craveytrain

Some days you just wake up knowing it’s going to be a good day. Nothing special is happening, just one of those days. The funny thing is, the same little crap that sets you off one day is laugable the next. For example, Wednesday we had a fire drill. I work on the 13th floor. While it’s not a severe work out, it, well, sucks. Last night we had a softball game and I always run really hard at games. Hell, I beat out a hit to the first baseman to first base. Sure he bobbled it, but he should have had me. I worked hard to beat him there. So today, the alarm wakes me up at 8, I surprisingly wake up pretty easily, turning the alarm off on the first ring (instead of the typical hour long snooze tag). I kick off the cover and jump out of bed. I have a high bed. When I land, the 2 days of work have taken it’s toll and my knees buckle like the new fall line in an Amish shoe store. I hit the ground with a thud. I do a quick assessment, ok, limbs still moving with relatively little pain. I shakily get back up to my feet and walk to the bathroom, laughing about it.

The other thing I notice different about good days and bad days is what you remember/notice about the day. For example, I didn’t really notice I needed to shave, but I noticed that my jeans, fresh out of the dryer are fitting looser than when I bought them. This is a big deal for me. For a period there, they were so tight I had to register the button on them as a concealed weapon. Every time I put them on I had flash backs of A Christmas Story. You’ll shooot your eye out! Pull the pants tight, suck in, button it. Slowly let go, what is the tensile strength of cotton again? Quick, put on the belt. That way the button will have something to hold it in the pants snap. It got to the point where I was examining how much thread was used to hold the button on when buying new pants. Sure, I could go up a size, but 40 is already so big, I’m already embarassed by it. No need to add insult to injury, just stick with the 40s. Thankfully, today was not one of those days. I had to wear the belt for a different reason today. It wasn’t a projectile shield to protect the eyes of innocent bystanders, it was there to keep my pants up, well, I guess again to protect the eyes of innocent bystanders. Now, after having been washed and and dried on high heat, they are fitting looser than brand new.

And then I step outside, a nice cool breeze blows through. It’s… wow… not in the 90s. This is nice. Man I love fall.

At the request of a friend, I thought I would publish my recipe for jello shots. It’s nothing special, the difference is in the details.

Ingredients

1 small pkg. Jell-O brand instant gelatin (any flavor, not sugar free)
1 cup boiling water
1 cup chilled citrus vodka
18-24 1oz cups

Actions

It’s just about as simple as it sounds. Wisk the jello and the boiling water for 2 mins or so, making sure to not leave any sediment. Stir in the chilled vodka and start dishing into serving cups. I get the little 1oz plastic cups from the local party store. It will fill 18-24 1oz cups, depending on how full you fill them. Place the cups on a sheet or pan of some sort and put into the fridge.

These should chill for 2-4 hours in the fridge. For less time to “solidify”, use less boiling water and chilled vodka. Do not drop below 3/4 cup of each.

Tips & Tricks

• Vodka doesn’t freeze at typical freezer temperatures, so keep the vodka in the freezer. Let sit in freezer at least an hour or 2 before making the shots.
• In drinks of this nature, it is not necessary to get good vodka, as there are strong flavors to overpower it. I usually get Gordon’s for this in the cheap plastic bottle. Be sure to get citrus. Berry flavors do not mix as well with an array of flavors and does not mask the cheap vodka as well. This is one of the very few instances I will advise getting cheap liquor (or cheap anything for that matter, I’m a bit of a brand whore).
• In order to keep the sides of the little cups from getting sticky, rather than scoop the cups into the liquid gelatin, set them out on a tray/cookie sheet and use a turkey baster to fill the cups.
• Consider buying throw away foil pans to stack to carry these in. No one wants to wash pans at a party or bring back sticky pans in your car.
• Cut out the front of the jello boxes and place them on top of the shots that they represent. This helps identify which flavors are which (instead of by color). The party guests usually get a kick out of this.
• Unless you are a closet sorority girl wanna-be, you will only be making these for parties, so in large quantities. This means several batches (my last session I used 7 packages of jello). Put a big pot of boiling water on the stove, use a separate mixing bowl to mix the gelatin mixture. This way between different flavored batches you only have to clean 1 bowl (and your wisk).

French toast is one of those things that everyone has a recipe for, but few make them truly good. So I thought I would offer up what in my humble opinion is the best french toast recipe. This my first recipe post, so I thought I would start simple. I am still playing with the format.

Ingredients

• 1 slice of texas toast (or 2 slices of regular bread)
• 1 egg (room temperature preferred)
• 1 oz of milk
• .5 oz of orange juice
• .5 tsp of vanilla
• ground cinnamon
• chopped fresh fruit (optional)
• dab of butter

Cooking

A note about the bread. Stale is better. We are not talking moldy. But stale bread makes better toast in general. These quantities are intentionally broken down to the lowest common denominator. They can easily be multiplied by any factor needed.

Heat non-stick skillet with butter in it to medium-low temperature.

Beat egg thoroughly. It helps if it has been sitting at room temperature, but not necessary. Add to egg the milk, oj, and vanilla. This is best done on a plate with walls, but a bowl will suffice. Your mixture should not be too thick. Many people’s batter is too eggy. This makes for a very heavy, dense french toast that makes my girlfriend nauseous. She doesn’t do egg, but loves french toast. So she was actually the perfect critic for this dish.

Place a slice of the bread in the batter and push it to the bottom to allow it sop up as much batter as possible. Then flip it and hold it down for a few seconds. Pick it up with the spatula and sprinkle the top of the battered toast with cinnamon. Flip into pan so that cinnamon side is down. Sprinkle the now exposed side with cinnamon.

Cook for 2 mins and then flip. It should look somewhat toasted, but not terribly brown.

After 2 mins more, take out and plate. Rinse and repeat with another slice. Top off with chopped fresh fruit. If your fruit isn’t quite ripe, put it in a bowl already chopped up and mix it with a tbsp of sugar. This will help sweeten it and take some of the tartness away from it.

Finally, cover in syrup. You may be saying, that’s a lot of syrup. Yes, yes it is. That’s what makes it good. Sure, you could put confectioner’s sugar on it, but the maple flavor is so much better especially with the citrus, berry, vanilla and cinnamon flavors. Very in the season.

That’s it, and don’t knock the plates. They are… well… they were clean.

Ok, I took a photo tour of the new pad. I left it on flickr since it’s just a lot easier to upload to and point to. So go check it out.

Well, I’m annoucing a rededicated section: food. I do a fair deal of cooking, some of it is pretty original or at least done differently than others would. Notice I didn’t say better, just different. Since food is one of my passions, I thought it would be fitting to share it on the blog. Not all that I have is that original. Some of it is just the way I like doing things. Either way, this is my blog, so I will subject you to my whims. Did I mention power is probably my favorite passion?

Allow me to explain how I came to this. I read a lot of food blogs. Well, like a dozen. People give recipes, reviews and relay other things cooking (and not). Strangly enough, it was this post about kitchens that gave me the motivation to start blogging about my own adventures in cooking. I saw a lot of people post pictures of their kitchens and it hit me. These people who’s blogs I read daily, they are just like me. Most of them have no formal culinary training and many of them work out of less ideal kitchens than my own. That’s not to say I am in the same category as these people, because, let’s be honest, I’m not going to be making The Swift-Tuttle Dark Chocolate Espresso Berry Comet Truffle any time soon. However, these bloggers are mere mortals, not those people on food tv who have unlimited budgets and means with which to create. I can be one of former people (and maybe eventually one of the latter).

I haven’t made up my mind exactly what all I am going to be putting on the web about my cooking. A lot of trial and error. A lot of error. So, so much horrible error. Oh the humanity of the error. But once in a blue moon, I hit something right. I will try to share the errors with you as much as my pride will let me, but hopefully I will not lose steam to at least get my hits up here.

If there is any site that has had the biggest impact on my cooking in the last year or so, it would have to be Cooking For Engineers. The author of that blog and I are very similarly minded it seems. His recipe grid is the most logical method I have seen to represent recipes.