a bougie woman

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Terry Gross interviewed Lena Dunham on NPR’s Fresh Air. During the interview, she played a clip of a scene from Girls, which Dunham then expanded on. The scene is one of my favourites from Season 1, and I liked Dunham’s elaboration so much I typed it out for you. Here it is…

Clip — Lena Dunham’s character Hannah, speaking to the guy she’s interested in: “I don’t even want a boyfriend. I just want someone who wants to hang out all the time, and thinks I’m the best person in the world, and wants to have sex with only me. And it makes me feel very stupid to tell you this because it makes me sound like a girl, who wants to like go to brunch and I really don’t want to go to brunch, and I don’t want you to like sit on the couch while I shop, or like even meet my friends. I don’t even want that.”

Lena Dunham: I think that there there’s a way that Hannah – and by extension myself – she has trouble with certain kinds of earnest expressions and maybe that’s a generational thing, maybe that’s her own anxiety that if she expresses herself in a true way she’s going to get shut down. But I think it was important for her, even as she said this incredibly sort of sweet, heartfelt thing, which is ‘I want you to want to spend time with just me, I want you to want to be with me’ I mean, she wants just what everybody wants which is –

Terry Gross: She wants a monogamous boyfriend.

Dunham: A monogamous loving partner, and yet she feels that she needs to explain that while she wants the thing everybody else wants, she is not like everybody else. And I think that is the important distinction to her, is that she thinks with the desire for a boyfriend comes all of these other trappings of being a sort of like bougie woman that she doesn’t think of herself as. She’s like ‘I’m a writer, and a thinker, and so anything you equate with being a boyfriend is not what you’re going to get with me.’ Even though once they were together she probably would want him to meet her friends, she probably would want him to sit on the couch while they shopped, and, god forbid, she would want him to go to brunch – but in this moment she sort of needs to define herself as this completely other type of woman, even as she wants what women want.

This show is uncomfortably accurate. Lena Dunham, hats off.

How To Be A Woman

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We should all be feminists. Feminism basically means that you believe both sexes to be equal, that someone’s opportunities and rights should not be determined by their gender. (Let’s not get into the debate over the meanings of the words gender and sex.)

That said, feminism has become a dirty word — or at least, if you label yourself a feminist, you risk being seen as a raging man-hater.

I think Caitlin Moran can change all that. She has a new book out. Read her interview with The Hairpin.

Choice excerpt: “This whole sassiness thing – everything’s got to be sarcastic, everything’s got to be knowing, everything’s got to be cynical. You’ve got to be on top of your shit twenty-four hours a day. THAT is exhausting. It’s just far better to go, you know what? I’m just basically a monkey in a dress, and the best I can hope for every day is just to be nice, to smile as much as possible, to be gentle, try and be a bit understanding, work really hard, go and smell some flowers, have a cup of tea, ring your mum if you get on with her, just kind of dial it down a bit. There’s a more sustainable idea of being a woman rather than feeling like you’re in a fucking movie twenty-four hours a day.”

Also I love Kate Beaton, and I especially love this comic (which is related to feminism) and this one (which isn’t).

hawaiian pizza +

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Last week, I emailed my good friend FG-S (married to the lovely Decently Domestic), in the hopes of recreating a meal we enjoyed during the Stanley Cup playoffs of 2012. We drank homemade beer, ate delicious pizza, and made fun of Bob Cole.

I wanted the dough recipe. Here is his response, cut-and-paste for your enjoyment:

Well… it’s never a defined thing but…
 
2 cups warm water
2 tablespoons active yeast
a good blog of honey or a tablespoon of sugar
 
MIX THAT SHIT TOGETHER AND LET SIT FOR 10 MINUTOS
 
Slowly add in 1-2 cups of flour and mix thoroughly till consistent.
 
Add some salt, don’t go crazy but you’ll need some
 
DRINK A GLASS OF WINE, THE PIZZA WILL TASTE BETTER
 
Even more slowly, add in another 2-3 cups of flour.
 
YES, YOU CAN USE SOME WHOLEWHEAT FLOUR, BUT I LIKE TO “KEEP ‘EM SEGREGATED” AS THEY SAY IN DA SOUTH
 
If you want to, add in some “Mixins”, as they call they at Marble Slab… Garlic, chopped up sun-dried tomato, oregano, parmesan, whatever you want.
 
THE CHOICE IS YOURS, BUT CHOOSE WISELY.
 
Either kneed by hand or with a mixer for about 10 minutes, the dough shouldn’t be sticky but should have elasticity…play it by ear
 
Grease up a large bowl with some sort of oil, plop in the dough and cover it all in saran wrap and leave it for about an hour

 

See why I love him so much?

too big for its britches — pick a bigger bowl than I did

I made the recipe last night. It makes two medium-large pizzas with a fairly thick crust. You could halve the recipe if you only want one pizza, or you want smaller pizza with thinner crust.

I added garlic powder and oregano, and used about 1/4 whole wheat flour.

When I took the saran wrap off after the rise, I needed to add more flour so that it wasn’t too sticky to work with. I tore it into two pieces and smushed it out into pizza shapes. It will rise significantly when you bake it, so you can spread it fairly thin.

I sauced ‘er up, then put on sliced ham, leaves of fresh basil, red onion, and green  pepper. I added a bit of freshly-grated mozzarella for glue, then added pineapple, pancetta, and green olives. Then I mounded half a pound of mozzarella on each pizza (minus the cheese I ate while I waited for the dough to rise) and sprinkled some garlic powder and oregano on top.

Bake for about 20 minutes in a 415 degree oven — check regularly.

Then devour in bed with red wine and disc one of Sex and the City season four (damn, Aidan).

oh mama