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.