Topic: What are you eating / What did you eat.

[6pairsofshoes]

I tend to agree.  This is a lovely neighbor who is otherwise just a great all round guy but he has these super weird ideas about food.

I had a big salad with some thai grilled chicken for dinner last night.  A Thai friend made the chicken.  It's marinated with lots of garlic, cilantro root, oyster sauce, white pepper.  She grilled it and it appeared to have been pounded into thin cutlets.  I sliced the chicken and put it over a large salad with romaine, spinach, arugula, cucumber, tomato, avocado and fresh mushroom with a light vinagrette.  I didn't need anything else for dinner after that. 

[8ullfrog]

it was a few days ago but I thought I'd mention it as I mentioned it in the HATE thread.

Checkers/Rallys is a cross country burger chain known for low prices and no dining room. They do have picnic tables outside, but no one uses them.

They did well under covid, since their footprint is tiny and designed around the drive-thru experience. I understand Wienerschnitzel experienced a similar bump.

One thing I like about rally's is that if you are on foot, it's not a problem. They have a walk up window, unlike most other chains.

Anyway, to the point, I'm not a fan of multi-patty burgers, and most of the bacon options at rally's are double or triple burgers. They recently added a promotional burger, the Bacon Ranch Cheeseburger. Since it's $2.50, I decided to check it out.

It's a small burger, but at that price point of course it is. Mine had four strips of bacon, and a slice of american cheese. The bun was so un-notable I don't remember what it was. It was toasted though.

The ranch oozed out. I'm glad I waited until I got home to eat, that would not have been a fun surprise in the car. Additionally, it was nasty cheap ranch.

I might be a bit of a ranch snob, but I've had better ranch in the hospital. Needless to say it wasn't buttermilk. It was that watery fishy ranch you find at dismal cafeterias.

I want to raise my appraisal of the burger because everything else was fantastic, but I can't. That ranch is a spoiler. Give it a miss.
The cheese was not notable in any way, might as well have been a kraft single.

[8ullfrog]

Funyons.
I don't like them. I don't know if humidity got to them or if that's how they're supposed to be, but aside from the onion taste I do not care for funyons.

[6pairsofshoes]

It's sad how a cheap condiment can ruin an otherwise fine sandwich.

I have been snacking on Blue Diamond Wasabi Almonds.   They're really fabulous.  Spicy and salty.  I love wasabi on sushi, so the flavor here is really a nice addition.  Otherwise, we have been having big salads every night as they are easy to throw together.  I'm running out of greens, though, so I'd better get onto that. 

I stomped into the brambles yesterday and brought home 10 pints of wild blackberries.  I spent the greater part of today running them through a ricer so I could get the seeds out.  It took hours.  Tomorrow I'll turn them into beautiful dark purple jam that is so much better than anything I could buy in a supermarket.  The labor and fights with thorns in the fingers is worth it.  At one point, I thought of going for my first aid kit as some older dried parts of the brambles had deadly thorns that tore my fingers.  But I soon got over that and focused on the prize.  It was about a week too late to get the really big as your thumb berries but I still managed to get a bunch.  They have to be washed, crushed and have the seeds removed, but after that, they have a great fragrance and flavor.  The fact that I managed not to end up on my butt in a bunch of thorny brambles constituted an achievement.

[8ullfrog]

I made toaster pizza. I used a homemade pizza sauce recipe
https://natashaskitchen.com/homemade-pizza-sauce/
modified to scale it down and use the ingredients on hand.

Substitutions:
I don't have crushed tomatz, so I used a 6 ounce can of tomato paste. This turned out WAY too thick.
Thinned it with four ounces of tomato juice, it blended up nice then.
I still used a whole tablespoon of olive oil because I like oil in my sauce.
Used a half teaspoon of iodized salt because sea salt is pretentious and I like getting my io on.
Instead of straight oregano, I decided to chase the flavor demon. I used 1/2 teaspoon of "taco secret" from fire and smoke society.

It tasted horrible. Awful, I figured dinner was a mulligan, but decided to soldier through. Took a long bread roll, cut it in half, then sandwich cut that half.

Spooned my horrible tasting sauce on the roll, then covered it with provolone cheese and some pepperoni.

Toasted it until the cheese blistered, then took it out.

The toaster saved the sauce. It's bless'ed amazing once it baked. I went back and tasted the unheated sauce, still nasty.

It's like alchemy, gold from salt.

I am very happy with the end product, but it was definitely a fluke. The resulting sauce is spicy and delicious, but before it bakes I wouldn't want to taste it again.

[6pairsofshoes]

I'm glad you were able to rescue that pizza.

I made some pasta.  Zucchini, onion, garlic, pignoli sauteed until tender in olive oil with some pepper flakes, and then angel hair tossed into that and eaten with some nice dry italian cheese (pecorino romano).  The slow part is cutting everything up in advance.  I toast the pignoli until they are slightly brown as they taste nuttier that way.

[6pairsofshoes]

It's morning so I'm having tea, soon to be followed by a cream scone with jam.  Not exciting and predictable but delicious regardless.

[6pairsofshoes]

I just made some tuna salad.  This relies on canned tuna in water, so it's hardly going to show up at the next Michelin star restaurant, but it's decent.  Equal parts mayo and dijon mustard, dry oregano leaves (fresh if you have it), finely chopped celery and shallots, a couple cans of tuna (5 oz) drained.  It is better if you chill the tuna before you mix it as it saves time and you can then eat it immediately.

[6pairsofshoes]

Breakfast again.  Tea.  Peach cake but made with nectarines.  Nectarines are a variety of peaches, apparently.  The great thing about this cake is that you don't really have to do anything but slice it.  It's not very sweet so it's fine for breakfast.  Kind of like a fruit coffeecake.

[8ullfrog]

I did the madrigal sauce flight. It's from Breaking Bad.

We take a trip away from the meth fields of New Mexico and visit a food lab in Germany, under the auspices of Madrigal electromotive.

The German scientists proffer a series of sauces, along with a fishbowl of hash brown crowns, or tater tots if you're not pretentious.

The first sauce is honey mustard. The lab wizards have reduced the amount of actual honey and replaced it with HFCS
The next sauce is Franch, a mix of French dressing and ranch dressing. Third sauce is "Cajun kickass sauce" reformulated because it caused gastric distress.

Next is hickory BBQ sauce, which is... Hickory BBQ sauce.

The final sauce is ketchup. Which is ketchup.


As usual I modified it.

First, I don't have crowns, I have Pilgrim chicken nuggets. They're decent, but still chicken nuggets. I like that they don't taste a damn thing like tyson, I'm not a fan of the "Southwest spice blend" Tyson products get in the southwest. Pilgrim nuggets are neutral, and taste like chicken, not a spice blend.

I'm not a fan of honey mustard, so I used some Sierra Nevada brown mustard. It was nice.

The Franch? Kraft ranch, kraft French. I didn't care for it. Kraft recently messed with the recipe, and it's "new and improved". Which means it's not.

Cajun kickass I have a green jalapeño sauce, it's got the consistency of salsa, and it's a champ. A rare win dollar store find, it's on par with the sauce cups you get at kickass burrito restaurants.

Hickory BBQ, I just used hickory BBQ sauce. It pairs extremely well with chicken nuggets, but that's not surprising.

Ketchup, I've got a jalapeño ketchup, and it also paired well with chicken nuggets.

What surprised me with this sauce lineup is that going from one sauce to another is not remotely jarring, these sauces pair well and taste good.

Madrigal knew their stuff, even if I'd rather they not go to the HFCS well.

[Edit the nuggets were PILGRIM, not Perdue. Perdue nuggets are on recall]

[6pairsofshoes]

I made hummos and baba ganoush.  I use these in vegetarian wraps.  So I heat a flour tortilla in order to make it a little more supple, and then smear some hummos or baba as a base and add slivers of bell pepper, cucumber and garden tomatoes in there, roll them up and voilà! lunch.

[6pairsofshoes]

I had the usual tea with some nice cranberry walnut bread from a local bakery.

But mostly, I wanted to see how 8ully was doing and hope he has a better kitchen where he ends up.

[8ullfrog]

I sleep at my aunt's but she scouted our new home. I wish she scouted a little harder but bless'ed liars are prolific in Florida.

Back to food, tonight was a butter chicken kit and it was bitchmade mild. Tasted good though, not a big fan of rice but the sauce elevated it despite bringing little spice.

My aunt is a fantastic host but I hope the seller ends up in the ben stiller retirement home from Happy Gillmore. Fully insulated my ass.

[6pairsofshoes]

I'd be surprised to find homes "fully insulated" in Florida.  What kind of materials is the house constructed from?  There were forms of lightweight aggregate concrete that were intended to insulate against heat in places like Teheran, but those were deployed in slab concrete construction of modest single family homes.  The house we are moving into has no insulation, either, and it's in a place with much colder winters.  So that's something we will have to pay to fix.

[6pairsofshoes]

Just had a thoroughly unsatisfying turkey and tomato on multigrain bread sandwich.  It had a bitter aftertaste.  At least I'm no longer hungry but of course now I want a nap.