Food

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NPR: 50 Years After Apollo 11, Here’s What (And How) Astronauts Are Eating.

That reminds me: don’t think I’ve ever actually tasted Tang, nor have I ever really felt the need drink that stuff.

Over the years though, I’ve generally come to the conclusion that astronauts don’t get the gift of good food. I’d like to think that life for the ISS crew sucks less than shuttle and Apollo crews suffered in terms of food stuffs but I’m pretty sure the day when space food is really great food rather than just the best we can do, is still quite far off.

The 20th century kind of brought a lot of advancements to storing, packing, and preserving food. But some problems remain unsolved, lol.

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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. :/.

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Explaining to dogs that refried beans are not for them is bound to never go well. Ending with “If I gave you this: you would fart, and we would all die”, is probably not the best idea either.

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I refuse to disclose how many cheese doodles the dogs conned me out of.

Impromptu dinner

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Just when I decided on curry rice for dinner, I got home and realized that one of the lies we tell ourselves is: “I’ll do that before bed”.

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

Dinner

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

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Odd problems:

When your microwave’s defrost works by ounces and the numbers in your head sum by the gram. Followed by converting guesstimates of these using your fingers.

My first self cooked lunch

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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).

Project Butterball

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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
First I washed the pan, containers, tools, etc; let the butter, eggs, and milk sit out. Then I started to measure stuff out into containers. Got my eggs together and put the milk in, mixed them up with a rubber spatula and cut the butter into slices and greased the pan with some. Then while mixing for a bit between, added each the flour, sugar, some butter (maybe 2/3 of 1/4 a stick). Than I put in the extract and more butter, mashed and mixed that and set about getting in all the butter.
After a while of doing this with the rubber spatula and a old whisk, I saw it would take forever to get the chunks out of the batter, so I just switched to a hand mixer: first at low, than for a bit at speed and throttled back to low to finish it off. Poured it in the pan, switched on the oven to 350′ F and let the batter sit in the pan for a couple minutes while I made prep to clean; then I stuck it in and cleaned up after myself. In retrospect I should have taken a picture of the batter, as a gauge for next time.
Here is how it came out:
It came out soft and tasty, not overpowering and rather close to what I wanted really. Next experiment I think, will trade some butter for vegetable oil.
Of course, the moron^H^H^H^H^Hgeek has to have a test tasting :-).
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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.