Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.
 |
Danielle picked up a pack of these gingerbread pigs when in Mexicantown last week. They are not particularly sweet, have a firm cake-ish texture, and a nice ginger flavor. It made a great breakfast.
In more of the moblog photos, here is a Dimension bike stem which I purchased at lunch from someone on the MMBA forum. This should allow me to try out the On-One Mary Bar which I’ve been borrowing for a few months now.
Leave a Comment |
Today Danielle and I headed over to my parents house. While there we made a double batch of caramels using this recipe from The Kitchn. While the caramels are excellent, the Karo Light Corn Syrup we used contains High Fructose Corn Syrup, whose presence greatly confuses me. I can understand the addition of vanilla and salt, but I don’t understand what business HFCS has in what should be a fairly basic product.
That said, the resulting caramels do taste excellent. Here is a photo of the caramel boiling after the addition of the cream, as we were getting it up to 248°F so it could be poured into the form. Yes, that’s a classic mercury bulb candy thermometer.
UPDATE: I emailed Karo to ask why Light Corn Syrup would possibly have HFCS in it, and I actually received some interesting replies. It seems that this has been an ingredient since the 70s in order to increase sweetness, but it was recently removed due to customer requests. I guess the bottle of it that my mom has is a bit old and we just need to purchase another.
Leave a Comment |
After Danielle and I helped Bo move into her new place today, we all went out for a late dinner of Korean food at New Seoul Garden in Southfield. The food was excellent, and I had a mushroom stir fry dish seen above, which contained lots of sesame, thus joining two of my favorite flavors. It was excellent.
Leave a Comment |
Today my coworker Brian and I ate lunch at the place which shall not be named. That there is my second round of food, which included a cinnamon roll, some manner of apple strudle pizza, and macaroni and cheese pizza. Here is the first round of food, in which even the Caeser salad dressing was sweet.
Just like with Taco Bell I need to stop eating here. It sounds good, until I’ve actually consumed the food. It’s cheap, and one gets what they paid for. Today I paid for a painful, weird feeling in my stomach, and a salty, numb-ish, sour taste in my mouth.
Leave a Comment |
Today’s lunch is these enchiladas, which are leftover from those that Danielle made last night. They are fresh corn tortillas, steamed, filled with refried beans, cheese, and fried onion. The refried beans were made fresh, with nitrite-free bacon renderings and onion, and the onions in the enchiladas themselves were fried up in the pan the bacon was rendered in. Mmm. This is really, really good.
Leave a Comment |
Tonight I’m having a bottle of Lagunitas Brewing Company‘s Brown Shugga Ale. It’s a really brown sugar-tasting, moderately hopped brown ale. It’s also 9.5%.
This is definitely a nice beer at the end of a nice, but productive, day. Danielle made an absolutely wonderful dinner of bean, cheese, and onion enchiladas, complete with freshly made refried beans. She also made the kitchen nicely clean, as I spent lots of time doing laundry almost to completion and beginning to straighten up the basement.
Leave a Comment |
Today was such a nice day (~46°F) that I was able to get out for a really nice ride with Nick, Erick, Marty, and Kristy. (I hope I spelled their names right…) We through neighborhoods from downtown Mt. Clemens, over to 16 Mile, out to the Dodge Park area, to the spillway, then back. Total was just over 20 miles, and except for the occasional patches of 4″ deep slush or standing water it was a very nice ride.
After the ride we ended up gorging ourselves at Chicken Shack, then heading over to Dragonmead for some really nice beers. Now I’m home, relaxing, and putzing with some electronics stuff but not really accomplishing anything.
Leave a Comment |
I’ve been using a camera app called SnapPhoto since switching to using a TMobile G1 / HTC Dream / Google Phone. It’s a rather nice camera app, as it does stability detection before taking the photo, manual white balance setting, JPEG quality settings, etc.
But, what I like most about it is that it uses the built-in geolocation stuff (GPS and/or cellular) to add the GPS EXIF headers which Gallery can parse and make a Google Map from. Therefore, if you visit my Moblog and click the View Album on a Map link, you’ll be presented with a map showing where I’ve taken Moblog photos.
As an exercise, find my house and you can get a link to the photo above of my breakfast from today (coffee and a Mexican pastry). Now I just need to wait for there to be a good Gallery upload app for Android and these can be taken, captioned, and posted all directly from the phone. (There’s one which kinda works, but not with my httpd and in a few other odd situations…)
Leave a Comment |
Normally my support of Wahhabism comes from purchasing things made of petroleum, but today’s oily Saudi acquisition is a 1kg jar of “Al Nahkal” Excellent Tahina from the local Middle Eastern-ish market. Danielle acquired this along with two bags of pita and some yerba maté. The first two will be used to make some hummus which we plan to take to a Super Bowl party tomorrow while the latter will be used to keep Danielle awake at work.
Actually, since the container is made of plastic I guess this is actually a Saudi two-fer. Thankfully, as the side of the container tells is, this product is FREE FROM CHEMICAL WHITENING AGENTS. There’s also something I really enjoy about seeing the ink jet printed manufacture and expiration date up at the top in a non-Latin character set.
Leave a Comment
