Category: food

Tonight’s dinner is a hastily purchased, prepared, and photographed mix of things of vegetable origin. On the left is home-made bread, toasted and topped with the roasted garlic left over from a few days ago and melted butter. The bowl of veggies is Birds Eye^® Freshlike^® Broccoli Stir Fry cooked in a bit of soybean oil and some leftover Hormel, House of Tsang-brand Korean Teriyaki stir fry sauce. The beer in the back is Bell’s Two Hearted, a favorite of mine.

The hastiness of the photo is evident by the crap DOF.

Here, have a photo of my quickly made bowl of white boy slop: mashed baked potatoes with roasted garlic and fire roasted corn. With Sangria Señorial, of course. Yes, it’s quite unhealthy and an absurd quantity of food, but I’m really not in the best of moods (thanks, Comcast!) and I probably won’t eat all of it.

I have an idea for selling more salad dressing: suggesting that people combine dressings at home for new, exciting, experimental flavors. The key here is to cross-promote flavors so that people will buy both their normal dressing and a flavor which they wouldn’t otherwise purchase.

The marketing would be easy, as the salad dressing company simply has to supply a recipe book (such as the one which introduced us to the Fiberccino) which suggests multi-flavor dressing combinations. These combinations can be chosen by looking at data detailing who buys what flavors, then ensuring that only one of the two dressings for those chosen recipes are regularly purchased by a particular demographic.

Flavors such as Crete (Greek & Thousand Island), Morricone (Tuscan Italian & Ranch), and Absolute Power (Russian & Caeser) are sure to win people over and, of course, sell more dressing!

Danielle and I had some excellent jacket potatos at a pub we visited with Dominic on the same day we took a tour of Fuller’s Griffin Brewery. Wanting the same sort of thing for dinner tonight, I put together this, from a baked (Idaho) potato and shredded cheddar cheese, topped with mushrooms, garlic, and black pepper that were fried in copious amounts of butter and olive oil. The oil was poured over everything to lubricate the potato a bit more and give it that unhealthy pub food feeling.

To keep the experience as pub-like as possible I’m eating it (as I type this) with a glass of lager. Rochester Mills’ Lazy Daze Lager, to be precise.

The verdict? Outstanding. Absolutely excellent.

As mentioned yesterday I made tapioca pudding. It’s quite good, but as the texture isn’t as smooth as I’d hoped for; I think that I whipped the egg whites a bit much before folding them in. The recipe said that they need to be stiff peaks, which is what I did. Unfortunately this made folding them in akin to stirring shaving cream and warm ice cream.

That said, it tasted very good.

However, if one lets some dry on the inside of a cup, say, while the cup sits on one’s desk all day at work that cup will smell of death. And by death I mean rotting eggs. And not rotting eggs in the good, wholesome sulfur dioxide fart-esque smell. No, just rotting animal parts.

I will definitely be making this again in the future.

Danielle purchased a large handful of chestnuts for me a few weeks back and tonight I finally got around to roasting them. Per the directions I found online I slit them (all but one) with an X, put them on a pan, and roasted them at about 425° for 15 minutes or so.

When they were done it wasn’t difficult — just a bit hot — to peel the skins off exposing the meats of the chestnuts. The only difficult part was opening the non-slit one, as cutting it caused a burst of steam to come out and burn me. Whoops! I was hoping that it would explode as the pressure built up, but alas it didn’t.

I’m not sure what I think of the taste of roasted chestnuts. They seem fairly good, but mentally I keep putting them somewhere between edamame and soft walnuts because of the soft texture, bean-ish flavor, and brain-y appearance. Here is a photo of the peeled chestnuts.

Yesterday while washing dishes someone was walking around my neighborhood putting Benefiber recipe booklets in people’s front door handles. Living in an area with mostly older / retired people I must get roped into the demographic of those who buy fiber supplements.

While I like ensuring that my diet has sufficient amounts of fiber in it, I do so by eating things like porridge instead of bizarre concoctions like the Fiberccino shown above. Water (capitalized, for some reason) is the most natural thing in there, with refined sugar as the distant second.

Other recipes in this booklet include Upside-Down Pizza, Quick Sloppy Joes, Cajun Chicken Salad, Cheesecake Pie, Apple Dumplings, and Raspberry Sauce, all with Benefiber-brand wheat dextrin, because Benefiber^® Makes Taking Fiber Easier Perverse™.

When Jeff and I went to Zingerman’s yesterday I purchased half a pound of peanut-fed Berkshire bacon. This afternoon Danielle made up some waffles, and while they were cooking I fried up some of the bacon, and we both ate some of each for a mid-afternoon lunch/dinner/whatever.