What I eat, apparently

So at some point in the not too distant past, a large mound of ground beef crawled into my freezer. Up until recently, my thoughts toward it, when it got thought of at all, were vague and murky and took on spaghetti-like forms. Then suddenly, I was showered with gifts from the Tomato Deities while simultaneously having leftover burger buns from a cookout. It suddenly became very clear what must be done: burgers. This is quite appropriate summer fare, indeed. Too bad I had to do it the lame stove way, as I lacked a grill to make appropriate outdoor cookout smells for the neighbors to drool over. Alas, I could have used a George Foreman grill and an extension cord, but somehow it’s not quite the same.

I managed to completely overcompensate on these babies. See, ground beef patties have this tendency to shrink up when being cooked. So, something that started out as a reasonable size for a bun ends up shrinking up and fattening up until you’re left with a bloated giant meatball doing a clam impersonation. Mind you, this is still a tasty result, but those several bites of bun without burger are somehow lacking. So I made them super thin and super large. Result: I fried 3 per pan load, and they were a perfect size…for a bun that was larger then the buns I had. So the meat kind of flopped over the edges. I guess too much meat sure beats not enough (insert ‘meat beating’ joke here). In any case, it tasted good, especially with the addition of such delightful tomatoes:

So, despite having overgrown meat discs, I still have entirely too much ground beef for a reasonable person to consume in a respectable amount of time. So it just got ground up in the hopes of sprucing up some lesser dish. Which, ultimately, led to the horrible excuse for Shepherd’s Pie.

See, I somehow ended up with a largish quantity of some frozen mashed potatoes. High end, meaning you could eat them and say ‘these are not bad….for frozen mashed potatoes’. There’s only so much I can take of plain mashed potatoes, to be honest here. Thusly entered the brilliant idea of dumping some of that ground beef on top, and then dumping some frozen corn on top of that. Brilliant, I thought!

Rather mediocre, in reality. I still ate it, as there were far worse things to eat, but it just wasn’t putting the sparkle in my eyeballs, to use a ridiculous metaphor.

Incidentally, I just looked up some shepherd’s pie recipes. This is apparently rather far away from what shepherd’s pie actually is, to the point of probably offending real shepherd’s pie so much as to cause it’s friends to beat this dish up if they ever ran into this dish alone at night. Shameful, really. The last time I had shepherd’s pie was in 6th grade, which might explain things. Come to think of it, that was the only time I’ve ever had shepherd’s pie. Meaning you should probably ignore pretty much everything I say, but you’ve probably figured that out by now.

Summer is a glorious time, indeed. This is because Summer is the time when all of the delicious tomatoes come out to play. They just love crawling inside my sandwiches! And where go the tomatoes, soon goes the bacon.

I have a weird relationship with bacon, see. It’s weird, or rather, it stands in contrast to the relationship that many I know have with bacon, in that it’s an in between thing. There seem to be two camps of people: those who prefer to eschew bacon entirely (often eschewing the entire category of ‘meat’ while they’re at it) or those who, if they could, would wrap everything that goes down their throats in bacon. And I’m generally just somewhere inbetween.

Take, for example, a bacon cheeseburger. I have been known to remove the bacon from one of these particular sorts of burgers. It’s not that the bacon is bad, it’s just that it tampers with the purity of a burger. Bacon is a separate item, quite appropriate in specific circumstances, but completely unnecessary when all I really want is a squishy pile of beef.

But then comes BLT time. It is a time when bacon is allowed to take the spotlight in my gastronomical life, for BLTs just might be the Sandwich of the Gods.

When frying the bacon for this wee tasty, I was totally licking the spatula. Because apparently bacon grease is just that good. I figure it balances out in the end because I pat the bacon down hardcore on some paper towels afterwards.

I’m saving the bacon grease, too. For what, you may ask? Because I want to try deep frying some vegetarian gluten balls in them. This could very well be the epitome of delicious right there.

Hot dang is it hot out! And of course, when it’s hot out and I’m hungry, the best thing to do is to eat like I live somewhere even hotter then where I currently live! Thus, the practice of baking meats floating in puddles of tropical fruit.

This particular instance of said practice involves salmon. This started off with the intention of being just Mango Salmon, but the pineapple was being whiny. See, mangoes and pineapples are pretty good buddies. When there’s a crazy salmon party going down, one has difficulty if it’s not invited and the other is. So I decided to let the pineapple in on the action. This turned out to be a pretty good idea, because this was totally a BYOJ event (bring your own juice) and lets just say that the mango showed up empty handed. Or as they say: my pineapple brings all the moisture to the yard! So the salmon got to soak a bit, quite enjoying itself I should add. The cilantro, as usual, totally crashed the party, but it definitely spiced things up! The carrots, stodgy old buggers they are, were there, but luckily the pineapple’s juices totally softened them up as well, if you know what I mean.

Post-party was a complete mess, as you can see:

My mouth was rather efficient at cleaning up the mess though, so it was all good.

I will do many things for free food. I am also always interested in a good excuse to dress up and look ridiculous. Therefore, Cow Appreciation Day, a.k.a. the day all Chick-fil-a locations give a free combo meal to anyone who dresses up like a cow, was right up my alley. If you at least wore a cow related item, like a cow print hat, you’d get a free entree, but as far as I was concerned, that was for the wusses who couldn’t handle being a real cow (err real person-dressed-as-cow).

The cow regalia in full, along with an obviously much better dressed cow:

Now, the best way to go about this day is to figure out how to hit as many Chick-fil-a restaurants as possible. Unfortunately, this idea did not strike me and Christine, my partner in crime for the night, until about 6:30 pm. So we ended up hitting 5 of them. There was an elusive duo of guys dressed as cows who’d come down from Baltimore, according to rumor at least, and were in the process of going to 30 Chick-fil-as. That’s a serious commitment right there. We never managed to run into them, though, just passing rumors.

And there seems to be a strategy to doing this. First off, after the first meal that wasn’t designed to be eaten that night, I stopped getting any combo that came with lettuce and tomato, as both would surely get wilted and shriveled by the next day. Also, no more sodas. Bottled water was is the way to go. The real problem was the fries. Fries just don’t last well as leftovers. The sides that you don’t have to pay extra for (cole slaw, or carrot and raisin salad) just don’t do much for me. Sadly it never occurred to me until after it all that the $.25 extra to get a fruit cup side might have been covered in the ‘free combo’ price. I’ll have to remember that for next year, as fruit cups can go a long way.

I ended up with about 80% of both of our waffle fries, I compiled them all into this conveniently large container:

All in all, it was quite fun to hit all of those restaurants, next year I may even take the day off just to try to hit as many as I can, for there are few things better in this world then free chicken.

At entirely too many restaurants, a serving is defined as the average amount of food eaten in the average meal of a 6 1/2 foot person who weighs 300 lbs (give or take a few lbs). For those who are shorter and smaller, this means a much larger then average meal by far. And it’s unfortunate for those of us that grew up with ‘eat everything on your plate’ ideas pounded into us. At least, I know I spent a large portion of my life, when in restaurants, in eating to the point of being rather physically uncomfortable, because I just thought that’s how things worked.

Luckily, at some point in all those years my brain took over. Now, part of the joy at eating out at places with portions of eating contest proportions is the fact that you’ll get two meals out of it instead of just one.

For example, take this here cheesesteak, which this rooster lustfully gazes upon. It is indeed the remnant cheesesteak of an earlier meal.

Once upon a time, there were about 3 more inches at the end of that cheesesteak. That, plus eating all of the fries, plus a bonus slice of pizza that came my way, made for a quite filling meal, with this quite large cheesesteak remnant for dinner later on.

The only downside of eating your meals this way, though, is the strategy involved can lead to a bit of an imbalance. See, this cheesesteak came with a quite large serving of fries. Reheated fries are disgusting more often then not, so as far as I was concerned, it was a given that all of the fries would need to be eaten the first go-around. This, of course, left less room for the cheesesteak, which is what I really wanted in the first place. But, such are the sacrifices one must make for efficiency!