ajmcguire.com

Like the bear says, I’ve been doing thangs.

• Basil’s seen better days.  Needs a transplant.  I need an infusion of give a damn.
• Yes, that’s the stuff of flavor tripping.  (Can we come up with less corny words than ‘miracle berries’ and ‘flavor tripping’?)
• Made some bread.  Will make some more.  Holding off on on acquiring a baking stone as that the cast iron skillet seems to know what it is doing.

Why am I hipster spotting on Google Streetview instead of making potato soup?  Anyone?  Anyone?  Carl?

Far be it for me to be a celebrity pitchman but Highland Park is some fine Scotch whisky.  Especially served with a side shot of a pure maple syrup to prepare the palette.

So I’m drinking the last of it and watching this:

Ooh… it’s all murky and mysterious and such.

Well, no, it’s actually just freshly cooked and steaming up my lens.

There. Spinach linguine (half-off rack at Key Food) with some old wrinkled grape tomatoes (still good when they’re wrinkled!) sauteed with garlic and herb goat cheese.  Yeah, the goat cheese I bought for 79 cents down in Brighton Beach.  Take that, life.  Top with a little salt and pepper, serve with a Labatts Blue and I won dinner, handily.

Got some new beer a-brewing.  It’s a ginger pale ale made with green tea.  Highly experimental.  Tottally winged it with the recipe.  1 lb of crystal malt for the sparge, 6.3 lbs of light malt extract for the boil and one ounce of Williamananmmamaette or however you spell it for the hops.  Kind of a cleaning out the fridge recipe.  We nailed the temperatures so I’m a little more hopeful than last time.  Though that came out pretty well too.

Just a good time hanging out with Adam and Les, watching some Sans Soleil.  I’m hoping to brew a little more regularly now.  Turning my eye to what sort of ultra-cheap, ad hoc sort of recipe I can come up with.

Made some snack mix too.  Almonds, dried peas, sunflower seeds and dried tomatoes with curry powder, cumin, salt and cinnamon.  Mmm…  Not a fan of sweet snack mixes so much any more.

I forgot to tell you jerks… A day after I made that ill-fated blended beet soup, I grilled up a burger (hand-formed with a little Worcestershire sauce), slapped some cheddar on it and served it up on toasted rye bread with horseradish mustard and a good sloppy smear of the beet whatever.

It was excellent.  I wanted to walk the streets telling people they suck because they hadn’t eaten it.  That delicious.

Israel, your snack food bewilders me.

Moriel got back from Tel Aviv with a bag full of snacks and a sweater to make up for swiping my sweater last spring.  Yes, she still has it.  She claims it has Stockholm Syndrome and wishes to stay with her.

Among the snacks was something I tried last night while in that ravenous after-work time when you are not just hungry but fully food horny.  What a weird, weird snack food.  It was like cheese puffs but coated with something that was like not-so-salty, not-so-sweet peanut butter.  Didn’t taste particularly like sesame, either.  I know how folks from that neighborhood like putting sesame in everything.

Still, I ate about half the bag before I made myself stop.  Y’know, to be healthy.  So I ate hot dogs.

I think this indicates that the weirdo snacks have sunshine, leaves, vitamins and a bitchin’ tribal tattoo they got while backpacking in Thailand.

Yes, I’ve been reading Etgar Keret.

I had to use up some chicken stock that I had in the fridge so I figured a cold rainy day was a good excuse to make soup.  In the stock I put some chopped onions and garlic and some slices of bacon rind.  That simmered for awhile then I tossed in some chopped beets and diced fennel.

Took the bacon rind out, dropped in a little red wine vinegar and let it simmer a little more until the fennel got ‘civilized’.  I had a bowl of the stuff and got to thinking: if I was a fancy man, I would blend this soup up and make it all smooth and crazy.

Well, I am the fanciest man around so I felt obliged.  Unfortunately, I’m also the toughest man around because I broke the blender with my bare hands.  Yeah, the little plastic thing at the bottom that holds everything together? Cracked all to hell.

Never one to take a cautious approach to cooking, I stuffed it back together and blended things up anyway.  So this happened.

I’m an idiot.  But not easily defeated.  Scooped that junk up and put it into salsa jars.

Fortunately, this stuff tastes really good.  Totally worth scooping up out of the exploded blender.  No glass shards in there neither.  Some may say that one should experiment with vegetables with less potential to stain everything permanently but those people are losers.

One more for the fans.

UPDATE: I have made an iTunes playlist of bird sounds.  I gave my mom my library card number.  I ate all the pancakes.

I know I made these pancakes on SUNDAY and I’m just eating the last ones TODAY, almost a week later but you can do that.  You can totally do that, it’s allowed.  They are a staple of your diet and taste better wrapped up in the fridge and resurrected by toasting.  There’s no excuse to not make a bunch of pancakes just because you are one guy eating them and not Warren Beatty cooking them for a lady before you go give another lady reasons to also expect pancakes.

Liberación panqueque! (I’m trying to learn Spanish.  Help.)