Holy Christ send help, I made too much rice.

No, seriously. That pot in the last entry, filled to the top with rice, is a fucking 3.5 quart soup pot. BEFORE most of the rice was fluffed.

I don't have children. I'm not expecting guests. My husband is not participating in my Americanized Versions Of Indian Food phase, for reasons I accept without comprehending, so I'm going to have to eat, eat, eat, or concede defeat.

Dear Lord, what in the crazy madness go nuts Hell did I do?!?

... And what's with the blasphemy, here? Jesus.

There it goes again!!!

Well, I'm listening to The Beatles' Abby Road, so it's obviously their fucking fault, fucking English creeps.

I accidentally cooked perfect rice.

Right?!? How did I do this?!? I never do this!!!

This rice does not only look perfectly cooked on camera, either. It's as fluffy and chewy as the stuff in restaurants. And I made a FREAKISHLY HUGE quantity of it.

So, what happened? I Googled rice cooking like I do every time, and this time, I found this link:

How to Cook Rice - Jasmine Rice

I liked the idea of just eyeballin' the ratios, so I decided to pick this recipe. I started with what I thought was too much water, but I wandered away while waiting for it to boil, and when I wandered back something like 40 to 400 seconds later, it was not only boiling, but that inch-y quantity of water over the rice was gone. I panicked, scraped the bottom of the pot with a metal spoon (no browned or burned bits! Must've caught it early), added a bunch of cold water from the kettle to the rice, panicked because it was supposed to be cooking, not cold- ing, tasted the rice, found it halfway cooked, and decided to keep cooking it. And keep adding water. And keep cooking it.

For the most part, if/when it was cooking, it was just simmering. And because I had no idea how much rice or water I'd used, or even how long it had truly been cooking, I kept tasting it. And when it was somehow freakishly perfect, I took it off the burner. The rice wasn't even damp! Or burnt! 

I made a huge pile of it, so I'll have rice to do all kinds of stuff with for the next while. I'll probably make rice pudding, later.

For today, I pan-fried little dice-sized cubes of the firmest tofu I could nab, and then simmered it in some stuff from Safeway. Best decision ever? Or just the best decision I've made in the past hour? Maybe both. But probably just the latter, because I've also been doing academic homework today, because FUCKIN' A THAT'S RIGHT, I'M IN GRAD SCHOOL!!!!!!!!!!! And I'm eating a lunch that I really like:

Here's a photo of my bag of rice (a gift from a relative who was cleaning bulk stuff from her pantry), and a photo of the empty butter chicken sauce jar, and a photo of the ripped up container that the tofu cubes came in. (THEY WERE ALREADY CUBED, RIGHT THERE IN THE PACKAGE!!!!!!!)

(Eew, that is a messy-looking, discarded package that once held tofu. What kind of jackass would put that in a food blog?!? Ugh. It's like, " only show food- grade food, or don't show anything, man.")

This guy!

Don't worry, it's not cheese, it's squash.

350 F, 40 minutes.

Brown sugar soda

I'm still exploring new ways to augment plain seltzer water, and I've found another one that I like.

Cane sugar soda's all the rage with the kids these days, right? 

But it's hard to bother with adding flavor to ANYTHING, let alone bother to make proper infused simple syrups from scratch, when I'm tiiiiiiiiiiired. It's also hard to justify BUYING flavored syrups when I don't want to spend $5. Especially when I really DON'T want to have to leave the couch to go to the store. I'm not home sick today because I'm in great health, okay?!? Okay?!? Okay. 

... Okay.

So instead of spending time and effort on much of anything, I decided to just try using  brown sugar instead, to make myself an Italian cream soda.

And I liked it! Brown sugar is delicious.

Here's what I did:

Seltzer water.

Brown sugar.

Maybe a little half & half.

Whipped cream, I guess.

Now, the sugar and water's enough right there. You can just stop and it will be fine.

But the half & half helps give that Italian Cream Soda taste, and gives it an extra boost against heartburn. Useful, right? And I figured that if I was going there already, I might as well top it with whipped cream. I probably shouldn't have, because it overpowered the light molasses flavor in the sugar. But it's what I did.

And I will do it again.

WATER YOUR CATS

Seattle had a little heat wave this summer. It reached temperatures as high as "maybe a little cold for summertime in Maryland." Like 78-85F. 

But as a region where most people (including me) don't own an air conditioner, this was still pretty freakishly hot. Hot enough that I had to actually start thinking about hydration.

My two cats, like many cats, just aren't very "into" water. They're still pretty healthy in spite of this. They eat wet canned food twice a day, so they do get at least a little moisture regularly, and they do have fresh water available in case they actually want it.

But I worry anyway.

So I decided to start mixing extra water in with their meals, so that the quantity of water is maybe about equal in volume with the actual food. This mix gets stirred up before serving enough that the cats have no choice but to treat it like stew, and down the water with the food. (My husband has backed this play, and also adds water to their food when he feeds them.) They lick their dishes clean every time, and in the process they end up drinking considerably more water than they used to.

The upside is that they've looked significantly more spry and comfortable than they did during Seattle's last heat wave.

The downside is that now they both drool a little when they're happy. 

I'd worry that maybe we've overwatered them, but they otherwise seem to be in much better condition than they did before we started this. Still. If I'd known that they'd blossom into droolers, once they became hydrated enough to spare the moisture...

Cornbread-Roasted (Almost Chicken-Fried?) Tofu

This was the best idea ever. I know I say that a lot, but I really mean it this time. This was the Best. Idea. Ever.

I was roasting a sweet potato, obviously (like people do), and I was like, "Hey, you know what? I could roast more than one thing! This is a pretty big oven!"

So I got out a little baking dish, made a runny paste of canola oil and white flour in the bottom (about 1/5" deep), arranged slices of extra firm tofu in it, sprinkled cornbread and Penzey's Ozark Seasoning (dude) on top, and just threw it on another rack while the sweet potato did its thing. Probably at 425F for an hour.

I took the tofu out when it was as browned an awesome as it is in the photo, and after it had cooled enough to eat, I ate it faster than I could actually photograph it. But there's still enough left in the picture that you should "get the picture."

I could stand to swap out cheese for something that's reminiscent of cheese, at least some of the time, to help slow down my consumption of animal fats a little. Cholesterol, whaaat? (Ugh.) But I still require oily, squishy foods that are high in protein. This one raises the stakes by being quasi-breaded in cornmeal, and by being as oily as a roux that substituted liquid for extra oil. Oh, heaven.

Round 1: Infused Whiskey

My fa-vo-rite baaaaars do it. (Ahem, The Shakedown and Knee High Stocking Company.) Beeeeeees do it. Even educated fleeeeeeas do it! Let's do it! Let's put stuff in whiskey!

PAX Prime is just around the corner, and for those of us in Seattle within the video game community, that means that it's time to start entertaining the notion of entertaining some house guests, in fancier-than-usual style. Puttin' on the Ritz, and all that jazz.

So.

I am attempting to infuse whiskey with non-whiskey flavors, to see what will happen. Because it's soooooooooo fashionable.

Tonight's contenders INCLUDE!

Pickling spice
I'm actively rooting for this one. It smells better than it sounds.

Cloves
Already proven popular by pros, but I'm not overly confident. I may still steep it for too long, or select the wrong clove-to-booze ratio.

Penzeys Dried Orange Peel
Effin' SMART! I have no doubts or worries about this decision, apart from the nonspecific dread that I've learned to pair with this kind of blind optimism. But otherwise? Chipper.

Peet's Irish Breakfast Tea
All the bars anymore already have an Earl Grey infused whiskey, so going for another strong black tea seems like a solid choice. However, I am worried about steeping time here, because I prefer to steep black teas in water for about 3.5 minutes. If I want especially strong tea, I normally add more leaves instead of adding more steeping time, because an overlong steep creates a bitterness that I don't much like. This tea is just sitting in the fridge, in some whiskey overnight. I have my concerns.

Herbes de Provence
I... ah... erm... impulsivity is a perfectly normal symptom of ADHD, and curiosity just HAPPENS to be a necessary component of any fine scientific mind. Which is to say that I'm painfully curious about this one, and I know that I'll still drink it later, even if it sucks. And it very likely will suck. And that's okay.

And there you have it! Everything gets to steep overnight in the fridge, and I'll see what happens in the morning.

I regret not having any vanilla beans to work with, but I've added them to the shopping list.

And not to get further off-topic, but look what else I found when searching YouTube for clips from All That Jazz. That's something else, isn't it? Look at them go!