Tag: food

Yay, nuts!

On By Luther M. SilerIn ParentingLeave a comment

It’s official: as of today, my son is no longer allergic to tree nuts or coconuts. Peanuts, unfortunately, are still on the no-go list, and are likely to remain there for the rest of his life, but he’s gone from a kid with a laundry list of allergies as a baby to just peanuts as a nearly-teenager and, even better, he’s managed to do it without ever having any reactions to anything stronger than a mild rash. Every other person I know with a peanut allergy has had to reach for an epipen at least once.

I probably have a similar post back in the archives from the Egg Challenge and the Strawberry Challenge, but the way this works is that they do a skin test first. He passed the skin test for everything but peanuts. So they pick one tree nut– apparently the allergen is common to all of them so it doesn’t really matter what kind you get– and they bring you into the doctor’s office, and they feed you a tiny sliver of the thing, then wait half an hour, then a little more, then half an hour, then a little more, then half an hour, and then a nice mouthful and this time they wait an hour. It takes forever and most of it is spent sitting around hoping to continue to be bored, because if something interesting happens it will be something terrible.

I forgot to bring a book, so I spent the whole morning holding forth on BlueSky. You should join me over there!

Also, speaking of joining me, I’m two minutes away from the White Dudes for Harris kickoff. Are you a white dude? Come on over. I don’t really plan on being there for much more than half an hour or so– from the list of Names they’re expecting, this is going to go on for hours, and I don’t have the stamina– but I’ll show up at the start and donate money again to pump up the numbers.

Tomorrow, Deadpool & Wolverine. For reals this time.

Wait, shit, I wasn’t ready

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Spent the weekend in Michigan visiting my aunt and my cousin, and between the drive and being “on” for family and the first week of school I am officially pre-exhausted for this upcoming week. On the other hand, my cousin had the good sense to marry a Lebanese woman, and Jesus Christ do I love absolutely every single fucking aspect of Lebanese cuisine, so we ate really well yesterday and brought a ton of food home, all of which I will have eaten by tomorrow.

Oh, oh, and I got a flurry of emails over the weekend and I have two new students coming in tomorrow, neither of whom can speak English and one of whom has spina bifida in addition to not speaking English, so that’s gonna be fun. Will I figure it out? Yes. Will I remember to create a sub folder so that I can put the legally-required evacuation order for the the spina bifida kid in it? Uh. Probably. Sure. Let’s stay positive. I have Monday and Tuesday planned out right now; surely that’s enough, right? Wednesday through Friday will take care of themselves.

Oh! Also! It’s going to be in the nineties all week and the high Thursday is supposed to be a hundred and one (101) degrees, after a summer that barely touched the nineties at all. Did I predict this state of affairs? Yes the fuck I did.

At least Kissinger’s going to die and TFG’s going to go to jail to make up for the rest of it, right?

#REVIEW: Venba (Xbox, PS5, Steam)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, video games2 Comments

I think this afternoon might have been the first time I’ve really regretted shutting down my YouTube channel, as I played through the entirety of Venba while my son was at camp this afternoon, and I think this would have been a fun little game to livestream. I played it through Game Pass on the Xbox Series X, where it is currently free, and I believe it’s $14.99 on the PS5. I’ll cut to the chase and say that if you have Game Pass access you should absolutely download this delightful little game and give it a chunk of your afternoon, and $15 is fair in a “reward the developers for making something cool” way as opposed to a pure price-for-playtime thing.

Anyway. Venba, which I have just now learned is the word for a form of classical Tamil poetry, is the story of a Tamil immigrant family that has moved to Canada. It’s very story-based, and for a lot of it you’re watching conversations between family members and occasionally choosing a dialogue option from two or three available choices, and this isn’t the kind of game that lets you go back and change your mind if you want to. Having only played it once, I’m not sure if the game changes based on your decisions or not, so that might be a reason to go back through it tomorrow just for the hell of it.

The gameplay comes in during– wait for it– the cooking sections, where you’re attempting to recreate old family recipes based on a poorly preserved recipe book that has pieces missing. Based on the instructions you’re given along with some verbal suggestions and occasional flashback memories, you’re expected to prepare the recipes properly. This sounds absolutely wonderful and for the first time I found myself wishing smell-o-vision was a thing; I’ve also got a serious yen for Indian food right now. If you can already cook, you’ll sail through it; if you don’t know a thing about Indian cuisine specifically or cooking in general there’s probably going to be some fairly simple trial-and-error involved. I’m … in the middle, I suppose? There were a couple things I sailed through on the first try, at least one where my stupid fingers kept messing me up, and another that took me some actual thinking to figure out what the game wanted me to do.

Is it fun? Yeah, but I don’t feel like fun is necessarily the goal here. This game has a story to tell, and something to say about the immigrant experience, and it’s one of the most unique experiences I’ve had with a controller in my hand in a long time. Even just the simple interactivity of being able to choose a dialogue response during a conversation now and again brings you inside the characters in a unique way that you don’t get with novels or television. The generational aspect of the game– at the beginning, it’s just the parents, and it ends with their son as a grown man, trying to read the Tamil in his grandmother’s cookbook– is really neat as well, and it’s really cool how much emotion the game is able to elicit over, again, a very short runtime.

Venba isn’t going to be Game of the Year or anything like that, but it deserves some attention and it’s a great use of the short time you’ll spend with it.

In which I am almost defeated

On By Luther M. SilerIn CookingLeave a comment

We had a training day today, so no kids, and one of my co-workers walked in and handed this to me. It’s his wife’s work, and I’m happy to announce that I am now in a polyamorous relationship, because I absolutely must be married to anyone who is able to produce pecan cheesecake in any capacity, and pecan cheesecake of this unbelievably high quality should be on sale in stores.(*) I told my co-worker that had I paid $30 or $40 for an entire pie I would not feel cheated. It was that good– gooey, caramelly, with absolutely perfect cheesecake and a fucking amazing crust. My mouth is still watering looking at it.

Of course, the sugar level sent me into a coma for the rest of the day– the second piece I had a couple hours later did not help– and it is 9:19 as I’m typing this and I didn’t not get around to posting today so much as I completely forgot the blog existed until just now, so lucky for everyone I had this deliciousness on my phone to make you all jealous of me.

Just don’t have two pieces. You will die. You will die happy, but if you die, you can’t have any more pecan cheesecake.

(*) I did not inform either my co-worker or his wife of this, although I did tell him he should do whatever is necessary for the rest of his life to keep her around. I should probably get around to that. People like to know about it when they’re married to other people, right?

In which I achieve something, maybe, a little

On By Luther M. SilerIn CookingLeave a comment

On the one hand, my dinner just now represents somewhat of a milestone. I wasn’t in the mood for anything we had premade and on hand, and I didn’t want to leave the house to go get something, so I looked in the pantry, found some ingredients, and put together a tasty thing to eat. On the other, what basically amounted to ramen tomato soup doesn’t really scream “creativity,” and it doesn’t look like much either, but here it is:

That’s butter, minced garlic, tomato paste, cream of chicken soup, a little bit of heavy cream, ramen, freshly-grated parmesan, and salt and pepper, and if I’d have been thinking I’d have thrown some Italian seasoning into the sauce as well. Yeah, it looks a little gross; I am not a food photographer, shut up. Yes, I could have achieved very similar results by simply throwing a block of ramen into a half-jar of Ragú, and if I’d done it that way I would have the balance of sauce to ramen much better than this, which had too much sauce. Oh, and next time I definitely need to cook the ramen separately, as the sauce didn’t have enough water in it to cook it with its normal speed. (It wasn’t undercooked, and I added water, but next time I need to just cook it separately.

I’m not going to start writing cookbooks or anything, but this still feels like a step of some sort, as I am very very reliant on and panicky about recipes whenever I actually cook anything. So … yay me? Sure. Yay me.

Soooooouuuuuuuuupppppp

On By Luther M. SilerIn CookingLeave a comment

I think the general feeling is that the first experiment with Pepper Belly Pete’s recipes was a resounding success, although when I make this again I’m going to fiddle with it a little bit. I feel like it wants corn, for some reason, and both my wife and I prefer our soups a little creamier than anything with a chicken broth base is usually going to be, so there might be some experimentation to see what the best way to thicken the broth is. Maybe toss something in there to add a little heat, too. More experienced cooks than myself are welcome to leave suggestions.

The critical part, the “dumplings,” came out more or less exactly how we wanted them to, although next time we might cut them a little smaller than quartering the biscuits. That’s a minor complaint, of course.

This will be my next TikTok-related food creation– this is the same guy as the apple cider cookies from a few weeks ago– and then I’ll probably try something else of Pete’s:

@bdylanhollis

Christmas on another level? #baking #vintage #cooking #christmas

♬ original sound – B. Dylan Hollis

In which this is stupid and that is stupid and everything is stupid set it all on fire

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy6 Comments

An overstatement? Maybe. But probably not.

Today has been ridiculous; every time I’ve turned around all day it has been suddenly hours later than I thought it was. This odd temporal phenomenon started when my wife and I both woke up at the exact same second at 8:30 this morning, I said good morning to her, mumbled something about both of us waking up and reaching for our phones at the exact same moment, and then four seconds later it was 10:30 and I was still in bed. Then she went to the grocery, which she does every Saturday, and during that time I clean up the kitchen and do various and sundry things around the house, only today somehow that took an hour longer than usual, and by the time she got home it was somehow past 1:00.

Then it was 4:30.

Nothing happened in between. I mean, she took a shower, but I don’t think that shower took three and a half hours, and I spent some amount of time X bouncing back and forth between trying to figure out why several of the streaming apps on my office TV suddenly wouldn’t work (never try to solve TV tech support issues online; Googling these things properly is impossible) and then, moments later (or maybe it was an hour, who knows) realizing that I’d somehow uploaded the wrong video to YouTube for today, only the video that actually got uploaded shouldn’t have existed in the first place, and that’ll take longer to explain than it’s probably worth, just trust me that the video that got uploaded shouldn’t have been real and roll with it.

Anyway, I fixed the YouTube thing (follow me on YouTube!) but the TV thing still eludes me; the error message has changed since earlier today, so I’m currently suspecting something on LG’s end, but we’ll see.

Tomorrow I am making this:

@pepperbellypete

Chicken and Dumplings.#tiktokcooks #easyrecipe #soup #comfortfood #receta #southern #recipe #learnontiktok #foodie #foryoupage #yum #fypシ

♬ original sound – Pepper Belly Pete

I discovered this delightful man’s TikTok account this weekend, and he is my new favorite person– do not miss the fact that he wears an actual fucking wrist-mounted bandolier of hot sauces– and I not only want to make his food, I want him to be my dad. Now, understand something; my actual dad reads my blog, so he’s going to see that sentence. He’s also going to be here tomorrow to eat the chicken and dumplings, and I think once he watches a few of Pepper Belly Pete’s videos he will not only agree that Pepper Belly Pete should be my dad, he should also be my dad’s dad, and therefore also my grandfather. He’s just that delightful.

I look forward to discovering he’s a milkshake duck in a couple of days, now that I’ve pronounced my affection for him, but the time in between now and then will be full of good food.

On learning, and how I will never

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

The events of the last, oh, twenty-eight hours or so:

  • Had Taco Bell for dinner
  • Couldn’t sleep for shit last night
  • Woke up and immediately puked
  • Took the boy to school
  • Came home and slept until 2:30 PM
  • Picked the boy up from school
  • Recorded, unshowered and still kinda queasy, a couple of episodes of Pokémon Sword with said boy
  • Started this blog post

I have to learn to not eat shit. Eating shit is bad! Like, predictably! I know this! And it’s not like it’s good enough to compensate for missing work because of vomiting and nausea! Come the fuck on, man, be an adult!

Sigh.