What I eat, apparently

This will be what I call exceedingly lazy blogging. See, here’s how things usually work. I take pictures, and then after awhile I dump them all out of the camera and into the computer, and hack them up in Photoshop and make them internet worthy. Sometimes I have many many things that I’m making, and I get a bunch of pictures at once. These help me get through the ‘lean times’ as it were. And when I say ‘lean times’, I mean ‘when I eat nothing but the same hot dogs and Mexican food for 5 days straight’. It’s just not that interesting.

A ‘Wiener of the Day’ blog would have great potential, though.

In any case, after a photo dump, there’s a lovely array of food photos to choose from. I’ll generally start with the most interesting and/or photogenic and/or tasty and/or funny first, and work my way down from there. If enough time passes where I either a.) haven’t eaten anything particularly interesting in awhile or b.) haven’t gotten around to dumping out new photos, then I get to the backup pictures. These are still interesting enough for me to slap up here, but tend to get saved for last. Meaning I may have added newer and more interesting photos to the photo pile before I get around to using those backup photos. And soon they become old and bedraggled and sad. They’re like the people on The Price is Right that never get to leave Contestant’s Row. Tragic, indeed.

In any case, option b happened. And thusly I present my lunch from about 2 months ago:

The sandwich is filled with turkey and delicious. Cheese nips are always a plus, and cannot be appropriately eaten without milk. The apple is one of the best sort, that which goes straight from the tree into your hand, and eventually your mouth, without at any point being immersed in wax to be made shinier. I prefer my apples dull, thank you very much!

I love macaroons so bad. They are like magical lumps of coconut and joy. I recently had the joy of eating one, made in the mini-mountains of Southwest Virginia, that was approximately the size of my fist and appeared to a have a stingray composed entirely of chocolate and yes, more joy, affixed to the bottom of it. It slid down my gullet quite nicely. Such delights will naturally cause the mind to wander to the possibility of producing such things in mass quantities. So I tried making macaroons.

They ended up being round and rather average as such things go.

Admittedly, I didn’t follow the recipe very well. I had this bag of uber-shredded coconut from a local Mediterranean grocery store, and it definitely came up about a cup short. So I just added more flour. Then, rather then dumping the vanilla in with the milk first, I dumped it straight onto the flour/coconut mixture, meaning about 3 of these babies taste like Super Vanilla, and the rest are, well, a bit blander then necessary.

Chocolate helps, though!

A bit more chocolate would have helped more. I can’t give up yet, though. I have to believe that delicious homemade macaroons exist, even if achieving them actually requires following a recipe!

This is a rather bad photo.

However, the deliciousness of the smoothie overwhelmed the badness of the photo so much that I was simply compelled to post it here. I apparently had some sort of lack-of-smoothie induced arthritis, or epilepsy perhaps. Or, maybe this was a symptom of a tragic onset of scurvy, which I almost succumbed to, but escaped by the skin of my teeth with this delightful smoothie. The ingredients? Frozen banana, frozen raspberries, a peach, orange juice, and ice. It was quite delightful, really. This smoothie, like this picture, is a testament to life. A testament to one person’s ability to fight her way past the evils of photographic mediocrity as well as the travesties of a day without liquefied food. Think of this less as a poorly taken picture of a smoothie, and more as a snapshot of hope. Believe!

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.