Assimilation

On this most American of holidays, I have a confession to make: I am no longer completely 100% Born in the USA.

Or at least my accent isn't. We have a good friend who is a voice coach and works with various actors on regional accents. She asked to record me and Himself as examples of a General American accent, and we of course said yes. So she came over with a bunch of recording equipment and a list of words and phrases for us to read. Imagine my surprise as, working my way through the list, I was asked to repeat myself on several occasions, with specific directions as to how to revert to my typical American accent! Apparently I've picked up some British pronunciations, but only when I'm talking to British people. When I start talking about America (I talked about Thanksgiving traditions for a bit), my accent goes completely back to "general American". Hunh.

The most infuriating thing, however, is that my husband had absolutely no issues with maintaining a true blue American accent, a fact I attribute to his innate stubbornness. Or something like that.

I hope you all have a wonderful 4th of July!

Happy Turkey Day!

From our family to yours.

Happy 4th of July!

Sadly, the Brits do not view today as a good excuse to stay home from work/school and each carbonized meat with lots of beer and watermelon. So we had to do it yesterday. We headed off to the home of some fellow expat-Americans (or rather, one expat-American, one expat-Ukranian and their two lovely children). I was charged with bringing graham crackers, for that special American summer sugar infusion, S'mores.

No problem! I thought. However, the British are unaware (or perhaps just resistant to) Nabisco's total graham cracker monopoly. And the digestive biscuit, while extremely tasty (and occasionally already chocolate coated!), was not going to fly. So I channeled my inner Martha and made graham crackers.

Molasses substitute

Very sticky dough

They weren't like the store-bought kind, that's for sure, but they were very, very, very good. And judging by the amount of gooey marshmallow and melted chocolate that was flying around yesterday, no one noticed the difference.

My inner Martha was feeling particularly rambunctious (and American food-deprived) this weekend, because I also made bagels.

Proto-bagels

Look Ma, no hands!

Duuuuuude...woah....

Way easier then I'd expected (although I'm not sure I ever really thought about how you made bagels before Saturday...), and pretty good. Next time I will make sure to have actual bread flour in the pantry instead of using a bread mix.

Yum! And also very good with cream cheese and orange marmalade.

I hope everyone has a fabulous Fourth, with lots of fireworks and lovely summer weather. Enjoy!

Happy Turkey Day!

Or as I am telling people here, "Happy day when my ancestors fled oppression by your ancestors so we could oppress other peoples' ancestors."

May your Thanksgiving be full of family, friends and good food.

Um. Wow.

Barack Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize

I'm sure I'll have more to say about this later, when I've had time to process a little bit, but the first thing that jumps to mind is:

How do you like them apples George?