Erich T. Wade

Where does the time go? I mean seriously, that just happened. And now it’s happening again.

Now I have to decide whether I’m going to take a stab at a NaNoWriMo book this year. On the one hand, the answer should be “No, I need to finish the book I’m on.” On the other hand, the answer should be, “Yes, I’ve been wanting to take another stab at it for years and this looks like a pretty good year to do it.”

I guess I’ll see. It’s not like I don’t have a half-dozen ideas in the I-could-totally-start-that-now stage.

Hmmmm.

Last night’s dream: I dreamed that the dream I was having had a writer, who was outside the dream (in the fashion that creators are generally outside their works). However, the illustrator was a character inside the dream, and had no existence in the meta-dream in which the writer existed. She was jealous of the dream’s main romance plot, so she locked the writer up in a cell in order to force him to rewrite the dream with one of the characters falling in love with her instead.

As if I don’t already have enough worries about characters taking on lives of their own.

On an unrelated note, Kat wants me to issue a clarification to yesterday’s post. Summer and I were vibrating like hyperactive gerbils: she went into a sugar coma and slept for several hours. I hereby blame my misrepresentation on vibrating like a hyperactive gerbil.

I swear this isn’t just spontaneously a food blog. I’m sure I’ll blog about something else soon.

An old Lifehacker tip pointed me to Recipe Matcher, a site where you can type in what’s in your pantry and be directed to recipes that use those ingredients. Given my current goal, this is really freakin’ cool. And it pointed me to a ridiculously simple peanut butter cookie recipe: all you need is peanut butter, sugar, and an egg.

These are really tasty.

A few notes:

• I took pictures. I swear I did. Apparently the sugar high from these things was so intense that it hit about fifteen minutes ahead of time, because all the pictures look like they were taken by a hyperactive vibrating gerbil.
• The recipe doesn’t say to grease the pan, and I assumed that the oils from the peanut butter would keep the cookies from sticking. This was correct.
• These cookies are really, really soft and crumbly, especially right when they come out. I thought I hadn’t cooked them long enough at first (I went for the low end of the cooking time), but as it turns out I nearly burned a couple of them.
• These cookies are incredibly rich. I accidentally made myself sick on them, and it didn’t take long at all. Also my whole family is vibrating like hyperactive gerbils.

Right! So the stewe was delicious.

It was savory, had a nice mixture of textures, and some stuff that doesn’t apply to all stews as well. The bits of zucchini squash were especially good. I almost didn’t notice the apple in there, but appreciated it when I did. There was a slight spicy aftertaste – this is not a spicy-hot dish, my wife had no issue with it, but the taste was there. I’d recommend it. I’d do it again, but given how I tend to experiment with dishes like this, I don’t think this exact stew will ever come out of my kitchen again.

Here, have a before-and-after-cooking shot of the crockpot:

Our plan had originally been to eat dinner around six or seven, or whenever depending on when we got to go look at a house, but looking at the house got postponed and we got hungry. In the end we ate about 4 PM, the stew having crocked for about 5 hours.

Current Music: Scarborough Fair by Simon and Garfunkel. This has been stuck in my head for about two and a half days now, and I think I may forfeit my life if I play it again sans headphones near my wife any time soon.

When I was writing up supper last night, there are two things that completely slipped my mind. First, our crockpot is broken. The last time we tried to use it we checked in at the several hour mark and discovered that it was still cold — well, you know, room temperature really. Not hot, is the point. The other thing that slipped my mind was that, yesterday being Thursday, that makes today Friday, which is (1) the day Summer and I usually go over to my aunt’s house in the morning and (2) the day we’re all eating dinner at my aunt’s, what with her going on a trip tomorrow and all. As it turns out my aunt was planning a roast for dinner, but since we still don’t know exactly when today we’re going to get to look at a house we’re interested in it would be difficult to time the roast correctly.

Luckily, these problems all contain the solution to one another. My aunt and I just got done throwing a stew in the crockpot which is heavily inspired by the aforementioned Greene Beef Stew: she didn’t have any brown sugar on hand and didn’t really want to add any, nor did she have seasoning salt, but on the other hand she had some other stuff she wanted to use up before she left. The final ingredients list looks about like so:

Greene Beefe Stewe – Wade Porke Variante*

• 1 lb boneless pork sirloin roast, cubed
• about a dozen baby carrots, sliced (I made sure the total carrot volume was about right)
• 3 celery stalks, chopped
• 4 yellow potatoes, diced
• about a third of a really big red onion, chopped
• 1 cup corn
• 1 large clove garlic, minced (This was probably equivalent to 2 normal cloves; we had another clove that would have brought the equivalent total up to 3, but it was moldy so we didn’t use it.)
• 1 tbsp honey
• 1 tbsp olive oil (used to brown meat)
• 1/4 tsp pepper
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp marjoram
• 1/2 tsp rosemary
• 3 cups beef bullion & 1 cup pork bullion
• 1 small zuchinni squash, chopped
• 1 red and 1 green sweet pepper, chopped
• 1 small Red Delicious apple, cored and chopped

The stew is now sitting in the crockpot, making my aunt’s house smell really good and patiently waiting for us to end its life sometime around six or seven tonight. I have a great picture, but since the cable for my camera is at home, you’re just going to have to imagine it. Or wait, I guess. You could do that.

In the meantime, worry not, I intend to make actual Greene Beefe Stewe next week, since my aunt has been so kind as to offer me the use of her crockpot during her absence.

*I totally asked permission to do this to the stewe’s name, because it makes me giggle. It also makes me giggle that the words that actually have e’s and the names are the same. It’s entirely possible that I’m easily amused. Or short on sleep. Those look a lot alike.

I apologize if the resized images kill anyone. WordPress is being stupid and I’m tired of fighting it today.

Hi, Summer! Whatcha reading?

Oh.

Oh God.

The funny thing is, I actually took it from her and put it back on the shelf once. She really wanted to ‘read’ this particular book. She sat there with it for about ten minutes, saying “E I M” over and over and occasionally turning a page one direction or another.

Only a test. (more…)