A bit more postpourri

I read a good book, which I think I'll talk about tomorrow.  And I went back to work, which was pretty productive given I was already done with all my email and the short week has most people fairly busy and I'm coming off two release cycles.  And we had our annual New Year's party which involved the least amount of cards/poker ever and was more a few board games and watching the children wrestle in the frontroom while Kyle told them it wasn't allowed.  Instead, I'll list a few things I've been reading.  Only a few, because I've been spamming the hell out of Kyle with things I find interesting on Zite, the Eagan Patch crime section, and a variety of other locations.

• Making waffles out of leftover Thanksgiving stuffing.  Something I would have never thought to do but which is an ingenious use of leftovers.  Gravy AND maple syrup - decadent.
• Indigenous Native American Food of the Southwest - Part I and Part II.  I wish I had known about some of the restaurants that did locally sourced food when I was last down there.
• Skinny orange chicken - I was also reading about velveting meat, but that just seems like extra calories.  This looks pretty straight forward for something I like to eat.
• 22 recipes under 500 calories.  I have to try pumpkin lasagna.  Then I have to modify it to try butternut squash lasagna.  I can find the other 21 or 22 recipes on that page.  Maybe it doesn't like my browser.  But the pumpkin lasagna alone is worth my time.
• The 124 United States that could have been - even in that world, RAGBRAI would have been just as long.
• 15 ways to exercise in under 5 minutes - basically the 7 minute exercise set, but with demonstration videos in case, like me, you sometimes don't know what the hell they're trying to describe.
• 12 maps that changed the world - the map of the 124 states is not among them.
• 10 ways to be happier - I agree with them.  Live close to work and plan your next bicycling vacation.  Helps keep me happy.
• The Forgotten Souls of London's Women of the Night - Amazing little bit of history Justinian  pointed me at.  Which led me to...
• Lost Frescoes of the Maginot Line - also wonderfully interesting.

Starfruit

I've never eaten a starfruit before.  Which is strange, because they've been right there in the supermarket tempting me for the last several decades.  Yesterday I bought one and went on a search for what to do with it.  After all, it's more difficult to ignore an ingredient if it's in your hand.  At least that's my theory - override my laziness with my stinginess around wasting food.  I did some poking around online and the best option seemed to be to dry them, which I figured I'd like as I like dried banana chips.  In the end, it was less about drying them and more about candying them.  What all the recipes have in common is a cup of sugar.  After that, it's variations on the theme.  I went with number three below, although if there had been ginger around the house, I would have combined #2 and #3.  They were delicious and, as an added bonus, I have a quarter cup of honey/star fruit infusion to put in tea.

• http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Star-Fruit-Chips-23666  - basic recipe.
• http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2012-10-25/features/fl-food-carambola-r2-20121025_1_chips-star-fruit - add some ginger.
• http://www.cbc.ca/stevenandchris/2011/01/the-ingredient-exotic-fruit.html - use honey and cayenne
• http://www.inomthings.com/?p=95 - seriously fancy (rum, cardamon, lemon juice)

Spotted Dick

I couldn't tell which one of them sent me this, but either my father or mother was amused to find this at the grocery store.  I like it that the tab for my upload in Flickr says "All Sizes | Spotted Dick".  I knew what Spotted Dick was, so I'd have been more impressed if they had brought me a can to eat with my Durian Nescafe Ming gave me (don't order me any - it has to be truly random, otherwise I'm not as amused as I can get it myself any time if I was really that jazzed to try it).

What was cool was learning the word dysphemism.  It's like utopia and dystopia, but instead euphemism and dysphemism.  Interestingly, there are euphemistic dysphemisms.  So it's not really just opposite sides of the same kind, it's more fine grained than that and can involve being a euphemism for one group, but a dysphemism for another group, based on the context.  And, for example, it includes a minced oath were someone substitutes a word in a usual phrase that might be offensive: bowlderizes it.  So when Eryn used to say "Oh bommit!" she was engaging in a minced oath.  And, when I call my mother Ellen, I may be guilty of name dysphemism.

Who knew spotted dick was such an educational opportunity.

Bread for Dad

Lots of bread recipes on the web.  Millions of them (yet one more series, from Betty Crocker).  The most basic bread machine white bread I know of, and use, is:

2 pound loaf of bread:

• 13 oz of milk (1.5 cups and 2 T.) - should be warm.  75-85 degrees.  Don't boil it.
• 2 T. butter
• 4 cups of flour - most recipes say use bread flour.  Regular flour works just fine
• 1.5 t. salt
• 2.5 T. sugar
• 2.25 t. dry yeast - little less if you use bread machine yeast, but it really doesn't matter, just use 2.25.

1.5 pound loaf of bread:

• 11 oz of milk (1.25 cups + 2 T.) - should be warm.  75-85 degrees.  Don't boil it.
• 2 T. butter
• 3.33 cups flour
• 1.25 t. salt
• 2 T. sugar
• 2 t. dry yeast

For egg bread, cut 1/3 of the milk and substitute with 2 eggs in both cases.

Calories

Since January 10, my diet calendar says I have:

Ingested 255,073 calories
Burned 397,313 calories
For a net of...-142,240 calories

/3500 = 40.64 pounds.

Actual weight loss, if I was right about my starting weight, is between 39 and 41 pounds.  Obviously my tracking system is working fine.  I slowed a bit in April, partially due to a vacation full of beer drinking, bbq, manicotti, and tacos (I recommend not eating patty melts - no matter how you factor it, they're Satan's calorie delivery system of choice), but May has seen about x2 the calories chewed up per day on average.  Partially because of bicycling.  Partially because of better eating.  I did buy a quart of chocolate chili ice cream today and I'm tempted to put the calories for the whole quart in today, just so they're a non-issue for counting purposes, but I suspect that's the kind of accounting that got Enron in trouble.

Denver - Oskar Blues III

Very cool - Oskar Blues has people who just meet up to play blue grass and drink beer.  Eryn liked it that there were so many guitars.


This doesn't look comfortable at all.  But my wife would probably prefer it to my kitchen drawer that achieves the same historical perspective on my drinking history.  Maybe all those nubbins are deceptively comfortable, like a full body massage.


More fountains made out of kegs...I have a keg.  I should try this.


See...purdy.  I wonder if my neighbors would approve.


The Oskar Blues tower.  A giant can of beer.


Finally, a picture of the front of the restaurant.  Eryn loved the ribs.  And the pulled pork. And the wings.  Reminded me quite a bit of the food and ambiance at Dinosaur Barbecue in Rochester, NY.

Seafood Pot Pie

A highschool classmate of mine, Raquel, sent me a recipe for seafood pot pie.  I finally got around to trying it tonight.  Pretty good, although Pooteewheet claims it needs fewer scallops and more sriracha.

Scooter and Pooteewheet's seafood pot pies.  Can you guess which one is mine?  You'll note I didn't carefully cut the edges.  I thought about it and then decided extra crust was extra crust for the pot pie and that was a good thing.  Constructive mess.  As further evidence of my food should taste good but not always look good, you'll see my fingerprints in the quickly rolled pastry tops which I had to create because I only had two bottoms and twice as much pot pie eatums as fit in one.


Baked.  One sinkhole, but a nice color.  Don't ask me how long I baked it with the bake dial set to "off" before I finally figured out they weren't actually cooking.


A piece of seafood pot pie artfully plated in the John Deere bowl.


A little heavy on the liquid, but Pooteewheet was spooning it over her serving, so it doesn't go to waste.  I'm wondering how I'll reheat 1.67 seafood pot pies without a functional microwave, however.  Tricky.

• 1 bag (12 oz.) cooked frozen baby shrimp - thawed
• 1/2 lb. bay scallops
• 1/2 lb. of your favorite white fish or crab meat
• 1 cup sliced carrots
• 1 cup frozen green peas
• 1/2 cup sliced celery
• 1/3 cup butter
• 1/3 cup chopped onion
• 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon celery seed
• 1- 3/4 cups chicken or vegetable broth
• 2/3 cup milk
• 2 (9 inch) unbaked pie crusts

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

In a saucepan, combine carrots, peas, and celery. Add water to cover and boil for 15 minutes. Remove from heat, drain and set aside. (you can microwave instead)

In the saucepan over medium heat, cook onions in butter until soft and translucent. Stir in flour, salt, pepper, and celery seed. Slowly stir in broth and milk. Simmer over medium-low heat until thick. Remove from heat and set aside.

Place the vegetable mixture in bottom pie crust. Place seafood on top of the vegetables. Pour hot liquid mixture over all of it. Cover with top crust, seal edges, and cut away excess dough. Make several small slits in the top to allow steam to escape.

Bake in the preheated oven for 35 to 40 minutes, or until pastry is golden brown and filling is bubbly. Cool for 10 minutes before serving.

Delicious Grilled Garlic and Herb Shrimp

I made this Grilled Garlic and Herb Shrimp recipe tonight from AllRecipes.com (they have a decent iPad app, although this particular recipe doesn't list ingredients in the app, which is strange). Rather than following the recipe exactly, I used one pound of cooked shrimp (good shrimp, from Kowalski's, although on sale) and the same mixture of ingredients, and let it sit in a plastic bag to marinate overnight. Then I put it in a pan, including the extra sauce, and let it simmer with a cover until ready and dropped it on top of some thin noodles and served it with a side of curried, baked cauliflower, and lettuce (salad).  Absolutely delicious.  Probably the best thing I've made so far since I've started focusing on fish and shellfish.  I strongly recommend it if you like shrimp.  Eryn ate half of my wife's serving, and she's notoriously picky.

Manicotti

Making your own food goes a long way toward assuring you appreciate just what you're putting in your system. Today I made manicotti, and somewhere around stuffing the tenth one with a mixture of Parmesan, whole milk ricotta, mozzarella, an egg, the insides of four Italian sausages, spaghetti sauce (I thought it would be easier than whole tomatoes and sauce, and whole tomatoes tend to provoke an allergic reaction) and various other foodstuffs, I thought, "that's a lot of calories." Not Kirstie Alley six tablespoons of butter on some noodles calories, but still...significant. Fortunately, you don't have to eat ten manicotti noodles. You can just eat one or two and drink some fruit smoothie to counterbalance.

I used to make lasagna all the time. It was one of my favorite dishes, and I inflicted it upon many dates all the way back to my high school years. But I've gotten away from making it over time not because I like it any less, but because it's just too much food (even when I cut the ingredients in half) and too much of food that's not very healthy. On Friday, I went out for lunch with two members of my team and we discussed how it was a healthy lunch because we were eating a burrito at Chipotle instead of the all-you-can eat pizza buffet at Old World Pizza. Manicotti might make me feel that way about lasagna.

Heartland

Pooteewheet and I went to El Burrito Mercado for lunch, and then out to dinner at Heartland for our sixteenth anniversary, followed by the 2009 British Television Advertising Awards at the Walker, courtesy of some tickets I won from work (they're sponsoring the show). They're obviously sponsoring it for the R-folks, because that was a younger, hipper, crowd than I'm used to seeing at my place of employment.

Dinner at Heartland was positively delicious. If you don't include the two beers, courtesy appetizer (duck liver I believe), fancy breads (pepper rye and some sort of darker cherry), or sweet champagne (which they gave us for asking us to move to a smaller table as a group from Coherence was showing up), I ate the following, plus bits from Pooteewheet's wild acres farm free range chicken with organic broccoli, cranberry poultry glace and parsley root fondant, Wisconsin golden potato-leek cream soup with fried leeks, and Gateau marjolaine with red currant coulis, Aquavit sabayon and black current curd):

• Singerhouse Farm rabbit loin with cranberry-bacon compote, pain de mie toast and apple cider-shallot sauce
• Money Creek Ranch wild boar roast with caramelized onion potato purée and tart cherry glace de viande
• Autumn fruit galette with sorghum syrup gelato, a honey oat Florentine tuile and autumn fruit caramel

I think that means I ate duck, chicken, boar, rabbit and pig today. I'd be a horrible vegetarian, despite the variety of plants mixed into all of those dishes.

Happy Anniversary, Pooteewheet!

Danimals Crush Cups

The new Danimals Crush Cups commercials sort of make my stomach churn. To boot, the whole process looks sort of obscene. No. Not sort of. It's obscene.

http://www.danimals.com/crushcup/index.html

Dim Sum

Over six hours (not two, Ming) after Ming took Kyle and I to Dim Sum in St. Paul, and my stomach is finally starting to calm down. I came home, got on my bike to do a few hill laps, went about half a block and a grinding stomach cramp nearly took me down in the middle of the street. Many Tums later, the twisting in my gut is settling down a bit. I suspect there's something in one of the dishes I should not be eating. I've never had anything I've eaten keep me off my bike before, and a Chipotle burrito with red sauce is a normal mid-ride lunch for me. Don't think I'll ever be doing that before or during a ride again. At least I'm prepared in the future.

(But thank you for lunch, Ming and Julie [and Logan]). I appreciate getting introduced to someplace new even if it had a bad side effect.

She Says' Choice Gets Cooler in Retrospect

When we were in D.C. over the summer, She Says and her husband (to be, at the time) took us to Ben's Chili Bowl for dinner to have some cheese fries. So "What does the president-elect order on his first Saturday afternoon since moving into town? A chili dog and cheese fries. (Huff Post)" That story obviously loses a little bit of it's luster as Obama wasn't there at the same time we were, but I'm not sure I've ever eaten anywhere else where a president ate, so it's sort of exciting. However, I do have this vague memory of eating with the Boy Scouts at what I swear was an automat frequented by congresspeople near the Capitol in D.C. back in 1981 (is that a dream? or was there some sort of automat-like cafeteria in the area back then? Perhaps not a real automat, but where they put your food in automat-like receptacles?) which would presumably have hosted a president or two if it was real.

Meal Time

We've tasked Eryn with cooking one meal a week. With help. But she has to pick what we're going to eat and do a better than equal share of the preparation. This week was foil dinners, courtesy of the cookbook my Aunt and cousins bought me and my brother when we were kids, Betty Crocker's Cookbook for Boys and Girls. Which, just as an aside, has a price as low as $0.01 on Amazon used books and retailed for $3.95 around Christmas of 1980.

Eryn seemed o.k. with the idea of cooking dinner. She's been involved in chocolate chip cookie production before and has helped me by fetching things from the fridge as necessary. And things went pretty well at first. Here you can see her chopping up carrots and potatoes, which was a little difficult as we used only a semi-sharp knife and were overly cautious about how hard she could press to chop the vegetables.


The big trouble came when we used a mixture of pork and hamburger to give the meals a meatloaf flavor. That required mixing the meat, and I had her do it by hand instead of a with a spoon. As you can see, her interest in squishing ground cow and pig between her fingers is dubious at best. In the full set of pictures, you can see her going from unsure, to mild dislike, to this one, a bit grossed out. I promised her next time we'd use a spoon to mix it, but that most people who eat hamburger tend to use their hands so they can form appropriate patty-shaped lumps. I'm of the opinion that if you're going to eat the poor beastie(s), you should have a firm understanding of what happened to the critter, and Eryn has always sort of understood where chicken and hamburger comes from, but this did seem to drive it home a little more. Then again, she's had that same face reserved for pumpkin guts since we first carved a pumpkin.

Free Food Day

It's my birthday this Friday, and I was pondering what I should be up to for the day. In the past, I might have gone out drinking, or wrestled a faux Perkin's waitress in a pool of oil (Or a police woman. You never know if your friends have druthers that impact your wrestling partner). This year, I think I'm going to eat. Because it's my birthday, I have coupons for free food to:

• Breakfast at Louisiana Grill (or any of the Uptown-related cafes/grills/diners)
• Coffee at Caribou
• Lunch at GenghisMongolian Grill
• Coffee at Dunn Brothers
• Dinner at Cold Stone Creamery (well, dessert, but after Louisiana and Genghis, I'll probably be full)

Coupled with a matinee of the new James Bond movie, I'm going to be a very content 40 year old.

Parking Lot Sushi

Really. There's not much more to say about it than "parking lot sushi". It was in the lot at Ring Mountain, being chilled by today's brief snow storm. I could say it was ironic because I was at Origami two nights ago where there was good sushi, but that would be a misuse of the word. Gross is a much better choice. Eryn refused to let me put it on her lemon sorbet, despite that she was at a sushi restaurant drinking Limonata less than 48 hours earlier.

Well Balanced

I must be in touch with my masculine and feminine sides, because I just ate four slices of bacon and three scoops of cookie dough for lunch.

Phallic Oral Baconality

After we finished playing games at Adam's and hanging at the Holiday Inn Waterpark in Brainerd last weekend, Kyle pushed for a visit to Thielen's Meats in Pierz on the way back down. The ham and bacon are delicious. But a majority of my bacon looks exactly like this, which I can't help but think is some sort of inside joke on the part of the butcher. When it's pointed at two sunny-side up eggs on the next pan over, well...you might as well be having porn for breakfast.

Family, Speed Bumps, Et Al.

The World's Most Effective Speed Bump, courtesy of Freewheeling Spirit (via LiveLeak)


Andrew Zimmern has a link to a molecular gastonomy powerpoint at New York Magazine. I had no idea this was a fad until I read about it in Sagal's Book of Vice. Then suddenly I'm seeing it on Zimmern, and what looks suspiciously like molecular gastronomy in a wheelchair on Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations. The bulk of Zimmern's post is about his dust up with the owner of Hell's Kitchen in the Rake and the locals involved. Apparently part of the argument is he looks down on the locals. Personally, I find that difficult to believe of someone who appears with Colleen Kruse (a columnist for The Rake) live at the State Fair on what looked to be the local women's radio channel. Can you be more in touch with the grass roots culture of the Twin Cities than to be hosting something with Colleen? My wife and I have been married fourteen years, and we fondly remember seeing her at the local comedy club when our love was newly minted and shiny and Colleen's joke about her son's strong penis might not have embarrassed him as a what...high school upper classman? college student? I enjoy Zimmern's show on The Travel Channel. He seems to truly enjoy food and the people who serve it. Then again, I also love Hell's Kitchen, as can be noted by my previous posts citing disgust that they were below Perkin's and how excited I was to eat there, and Eryn and I talking about possibly riding the train downtown to eat there this weekend. Just get along and keep me entertained and well fed. Maybe that's what you're doing.

My great grandmother. I believe my dad pointed out that she's the one in the middle front. That may be my great great grandmother to the left of her. He wasn't entirely sure.

Breakfast Potluck in a Crock Pot

I needed a post so that I can refer the potluck dish I made for work to the people who have been asking for it. I was sort of loose and fast with the process, but here we go:

For a FULL crock pot (sizeable - 4-5 quarts):

• 2-3 pounds of tater tots
• A pound of chopped ham - I think sausage or bacon would also work, although tater tots provide a lot of grease, so you might have to be careful in your experimenting (or thorough at drying the grease off the meat)
• A green pepper - you can chop it or mince it - I preferred mine minced
• A big onion - you can chop it or mince it - I preferred mine minced
• 1.5-2+ cups of shredded cheddar
• 8-10 eggs mixed with a cup of milk

In the big crock pot put down enough tater tots to cover the floor of the pot, and then layer in ham, pepper+onion and cheese. Layer it several times (i.e. about three), and then pour in the eggs+milk. Takes between 4-6 hours to cook on low. I started it at 11:00 p.m. and it was perfect at 6:00 a.m., so overnight works fine.

I did experiment with a 2/3 crock pot first. You can just do fewer layers. Use less tater tots and cheese, but the same amount of ham and onion and pepper as in the big pot. Top with six eggs mixed into a half cup of milk. Took about four hours on low.

Absolutely best served fresh unless you like overcooked cheese.