In which I eat sensibly… mostly.

On July 15, 2013July 16, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking1 Comment

Screen Shot 2013-07-15 at 12.43.44 PM Had the other box of Betty Crocker Mac & Cheese this afternoon. Prepared it in the traditional fashion, ignoring the box. It still sucks. Also, I mowed the lawn and picked up the several-inches-deep pile of seed thingamajiblets that the Root Tree in the front yard has decided, inexplicably, to throw off this year. It’s never done that before. They’re *everywhere* in the front yard; it looks like fall out there. I think I’m entitled to spend the rest of the afternoon with a book in my hand ignoring the universe before I go to work, yes? Good.

Hit up Thug Kitchen for dinner yesterday and made their recipe for buffalo falafel, which was delicious. I was taking a little bit of a risk; while I’m a big fan of falafel in general, I’m used to it being fried (and their recipe is baked) and I’ve never been a huge fan of buffalo sauce. However, I’ve been trying to expand my palate lately as far as spicy foods go, and I figured that the difference couldn’t be that spectacular, could it?

No, not really, actually. Baked falafel seem to be quite a bit crumblier than fried, which isn’t terribly surprising, but the taste isn’t all that much different and the buffalo sauce was spicy as all hell; basically exactly how I wanted it. I threw them in some pitas with some dry cole slaw and some celery and tomatoes on the side. I even made a cucumber salad, another stretch, but I figured if we were eating Mediterranean we ought to go ahead and go all the way. The salad was dead easy; cucumbers, sour cream, dill, green onion, salt and pepper, all put into a bowl, mixed, and refrigerated. We’ve actually got some of both left over so the wife ought to eat wonderfully tonight if she’s so inclined. If not, there’s lunch tomorrow. Shoulda been lunch today but I was fixated on getting rid of that other box of Betty Crocker nonsense.

Also of note: the meal was completely vegetarian. All of Thug Kitchen’s recipes are vegetarian (and it’s fun to see people in the comments on their recipes who clearly haven’t figured that out yet) and I haven’t hit one that wasn’t good yet. Well, okay, I wasn’t a huge fan of their potato salad, but that’s because they need to call it something else. It’s delicious, but calling it “potato salad” really primes your taste buds for something entirely unlike what you’re about to eat. Their guacamole, on the other hand, is the best thing on Earth and I will fight you if you say otherwise. I picked up a taste for veggie burgers when I was living in Chicago; I’m far from a vegetarian under normal circumstances, obviously, but I can certainly do without meat for a meal now and then. There’s stuffed zucchini coming later this week, too, so it’ll happen at least twice this week. Probably Tuesday.

Right. That’s what I’ve got at the moment. There’s an Englishman lost on an island somewhere who needs my attention, plus I smell bad, so I gotta go.

On anger and hatred

On July 14, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

I didn’t post yesterday because I was exhausted; I didn’t get home from OtherJob on Friday until after midnight. I didn’t get home from OtherJob until after midnight last night either; it turns out that when we finally get a few days of no-bullshit perfect weather people remember that it’s fun to go outside and do things, and so they do. I’m still exhausted, and my back hurts. Today will not be terribly productive.

I got home to three pieces of bad news, only one of which I’m remotely interested in discussing, and honestly I’m not even going to do that.

Because right now I feel like the first black person– no, the first person– to catch George Zimmerman outdoors and alone after dark should shoot him in the face immediately.

And I cannot trust myself to write when I’m in this state. It’s been almost twelve hours; I’m still here.

Seven or eight years ago, I would have. Seven or eight years ago I was a much angrier person; ironically, I may have lived in a better world then than I do now. Little has gotten better. But I don’t want to write this post, and I don’t trust myself to write this post, so for now, I’m not going to. If that changes, I might.

But probably not.

In which Betty Crocker is out of her goddamn mind

On July 12, 2013July 12, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking1 Comment

Screw it: Bonus post!

Maybe you haven’t noticed, but Betty Crocker does their own Mystery Taste Sand Macaroni and Cheese now. They’re clearly trying to move into the same market that Kraft has had utterly cornered for, oh, a couple of generations or so. I saw the boxes at Martin’s the other day and got curious enough to bring home a couple of them.

Guys, I’m a mac and cheese aficionado. An expert. Boxed Mystery Taste Sand Kraft Macaroni and Cheese is like my signature dish, okay? I’ve been making that for myself since before I realized that cooking other things was even possible. Since I started Cooking For Real I’ve made the boxed kind much less often, but that’s because I’ve tried no less than six other recipes for more complicated, non-Mystery-Taste-Sand versions of the food. But let’s stick with the basics. Here’s how you make Kraft Mac and Cheese:

Acquire a pot. (Acquiring pot will only make you want more Mac and Cheese; this is currently inadvisable.)
Fill with water.
Boil.
Pour uncooked Mac and Cheese into pot; boil for somewhere between seven and ten minutes depending on the specific kind of KM&C you have and how al dente you want it to be.
Strain.
Pour Mystery Taste Sand over macaroni; add butter and milk as you see fit depending on how soupy and buttery you want your meal to be.
Eat. I have, many, many times, eaten it directly from the pot when I didn’t want to make more dishes. This is fine.

My mother-in-law is here today, as she tends to be on Friday. I’d decided to try out the Betty Crocker Mac & Cheese to see how different it was. She walks past me as I’m stirring water, having just seconds before added the macaroni.

“You’re doing that wrong,” she says.

How the hell am I doing this wrong? I think.

“How the hell am I doing this wrong?” I say.

She points out that the recipe on the back of the box, which I have ignored, is very different from Authorized Kraft Procedure. I’m supposed to combine a cup of milk and a cup of water right away along with the butter and the macaroni and the Mystery Taste Sand, bring all that to a boil, then simmer it for twelve minutes.

“That’s not gonna work,” I say. Then I figure, fuck it, I’ll do it her way. I strain out the macaroni real quick, pouring a cup of the water into a measuring cup and putting it back in, then rapidly add the milk and the butter and the Mystery Taste Sand.

The results are as above. It looked gross, and it looked like soup. Mac and Cheese is never supposed to look like soup. Granted, I was supposed to have this in before it came to a boil, but the burner I was using on my stove boils water fast. It didn’t make that damn much of a difference.

This is never gonna boil down, I thought to myself, as I stirred and simmered for twelve minutes, in accordance with the instructions that I hadn’t bothered reading.

It didn’t. That up there is basically exactly what the shit looked like when I was done.

Well, okay, I thought. I’ve gone through phases where I liked my Mac and Cheese soupier than others; let’s just use most of the liquid in the first bowl and then the second one should be more normal. I poured some into a bowl and sat down to eat.

And burned the living shit out of my tongue with the first bite, because with the sensible preparation, the cold milk and the part where you strain out the boiling hot water cools the macaroni down enough that you can eat it immediately. This bullshit called for no straining– I’m seriously rereading the two steps worth of instructions on the back of the box right now to make sure I’m not crazy– it goes from “Remove from heat” to “Refrigerate leftovers,” never mentioning actually eating the shit, because why would you do that, and omitting the step where you throw the grotesque mess of slop you’ve created into the garbage and make some Kraft Macaroni and Cheese instead.

It was hotter than hell, because there was no stage where anything had a chance to cool down. It wasn’t creamy or thick because there was fucking water in it, and it was soupy as hell because two cups of liquid is insanely high for a box of macaroni even before they want you to throw are-you-kidding-me four tablespoons of butter into it. Twelve minutes of “simmering” does not even come remotely close to reducing that amount of liquid to something manageable, and it’s gonna stay hot for long enough that you’ll have lost all interest in eating it by the time it’s edible.

And the Mystery Taste Sand wasn’t even that cheesy.

You fail, Betty Crocker. You fail hard. I bought two boxes, and I don’t throw away food even when it sucks, so the next time I’m going to make your shit the way a normal person makes it, and unless it’s Goddamned Delicious, I’m never buying not-Kraft ever ever again.

tl;dr I fuck up boxed macaroni and cheese.

Hamlet’s momma, she’s the queen

On July 12, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting1 Comment

full-metal-jacket-1987-04-g I just found out that my bathroom is going to cost me one million dollars, so today’s post is basically gonna be a couple of links and some whining. Y’all are okay with that, right? Good.

I found this article when a friend of mine shared it on Facebook. I need to spend some time reading up on disciplining toddlers; I flat-out asked my wife the other day how long I had to wait before I could expect the boy to understand that when I tell him to do something I actually want it done promptly, and furthermore am deeply uninterested in a prolonged explanation/negotiation process. The boy is actually pretty well-behaved in general so far, but he’s still not quite two yet, so I understand the next year or sixteen will be a time of limit-testing and tantrums. I am old school enough to want to believe that creating an atmosphere of Do This or Daddy Smash will be sufficient but I suspect that something somewhat more nuanced and, well, humane will probably be necessary. I’m generally pretty good at getting older kids to do what I want them to do, but dealing with middle-schoolers who are capable of seeing reason (or at least understanding I Will Kill You Boy) is somewhat different than raising a toddler. I like the way this Janet Lansbury person thinks, for the most part (that’s the lady who wrote the article at the link you didn’t click on) so I’ll start by digging more deeply into her website in the near future.

Oh, and my mom asked when we were gonna start potty training him the other day. Can I just say that potty training is the part of parenting I’m least looking forward to? Another Facebook friend posted a picture of his kid standing on his shoes so that he could reach the urinal in a public bathroom and it made me suicidal. Can’t we just get him a litterbox or something? Is that okay?

I don’t know if I’ve claimed that being a parent hasn’t changed me much, but I certainly feel like being a parent hasn’t changed me much. One way in which it absolutely has is that reading this article made me an absolute wreck, and it certainly wouldn’t have had that effect before the boy was born. I’m occasionally surprised to find myself jumpier about safety-related stuff than my wife or parents or in-laws are; I wouldn’t have expected that, but it’s happened anyway. What gets me the most is the sense that Horrible Shit Can and Will Happen at Any Goddamned Time that pervades the entire article. It’s not like I wasn’t aware of this before having a kid, but it’s more likely to mess with my head now that I do. I will say that I can’t wait until the moment when we can flip that damn car seat around so that I can actually see him from the front seat.

I’ll bitch more about the house once I have a better sense of what we’re in for. It’s gonna be ugly.

In which I peeve your pets

On July 11, 2013July 11, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

It was, basically, a perfect day. Not a cloudless sky, quite, but I like a few clouds in the sky for contrast. Sunny, low eighties all day, not humid, nice breeze. If there’s a way for South Bend to have a better day in July I can’t imagine what it might have been like.

I was at OtherJob, expecting a busy day, an expectation that was, more or less, fulfilled.

I had the following conversation one thousand times today:

Ring ring!

“<other job>, how may I help you?”

“Yeah, are you guys open?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, thanks!”

Click.

Lemme explain something, Internet. First of all, OtherJob is an outdoor family destination. If you can’t figure out that a place that does 70% of its business for the year in June, July and August is open at 4:00 PM on a Thursday on what will probably prove to be the nicest day of the year, you may in fact be too stupid to use the phone. Yes, you morons, we’re fucking open. Look outside! Of course we’re fucking open, what the hell is wrong with you?

But even. Sometimes shit happens, right? Maybe we lost power, or the sewer exploded again, or maybe everywhere else you’ve been to today has been inexplicably closed and you’re starting to wonder if there’s something wrong with the universe. Or you live forty miles away and you just want to be sure. That’s okay! I mean, you can probably safely jump to a conclusion on this one, but it’s okay!

Here is how that conversation should go, guys:

Ring ring!

“<other job>, how may I help you?”

“Oh, hi, I was just calling to make sure you guys were open.”

“Yep! We close at (time.)”

“Okay, thanks!”

Click.

Alternately, instead of admitting that you’d just called to make sure we were open, you could ask about closing time or the prices or something. Or just hang up! That’s actually okay too. Because, see, if we answered the fucking phone, it means that we’re open. We don’t pay employees to sit around in a closed building and answer the phone to tell people that we aren’t here. No one does that! It doesn’t make any goddamn sense! Seriously, what the hell did you think was going on here?

You goddamn idiot.

Sigh. Seriously, one thousand times today.

Now that I’m done griping about customers, lemme take a minute and thank a couple, because it was kinda rude for me to horn in on that couple’s private conversation at the picnic table just because I heard the words “bacon” and “peanut butter” in the same sentence, and when you explained that you were actually talking about a bacon peanut butter jalapeno burger, and where I could get such a wonderful-sounding thing, you became my very best friends for ever, and I wish I had gotten your names and addresses so that I can babysit your kids or something. Because holy shit bacon peanut butter jalapeno burger. Oh my god.

Dinner was good tonight, y’all.

Edit, maybe one minute after hitting “Publish”: I will say, however, that bacon peanut butter jalapeno burger farts are not something that I’m hoping to have as part of my life for the rest of the night. I really don’t want to sleep on the couch.

On larnin’

On July 10, 2013July 10, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Music, TeachingLeave a comment

2013 has been a good year for learning new shit. I’ve gone from someone who never ever cooked to somebody who, more or less, can find his way around a kitchen (although I’ll note that I haven’t cooked in a bit; I’ll fix that tonight– chicken tikka masala again, and something new this weekend) and I had my first ukulele lesson yesterday.

I was really, really hoping for a good story, guys, but it didn’t quite happen. There’s not much room for shit to go wrong in a half hour of instructional time, and I think if I tried to force it into a good story it would devolve mostly into making fun of my instructor, who seems like a good guy and is obviously quite musically talented but… well… picture an eighteen-year-old who’s way way way into instrumental music and then turn down his social skills a wee bit in your head. He’s kinda hilariously, adorably awkward, is what I’m saying, and adorable is not a word I apply to teenage males all that damn often. He spent most of the session showing me the right way to do things, then when I noticed (key word: I noticed) I was doing them wrong, telling me that my way was also right. I was kinda picturing somebody who was gonna be repositioning my fingers on the frets, right? None of that. I don’t think this guy is too comfortable touching people.

That said, I’m going to take this seriously and spend some time each day between now and next Tuesday practicing on the five notes or chords or finger positions or whatever they are that I sorta-learned during our first session. I’ll save the pedagogical observations for when I think he has a better student.

I am hoping for a busy, productive day today. Yesterday was mostly unmitigated nonsense from start to finish punctuated by an actual hurricane which trapped me in the mall, of all fucking places, for like an hour and a half, where I was accosted and abused by a kiosk employee who began her sales pitch by rubbing cream on my arm, unsolicited. I was able to tear myself away once she pointed out in what might have been an Ecuadorian accent that the cream she wanted me to buy cost $125. No, sorry, I’ll stay dirty, g’bye.

Oh. Also, David Lee Roth. No, I’m not sure why either. But yesterday had lots and lots of David Lee Roth.

In which I guess that I just don’t know

On July 9, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized3 Comments

Mmm, Vicodin.

Came home with a massive backache last night. Took two pills left over from my gallbladder surgery two or three years ago. That was twelve hours ago. Didn’t manage to drag my ass out of bed until about an hour ago. Still slightly high.

Heroin people: I understand you, and I shall not judge.

Also, I’ve been sitting here staring at this computer waiting for inspiration to strike for half an hour and it hasn’t happened yet, so it’s time to give up and take a shower. I have my first ukulele lesson tonight and I’m mildly panicking about it for some reason (OMG WHAT IF HE THINKS I’M DUMB???) and in between now and then all I have to do is make a phone call and run some errands in Mishawaka. If anything fascinating happens I’ll be sure to tell you about it.

In which Amazon sucks and I’m stupid

On July 8, 2013July 8, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I warned you that today would be whining.

I read a lot, right? I read widely, I read voluminously, and I read fast. I’m on something like my 95th book of the year; anyone reading this by clicking through my Facebook feed is already aware that most of what I use Facebook for is keeping track of how much I’ve read, an experiment that will last through 2013 and then end forever. When you read as much as I do, and you read because you love books and not because you love stories (and this is not an unimportant distinction) you find that you end up spending lots of your discretionary cash– the majority of it, in fact– on books. This hobby, unfortunately, is getting more and more difficult as time goes on. First a perfectly good Barnes and Noble moved from a great location to the mall, which sucks. Then Borders exploded. Then Barnes and Noble decided to commit slow suicide-by-Nook; every time I go in there (and it’s been quite a while) I walk out insisting that I’m never darkening their door again and they’ll certainly be closed in a year.

I feel like this latest time I’m right, by the way, but that’s a different conversation.

This leaves me, in a town with just over a hundred thousand people, with one viable bookstore– the Notre Dame bookstore, which luckily probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon since it really doesn’t much need to turn a profit. However, it’s inconvenient to get to, so most of the time I’ve been ordering everything from Amazon.

I do not like ordering anything online. I’m hellaciously picky about the condition of my books, for starters; the book I’m reading right now, in fact, would have been left on the shelf because there’s a small tear in the corner of the cover. They’ve shipped me three different books recently with huge stickers on the back that I had to peel off, a huge pain in the ass. And then there’s the books that I wouldn’t have bought if I’d seen them in person because you’ve gotta be kidding me.

This, children, is Neil Gaiman’s newest “book.” Note that 1) it is tiny, and 2) it is hardcover, and 3) — and 3 is a bit of a stretch, I’ll admit it– it’s got those annoying-ass shaggy-cut pages that absolutely no one likes and why the hell do they keep doing that.

177 fucking pages. The book is called THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE: A NOVEL, because if it didn’t have the words “a novel” in the cover you’d sensibly think you were dealing with a novella. That’s because it’s a novella. A hardcover novella. A hardcover novella that I’ll read in an hour that the multimillionaire bestselling author thinks people should spend twenty-six dollars to own.

(I know Gaiman doesn’t set prices. And I got it for $16 after discounts. All the same. Shut up.)

I like Gaiman’s writing a hell of a lot, so ordering his book completely blind didn’t bother me at all. But had I seen this thing in a store it would have stayed on the shelf and I’d have waited for paperback because– again– you’ve gotta be kidding me. $26 for 177 pages is insane. For a book that’s gonna sell a ton of copies, and not, say, some obscure academic-press book, it’s madness. It’s even big, wide-spaced print. So the manuscript he submitted had to be beefed up to get to 177 pages.

I have no doubt at all that I’m going to enjoy the story– again, I really like Gaiman. But this is bullshit and ordering things online is bullshit.

What I’m going to have to do– because this isn’t the first time I’ve gotten burned by this nonsense– is start paying serious attention to things like the dimensions and page counts of the books I’m reading, which is information that Amazon makes available but it isn’t like they put it front and center. That’s the “…and I’m stupid” part of the title of this piece, because this totally could have been avoided. But you know how else I could have avoided this? Buying the fucking book in a store. Online is bullshit and I hate the future.

Ah, what the hell: pictured below are the other two books I ordered along with the Gaiman. THE THOUSAND NAMES was actually the most expensive in terms of what I paid, but all three were within a dollar of each other. The cover price on the Hosseini is two bucks more than the cover price on the Gaiman book, but it’s over twice as long. THOUSAND NAMES is over five hundred pages.

NEVER LET THE FACTS GET IN THE WAY OF A GOOD RANT EDIT: It turns out that the son of a bitch was effectively a limited edition release, because it’s already out of print and has been out for like a week. I have a John Scalzi book of similar dimensions that I ordered deliberately for basically the exact same price. So.. uh… never mind?