Food/Drink

Soup’s On

by

On my final night of trying to poison people that live in the same living space as me I took the steak from last night and made vegetable soup. Chopped up some carrots, bell pepper, onion, shallot and added some mashed potato from last night too, and also threw in a can of chopped tomatoes. I also wanted to try making a bechamel sauce for a bit of creaminess and additional flavor. Then of course you have your herbs and spices… more paprika! I’m not sure why I like paprika so much. I seem to go for sweet Hungarian for the most flavor.

That will be enough cooking blog posts for awhile. I’ll get back into writing other stuff tomorrow. :zorak:

Because there wasn’t enough steak last night

by

Ordinarily I don’t do steak two nights in a row, but that seems to be the majority of what is in the deep freeze. I seasoned them with salt, pepper, and lemon pepper. Then I sauteed some onion with balsamic vinegar, and made homemade paprika mashed potatoes and paprika green beans.  I have to say, today’s weather combined with dinner made me feel like I was still in the summer months.

If I have enough for leftovers I’ll come up with a good dish to recycle them into tomorrow, if not I still have shrimp as a backup plan. 😛

Meanwhile, I’m making good on my SFM project for an upcoming gameplay video. I’ve segmented the audio and animated the characters, now I just need to work on lighting and camera positioning. From what it looks like I’ll probably have to perform three separate renders for particular scenes. I can’t do it all in one go because SFM doesn’t like it when you have too many keyframes on a particular model. So what I have to do is animate what I can, then split off what I need and save two different files. It’s kind of annoying, but I’ve dealt with this before and know my way around it. I spent a good few hours animating a 46 second clip, granted a good portion of it was me trying to get good positioning but, wow… it adds up after awhile..

Yin and Yang in the kitchen

by

I have dinner duty for the next few nights. I started early this morning by making a nice Korean/Japanese marinade, and I let them soak until the evening. This was my first time working with Gochujang (a spicy Korean chili bean paste), it has quite the kick to it. There was also lime juice, garlic cloves, sugar, soy sauce, mirin (sweet sake), rice vinegar, ginger, and Korean spice powder with just a couple touches of salt and pepper. The end result is a sweet spicy steak, in fact this would probably taste great on beef too. Of course you can’t live on meat alone…

To compliment the spiciness of the steak I made a cool Korean cucumber salad with shredded carrot, toasted black sesame seeds and a ginger sesame soy vinaigrette with garlic, spring onion, Korean and Japanese spice powders and a touch of sriracha. Then of course there was white jasmine rice, one of my all time favorite rices to use.

I would count this dinner definitely among one of my better ones, but then when it comes to Asian cuisines I always seem to get the savor and spice just right. I’m not sure what I’ll do tomorrow. I have beef fillets defrosting, if they’re not ready tomorrow I may use shrimp as a backup plan…

Sabrosa

by

I had a pretty uneventful day at work. Went through the usual motions, switched things up by playing a bit of DeadPool during lunch today. I came home and went into Windows with the idea of continuing work on my video project but somehow ended up entering sleep mode for a few hours, entering areas of my imagination that I can’t seem to completely escape. Then I woke up, showered off and went to check out a new restaurant in town. It’s actually where I used to get my hair done years ago, the building was remade into am unusual Meximerican restaurant. I say unusual because you don’t just sit down and order. You go through a line like you would for a salad place or Subway, and you tell them what you want for your base (nacho chips, fries, or a tortilla shell) and what you want over or in it. I opted for nachos with four different kinds of hot sauce! They had so many sauces too to choose from… if it were the weekend I probably would have used every single one, and would of had my stomach pay the ultimate price. As it is my stomach hurts in a good way, now back in the comfort of home wearing watermelon PJ’s and knocking out a couple B52 straight shots before bed, goes down like candy.

Until tomorrow…

Evening Open Thread

by

Tonight I decided to chip in and make dinner for everyone, this was a bit of a challenge since I haven’t felt well these last couple of days. But I had taken painkillers and candy, and was able to put together a chicken curry dish:

Originally it wasn’t supposed to have a bunch of vegetables in it, they were for a Thai salad to accompany the chicken curry. Sadly when I went shopping today they were out of some additional ingredients, which left me with combining the vegetables with the curry. I regret nothing. 😛 I used Mongolian fire oil to stir fry everything, and a yogurt curry masala. It was spicy, but just the right kind of spice. It paired well with peanut sauced noodles, everyone loved it. The best part is that there’s still leftovers for tomorrow’s lunch! :happy:

 

Hot Fucking Chocolate

by

I was reading this blog post over at Fucking Recipes today, and this quote as well as the subject matter caught my attention:

with hot chocolate season on the way, there are a lot of subtle ways to work a little magic into your mug! a compiled list of easy recipes to have some magic in your day

Then I looked out my window and saw fog and felt the balmy weather, and I thought to myself “hot chocolate season is right the fuck now”. So tonight after having soup and sandwiches I made some hot cocoa with cinnamon, peanut butter, ginger and a dash of FUCKING NUTMEG… because I’m not a nord who can swallow cup after cup of the stuff.

They do have some interesting ideas for hot chocolate on that page, not entirely sure if I’m on board with the lavender type but everything else sounds good.

Birthday Reprise

by

I had some birthday presents arrive in the mail recently, one of them being some really nice Oolong. Alas all of my containers are full of… tea; because I have problems. To keep anyone from throwing away a perfectly good cardboard box I took a moment to get the point across:

 

It has a really earthy aroma, in some ways it reminds me of licorice. I haven’t tasted it yet, but will have it iced tomorrow for work. At some point when the stars align I’l use it in the Gaiwan set, also a birthday present!

For my fellow tea drinkers

by

Everything from the color of the tea, to the teabag, and to the presentation are just all kinds of awesome. :meeseeks:

The tea is a natural blue due to use of the butterfly pea. Plus the tea has both peppermint and spearmint making it both look and taste refreshing. Someday I will have to order it, at the moment I’ll get by on my flowering green tea. :meeseeks:

Hunting the internet for recipes.

by

In pursuit of a new BBQ sauce recipe to go with some chicken nuggets tonight I turned to the internet and caught wind of this little recipe.

To give it a little more kick I added a couple drops of hot sauce and some grated ginger. I’ve never had Sweet Baby Rays (Last time I checked they didn’t use real sugar), but this was sweet as the name it was trying to mimic. Has a nice bit of tang to go with it too, it was pleasing to all of the senses. I even had it all over my chicken and even dipped fries in it.

Highly recommended overall. :meeseeks:

Evening Open Thread: Food Edition!

by

Tried a different cooking technique this evening. I marinaded some chicken breasts in a sake marinade, then I cooked them in a Chinese bamboo steamer. Turned out extremely moist and I served rice and green beans on the side. I’ll need to use the steamer more often for other dishes, the breasts were done in about 15 minutes and I didn’t have any additional fats added to the meal. Just the marinade and the taste of the chicken itself.

I’m already plotting dinner for tomorrow night too. Last night I did Tom Yum Gai which is basically a Thai hot and sour soup, tonight was Japanese inspired even though the bamboo basket is Chinese. :trollface:  Then for tomorrow I’m thinking Hungarian steak and paprika potatoes.

Anyways, open thread!