Foodgeek Blog

I’m writing this from a motorcoach en route to Montreal. We stopped in Niagra Falls for lunch and to catch the beautiful view of what we dubbed a “God-made and man-tweaked” wonder.

We ate at Pizza Pizza, whose tagline claims that it’s Ontario’s best pizza. Having not sampled all of Ontario’s pizzerias I can’t be sure, but darn tasty indeed.

I had a slice of “super,” or what we’d call deluxe in the States. I’d describe the quality as being a slice above Sbarro. I was very impressed.

For dinner I had a turkey bacon from Tim Horton’s, and then a cup of the best coffee I’ve had in quite a while. Delicious. Now another hour and a half on the bus til we reach our hotel.

More detailed blogging (and even photos!) when I’m at a desk with my laptop instead of on a bus with my iPod.

On Monday I’ll be boarding a bus to take Tri-C West’s production of Don’t Count Your Chickens Before They Cry Wolf to beautiful Montreal.

The itinerary contains the phrase “French restaurant” and the word “bistro” several times so I suspect there will be plenty of blog fodder north of the border.

I’ll be taking my camera with me as well as my laptop, so there should be plenty of pictures in the blog as well.

Hopefully the hotel has wi-fi.

And now for something completely different! I am now the proud owner of a new iPod Touch, so finding a blog subject and forgetting it by the time I get home should be a thing of the past! Updates to follow…

I made breakfast this morning. I didn’t make bacon, but I couldn’t think of a pun involving the word “chorizo.”

Here’s the menu:

Eggs

Chorizo sausage

Hash browns*

Buttermilk biscuits*

Orange-banana-pineapple juice*

Coffee

*Ok, you caught me. Bob Evans brown & serve hash browns, buttermilk biscuits from a tube, and orange-banana-pineapple juice from frozen concentrate. It’s not that I don’t know how to make these things, but I was hungry darn it. Also, I have no buttermilk.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks (as you can imagine.) A musical for which I was playing percussion just closed last weekend, then Christmas, there hasn’t been much time for me to just stand around and relax lately. As the hash browns were experiencing a little Maillard mayhem, I was leaning against the counter and drinking coffee.  A wave of relaxation ran over me.

I’ve been kind of stressing out over other life-related stuff lately, too, and the sudden and unexpected calm was really nice. I guess sometimes you just have to chill the hell out before life can get calmer (as opposed to waiting until life gets calmer before you chill the hell out.)

Anyway, back to breakfast….

Delicious.  Over-easy eggs (or dippy eggs for younger readers.)  The hash browns were fantastic.  And I’ve found chorizo to be an excellent breakfast sausage.  Nice little kick to it.  The juice is excellent.  And the best manual drip coffee I’ve made in a while.

That’s all.  Have a great day.

I am currently enjoying a bowl of stovetop macaroni and cheese. I’m not referring to a great recipe for easy, convenient stovetop macaroni and cheese with real cheddar. I’m not even referring to Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

No, I’m referring to the uber-cheap, uber-unhealthy, uber-off-brand macaroni and cheese from a box. (33 cents a box at Aldi’s!!) You know the stuff. It’s the one with the gooey cheese sauce that’s mostly butter, salt, butter, salt, butter, salt, and orange dye number nine. Did I mention the butter and the salt?

I don’t know what it is, but every now and then, I just crave some cheap, instant mac and cheese. Or a vendoburger. (When I was in college, the vending machines sold these microwave cheese burgers that were freaking awesome. Not awesome in terms of a burger, but in terms of a tasty snack food that happens to be vaguely burgerlike.) Or a banquet chicken pot pie. Or a burger from White Castle. (Yes, really.) You get the idea.

I know it’s not high quality food. I know it’s not even medium quality food. (Honestly, in many cases even “low quality” would be high praise. Vendoburgers probably don’t have any meat in them.) What can I say? Once in a while, it really hits the spot.

I said in one of my first entries on this blog that a rice cooker was the only contraption that could truly deliver on reheating rice without turning each grain into an impenetrable fortress of non-yummy food crappiness.  (Ok, not in so many words, but you get the idea.) I was just rereading it and I thought I’d share my more commonly used method of reheating rice:

First put the rice on a plate or bowl (a bowl works best,) and add some water to it.  Then completely saturate a paper towel.  (If it’s not dripping, it’s not wet enough.  Don’t wring it out.)  Cover the rice with the paper towel and tuck it under the rice around the sides forming a pouch.  Microwave as you would anything else.

When the water you added turns to steam it is trapped by the saturated paper towel (which is largely moisture-tight.)

This works well with fried as well as plain rice.

I wanted to call it the “Fall Food Spectacular,” but that would kill the alliteration.
My favorite month began today.  Pumpkins, cider, really good apples, pumpkin spice lattes from Starbucks, hoodies, sweatpants, I freaking love fall.  I also work with a high school marching band, and I’m constantly irritated at football games when the temperature is like 80 degrees.  WTF?  It’s football season.  It’s supposed to be hoodie weather at the minimum.  (Or maximum, depending on how you look at it.)

Anyway, I digress…

On the to do list for this fall:  (We all know how well I do with to do lists…)

• Go to an apple orchard
• Spaghetti recipe (really this time)
• Concoct the perfect hot chocolate
• Pumpkin pie from scratch (Ok, this might be a little ambitious.)
• Apple pie

So yeah.  That’s the plan.  Stay tuned.

Sorry.  For some reason, it’s hard for me to write consistently.  I’ll try harder.
Regarding the Drawing Board, I got the cold soup accomplished, but that’s it.  No margarita.  No spaghetti.  I’ll have to extend the time frame to beyond the summer.  The Morel Dilemma is still in the research phase.

Updates to follow (I hope.)

The experiment was successful.

2 pounds strawberries

applesauce (Didn’t measure, sorry.  Probably something like 2 cups.)

5 anjou pears

the juice of 2 oranges

honey to taste

1 pint heavy cream

1/2 brick cream cheese

I started by pureeing the strawberries and then mixing them with the applesauce, but in retrospect I wish I’d pureed the applesauce for a while to get it a little smoother.  The finished product was thicker in texture than I’d have liked.  Cut three of the pears into chunks, removing the seeds.  (Don’t worry about the skin.)  When pureeing the pears, I found it works best to add a little of the strawberry/applesauce mixture to the food processor.  Without it, the chunks of pear just ended up sticking to the sides of the bowl.  The added mixture kept the pears in contact with the blades.  Add the pureed pears to the strawberry mixture.  Add the orange juice.  Thinly slice the remaining pears and mix into the soup.

I added the pears to sweeten the soup, but I figured that if I added enough to get it to the level of sweetness I wanted that it would taste too heavily of pear.  The honey gets it the rest of the way.

Beat the cream cheese to soften and fluff it up a little.  Add the heavy cream and whip until medium peaks form.  This ended up being too much cream for the soup, but if you can’t think of anything else to do with cream cheese spiked whipped cream, then there’s no hope for you.  (Hint:  If nothing else, you could just eat it out of the bowl.  Mmmm.)  We used it for pumpkin bars.

Serve the soup with a dollop of the whipped cream.  Enjoy.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve become the unofficial cold soup guru for our Thursday gatherings.  For a couple of weeks now, I’ve wanted to create a recipe, completely from scratch.  I decided this week would be the week.  Ever since I started thinking about it, I’d had a difficult time deciding what to put in it.  I kept thinking tropical; pineapple, coconut, call it pina colada soup, or some such.  Then yesterday, inspiration hit.

Strawberries.

The plan (as it stands now) is to use apple sauce as the base (a whole bowl of pureed strawberries might be a little overpowering,) add a tub or two of pureed strawberries, some pureed pear to sweeten it up, probably some orange juice, and serve it with fresh whipped cream spiked with a little cream cheese.  (I haven’t thought all the way through the physics of that.  It might not work.)  Trying to decide about seasoning.  Mint doesn’t feel quite right, fresh cilantro sounds interesting to me.  I’ll probably just riff and see what happens.

Results to follow…