Tag: cooking

Because I haven’t done a #cooking post in a while…

On By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking3 Comments

CNxHYtLUcAESoz1I made blueberry risotto for dinner tonight, using a Facebook post from an old friend and this recipe as inspiration.  Changes were minor, mostly involving using more blueberries than the recipe called for (a full pint initially and then another half-cup or so as garnish afterwards; I don’t think you can really overdo the blueberries in this dish) and using heavy cream instead of light cream, since no grocery store in Indiana knows what the hell light cream is.  After tasting it, I endorse this change; I don’t think it would have been creamy enough without the extra fat content.

Basically: melt 3 tablespoons of butter and sauté a diced onion in it at medium or medium-low heat for a couple of minutes.  Meanwhile, have 6-7 cups of vegetable stock (chicken would be fine too) at a boil in a nearby pot.  Add 2 cups of arborio rice and stir until golden-brown, which shouldn’t take more than another couple of minutes.  Add 3/4 cup of white wine, stir again until the liquid is gone, then add the blueberries.  Start adding stock about half a cup or 3/4 of a cup at a time, and don’t worry too much about the amounts.  You’re basically stirring in between each dose of stock until the majority of the liquid is gone– the rule of thumb I use is that if I can split the rice in half with the spoon and it takes more than 2-3 seconds to merge back together again it’s time for another dose of liquid.  Once all the liquid is absorbed– which means 25 minutes or so of constant stirring, probably– taste the rice to make sure it’s done.  Actually, you should probably be tasting it along the way so you don’t overcook.  Don’t worry about adding more stock or even water if you’re out.

Once the rice is done, add some more blueberries, half a cup of heavy cream, and half a cup of parmesan, and then whip the hell out of it, trying to spill as little of the cream as possible, for at least a couple of minutes.  Then?  Done.  I may fiddle with extra ingredients next time, as both my wife and I thought it needed something, but weren’t quite sure what, and add salt, pepper, and extra parmesan to taste.

Delish.

In which om nom nom buy books

On By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, Writing5 Comments

unnamedI baked!  And I did not bake failure for once!

For the next three hours or so, both of my novels will be $1.99.  For the rest of the day after that, Skylights and The Sanctum of the Sphere will be $2.99.  That’s still 40% off! The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 will remain 99 cents all day.

If you buy one, I will think fondly upon you while I eat cheesecake.  I may even say your name, if you tell me what it is.

skylights  ba-cover-tiny  Sanctum_72dpi

And now…

On By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking6 Comments

I shall transform this into cheesecake.  Probably poorly.  

In which I provide good news and then gross you out

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews10 Comments

IMG_2397Okay, maybe I’ll gross you out immediately, because you have to look at this picture before you get any context. Bear with me.

It is possible that you may remember my blog post entitled How to Launch Your New Book: Everything I Know.  If you’ve memorized that post, or if you just clicked on it to refresh your memory, you may recall that I recommend taking the mandatory month between finishing a manuscript and rereading it for editing and redrafting and writing something else.  Now, I’m not good at taking my own advice, guys.  I’ve already broken like half the rules on that page for The Sanctum of the Sphere (preorder available now!) and I’ll likely break more before it comes out.

But!  Although I had to channel my college self, who laughed at deadlines and stayed up late when he needed to finish shit, I completed my entry for the Swords v. Cthulhu anthology last night– and, amazingly, I actually think it’s pretty damn good.  I think it’s got a solid chance of getting accepted, even if I took forever to finish it and literally didn’t send it in until 11:30 on the night before it was due when I had to be at work in the morning.

(Hah.  Do a Google Image Search for “Swords v. Cthulhu” and take a look at what comes up.)

Unfortunately, what this means is that now I have to start editing my stupid novel so that people can, like, read it and stuff, because I want that to happen for some reason.  Blargh.

Anyway.  Now the gross part.

We went to a local establishment for dinner last night, one I had not previously eaten at.  I like new restaurants, although I will admit that I’m starting to cool on the concept of the Italian restaurant, just because I’m pretty sure by now the pasta that I can make in my house is as good or better than the pasta that basically anywhere around here is going to charge me for. (I’ll make an exception for any place that actually makes their pasta fresh on-site, however I know of no such restaurants in town.)

But!  This place supposedly has really good vodka sauce.  I like vodka sauce!  And I’ve never made it!  So let’s check ’em out.

I am going to be charitable and assume that we were afflicted with a novice chef last night. Because while it has got to be true that there has been some point before last night that I couldn’t finish a meal at a restaurant because of how terrible I thought it tasted, I certainly can’t remember it– or it fits into some sort of special case where I was deliberately experimenting with something exotic and it turned out that I was overreaching.  Because if this shit is the best vodka sauce anyone has ever tasted, I have a frozen meal to recommend to you.  Because I am not joking when I say I would rather have Weight Watchers Mini Rigatoni with Vodka Cream Sauce for every meal for the rest of my life rather than eat the food at Polito’s again.  This shit was inedible.  I have looked at several different recipes for vodka sauce since we got home last night, and not one of them mentioned black pepper as a primary component of the dish, so the fact that this goddamn thing was swimming in black pepper has to represent some sort of error somewhere.  I’m not kidding.  I am a fat man, goddammit, and for better or worse I have been conditioned over my entire life to not leave uneaten food on my plate.  I couldn’t finish a quarter of this shit.

Which brings me to one of the other sins of Polito’s:  portion sizes so large as to somehow be offensive.  My wife and I ordered the following: an appetizer of garlic bread (which had a sliver of metal in it and still managed to be the highlight of the meal,) fettuccine alfredo and the vodka rigatoni.  The entrees came with a single breadstick and the salad bar.  Even the salad bar had a number of items that were far too large; we literally were unable to finish a single component of our meal, and my wife actually laughed at the breadsticks when they showed up.  The damn things are two inches across and nine inches long; I couldn’t tell if I was trying to eat a breadstick or blow a porn star.  

The punchline: before I realized what we were in for, I had some trouble deciding what I wanted to eat, and went to the unusual step of also ordering a calzone, thinking that I’d have it for lunch the next day, mostly because I still really miss being able to eat at Pockets whenever I want and I don’t really have a good source for calzones whenever I want one.  I tried to have the calzone for lunch today, and again ate maybe 20% of it before throwing the rest away and going to McDonald’s.  Why?  Because a sausage and mozzarella calzone was, inexplicably, packed with black pepper.

If I had lived in South Bend during my dating years, I’d be seriously wondering right now if I screwed our waitress at some point and never called her back or something.  Because holy shit have I never paid money for worse food.  We left with so many to-go bags it was ridiculous; I am not the type to complain at waitresses, so I just brought the boxes home and threw them away, and I’ll never darken the place’s door again.

The final offense?  I went to the bathroom while we were waiting for the check.  The bathroom has no lock on the door and has a freestanding toilet (no walls) and two urinals that are so close together that no pair of men anywhere on earth would ever use both at the same time.  In other words, it’s not a one-seater, which would be fine; it’s just a community bathroom with absolutely no privacy allowed of any kind.  I couldn’t have taken a shit in there if I’d wanted to.

I decided to piss at Target instead.

In which this is not the meat you’re looking for

On By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking12 Comments

IMG_1558Yes, that’s spaghetti.

But that isn’t ground beef, nor is it sausage.

Longtime readers know that I dabble with vegetarianism occasionally, and that I enjoy me a tasty boca burger from time to time.  Meat substitutes intrigue me.  Some of them are better than others, and some of them are just good on their own merits.  Boca chicken, for example, tastes enough like chicken for me, but Boca burgers don’t taste like meat at all.  They’re still good, because lots of things that don’t taste like meat are good.

Some of the Subways in Chicago had a veggie patty that was goddamn delicious, but none of the ones in Indiana seem to have it.  It’s very depressing.

Anyway, a couple of months ago I suddenly saw a bunch of articles all in a short period of time about Beyond Meat, a company that was so insistent that their plant-based meat substitutes were indistinguishable from meat that the CEO was insisting that, chemically, they actually were meat.  I can’t find any of the articles now, unfortunately, but this page on their website makes a similar claim.  Key to their definition: you have to call it “meat” because of what it is, not what it comes from.

Available at Whole Foods, starting in January.  Well, OK.  There’s a Whole Foods in town, and I’d needed an excuse to go pop in anyway, so I used part of my free day off yesterday to go check the place out.  I came home with some Beyond Beef Beefy Crumbles, which were around $5 for about 11-12 ounces.

Preparation was exactly the same as ground beef; I tossed it in a frying pan with a little bit of olive oil and sautéed it.  I made the tomato sauce from scratch, and after tasting and seasoning it a bit I tossed it into the tomato sauce and let the meat and sauce live together for a little bit.

So here’s the skinny on Beyond Meat: It looks and cooks basically exactly like meat. I don’t think anyone would look at that picture and not recognize ground beef or sausage.  And so long as you season it and put it with something, it tastes fine.  But you know how whenever you make a meat sauce with pasta, your last bite is always just the meat, because the pasta is always gone first?  Okay.  That bite’s gonna be weird.  The primary ingredient of Beyond Beef Beefy Crumbles is pea protein, and that last bite’s gonna getcha a little bit.  The texture is a little– just a little— off, still, and you can sorta taste the pea even through the tomatoes and the oregano and rosemary and thyme and all the other stuff I had in my tomato sauce.  Mixed with some spaghetti, though– basically anything else to chew on— and I would have fooled you.

Not quite perfect yet, in other words.  But I’m keeping an eye on this company, and I’m curious about their not-chicken, because for whatever reason chicken seems to be easier to fake than beef.

REBLOG: Monkey Bread

On By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking4 Comments

I know I just posted and I DON’T CARE WANT MONKEY BREAD NOW

THE FARTENING, PART III: Holy Hell, that didn’t last long.

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

I am forced to announce, with no small amount of shame, that the experiment known as The Fartening has ended.  Because holy shit, this looks like nothing more than it looks like caked-on vomit on the side of the toilet bowl, the kind you didn’t clean off because you were sick as fuck and the best you could do was drag yourself to bed.
IMG_1528I was not expecting to make Soylent a lifestyle choice.  I was expecting to have the intestinal fortitude necessary to make it through at least half of the packages before giving up the ghost.  But no.  Sadly, I cannot do this.  That right there is exactly how far I got into my final cup of horror mud, and I done drunks all I can drinks and I can’t drinks no more.  I simply cannot get past the goddamn texture of the stuff, and I refuse to continue torturing myself with it in hopes that it ends up magically catching on somehow.  So I give up.

If anyone is interested, I’ll ship you my remaining six packages and six bottles of oil for $40, which is way less than they’ll charge you.  Just drop me a line in comments.

THE FARTENING, Part II(a): Consuming #Soylent

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy8 Comments

I’ll admit it: I am a little disappointed that this story is going to turn out as mundanely as it’s going to.  Then again, I’m sure everyone I work with is perfectly happy that nothing insane happened with my digestion today.

This is what roughly one-third of a day’s ration of Soylent looks like:

IMG_2177I mixed this up last night and left it in the refrigerator overnight without tasting it.  This morning I poured what looked to me to be about a third of the container (I’m now slightly doubting that measurement, and will have to experiment) and downed it for my breakfast this morning.  I put maybe a teaspoon of vanilla extract in it just for some flavor.

First, Soylent is not nearly as thick as I thought it was going to be, which is entirely my discretion– I followed the directions that I was provided with; I plan to use a bit less water next time so as to impart more of a shake-like consistency.  The texture is… well, it’s gross as hell is what it is.  I’d liken it to drinking river silt.  It’s more like a suspension than a solution; the Soylent doesn’t dissolve so much as float in the water, and the oil had separated to the top of the container, requiring a lot more shaking.  However, from what I’ve seen on the boards, everyone is horrified by the texture at first but most people get used to it fairly quickly, so I’m not going to let this stop me just yet.  But yeah: Soylent, even with a bit of vanilla in it, tastes pretty damn bad.  Future iterations may include a banana; we’ll see.

I wanted to report back on gastrointestinal issues; there were none.  Slight TMI here: I did have a bowel movement in the morning (this is typical) and it was entirely normal.  I can report no gas.  I was a little belchy after lunch, but at the moment I’m attributing that to pop and not to the Soylent.  Now the good news: part of the reason I’ve purchased this stuff is that meals at work are very difficult, and furthermore I’ve been finding myself crashing in the morning in a way I really don’t like– and since my gall bladder surgery several years ago I can go from not hungry at all to nearly fainting from hunger in a matter of just a few minutes.  I have to have something that evens my mornings out, and I’m hoping Soylent can do that for me.

I not only made it to lunch with no issues but lunch was late– I didn’t make it out of a meeting until almost 12:30, which would kill me most days.  No problem today.

Tomorrow, I plan to take what’s left to work with me in a thermos, keep it in the fridge, and sip from it all morning, with the idea being that it’s breakfast and lunch, just spread out.  If I get home from work without wanting to eat the entire kitchen (another problem: even if I eat a largish lunch, I get home hungry, and just eat anything I can find) I’m gonna call this stuff a win.  At the moment I don’t plan to replace dinner with it; we may try a day with that this weekend to see what happens, but not quite yet.

So: not funny yet, unfortunately, but not a waste of my money either.  Winning?

OH WAIT SHIT I ALMOST FORGOT edit:  As I said, I tend to get home from work hungry.  My thought today: I’d had a regular dinner glass full of the stuff for breakfast, and I thought I’d try drinking roughly a whiskey glass full as a post-work snack.  So I poured some into a glass and got the vanilla and added some.  A couple things:

  • Essence of peppermint is contained in a bottle that is exactly the same as vanilla extract;
  • Peppermint essence is an incredibly thin liquid that pours very quickly;
  • Soylent with way too much peppermint essence in it is completely fucking undrinkable.

So so much for that experiment.  I decided to reserve the rest for tomorrow.