanksgiving, Boyfriend and I sat down and talked about everything and reached an agreement on how to proceed. (We are going to proceed, for those of you who were wondering.) But because he’s leaving January 7th and I basically won’t see him (with the exception of maybe two weeks when I take my vacation to go visit him.) for a year, I’ve been spending as much time as possible with him. Which means that I’ve been doing not a lot of reading and a lot of spending-time-with-Boyfriend.
But fear not! I love this here bloggy blog something fierce and I WILL return to it in 2012 when I will have beaucoups of time to read and blog and not be sad at all.
So! That’s my story. Judge me as you see fit. Leave your judgment in comments if you so choose. And, above all, have a wonderful, fabulous, joyous, relaxing, delicious, merry, and bright holiday season!
*For the probably two of you who are curious about the status of my work-in-progress, it’s still around. It’s also be neglected due to my emotional derailment/realignment. But I’ll start working on it again soon. Thank you for your concern. 🙂
Review: Between the Sea and Sky
Title: Between the Sea and Sky
Author: Jaclyn Dolamore
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Pages: 240
Release Date: October 25, 2011
Format: ARC Tour by Good Choice Reading (Thank you!)
For as long as Esmerine can remember, she has longed to join her older sister, Dosinia, as a siren—the highest calling a mermaid can have. When Dosinia runs away to the mainland, Esmerine is sent to retrieve her. Using magic to transform her tail into legs, she makes her way unsteadily to the capital city. There she comes upon a friend she hasn’t seen since childhood—a dashing young man named Alander, who belongs to a winged race of people. As Esmerine and Alander band together to search for Dosinia, they rekindle a friendship . . . and ignite the emotions for a love so great, it cannot be bound by sea, land, or air.—Goodreads
The problem with writing a book about mermaids is that the demographic of readers in YA is probably familiar with Disney’s The Little Mermaid and will then, even if they try really hard not to, compare it to the beloved movie. As I picked up this book to read it I said, literally out loud, “I will not compare this to The Little Mermaid.”
And then about halfway through I found myself thinking, “Esmerine is sort of a mix of Ariel and Belle.” (And she really is.) I just couldn’t help myself. But that aside, Between the Sea and Sky (btw, I adore the title) is a really sweet little love story.
However, I had a couple issues with the book. The first is that the main premise of the book—Esmerine leaves her water world to search for her sister Dosinia when she goes missing and Esmerine is JUST SURE she’s been kidnapped by those evil, lustful human men—annoyed me. I couldn’t understand why Esmerine never considered that Dosinia had run away (this isn’t a spoiler, as it’s in the description provided to Goodreads by Bloomsbury). It was just so obvious to me and I sort of wanted to slap some sense into Esmerine.
Then, and this is admittedly a small thing, I couldn’t ever figure out what was going on with the time period. Sometimes the clothing and settings and even speech patterns used seemed very Renaissance, and then without any reason at all, it would switch to something akin to Jazz Age America. It probably shouldn’t have been such a big deal, but I was seriously distracted by it.
In the end, the story is very sweet. If you love mermaids and quests for identity and run-away sisters and like books that are light on the sexytimes, you’ll love this book.
Bethany Larson 