Melting Cheddar Cheese on Baby Spinach

"I get it."

"I get it!"

"No, really, Lindsay. I get it."

"All you eat are found art objects, desserts, green vegetables to prevent total annihilation, and melted cheddar cheese. A typical day consists of a breakfast of candy and Ritalin, green beans and coffee for lunch, and a hot bowl of melted cheese and Oreos for supper. God, just stop... JUST STOP TALKING ABOUT IT!!! Please! There are CHILDREN on the internet, for cryin' out loud!"

"Stop making me look at your food! Just stop it! Please, please, PLEASE knock it off."

"I just... I... I give up. Let's just get this one over with."

Depicted in the photo below is tonight's main course for dinner:

A bowl of baby spinach, tossed with homemade raspberry vinegar from a wonderful aunt on my husband's side of the family, with Tillamook mild cheddar cheese melted on top to serve as the oil, salt, and protein of the dish.

It was lovely. This is the second night in a row that I've had this for dinner. I plan to eat the whole Costco tub of baby spinach before it wilts, because I have an antagonistic relationship with our compost bin, and don't want to give it any handouts. It is lazy and full of discarded things.

Why Always Eat the Food? Putting Cooking Oil In Your Hair & Almond Extract on Your Person

Now, I'm a big fan of eating food. Like, hands-down, in favor of it.

But sometimes, it can be useful to use traditionally food items in non-food ways! Like using eggs in place of snowballs, when there isn't any snow. Or mixing baking soda and lemon juice, and then putting the foaming mass of organic drain cleaner on my face. Because I did.

Today, I did two similar things, with mixed results:

#1. I put on almond extract like perfume

This should be a great idea, right? I get to smell like some non-human stuff, but I don't have to make anybody sneeze or complain. Seriously, if you even CLAIM that something in the world smells better than almond extract, then I will fight you. Or love you, if you introduce me to some game-changing new smell. I'm not really sure. (For example, my sister claims that there is a beautiful type of centipede that smells just like almond extract. So, if you have one, and we are close friends, please invite me over, so that I can smell it.)

So!

I dabbed a bit of almond extract behind my ears and on my wrists today, in the standard perfume ritual, and it smelled great. In fact, the smell was perfect. It was a perfect smell.

Maybe five seconds later, the smell vanished completely.

Sure, I've heard it said that a truly compatible perfume will mix with the wearer's own scent so subtly that it no longer becomes overtly noticeable. And I HOPE that this is the case. I would love to learn that I was simply made to wear almond extract. But my instincts tell me that it probably just evaporated into nothing.

#2. I mashed canola oil into the non-scalp part of my hair, knotting it up in a bun, and just letting it soak up the oil like a baseball mitt.

Luckily for me, I already KNOW that this one works, because I've done it before.

As a ginger, I have a handful of oddly specific vanity "issues."

One is that my eyebrows and eyelashes are as invisible as Tilda Swinton's, so if I want them to show up on my Cyndi-Lauper-round-not-Ziggie-Stardust-gaunt face, I'd better do my best to remember art school. Gotta draw within the lines, that kind of thing.

Another "issue" is that I don't get along with direct sunlight. I burn fast, and I hate the look of it. Did you know that Bram Stoker was a ginger? A ginger from Dublin, even! Are you surprised? Me neither. (I am not from Dublin, but when I was there I found the weather comparable to Seattle's, and I felt pretty comfortable.)

And ANOTHER thing is my hair.

Without the shiny mutant hair, I'd just have the coloring of a super-pale, eyeless fish from a sunless cave. But WITH the hair, complete strangers have an excuse to walk up to me and ask me if I use hair dye. Thanks for asking, strangers! I also have one more excuse to secretly pretend to be the Dark Phoenix from the 1970s X-Men comic books. And that's a good thing. ("Oh, X-Men, I must kick your asses severely, for no real reason, because I discovered some bad habits at the discotheque where we picked up The Dazzler last week. Also, I ate a solar system for the kicks.")

Sure, I might pretend to take my hair for granted. I've let it grow out in such a way that, when brushed fluffy and vigorously nodded to heavy metal music (we call this form of dance "headbanging") the appearance is oddly masculine, in an old-timely Metallica way. I can style it like Drew Barrymore's hair in that Charlie's Angels movie, but that requires art supplies and forethought, so I tend to just round it up to "pre-haircut James Hatfield with a sassy ponytail." It works out well enough.

But nonetheless, I secretly take intensely dedicated care of my hair, like it's a private little victory garden to tend in times of strife. It... Well, to quote some not-quite-metal, we could say that my hair reminds me of a warm, safe place, where as a child I'd hi-de-yide, and pray for the thunder and the rain to quietly pass me by. In fact, in middle school and early high school, I DID hide in my hair. But as a child, I hid in the fur of a collie that looked just like Lassie. The experience was roughly the same.

So!

Even as I type this, the non-scalp parts of my hair are carefully organized into a "super-cool," top-of-the-head ponytail, and that ponytail is THOROUGHLY saturated in canola oil. I seriously just mashed about 1/3rd of a cup of cooking oil in there, until it was ridiculously oily. Today was a sick day spent hanging around the house, so I've had the opportunity to just leave my hair like this for hours.

Because I've done this before, I know that once I've showered my hair into something clean, the previously dry ends of my hair will be much, much softer, and less frizzy. I've tried a wide assortment of different hair moisturizing masks, and cooking oil actually produces the best results. Yay for my wallet!!!

I know that many people have already done cooking oil hair masks for ages and ages, so while I can proclaim awesomeness, I can't claim discovery.

It's a trick that I'd originally picked up when reading about how to maintain gorgeous, curly, natural, African-style hair. (A girl can dream, eh? The grass being greener on the other side, and so on. I like to read about what I don't have.) The results in the how-to articles were always so lush-sounding that I wanted to try it on my own hair, just to see. And while my hair is a different texture, I can report that the results are still amazing. Huzzah!

Typically, I read about this being done with olive oil, but I use standard cooking oil instead, for a couple of reasons. One is that I don't want to smell like olive oil. I want to smell like almond extract!!! The other reason is that olive oil is CONSIDERABLY more expensive, and the results that I get with cheapo cooking oil are definitely good enough for me.

And that concludes today's report on using food in non-food ways! I hope you had fun, because I sure did.

See you later, everyone! Bye bye! Good night! Have a nice weekend! So long! Until we meet again! Take care, now! Say hello to your mother for me! Bon voyage! Godspeed! Let's do this again sometime! Well, look at the time. It sure is getting late. But drive safely, okay! Don't forget that you can always just call a taxi, and then get a ride back to your car in the morning. Alright, see you around, pardner! Goodbye!

What, real food?!? Attractively plated, real food?!?

I'll bet you didn't think that this Duchamp(ion) had it in her, did you? Actual, edible, proper food. Not inedible craft supplies, not candy, not even "cheese on top of whatever." But I got the stuff, cats. The stuffed cats. Wait, no. No cats were involved.

But I did a good job!

Tonight, I roasted chicken parts in olive oil, generously coated in Penzeys' Ozark seasoning.

I also boiled fresh kale and fresh beet greens in water seasoned with Old Bay seasoning, a little more of the Ozark seasoning, a bit of Johnny's Salt, some fresh salsa, some Cholula hot sauce, some vegetable oil, and some apple cider vinegar. Instead of browning mild Italian sausage on the bottom of the pan before adding the water, I tried to get a meaty, smoky effect in a vegetarian way, by using liquid smoke. The greens still came out nicely, but I should have used a bit less of the liquid smoke, because it overpowered some of the other seasonings. Live and learn, eh? Still, my greens were, as usual, a feather in my cap. A damp, green feather.

I also boiled whole, fresh beets until sweet and tender, to be peeled before eating at the diner's discretion.

And dessert? Dessert's easy. Like assembling a five-part children's puzzle.

Two wafer "cigars," three rounded, truffle-sized scoops of vanilla bean gelato separated from the rest of the dish by a small moat of slivered almonds. Across the almonds were chocolate chips to the right (a good kind with a short ingredient list), and frozen blueberries to the left. The left side of each dish, from the berries to the gelato, was drizzled with stripes of Torani caramel sauce. Whipped cream was also at the ready, to be applied as a condiment by each individual diner, as the dish is consumed.

But more than that, more than the quality, more than the range of temperatures and textures--berries colder than gelato, gelato colder than chocolate chips, chocolate chips colder than almonds, almonds colder than caramel, with a much more easily predicted "soft to crunchy" texture spectrum--more than the range of sweet to savory, even... was the plating.

I may be something of a sideshow geek when I'm showing off, but I'm still the daughter of a rowdy, retired chef, and even my plating can "bring it." At least, I, uh, I mean, that's not my BEST dessert plating EVER, and the photo's blurry and poorly lit, and the caramel didn't look like clean stripes when I took the picture, but, uh, uh, uh, it's still alright. And in PERSON, it looked awesome.

(I only paused to photograph dessert, but you can probably imagine what the rest of it looked like.)

ALSO too cowardly to buy THIS

Right?!?

The experimental marketing crossover is so dada that I'm actually a little pissed at my own penny-pinching and cowardice, because my curiosity about this commercial product is ALMOST unbearable. But, like the title of this piece broadcasts, I was too chicken to buy it during today's grocery run.

Cocoa Puffs Muffin Mix, brought to you by Betty Crocker.

I... Uh...

If memory serves, Cocoa Puffs cut the roof of my mouth. But normally I'll eat anything doused in sugar.

So...

Jury's still out. But I haven't had the will, strength, or personal power needed to leap into this particular experiment. Not yet.

Oh, and the blurriness? That's a scratch on the phone camera, not a cool filter effect. So we're clear about that.

"Grilled cheese?" More like Grilled! Cheese!

I can't EVEN articulately express how game-changing this discovery was. In one of her recent visits, my sister showed me that cheddar cheese--all by itself--can get toasted in a skillet without sticking, and that it turns into these amazing, crispy sheets that look like potato chips. It is absolutely the right choice for a number of occasions, and if you're able to do it (no lactose issues, no veganism, etc.), then you HAVE to do it.

Now, I consider cheese to be a legitimate food.

Right now I'm having a light dinner of apples and cheese, in which cheese--again, ALL BY ITSELF--is the main source of protein and fat. Right?!? Awesome!

Now, I like different cheeses at different temperatures and textures, but typically I like cheese to be served warm. Warm enough for the fats to liquefy.

Not only do I love the illusion of increased richness created by altering the texture, but I also love that heated cheese stops having what's typically one single texture (often like modeling clay), and splits into two or three textures (gooey, oil, and sometimes crisped).

Sure, some cheeses have multiple textures even when chilled, but let's pretend that I'm not including rinds, extra ingredients like dried fruits, or veins of mold in this discussion. Today's food project was specifically a deconstructed grilled cheese sandwich, for the "let's not bother with bread this time" crowd, so I used a Tillamook medium cheddar, and I stand by that choice.

In fact, I love that choice. By liquefying the already-present fats, this cheese ABSOLUTELY felt like a richer food, EVEN THOUGH the actual fat content decreased as the oil ran off. I wouldn't say that the decrease in fat content was enough to be medically significant, but it's absolutely enough to be MATHEMATICALLY interesting.

Alchemy, right?!?

The cheese even tastes noticeably saltier once it's been heated, despite no actual changes in the salt content. I love this alteration, as well, because I like salt. If I'm going to have a bit of the ol' NaCl anyway, then I want to taste it.

Sure, it might get a little tough when it cools, but it's easy enough to avoid that mistake. You just eat it before that happens.

So?

Again, our bottom line here is that heating up cheddar cheese directly in the skillet until it's just toasty enough to flip like a pancake is a brilliant idea.

Here's a photo:
(I put part of the skillet on the burner, and let part of it hover in the air, to help make the cheese heat unevenly. This helped diversify the cheese's textures in a more overt way, and was absolutely the right decision for the situation.)

Easy as easy-pie, easy peasy

What? You think writing a food blog is EASY?!?

You think that FOOD is easy?!?

You think I was just BORN knowing which end of the fork is too pointy to stick in my ear?!?

Yeah, well you know WHAT?!? Maybe it IS easy. Is that what you want me to say? Is it? IS IT?!?

Well FINE. Maybe it is.

As easy as PIE, more like!!!

...

So, I made a blueberry pie this week, because my dad brought a homemade blueberry pie to Easter dinner (this past Sunday), and it was amazing, and when my husband and I got home from dinner we both looked at each other and went, "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck, we should own a pie for ourselves." So that's ultimately what had to happen, about two days later.

Recipe!

Step 1. Buy two 15oz cans of blueberries. The ones from the photo.

Step 2. Carefully peel the label off of the can. The recipe is on the inside lining of the paper label.

Step 3. Read the recipe BEFORE you open the can. I made that mistake, and had to seal the opened can back up with cling wrap to make an emergency run to the grocery store for corn starch.

Step 4. Have some pie crust ready.

I'm lazy and undiscerning, so I bought pie crust from the grocery store, too. I didn't buy frozen, because I'm not patient like that. I bought dough from the dough part of the store, never looking back... Except for right now... Because I am looking back... Through the lenses of time.

5. Do what the instructions on the inner lining of the paper label from the berry can says. Do WHATEVER IT SAYS!!! FOLLOW THE RULES AND NOBODY GETS HURT!!!

6. ... Congratulations! You have pie!

Remember, the pie that I photographed looks like it has freckles because I sprinkled the whole thing with, like, a LOT of turbinado sugar crystals.

It's delicious, but the photo makes the pie look like it has a rash. Ignore this.

Just appreciate that it's pie.