Tortillas: Eggcellent Save!

Oh man, what a morning for breakfasts.

After looking at a lot of recorded footage of myself for Communication & Counseling Skills class (therapist training), I realized that I need to focus on nutrient-dense foods for a while. I've been living on ice cream, as y'do sometimes, y'know, and my face from side profile looked undernourished, yet overfed, and overall just not what my face had planned for itself. The world is not kind to people who look like women, yet eat like sitcom bachelors. So I microwave myself a big bowl of frozen blueberries, pour a little milk on those berries, peel myself an orange, and fry myself a couple of eggs. (Protein, fiber, and vegetarian fat are my best friends when I need to cut back on processed sweets. Going to use public transit to school, too, to force myself to walk a few miles.)

Unfortunately, my breakfast plans faltered when the eggs overcooked juuuuust enough to solidify the yolks. Oh no! And when I went to season them, the "shaker" opening on the tin of Old Bay seasoning dumped out a heaping teaspoon of ground spices all over those eggs in one big, confusing lump. Like, how did that even happen?!? But it DID happen, is what I'm saying. So, I dusted off the powder as best I could with a paper towel (not very well) and used my little fork to flinchingly lift one tiny, little, cynical test bite out of a hard-cooked yolk before throwing them out. 

The eggs...were not bad. Surprisingly. Not good, either, but not bad enough to throw out. Just overseasoned and disappointing. (I'm too cheap to toss out viable foods.)

This is when I realized that I needed to put the eggs into one or more tortillas, to balance out the flavors. Virtually everything tastes better in a tortilla, because tortillas are from heaven.

We have corn tortillas in my kitchen right now, which I PERSONALLY think should only be eaten after they've been cooked. So I pan-fried two tortillas in the same skillet in which I'd cooked the eggs, put an overcooked, over-spiced egg in each tortilla, and gave myself some smug self-congratulation while eating breakfast like a Breakfast Champ (TM).*

CHAMPION

* I just made up "Breakfast Champ (TM)" right now. Pretty clever, if I ask me. Pretty damn clever.

So these Otter pops and vodka walk into a blender...

As if often goes, if you're me, then you are quite nearly, quite possibly the cheapest person in the world, and yet you volunteered to provide alcoholic drinks and nonalcoholic snacks to a fabulous, queer-themed birthday party for a darling close friend.

Pride (as in "Seattle Pride Parade") might be over a month away, but it's never the wrong season to rainbow things the fuck up.
I have a freezer full of otter pops year-round, and I found a 1.75 liter bottle of adequate vodka in a grocery store clearance shelf, going for $14.94. I also have soda water and a Magic Bullet blender.

Good Idea: Blend the otter pops and vodka together, and add soda water to taste after blending. It doesn't result in the margarita texture that I was aiming for, but if you put one otter pop in the blender with the vodka and blend them into sugarbooze, and crunch up another otter pop of the same flavor into a couple of chunks and put it in as ice, the result is wonderful once watered down sufficiently with maybe 5oz of club soda. If you want to ingest a lot of sugar with your vodka, this is one highly sugary way to do it, and I am very pleased with the results. The purple otter pops taste like grape soda.

Bad Idea: Putting the club soda into the blender. Oh man, that expanded FAST and got everywhere. It was funny, though.




I want to say that this cheapass cocktail recipe puts the pronounciation "gee!" as in "golly gee whiz, that's a good idea!" in "LGBTQ," but despite being both the B and the Q* in that acronym--making me TWO SWEET COLORS OF THE RAINBOW AT ONCE--I feel like that joke would make the "good taste joke police" track me down, put on some Margaret Cho or Louis CK or some of those Reggie Watts sketches from Comedy Bang Bang, or something else with better jokes than I have, and then shush me. As they (the joke police) should. As they really, really should. Those comedians are excellent, and at least 1/3 of them can do cool accents while also making cool non-speech sound-effects, which is pretty much a comedic end game, right there. I'm like, whoa. You win. We both win. Everybody wins.

*Here, the "Q" is implied to mean "queer" as in "catchall word for a gender rebel" or "genderqueer" or "Xena," rather than using "Q" to mean "questioning," or to mean "that space Q who kept messing with Captain Jean-Luc Picard." But "questioning"-labeled folks, as well as space Qs, are also welcome, of course.




Bonus: Never ever, ever, ever do this yourself, ever, ever...but a modest cocktail on one's day off can help numb the symptoms of de Quervain's Tenosynovitis long enough to endure disobeying one's occupational therapist's advice long enough to handwash a few dishes. Just don't do that to yourself. Just because it can be done, it doesn't meant that it should be done. 

REMEMBER JURASSIC PARK!!!!! "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should." But this scientist knows that you should not. Not ever, ever, ever. Not ever. 

...Unless you need to test out a cocktail recipe anyway before debuting it at a friend's birthday party, right? In which case, you use that buzz to get some handwash-only dishes caught up before your partner comes home (except don't), because wahoo! Love is wonderful! (Occupational therapy is also wonderful. Tendon recovery is also wonderful. Be smart with your "gamer's thumb" injury, if/when you develop it.) But love is also wonderful.

DISCLAIMERS:
(Because I don't normally write about alcohol, and want to make sure that I do this right.)

• DRINK RESPONSIBLY
• DON'T DRIVE AFTER DRINKING
• OBEY THE LAW AND THE SAFETY RULES
• HERE IS A LINK TO PROVIDE YOU WITH COOL INFORMATION ABOUT ALCOHOL SCIENCE BECAUSE SCIENCE IS THE BEST: http://www.niaaa.nih.gov

I love you, National Institute of Health. I've loved you since I first met you, even though I sided with the rats when reading Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, because you gave those rats the capacity for electrical engineering and empirical research! But as an adult, I also love you for PubMed, which is maybe my all-time scientific research article database, and for all the science, and also for the science. You...you...you just keep being you, NIH. You make me proud. So proud of you.

Drank a Glass of Coffee Creamer Last Night: The Morning Aftermath

I barely ingested 1/4 cup of straight Girl Scouts Thin Mint Coffee-Mate last night before I gave up and poured the rest of it into a mug, and put the mug into the fridge to save for morning coffee. 

At the time, I reported to friends that the coffee creamer no longer tasted remotely like food, and strictly tasted like a food additive. It was a pretty horrible experience.

It is now 8:15 am. I have been awake for just under an hour. I sliced up a small gala apple and a small honeycrisp apple, and have started nibbling on them. There are two slices of sharp, aged white Tillamook cheddar thrown into the mix, to help balance out the flavors, and to help balance out the apple sugars with a bit of protein and fat. I don't want a blood sugar dip later on.

Now, I haven't an alcoholic beverage in at least a week. Not so much as a beer or glass of wine with dinner, despite having had hamburgers cooked on the charcoal grill this weekend, which is something of a classical "beer" food. I've been drinking water, because it's springtime and I've increased my exercise.

But despite my teetotaling as of late, I woke up feeling the nausea and overall ingestion-regret that I have previously only experienced a handful of other times, when I was young and had dramatically overestimated my ability to metabolize hard alcohol. In fact, it would take several times more liquor to make my morning stomach feel anywhere near as gross as this morning-after-drinking-straight-Coffee-Mate "morning stomach" feels. 

It feels similar enough to a real and proper hangover that I've started thinking of hangovers future, in addition to hangovers past.

In the past, I have promised my nonpracticing Catholic father that I will someday feel as gross as this, the morning after his wake, and we take that shit seriously in our family. He's said that he wants a live band (he's in good health, but still gave me a list of which bands just in case), he wants everybody to tell stories about him, and he wants his funeral to have a very generous open bar. I'm pretty terrified of losing my father. Not only because he's my friend and my dad and I love him and don't want him to die, but also because of the astronomical bar tab his wake is expected to generate. He'll need to live at least another twenty years before I'm financially ready for that kind of grandiosity. (The dude has a lot of friends.)

So, last night's attempt to swig straight Coffee-Mate like I think I will live forever now has me thinking about family and death, as I lurch through my morning routine.

That SAID, the coffee creamer hangover is different than an alcohol hangover in a number of ways:

1. There is not any leftover junk food in my fridge. No pizza, no nachos, nada. I'm not happy about this.

2. I woke up craving fibrous, acidic foods, instead of fluffy, fatty, starchy foods. Hence the apple slices.

3. I am thankfully still well-hydrated.

4. I don't really have much of anything in the way of treasured memories, when looking back on my evening. There were no sing-alongs, no midnight trips to the Gourmet Dog Japon hot dog stand on Pike St in Seattle, and the closest thing to a drinking game with friends was posting last night's Coffee-Mate article on my private Facebook wall, and laughing about it with friends in the comments. But I didn't get out of the house and have an adventure with people I love.

5. While I feel queasy, like the pH of my stomach is "off," I don't actually feel like my medulla oblongata (yeah, Google that one) is detecting anything literally poisonous in my body. Having finished my apples while typing this, I actually feel fine again. Fixing my stomach pH was the only thing I actually needed to do, to repair the gross bodily feelings that I had woken up to.

¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡THERE IS ALSO GOOD NEWS ABOUT THE GIRL SCOUTS THIN MINT COFFEE-MATE BRAND COFFEE CREAMER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The bad news is obviously that it cannot be ingested like a drink of its own, even when one really, really wants some fucking Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies, because those cookies are phenomenal. I mean, come on. In recent years, the Girl Scouts have even been praised for being trans-inclusive, which is especially heartwarming given the Boy Scouts' comparative lack of LGBTQ friendliness. Trans-inclusivity is a huge win, in my book. (Hopefully in yours, too.)

Anyway.

The GOOD NEWS is not only that I got to buy something with a Girl Scouts logo on it, despite cookie season having come and gone, but also that the coffee creamer works really well as a coffee creamer! It's delicious!

I own the most effeminate coffee mug in the world.

Here's what I'm drinking:

Peet's Major Dickenson coffee, prepared via French Press with beans ground about a minute before actually going into the press.

A bit of cane sugar.

A splash of half & half.

The coffee creamer that spent the night in the bottom of that mug, uncovered, in my fridge. (Just boasting that my fridge is okay, gets thoroughly cleaned every few weeks, and doesn't stink up uncovered foods.)

CONCLUSION:

The Girl Scouts Thin Mint Coffee-Mate coffee creamer should only be used as intended.

Coffee-Mate: Girl Scouts Thin Mint Cookie Flavor

It's great, but DO NEVER POUR A GLASS OF IT AND TRY TO DRINK IT STRAIGHT.

I was pretty confident in the assumption that I was just going to understand the flavor intimately, by isolating it and meditating on it. That's what I do. If I want to understand a flavor, I taste it by itself for long enough to wrap my head around it.

But halfway through the first sip, I learned that drinking a glass of undoctored Coffee-Mate is a HORRIBLE IDEA. It needs coffee, OMG. Or vodka, maybe. Or hot chocolate. Or ANY OTHER LIQUID THAT MAY CONCEIVEABLY HELP BALANCE OUT THE FLAVOR OF STRAIGHT COFFEE-MATE.

Save yourself.

SAVE YOURSELF!!!!!!

I haven't, as of writing this, tried it with coffee. But I'm sure that it would be delicious. Better than what I'm up to right now, at the very least.

UPDATE: I feel like I'm drinking a glass of lip gloss. 

Here's how far I am through the cup, now.

See how viscous it is?!? Man. Science!  

Toilet paper's not food, but c'mon.

It's time to tackle a controversial issue: toilet paper.

***WARNING: THIS BLOG POST WILL CONTAIN SOME EUPHEMISTIC AND BARELY RECOGNIZABLE REFERENCES TO HUMAN BODY PART AND SEXUALITY STUFF***

Okay, so...

Um...

This is not the best toilet paper in the world. It serves its primary function--known as "you know...toilet stuff"--perfectly well. 

But as other folks (including Neil deGrasse Tyson) have already stated very eloquently on a number of occasions, you know, something about "sewer located in the middle of an entertainment center" something-something.

This toilet paper leaves tiny little paper "snowflakes" behind wherever it goes. Even my face looks dusty, if/when I use it to remove makeup. In fact, I don't use it to remove makeup. I have temporarily switched to using cotton balls to remove eye makeup, thanks to this toilet paper.

Therefore, something-something-something, "eating," blah-blah-blah, "toilet paper," yadda-yadda, do yourself a favor and invest in something that doesn't leave papery pills and dust behind. You're worth it.

Note to Quilted Northern:

PLEASE FIX THIS PROBLEM WITH YOUR PRODUCT!!!!!!! I hate giving bad reviews. I hate even just disliking things. But I wrote this blog post because, well, yeah, because I thought it was funny, but also because I needed to give myself a memorable reminder to refrain from buying this particular toilet paper again.

That's a bad sign, and it didn't have to be this way.

You know what to do: product testing and tighter quality control methods.

Seriously.

Greens, and Potato/Sweet Potato Mash. Did I Write This Already?

A friend posted on Facebook, requesting new, healthy recipes, because he'd decided to "step up his game" as a self-feeding home cook.

I posted these two recipes, and was like, "Hey! I just typed two recipes! THAT'S a food blog entry, right there."

Potato/Sweet Potato Mash

I like to roast peeled chunks of sweet potato (brushed with oil) while peeled chunks of regular potatoes boil. Once everything's fully cooked, drain the water from the boiled potatoes, add the sweet potato chunks to the same pot, and mash 'em up however you normally prepare mashed potatoes.

It's simultaneously more nutritious AND more interesting than traditional mashed potatoes, and is a good way to add a little variety to things. (Ed. I stole this idea from a cooking show, I think, but I've seen different recipes for this concept all over the place.)

Greens, How I Do Them

Here's an adaptation of Southern-style greens that I do pretty often, and it turns out a lot tastier than it has any real right to.

1. Prep the greens. Make sure that you have a bunch of edible green leaves that are clean and have been ripped into bite-sized chunks. Kale is rad, but you wanna minimize the amount of stalk in there. You can go totally nuts and prep what looks like an unmanageably huge pile of leaves, because it shrinks a lot.

2. If you like meat, brown a little bit of (usually non-breakfast) ground sausage on the bottom of a big soup pot. Leave the sausage in.

3. Fill the pot with water, scraping any brown meat residue off of the bottom, if appropriate. You can also use any kind of broth. To be traditional, use pork broth made by boiling some smoked ham hock. But I usually just go with water, and it's fine.

4. Put the leaves into the pot with the water, and get the water boiling. Use a spoon or something, if necessary, to keep mashing the leaves down until they fit into the pot. They'll shrink as the water gets hot.

5. Boil 'em as long as you want, and add a bunch of savory things to the water. A few splashes of apple cider vinegar and a bit of decent hot sauce or salsa are mandatory (I was skeptical before trying it, but I'm now a believer). After that, seasonings are "to taste."

I use salt, usually some kind of fat like butter and/or olive oil, this mystery stuff called "seasoning sauce" that I picked up in a store, worstechire(sp?) sauce, soy sauce, maybe some garlic powder, maybe some ground peppercorns, and sometimes just a subliminally little pinch of curry. I recommend tasting the broth pretty often, and having fun with this stage. I also recommend shying away from sweet additions, and leaning more toward sour and spicy additions.

Cook "to death," or until the leaves have seriously wilted, and taste good. (Ed. This is a personalized adaptation of some recipes I've seen elsewhere.)