What I eat, apparently.

Have you ever had one of those days where you just really really wanted sushi but couldn’t quite justify the cost? This is why it really comes in handy that I know how to make sushi. And I really had planned to make sushi, too. However, when you’re missing a key ingredient (nori, aka the seaweed paper that sushi gets rolled in) and are too lazy to go buy it, the sushi just ain’t gonna happen. Albeit, one who is too lazy to go buy an ingredient is certainly too lazy to actually make said sushi, but let’s just ignore that fact for now.

So instead I just made all the ingredients for sushi and dumped them in a pile. Turned out I was out of sushi rice, but I just used jasmine instead (jasmine = best rice ever) and it was quite delightful. I fried the egg + sugar that always looks so nice and folded in nigiri rolls, but, quite inevitably, it suceeded looking only like mutated scrambled egg. So much for my egg frying skills. But no matter, it all piled happily with the avocado and carrot, as well as delightful furikake. Furikake is the Rice Seasoning of the Gods, it is flavorful and makes even plain rice absolutely delicious. And then came the shrimpies!

In any case, here’s the final result.

Lazy sushi for a lazy me. But, so good.

I really need to get some (nori, that is).

P.S. If you want to be super cost efficient, it’s infinitely cheaper to buy nori in a 100 sheet count pack from your local Asian food store then from the fancy schmancy international aisle of your local grocery store, where they might charge the same price for only 10 sheets.

These days, having a window open generally results in the scent of cooked meat wafting in at all times of day (and possibly night, as I’m generally asleep however I can’t be too sure about that). The entirely frustrating part about all of this is my complete lack of grill. I suppose I *could* technically buy one, but that would involve spending money, as well as the intent to spend more then a year living in my currently backyarded rented abode. This leaves me with two tendencies which I vigorously practice.

Tendency #1 is my waiting for the both eagerly anticipated and highly dreaded arrival of the Grill Fairy, whereupon I’d wake up with a sharp jabbing pain in my neck and charcoal down my shirt, but a grill resting sweetly beneath my pillow to make it all worthwhile. No luck on this one so far.

The far better tendency is #2, whereupon I get to mooch off the cook-offs of others, and eat tasties like these:

There’s actually another option in all of this. It’s called “The George Foreman Grill and Extension Cord Method”. It doesn’t produce quite the flavorful taste and aroma one might hope for, but it does indeed fulfill the ‘grilling outdoors’ requirement entailed in, err, grilling outdoors.

A final note: Those with gas stoves are in luck. I greatly enjoy stabbing a wiener (huh huh ‘wiener’) with a fork and cooking it over the gas stove until said wiener is rendered delicious. This also works well with marshmallows. I highly recommend it.

So at some point in the vaguely recent past, I happened to acquire a small collection of goobers. I’m not quite sure I’ve had goobers before this point but, sad to say, they’re just not all that good. I need them to at least be doused in caramel or some other substance, at least they’d be approaching Snickers-like tastiness at that point. However, apparently I need a minimum of Whitman’s Sampler quality chocolate and peanuts to satiate me.

Not that this has stopped me from eating them, however. Which is precisely what I was doing when I decided they needed to be documented in pixel-form. I knew they couldn’t just be in little ball glob form, it’s simply not festive enough. So I made a swirlie:

Think of them as hippie goobers?

Actually, as I was doing this, I just kept thinking of rabbit poop. I mean, I’m pretty sure they taste better, but visually they do bear a strong resemblance. All of which inevitably led to this horrid accident:

I mean, c’mon, if you were decapitated, I’m sure that holding it all in would be the last thing on your (lack of) mind.

This did nothing to improve the taste, by the way.

I actually have a really hard time making salads. The big problem is the dressing, I suppose. The store dressings I’d get never tasted as good as restaurant dressings. Also, I had a bad habit of buying ranch dressing and continuing to use it for long after the expiration date, whereupon it gets a weird tangy flavor. I was young and innocent in those days, and assumed that salad dressing had the shelf life of any other condiment. Ranch, in particular, has a bad habit of pooping out on you entirely too early, due to it’s large dairy presence.

I also had a Caesar salad phase, and it is practically impossible to buy Caesar dressing from the store and have it taste anything close to good. For me, at least. This is all possibly because I was(am) a cheap bastard and generally avoided anything higher then Kraft-quality, due to the price tag.

Then along came Ken’s Steak House honey mustard dressing. It is a glorious thing indeed.

And also, I should mention, along came Drew, equipped with the Tripps Restaurant gained knowledge of how to make a decent salad. And thusly, we have this baby, which he even made all artful for me:

It uses romaine lettuce, tomato, croutons, sliced almonds, tortilla bits, parmesan cheese, american cheese, and the aforementioned honey mustard dressing. Yay!

So the beauty of the bean concoction that I made yesterday lies strongly in its cheapness. $.60 for a can of beans, $.60 for a can of tomatoes, a scoop out of a large bag of frozen corn that cost $1.50, a chunk of cilantro for a buck, and misc. seasonings already sitting around. And the rice: a scoop out of a 10 lb bag that cost $6. Oh how I love Asian grocery stores.

And the beans go on forever, as beans are want to do.

My lunch. Or rather, half of my lunch, as the other side of this baby was rather identical to the first.

I got bored and soaked some chicken parts in bbq sauce for awhile, baked them, and they worked as excellent accompaniment to the Delightful Bean Scourge.

I cropped that, not necessarily for the artistic feel, but because the chair that plate sits on isn’t exactly promoting of a healthy appetite, if you know what I mean. And by this, I mean it had been sitting in the sun for a few days and had accumulated the sort of look that such a piece of furniture is apt to acquire, especially considering the feisty tree and bushes nearby.

I still have beans left, somehow. I promise I won’t take any more pictures of them, really.