The Fluffins are Bland

Ok, so it's not a real word. In fact, if you are into questioning reality, this isn't a real post at all. So give that one a spin around the block. Sorry for not updating yesterday.  Actually for being a very lazy day, the fact that I didn't get to the blog is shocking to everyone involved. So I'll attempt to make it up to you now by giving you a play by plan of my relatively uneventful Saturday.

Step one: Get Caffeine.
        This is something that can be important world wide. Americans head to Starbucks, Minnesotans go to Caribou, and the people in Rome/Italy go to the nearest counter with a nice man standing behind it and order very small drinks in very small cups.  You'll notice that there is no 'tall' or 'venti' or 'grande' (I'm not even sure if those are in the right order) but almost everything with the proper dosage of coffee in it (this excludes things made up of 95% steamed milk) comes in what most 5 year old girls would assume is a teacup for her dolly. None the less, the four of us (looking like American college students on a Saturday morning) made our way down to our favorite counter, and ordered our favorites. M: Espresso, Pea a: Espresso, Pea b: Frilly stuff, E: Frilly stuff. We do have our divides.
         We also attempted to have a conversation with the owner of the store.  Considering that I know approximately 7 words in Italian, and one of them was used to order the espresso, we all turned to Molly.  Whether or not she is actually an authority figure on the Italian language remains to be seen, but at least she's in Italian III (When you write 3 like the Romans it looks like mini doric columns! Yay!) Without going into details about this relatively stagnant conversation, let's just say that we all really like to smile and nod.

Step two: Do homework
        Ok, just do it.

Step three: Eat Purdy things
        This can be difficult if you don't have anything purdy to eat. But here in Rome, it's easy! Erica bakes such purdy things and the Berry Lemon Bars were no exception.  The crust floated to the top (uninvited) and surprised us all. Eventually we flipped the entire concoction over so that the crust was back on the bottom and the berry lemon part (un set) oozed over the top.  For about a day we decided that it was much to purdy to eat, so eventually we just had to let the aesthetic pleasures pass and finally had to dig in.  Every had a spoon, and everyone had a corner.
        A this point, things got sticky. Molly didn't want a bit of gelatinous berry goodness, so Kate decided that it was a good idea to spoon feed her some instead. This is the reaction to that.

Step four: Learn Vocabulary
        Thanks to a skype call from Kate's parents (Shout out the the adopted parentals!) Erica, Molly and I learned a new word: 'popover'.  Now a popover is not when you decided to unannouncedly go and visit your neighbor (or pop over for a visit), this is actually a bready Minnesotan delicacy. Kate described them as "fluffy muffins".  Naturally, the three of us were so intrigued by this new word that we simply had to use it in all kinds of incorrect ways before we finally got it right. But instead of immediately sticking to the correct terminology of a 'popover,' we decided to give it a new name. Meet the Fluffin.  Erica, being the little baker that she is, made the smart move (after Kate ran away from us carrying her computer-aparently offended that we didn't know this particular food group) to actually look up what a popover-fluffy-muffin-fluffin actually looks like.  And low and behold, we found a recipe.

Step five: Hide things from Kate
        So while Kate was sequestered in the room talking to parentals, the three of us decided to whip up a batch of fluffins. The trouble was, that we have made far too many 'purdy' things for this to possibly go right, so we didn't want any sad pandas in the apartment for messing up the fluffins. The minute we got everything all battered up, we sent Molly on a special mission to make sure that the conversation didn't end too soon. Go Molly go! (she's kind of a star spy) But she managed to give us the perfect amount of time to get the fluffins baking, and then to start dinner on the stove so as the oven being on wouldn't look suspicious. Magical. Cooking and sneaky baking always go hand in hand. At one point Kate said that she smelled something delicious, and the only problem with acknowledging that is that Erica was only boiling water at the time. Anywhozles. We continued to cook delicious things both in the oven and on top of the oven.  Erica finished making hers, Molly made hers, and now I was going to cook for both Kate and I, but no one was left to make sure that she didn't accidentally look in the oven. [Insert Pink Panther theme here]. Got to making the pasta sauce, put in maybe a bit too many red pepper flakes (nice and spicy). Then, SURPRISE!!!!  Fluffins are done! And the look on Kate's face was delightful. Just overwhelmed with the apparent caring hearts of her roommates for making 'popovers' (they were very clearly fluffins).  Regardless, they were nice, and they were purdy.

And we managed to enjoy the rest of the evening without too much else to report.