Food

Recurring problems: when your brain tells you not to make coffee after dark.

Is there such a thing as too much coffee? I doubt it.

There are weekends where my coffee consumption approximates my weekday consumption, and there are weekends where I hardly down a drop of coffee. :/.

Thus I came up with an alternative that works when I do dishes after dinner rather than before 😀.

You can bet that more than a few tatters found their way down the treat hole of some hungry doggos.

Odd problems:

Today, I did something odd in making my own lunch, and actually cooked. Needless to say, I generally don’t cook in my mother’s kitchen if I can help it, but this time I got hungry…lol.

I warmed up a left over salisbury steak and cut it up into pieces and a slice. Then I mixed up three eggs to make in a pan, trying to get all the liquid to cook reasonably solid and spread out; flipped it over and pressed it a little and let it cook. Mushed some bits of the salisbury steak and folded it over, and pressed it for a bit, flipped & repeated. In retrospect, I really should’ve added some pepper for flavour and bits of cheese to bind the meat together.

For the sandwich, I put mushed bits of the meat on, layed by a slice of cheese, the slice of meat, another slice of cheese, and more mushed bits. Not sure if only buttering the pan-facing sides was smart but I loved how it came out, and decided to burn one side a little bit, just to make sure it would be strong enough with so much inside. I loved how that sandwich came out xD.

Generally I’ll make do with left overs or make a normal sandwich, it’s just the most safe way to avoid dealing with the parental  unit. In this case though it worked well enough (Y).

No, I am not making a turky (hell no!) but I did just try a bit of pound cake. I started with this recipe as a base and the knowledge that the traditional pound cake is a 1:1:1:1 ratio of eggs, flour, surgar, and butter. This is my first cake ever, and more of a quest to figure it out than create a yumo confection.

My end result for test Alpha:

• 1 cup unsifted cake flour.
• sifting in a colander proved nuts, so I just attacked in a measuring cup.
• 1/2 cup sugar.
• 1.5 stick of room temp’ butter.
• 3 eggs
• I only failed at the first egg, and lost most of the yolk.
• Being smarter than totally stupid, I used two containers: one to hold the eggs and one to crack/drain in.
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1.5 teaspoon pure vanilla extract, since both my other half, my mother, and Google all agreed.
• My first go is more about science than taste!
• 1.5 sticks of butter
• seems excessive to me but as Paula Deen says, “Butter makes it better”, so I digress.
• I chopped it for ease of mixing.
• My mother suggested melting it.
• 3 tablespoons of milk

The perfect way to control splurging at the grocery store: limit unplanned spending to <= $2.00. Of course, when the beer is two bucks cheaper than planned, of course I can add $1.50 for a small snack…. lol.

Tonight Food Network displayed one cracker jack of a mission, in which Robert Irvine of Dinner: Impossible was sent off to the UNC. The objective? Turn whatever he could scavenge out of the dorm rooms into a quality meal for a ~hundred students, in less then six hours!

So here Irvine is with his sous-chef, and they’re trying to figure out what the hell can you do with a barrel of cheese balls, dozens of cans of different soups, a megaton of ramen noodles, and so many other odds and ends lined up on tables. Not to mention a deep fryer that went out so many times, he had to threaten the to throw the rent-a-fryer guy in it, lol. In the end they had to raid the sonority houses just to gather enough proteins to make a decent meal. Impressively they shipped about 19 dishes, and no one died of a heart attack in the process. Battle planning went out in like the first 15-min, and they had to result to an on the fly menu plan. It was shocking that they actually came up with something edible, let along that much food lol. In response to someone saying they would make his last minute concoction for the fair, billed as “Robert’s Corn Dogs”, he quibbled something about how he would never cook like that in a sane situation.  Despite what’s probably the most ludicrous episode I’ve ever seen, somehow they pulled it off with a hair trigger.

What makes Dinner: Impossible such an enjoyable show, is watching the host stew through it… and thanking GOD that you don’t have his job, hahaha. If Guy Fieri has the best job on Food Network, Robert Irvine has the most stressful. Me, I would just like to tag along on Triple-D, and gain back my lost 40 lbs in the process xD.