What I eat, apparently

I love Asian grocery stores. I don’t know what 1/2 the vegetables are, which makes it all the more exciting. At any point, I could go in there, buy a random thing I’ve never eaten before, and throw it in a pan and see what happens. Keeps life exciting, you see. I also appreciate the fact that Asian grocery stores exist in an alternate price dimension from regular grocery stores. Like if I want basil? I could go to a regular grocery store and pay entirely too much for a puny container of basil, as apparently fresh basil is considered gourmet or something, or I could go to Tan-A (my Asian grocery store of choice) and get a big poofy bag of basil for a buck at most. This applies also to nori, of the sushi-paper variety. So cheap in a 50 or 100-pack, and costs entirely too much in the measly 10 pack from ye local Kroger.

I always end up with too many bean sprouts. I think it’s physically impossible to eat as many bean sprouts as you can purchase in one quantity, at any grocery store. Kroger has them in plastic boxes, waay too many to eat, and Tan-A has jumbo bags of the stuff. The things go bad so fast too, I’d feel guilty if it weren’t so dirt cheap. Oh well, I’m assisting in adding decomposing materials to the landfill, as inspiration for all of the plastics, or something like that.

In any case, I like pho. I like fake pho, too. I lack the skills to make the broth necessary for real pho, and the one time I bought a jar of paste labeled ‘Pho’, it tasted less then tasty. Untasty, even. So I get snazzy little bouillon cubes in a range of flavors, also from Tan-A. My favorite flavor is stewed duck! I dump that in with pho noodles, then add whatever protein is convenient. I was feeling the tofu this time around ($1.35 + tax per box, not too shabby!). And afterward, I dump in copious amounts of basil and bean sprouts. I, being a wuss, do not add peppers. However, I do add Chiracha sauce (AKA rooster sauce), as well as essential hoisin sauce. Plus a squirt of lime juice, for bonus flavor!

Not exactly real pho, considering the lack of the luscious beef broth and all. But that’s ok, because I like saying ‘faux pho’. If I was making it for someone, I could say it was faux pho fo’ that person. If it was for someone named Forrest, it would be faux pho fo’ Forrest. This is really fun to say. I recommend that you immediately go and make some half-assed pho for your good friend Forrest, so you have an excuse to say it, too.

I have decided that I greatly appreciate pasta dishes in strange environments. Galactic pasta was not enough, I simply had to throw some into the ocean as well.

In any case, Pasta Roni is super useful when you need to use up a bunch of stuff and are too lazy to make pasta from scratch. This particular instance uses a box of parmesan noodle, or some name like that. In any case, I dumped in bits of celery, green onion, and carrot, as well as parmesan cheese on top. And more garlic, as I’m trying to fend off the vampires for as long as possible. There was turkey that was destined to go in as well, but my little brain didn’t remember this fact until after said pasta was already in my mouth. Ah well.

I’d been planning on making sugar cookies for awhile. See, there’s been a large quantity of sugar cookie frosting sitting in my freezer for entirely too long, and I’ve just been waiting for a good opportunity to use it. As I’m not quite sure how long frosting lasts, even when frozen, I finally decided to suck it up and yank that puppy out of the freezer and eventually into my tummy.

The ‘with wheat flour’, as mentioned in the title, was purely by accident, by the way. Or rather, purely because of poor planning. Flour isn’t the sort of thing I check on a regular basis to ensure I still have some. Flour takes awhile to go away. Sometimes, in my mind, ‘takes awhile to go away’ equates to ‘infinite’. Like, I imagine there’s a portal in my pantry, specifically in my flour tub, and this portal leads to the Flourverse (like our own universe, but dustier and full of starch). See, there’s excess flour in the Flourverse that spills over through the portal, keeping me constantly with a supply of flour. This theory was completely blown to hell when, at the point after pretty much every other ingredient was mixed up, I went to get flour. I suppose it’s really a positive that I had wheat flour instead of no flour, as it saved me a bitter and cranky extra trip to the grocery store. And on Sunday afternoon, of all times, the most godforsaken time to ever set foot in a grocery store. So really, here’s my sentiment: Wheat flour, how I love you so. You made my cookies taste like health biscuit, but I added so much frosting that it doesn’t matter.

The picture is rather dark, this is because both my camera and my photo skills are competing for the 2008 Dinginess Award. In any case, here’s something else ridiculous. I’ve got this cookie gun, which can also be used as an frosting gun. So I’m all like, I’ll just stuff the frosting into the gun and shoot it on! I do so, and the frosting comes out really poorly. Like, sticking to the gun and refusing to get onto the cookie, and then getting on the cookie and sticking out all funny. And I start getting frustrated and wondering if I’m actually mildly retarded and don’t realise it, as I’ve seen people use a cookie gun for frosting quite well, and wonder what exactly is so wrong with me that I can’t do it? Then I get pissy and throw a knife on the floor. And then I throw the cookie gun. Both were unharmed in this completely unnecessary act of violence, but there is still frosting on the ceiling from the incident. I really don’t know how my objects put up with me, honestly, I would have walked out long ago.

Of course, I had a revelation about half an hour later that I used a cookie dough nozzle, and not an frosting nozzle. D’oh! So I’m gotta go buy my cookie gun some roses or something to make up for it, try to convince it to tell it’s friends it fell down the stairs, or something like that. To be honest here, I felt really bad about throwing the thing afterward, like I took a puppy and threw it or something. Anthropomorphization isn’t all it’s cracked up to be sometimes.

I’ll tell you who deserves it though: my kitchen cabinets. Things whack me upside the head all the time.

There are two types of pasta in this world. There is planned pasta, and there is improv pasta. Planned pasta is often the result of a recipe, where you have a trip to the grocery store and spend precious dollars to get fabulous ingredients for the making of your dinner. Then there is improv pasta. See, improv pasta happens when you’ve got a bunch of remnants of other planned meals just crawling all over your fridge. They need to be consumed in some manner before they get all green and hairy. Thus, pasta to the rescue!

I generally have some sort of dry pasta hanging out in the cabinet, as it is excellent backup food. This particular instance involved little tubes whose name I can’t remember. Why is it that every shape of pasta has it’s own name, anyhow? I’m going to bake a loaf of bread, shape it like a hat, and tell people it’s called a Stanley. Or hey, I’ll bake a loaf of bread into little tiny balls, and tell people it’s called a Roll! Hmm, crap.

In any case, I had leftover red sauce from some dipping adventure, as well as leftover turkey and tomato from some sandwich adventure, and leftover celery from some salad adventure. So they all got gloriously dumped in, along with some shaved carrot, a range of seasonings, and parmesan cheese. There was to have been additional cheese involved, but the mold monsters had already gotten to it, which was quite a blow to my palette, admittedly.

Then I photographed it while the pasta relaxed comfortably on a black chair. Meaning that when properly cropped, the pasta appeared to be floating in space. So I decided to go ahead and heighten this particular effect, and we thus have Galactic Pasta.

It is a very dairy time of year. See, around this time of year, your wallet starts conspiring with your stomach. Your wallet is all like, “Boy, heating this home sure is expensive, wish I could get my owner to be warmer without wasting all this money!”, and your stomach is all like, “Boy do I like fats!”. One thing leads to another and you find yourself slurping down more cheese then the human body was ever intended to cope with. It is quite a delicious thing, however. Still, one must chastise one’s wallet, as well as one’s stomach for listening to the wallet, taking note that, while you might save on your heating bill by gaining 10 lbs, all of that money goes quickly down the drain when you have to go buy new clothes to avoid having the ever-stylish ’sausage look’. Silly stomach, it thinks it’s a brain!

All of which is a lead-in to another post about cheese. A post about a lazy lunch, whereupon I zapped some cheese on some crackers. This was an art of cooking I discovered fairly early on, in late elementary school. At that age, melting cheese on crackers is a truly wondrous feat. At some point since then, it became the stuff of backup lunches.

Note: I also had miso soup accompanying this, which, while much more interesting in terms of it’s process of preparation, was much less interesting visually. Meaning miso soup photos, when I take them at least, generally look like crap.

Note #2: The cat (Estha) was purely ornamental, and was not harmed in the making of these crackers.