What I eat, apparently

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!

My pasta is totally blinged out, yo. You see, when you really get down to the nitty gritty, there’s just something about a lens flare that makes life worth living.

See, these shells and cheese are so glamorous, you can barely tell what they are!

Actually, Pasta Roni shells and cheese is a glorious thing. I like to pump them up with parmesan, oregano, and garlic. So cheap, too! Actually, I really like cheapo shells and cheese. There’s something about that powdered cheese food product that makes life worth living.

To be honest here, I like expensive shells and cheese too. Really, as long as there’s cheese involved I’m gonna be OK with the pasta situation. Well, unless it uses elbow macaroni. That is the Macaroni of Satan. I don’t care what anyone tells me, I totally think that different shapes of noodles taste different from each other, and elbow macaroni is just no good at all.

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!

There really are very few things that wouldn’t benefit from having a large quantity of chipotle tabasco sauce dumped on top of them. Well, maybe not ice cream I guess. Or my car. Nonetheless, the point here is that chipotle sauce is the Sauce of the Gods.

So I was feeling Tex-Mexey tonight and decided to dump a bunch of crap in a pan and see what happens.

Ingredients used: Can o’ black beans, can o’ diced tomatoes, a pile of frozen corn, a pile of cilantro, a bit of cut up onion, vegetable oil (with the onion at the beginning, before dumping everything else in), vinegar, cooking wine, chili pepper, chipotle sauce, and cumin. Err, and rice.

First lesson of the night: don’t dump in the cilantro until the last minute. It may be tempting to just fling it into the pan all willy nilly whenever it strikes you, just don’t do it. It may be begging you on it’s flimsy little legs flashing you cilantro currency, but don’t do it. I put it in at the beginning, and not too long after that was met with some severely spinachey and flaccid Cilantro. Flaccid Cilantro! No good at all! Luckily, I had some extra that I dumped in at the end, for maximum cilantro-ness.

It really was quite tasty. However, you know what I completely forgot about that would have seriously maximized the taste? The cheese! I had gotten some cheddar explicitly for this, and of course I only remember this fact several hours later.

It means that this dish is officially vegan! That is, unless I got the can of meat-eating killer tomatoes. Again. Oh well, At least they’re high in protein.