There Are Some Things In Life I Don't Understand

Like this:

"Meatless" MEATballs?  What's the point?  Not to flog dead draft animals or anything, but I'll bet what are in those bags are really tasty.  (/sarc)

Breakfast

One of the best things about bein' an adult is eating whatever you want, whenever you want, and that includes pumpkin pie for breakfast.  I might have seconds.

Totally unrelated, this:

Heh.  "I'm sorry, Dave..."

Weekend Update

The weekend wasn't the best o' times here at  El Casa Inmóvil De Pennington, but it was far from the worst.  Saturday was almost a complete bust, what with the Wings getting blown out in Toronto, the Irish losing yet another game they prolly should have won (and that makes four losses out of the last five games), and Florida State winning yet again in a squeaker against a scrappy Boston College team.  (I won't link the FSU game coz I hate actively dislike those prats.)  Saturday's only saving grace was near 70 degree temps, which enabled us to take an early Happy Hour on the verandah before the UCR all-day football orgy.

Sunday?  We hit our high o' 52 degrees before noon.  A miserable cold front blew in right after that and just before Happy Hour, dropping the temps into the 40s with a wind chill in the 30s.  That meant we took Happy Hour indoors, what with us being of sound mind and lacking a sufficient insulating layer o' fat to brave the verandah in that sort o' weather.  We used that time to finish off the book we were currently reading, took a short nap, and fixed dinner... consisting of leftover spaghetti and a salad... after which we watched at least four episodes of "Eat: The Story of Food" on the NatGeo channel.  The absolute BEST parts o' that show were the frequent appearances of Nigella Lawson.  Ooooh... what a hottie she is!  The second best part was the segment on beer, which you can see here (Blogger doesn't like NatGeo's embed code).  Ah, yes.  Beer is life, innit?

And then there's this...

Occasional Reader and Constant Correspondent Rob sent that along this weekend.  I suppose you have to be of a certain age to get that.  And I AM.

Onward and upward...

Just a Couple o' Few Things

I've been up since 0330 hrs this morning, which is my own stupid fault, what with retiring at very early hour o' 2130 hrs last evening.  I knew this would happen, but for some inexplicable reason I surrendered to the yawns and went down early.  A lil over six hours later and Bing! Eyes wide open.  I think nap time just might happen BEFORE Happy Hour today.

We've been in that sweet spot that comes twice a year, once in Spring and again in the Fall, said sweet spot bein' that time when we require neither AC nor heat.  I love this time o' year mainly for the comfort that's in it but also for the fact my electric bill falls by nearly half, which is a significant savings.  Well, all that is gonna come to a screeching halt by the middle o' next week.  Note:

It's been nice while it lasted.

Occasionally I'll mention the fact there are certain things I miss about city living and here's yet another item: wonderful food delivered to your door, just for the asking.  Case in point:

That's from an article titled "The Most Expensive Food You Can Order on GrubHub," which is food pr0n at its finest!  Apropos o' not much, I used to order wonderful delivery-food about once or twice a week when I lived in SFO and had a myriad of choices.  These days?  Not so much, coz the only food establishments that deliver here in P-Ville bring me either pizza or sandwiches.  Yup, I DO miss certain things about city living.

And finally... The First Mrs. Pennington turns 71 today.  SN2 is out in Sandy Eggo doin' Navy things and plans to take a couple days o' leave and drive up to the ancestral home in Lompoc to surprise TFMP on her birthday.  I'm thinkin' she'll like that... a lot.  Happy Birthday, Ramona!

I've Been Doin' It Wrong Redux

My original "wrong" post was all about sushi.  Today we learned we've been eating Thai food wrong, according to this lady:



What would we do without these inter-tubes?  OTOH, now I'm hungry for Thai food.  Mebbe I'll head over to The Big(ger) City^TM later today.

I've Been Doin' It Wrong

I recently learned I've been eating sushi wrong, after oh, say, 45 years or so.  This is supposedly how one does it:



OK,  Naomichi Yasuda is Japanese and he's a master sushi chef so there's no arguing with his credentials.  That said, I will continue to mix my soy sauce and wasabi together, thank you very much.  And I eat individual fish pieces with my fingers, not with hashi.  I know, I know... I'm a barbarian gaijin.

In other news....  Speakin' o' doin' it wrong, there's this:

Would someone please explain WTF that thing is eclipsing the sun?  It LOOKS like a hockey puck, kinda-sorta, but I don't think that's what this means.

Update, 1430 hrs:  All is explained in comments about that eclipse thing.  To my GREAT shame.

What's For Dinner, Buck?

Home-made red chile tamales!

Out of the nuker and before peeling

Peeled, smothered in El Pinto Green Chile Sauce, and ready to devour

When it comes to culinary delights, there ain't much in life that's better than home-made tamales.  Mmmm-mmm-mmm!

DIL Erma's sister Sulie stopped by the day before yesterday and dropped off a dozen of these beauties, relieving me of evening kitchen duties for three or four days.  Well, cooking duties, I should say.  We still had to make a salad and pour our beer. 

Life's been Hell since the maid quit, but kindly relatives help ease the pain and the inconvenience.

Not Too Very Smart

The Digg title (where I found this) o' this Tube O' You vid is "LARGE-SCALE MASOCHISM;1,000 People Each Eating A Ghost Chili Simultaneously."  Two things immediately come to mind about this.

First:  It's CHILE, gotdammit.  Stop writin' "chili" unless you're talking about that southwestern dish made out o' meat, chiles, and other stuff.

Second:  How hot is a Ghost chile*?

In 2007, Guinness World Records certified that the ghost pepper was the world's hottest chili pepper, 401.5 times hotter than Tabasco sauce; the ghost chilli is rated at more than 1 million Scoville heat units (SHUs). Classic Tabasco sauce ranges from 2,500 to 5,000 SHUs. However, as of 2012, it was superseded by the Trinidad moruga scorpion.

So: Popping one of these into your mouth and biting down hard ain't too very smart.  Then again, what do Danes know about chile, anyhoo?  To answer my own question: little or nuthin' (except for Klaus, bless his heart), but at least a thousand of 'em learned a lil sumthin'.

* Even the freakin' Wiki gets it wrong, in two different flavors: "chili" and "chilli."

I Hate It When This Happens...

Sometimes I think I throw away more food than I eat.  Case (cake?) in point:

Next stop: the dumpster.  The cake is half the height it was when I bought it last week and there just might be unwanted life forms living in it after sitting on my counter for a week.  I guess I just didn't have that much of a sweet tooth over the last couple o' few.

Oh, well.  Beer Me!

Saturday: What Would I Do Without Fallon?

I think I might have to start watching the Tonight show.  Everything Fallon does seems to be first-class, even the frickin' hip-hop he has here, a genre to which I devote zero time and/or interest.  I have no ideer who this Emma Stone person is... she's cute enough, and talented... but she's in desperate need of more than a few cheeseburgers.  None the less... this is good stuff.

And there's this...



Ooooh!  Döner kebab!  I haven't had one of those in freakin' YEARS.  I dunno about you, Gentle Reader, but I always used to end up at Denny's (for breakfast!) during my bar-closing days in the USofA.  Other après-bar places varied, depending on what country I was in, but when I was in Nippon an after hours sushi bar was always the ticket.

Yeah... That's About Right

Courtesy of that Brighton Pensioner, a fun quiz.  My results:

As the post title notes: that's about right.  And we most certainly DO love us some raw fish.  We've been known to go to great lengths to get it, too.  Like this:

The Second Mrs. Pennington and YrHmblScrb in a Tokyo sushi bar, c. mid-1990s.

Ah, Former Happy Days Fish.

Science Experiment

So... we went rummaging around in our cabinets this afternoon, the objective bein' to find sumthin' suitable for dinner.  "A-ha," thinks I, "a couple o' braised pork chops, some cut corn, parsleyed redskin potatoes, and a salad would be good.  I think we might have some redskin potatoes lurking about... lemmee check."  And we found these...

Click to embiggen... if you dare.

Oh, well.  Back to the drawing board, as it were, after annotating our shopping list.  There are times when I think know I don't cook NEAR enough.

What's For Dinner, Buck?

If you think you've seen this movie before... well, you have.  We're doin' almost exactly the same thing we did in our first BLT post, so just call this the sequel, mmm-kay?

In the beginning

Near the end

Dinner is served!

Our sides were a bowl of Kettle brand sea salt chips and three Claussen dill spears; our beverage was an Anchor Steam beer... which we began drinkin' during the build process.  Boy, I sure do love me some BLTs!

And now it's out to the verandah for After Dinner Whiskey Hour, to be followed by the Beloved Wings playin' the Hated Avalanche, in Denver.  Life's pretty good at the moment.

A Public Service Announcement (AND a Re-Run!)

You long-time Gentle Readers know that I go on (and on!) about El Pinto salsa and chile sauce, which is New Mexico's best... and that, by definition, makes it the WORLD'S best salsa.  I was amazed and gratified to learn that everyone in these United States can enjoy New Mexico's finest chile because you can now buy it on Amazon.  Witness:

You may wonder why I bought El Pinto on Amazon and you'd be right to wonder.  The main reason is because a uniformed official from United Parcel Service will deliver the chile right to my door, saving me the trouble and expense of driving all the way to The Big(ger) City^TM to purchase same (no store in P-Ville carries the green chile sauce).  So there's that.

Oh, yeah.  I said I had a re-run for ya...

Monday, August 29, 2011

Does My Diet Make Me Look Fat?

I got to thinkin' that Michelle O would NOT be pleased at the way I eat.  Sometimes.  We all do this sorta thang occasionally and I know nary a soul who hasn't eaten a whole bag o' Oreos (or the equivalent amount o' junk food o' choice) and called it dinner at one point or another.  But consider my entire caloric intake from yesterday, in rough chronological order:

• Eight cups o' strong espresso-grind coffee, lightened with moderate amounts o' half-and-half and sweetened with raw cane sugar. Oh, and one level teaspoon o' Ovaltine, per cup.
• A complete bag o' home made tortilla chips from Juanito's restaurant, accompanied by a quarter jar o' El Pinto Green Chile Sauce (consumed in concert with the following)
• Three beers (Sammy Adams Octoberfest x2, Newcastle Nut Brown Ale)
• Four Nabsico Pinwheel cookies
• Two large glasses o' whole milk (we do NOT do 2% or any other sort o' perverted and unnatural food acts here at El Casa Móvil De Pennington... in the truest sense, meaning we also reject anything/everything labeled "organic" or "light")
• Four fingers o' Cragganmore (well, mebbe just slightly more)
• One tin o' Crown Prince Kipper Snacks
• A half pint o' Häagen-Dazs butter pecan ice cream
• One Centrum Silver vitamin pill 

I don't worry about the calories... I get plenty o' those in one form or another... but there are times when I just don't want to cook, even to the point of nuking sumthin' out o' the freezer. So, we just graze when terminal laziness hits.  Am I wrong in this?  Or is Michelle O just an overbearing, dominating, more-than-slightly-addled, busybody?  Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.

Yup.  El Pinto... it's what's for dinner, sometimes.  And now YOU can do it, too.

Yum

We broke one of our cardinal dining rules last night, to wit: "NEVER eat sushi more than 50 miles inland."  Well, The Big(ger) City^TM is pretty far from the ocean but we heard tell there's a passable sushi bar at one of the Thai restaurants in Clovis.  So we took the plunge, like this:

Yet another crappy cell-phone pic.

What you see is four pieces of maguro, three pieces of sake, two pieces of tamago, a big-ass pile o' wasabi, and a bowl o' miso soup (not pictured is a bowl of greens in sesame oil... that was my salad).  It was good.  Not great, mind you, but good enough that I think we'll go back to Thai City again.

What's great sushi?  Well, it's served in a place like this:

The Second Mrs. Pennington and I in a Tokyo sushi bar, 1991.

That's a long ways to go for raw fish, innit?

It's Really True, Yanno?

Tacos.  It's what's for dinner.

What's For Dinner, Buck?

Well, it's more like what WAS for dinner, given that dinner is long over and this is the first post for Friday... written late Thursday night.

Last week... on the occasion of completing our latest Adventure In Modern Dentistry... I wrote:

And now we can eat sammidges, and tacos, and pizza, and apples, and... well, you get my drift, I'm sure.

We've done all of the above except for a sandwich or two and we rectified that situation this past evening.  I had a number of things to do on this our first full day back at the ranch... stuff like replenish the beer and whiskey supply, pick up meds at the Cannon Airplane Patch pharmacy, and last but not least, restock the larder by visiting the Cannon commissary.  We were on a mission while in the commissary, which was to pick up the ingredients required to make a world-class sandwich or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

If this were a perfect world I'd have satisfied my sandwich lust by making a trip (or trips, plural) to the local delicatessen... the local Jewish delicatessen.  There ain't no such animal in this part of the world and I doubt the locals would understand the concept of a delicatessen, let alone a bona-fide Jewish deli.  That whole concept is kinda-sorta limited to the bi-coastal cultures and to the Midwest... Chicago and Dee-troit, in particular... but not so much in the southwest.  Not at ALL, actually.  I could go on for days about delis I've known and loved in the past but doin' that is like a lot o' other things: if you understand there's no sense in flogging a dead horse and if you don't there's just no explaining it.  Shorter: you either get it or you don't.

What I had in mind looks something like this:

A big-ass roast beef sandwich, in other words, with all the trimmings.  A corned beef sandwich, or a REAL Reuben, would come in a close second.  We settled on roast beef because commercial corned beef just doesn't cut it... never has, never will.

So we picked up a good supply o' thinly-sliced roast beef at the commissary's deli counter, a big-ass package o' provolone, a loaf o' whole wheat bread (I wish I had access to a real bakery, while we're moaning) and those were the makings o' tonight's dinner.  I already had a supply o' Claussen pickles and a bag o' potato chips laid in, so we were set.  Cutting to the chase... we made ourself two humongous, cholesterol-laden, big-ass sandwiches that would give Shelly Obama or any other "healthy eating" scold a case o' the vapors.  And we enjoyed every single bite... both the physical act o' biting into the sammidges (glorious!) and the gustatory goodness of roast beef, provolone cheese, lettuce, tomato, and horseradish... all of which combined to produce something on the order of an orgasmic sensation.

I prolly should have taken pictures of this modest feast but frankly the thought didn't occur to me that dinner was blog-fodder until well after we were done eating and clean-up complete.  So... look at the image on the right and use yer imagination; it's a close approximation of what we had for dinner this evening.  Yup, our sammidges... with layer upon layer upon layer of beef, cheese, and the other ingredients... were Dagwoodian in proportion.  Is there any other way?

Yum

From NatGeo, a list of the ten best chocolatiers in the world.  One of 'em is prolly in a mall near you...

7. Godiva Chocolatier (Brussels, Belgium and worldwide)

It's all about finishing touches at Godiva. (Photograph by Everjean, Flickr.  Click for larger.)

The beginning of Godiva chocolates traces back to a 1920s chocolate- and sweet-making workshop owned and operated by the Draps family in Brussels, Belgium. Their “pralines,” typical Belgian filled chocolates, were sold in the large, highly fashionable shops. At the age of 14, Joseph Draps went into the family business. Over the years, he developed both his ability and creative talent as a master chocolate-maker as well as his business sense. He decided to create a prestige range of chocolates and to give it an evocative name. He chose “Godiva” and marketed his chocolates in instantly recognizable gold boxes. In recognition of its excellence, Godiva has been rewarded with an appointment as supplier to the Court of Belgium. Godiva continues to be an innovator in gourmet chocolate.

I've been known to drop a hundred or more Yankee Dollars in a single visit to the Godiva store... mainly coz there's not one near me, the closest bein' over two hours away.  I tend to stock up when I go.

The other surprising thing on this list?  Half of the "ten best" are here in the USofA.

Nigella

So it came to pass The Mayor put up a post featuring the woman who's the proprietress of the ONLY cooking show I enjoy watching, or that I have ever watched, to be perfectly clear.  I commented to that effect at The Mayor's place but then someone else posted THIS video of Ms. Lawson in comments...



Heh.  And THAT's why I love the lovely Nigella.  Talk dirty to me, Bay-bee... and then make me a sammich, please.

The h/t goes to The Mayor's frequent commenter J.M. Heinrichs.

Small Stuff, Again

From the Usual USAF Source...

Schwartz's Official Portrait Unveiled: Air Force officials unveiled the official portrait painting of retired Gen. Norton Schwartz, 19th Chief of Staff, on Tuesday during a ceremony at the Pentagon. The portrait features Schwartz standing with the Air Force Memorial in Arlington, Va., shown in the background. The painting will be on display in the Pentagon's Arnold Corridor alongside the portraits of the other former Air Force Chiefs of Staff. "As I painted the portrait itself, my main goal was to convey something of the spirit of General Schwartz," said artist Michele Rushwort during the Jan. 8 unveiling. Schwartz retired from the Air Force last year after 39 years of service. He spent his last four years in uniform as Chief of Staff. "Our nation must never take for granted the selfless service, dedication, and sacrifice of public servants and military leaders like Norty Schwartz," said Air Force Secretary Michael Donley at the ceremony. Schwartz said the portrait "will be a lasting symbol that in America, and in America's armed forces, remarkable things are still possible no matter who you were, or where you came from." (Washington, D.C., report by SSgt. David Salanitri)

Well, at least it looks like him.  Gen. Schwartz has every right to smile, seeing as how he'll be drawing 97.5% of his final base pay for the rest of his life.  That works out to $14,600.00 a month.  I'd smile, too.

―:☺:―

We're still eating those Navy beans we cooked up last Sunday but we'll see the end of 'em today.  That said, it's a great good thing I really, rilly like those beans.  I can't think of anything else I'd eat for five days straight... unless I was forced to do so.  OTOH, fixing dinner has been remarkably easy these past few days... make a salad while the beans are in the nuker, sit down, eat.  It don't get much easier than that, Gentle Reader.

―:☺:―

I forgot to mention this yesterday, but the onset o' winter has GREATLY reduced my whiskey and cigar consumption, what with the virtual suspension of After Dinner Whiskey Hour, which is always taken on the verandah in warmer weather.  The last time I bought whiskey was on November 14th and I went the entire month of December without purchasing cigars.  The impact on my budget has been astounding.  That won't last, however.