What I eat, apparently

It’s kinda rare for me to get decent closeup shots. Generally, I think my camera is bitter towards me. See, I used to have a different digital camera before my current one. I really liked it, I even hand-made it a camera case and everything. Then someone broke into my apartment and stole it (among other things). I mourned the loss of that camera greatly. That camera and I, we had forged a special relationship together, and to have it ripped so cruelly from me was not something I could readily handle.

Anyhow, after an appropriate mourning period, I decided it was time to get a new camera. I even upgraded to a better model. However, I think this camera has always known that I never completely got over my feelings towards the first camera. It’s a shame in a way, too, as this camera is definitely better (by some people’s standards of ‘better’ at least). I even bought it a shiny case and everything, and I give it as much affection as a person like me can possibly give a camera! Still, it serves me well, and has it’s bad days like any other piece of machinery. I need to give credit where it’s deserved.

In any case, here’s some cheesy pasta with basil:

I always attempt to make homemade pasta with cheese to combat the general unhealthiness of box pasta with cheese, but it tends to end up being greasier. This is due to me being all inspired to dump in as many cheeses as possible, and inevitably several of them are not inclined to melt very easily. Meaning that, inevitably, I’ll think adding butter and/or olive oil is a great idea. All of which still leads to delicious, but definitely not to healthy. Albeit, if you want to eat pasta and cheese, it’s probably best to chuck the whole ‘healthy’ thing pretty early on, anyhow.

So at some point recently, a legion of lazy carrots invaded my fridge. They refuse to leave. So, inevitably, I’ve been attempting to figure out things to do with said carrots. I find raw carrots by themselves bland and boring, and cooked carrots by themselves are mildly repulsive. Nonetheless, the part of me that is descended from rabbits recognizes the value in eating carrots, as also does the part of me that wants to put off having to get glasses for as long as possible. Thus, I find ways to eat the carrots.

One excellent means of sneakily getting carrots into my stomach is the Vietnamese garden roll. These also serve as a vehicle for peanut sauce, one of the top nominees for the Best Sauce of All Time.

Anyhow, I boiled up some delightfully wormy (like, resembling worms, except incredibly appetizing!) noodles, shredded some lettuce, sliced up some tofu, and attempted to slice carrots without hurting myself. I failed at the latter task. Sure enough, that knife decided to get awful friendly with my left index finger. So it goes. Nothing bad at least, kudos to me for being lazy about sharpening cutlery!

Anyhow, after a sloppy assemblage, my dinner looked like this:

I had a bunch left. I set them down for one brief moment, and suddenly these strange beasts emerged from the ether, as if by Garden Roll Magic. They approached timidly, with that tiny glimmer of hope that these strange tubes might be a disguise for a chipmunk, or possibly a sparrow, or the rare wild sighting of small brown digestible pellets. But alas, disappointment was met by all but my tummy.

Anyhow, the peanut sauce is awesome, you should make it and dip things in it. It’s easy!

-1/4 cup peanut butter (chunky is always fun)
-1/4 cup hoisin sauce
3/4 to 1 cup water

Boil until saucy. Add crushed peanuts if you are also saucy.

P.S. The recipe calls for a dash of sesame oil, but I always forget to add it. Tastes good either way!

So every time I’ve eaten green papaya salad, I’ve gotten sick to my stomach. The first time I ate it was when I’d up and decided to make it myself, not long after having discovered the fabulous joys of Vietnamese salads. See, I was at this party, and this dude Chad burbled on to me in glowing terms of the fabulous merits of shredded papaya, and it’s salad-like uses. So I sought out the papaya in all of it’s shredded goodness.

I was so excited that I forgot to rinse it.

I downed a bunch, and ended up missing work the next day due to the viciously uncomfortable swelling my stomach was experiencing. Only lasted a day at least, and kept me from eating green papaya salad again until a year or so later. That next time, however, was from an actual restaurant. Thusly, the weird bloat only lasted a few hours, and was milder.

My problem is that if something is delicious, I’ll still want to eat it no matter how sick it makes me. This also gives insight to why, every year as a child, I was always ill in early November, having free reign on my Halloween candy.

In any case, I made some more green papaya salad last night, it was quite delightful and the best part? Not a bit of sickness.

It really is the sort of salad that you just want to roll around in!

I’d post a recipe, but you can just google it instead, for I am full of lazy!

Hey look! I made real sushi! Not lazy sushi! Yay!

I totally have the wrong type of rice. The sweet rice was right by the short grain rice at the store, and I was all like ‘Hey! Instead of getting the rice I’m supposed to get, I’ll get the one right beside it instead!’. So I did. And it’s really glutinous and sticky. To think, way back in my early sushi-making days it was a hard and arduous task to get the sushi rice to be ’sticky’. It involved strategic soaking of the rice, painful measurements of the water, and much arduous squishing around with a large spoon or other such device to get the rice to desired stickiness. It’s gotten much easier since then, mind you, but with this sweet rice, I don’t even really have to touch it for it to be sticky!

Anyhow, here’s a bit of technical detail about the process of preparing the ingredients: I hacked up a bunch of crap.

The cucumber and carrot went easy. The avocado, being perfect consistency (something else I was hellish at determining back in the day) also went easy. That egg was a real bastard, though.

First off, I was out of white rice, so I mixed brown rice up into the egg instead, which is why the egg is funny colors. I really hate cleaning frying pans, so I use the fabulous ‘boil the egg in a ziplock bag in a pot full of water’ technique, which is generally brilliant. Doesn’t work so well when there’s sugar in there too, though, as the sugar just wanted to sink to the bottom, and scald onto the bottom of the pan, and consequentially tear when I lifted the bag to check on the egg’s progress. Let’s just say some of the egg had not finished boiling yet and decided to escape. My strainer is my buddy.

So then I rolled it all up into delightful friendly tubes, as can be seen below. The ‘lack of white sugar’ problem also lent it’s coloring to the rice as well, as you can see. Brown sugar actually tastes fine in sushi, the aesthetics are the problem, I suppose.

Then comes the slicing, and the dicing, with the hackin’ of the knives. And so forth. All producing this delightful crop of fishless tasties:

I actually would have had them include meat if I’d been able. But you see, Drew is repulsed by both crab and shrimp, so they’re out. Hell if I can find tuna at Kroger anymore, so that’s out (I was apparently too lazy to check any other grocery store). Salmon in raw form just doesn’t do much for me, so none of that. And I’m still not completely sure which white fish would really work well in sushi. Oh, and eel would have been fabulous, but the Tan-A Asian grocery store was also beyond the scope of my laziness. Alas. Egg is kinda like future meat, so I guess that works.

Anyhow, i made it all purdy:

All of which became an attempt at a romantic dinner. Or at least, imagine that there wasn’t a blinding flash used in this picture below, and that the table isn’t all scratched up, and that the drill isn’t there. Or something like that.

My original plan was to make orange chicken. I had the orange juice rather strategically located in my fridge, and everything else just a cabinet’s length away. I even had a pre-existing recipe, and by ‘recipe’ I mean ’scrawled-up piece of paper’. The recipe called for oranges, and I had juice, so I figured I’d just dump things in at random. This was my first mistake.

Apparently there’s a big difference between ‘1 tbsp of sherry’ and me just casually adding a vaguely largish dollop. No matter how much sugar I added, the sauce kept tasting like a screwdriver gone horridly and vomitously wrong. The soy sauce didn’t help either. Albeit, the recipe I was vaguely following didn’t actually call for soy sauce, which right there might have been part of the problem. So I gave up and strained it all out.

Luckily, I’d only added carrots, which strained out quite well. I dumped them back in the pan, and added the green pepper and gluten. I then proceeded with the ‘teriyaki sauce, garlic, and sesame oil’ approach, which worked much better. I stuck to safer addons like sesame seeds and pepper. Look, it’s pretty! There’s even steam rising! It’s like a train got buried in a tragic avalance of vegetables!

These gluten balls are awesome, btw. So squishy and just the right amount of absorbent! Like, I wish I had a giant magical bed of gluten I could curl up on and go to sleep on. Then if I got hungry in the middle of the night I could just start gnawing. I suppose I’d need to douse myself in teriyaki or sweet and sour sauce before going to bed though, otherwise the gluten wouldn’t have too much flavor. I could just shower in the morning, I suppose. These things are so complicated!

Oh yeah, it all got gloriously dumped on rice for the final consumption. I had a serious case of consumption…of teriyaki! Woo!

P.S. I’m putting the ‘vegan’ tag for this, so kindly ignore if you are Buddhist, as apparently garlic is non-vegan for Buddhists. I always knew garlic came from those cloven beasts that haunt the hills and meadows of the lands no vampires dare enter!