Tag: food

In which today got away from me

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, ParentingLeave a comment

Three or four Saturdays in a row now have involved a lengthy afternoon nap; my body has been doing this thing to me where I’m waking up at 6:30 on Saturday mornings whether I want to or not (spoiler alert: I don’t want to) and have been completely unable to get back to sleep. This has led to hours-long naps on each of those Saturdays, eating my entire afternoon.

Well, tonight the boy had a birthday party to go to that was a good 45 minutes from our house, so after driving him out there my wife and I had dinner at Das Dutchman Essenhaus and spent some time attempting to shop in Amish country; it turns out Amish country shuts down entirely at 6:00 PM on Saturdays other than that one restaurant so we didn’t really get to do any actual shopping, instead driving around and alternately dodging horses that were supposed to be in the road and chickens and deer that weren’t. We just got home; it’s 9:00 and I still feel like we dragged the boy away from his party too early.

(The family of this friend of his is richer than God; the building we originally thought was their house, because it was house-shaped and considerably bigger than our own house, was actually their gym, an entirely separate building from their actual house. When he got in the car at the end of the night he said that they had spent a fair amount of time at the party digging a tunnel in their foam pit, which means they have a foam pit. We do not have foam pit money in the Siler household.)

Anyway, I’ve spent all day writing a review of Keith Ammann’s new book in my head; I got an early copy of it and it releases this week, so absent any world-shaking events that absolutely must be written about, expect a book review tomorrow.

Counting Crows tomorrow!

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

… assuming, that is, that the Indianapolis police department doesn’t decide to turn the protests violent. I’m only a teeny bit worried about it; I bought the concert tickets well before the No Kings protests were a thing, and I’ll be traveling right during when most of them are going on, but I assume that particularly in a city the size of Indianapolis nobody’s gonna be super concerned with the official start and end time. I’ve never seen the Crows live, but I’ve downloaded a bunch of their shows and I’m expecting a really good show. And I’m planning on hitting the Lego store on the way home on Sunday, so Father’s Day is gonna be lit.

Last night I texted my wife and said that I wanted to go to an Italian place called Carrabba’s for dinner tonight. It’s a chain but they’re not exactly ubiquitous, so if you haven’t heard of them don’t worry about it. What you need to know is I didn’t actually want one of their entrees– they do a ridiculous carrot cake and I actually wanted some of that. Bek agreed and so the three of us headed off for Italian after she got home from work.

We walked in and immediately something felt off. We were seated immediately and made a sort of half-confused eye contact on the way to our table, then after being at the table for a moment she leaned over to me and asked if the place had seriously remodeled since we’d been in there last. I remembered the decor, but it wasn’t matching with what I had in my head. Then we got the menus and that’s when I realized it– we were in the wrong damn restaurant. So I’d said I wanted to go to Carrabba’s, and we’d gone to Carrabba’s, but what I actually wanted was Papa Vino’s, which is a much more local place (only three locations total, all within an hour of each other) that was a block away. The really ridiculous thing is that my wife was also thinking of Papa Vino’s, and had made the exact same mistake I’d had– when I said Carrabba’s, she heard that, and drove to that place, all the while expecting it to be Papa Vino’s when we walked in.

Anyway, we’re cowards, so once we’d been seated the notion of getting up and leaving was unimaginable, and it turns out the lobster ravioli at Carrabba’s is pretty good, but I didn’t get my God damned carrot cake. I mean, come on. Look at this:

So, yeah, we have to have Italian again next week, I guess.

Because I’m dumb

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

A couple of days ago, I was at 287 pounds on the scale. Objectively, that’s a lot, especially at my height. However, that’s also the lightest I’ve been in at least four years and probably more like five or six. I’m down over thirty pounds.

Today I had Qdoba for lunch, two doughnuts, and McDonald’s for dinner.

Kinda want to die.

In which I’m not complaining but I definitely am

On By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, life2 Comments

I am not big on the whole St. Patrick’s Day thing. I have been more strident in my dislike in the past, especially when I lived a life more likely to expose me to drunken idiots in green (ie, when I lived in Chicago) but I am not willing to even pretend to be remotely Irish, am definitely not remotely Catholic, and I don’t drink, and between those three things I don’t have any particular use for this holiday. This means that when my wife told me that we were getting together with her side of the family today, and that “brisket” would be involved, I was excited as hell– I never get brisket– and I did not even think to connect it to the holiday.

You can imagine my consternation when we got to the party and the “brisket” was corned beef, which yes, I understand is from the same part of the cow and is in fact a different preparation of the same meat, but Goddammit when I get to a party and I’m expecting brisket on a Sunday afternoon and instead I’m given a reuben I might start muttering under my breath and quietly sending pointed and slightly disrespectful text messages to my wife. Don’t misunderstand me, I love a good reuben, although my particular preference for brined meats on rye runs more to pastrami– but reubens don’t at all fit into the same headspace as “brisket,” dammit, and part of me still feels betrayed.(*)

The rest of me is stuffed full of corned beef, though, so all in all it was a pretty good day.

(*) I should have learned after seventeen years of marriage into this family that I should never assume I know what is going to happen when we go to her sister’s place for a meal, even when said sister isn’t responsible for the cooking, and most of the cooking for this particular event was done by her cousins. The last time we went there for Thanksgiving there were no mashed potatoes, which is a food sin of the highest order, and I absolutely left that particular gathering with my dis firmly gruntled. You can’t even call it Thanksgiving if there are no mashed potatoes. It may as well be Mashed Potato Day. There can be other potatoes too, I’m fond of au gratin and any form of sweet potato, but either way wrongs were committed against Thanksgiving in general and me in particular.

I had no pie today

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics4 Comments

… but I did have a slice of abso-damn-lutely delicious carrot cake for dessert that I grabbed from our local grocery on a whim, and I’m so sugared up right now that I might die, and that’s fine, and if you’re one of those people who doesn’t like carrot cake you may have a regular carrot and find an alternate use for it. Carrot cake is Goddamned awesome and I have it maybe once a year, and tonight decided to be the night.

And I think I’m going to leave it at that, because I just found out that the Post Office is cutting 10,000 jobs and anything else I have to say is going to attract the attention of the FBI. The Indianapolis post office distribution hub may already be the most fucked place in the country— I’ve had a package sitting there for two weeks with no information at all– and … yeah. I’mma stop there.

Sometimes I think about how I thought I hated George W. Bush, and how that doesn’t even vaguely compare to the quality and quantity of hatred that continues to blacken my soul every fucking day in 2025. So I’m going to go back to thinking about the rest of that carrot cake, because otherwise I start wondering about what a regular civilian normal person might be able to do to damage someone who owns a private jet, and that seems like a bad idea.

Eh, we’ll try again tomorrow

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

Today was either going to be the blogwanking post or a full reading round-up for the year, and I am filled with Chinese food and enough sodium to kill an elephant, and as such I’m not terribly interested in producing either of those posts. As such you’re either going to get a shitton of posts tomorrow or I’ll push some of them back into the first couple of days of 2025. Again, it ain’t like I’m on any real deadlines around here.

My palate is crap

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy5 Comments

I’ve talked about Importin’ Joe’s Coffee around here at least a couple of times– they are a local small business that is somehow also an Ethiopian coffee company. They first came across my radar when they delivered a bunch of coffee to my school a few years ago, and every so often they send me an email at exactly the right time and I order some more coffee.

This happened last week, and I didn’t realize until after the coffee had been delivered that I’d inadvertently ordered whole bean coffee rather than pre-ground. And since the only way I solve problems nowadays is by throwing money at them, rather than tossing the unusable $15 bag of imported Ethiopian coffee or, God forbid, attempting to return it, I spent $80 on a coffee grinder.

A secret about me, or maybe I just think it’s a secret and it’s been completely obvious to everyone who has ever known me: I would like to be a snob about something. Something. I don’t care what. I want there to be something where my tastes are refined and classy and shit, and I turn my nose up at the lesser versions of, I dunno, whatever that thing might be.

I don’t drink alcohol, so that leaves out whiskey and wine. I don’t smoke, which eliminates cigars. I cannot convince myself that clothes are important enough to start dressing like a fancy person. And I’ve got to admit that part of the attraction about buying a coffee grinder– and not some cheapass $20 coffee grinder, no, it’s mid-range or nothing for this guy– was that fresh-ground coffee beans are supposed to be a lot better than pre-ground. And, like, I thought that was supposed to be an obvious difference? I already know to avoid instant coffee like the plague, but I think everyone kind of knows that already, and the simple fact is that since I became a coffee drinker in 2015 or so, if instant is all the coffee that’s available, fuck it, I’m drinking instant. My tenure at the furniture store proved that. Shit, I already drink my coffee black, and that’s pretentious enough, right? Let’s go to the next level!

Y’all, I absolutely cannot tell the fucking difference between fresh-ground coffee and pre-ground coffee. I can barely tell the difference between the different coffees we have in the house. I mean, I can; the Meijer house brand’s “Michigan Cherry” flavor smells strongly of cherries and I suppose kinda tastes like them, too? I like chicory? But the particular Importin’ Joe’s coffee I ordered claims to have “tasting notes” of fudge, toasted caramel, and cherry “on the back end,” and I literally do not know what the fuck any of that means. It tastes like coffee. It doesn’t taste burned like Starbucks coffee does, which registers in my head as “good coffee.” I ground the beans for the Michigan Cherry for the last couple of mornings and I can’t taste any difference. I happened to be at the grocery tonight and picked up some Colombian coffee, because Colombia. But my wife is going to do a blind taste test on me this weekend, and I’m gonna lose it, and I’m gonna lose it so, so badly.

Is there a way to train yourself for this shit? I don’t smoke, again, which would make me think I’d be able to identify basic flavors, but I’ve got nothing over here, and I wanna be a damn coffee snob. Somebody help me. Surely if I can train myself to like black coffee I can figure out how to identify a “note” of “toasted caramel,” right?

Go ‘way, I’m sleepin

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

My sole accomplishment this weekend, if you want to grant it that status, was taking this spinning bookshelf out of its box (fresh from the TikTok shop!) and putting it together, which means that I now have this little spot for all of my YA books, or at least I have this little spot for all the YA books I have right now, because I’m going to outgrow it in about five more books. It’s pretty and colorful, though, and the fact that every book on there but one is exactly the same size grants it a really pleasing symmetry. I’ve said this before; there is a difference between being a reader and a book collector, and I am very much both of those things.

That’s about all I did. I’m about halfway through R.R. Virdi’s The Doors of Midnight, which is 800 pages long so it’s taking me a while, but I took one pill on Friday night because I was having trouble sleeping and it knocked me on my ass for a day and a half. So there’s not much else of note worth talking about at the moment.

This happened Friday at work, so I can’t count it as an achievement, but I’ve got all of my classes planned out through December 4th, an event so rare that, statistically speaking, it didn’t actually happen. Any number of things can upset my plan (which is why I’m never planned out this far ahead; it’s mostly pointless) but we’re in a sort of autopilot-type unit right now, where C has to follow B which has to follow A, and the only real changes that could happen is delays either due to school closings, further sickness, or my kids just not getting something, and then really all I have to do is back everything up a day, which is no big deal. There are seven instructional days until Thanksgiving; I have no plans for Thanksgiving and we likely won’t make any either, since Bek’s family is the weekend before Thanksgiving and my family is the weekend after Thanksgiving. So that weekend will probably be filled with Lego, reading and video games and not so much massive amounts of food. But I have to survive that long first. We’ll see.