It's October! Welcome to CHAOS BAKING!

I know a couple of people who are afraid to bake. They're good cooks, but something always seems to go wrong when they slide cookies or bread or some kind of baked good into the oven. And I can see why they're nervous about baking. We've been practically brainwashed to believe that baking requires precision measurements, careful treatment of every ingredient, and an oven calibrated to the perfect temperature if we're going to get a quality result.

Nonetheless, every now and then it's worth attempting some chaos baking -- just making stuff up to see what happens.

It's easy to forget that people have been making baked goods for a long time, and for most of that time baking was much more a seat-of-the-pants process than it is now. Medieval baking required working with rustic, unsifted flour and a sourdough starter, using no standard measurements to bring a dough together, heating an earthen oven with a wood fire for many hours, then raking everything out so there would be no ash on the bread, then carefully sliding the loaves in, sealing the entry shut with a wooden door that had been soaking in cold water for hours so it wouldn't burn, and leaving the loaves in long enough to bake them through but not long enough to dry them out or scorch them. One way to check oven temperature back then was to toss in a little raw flour; if it turned brown the oven was ready, but if it turned black the oven was too hot.

If medieval peasants could successfully make bread with no measuring cups, no electricity, not even a set recipe -- then we can go a little off script with our baking and still turn out something worth eating.

You want proof? Here ya go!

Right now I have a whole lot of milk that's just gone sour (about 4 cups total), and I'm wanting to do something with it before it actually spoils. Thing is, milk that's just barely soured may not be great on your breakfast cereal, but it's still fine for baking and can be used, cup for cup, as a substitute for buttermilk in most baked goods. I'd just settled on making a homemade sour milk spice cake when I went to the store for supplies.

Well, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a pile of Betty Crocker cake mixes for 98 cents apiece. In this economy, that's hard to beat; I haven't done the math but I'm not sure I could make a cake from scratch at that price. There was no spice cake mix on sale (or even available for purchase), but that wasn't going to stop me. So I changed my mind and grabbed a yellow cake mix. (Also impulsively picked up a six-count of pumpkin spice flavored old-fashioned donuts, which will be important later.)

In the car on the way back from the store, I ate too many of those donuts. Yeah, sometimes I'm not very smart. Captain Midnight doesn't care for old-fashioned donuts and is neutral about pumpkin spice stuff, so I knew he wouldn't want any of the remaining donuts. He doesn't even like frosting on his cake. This spice cake is probably going to be pretty plain --

Oh hey. No it isn't. I have a potentially brilliant idea.

I mixed up the cake mix mostly according to directions, swapping in a cup of sour milk instead of a cup of water, and adding 1/2 t. allspice, 1/4 t. cinnamon and 1/8 t. nutmeg to the mix. (Now it's a spice cake! There ya go.) Poured it into a greased 9x13" glass pan, then did the brilliant thing: I dropped the remaining pumpkin spice donuts into a bag, mashed them into crumbs and used them as a streusel topping to scatter over the top of the cake batter. Baked about 25 minutes in a moderate oven.

Here's the result.

I didn't even wait for the cake to cool down, I just cut myself a corner piece.

NOM.

This is good, but if anything, this doctored spice cake needs even MORE spice. (My English ancestors didn't do insane things to find better spice routes just for their descendants to be terrified of "1/4 t. black pepper" in a recipe, dangit!) I'd at least double the amount of spices if I were to make this again. As it is, though, it's delicious all on its own and would also be great covered with whipped cream or served a la mode. There's no indication in look or taste that this cake was made with sour milk. And the streusel topping was a genius idea -- soft, light cake covered by a crunchy, sugary, spicy topping.

In fact, it was so tasty that the minute I left the kitchen, Charlie-cat jumped up on the counter and helped himself to a big mouthful of cooling cake. BAD CHARLIE. NOT FOR YOU. So now the cake is safely cooling in the oven with the door cracked open because our cats are mad jonesing for our chaos baking experiments.

How the Internet occasionally saves my sanity

(Pumpkin spice peanut brittle image courtesy of Target.com)

I enjoyed a piece of pumpkin spice peanut brittle today (go get some at Target, it's really good!), and as I crunched on it a phrase from a book bubbled up to the top of my head -- something about someone buying peanut brittle for an older relative, who would "clatter and crunch" over it later. I knew that particular phrase, and I knew I'd read it many times in the past, but couldn't place it.

People born after 1990, I want you to get a little taste of what life was like in the 1970s and early '80s. Barring my finding that phrase in a book through happy accident, or my subconscious managing to dredge up where it came from, I would have no choice but to let the phrase "clatter and crunch" bounce around in my skull for weeks to months, with no easy way to look it up because there was no modern internet.

As it was, I had my answer within 90 seconds. It comes from an early passage in the book We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, and it describes the narrator's Uncle Julian messily enjoying his treat.

Once again the internet has saved my tenuous sanity. Thanks, Al Gore!

Happy Strawberry Shortcake and Nothing Else Day!

 

Don't worry if it snuck up on you. As a movable feast, it tends to do that. The good news is, you can celebrate Strawberry Shortcake and Nothing Else Day any time it gets too hot to cook or strawberries are on sale for cheap. I actually ended up making these because I got a Too Good to Go bag that included some pre-made shortcakes, so all I had to do was prep the berries and add some whipped cream. Super simple and delicious!

I'll always miss my mom. This is one of the small reasons why -- she chose to do a few spur-of-the-moment things that became regular occurrences every year. (Including making nothing but strawberry shortcake for dinner on a summer night when it was just too hot to cook.)

Notes from the Oak Table Cafe

HERE'S a place in Silverdale at the top of a hill, overlooking the valley and Dyes Inlet, called the Oak Table Cafe. It serves only breakfast and lunch, and it usually has a long wait time because the food is fantastic. Anyway, since my brother was in town and since we were all hungry, we went to Oak Table for some delicious brunch (if you're interested, I had the eggs Casey; Captain Midnight and Tim-my-brother opted for corned beef hash).

It had been a very long time since I entered the dining area of a restaurant; I've been very careful during the pandemic to stay masked in public and not to linger too close to strangers for very long. Looking around the room, I noticed literally no one in the very busy dining area was wearing masks or social distancing, which gave me the willies.

When CM and I first moved to Seattle, I learned some history about the city. In 1889, there was a huge fire that destroyed practically all of the central business district. After the ashes and rubble were cleared away, the city fathers urged business leaders to build back higher than the shoreline so there would be less trouble with flooding and sewage issues (the tides had a tendency to back up all the city's toilets), but as soon as they could, people began rebuilding right back on the flat again. Nothing would convince them to work in the best interest of all Seattleites; they wanted to get back to making money immediately.

At the time I couldn't understand why so many people would act in such a short-sighted fashion. But now I get it. All these places across the United States are reopening without Corsi-Rosenthal boxes or any other kind of viral mitigation measures, as the Covid pandemic continues and as we prepare for a potential H5N1 pandemic. No one will take even basic measures to guard against more people falling ill. Because it's been a few very lean years and damn it, they want their money.

It makes me wonder whether cities that want serious viral mitigation should do what the city of Seattle did to fix their problem. Since they couldn't force shop owners to rebuild higher than their original storefronts, they chose to rebuild the infrastructure--namely, the streets--twelve feet above the front doors of the new shops, requiring pedestrians to use ladders to cross the streets. This situation was so awkward that it soon became evident to shop owners that they had better do what the city government had asked for in the first place. Maybe, if you couldn't reopen your business without several Corsi-Rosenthal boxes in place and running, you would do what you needed to do to get back to serving customers. Because clearly, most people aren't going to do what's right unless it's making them money, they're being legally dragged to it, or they're shamed into doing it.

Blam This Piece of Crap Day: Let's blam some Spam! (Plus bonus blamming)

Well, it's the day you've all been waiting for!

I'll admit, I didn't think up a good idea to celebrate BTPoC Day until it was upon us. But then I realized I had not one, but two different examples of BLAMming ready to go.

Let's cover the tastiest one first: Spam fried rice. This recipe was slightly modified from one made by Seonkyoung Longest and it is YUM.

Yeah, yeah, Spam is a registered trademark, yadda yadda, bite me, Hormel. Anyway, this can be made with any kind of "canned luncheon meat" you have on hand, as long as the flavor isn't too exotic. I recommend using lower-sodium generic spam if you can find it, because the sauce we're gonna make for this has a fair amount of sodium already.

I have long held a pink-meat prejudice that dates from my teenhood, when my working mom would occasionally make jazzed-up ramen for dinner. If I came in late for dinner, which I occasionally did, I'd get ramen noodles so soft they were falling apart, garnished with shriveled peas and cold chunks of spam. Bluergh. So for a long time I wouldn't eat spam. This recipe brought me around to liking it again. Maybe you'll feel the same way.

Anyhoo, get that spam out of the can and cut it into 1/4" thick slices, then into dice.

And if you have cats, better put them somewhere else. Charlie and Millie became very interested in our kitchen-related doings the minute they heard that can open. But spam of any kind has too much fat and salt and mystery amendments to be good for them. (Sorry, kittens)

Four eggs. There go our next four mortgage payments. Scramble 'em up.

A medium-sized white/yellow/brown onion, chopped or diced. This is optional, but Captain Midnight likes it.

A few cloves of garlic, finely chopped, minced or pressed. You can add as much or as little as you like, but at least three good-sized cloves, I think. 

A whole lotta rice ("6 cups," says Captain Midnight). It doesn't have to be fresh from the rice cooker, like this. In fact, fried rice benefits from using rice that's a day old and starting to dry out. (Yes, another piece of crap to BLAM!)

Also a whole lotta green onions. Use these even if you don't use the white onion; they taste different and a little bit set aside makes a very pretty garnish for the finished bowl.
 

Homemade teriyaki sauce. Refer to the Seonkyoung Longest recipe for full details because I'm lazy.

Oh, okaaaaay. Briefly: 2 parts soy sauce, 2 parts sake, 2 parts mirin, 1 part sugar. For this batch of fried rice, we did "tablespoons" for parts. You can scale it up or down depending on your tastes and how large a batch you're making.

And, of course, a wok. No, it doesn't have to be 35 years old like this one. You don't even need a wok, but you do need a pan that can handle high heat and a lot of fast sauteing, and has enough volume to hold a lot of rice.

Not shown, but used: vegetable oil, a little sesame oil, some cut-up slivers of nori if you like it, and some sesame seeds. And maybe some sriracha.

Now, what happened next went fast enough that I didn't take pictures, but:

Captain Midnight prepped all the ingredients beforehand. He got the wok screaming hot (yay gas stove!) and put in a tablespoon or two of vegetable oil. When it was hot, he threw in the egg. It immediately puffed around the edges. He tossed the egg around until it was about three-quarters cooked, then fished it all out into a bowl. Then he added a tiny bit of oil and the chunks of spam. These he cooked, gently moving them constantly, until they started to get crispy (the first rule of improving spam: improve the texture). Once they were nice and crisped up, he fished them out so he could cook the yellow onion. (If you're not using this, don't take out the spam; just move right on to the garlic.)

Onion in. He cooked it just until it softened and started to brown. Then in went the garlic, and he tossed it around just until it started to smell good. Back in with the spam; added the rice. He stirred it about until things were well incorporated, then drizzled the teriyaki sauce around the edges of the wok. That was thoroughly mixed in. As the rice absorbed the sauce and started to get dry again, he threw the egg back in and chopped it up a bit (you want fairly large chunks of egg in this -- I mean, if you're going to pay for eggs, you might as well be able to taste them!). Off the heat, he added just a touch of sesame oil for flavor, three-quarters of the green onions, some sesame seeds, gave it all a good toss and it was ready.

This was promptly plated up and sprinkled with additional green onions.

I prefer my fried rice without nori on top.

Captain Midnight prefers his with LOTS of nori on top. And some sriracha for good measure.

Remember what I said about the cats? Yup.

No, Millie, you cannot have some.

Both the cats did get some strips of nori, aka Tasty Green Fish Paper. And great was the omming and nomming thereof. So a good time was had by all.

And now for the Bonus Blam: a thrift store special!

About two weeks ago I ventured into the local Goodwill looking for sundries. What I found was a very large ball of red yarn with three sets of knitting needles shanked into the middle of it. Whoever had owned it before had started knitting a scarf with it, but had gotten bored with the project and ended up donating it to Goodwill.

Well, I ripped it back to the beginning, and after two or three tries with different patterns, I finally settled on this one.

This is variously called a basketweave or checkerboard pattern, it's fully reversible and it works up fast enough that even though I'm a slow knitter, it's nearly done. I will either give it to the Red Scarf Project or pass it on to someone else in the community who needs or wants it.

So that was our Blam This Piece of Crap Day. How was yours?

A visit to a hobbit house

I'm still exploring the edges of the new county in which we find ourselves, and several local folks have suggested I visit "the hobbit house." Turns out there are at least two places in the county that qualify as hobbit houses -- one at a local greenhouse, and one on Bainbridge Island.

Today I went to the Bainbridge hobbit house.

With seasonally appropriate decor!

Turns out it's a little business. And a cute little business it is too.

The legend of founder Perky Paul

Perky Paul's Gourmet has recently (well, within the last five years) relocated to the Pacific Northwest and is now serving up his home-canned goodness from a cute tiny house just across from his front door.

It's even cuter on the inside!

Paul sells jams, pickles, chutneys, sauces, and all sorts of tasty goodies, from teeny trial sizes to full quarts.

A wizard would never steal, right?

Everything here is sold on the honor system. THIS MEANS YOU, GANDALF.

They're so cute

After perusing all the contents of the shop, I chose a half-dozen little tasting jars and absconded with them (yes, OF COURSE after paying for them). We've already opened up some jam, and tell you what, Perky Paul knows what he's doing! This stuff is fantastic.

The art of the Kari Sue special

This never fails to make me giggle (stolen from Twitter with attribution, but not permission):

I love it because it reminds me of my mom (both the baking AND the cooking part). If you were at my mom's funeral service, you might remember my mentioning that my mother was a talented cook and baker. She was especially good at freestyle cooking from whatever was available. Mom had the uncanny ability to concoct a tasty dinner, somehow, from a patchwork of pantry scraps, miscellaneous stuff from the crisper bin, and that one lonely olive floating in a jar of brine in the back of the fridge. These were usually dubbed "Kari Sue specials" and served up with the comment, "Enjoy! I don't remember what went into it, so I'm never making it again." Most of the time they were at least tasty; occasionally they were inspired.

There was a time when I thought I'd never be able to cook like my mom, just making it up without a recipe. I could make recipes competently from a cookbook, but I was scared to try anything else. But here's the interesting thing about cooking regularly, even straight from the cookbook -- as you cook many kinds of recipes, you start to take in some of the rules of cooking alchemy. You begin to notice the similarities between recipes, how many start with "in a saucepan, sauté onion and garlic over medium heat." You notice that "eating your colors" isn't just healthier, but makes a plate of food look more attractive and appetizing. You know how particular foodstuffs have to be prepared if you want them to turn out a certain way. And you start mentally timing how long different foods need to cook, and at what temperature, so that they'll all be ready at the same time. (This is one I still struggle with, for what it's worth).

Then one day you may take your first step away from the cookbook. It'll probably be on a day when you're pressed for time, and halfway through cooking the recipe you realize that someone finished off the potatoes. No mashed potatoes to serve with your main course. So in desperation you boil some pasta instead, toss it with a little butter and serve it. Or you might cook up some grits, or broil some bread with garlic butter, or come up with some other kind of alternate starch on the go. And it's delicious. Maybe better than what you'd planned. Congratulations; you've just stepped into the larger world of cooking by the seat of your pants.

All this came to mind because tonight I'm kinda making a Kari Sue special. I had an actual recipe in mind, a three-ingredient sweet-and-sour meatball thing made in the slow cooker. It called for two pounds of meatballs, 1 1/2 cups of grape jelly, and 12 ounces of chili sauce.

I'd waited a little longer than I should have to start dinner in the slow cooker, so I grabbed a bag of frozen IKEA meatballs (1 kilo or 2.2 pounds, close enough) and threw them in the crock. Immediately set the crock to high heat to make up for lost time. I then threw in as much grape jelly as we had left, a bit less than a cup, then poured a bit of hot water into the jelly jar, screwed on the lid, shake shake shake for about a minute, then tossed the jelly-infused liquid into the crock.

Still not quite enough jelly. What else, what else? I shuffled through the fridge and came across some of the marionberry syrup my friend Tara (hi Tara!) made for me last Christmas. In it went.

Now for the chili sauce. I didn't have any. I didn't want to go to the store. What could I use instead? Well, from past experience I know chili sauce tastes a lot like spicy ketchup. Did we have ketchup? Yes we did, but not quite enough. Well, time to use up what we have. I squeezed in the dregs of two bottles of ketchup, did the ketchup-water thing to get every last bit out, and started thinking about how to add the "spicy" part of the equation. Well, hello there, sriracha sauce! A few healthy zig-zags across the crock should do it. Oh, and a quarter of a bottle of bibimbap sauce left over from my latest Korean food experiment -- it's sorta ketchuppy and definitely spicy. In went the rest of that, plus the hot water treatment to flush out every bit of flavor.

Heat. Stir. Taste.

Oh. That's GOOD. Better than it has any right to be, honestly.

The meatballs have been burbling away for a while now. I'd probably throw chopped green onions over the top, if I had any, but I used them all up the other day. I could use chives instead if I had some, or a sautéed leek if I had one, or even a regular ol' yellow onion cut up small and cooked for a while with the meatballs. The point of this meal is to use what's on hand. So I think what I'll do is sprinkle it with sesame seeds at the finish, serve it over rustic mashed potatoes ("rustic" = don't bother to peel the skins), with a side of cooked carrots and peas tossed with a little butter. I'd prefer broccoli or bok choy as a side, but again, I'm working with what's on hand.

Inspired? Ehh, not s'much. Tasty? Probably. Would Kari Sue approve? Dunno, but I'm avoiding food waste, so she'd probably be pleased. Plus we're not throwing in the towel and buying fast food instead. And hey, I've now gotten rid of four almost-empty bottles of condiments/preserves that have been hanging around the fridge for months!

(Note to self: buy more ketchup.)

ETA: after perusing the fridge, I've changed my mind again. The carrots will keep for a while; this cucumber in the crisper bin won't. So we're having a simple cucumber and tomato salad with ripe San Marzano tomatoes from Julia's garden (hi Julia!) and a good sprinkle of Montreal steak seasoning. AND some peas, because yum, peas.

ETA2: nom! Potatoes and peas, both excellent. Salad was tasty. Captain Midnight tasted the meatball sauce and added a leeetle balsamic vinegar to give it a bit more of a sour note. Approved.

Blam This Piece of Crap Day 2022: fridge velcro quiche!

So I took my own sweet time figuring out how to turn something from meh to marvelous for Blam This Piece of Crap Day this year. As a result, when the day finally arrived I had to hustle something up pronto. And the most obvious decision was to make some kind of fridge velcro.

I'm not absolutely certain about the origins of the phrase "fridge velcro" -- it might be an Alton Brown thing -- but in this household it refers to certain foods (quiche, casseroles, soup, etc.) where most of the odds and ends of things you have lurking in your fridge will "stick" to the recipe. Make something tasty and clean out a major appliance at the same time!

Considering the number of marked-down supermarket specials, various containers of leftovers, and the quantity of eggs we had in the chiller, I decided to make a fridge velcro quiche.

Now behold its slung-together glory!

Crust: leftover rice.

Filling: sautéed red onion, marked-down mushrooms, one sad Roma tomato cut to bits and sautéed with slightly wilted green onions (both came back to life in the pan), a marked-down turkey kielbasa cut into bits and sautéed until piping hot, marked-down chêvre blended with four eggs and a splash of milk, various grated ends and pieces of cheese, all slooshed together and poured into the crust. Deeeeelicious (if a little goaty, but I happen to like that quality).

I didn't set a timer and forgot about the quiche in the oven (so, ADD Brain, we meet again.), so it got a little more brown on top than is normal for a quiche, but it's still delicious. I had a test piece to make sure. And since quiche is good served either hot or cold, we'll have meals for a couple of days off this baby.

I also had a little bit of leftover Nutella, so I made some Nutella hot chocolate (heat some milk until it's hot but not boiling, add Nutella -- I'd say about a tablespoon of Nutella per cup of milk, but you do you -- and whisk until it dissolves. Add a touch of vanilla extract if you want, or just drink your deliciously rich hazelnut hot chocolate as is).

ALL HAIL BTPOC DAY! *slurp* aaaah, chocolate.

Too Good to Go: Seattle

For the last several weeks I've been using the Too Good to Go app to reduce food waste around the greater Seattle area. Too Good to Go has been a popular app in Europe for some time and is making inroads in metropolitan areas of the United States, and I thought I'd see what all the fuss was about.

How it works: Too Good to Go partners with various restaurants and other businesses that have surplus food at the end of the day, and allows them to offer their extra food to customers at a discount through the app. So: you download and install the app, tell it where you want it to search for available food, look over the options, pick an offer you want to reserve, pay in advance (there are several options for payment), then come to the restaurant, bakery or grocery at the agreed-upon time to pick up the food. Take home, eat, enjoy, repeat as desired. Since you're saving food that might otherwise be thrown away, you get the chance to pick up a meal (or foodstuffs) at a deep discount. And since you don't usually know exactly what you'll get in advance, it feels a little bit like adult trick-or-treating.

After a few weeks, I've formulated some general observations about Too Good to Go Seattle:

You will mostly deal with small, local businesses: single-storefront restaurants, specialty grocery stores, local burger chains, etc. The big multinational chains have their own corporate protocols for getting rid of food they didn't sell, so you won't see Massive Supermarket Chain or International Burger Joint on the app.

It's probably best for singles or small families. Scoring meals from the same location for more than about 4 people at once is going to be a challenge. And as the app gets more popular and more people use it to find meals, the likelihood of picking up more than one meal from the same location will go way down.

It's easiest for people with flexible schedules and a car. Different businesses specify varying times for pickup; some have wide time windows (say 11 to 5) and some have extremely narrow ones (7:30 to 7:45), so if you're booked solid during the week, you might only be able to schedule pickups on your day off. And a car makes pickup much easier. (It's theoretically possible, but I don't want to think about the logistical headache of trying to pick up more than one surprise bag using Seattle's public transit system.) If you reserve surprise bags from several companies in one day, try to keep the locations close together and batch your pickups around the business with the shortest time window to save time and gas money. And if you're going to drive more than a few miles, PLEASE check the establishment's rating on the app first. Look for four stars or better; you shouldn't fight rush-hour traffic or drive long distances for mediocre food. (Learn from my fail.)

It's also a better fit for night owls than for early birds. Most businesses don't offer early-morning meal pickup; they tend to schedule pickups from 11 am to near closing time, so be comfortable with eating a late lunch and dinner.

It's easier for people who are OK with imperfect food. Items you get in your surprise bags may be seconds, near expiration, menu items that aren't as popular, or large amounts of the same thing. If that bothers you, Too Good to Go may not be a good fit.

And it's easier if you have few dietary restrictions. Some businesses advertise what they offer (vegetarian/vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, kosher, halal, etc.), but most don't. You agree to take whatever they bag up, including stuff you may not like or eat. (This household doesn't do coffee, and on a recent day when we picked up multiple surprise bags, we got mocha cookies, sweetened condensed milk with coffee, cold brew coffee and a slice of tiramisu. All from different businesses. Hey, this is Seattle. We just found friends who like coffee and passed the caffeinated goodness on to them.) You could also get foodstuffs to which you're allergic, so if you have a severe food allergy, be proactive and contact the business with your concerns before pickup time.

Forrest Gump might say that Too Good to Go is like a box o' chok'lits. (Sometimes literally. Yay Theo Chocolate surprise bags!) You never know what you're gonna get, and being comfortable with that uncertainty is a big part of enjoying this app. That food is so cheap because it's either a form of viral advertising for the business, an item that's perilously close to or past its Best By date, or leftovers that were prepped but not purchased. Sometimes you'll get a great value (like the aforementioned bags at Theo Chocolate) and sometimes you won't (three slices of lukewarm pizza from The Unnamed Pizza Joint, supposedly an $18 value--ha). In all cases, you'll reduce food waste and save money, but not every offering is equally stellar.

Got questions? Let me know in the comments.

Devil pepper!

I like making a few seasonally-appropriate dinners around Halloween. Usually it's pretty traditional fare -- Dinner in a Pumpkin or pumpkin soup served in a hollowed-out pumpkin shell or the like -- but this time I noticed a recipe for jack o' lantern stuffed peppers, presented by the inimitable Chef John himself. Everyone in our family likes stuffed peppers (yes, including Charlie, but he never gets any) and I knew orange peppers were on sale this week, so off to the store I went!

This time I pulled a mix-and-match recipe swap and filled the peppers with braaaains stuffed the peppers with another Chef John recipe (if you try it, be forewarned: this recipe creates enough stuffing to fill 8 peppers, not 4). Three of the four peppers were orange, and they made great jack o' lanterns, but I had a fourth pepper that was red.

It had to become THE DEVIL PEPPER.

Behold His Infernal Majesty!

The photo makes it kind of hard to see (yes, that's my glorious "Happy Halloween" bleach shirt in the background), but I created a couple of little devil horns from the pepper offcuts and stuck them on his head using toothpicks. They blackened up in the oven to create a nice, properly demonic effect.

Shortly after this picture was taken, Mr. Devil Pepper was doused in marinara "blood" sauce and scarfed with great glee.

So long, Devil Pepper. You were demonically delicious.

Oh yeah, and if you're stuck with more pepper filling than you need and wondering what you should do with it, may I suggest making Italian meatballs? (That's what we did. Super tasty!)

How to blam a piece of crap

So, since February 3rd is Blam This Piece of Crap Day in our household (it can be in yours, too! Try it, it's fun!), I thought it might be worthwhile to show y'all an example of how a piece of crap can be BLAMmed up into something better.

Exhibit A: canned beef chunks in water.

I've had these canned beef chunks in our food storage for quite some time. While they are not horrible by any means, they tend to look rather off-putting when they first come out of the can, like something you might feed to a dog.

(Foties from here on out by Captain Midnight. Thanks, honey!)

Here, Fido

Appearance, however, isn't as important as taste. See, this canned beef was designed to be part of a long-term food storage solution. I want to use it up before it loses significant nutritive value. Canned meat works fine in any application that might use leftover cooked meat; it makes decent chili, for instance. But at this point in its shelf life, canned beef often tastes more like can than beef. If you make beef enchiladas out of this, you will taste the canned flavor. If you make deviled meat for sandwiches, you will taste the canned flavor.

I do not want to taste that can. I do not like it, Sam-I-Am.

So whatever I make with this will have to be flavorful enough to defeat the taste of the can.

Fortunately, I know just the thing, because I watch the Future Neighbor channel on YouTube. I'm gonna BLAM this can into a spicy red-pepper-based stew over rice!

Ingredients assemble!

For those of you who are Korean or who cook Korean on the regular, yes, this is an adaptation of gochujang-jjigae. Yes, OF COURSE it tastes better with fresh beef/pork/chicken and otherwise more authentic ingredients. But it was surprisingly delicious just using up what I had. (In fact, to complete this dish, I had to buy exactly one item from the store: a jalapeño pepper. I thought I had one, but it had been sitting in the fridge too long and had started growing its own little civilization, and eating volunteer mold is never a good idea.)

Not shown: the pepper I had to buy and some soy sauce, because, um, I forgot this recipe had soy sauce. I did add it later.

In addition to the beef chunks, there was a handful of mushrooms of questionable provenance which I wanted to use up, as well as some leftover rice and a rather sad-looking old potato.

Let's do this.

Mise-en-place

In the center: gochujang, a traditional Korean fermented red pepper paste with tons of fabulous flavor. Around it: half a white onion, the aforementioned jalapeño, mushroom soaking water, mushrooms, green onions, the peeled and thinly sliced potato, and about 2 tablespoons minced garlic. Oh yeah.

Let's drain and rinse those beef chunks. They look better already.

Time to put a wok or other large saucepan over low to medium-low heat, and add some neutral cooking oil and some sesame oil. It immediately starts to smell good.

When the oil is hot, you slide in the gochujang paste and cook until it starts bubbling and changing the color of the oil. Mmmm. Then you throw in about a tablespoon of gochugaru (red pepper flakes)...

Mmm, gochujang broth.

...and immediately follow that with a few cups of water (we added the mushroom soaking liquid to this), bringing the whole thing up to a boil.

Bubbling broth!

Here you add the potato, garlic, some soy sauce and some fish sauce. If we'd been using fresh beef, this is where we would have added that -- but since canned beef is so soft it will fall apart if you look at it too long, we decided to wait until later in the cooking process to fling it in.

This bubbles away for about 5 minutes, letting all the flavors get to know each other and giving the fish sauce some time to settle down.

Getting chunkier

At this point you add the white onion, mushrooms and jalapeño. Bring it back to a boil...

And into the drink they go!

...add the beef chunks, gently stir to break them apart, and let the stew bubble for another 7 to 10 minutes, or until the potato pieces are soft enough to eat.

Is it stew yet?

When the potatoes are soft, sprinkle over some of the green onions, turn off the heat and let the stew sit for 10 minutes to allow the flavors to relax. Check for seasoning -- if it's too salty, add a splash of water.

Done!

The stew is now complete. Heat up your rice and plate that thing up.

All ready to eat

Put rice in bowl. Put stew on rice. Put green onions on stew.
Put spoon in bowl. Put spoon in face. Repeat until gone.

Nom.

And that, my friends, is how you BLAM a piece of crap.

Pandemic: ephemera

OME minor odd things I've noticed regarding pandemic conditions, which may or may not be forgotten by history unless someone (say, me) writes them down:

• Decluttering is tough right now. There's plenty of time to do it, but thanks to widespread states of depression or dysthymia there may not be much internal motivation to do it. And then there's the problem of disposing of all those unwanted but still-useful items. Due to fears of COVID-19 contamination, Goodwill and other secondhand stores aren't accepting donations right now. Unless you want to break out the bazillion Amazon boxes in the garage and start trying to sell items one by one on eBay, you're kinda hosed.
• So. Much. Flour. With lots of free time on their hands and a strong yen for comfort food, many Americans have rediscovered baking -- which means that flour, yeast and other ingredients for baked goods have vanished from stores almost as quickly as face masks and toilet paper. (Fortunately for me, the chocolate supply is still holding up!) I'm no stranger to this activity; a few weeks ago I picked up some instant yeast online, and since then this household has feasted on homemade bread, cookies, calzones made from homemade pizza dough, and Swedish apple cake. (You know I can cook.)
• I get tired of cooking all the time, and sometimes other family members spell me off, but every now and then nobody wants to take the responsibility and everyone's hungry. That's when we yell TO THE TACO TRUCK! and light out for Westside Park. Someone in our neighborhood cut a deal with several area food trucks, so nearly every weekday around lunchtime there's a truck parked at Westside, slingin' hash and takin' names. We've seen some familiar faces from the neighborhood while waiting in line for lunch (maintaining good social distance, of course).
• I've noticed you can now tell where other grocery shoppers are getting their news. Most people around here wear masks. Above the face coverings, their eyes are concerned, resolute, occasionally friendly. They keep a respectful 6 feet of distance from other shoppers and apologize when they get too close. Conservative media fans, on the other hand, tend not to wear masks in public (though this will change in the coming week, as King County is making it a requirement). Their expressions range from confusion to frank disdain of their fellow shoppers with masks. They don't maintain reasonable social distance, they never apologize for coming too close, and they tend to get angry when people ask them to move away.
• Last week I had a run-in with one of these clowns, an older man with no mask, at the grocery store. I was boxed into the produce section (another shopper was blocking the exit behind me) and I couldn't get past him safely, so I waited for him to back away and let me out. But Grampa Boomer wanted something next to me and wasn't willing to wait for it, so he got really close and started passive-aggressively coughing in my direction. I had to push past him to get away (with a single-word opinion on the status of his parentage, I'll admit), but if I had a do-over I would've gotten a closeup photo of his face. DUDE. Deliberately coughing at someone else during a pandemic is a form of assault. You are old and have lived your life, and if you want to play tiddlywinks with COVID-19 that's your call, but I have a family to take care of. How dare you put me and them in danger because you want your broccoli 5 seconds faster?
• In the same vein, I'm continually amazed at the people who are out protesting life-saving quarantine measures for reasons I can only describe as frivolous. I'm not talking about protests due to concerns most people would recognize as valid (resuming needed medical treatments, financial assistance to get through lockdown, fear of increased domestic abuse, etc.). I'm talking about people losing it because they "need" a haircut, a manicure, a massage; they are demanding the return of summer camp and the reopening of Disney properties not because it's safe, but because they're already sick of their kids. *sigh* ... really? I know, I know, these conditions have never before happened in your lifetime. They've never happened in mine either, and I can think of hundreds of things from "normal life" that I'm missing right now and would dearly love to have back, but not at the expense of other people's lives. I don't think Patrick Henry would've been on board with milling around in front of the capitol building, yelling GIVE ME PEDICURES OR GIVE ME DEATH through a bullhorn.
• Quarantine has been fantastic for Charlie-cat. I honestly think he's going to have some kind of feline nervous breakdown the first time all three of us humans leave the house at once. He's adored all the extra company, attention, toys and treats he's been getting for the last two months. (As I typed this, he hopped onto the computer desk, curled up next to me, leaned his head on my left arm and is now purring contentedly. D'aww, fuzzy beast.)

Adventures in Pennsylvania: scrapple, caches and ice cream

Today was Miss V's first day visiting Penn State. After we breakfasted from the magic breakfast nook, I dropped her off on campus and began my daily quest for local adventure.

My duty was clear: this being my first time in Pennsylvania, I had a moral obligation to try the local delicacy known as scrapple. The Naked Egg Cafe, just off PA-26, was happy to oblige, with a plate of eggs, toast, home fries and scrapple with maple syrup served on the side. Paula, my awesome waitress, recommended trying maple syrup on the scrapple, and I am here to report that it took Mystery Pig Loaf to a whole new level. Scrappletastic! I was too busy wolfing down breakfast to take a pic, so you'll have to take my word for it that The Naked Egg serves some mighty good scrapple.

Seriously, if you've not tried scrapple and you don't have some dietary issue forbidding it, you should give it a shot. It's remarkably tasty. Crispy outside, creamy inside, very slightly smoky and sausagey with just a hint of pork liver. If you like sausage and/or fried mush, you will like this.

Thus fortified for the day's shenanigans, I did a bit of necessary shopping, then a bit of unnecessary shopping (ah, Five Below, how you tempt me with cheapie goodies! Why are you not in Washington yet?), then proceeded to look for a geocache. After a walk in the woods, during which time I got completely turned around (for future reference, maybe don't go caching alone in the woods on an overcast day in an unfamiliar area where you don't know your cardinal directions), I had success both in finding the cache and making it back to my rental car in one piece. Yay for another state souvenir! Yes, we've already established that I'm easily amused, thanks.

Back to the hotel to drop a few things off. Then I went to the one place where the camera actually came out: Berkey Creamery on the Penn State campus.

This little number is called Death by Chocolate. I can think of worse ways to go. Though it still doesn't hold a candle to German Chocolate Crunch from BYU Creamery. (Sorry, Penn State. You were a worthy adversary.)

Now I'm getting a few online-related things done and waiting for V to give me a call so I can pick her up from campus. As you do. If anyone asks, I DID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING today. heh.

Criss-cross-applesauce

Autumn has come to the PNW. It was colder today, with a fair amount of rain. Charlie-cat was busy trying to find warm spots all over the house. (He's currently in his favorite place, curled up on the back of the sofa.) And I mostly stayed in to do various household-related tasks.

One of those tasks was taking care of some apples. I bought a bag of slightly imperfect apples from the Used Food section of the QFC a while back, and they were getting to a stage of flavor development best described as "wizened," so I needed to do something with them fast. That something turned out to be pressure-cooker applesauce, and it also turned out to be super easy.

Peel, core and cut up apples (welp, that was the hardest part). Throw 'em in the Instant Pot insert along with a half-cup of water, a tiny sprinkle of salt, and some cinnamon and cardamom. (I could have also added some lemon juice, but I didn't have any... and maybe some sweetener, but these apples were plenty sweet enough on their own... so out of necessity I kept it simple.) Clamp it down, cook it on high pressure for 5 minutes, let the pressure drop naturally 5 minutes, then vent the rest of the way. I zapped the cooked apples with an immersion blender, et voilà, homemade applesauce.

It's easy to forget because it's ubiquitous, but store-bought applesauce is a convenience food. In my 1950-reprint Betty Crocker cookbook, any recipe that calls for applesauce first directs the cook to make some, indicating whether it should be thin or thick, plain or spiced, etc. for the recipe. And because it's so often bought instead of made, it's also easy to forget that homemade applesauce is delicious in a way that store-bought applesauce will never be. I grew up with home-canned applesauce made from the sweet-tart Gravenstein apples growing in my auntie's back yard, sweetened and spiced perfectly, and it's spoiled me for life. (It's also why I add cardamom to my applesauce because, hello, YUM.) Tonight's batch of homemade sauce was made with all sweet apples, so it doesn't have the complex flavor or the little tart kick that my auntie's applesauce had, but even so it's still better-tasting than 90% of the bland, watery, mass-produced gunk at the grocery store.

And now I have applesauce to make my great-grandma's chocolate applesauce fruitcake! Um, or not.

What does Soozcat do all day, you ask? Here we go.

Making semi-homemade baked beans today. (This involves rough chopping a small onion and cutting up some pork product -- some days it's bacon, others it's kielbasa, depending on what needs using up -- sautéeing them in a medium-hot pan until the onions start to get soft, then opening up a couple cans of pork and beans, adding them to the pan along with a good squirt of ketchup, some spicy brown mustard, a shot or two of Worcestershire, a bit of liquid smoke and some kind of sweetener -- this time it was apricot preserves instead of brown sugar because I'm all fancy-pants like that -- putting everything into a casserole dish and cooking at 200 degrees for a couple hours, or until it's thick and bubbly and delectable. Nom.) I'll whang together a green salad later, and that'll be dinner done.

No, I didn't use these. Though they are pretty tasty.

Also running a hot bleach load fulla whites and some fabric yardage Miss V wanted preshrunk before it was sent to her. I'm hoping I cut enough of it to account for shrinkage, but we'll see. And later I need to unload the dishwasher.

Meanwhile, in errands, my Doomed Quest for Packing Peanuts continues. You'd think packing peanuts would be available for sale everywhere. Nope. I've been to four different businesses today, with no joy. The only glimmer of hope so far was at Staples, where they had a tiny bag for inflated prices. I AM DISAPPOINT, but I'm also tenacious. I'm certain U-Haul or the UPS Store will have what I need, at a price I'm willing to pay.

Also on the list today: 120 grit sandpaper, Mountain Dew, kitty litter, replacement shovel (ours did a bunk a while back when someone borrowed it for a Boy Scout Eagle project) and ice cream sandwiches. Hmm. I'm pretty sure I know who added that last entry.

I'd be off to Git Stuff Dun, only Roxy-cat jumped up onto the desk while I was typing and has settled down between my arms to take a nap. AAAAH PINIONED TO THE SPOT BY FUZZY CUTENESS. I must gnaw off a limb and flee!

Today's update (plus a sidebar on eating after DS surgery)

So, here's how things went with Mom today.

Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are dialysis days for Mom, so around 10:30 they wheeled her off to the mysterious place in the hospital where dialysis happens (I was not allowed to accompany her, so I ran errands, cleaned house, etc. for the next four hours). Dialysis always takes a lot out of Mom, both literally and figuratively. When she came back, she was exhausted. She'd also missed lunch, so she got a small snack to tide her over to the next meal. Unfortunately, her blood pressure dipped low again during dialysis and they weren't able to bring it up sufficiently, so they didn't take much liquid off her today. This likely means that Friday's dialysis session will be rough on her.

Despite being tired and having difficulty standing for even short periods of time, Mom underwent two different rounds of physical therapy today. She walked further than she ever has before. Go Mom!

Mom's heart surgeon stopped by in the late afternoon to check her vitals and see how she was feeling. She's still draining from a couple of tubes attached to her chest cavity, but I guess that's well within normal parameters a week after surgery. The surgeon didn't seem to believe Mom when she told him her typical dialysis dry weight, which was a little frustrating to her. Mom may be physically frail, but she's very mentally sharp and she knows her own dialysis stats. At any rate, if things go well she should be released to the rehab facility some time tomorrow. We've planned ahead by bringing her a change of clothing, so she doesn't have to be sent off in a hospital gown.

We ordered dinner so it would arrive at a reasonable hour, and Mom ate most of it, not having had much else to eat today. She watched a little TV, mostly Animal Planet and Discovery Channel. (Apparently there's this one show on Animal Planet that's all about these guys who build treehouses, and she's fascinated by it.) Nurses and respiratory therapists stopped by to do their thing. Everyone at this hospital has been very kind, solicitous and gentle with Mom, which I appreciate. A few hours after dinner I took my leave to pick up a few things, as Miss V's birthday is on Friday and I want to make sure I've gotten as much done as I can in advance to prep for her party.

* * *

And now, a little something about eating after DS surgery.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I've had a tough time getting used to how much -- or, to be more precise, how little -- I can eat after surgery. It does help to visualize my new stomach as about the size of a banana to determine what will fit, but it's not precise. Liquid foods, for instance, go down easily and I can eat almost as much broth-based soup now as I did before surgery. Dense foods, on the other hand, fill me up so quickly that I can make myself dangerously overfull before I know it. Plus I'm fighting a lifetime of mental experience about how much I'm capable of eating at once; none of that information is accurate any more, but it will take a while until my brain and body sync up properly.

And today I figured out something else: if I dole out my own servings of food, I err on the side of caution and rarely end up eating too much, but if I let someone else determine my serving size (looking at you, takeout food), I try to finish it all and end up overfilling my tum. This has led to a couple of *blorp* incidents while I've been in Utah.

Not. Good.

I don't have much time to cook for myself since I've been spending most of the day in the hospital, but in future I think I'll be better off picking up items from the deli or Trader Joe's, portioning them out sanely and eating slowly, rather than snarfing down something from a drive-thru window. (Tempting and yummy as that option may be, it's not worth the unpleasant aftereffects. Barfing is not an entertaining activity.)

Suzanne, NOT Susan

All right, before you start in on me, I KNOW what I did today was immature and petty. I'm pushing 50; I should probably be above this sort of passive-aggressive behavior by now.

And yet.

When I read the book and watched the movie Coraline, I empathized fiercely with the protagonist. Because much like Coraline Jones, throughout my life I have had to deal with nearly everyone calling me by the wrong first name. When I was younger and even more shy of strangers, I'd furtively tell them my name -- Suzanne -- and they wouldn't hear me properly and call me "Susan" instead. This happened so often to me that I just started answering to "Susan" without bothering to correct them.

When Mom first noticed me doing this, her displeasure was obvious. "Honey, that isn't your name!" she said.

"That's what they call me."

"Well, tell them your name is Suzanne, not Susan."

"They don't listen to me," I muttered.

"It's easy. You just say, 'My name is Suzanne,' loud enough that they can hear."

At the time, asserting myself this way sounded like torture. I didn't actually start standing up for my real name until some time late in high school, when I finally got thoroughly sick of being Susaned and started saying, "It's... it's Suzanne, actually," to teachers who got it wrong.

Don't misunderstand me -- Susan's not a bad name. It's just not my name. (It is, however, the name of my dear sister-in-law, which has caused all sorts of social media problems for both of us -- but that's a whole 'nother story set.)

From high school to now, some 30 years later, I continue to be Susaned on a regular basis. Even today, when I went into a local burger shop to pick up dinner for Captain Midnight. At the end of the order: "Could I get your name, please?"

"Suzanne," I said, as clearly as I could, not too loudly but loud enough to be understood, articulating the emphasis on the second syllable. I then handed the slightly weeded-up teenager behind the counter my debit card, which has the name "Suzanne" engraved right on it.

"OK, we'll call your name when it's ready," he drawled, handing me back my card and the charge slip, which clearly had printed across the center:

Now, I've been out of sorts all day, so I guess I could blame it on an already bad mood, but for some reason when I saw The Wrong Name being used on me YET AGAIN after I'd taken the time to articulate it clearly and had given Teen Wage Slave a card with the proper spelling of the name in question, I suddenly had no crap to give any more.

I took the card and the receipt, sat down in a chair and proceeded to wait -- and to ignore the numerous calls behind the counter: "Uh, Susan?" "Cheesesteak, Susan?" "Order to go for Susan, cheesesteak and bacon cheese fries?" Sorry, Buster, not my name. Not my circus, not my monkey.

Finally the kid who had taken my order got tired of hollering to no purpose, and trotted out from behind the counter to hand me the bag. I thanked him, did not bother to explain why I hadn't retrieved the order myself, and left to bring CM his delectably greasy goodies.

I'm not sure I'm prepared to go back there soon. First, I'll need to have a T-shirt printed up that says "MY NAME IS SUZANNE, NOT SUSAN." With my track record, however, I'm not sure even this obvious lampshading will get me any leverage.

Maybe that's why I stick to Soozcat.

On the mend. Slowly. (Plus bonus video)

It embarrasses me to admit this, but I haven't left the house since I came home from the hospital on Saturday. I've been too weak and in too much pain to do anything outside.

BUT! Friends have been so kind and thoughtful since I've been home, asking what they could do to help. Friends brought dinner for CM and V, they brought flowers to brighten the kitchen, they brought puzzle books and copies of Scientific American and snack packs of sugar-free Jello. (I have had SO. MUCH. JELLO in the past week. If you are what you eat, I am now a quivering blob of red Jello. But when your surgeon has decreed no solid food for four weeks post surgery, you get that sense of "eating" any way you can.) Their kindness kept me going on days when I questioned whether I'd made the right choice. I'm very fortunate to have family and friends who are a solid support group.

Perversely enough, since I've been home the thing I've wanted to do most is cook. I've made dinner for the fam almost every day this week. I've also been going through our overstuffed freezer, unearthing various objects of mystery and defrosting them to determine their identity. So far I've made a big cauldron of turkey broth, a small batch of ham broth (broths are on the list of items I can ingest for the next four weeks, so I'm making the most of it), and a meatball meal from the depths of the freezer. Tonight's mystery freezer package turned out to be halibut. Hope the fam enjoys it!

I've also been using my copious free time to watch first-person accounts of people who had DS surgery on YouTube. And one of the things I've noticed is that my experience was, well, not entirely similar to theirs. So at risk of boring you all to tears, CM and I made a video!

1) Yes, I know I look like very hell. I'm not wearing any makeup, I'm still in a fair amount of pain and I'm recovering from major surgery conducted just over a week ago. Cut me some slack.

2) Since this was recorded completely off the cuff with no notes, I meandered a bit. Next time I'll try to tighten it up.

I hope this will be useful to someone who a) is thinking about having DS surgery, b) just had DS surgery and is not feeling at all chipper about it. Not everyone who has bariatric surgery experiences ideal outcomes, especially in the first week, and I think that's worth knowing -- especially if, like me, you're questioning your decision the first few days after surgery, when you're swollen and bruised and miserable and the only time it doesn't hurt is when you're flat on your back in bed. People need to know that it does get better.