I'm still not dead! I'm just resting!

I'm also sorry, internet! It seems that for a while there I was finding better things to do than write about what I was cooking. Then it hit me: what about all those people who have nothing better to do than READ about what I was cooking? A terrifying thought, to say the least. In addition, I stopped out of embarrassment; the southwest quiche was actually pretty terrible, and, as horrible as it sounds, it turned me off quiche altogether for a little while. Never fear though, gentle reader. Last week I made a delightful one sticking to the book, and it was delicious.

My THIRD reason is that I got culinary laziness. Not as badly as my friends' roommates, who (and I quote), "Just eat different kinds of pasta with sauce from jars (her emphasis/snobbery)." It's just that there are only so many times I can write "well, I sauteed some onions and garlic, added some kind of meat and starch, then ate it" before I go crazy and start eating McDonald's just to escape it all. On the other hand, I have done some creative stuff in this interlude, but it is usually at the impetus of having someone over (or being at someone else's place!), and I did not want to disrupt the evening to LABORIOUSLY type out a BLOG post on the keyboard layout I switched to because I think way too highly of myself.

That said, on monday night I made myself fried udon with garlic, onion, (SURPRISE! I put them in EVERYTHING but it's ok because they make everything good!) orange peppers, ginger, and, because I decided long dinner was looooooong (the peppers and onions were sliced thinly and the udon is to begin with), I sliced the hotdogs I was putting in the long way and made hotdog noodles! I also put in some peanut butter for flavor and because I was curious. It was delicious! Pretty oily though, because I added the peanut butter and hotdogs after I'd already put in more than enough vegetable oil, meaning that what they secreted pretty much pushed it over the edge of 'mmmm oil' to 'licking your lips to get the grease off for the next hour.'

About the future of this blog, though, I am uncertain. Now that school is starting again, I can once again go to the dining hall's trough and have vast amounts of slop shoveled into my waiting maw, all on my parents'(/the government's/the university's/scholarships') dime! There is a kitchen in my dorm but my use of it will be limited for the above reason AS WELL AS that said shoveling takes much less time than preparing a meal, and time is my MOST VALUABLE ASSET.

So yeah. I might just take the ol' girl down (not sure why though, Google is paying for it).. the name makes a easy and ironic transition to a political blog, I guess (though 'quiche eater' was used as an insult before I was old enough to eat said quiche). The other issue with that is that I am only ever about 50% aware of what's going on (though that still leaves me better off than much of the BLOGOSHPERE and all of talk radio). Behind door number three, I use it as a platform to repost the few strips of the webcomic I made in highschool that I am actually proud of while I hastily cobble together more, because not having the good ones on the intertubes makes me sad. This might not be kosher with the rules of blogger, though? I don't know! Anyway, internet, goodbye for now... but, as Arnold Schwarzenegger said of an upcoming role in a movie about classical composers, "I WILL BE BACH (my brother's joke)."

I'M NOT DEAD

But I did go to a magical faraway place where people cooked for me. I forgot to post before I left, but my last meal was going to have a post entitled KILLA QUESIDILLA in which I made some quesidillas with cheddar and jack cheese, chorizo, and some sauteed onions. I served them with sour cream and some homemade salsa I made up for the occasion, made of tomatoes, the last of my jalepeno, onion, green onion, a clove of garlic (I COULDN'T HELP IT) and just enough cilantro. The meal was KILLA. I started by making the salsa. Upon inspecting the leftover tortillas I was planning to use, I discovered they were stale, and thus made them into tortilla chips via some oil and a hot pan. This allowed me to snack on the salsa while I was cookin' the quesidillas, which was basically awesome. I think back on that meal fondly.

SO YEAH, updates will resume now that I am no longer living a decadent life of plenty. Hooray!

fried rice reliably returns

Yup! Made some more because I'm boring and it's delicious. On account of my dedication to SCIENCE, though, I switched it up a bit. This time I threw in some frozen peas (note to self: allow to thaw first next time) and for the meat there was a can of tiny little shrimp. It tasted nice, though the canned shrimp entirely dissolved. This means there's a swirl of shrimp flavor in every bite!!

Yeah so I'm not doing shrimp again unless I splurge. Overall, pretty good. For completeness's sake here's all the ingredients: Garlic, green onions, red onions, peas, can of mini shrimp, leftover hotdog (CUT ON A BIAS), ginger powder, and heeeella soy sauce. Oh and lots of vegetable oil.

Another day, my friend and I also made what was later dubbed "Peasant Food for the Discerning Serf." First I took some bacon fat and sauteed up some O&G (what I'm going to call onions and garlic from now on). Having some Jalepeno left over, they were chopped and went in too (and then I was really dumb and rubbed my eye and I was reminded why I don't usually cook with Jalepeno). I threw in two eggs and scrambled, and then in went the baked beans and hotdogs. It was both delectable and affordable! I was impressed.

Deserving mention this week is the Day Of Grease. We got together and made bacon and eggs for breakfast, then used the leftover bacon to make BLTs for lunch (that we ate while watching the BLUE ANGELS, which happened to be gallivanting about the skyline while we were downtown, and which were (nerd voice) TOTALLY SCHWEET (nerd voice)). For dinner, we went to a British place, meaning our choices boiled down (hehe) to boiled or fried, and we both went with fried. Most decadent day eveeer. To my protesting innards I declared in the immortal words of Hedonism Bot (futurama) "I APOLOGIZE FOR NOTHING!! OHOHOHOHO"

Americana! Beans 'n Patty Melts 'n MOTORCYCLES

Ok, there were no motorcycles. The beans, that magical fruit (not a fruit, where is the 4th-grade schoolyard rhyme fact-checking board!?) were delightfully simple. Being simple folk, we emptied a can of Busch's into a pot along with the last 2 sausages (and some meatloaf that was leftover still after a week of bein' carved up fer paninis), heated, ate, and farted (TEE HEE I WROTE FARTED ON THE INTERBLOGOTUBES- I WIN HUMOUR).

That being consumed, we picked up some more amazingly delicious Rajun Cajun and prepared to go where countless short-order cooks have gone before: the patty melt (I do like melts, if you hadn't noticed). This massive undertaking was undertaken at my loyal and multiplicitable sous chef's place (the same that helped with the fried rice and hijacked the fajitas), so I made many a melt while they made hash browns. To make the patty melts was a two step process outlined in the name: make the patties, then melt them. The patties followed a classic family recipe:

Meat
Garlic (lots)
Worchestershire sauce
(Onions, garlic's steadfast companion, can be added but we didn't. Also, someone was all "throw in teriyaki sauce!" so we did.)

For the melting portion, I used store-brand whole-wheat bread, schlepped on a patty and some cheese, another piece of bread, more meat 'n cheese, then fried 'er up good. I wasn't used to the stove, so there were... complications with the first iteration, but the later ones turned out nicely, if a little greasy.

The Hash Browns were made by shredding the potatos, heating up a pan with some oil, coating the bottom with potato, then lidding and waiting. At this point they were also flavored liberally with salt and pepper. They were flipped once, then the process was repeated for maaaaaany potatoes. Add in some store bought cole slaw and you have a delicious and horribly non-nutritious meal for the eatin'. Om nom nom.

Y fajitas tambien!?

(I didn't even need babelfish for that- gogo highschool spanish!)

This was another bunch of ingredients I brought to a friend's, and they supplemented with their own (Chicken was on sale at the local grocer so we'd had the same idea). I forgot the avacados and we also needed more lime, so I was sent out on a collection mission. Upon my return, I had been completely supplanted as head chef, and was pretty much relegated to table-setting duty. As such, I cannot tell you what occult culinary rituals went down in there; I can only tell you the result was absurdly good. I'll be in contact with the usurpers- so fear not, dear reader (almost a palindrome!)!

Anyway, since we devoured all the chicken in the great fajita caper, the next night I moved right on to the next meal on my big ol' list 'o things to cook: the quintessential Spaghetti! I picked up some super-cheap sausage to serve as the meat, then followed the recipe from the Godfather when Michael is in the kitchen and Clemenza tells him how it is. As such, you (DEAREST READER) don't get a blockquote because you can (and should!) just go watch an American classic. Unsurprisingly it was delicious, though a tad watery (too much stewed tomato). Also cheap sausage is cheap (/repackaged hotdog). Overall though, as one taster noted, "Good enough for a gangster."

It would be cool to continue along the mediterranean and make something Greek- but then again, fajitas aren't remotely spain-spanish, and similarly the spaghetti (in the form I made it) is as much an American classic as the Godfather itself. As such, next time: "BAKED BEANS AND CHEAP SAUSAGE: the only way this could get classier is if we invited a teacher"

Fiesta Quiche!

This week we take a sojourn south of the border with a spicy pepper-pepper-cheese-green onion-cumin-chili quiche! I would say that this was probably my most adventurous quiche so far, and I made several errors. For one, I made the always bad choice of going shopping 1) hungry and 2) sans list. As a result, the quiche lacks things like cilantro and jack cheese (I did impulse buy Ben and Jerry's, though- om nom nom). It still tastes pretty good, though, so you don't see me complaining (much). The recipe uses the same base as always (Next time (there will be a next time in several weeks), I might go cuh-razy and use a tortilla as the bottom), along with:

1/2 red pepper
1/2 jahl-epeno pepper (no seeds because I am WEAK)
some o' that cheddar cheese
3 bunches of green onions
and to the eggy batter I added a bunch of cumin and chili powders and mixed 'em in thar good.

as I said, it turned out tolerably well. Status remains incomplete, though.

(If it seems this post is less delightfully wordsome than usual, it is on account of me having recently switched to dvorak layout on my keyboard, and I can painstakingly type around 20 error-laden wpm with it so far, which is hell after being able to consistently pound out over 90 on qwerty...)

Meat-a-loafer!

So this has been a weekend of culinary delights.. with a mishap or two along the way. We went out to a local indian food/soul food fusion type restaurant (Rajun Cajun), which produces food that is just unbelievably delicious. Their samosa are filled like normal samosa, but the dough is about half an inch thick of delicious fried-ness. They're great folks, and it's a real nice place. I can't believe I've lived here as long as I have and never gone before now.

On another night, I got home very... tired, and decided I would (as is my custom) make french toast stick type things from the leftovers of my quiche which I had sitting around the refrigerator. It usually goes as such:

2 eggs
Whatever half + half is left
cinnamon
vanilla
crusts from the bread
Mix everything but the crusts in bowl, put in crusts, pick out one by one and cook in skillet, consume

This time I got 'creative' and added ginger and soy sauce (French asian fusion?), and then while cooking the first batch of crusts I got bored and dumped the whole bowl in and made a huge mess of oil and eggs and cream and wooooow was it horrible. Terrible. I regretted it very much in the morning.

ANYWAY so tonight I made meatloaf! I briefly debated doing it swedish chef style:

Find loafer
Stuff meat in loafer
???
Profit

But I decided against it on account of worrying swedish people would think I was racist (bork indeed!). Instead I went with another solid solid recipe from the ol' "Cooking with friends" church cookbook:

2 lbs meat (any 2 lbs of meat will do, it is in the book as 2 lbs groud beef but at home we changed it to 1 lb beef, 1 lb turkey so it's a bit leaner. It also tastes better that way)
2 eggs
1 c water
1 package Stovetop stuffing
Ketchup

Beat the eggs in a mixing bowl, add the water, the stuffing mix, and the meat, mix it around with a meat mixer thing (Or, if manly like me, YOUR BARE (BEAR ALSO) HANDS!), shape into loaf and bake at 375 for 1 hour (if clever, put tinfoil inside the pan you use so you don't have to do as many dishes)

It turned out great, and 2 pounds of meat means it'll do me for quite a few dinners and sandwiches. To go with it, I made up some mashed potatoes with garlic and green onion, which I think the fair reader can figure out how to do without a blockquote. One interesting thing I am probably going to do is make super meatloaf sandwiches, which is where you put meatloaf AND mashed potatoes in a sandwich and grill it panini-style (I had it at a restaurant once!). To do this right without a panini grill available, though, I should really find myself a brick (Alton Brown style- you wrap the brick in tinfoil and put it in the oven, then put it on top of a metal rack on top of your panini- all the press without having to buy an expensive one-use piece of equipment!). Time to start loitering around construction sites! Wish me luck.

Are you tired of my "wok into mordor" joke yet? No? Good.

For my fried rice, I scoured the internet (first result on google then on foodnetwork.com) for just how to go about such a thing. I had help with this one, so I cannot claim all the culinary genius for myself, but it turned out very well. The basic framework of pretty much every recipe I found was to:

Throw a bunch of oil in the wok
Quickly scramble some eggs
Take the eggs out
More oil, cook the slow cooking veggies (we had onions, garlic, and ginger)
Put in the fast cooking veggies (we had bell peppers, green onions, and
Add the rice and flavor stuff (soy sauce, also had some rice wine vineger yum)
Add the eggs back in
Consume and become fat.

Obviously you're a-mixing and a-stir fryin' the whole time. We did it on pretty high heat, so the garlic was terrifyingly close to being burnt, but we avoided it by being totally awesome. An interesting thing to note is that it's apparently (never tried it any other way) much better to use cooked rice that's been sitting in the fridge for a day, as the dryness absorbs the flavor better. I accomplished this only halfway, as I did not have any tupperwares that were large enough to accomodate 4 cups of rice and I finished cooking pretty late, so I just kind of shoved it all into a too-small tupperware a little under cooked- this resulted in a very very solid cylindrical block of cold but still wet rice. We chopped at it mightily with the spatulas- hewing, if you will (or if you won't). Eventually that, the heat, and the soy sauce airdrops broke it up enough for us to spread the flavor evenly, and delicious flavor it was. Total success- it will be repeated.

Tuna Melt

While taking someone's money for an overpriced, prepackaged tuna salad sandwich, I thought to myself that what I really wanted out of life was a tuna melt. So I made some. On a scale from 1 to delicious, they were delectable. I made the basic tuna melt, a tuna salad sandwich with cheese (remember that expensive cheese from the quiche? Ooooooh yeah) that is fried (remember that grease from the bacon? Ooooooooooooooooh yeah). I used fancy-pants Italian bread that I'm also going to use to make French toast (Continental breakfast?), and since I got the proportions I used for the salad from the starkist website I went ahead and sprung for their tuna (40 cents more per can than the cheapest store brand! Oy!).

On a parenthetical note, this post would be about 75% as long if you removed the parenthetical notes, not including this one.

The taste and texture were both wonderful, the melty expensive cheese combining with the tuna salad all sandwiched between two really nice slices of bacon bread. If I had to find something wrong, it would be that the tuna salad had too much tuna and not enough salad (a rookie mistake that I should be ashamed of). There was one thing lacking from the starkist recipe: eggs. More refined wasps always also add hard boiled eggs to their thing + mayonnaise salads, because they love eggs and there aren't enough in the mayonnaise already (thing + egg + mayonnaise = classy thing salad). Never fear; I've only made 2 sandwiches with it so far, so tonight I'll toss one into the tupperware of tuna salad that's currently stinkifying the bottom of my fridge.

ON THE NEXT EPISODE: I simply wok into Mordor- Fried Rice (Or: Eat your heart out, Boromir)!

The Pepper-Onion-Bacon

This week's quiche is a delectable onion-green-bell-pepper-bacon-expensive good cheddar cheese quiche. The cheddar gets special mention, as I get a pound of it for like 8 dollars, which basically costs more than the rest of the quiche put together. It is worth it though, because I eat a lot of cheese and it really is very good. Anyway.

I used around 1/4 pound of bacon (I ate the other half before the oven heated up, because bacon is delicious and I have very little self-control), half an onion chopped very small, and half a green pepper in maybe half inch cubes. This bacon pepper onion quiche features a delightful bouquet of flavors. I made sure the bacon was not overpowering via cooking it in little pieces and draining it beforehand (this bacon grease will make a triumphant return, much like Ahnold and General MacArthur, don't you fret). If anything, the pepper is the weakest link, as it is slightly understated and doesn't fit in very well even when you directly get a piece of it. It probably won't last.

There were two other interesting variations this week that both resulted from either mistakes or unfortunate circumstances but that turned out well. In the first, the grocery store I go to didn't have half and half containers smaller than a quart, so I used heavy cream instead. I also forgot how much flour there was supposed to be so I put in way too much (a whole cup), then tossed in some more skim milk to hopefully even things out kind of? Anyway, it worked out really well and the texture was much more solid and pleasing than in former iterations. I postulate that using half and half and a little more flour than usual will have the same effect, so I'll try that out this week and see how it goes.

Introduction, or getting stuff out of the way

Things to start with: I would paste the wikipedia entry for quiche all up in here, but that's fairly tacky. I am operating on a definition of quiche forged at Presbyterian church Easter breakfasts, pot luck brunches, and other events where all the church ladies (and men!) get to bring their signature dishes and it is delicious for everybody. As such, for my quiches, I am using the bare-bones of a quiche recipe found in my church's cookbook for middle-class presbyterian folk (lots of thing + mayonnaise = thing salad), the important parts of which go as such:

4 slices bread, chopped into cubes and baked until browned kind of
1 1/2 cups of half and half
5 eggs
1/2 cup flour

You put the wet stuff in a bowl and beat it, put in the flour, put the bread cubes in the bottom of your greased quiche dish then whatever you're putting in the quiche on top of that, then pour in the wet stuff, then bake at 350 for an hour

And there you have a quiche! It is a clever clever recipe because the bread cubes sort of drift to the bottom and the sides to form a crust, so you don't have to bother with the nonsense of buying one (gross) or making your own (time consuming).

From this, I will proceed to experiment, play around, and otherwise tinker with additions, fillings, toppings, and all other manner of Frankenstein-esque changes to this noble recipe. My goal is to create the ultimate quiche. I'm also going to post the other stuff I'm cooking, so that when in the future I am famous and people read this blog they will know what is good and what is bad to eat when you are eating cheap and delicious, and avoiding ramen on account of worryin' about hypertension. They will also know how run-on sentences should be in the vogue if I have not made them so already.