Das Tagebuch Murnaus

From dfordoom.

Do you mostly cook proper meals or do you rely on convenience food, take-away and eating out?

If you do cook do you actually enjoy it or do you do it out of necessity?

How much time is too much time to spend on preparing a meal?

Do you think it’s worth bothering with cooking just for one person?

Is cooking something you’d like to be able to do more often but can’t because of time restraints or lack of energy/motivation?

Answer as many or as few questions as you wish.

My answers:

Do you mostly cook proper meals or do you rely on convenience food, take-away and eating out?
I mostly cook proper meals - I feel I can't trust Lianne and Aki to nourish themselves properly! Food is an afterthought for her and he'd gladly live on starch for the rest of his life, like a potato beetle. What I often do is make "batch food" on the weekend, like batches of spaghetti sauce or stew, freeze it and reheat it during the week after preparing noodles or rice to go under it. But once in a while, we will have pizza or I'll get a roast chicken or something from Safeway, if it's too late or I'm too tired or ill to cook.

If you do cook do you actually enjoy it or do you do it out of necessity?
I enjoy cooking, I really do. I do get stressed out at the end of preparing a meal, when everything has to be ready at the same time, and I hate having anyone in my "cookin' room" when I'm working there - it's very distracting.

How much time is too much time to spend on preparing a meal?
When I make "batch food", I start in the early afternoon and let it cook until the evening. Sometimes I make a roast or a ham. I wouldn't want to do that every day.

Do you think it’s worth bothering with cooking just for one person?
Sure it's worth cooking for one person, if that person is you and you care at all about what you eat. It's cheaper too.

Is cooking something you’d like to be able to do more often but can’t because of time restraints or lack of energy/motivation?
I don't get home until after 5:30 so don't have time to make an elaborate meal every night, but I do alternate the reheated stuff with quicker easier meals like taco salad, pork scallopini, or stir fries with bottled Asian or Indian sauces. The plan this year is to incorporate a lot more vegetables!

Yes, I know, it's been a while since I posted but I've been busy. Finished writing yet another article: 7,600+ words on the Sino-Japanese War, to top the 9,300 I cranked out on the Spanish Civil War over Xmas and New Year's holidays, means I've been a busy little bee.

The problem this time is that in the aftermath of moving every blessed thing I and everyone else near and dear to me own, about a mile away from where it was, is that I lost the box of books and reference materials I had pre-packed in order to write this article without having to unpack my entire library. Over 40 boxes of books and guess which ONE is missing. It has to be somewhere in the damn house. Anyway, I had to round up some lesser quality reference materials and get it done in a cracking hurry - at least there were no library books in that box. Wouldn't want Lt. Bookman to get after me (http://ltmurnau.livejournal.com/197500.html).

Next up: the CONNECTIONS conference in Orlando Florida, in early March. Some potential here for making some, uh, connections in the serious games world, wish I had time to convert Virtualia to some kind of digital form. I've given up on learning to use Visual Basic this year - life's too short. Probably not going to Phoenix this year even though I have three games coming out by then (Greek Civil War game, Balkans invasion game, and revision of Vietnam 1964 game), need to save money to fix the back deck and put the stairs back in.

Oh yeah, about lunch: I just realized I am about to tuck into baloney and mustard, with processed cheese on white bread, and wash it down with genuine orange Tang. What am I, nine years old? But that's what was in the fridge this morning... I will try to do better.

My mom used to make this when we were kids, for dessert. Cooks. com has almost 60 recipe entries for it. Here is one that does not use eggs.

HOBO BREAD

2 1/2 c. leftover coffee
4 tsp. baking soda
2 c. raisins
1 c. white sugar
1 c. brown sugar (light)
1 1/2 c. chopped nuts
4 c. sifted flour
1/4 tsp. salt

Put the raisins and baking soda in a large bowl and toss to coat the raisins with the soda. Bring the leftover coffee to a boil and pour over the raisin mixture. Stir well and cover the bowl and let it sit overnight at room temperature. The next day, add the rest of the ingredients and blend well. Grease and flour three 1 pound coffee cans and divide the batter evenly, a little more than half full. Bake at 325 degrees for 1 hour. Cool in the coffee cans for 15 minutes and tap cans on the bottom to release the loaves.

This is good to take on a picnic: just put back in the can and replace the lid. Freezes well too (if you are a hobo with a refrigerator).

Oh no, White Rabbit candy is contaminated with melamine!

http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2008/09/24/whiterabbit.html

Run you rabbit, run...

From time to time I go by Oxford Foods on Cook Street.
Sometimes I walk in and buy things.
It's a filthy place, notable for its generous selection of Polish foodstuffs that are at or near their expiry date, and therefore available at a hefty discount.
For example, I have just finished eating a 150g (5.25 oz.) packet of "ginger breads choco hearts" (serca szivecske).
I believe they come from Chemnitz (Ciemne).
The ingredients are descirbed in twelve different languages on the back of the packet: GB, D, F, CZ, H, HR, SI, LV, SK, EE, RO, and PL.
In English the food is described as "ginger bread with fruit filling covered by chocolate similar mass".
And so it is.
The cover depicts raspberries, strawberries and blueberries, but the only fruit specified in the ingredients is "apple condensed paste".
It was only 99 cents, marked down from $2.99.

That same day, I also bought almost-expired bottles of cherry juice and Jaffa cakes, made by the same company that made the gingerbread.
I did not buy any of the packets of cornmeal-crusted back bacon or almost-vacuum-packed pastrami, though they were cheap and haven't made me sick yet.
There is a limit.

Yum yum yum.

Well, what do you know - Tuesday night I got food poisoning (avoid the White Spot on Douglas Street!) and spent the next two days at home, thinking I was either going to die or snap in half and then die.

Friday today, and I am back at work, kinda.

And so what if I'm not always Mr. Happy Jolly Fun-time.

"I'd rather be myself. Myself and nasty." - Bernard Marx, Brave New World

Another weekend filled with consumption of pork products - pork jerky on the way to Grandma's, a roast ham, and a huge feast of cornmeal back bacon and cornbread on Sunday. I think the reason why these boots don't fit is that I'm growing trotters.

( other information, not so related to meat, follows )

I have just finished eating a cup of Sunburst brand cheese-flavoured noodles-in-a-cup. It is one of the most disgusting conusmer products I have ever tasted. That includes two years of semi-random sampling of what looked interesting on the shelves of the grocery store near my apartment in Japan.

I really think I am going to be sick now.

WAN

I have been amusing myself recently with the "find random user" function of Livejournal. An unexpectedly large fraction of the journals I've seen are written in Russian. I wonder (since I've been too lazy to look it up from their userinfo pages) whether these are Russians posting from Russia, or are they Slavs transplanted to America, taking advantage of abundant and cheap American technology and Net access to write online in their first language? For that matter, where are the other immigrants - I have found only one other user posting in a foreign language (German).
***

TUP

One of the more disgusting things to come out of the Mammon McDonald's Corp. is the new "McGriddle". Haven't tried one myself yet (I don't eat eggs) but I understand it's a wad of bacon or a sausage patty, scrambled eggs and American cheese, served between two McGriddle cakes, which are small pankaces with syrup added to the mix. Apparently 550 calories and a colon-clogging 33 grams of fat.

Now, where do you suppose the idea for this came from? Did someone in the marketing department think that people who eat at McDonald's really do not have the time or coordination to eat things separately, or were they perhaps slumming it in an actual McDonald's one day and saw some obese moron who preferred to eat with his hands shoving the components of his whole Hotcakes n' Sausage tray into a huge syrup-soaked sandwich and stuffing it down his capacious maw? Equally probable to me but we'll never know the truth.
***

TREE

For all the time I spent in the Army in my younger life, I rarely dream about it. But last night I had another mixed-up dream in which I was a platoon commander, had been wounded in the shoulder slightly and was kind of slumming around the mostly empty barracks while my arm healed. I scrounged a couple of doughnuts from the kitchen and sat around reading war comic books. Later the dream turned into a sexual (though not consummated) fantasy involving one of my co-workers, a woman I've never been interested in, see once a week and speak to once a month. Jeez, why can't I just sleep?
***

FORT

Uh, that's it. Say something, whydoncha?