On a related note I don’t have anything to post right now because I didn’t actually have any food until today. Surviving on hot dogs and peanut butter for three days is not fun. Anyway, this quarter is going to be very busy. I am working out my schedule, so once again I have not forgotten you. I am just bogged down. More to come.

Last week was spring break. I did get some work done on the site, but I also focused mostly on visiting family and friends. I got to see my grandpa for the first time in a few months, which was nice. I still can’t quite find what I’m looking for to replace the food page, but I’m close. Ideally I will be able to update the front page and have every other page update automatically. More to come on that, so please just bear with me while I try to get this all figured out.

Today was the first day of fall quarter as well, so I need to determine when I can actually post updates during the day.

It tasted like peanut butter and bananas

All right. Images are working again, the food page is almost finished, and I’m going to be reformatting old updates retroactively over the next couple of weeks. The way things will work is pretty simple. Instead of having two separate articles for each thing I make (a post on the front page and a food page) there will just be a link at the bottom of each post. Clicking on that will send you over to the fill post, which will contain all of the extra content that would otherwise appear on the food page. That would include the ingredients list and the recipe, more or less.

About this peanut butter smoothie. So far not one person I have described it to seems to think that it is a good idea, which I can understand. Mixing orange juice, peanut butter, strawberries and bananas sounds a little strange. It tastes a little strange too, but in a good way. I think.

The story behind it is pretty simple; I was hungry and thirsty and didn’t have anything frozen to thicken up a smoothie. The next logical choice was peanut butter. The only problem was that I had all of my fruit in the blender already and it was soaking in orange juice. There is no going back once there is orange juice in the blender.

As soon as the peanut butter was in the blender I was fairly positive that this was going to be a tragedy. Well, I probably wouldn’t be blogging about it if it was. The smoothie turned out extremely thick due to the peanut butter. It also ended up tasting like bananas dipped in peanut butter, which was actually very good. In fact, if you’ve never had bananas dipped in peanut butter I highly recommend it.

If in the future you find yourself with a bowl of fruit and nothing frozen to thicken up a smoothie, consider the stranger things in your pantry. Like peanut butter.

Recipe:

Ingredients:

• 2 Bananas.
• 6-8 Strawberries.
• 2c Orange-Pineapple-Banana juice.
• 1/3-1/2c Creamy peanut butter.
• 1 tsp cinnamon

Recipe:

1. Blend until smooth
2. Keep refrigerated

I’m going to just wait it out until after finals week is over. That means no update today or Friday. However, by the end of Spring Break I will have the site completely fixed up, including the food tab.

Updates lined up:

• Latkes (potato pancakes).
• Pudding injected, glazed banana muffins.
• Biscuits.

I promise I haven’t forgotten you Internet, it’s just that I accidentally broke the site during maybe the worst possible week.

Unfortunately it’s finals week, so my time is strained. If I can figure this thing out by the end of the week I’ll have it all wrapped up over Spring break.

Hard-boiled eggs on a bagel. With cheese.

Hard-boiled eggs are delightfully simple. All you really need to hard-boil an egg is about 15 minutes, some boiling water and an egg. They are also fairly filling and can be utilized in a number of dishes such as deviled eggs and egg salad.

If you happen to be pressed for time or don’t have/like mayonnaise, just slice the egg thin and put it on some sort of bread. Maybe something like…leftover bagels. The egg bagels (Eggels?) to the right are simple; a cut and toasted bagel with a piece of cheese, one sliced, hard-boiled egg and some salt and pepper.

They make for a fairly substantial lunch and are easy. Plus you can add just about anything you want. A slice of tomato, light mayonnaise and some spinach would be good. Add a piece of goetta or bacon and you have a breakfast sandwich. Some chipotle ranch dressing and leftover chicken breast, maybe. The world is your oyster. Make a seafood bagel.

If you have never made a hard-boiled egg, fear not. I have. A hard-boiled egg will keep for a while, so you might as well make a few. Set your egg(s), shell intact, in a pot with at least enough water to cover them. Turn the stove on and get the pot up to a nice rolling boil. Depending on how fast your stove is it should take about 10 minutes (or a little less) of boiling to cook the egg through. They will be very, very hot.

The egg is less likely to crack due to sudden temperature change if you have it in the pot as it starts to boil. Adding an egg to a pot of boiling water can result in cracking and an annoying mess.

Set the eggs aside until they cool and put them back in the fridge until you need them. If you’re into instant gratification and want your egg now, put it in a bowl of cold water in the freezer for a few minutes.

There are a few ways to approach cracking a hard-boiled egg. If you don’t care whether or not it stays intact, just crack and peel. My personal favorite is to grip the egg in one hand to make a fist, then punching my open palm. The egg will crack (or squash if you use too much force) and you’ll probably feel a little cooler. Assuming you do care about the look of the egg, a little more care would be wise.  There will be a space of air at the bottom of the egg called an air cell. That is a good place to start if you’re not used to peeling an egg. Crack that and do your best to peel the entire shell away with the thin white skin that will be attached to the shell.

Slicing an egg is fairly simple. I find it’s best to take a very sharp paring knife and just press it through the egg. Be careful not to press it through your finger as well. A cutting board would be ideal. The yoke will provide some resistance, but that shouldn’t cause too much trouble.

Edit:

(The Real) Chris is right. Adding a little salt to the water as you boil it will make peeling the egg easier. Also older eggs are apparently easier to peel (as opposed to farm-fresh).

Poppy seeds get everywhere, by the way.

You know, for this being a bread that was originally based on making bread there is not a lot of bread here. In fact, this is only the second gallery update dealing with bread, the first being Focaccia Pizza. Bagels are, in case you’ve never had one, delicious. They are my favorite ring-shaped food. Why I have waited this long to make them is a mystery to me.

Anyway, about the bagels. They’re easy to make. If you can make yeast bread you can make bagels. All you have to do is send them through some boiling water before you bake them. Simple work.

It should be clear to anyone who reads regularly (and apparently about 30 of you do) that I can’t be satisfied with simple things. Clearly I had to make garlic and onion bagels, not just plain white bread bagels. That’s boring and easy. I would recommend starting with the boring and easy, because I think I just get lucky most of the time. Adding the garlic is simple enough; just add garlic. The onion is a different story though.

I basically pulped the onion by sending it through a fine grater. The nice thing is that the onion doesn’t grate into strips. It just sort of turns to pulp. (That’s good. We want that.) To get rid of the excess juice I put the pulp in some paper towels and gave it a good squeeze until all I had was onion bits.

If you have never made bagels and are looking for some sort of bread to make, I would suggest it. The recipe posted over in the Food tab is just a basic recipe. Feel free to send me pictures of variations you make.

Smoked sausage and spaghetti

For the last several days I have been making some modifications to the site. A few one them are obvious, like the random gallery and the little ad block on the right. A few changes have more to do with streamlining and formatting and are less obvious. Well, because I have spent more time on the site than cooking I don’t have any gallery or recipe today. Instead I have a simple meal suggestion.

Pasta is almost as easy as it gets when it comes to feeding yourself in college. It’s fairly filling and about as easy as boiling water. The problem is that it gets monotonous. Unless you happen to be Josh. It’s easy enough to add some variety to spaghetti and pasta sauce. Meat is probably the most obvious route. Whatever you happen to have in the freezer, 1lb of smoked sausage or a few chicken breasts, will go well with pasta.

Assuming that your meat of choice is not frozen, cut it into bite-size pieces and cook them however you see fit. I usually put either chicken or sausage with some spices in a skillet with some oil. In fact, this chicken will work just fine. Be sure that the meat is cooked through to your satisfaction before you go eating it though. While the meat is cooking get the water for the pasta boiling and the sauce warming in a saucepan. Once the meat is done just drain the oil and put the meat in the sauce with anything else you might want over spaghetti. Maybe some finely chopped onions or shredded cheese.

Different meats or vegetables added to pasta changes the flavor and provided some variety, which is apparently the spice of life. It’s also a good way to use up leftovers.

I improvised by just baking the corn dogs on a baking sheet. What resulted was, as anticipated, cornbread coated hot dogs. They were not really corn dogs. Honestly I would rather have chopped the hot dogs up and tossed them into the cornbread, but for an experiment they weren’t too bad. Next time  I will make sure that I have enough oil.

In other news, my plans for the site are moving slowly but surely. Hopefully by the end of my spring break I will have redone the Food page as well as the way posts show up here on the front page. Ideally there will be description of what was made (like the one you just read) followed by a continued link. Clicking the post title or the continued link will take you off to the full post, displaying the recipe and possibly gallery as well. I’m not sure yet.

Finals week is fast approaching though. School takes priority.