If I’m going to die while eating the food had better have MSG in it Sunday, Mar 22 2009 

cooking and food , , , reuche 5:46 am

Run and never come back. That’s what I’ve done since starting to use MSG in my cooking. I recently have gotten into making Chinese food and cooking with a sort of Chinese style. This ultimately lead to me buying some MSG and using it. And god damn it’s good. If I wasn’t dying I might worry about my sodium levels but I really can’t care about that any longer. It’s good so use it, in anything you can think of.

I have a habit of eating an entire meal -from appetizer to desert- on one plate. This started out because of poverty, and was maintained because of lazyness, but now it’s a fine tradition. The relevance of this is the unique taste of the sauce I made for tacos being left on a plate that I ate ice cream on with a fork. Conversely I had put oyster sauce and mushroom aged soy sauce into the taco sauce which was basically just tomato sauce with a bit of vinegar and spices in it (it’s not tacos without cumin, you can have tacos without chili/peppers as far as I’m concerned, but not without cumin) topped off with some MSG. I enjoyed it quite a bit but a thought lingers.

MSG is cheap, and I don’t just mean the price. You can take a dish with no flavor and instantly impart it with “umami” or basically “savory” flavor just by putting some MSG on it. Of course putting regular salt or pepper onto something will also give you some results but it’s nowhere near as dramatic. So it’s fair to say that using MSG is a shortcut to flavor not unlike using a sauce packet or the like. That is not a lot of fun for someone who tries to take cooking a bit seriously. Then again do people say sugar is a shortcut to flavor? I bet that someone thought it way back in the day; perhaps the same about salt or any other condiment. Isn’t tossing some soy sauce in or on a similar shortcut to give food a different taste? I suppose that is just the way of it with condiments.

Well I’m not an expert on MSG and about the only interesting thing I can say is that it’s called Aji no Moto in Japanese mostly because that’s a brand name, and Wei Jing in Chinese. They had 味の素 (aji no moto) at the Asian market I bought sauces from so that’s what I’ve been using. I can tell you that a little goes a long way. For a bowl of food you really only need a pinch sprinkled over the top. I was told to add it late in cooking because the heat weakens the flavor but I don’t know the extent of that. Today I put it in some stew I made at the start and the stew was as good or better than ever at the end. Although there was definitely a difference when I put some more on once it had cooled down so perhaps this is the case. That means that if you don’t want as strong of a flavor, or if you want to hide the flavor for any reason you should add it earlier, but if you really need that hit then put it on at the end. My last recommendation would be to cut down on the regular salt you use if you’re including MSG. You probably shouldn’t use the same amount of MSG as the amount of salt a recipe calls for, but you can definitely cut out the same amount of salt as the amount of MSG you use.

 

Of capricorn and hermes Saturday, Aug 16 2008 

cooking and food and observation and opinion , , , , reuche 10:43 pm

Recently I have decided to eat yogurt made from goat milk as opposed to cow milk. There is not a particularly good reason for this, although there has been a certain health movement in that direction recently but I have no idea whether that is valid or not. It is just that I have been eating cow milk yogurt regularly for at least 20 years (my eating habits before even last year are hazy at best but I seem to remember eating yogurt for a long time now) and so I decided that I might as well try something else for a while.

So in general I would say that goat milk products do not taste as good as cow milk products but that could simply be an industry standards problem due to the disparity between the cow and goat agricultural industries. Since yogurt is acidic in the first place and possessing of a bracing and sometimes bitter nature there is less of a taste difference between plain cow and goat yogurt.

I had previously heard that goat milk did not have lactose like a cow’s milk does so it was OK for people who are lactose intolerant (probably the majority of the adult world at this point) but that was apparently not true. I suspect that might mean that all milk has lactose but I do not know that. What is apparently true however is that people who are outright allergic to cow milk (I recall knowing someone with this allergy) are not allergic to goat milk. I suppose this makes sense, they are different species after all. So that is a consideration for people so afflicted but it has nothing to do with me.

In case anyone cares, I like to buy the larger and generally more economical (make sure you check the unit rate for yourself if it is not given to you) tubs of yogurt as opposed to individual servings. For the most part I buy vanilla flavored yogurt and eat it with my own fresh fruit to approximate the popular blended individual serving yogurts. However if I’m going to make curry or something else I prefer to buy plain yogurt. There is not necessarily anything to preclude the usage of vanilla in curry, and with the goat’s milk yogurt I have now you can hardly tell the difference anyway, but I nonetheless prefer to follow recommendations and use the plain for cooking.

As to whether to choose “whole” or “reduced” or “non-fat” yogurt, it depends on your dietary requirements or preferences. I tend to prefer things which are lower or non-fat in general but you do need some fat in your diet for health. Why that is I do not exactly remember but it is probably true. Maybe.

Just to mention it the so called “yogurt parfait” has gained a certain amount of popularity as a so-called “healthy desert”. The idea is to layer fruit, yogurt, and granola (fruit, yogurt, fruit, granola probably) and sometimes cover with syrup in a “sundae” or regular drinking glass or bowl. I say that you were probably OK until the syrup came into the picture but certainly yogurt has fewer calories than ice cream anyway which has supplanted custard as the main component of parfaits around the world at this point.

 

god damn you, hotcakes Tuesday, Mar 18 2008 

cooking and crepes and food and hotcakes and observation and pancakes and vegan and vegetarian , , , , , , , , reuche 2:08 am

Alright well as threatened I prepared pancakes for a third time in a handful of days and this time I just used egg and milk like you’re supposed to. This is what I have to say: the mix I was using really sucked. It was a whole wheat pancake mix. Whole wheat is very hit or miss. And I remember hearing that whole wheat flour isn’t necessarily that much better for you than regular wheat flour. It occurs to me that since whole wheat isn’t hulled, if it has been sprayed with pesticides then they might be doing you a favor by hulling the wheat and throwing that part away. Pesticide probably soaks all the way into plants though. Anyway let me break it down in order of what turned out and tasted the best

  1. Making hotcakes the traditional way with milk and egg. The pancakes didn’t really taste better with milk rather than milk substitute, although they did taste better than the oil pancakes, but the consistency was a lot better and of all things they actually got done faster. Unfortunately I thought that they got too easily burnt on the outside, by far. Which was probably the strength of the oil cakes. Nonetheless if you pay more attention than I did when making them you’ll be fine.
  2. Making hotcakes with milk substitute (I used vanilla flavored almond milk) and eggs. This was the first way I made them and even though I am consistently unhappy with the denseness of pancakes made this way I seemed to have the easiest time getting them done properly. They also tasted the best but the vanilla flavoring in the almond milk is what accounted for that. If I had actually flavored any of these pancake mix attempts (cinnamon seemed like a good idea) they probably would have tasted better but more on that later.
  3. Making hotcakes with almond milk instead of cow milk and canola oil instead of eggs. These ones just sucked. The poor taste was mostly due to the canola oil but it would have been worse if I’d used anything else I had (actually the only other oils I have are safflower and olive so there was almost no choice). I wonder if peanut oil would have been any good? I don’t use peanuts though. This mix ended out extremely runny, I think this could have been mitigated by less liquid but I didn’t think of that at the time, and in the end less liquid means less cake. The advantage of using oil over egg was that because they didn’t have anything in that got done that quickly they came up easier, another advantage was not having to use an egg. In the end though, as much as I hate eggs I hated the way these pancakes turned out even more. They were though vegan as far as I know so that’s something. I wouldn’t say that I can make all my regular dishes without various common allergens or animal byproducts (I don’t have the spirit to make meatless meatballs), but I can make a lot of them that way if pressed. And that seems to come in handy a lot more often than you would think these days. Fortunately as far as I know I don’t have any food allergies so it’s all academic to me.

Well  anyway that was how it went. Other than being instructed to substitute 30 ml of oil for 1 egg, which I’m not sure is an equal volume conversion, I just substitute milk substitutes in equal amounts for milk. If you tweak a bit the results would probably be better. For the record the only other one I’ve used for hot cakes is rice milk but it’s not quite thick enough for anything that you want to have some consistency. I once used it in rice pudding (which if I recall was just cooked rice, milk, rum, and sugar, I used brown sugar and quite a bit more rum as well as coconut milk for thickness) that came out well though. Speaking of coconut milk I wonder if you could use it for pancakes? I’m not that interested in trying, coconut milk has too much fat for regular use in my opinion. I really like it in curry though.

It occurred to me while eating these flavorless pancakes that if you want to flavor your hotcake batter it’s easier to get a flavored liquid than to try and figure out how much of what, like for instance chocolate syrup, to add and try and mix in yourself. In general I’m a fan of vanilla (especially bourbon vanilla) and cinnamon when it comes to spices to use in sweet things because you almost can’t add too much of the former and you’re unlikely to add too much of the latter. You could maybe put some nutmeg or clove or whatever in there as well as sugar. Being reminded of an actual cake I made a while ago, I wonder if you could make a pumpkin hotcake somehow. I’m not that interested in finding the answer to that out for myself though.

In any case here’s the end of this stupid experiment. Good riddance. Let me once again say that I prefer crepes to pancakes hands down. Although I think that if you tried to substitute 30 ml of oil per egg in crepe batter you would just end out with oil drowned flour. That is not a pleasant thought.

 

Somewhere along the line I realized that being able to type over 80wpm meant that I could probably move my fingers fast enough to play a synthesizer Monday, Mar 17 2008 

cooking and food and opinion and pork and potatoes , , , reuche 9:17 am

Today, or something very much like it, I cooked a very simple meal. Roasted pork tenderloin (yes, tenderloin in the oven), green beans, mashed potatoes and gravy. I don’t know if that’s officially a british meal or an american one (I didn’t fry anything that might make a difference), either way it was pretty boring, fairly easy, and plenty filling. I would file this one under a meal that anyone can make that you don’t even need a real recipe for. Although there are of course myriads of recipes availble for such things if you need them and care to find them.

For my part I will say that even though I read something that said the tenderloin would be done in 25-35 minutes at 175*C that wasn’t even close. I think that possibly 50 minutes would have been good although I ended out letting it go longer since, as I have documented, I am a supplicant who dependant upon the whims of others and therein I’m always cooking for other people who do not usually share my sense of food (like pork that’s still a fair bit pink or beef that’s bloody). Sometimes I suspect that in various recipes they intentionally give you short cooking times so that you won’t end out cooking something too long but it really wasn’t even close this time. I did have more meat than the directions that I read called for, but 15 minutes more meat? Something else I read said to go 250* for tenderloin because it’s so lean that it will dry out before it gets done during long cooking times. I did not experience that. And I never cook anything that high so I wasn’t really sure whether any of my stuff could take that. Sort of like how you might see a speedometer that goes up to 300 km/h but you know there’s no way that thing is going to go that fast under normal circumstances, and that if it ever does you don’t want to be anywhere near it. If you have the guts to go 250 then presumably you would only need to do it for 25-40 minutes rather than 40-55 (mine went over 55, I stopped even keeping track at the end).

So the roast aside the advice I have about mashing potatoes starts with boiling them. In the first place you don’t explicitly have to boil potatoes before mashing them, you can roast or bake them until suitably soft, it’s just that boiling them is the easiest and fastest way to do it. Moving on, it’s OK to use not only different types of potatoes but to include other similarly suitable root vegetables like rutabaga or yam. But no matter what you do make sure you either start them all at the same time or get the ones that take longer in the pot first and very quickly get the others in. I had a certain embarrassment as I put in one group of potatoes to start and there ended out being about 10 minutes in-between getting the next batch in as I was dealing with other things while trying to peel and chop them. The end result of this uneven cooking was umashed potato parts in with the mashed ones. Other people didn’t care but I say that the moment you’re satisfied with imperfections you become incapable of ever attaining even an approximation of perfection. I put chicken broth and margarine into my potatoes by the way. Someone I know whose cooking I hate but whose potatoes are always rich always uses cream and butter. You can pretty much make them however you like using whatever you like. Coconut milk for instance is also feasible. I like to mix some peas into the potatoes after mashing them, though you could mash the peas in as well if you like, but that’s not what I did this time. Just canned beans on the side. *sigh

At least the gravy turned out alright. Though I’ll confess that it was just a dry prepared mix. Tenderloin does not have sufficient fat to yield enough grease with which to start a gravy (as opposed to regular loin which is also much bigger) . Actually I think that they recommend you trying to make specific fruity (tomato, fig, etc.) sauces for it for that reason. I really wasn’t in the mood to make myself even a simple brown sauce. Not least of which because one of the people I was cooking for can’t/won’t eat it. But honestly, prepared gravy and other sauces (I rarely make my own marinara sauce for pasta, I never make my own plain tomato sauce) have come a long way in my lifetime and it’s definitely good enough for most people. Including the ones I was cooking for and me in the mood I was in.

Well I’ve been making a lot of simple food lately, utilizing a lot of prepared ingredients (mostly sauces, maybe only sauces, unless you count pre-shredded cheese as processed). I seem to be in a bit of a flux between wanting to challenge myself a bit and not wanting to bother with anything much. I had not previously prepared pork tenderloin in the oven so it was an experiment but being such a hands off experience and all you know… hmm… Well we shall just have to see what I whip up next. Probably the last of that dry pancake mix, using actual milk and eggs this time to get a comparison between the variations with it I’ve tried so far (that being milk substitute and egg, and then milk substitute and oil instead of egg) and the usual recipe (milk and egg).

 

The eggless hotcake Saturday, Mar 15 2008 

cooking and food and hotcakes and opinion and pancakes and vegan and vegetarian , , , , , , reuche 6:41 pm

So as promised I attempted to make pancakes without eggs since the mix I received said you could use oil instead. It didn’t specify which oil to use so I used canola. Unfortunately the canola I had really didn’t taste so great, and the hotcakes ended out tasting mostly of it. But they did turn out.

Now on this package it had me using 30ml (two tablespoons if you’re familiar) of oil instead of 1 egg. I have no idea whether or not that would work out for a typical pancake recipe. I had previously heard of people adding grease to the mixture in addition or in the absence of greasing the pan, but never had I heard of using it instead of egg. The overall consistency to me seemed both runnier and thicker if that’s possible. I had some difficulty in cooking them as I pretty much had to let the bottom burn (2 minutes a side as opposed to 1-1:30 a side the last time I made them) in order for enough of each cake to cook to be able to flip it over without the whole thing falling apart. This probably could have been solved by doling or spreading the mixture thinner on the pan but I was having other issues so that’s not how it went for me. Speaking of which, the cakes really collapsed once I flipped them over and they ended out so dense it was hard to tell when they were done. I again made this batch with almond milk instead of cow milk by the way, that again might have made a difference.

I previously mentioned a certain difficulty with the pancakes splashing around on me when I flipped them. The thinness of the mix only added to that problem however I found that by flipping them away from myself (my inclination is apparently to flip them inwards) this was somehow dampened. Also I pressed the cakes flat with my spatula so that they matched up with the splash. Frankly even though I suggested trying to get the cakes to land flat I didn’t make a great effort in doing so. I was holding the spatula extremely low, my hand was nearly touching either the burner or the cakes, while flipping hotcakes, part of that was the spatula I was using which has a parallel blade and handle and part of that was a stiff serving (unless it was supposed to be three) of mead. For the most part the faster I flipped the less fluid deviation there was and the neater the cakes turned out. But whatever. I was baking them in batches of 4 and ended out with 12 which is a pretty typical amount for that kind of thing, I think, so that gives you however many chances to try doing things whatever ways you want.

All said and done, going back to being a bigger crepe fan, even though I dislike eggs as a general matter of principal I prefer the way that pancakes turn out if you use eggs compared to not using them. Same thing with cow milk, probably (I will next try eggs and cow milk with the last of the dry mix I have). However for those of you who are vegan or simply have an egg or milk allergy or whatever there is a glimmer of hope as all kinds of pancake recipes are out there and for the most part they all end out about the same: almost flavorless. So don’t worry too much about what’s in your cakes and instead worry more about whether you’ve got enough of them (those 12 cakes went pretty quickly) and what you’re going to put on them.

 

The simplest cakes Thursday, Mar 13 2008 

advice and cooking and food and hotcakes and pancakes , , , , , reuche 11:28 am

In my opinion the easiest cakes are pan/hotcakes. Whether or not these are truly cakes is debatable but considering recent kitchen forays I can say that you use roughly the same ingredients, eggs milk and flour; and end out finishing in similar ways, pouring some kind of sugary sweet topping on them. And so viva pancakes. But. Crepes are better. By far.

Having a preference for crepes it had been some time since I’d made hotcakes, but someone wanted me to try out an organic whole wheat and coincidentally vegetarian/dairy free mix that they’d obtained. Which conversely had no cooking instructions on the back, just a list of measurements for mixing. Oh well. So I made a batch using it, warily at first and then properly once I realized that my crepe making tips (which conversely is one of my most popular posts since I used the phrase “burnt butter” for the title, I had no idea how much trouble people have burning butter) generally applied only pancakes have a much greater margin for error because they’re quite a bit thicker (if you mix and pour them right anyway). The experience was somewhat unremarkable, however I did use an almond milk instead of cow milk since I was making it for someone that’s extremely lactose intolerant. And of course after going out of my way that person ended out eating just 2 of the 16 yielded pancakes. Yeah fuck you very much too. Actually I don’t mind substituting milk types that much and pancakes are one of easiest things to substitute out ingredients for. It does seem like the fewer animal products you use the thinner and denser and possibly even dryer your hotcakes end out though. I might try that mix again with cow milk, and then another time with rice milk instead of cow milk and oil instead of egg (actually the mix said the egg or oil was optional but that seemed weird and already substituting one thing I thought that I’d better use the egg), if there’s enough for two batches, to see if that holds out or not.

The only interesting thing to happen while making the pancakes was that one particularly wet set ended out kind of splashing because I flipped it strangely. And so in the spirit of my crepe observations I want to give some hotcake observations. First of all use a reasonably long and wide spatula for the flipping. If you use the term “flap jack” to refer to pancakes you should be shot. You might not deserve death for that, unlike riding a vespa on the sidewalk, but you do deserve to be shot. Second is to make sure that the heat is up hot enough, heat the pan to medium high (8 out of 10) to heat it up and then turn to just past medium (like 6 out of 10). You’re trying to burn them to a certain extent you know, that’s the goal of most pan cooked dishes in fact, so don’t worry about it. That said in order to get them properly done enough to flip you need to go a little more than a minute and a half on each side, two minutes is not overkill on the first side as long as you’re using a non-stick griddle and plenty of grease (butter, margarine, oil) but it shouldn’t need as long on the second side after that. As to flipping, you need courage to flip properly. Get your spatula well under there and lift it up off the titular pan, if the cake isn’t holding it’s place firmly on the spatula, like if it’s trying to bend over or the top is sliding off, then you’re flipping it too soon, and then aggressively flip it over all the way in one sudden motion. As opposed to kind of sadly sliding it off the spatula. Upon giving the matter a little consideration, I realized that my pancakes “splashed” when and how they did because of a combination of how I was holding the spatula and the direction I was flipping them. Unfortunately I don’t remember what the right combination was although I’m pretty sure that I was holding the spatula with my palm down and then flipped them towards myself, so in theory you should go the other way. If you’re holding the spatula with your palm towards you then you can flip it towards yourself, just make sure you’re holding the spatula at a height above the pan that when you make the flip it will land flat.

Seeing as writing the way to not smear your pancakes all over the place was the intended point of this whole entry I should have made a note of what actually happened since I’ve already forgotten. Shit. Oh well. I’ll make them again another day and pay more attention. So by the way, crepes really are better, but if you’re just starting out with cooking pancakes are a lot easier, pancake mixes are pretty reliable too. This is some general cooking advice but if you want to be good you need something to measure against so when possible my usual method is to first have a food cooked for me at a restaurant, which will presumably be the way it’s supposed to be assuming the restaurant or chef doesn’t suck. Then I’ll make the dish from a mix or otherwise partially prepared version. And then I’ll finally make it “from scratch”. This is a much more relevant process as far as sweet or desert dishes go, like a lemon meringue pie or crepes, because those are much more widely available in numerous forms than say… Bollito Misto. Maybe there’s some kind of mix for that somewhere but actually I’ve never even had it in a restaurant myself so I just made it after seeing it on a show one day and have no idea whether the way I made it is the way it’s supposed to be. But it tasted good and that’s all that matters right? Yeah so hotcake away, almost everyone has eaten a hotcake right?

And by the way, being dark brown or black all over isn’t a requisite to doneness for a pancake, it does mean that you burnt it though. Someone I know will without fail always manage to burn both sides of their hotcakes and yet still have it be not quite as done as you’d like in the middle. That’s really the worst you can do, you’d think that being burned at least it would be done but that’s not always the case. If you’re having that problem then re-coat your pan with grease (brush some butter/margarine on) after each batch, turn the heat down a bit, and leave them on longer than you have been. I know what you’re thinking when you botch the batch though “it’s smoking so it must be done” but that’s not always so. You can also apply that advice to anything you cook/sear/fry in batches (like pork cutlet or pan fried fish) as the problem is generally just too much heat with not enough grease.

 

lazy cooking Tuesday, Mar 4 2008 

cooking and cracked and food and morality and observation and opinion and questions and soup and thoughts , , , , , , reuche 10:37 am

What happens when you combine onion, garlic, carrots, turnip, rutabaga, potato, white wine, thyme, beef and vegetable broth and boil it all up for a while before tossing some cooked rice in? A really boring meal. Really boring. At the least I would have liked to have made it into curry soup instead of plain vegetable soup, or put a piece of meat in or something. But I was constrained! This is what happens when you have to cook for other people. It has been said that the joy of a chef is making food to satisfy and suit the needs of their patron. I say that as a cook satisfaction comes from making something that you yourself enjoy eating. fuck. Can you tell that I’m not the type to serve others? Actually I’m pretty good at it for as long as my body holds out (for example right now it feels like all my fingers are about to break), I just really hate doing it.

I have been thinking about the matter of serving lately. I was actually considering using it as a central topic in some work or another. As it’s unlikely that I’ll see that work through as I’ve never seen anything aside from dinner and painting my bathroom through, I might as well take this opportunity to express my thoughts. So let me open with a question:

Do you wish to serve some purpose with your life? That’s a thought that has consumed me to some degree, and as far as I know most people have had that desire at some point or another. So I had to ask myself: do people intrinsically desire to serve? Perhaps rather than asking myself I should ask others, but for what it matters my answer is “probably”. The thing is, I imagine that people are more inclined to serve the greater the object of their servitude. It has been said, and indeed I think it’s one of the “10 commandments” that humans exist to serve god. Could that possibly be true? Of course, anything could possibly be true until you actually know the truth. But if you add up saying like that, and others like “people exist to serve god”, “people are commanded to serve the gods”, “we are all
bound by fate”, etc. there are a lot of concepts of servitude floating around. Some are pledges but a lot are more along the lines of slavery. So, do people have a characteristic that makes them susceptible to serving others? There’s no doubt in my mind that they do. However I don’t think it’s to anything in particular, I think it’s a general trait. And this is to say nothing at all of loyalty. How many who serve are indignant and behave in a passive aggressive manner?

Well indeed human existence is mysterious. I’m not sure that I can come to a complete conclusion on the matter of serving. Although I will say that when one comes to accept that a certain level is their state, and later when one accepts limitations, there are choices available. And among those choices is to bow to that which ones considers greater than themselves and try and reach higher than they could on their own by serving another. Whether it’s a god, an instructor, a master, money, society, or whatever it’s all the same. It’s worth noting that accepting a situation says nothing about the true state of the situation, and there are some people who never do accept any such things. Whether they’re better or worse off for it I can’t say for sure. I also can’t say whether it’s really easier to serve or to be the master. Probably it depends on the person. I can say that you fit in a lot more if you accept society and serve it to some degree, if you think fitting in is easier or harder then that’s saying something at least.

So, I don’t know if I’ll ever use the theme in a story or not. The scenario was something like the protagonist coming to accept their enslavement to a much greater being. I suppose a lot of people would be indignant about that idea, but having floated a few concepts of servitude around above that is just a straightforward representation of one of the common ones. I mean look, if god came down to you and demanded your service would you not serve? If you served god and god was good would that not bring you joy? That was an aspect I wanted to explore in a story. I’m not sure who would want to read the kind of story that I’d put out though. Maybe some of the same people who come around here?

 

boiling meat to make a stew Friday, Feb 29 2008 

anime and cooking and for later consideration and otaku and rental magica and shakugan no shana and stew and thoughts , , , , , reuche 12:01 pm

No. Don’t just boil meat if you want stew. I suggest seasoning and searing the meat with some aromatic vegetables first and then deglaze with some wine before adding your other stuff, liquids and root vegetables, boil then cover and reduce to a simmer for an hour or three to make stew. Yeah or something like that… The thing is that no matter what liquid you boil meat in it doesn’t make that much difference to the inner flavor. In fact the longer you cook meat the less flavor it has. That’s why you cut it up into relatively thin slices and sear it to capture some spices and oil in a crust and give the meat some flavor.

So the way things are going, both Shakugan no Shana II and Rental Magica will end on high notes. If that is the case I’ll have to decide whether strong finishes make up for sloppy starts and mediocre middles. In a race finishing first is all that matters, in a game of sports scoring more points by the end of regulation time is the point. But how do you define a winner when it comes to a tv series, let alone an animated one? Is the overall impression or the final impression the most important thing? Well I’ll have an answer for you after those series end.

 

When the shit hits on a fucking fun afternoon Monday, Feb 25 2008 

advice and comedy and cooking and cracked and food and personal and philosophy and rice and thoughts and writing actually , , , , , , , , , , reuche 11:38 am

So after recently writing about how much risotto (a common italian dish) sucks and how superior to it the dish commonly referred to as merely “spanish rice” (I have no idea if its origin is truly spain) is, I did indeed make some. Frankly the way I make spanish rice is to just saute some onions and garlic in margarine and then add rice, peeled and diced tomatoes (OK I use canned ones), and lower sodium vegetable broth, heat to a boil, cover, and toss it in the oven for 25 minutes. You can probably find whatever recipe you want for it. I used just paprika and pepper in it. And having tried a new variety of paprika I have this to say: spanish rice may be great but spanish paprika sucks. Spain is a much better country than Hungary but whatever those Hungarians do to their (sweet) paprika it is indeed the best in the world taste wise.

Now I could end this entry here, I bashed risotto and two or three nations. A fine day’s work right? But you know, I have more to say today. I don’t like to talk about myself. But today I will paint you an incomplete picture of my life.

I am sitting here the past few days philosophizing and speculating on food and pop-culture and penile torture while listening to music from the 1980s with a dislocated, or something, shoulder, a broken nose, twitching eyes, and a migraine. And I honestly could not tell you how I got any of them. That’s my life. If you ever wondered why I say crap, if you ever wondered why you don’t see me talking about what’s going on in my life, the work I do, that’s why. I have no life. I do no work. I have no independence. My continued existence is entirely dependent on the guilt-borne pity that others feel towards me.

My most honest wish might be that someday I’ll just wake up and everything will be alright somehow. Or that it’ll be 20 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago, and this will all have been a dream. A slightly more dishonest wish is that I’ll go to sleep and never wake up again. Whether that means dream or death or coma or what I have no idea. But I don’t say the first two to others, I only say the last one. So that’s the picture that the people actually in my life have of me. A person just waiting around to die. They try and pretend like that’s not the situation so I try and pretend like I actually care about anything, instead of merely passing the time and trying to stay amused enough to ignore other things. Like my shoulder that I can’t move properly and the pain in my nose and the throbbing in my skull and the fact that if I ever took a particularly strong shock to my head I’d probably tear a retina and go blind. Yeah it’s a great life. I can’t even get on my bicycle like this.

Alright well this has turned into a pity party. People don’t feel as sorry for me on the internet as they do in real life. I kind of like that actually. There are some people who really hate me and will tell me so online. In fact there have even been a couple of occasions where I have found out what people really think of me but would have never told me directly. Like how I’m really weird, how I don’t have it that bad, or about all the people that are worse off than me. And they’re right. It could be worse. Regardless of how well or poorly they work or how much anything might be damaged and in pain I do still have almost everything I was born with, certainly all the parts I need. And people provide for me. Not only am I not living on the street, I’m living on the internet.

I still find things to laugh and smile about. Some days it’s not much but it’s there. I think that if you can’t find anything to laugh about anymore then your life probably isn’t worth living. So stockpile some material if you get the chance. You never know when a memory might save your life.

At the end of last year I was going to kill myself. I didn’t eat anything for two weeks, and frankly I thought about never eating anything again and just dying with nothing but Coca-Cola and anti-depressants in my system. I planned on jumping into the river. But I didn’t do it. Probably I didn’t do it mostly because I’m a coward and everything else was secondary. But that’s how things worked out and here I am getting 30 people to glance at my opinions on sex acts. It could be worse. That doesn’t make things any better, but still it could be worse.

I’m actually just saying these things because I’m in a lousy fucking mood. There is no other reason. This isn’t a cry for help, this isn’t a bid for sympathy, this isn’t an attempt at communication. This is just griping plain and simple. Maybe a bit of boredom thrown in. What else was I going to say? Was I going to give advice about writing? Well hell I might as well.

Some people say they have no inspiration, that they are stumped, that they have “writer’s block”. That is bullshit. In reality they just don’t have any discipline or talent. You need one or the other to get anywhere with a project. Or maybe you need to be pitiful enough to get someone else to do it for you (talking someone into doing things for you could in fact require both discipline and talent, it usually takes more time and effort than just doing it yourself). Whatever. But let’s say for a moment that you really do have “no idea” at any particular time about any particular thing. Sometimes you really just don’t know what the best thing is, or even what any thing is. This never happens to me by the way, I could say something to anyone about anything when I want to. I usually don’t but I have and I can and I could.

So there you are all by your lonesome trying to come up with something and you’re thinking how you’re fucking stuck. Well go outside, or if you’re already outside change location. Just go out there. And look around. If a person can’t see this advice wouldn’t do them any good, but then again if they can’t see at all then they can’t see this either so too bad for them, go listen to some Elton John music and grope something, I don’t know. So you’re outside and you’re looking around. You’re seeing billions of things right now. Just pick one and start writing. Or pick them all and write about them. A person in their life could not write down all the things that they see in one glance under the sun. It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to create. A story, a dissertation, a math problem, if you look around for long enough then you’ll come up with something. If you don’t you have no talent and I can’t help you. Actually if you asked me I probably COULD help you but you know what I mean, get someone else to help you, you can probably find someone on the internet even if it’s just a bored little bitch like me who is just looking to kill time. Whether you could find the right person at the right time who can get things done quickly enough is another matter, but that’s your problem, figure it out or not I don’t care.

Personally, I never look for ideas. I just live my life and every single moment inspires me. That might be profound precisely because I feel miserable. If I look at the moon for 5 minutes I can come up with an entire novel. So I’ve never written one. I just write crap like this. I can’t tell you why that is for sure. Maybe I’m scared or insecure or simply lacking motivation. I don’t even think about it, I just don’t do it and I talk about that sometimes and people say things like that to me. “just do it”, “you’re a great writer when you try so just be confident”, “if only you had the right motivator”. It’s really easy for people to say anything. It doesn’t matter what it is, people can say it. They might not say it at the right time or place. But even though talking is an action too it’s so much simpler for people than anything else.

A mother fucker would be more willing to stand in a crowded plaza and shout obscenities than jog for their health. I don’t know why. I don’t care either. That’s just how I see it. Maybe you see it differently. If so then go here and get to work.

 

Italian rice sucks Sunday, Feb 24 2008 

cooking and food and irresponsible statements and italian and pork and recipes and risotto , , , , , reuche 11:23 am

I actually meant to talk about my further experiments with Italian food in my previous entry but I got a little carried away and it just seemed better to separate things. I think you’ll agree.

So, I tried my hand at making risotto again and this time I used authentic arborio rice and just generally actually followed the recipe I had rather than substituting every single ingredient. And you know what? It turned out the way it was supposed to this time. Rice that was cooked a bit softer than “al dente”, a creamy consistency, and no fucking flavor. For all that the rice didn’t get done the last time I attempted risotto, to the point that I remarked that I’d have been better off just adding margarine to rice and boiling it in broth instead of water (in fact this is basically how I make “spanish rice”, only after boiling the water I bake it in the oven in a lidded casserole), actually making it correctly was a huge disappointment.

To be fair I made “basic risotto”, surely there are more exciting variations that MIGHT taste better. But the problem of arborio rice sucking and how much attention the dish needs when cooking isn’t something that you can do anything about. I frankly would rather have plain white rice of another variety than bother with risotto. Now presumably risotto was created as some sort of tasty accident using leftovers by someone trying to figure out how to cook rice by sauteing it. And the refinement of it is in a certain way genius. But it is so laborious a process that I can not endorse it.

So, the lesson to learn from my risotto exploit is that even if a dish is made up of various things you like, if it seems like it’s going to be too much of a chore to make then it probably is not going to be worth it for you to make it. Something else notable about risotto is that like chinese fried rice (which I imagine it being most comparable to culturally), it is not really a meal on its own. However unlike that dish which is easy to whip up and can be left on its own for a bit while you work on other dishes/a real main course, other than the simplest of dishes requiring the least input (you could probably make bollito misto at the same time if you’re good or can use both hands at once for separate tasks (which most people can’t)) risotto takes too much attention to allow you to do other things. So take a bathroom break BEFORE starting. That’s generally good advice for almost anything though, traveling, having sex, etc.

Well moving on I also tried making “Milanese style pork cutlets” recently. This is basically just your average fried pork cutlet; pound the pork as flat as you can, season it, dredge it in flour, dip in egg, coat in breadcrumbs with herbs (and grated parmesan cheese if you do cheese) mixed in, and fry it up for a few minutes each side in a pan with appreciably high sides. To be honest I shied on the oil and ended out burning the fried coating of the cutlets somewhat and therein smoking up the house quite a bit. Which is below ideal. Frying food like that might be the time to use a non-stick or otherwise coated pan or even pot. But even though smoking up the house marred the overall experience they turned out alright otherwise. In fact frying up the pork like that sealed up the juices of the cutlet. I’m not sure that I’ve ever had such juicy pork before.

Fried food is of course below ideal health wise, but this was a pretty light fry with olive oil and homemade bread crumbs (which is not worth it to try preparing when you’ve got a tiny food processor that smells like it’ll blow up every time you use it) and I ate it with some steamed broccoli rather than crisps or something so that balanced things out a little.

So my more or less successful second try at risotto means that the only Italian food I’ve tried making and have not succeeded at is pizza. Since I was able to beat risotto I’m tempted to challenge pizza again. I don’t want to lose against anything italian.

By the way you probably didn’t notice but there’s a reason that the only “oriental” foods I ever talk about making are fried rice and curry. That’s because those ARE the only oriental foods I can make. Actually contemporary japanese food is pretty simple, so I could probably make it, I think that “ton katsu” is basically the same thing as the milanese pork cutlet I just made for example, but I’m just not that interested. Anyway losing to oriental dishes is one thing and losing to occidental ones quite another. Yeah that god damned pizza… I might do it. I just might do it.

 

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