Sam's Backup Page

 I have cooked so many things. So many! All the things. 

Except yogurt, because I forgot how effing long yogurt takes to cook, so it's going to be simmering in the Instant Pot for another, like, four hours. Hot damn I hope the starter I used was still alive, otherwise I'm gonna have spent eight hours waiting for a bowl of hot milk. 

On the plus I now have probably about three weeks' worth of food in the freezer. Casserole party at Sam's house! 

Today's origami is the Blue Whale, a fold so nice I did it twice. Instructions are here (click on the images to embiggen). 



*whale noises* three-dimensional origami is hard to photograph well. Especially when the paper is shiny. 

For Christmas this year, my parents wanted to buy me a slow-cooker, because mine is dreadful and also terrifyingly cheap. So we went shopping around for some slow-cookers on Black Friday, which was fascinating, and we found a slow-cooker. But not just a slow-cooker.

A seven in one slow cooker.

It has specific buttons for rice and porridge and yogurt. It can sautee! It possibly provides a gateway to a dimension of enlightenment. I don't even know what all it does. Why does it have a meat button AND a poultry button?

But the most interesting thing is that it is a pressure cooker, and it uses the pressure cooker to cook many other things. Like rice.

I am pressure-cooking rice.

This will definitely go well.

WELL.

EGGPLANTS are off the "potentially edible" list with an annotation: Taste like badly-steamed broccoli.

I'm pretty sure I salted them right this time, because when I stir-fried them they didn't absorb nearly as much oil as badly-salted eggplant is said to. But when they don't taste like salt, they have a lovely creamy texture and a dreadful flavour. Shame; I had high hopes for eggplant.

ONWARDS TO CELERIAC. I have high hopes for this, too. Supposedly it behaves like a potato. WE SHALL SEE, CELERY ROOT. WE SHALL SEE.

I HAVE PROCURED AN EGGPLANT.

Well, Trader Joe's didn't have any cabbage. And really if you want to call it an Aubergine, it's overdue.

I intend to make eggplant fries in the oven. And yes, I know about purging. Man, this vegetable may or may not be tasty but it sure is a pain in the ass. The artichoke was less trouble. Though significantly more expensive.

Tonight, however, is sauteed portobello sandwiches smothered in brie. LOOK HOW ALMOST HEALTHY THAT WAS.

Also my new laundry service delivered me some clean laundry. Fluffy! *rolls around in it*

It's like the day of Reinforcing Why Sam Doesn't Want To Leave Chicago.

So, my doctor said I need to eat more green things, and avocados and mint chocolate chip ice cream don't count.

The problem is that I'm a supertaster, which comes with some quirks. Like it's difficult for me to distinguish between orange and peach because all I taste is citrus. Or like how you can't actually hide vegetables in other things with me, because the vegetable taste is so strong it's all I taste. Most veggies taste exactly alike to me: faintly rancid, with an overtone of grass. Supertasters tend to stick to bland foods because anything else overwhelms them or tastes terrible. (Some lucky ones get the ability to distinguish between foods as well or instead, like how I wrote Steve in Feed The Body. I am not one of them.) It's not just vegetables; I also have to avoid cinnamon and processed (ie, not whole-grain) wheat bread, since burning sensations in mouth are unpleasant. And in general spicy foods. Hiding vegetables in curry is great, but the amount of spice it would take to "hide" the veggies would make it inedible anyway, for me.

Imagine the food you hate the most in the world. Now imagine that half the food in the world is made up of that food -- imagine there are whole restaurants dedicated to that food, that half the food available in any given restaurant is that food. Imagine you've spent your entire life being mocked and punished for not eating it because everyone else does. That is my world.

But I am tired of doctors telling me this bullshit, so I've started a CULINARY ADVENTUR, whereby I am working my way down the list of vegetables, alphabetically. It's not really that I expect to find myself enjoying eating green things, but at least this way I'll have a spreadsheet I can show my doctor.

I made artichokes last week. That's an awful lot of work for a food that tastes like slightly soggy baked potato and must be dipped in some form of liquid fat to be edible. I made brussel sprouts this week, which are tiny little shitbombs of reeking sauteed bitterness. They smell like rotting flowers but don't actually look unappetizing until you put one in your mouth and realize you are eating something nature clearly intended you not to eat. THE SMELL WAS A WARNING.

I still have half a bag of them. I'm trying to decide what to do with half a bag of tiny toxic bombs.

I'm skipping things I either a) have eaten recently enough to know that either I don't like them (asparagus) or b) can eat under certain conditions (beans, but sadly not the green ones) and have arrived at my next foe: Cabbage. I'm pretty sure I don't like cabbage. I find coleslaw and sauerkraut repulsive, and cabbage has ruined many a fine potsticker for me. But Jean has suggested kimchee, which I know most people find gross to start with but hey: I have to have some results for the spreadsheet. And I haven't actually ever eaten kimchee.

I'm going to be not-eating a lot of vegetables in the near future.

I HAVE MADE PORK MEDALLIONS AND DID NOT EVEN SET THE KITCHEN ON FIRE.

It was a close call. I seared the everloving fuck out of those bastards.

Apparently the secret to making delicious pork medallions is to do almost nothing oneself. I used a packaged teriyaki marinade mix on pre-sliced medallions, so all I did in the end was heat up my frying pan super-hot and give them three minutes per side and then two extra minutes to make sure they at least seemed cooked before I nommed them to shreds. Even then I didn't actually come up with that "recipe". I got it off eHow.

They were blackened but delicious.

It's been a good food day. I did food trucks for lunch and got samosas and a tamale.

I DEMAND ALL MY LUNCH FOODS BE WRAPPED IN DELICIOUS CARBS.

I AM HOME FROM POUTINEFEST.

Poutinefest: your gateway to ADVENTUR!

The trains are all effed up this weekend, or at least the red line trains are, so it was a bit of an adventure getting down to Haymarket Pub, where it was being held. Worth it though. There were eleven different high-end restaurants serving a variety of poutine, which for the sadly uninitiated is fries covered with cheese curds and then doused in brown gravy. I KNOW.

( MY REVIEW OF POUTINEFEST '13 )

The funny thing is I paid $50 for my ticket, which is not inexpensive, but I figured that money was going towards renting the space and the free drinks (two free beers and a bourbon). Turns out it also went to give us a crapload of swag. I got a PoutineFest sticker, a button with the logo, a Jim Beam commemorative glass, some stickers, and

WAIT FOR IT

YES

YOU KNOW IT

A POUTINEFEST TOTE BAG.

I'm considering sending it to my mum.

There is a NEW BURGER JOINT in town! Like, up in my neighborhood, a block south of my train station.

It's called VOPS, I don't know why. It can't have been there long, because as a hamburger aficionado I monitor the beef-related activities of this neighborhood very closely. I stopped off for dinner and they make quite a good burger, plus their fries are plentiful.

At some point I'm going to risk my delicate fucking constitution and order the TURDUCKEN SAUSAGE they claim to serve.

It was jammed with hipsters while I was there, but such is my lot in life at this point. Our neighborhood is not gentrifying; it's hipsterfying. Every day more skinny jeans and ironic beards walk into and out of my life. I must learn to peacefully coexist, somehow.

I worried a little bit about Byron's, my best beloved horrible burger joint that is a block north of the train. The greasy spoon is a dying breed, in part because a true greasy spoon is always two points from failing a health inspection, and people understandably want to eat somewhere clean and hygenic. But I love Byron's and so I worried that VOPS was going to put them out of business.

And then I realised, no they won't.

No burgers-and-dogs place in Wrigleyville will ever go out of business as long as the Cubs are there. We could be wall to wall with Vienna Sausage signs from here to the stadium and on a summer afternoon there would still be a line at Byron's preventing me from getting onion straws with alacrity.

At least they'll scare off the hipsters.

I HAVE DISCOVERED THE HORSESHOE SANDWICH.

About a week ago, a post went up on Serious Eats and then just as mysteriously vanished -- I couldn't say why, there was no offensive content or anything, but fortunately Google Reader saved the text. It was about regional sandwiches, and I like to try local specialties, though usually I'm let down. The most traditional Boston Baked Beans I could find tasted exactly like the tinned baked beans I could get from Campbells, which has its canning plant in New Jersey, and don't get me started on the disgusting nature of Chicago deep dish. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I made a note to look up some of these sandwiches.

The jibarito, for instance, which was supposedly invented in Chicago, is a bit like a Cuban only instead of bread you use fried plantain. I have sampled many a fine Italian Beef sandwich, which is marinated, shaved beef served (sometimes with peppers) in a bun that's been dipped whole in au jus. Al's is the best. They're rumoured to use nutmeg in their marinade.

But I had never heard of two of the sandwiches on the list: the Horseshoe, and the Mother In Law.

The Horseshoe: Two pieces of toast, topped with meat (apparently ham originally, though usually hamburger patties now), topped with french fries, TOPPED WITH CHEESE SAUCE.
The Mother In Law: A tamale. In a hot dog bun. Smothered with chili.

We are hearty eaters in Chicago. Well, it supposedly gets cold during the winter.

I WILL HAVE ONE OF EACH PLEASE.

THIS IS AN AMAZING MILKSHAKE.

So, about a week ago I made some ice cream, or I suppose some frozen custard, because I made it with an egg base. The custard requires five egg yolks, and of course the problem is always "What do I do with the egg whites don't say meringues I don't own a stand mixer". (Yes, I know you can make them without a stand mixer, but it's way too much work.) Then foxxydancr piped up that she had a cake recipe that used egg whites, and I was all over that shit. This is some magnificent fucking cake, you guys.

But! It was a little on the dry side, so I soaked it in a lemon glaze, which kind of helped but not totally. And the ice cream was a little bland, because I forgot to add flavoring, and also homemade ice cream, once frozen, is not as easy to scoop or eat as commercial ice cream. At least, mine isn't.

So then I made a cake milkshake.

I put a slice of cake in the blender and turned it to crumb, then added a few scoops of ice cream which made a very pretty slurry, then added some milk and poured the whole thing into a cup and VOILA. THE MOST LABOR INTENSIVE MILKSHAKE IN THE COUNTRY.

Thus, in the end, the eggs were reunited.

I shoulda just made a really big omelette.