He introduced me to Hawaiian food.
Was going to make some sort of cheeseburger donburi last night to use up some ground beef and rice; the onion had gone bad and it’s just not a proper cheeseburger without onions.
So I made Loco Moco instead. I skipped the egg on top, though. Figured between the multiple slider-sized patties and the gravy made with drippings from same, there was enough cholesterol in that bowl already.
Mirrored from Fire of Unknown Origin.
Chili and taco meat are not the same thing. No, really, I know the difference between chili and taco meat, and this is taco meat.
A good chili is kind of thick-soup-like in consistency. The meat is coarsely ground or in chunks, not mulchmeat. Maybe there’s some chunks of well-stewed tomatoes and/or onions in it. Taco meat is just seasoned mulchmeat.
This is a bowl of seasoned mulchmeat with a quarter-inch of red grease at the bottom of it.
Son… I am disappoint.
The wedge salad is good, at least. Then again, it’s pretty much impossible to fuck up a wedge salad.
Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.
So even though there’s just something about things like this–pumice stones included–that squicks me, I got a PedEgg the other day. I did this because my heels look like elephant hide and that bothered me more than the scraping.
It works as advertised, and it’s not that bad, but as I was egging away on my heel I thought man, I bet this thing would be awesome for really fine grating. I mean, you just about pay $10 for a decent grater anyway, why the hell not?
Which led to pondering the purchase of a second PedEgg, to be clearly marked and stored in the kitchen for culinary use only.
Which led to being amused by the image of the facial expression of someone I don’t really care for at some holiday gathering as I approach them with a whole nutmeg and a PedEgg and offer to garnish their eggnog.
Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.
It occurs to me that my initial reaction to pretty much everything on This Is Why You’re Fat boils down to “man, I love all those things, just not all in the same dish”
Case in point: this pancake nightmare.
Exception: this jelloburger, which has no readily apparent redeeming qualities. I just don’t trust opaque Jello.
Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.
I can safely say this thing is the best $20 I’ve spent on a kitchen doodad in a long time. Mostly I got it to make takoyaki–or, well, ebiyaki or some other kind of yaki, ’cause I ain’t eating no tentacles–and while the resulting puff is bigger than the standard takoyaki ball, it seems to work just fine. My ebiyaki were delicious. I used it tonight and made one batch of “breakfast takoyaki” which were regular pancake batter balls with chunks of veggie sausage in the middle, and one batch of plain pancake balls with the batter left over from that. I really want to try some corn fritters or some such.
It’s cast iron, and some of the Amazon commenters seem to be baww’ing about the stuff sticking (haven’t seen it–if it’s sticking, chances are it’s not ready to flip yet) and it being too hard to flip the puffs with skewers (it’s not that hard, really), but I have seen neither of those problems.
Also I got a steam cleaner for my carpet and immediately used it to attack that spot in the hall where Mini-Me likes to pee. It worked very well.
Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.
Pie #2 is made for tomorrow, with one major improvement–instead of attempting to pour the melted chocolate on top and spread it over the filling, I put it in a Ziploc bag with a corner snipped off and squeezed it on. Much prettier.
And now I’m watchin’ me some Blue Man Group before I go hose off and dress up and put my face on.
Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.
I just made the peanut butter pie for tomorrow’s Christmas Eve festivities at Aunt Boss’s house; tomorrow I’ll make the one for Christmas proper.
It’s very easy. An idiot could make it.
You need:
Leave the cream cheese out on the counter until it’s room temperature and soft. Throw the cream cheese, Cool Whip, and peanut butter into a bowl. Beat until smooth. You can do this by hand but even with properly softened cream cheese it will kill your arms; you really want mechanical assistance. And I don’t recommend stick blenders for this, either–I tried it once and it was almost worse than doing it by hand. Use a hand or stand mixer or a food processor.
When it’s all nice and smooth, add some powdered sugar. Beat that in really well and taste. If it’s not sweet enough, add a little more sugar. When it tastes good, spread it out in a graham cracker crust.
Melt the chocolate chips and pour on top; try to cover cover the whole top of the pie if you can. Then sprinkle on peanut butter chips.
Put it in the fridge to chill–a couple of hours should do it, leave it overnight if you can.
Also I read my new TV’s instructions and figured out how to make it pick up UHF channels. Also the DTV channels. Hot damn, DTV looks good. Is it can be February 17 nao plees?
Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.
For dinner tonight, I made ramen with green onions, avocado and boiled egg slices, and broth that did not come from that sodium bomb disguised as a flavor packet.
Fuzzy measurements as always; this is for one big bowl.
Heat up some oil in a pot and throw in your onion, garlic, and ginger; add a splash of mirin and saute until the onion goes a little brownish around the edges. Pour in water, scrape good brown residue off bottom of pot and mix it in. Add memmi/dashi, miso, and Thai chili sauce if you have it, stir well, bring to a boil. Put the whole, unbroken egg in the pot, throw some nori in (leave it in big pieces, you’re going to fish it out later) cover, reduce heat, and simmer gently for twenty minutes or so. Check on it once in a while to make sure there’s still plenty of liquid and roll the egg around a little.
After the twenty minutes or so, take out the nori, take out the egg and peel it (don’t cut it up yet), and return the whole naked boiled egg to the pot to soak up flavor. Go ahead and put in your ramen noodles now. While they’re cooking, slice up the avocado and chop up the green onion.
When the noodles are as done as you like, dump the soup into a bowl, slice up the egg and lay it and the avocado slices on top, and sprinkle green onion over it all. IT IS DELICIOUS.
Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.
Well, I played Mama Kills Animals, and I have two things to say about it:
1. It makes me want to go buy the real Cooking Mama, and
2. If you are putting feathers in your giblet gravy, you are DOING IT WRONG.
Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.
Next day:
Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.
…by which I mean, I made gyudon for dinner and tomorrow’s lunch and it was delicious. I even posted my recipe. YES, I USED A DAMN FILET, THEY ARE JUST THE RIGHT SIZE AND $4 AND THE DELICIOUS BACON CHOPPED UP AND ADDED TO THE BROTH WAS AWESOME. (warning: I’m still farting around with some new templates there, site may be kind of butt-ugly)
And out of my $50 scratch-off prize, $40 of it went to putting a new tire and tube on the bike after a blowout on the way home Friday. :cuss:
Fortunately, the guys at the bike shop had not much going on yesterday and were able to change my tire in just a couple of minutes. And the new tire is the sort they put on police bikes. I’m going to take it back in next weekend and have one put on the front, too.
Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.
Via beeblebabe@lj, et al…
( Read the rest of this entry » )Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.
Because I am always the last person ever to try anything anywhere, I just discovered that mojitos are awesome.
And if you take Bacardi frozen mojito mix + 2 cans water and leave out the rum, half-fill a glass with the resulting mixture, and top that up with some sort of lime soda (my preference is for this “Crystal Clear” stuff they have at Kroger instead of Sprite or whatever, because they have actual Key Lime flavor), you have basically the best hot-weather drink EVER. I want to drink this by the gallon. :9
A second lime+minty goodness experiment has also gone well. 1-liter bottle of aforementioned Crystal Clear key lime soda (or equivalent) + 2 mint tea bags poked right into the bottle (herbal or actual tea, both seem to work fine) + an hour or two for the tea bags to soak = mojito soda. Not nearly as sweet as the Bacardi mix version, very light and tasty, zero calories.
Either way, yeah, just hook me up an IV of lime, mint, and ice. Rum optional.
Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.
I made two dishes from that silicone cup cookbook for dinner: the scalloped potatoes and the roasted butternut squash. Actually, I made the potatoes in miniature cake pans instead, because they were to be my main course.
On the potatoes, I ended up adding some onions and leaving the ham out (the recipe didn’t call for it anyway), and adding some asiago cheese and bread crumbs on top. The butternut squash recipe called for pine nuts to be sprinkled on just before serving. I left those off and gave them a sprinkle of cinnamon instead. I also added a little water to the bottom of the cups just in case the (yogurt-based) butter (substitute) wasn’t enough to keep the squash from drying out.
The potatoes could have probably used a little more liquid, but they were excellent.
But the squash… the squash…
Look, folks, I’m not a big squash person. I really don’t care for it that much. So when I tell you this squash was awesome, you have some perspective there. Seriously. I do not use the phrase “off the hook” often. This squash was off the fucking hook. In fact, here’s a diagram to show you just how far off the hook this squash was:
I could live on this squash. And then in researching things to see how else one might prepare it (pie, man, pie would be great), I found out that apparently butternut squash is actually pretty much interchangeable with pumpkin for a lot of things. Except it’s A HELL OF A LOT EASIER TO PREPARE.
But uh, anyway, yeah. SARAH HAS GAINED A LEVEL. SARAH HAS LEARNED NEW SKILL: “COOK BUTTERNUT SQUASH.” And now one little pan of scalloped potatoes and two little cups of pumpkin pie-candied squash are packed for lunch tomorrow. :9
Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.
I am looking at you, two people who stood at their U-scan while a line seven people deep was waiting to check out, you whose U-scan-using procedure went something like this:
One of the other three U-scans was taken up by a person who kept disputing every single price on every single item she scanned. Another U-scan kept going “OMG PROBLEM, PLZ WAIT FOR EMPLOYEE LOL” at its poor user every time she scanned an item (I don’t blame the poor lady for this one).
Those first two? They were still there after I had scanned my armful of items, paid for them, unzipped my reusable-shopping-bags-what-fold-and-zip-into-wee-squares, and stuffed all my shit into them.
Yeah, I’m finally on the reusable shopping bag train. Not so much out of OMG LUV 4 TEH EARTH as for practical reasons (grocery loads don’t always fit in my backpack, especially if I’m hauling the laptop that day, and reusable bags hold up a lot better when dangling from my handlebars). I have a few canvas ones, but I hadn’t used them much. Hauling them around and pausing to remove them from my backpack was kind of a pain.
So yesterday I went to Target, because they have some neat snacks and things the normal grocery store does not, and I realized halfway there that I had forgotten to roll up my big canvas shopping backpack and bungee-cord it to my package carrier. Crap. Oh well, I thought, I’d just buy a cheap tote bag or backpack or something if it came to that.
Well, right inside the door, there were reusable shopping bags. $1 each. The traditional kind, and these neat fold-and-zip ones. I just about swooned. Oh, convenient fold-and-zip reusable shopping bags, where have you been all my life?
I got a handful of them. Now they stay in the little side pockets on my backpack, so I can whip them right out and unzip them and shove shit in them as needed. Several of them could also easily be stuffed into my purse.
I also went to the Toys R’ Us next door to the Target and found this.
This was exactly what I didn’t know I wanted. In a nutshell: it is a cookbook that deals with using silicone cupcake cups to cook things. All kinds of things. From cupcakes to eggs to little mini-lasagnas to rice to quiche. Yes, it’s sold as a kids’ book, but how perfect is that for us bento-packers? So I decided I might like to try making some scalloped potatoes in a cup. Slightly different recipe from the book, but same general procedure.
Well, I got organic half-n-half and ham and cheddar and asiago and garlic. Notice what is not on that list. >_<
Oh well. I didn’t need to make them for lunch tomorrow, as I still have half of the chicken lo mein I got today in the fridge. I am going to bake up some pasta, though. Or maybe make a ham-n-cheese noodle bake or something. nom.
Finally, there is a tiny update over in 100 Candles-land: a new splash and a new preview.
Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.
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