Adventures in Cooking: Celery Surprise

Every great Adventure in Cooking! begins with a single ingredient—usually one that's been sitting around way past its expiration date and desperately needs to get cooked. Today the honor goes to a large collection of low-carb gluten-free sandwich buns, some of the last few relics of my ex-boyfriend's tenure as my roommate. I don't eat sandwiches very often – and when I do, I only use half a bun – and half of that time, it's the other half-bun from my last restaurant sandwich – so these singly-wrapped buns that he bought in bulk shortly before moving out have been cluttering up my freezer for almost a year.

But what do you do with buns when you don't eat a lot of sandwiches? Eating more sandwiches sounds like a sensible answer, but this adventurous chef has a better idea—top a casserole with them!

I have a soft spot for casseroles. They almost always involve cheese and carbs, cooking them often requires little more than stuffing them in an oven and forgetting about them for a half-hour, and they can be made from almost anything.

For this casserole, the "anything" was going to have to be celery, as I had a large bag of celery sticks in the fridge and I might as well make use of them!

Armed with my two key ingredients (celery and breadcrumbs), I scoured the internet for casserole recipes that included them both. The winner was "Creamy celery casserole" from Allrecipes. Of course, this particular recipe also featured a few other ingredients I don't have and don't even like, so I was going to have to employ my creativity. And my math skills. Since the original recipe serves 8, and that's a lot of meals for a singleton who might not even enjoy the finished product, my first step was to divide the recipe in half.

Mental challenges! That's what Adventures in Cooking! are all about!

The ingredients

• 4 pats of restaurant butter (hopefully this is approximately equal to 2 Tbsp)
• 1 heaping cup thinly sliced celery (because somehow in your mind, 4 divided by 2 equals 1, but 1 isn't quite enough when you look at it)
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour (rounding up since 1 1/2 Tbsp requires too many spoons)
• 1/2 heaping teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup milk
• Some water, just a little
• 1 huge white mushroom and 3 smaller ones (because that sounds approximately equal to a half a can of them, right?)
• 2 tablespoons chopped green bell peppers
  
• 1 (2 ounce) jar chopped pimento peppers
• Forget the peppers and just use 2 carrots instead
• 1/2 really heaping cup shredded Cheddar cheese (no such thing as too much cheese!)
• 1/2 cup soft bread crumbs
• 1 Tablespoon butter, melted
• More bread crumbs (because, darn it, a cup of shredded bread comprises a surprisingly small amount of hamburger bun)
• More butter (because more buns)

The Steps

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. You don't have a can of mushrooms like the original recipe called for, but no surprises there—you came prepared! Slice your fresh mushrooms and microwave for about 99 seconds. Pour off water.
3. Melt butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat, and cook celery until tender, about 5 minutes. Move celery aside, and mix in flour and salt. Pour in milk, and mix all ingredients, stirring constantly, until thickened. (Seriously, original recipe? That's like at least 4 steps...but I'm about to turn it into more!)
4. Cook celery until tender, about 5 minutes.
5. Surprise! Since you improvisationally added carrots to this recipe, you need to pre-cook them as well! In between stirs of celery, chop carrots into bite-sized pieces. Add to celery and butter and continue stirring.
6. Move celery aside, but to where, original recipe? This saucepan's all full of surprise carrots! Dump flour and salt all over tiny cleared area in bottom of saucepan as well as all over the celery and carrots. Stir quickly, lest the flour get singed.
7. Surprise! Since you don't have milk, you have to make milk from powder. As a general rule, you use 1/3 the amount of milk powder as the total amount of milk you want, so roughly fill 1/3 of the 1/2-cup measure you're using with powdered milk, then fill the rest with water.
8. Mix milk powder and water with other ingredients, stirring constantly, until thickened.
9. If you've been improvising correctly, it should thicken almost immediately, so sprinkle in some extra water to reassure yourself that you've used enough liquid.
   
10. Stir mushrooms and...nothing else, because you don't like peppers...into mixture.
11. Mix in cheese, and stir until melted.
12. In a small bowl, blend bread crumbs and melted butter.
13. Transfer the celery mixture to a medium baking dish, and sprinkle with the bread crumb mixture.
14. Surprise! Not only does 1/2 cup of crumbled bread only use up 1/6 of the three hamburger buns you thawed, but it also doesn't even begin to cover the top of this wide, shallow casserole. Crumble up the remainder of Bun #1 and mix with another tbsp. of butter. Sprinkle on top of the casserole.
15. Bake 20 minutes in the preheated oven, or until lightly browned.

Congratulations! You have converted a simple 4-step recipe into a 15-step magnum opus, and hopefully, in the process, produced an edible casserole. 

Surprise! Due to the magic of fuzzy math, you'll probably only be able to wheedle three servings out of this ostensibly 4-serving half-a-casserole. But that's fine, because you've still got a lot of hamburger buns to get rid of. It'll be no time at all before you're ready to go back to Plan A: Eating more sandwiches.

It's Shower Curtains

The shower is a great place for thinking...which might explain why I think so much about shower curtains. Would you believe I have so many thoughts about shower curtains that I've dedicated a whole blog post to them? Well, believe it, because I have.

Buying my first shower curtain was a great "adulting" moment for me (this – right now – also marks the first time I've ever used the word "adulting," and I don't feel great about it....Do I sense a post coming about that particular controversial term?). It was when I moved into my rental house in 2010, and for the first time in my life, became the person in charge of all interior decorating. I did what I rarely do any more, and purchased some of the necessary objects brand new, from Target. One of those objects was a brown cotton shower curtain with multicolored polka dots. I remember thinking it was cute and fun, but not overly feminine should I get a male housemate, which I very shortly did.

My first shower curtain,
now a secret hideaway for office dogs!

That curtain lasted for a few years, but because I never used it with a liner, it eventually developed holes from the mold. I removed it from the bathroom but loved it so much that I kept the undamaged parts of it for future use. Eventually it got a second life as a draft-blocker for the bottom of my desk at work.

Since that early foray into buying home goods like a real consumer, I have evolved into the extreme thrifter that I am today and so far have avoided purchasing any more new shower curtains (but I did recently buy an antimicrobial liner that can be washed and reused, so you might say potato potahto). The last actual shower curtain I bought was an aqua one from the thrift store, which survived two moves and was still in regular use this past summer.

...Until...I got a new shower curtain from Freecycle! This one is translucent white and covered with images of bright tropical fish. I love it! It is just the kind of cheery, nature-inspired kitsch that I used to decorate my bedroom with when I was a teenager. Now that I am a mature 30-something in charge of my own household, I get to extend my tacky decor into the bathroom!

But a new shower curtain doesn't mean I have to dispose of my 7-year-old one, oh no! I'm just keeping that one in storage until the spirit moves me to change up the theme. Since I also recently acquired a hand-me-down curtain from friends, I could easily see shower curtains being one of the many items I accumulate and switch out seasonally—fish in the winter, florals in the spring... translucent curtains during the dark and cold months, opaque ones during the summer when every bit of light blocking can help to keep the bathroom cool... there are all kinds of shower-curtain related experimentation to be done!

But one thing I won't be experimenting with is the hangers that hold the curtain up. No, over the years, I've tried all sorts and I've come up with a favorite and no one is going to change my mind!

In my early days of home-making, I was drawn to ornamental metal shower curtain hooks. The set I got to suspend my brown Target curtain had, if I recall correctly, blue wooden balls at the end of the hooks. I was shooting for a plastic-free lifestyle, but as I learned, metal shower hooks are a pain! They were constantly slipping off the rail. When I tried to bend the hooks into a tighter loop so that they weren't so easily removed, I ended up breaking several of them.

Well, that necessitated the purchase of replacements from the thrift store—naively, I thought that maybe these cool crystalline plastic ones would work because they opening was smaller (they couldn't fall off the rail), but they were even worse than the metal ones—their hook-within-a-hook design meant the curtain would just fall off of them instead

So I set out to buy my third set of shower curtain hangers. This time, I went for the kind I'd grown up with: plastic rings that can be snapped shut. They worked OK for quite a while, but over time, some of the closures stopped working, allowing the curtain to slip off its mooring.

No and no.

It got annoying enough that eventually, I made my fourth and final shower curtain purchase. This time, I went as cheapo as possible—pink plastic C-rings that I think cost 99 cents, 50% off.

And whaddaya know? They're my favorite shower curtain rings yet!

The flexible plastic means they're easy to pop on and off the pole, but the opening is too small to allow them to fall off by accident. The best thing is they can easily be flipped 180° while in position, so the opening can face either side of the shower rail.

 
This enables you to remove the curtain without removing the liner, and vice versa! Wow! Score another win for cheap plastic over more environmentally friendly materials. I can only just hope that my plastic C-rings last a lifetime.

I think that covers everything I had to say about shower curtains, so I guess I'll close the curtain on this post!

Super (and not-super) Market Shopping

Can you believe it's been almost a year since I last posted a list of things I like or dislike? This usual staple in my blog has been sorely neglected, and I have no excuse...but I shall be silent no longer! Today I'll present a veritable grocery list of my personal preferences. In fact, since so many of them are grocery-related, I might as well make a theme of it, and conduct you on a virtual tour of the best and worst of the grocery universe.

Walking into the store, let's head directly to my one of my favorite aisles: the condiments. While I've sung the praises of mayonnaise before, I've never given due credit to my absolute favorite condiment: dill pickles. You could probably tell I was heading in this direction, since I've rhapsodized about dill by itself and about the joy of receiving a pickle with my sandwich. But sandwiches with pickles wouldn't be possible without pickles in the first place, so let it be known: Pickles are great!

Some things that are not so great, though, are a wide swathe of other things found at the grocery store:

For starters, food that sticks to your teeth. You know how some people like to go to the beach and come back with saltwater taffy for their friends and associates? Those people better not be my friends or associates! I can't stand the texture of taffy. Also Starburst. Also, of all things, macaroni and cheese in certain circumstances. Though I'm a retired macaroni-reviewer and can be expected to have strong opinions about the stuff, I never thought macaroni and cheese could be downright bad, until I had some a few weeks ago that I literally could not finish. The reason? The cheese was so gooey, it stayed on my teeth even after I had chewed and swallowed. That's when I knew: Super-sticky foods are the worst!

Other bad foods: anything spicy. Truly, this preference is a serious handicap to me, as it prevents my enjoyment of a lot of meals when I go out, and even bars me from entire cuisines. Sometimes it has a detrimental effect on my social life. Everything would be a lot easier if I weren't so bothered by spicy food, but I can't help it; I'm sensitive! (I know this is true, because when I'm eating with others, sometimes I'll ask someone, "Is it spicy?" And they'll say, "Not at all." And I'll proceed to burn off my taste buds and drink half a glass of water to relieve the pain, because the heat I perceive as unbearable is undetectable to others!) I have the mouth of a kid who never grew up....

But if you take me over to the kid's food aisle, I'll probably run away screaming, because kids' foods are notoriously full of...artificial fruit flavors! Yuck! Most artificial flavors are disappointingly...well...artificial-tasting, but the top three on the gross list are as follows: apple in third, then grape, then banana with the grand prize. I can barely stomach real bananas; fake banana flavor is enough to induce vomiting (some of this sentiment may be due to the fact that the last thing I ate before getting a whopping case of the stomach flu when I was about nine, was banana-flavored Now & Laters. But most of the sentiment is, I'm pretty sure, just because banana flavoring is intrinsically nasty).

So we've scanned the shelves and identified all the foods that we don't want to buy, Now, the question is how to decide on what we do want to buy! Fortunately, in recent years, many grocery stores have made that easy by providing per-unit costs on their price labels. What a wonderful advancement in shopping technology! Now I don't have to do math in my head; I can easily discern which of several brands gives me the most bang for my buck, just by reading the tag on the shelf.

One last innovation in shopping, and the last thing that I really like on this list, is the single-line checkout. Many grocery stores have implemented this system in the past few years, and it takes most of the stress out of waiting in the checkout line. Remember when queuing up at the grocery was a crapshoot? You'd choose what looked like the shortest line only to find that the person in front of you had 60 coupons and was waiting for a manager to do a price check? Now (at least in the best-designed stores) that's impossible. Everyone just gets in one line, and when it's your turn, the first available checkout is yours, all yours! See, there is hope for the universe.

Balder is Better

As a certified mammal, I find myself drawn to other creatures with lots of hair. The cuter and puffier, the better! Or so I thought, until I found myself the beleaguered mother of an extremely furry cocker-spaniel-hybrid (I don't know his pedigree, but while he has the general shape and temperament of a cocker spaniel, his hair is much wilder and more profuse than is generally shown in most portrayals of the breed).

When I became his sole caretaker last March, I was brushing him at least once a week (and trying to do it every day), cutting huge mats out of his fur every time. It's a wonder he had any fur left with all the mat removal I was doing, but somehow he did. Vast quantities of fur! Floppy, hairy ears that came dripping out of his water bowl every time he took a drink! Huge hairy feet that soaked up all the mud every time he went outside! And let's not forget how bad it got when he tried to play in the snow!

Bilbo was an outdoorsy dog in an indoorsy dog's body.

If the fur on his body and legs was a challenge, the fur on his head was a veritable disaster! His breed is susceptible to cherry eye, which is when the third eyelid becomes swollen and pops out, resulting in oozing and weeping. Bilbo's eyes oozed and wept continually onto his face, where the mess would congeal and adhere to all the long hairs in the vicinity. Another thing about his breed is long floppy ears. Supposedly they were bred that way so that when digging in the ground after burrowing game for their humans, the ears would keep dirt out of the dog's face. But combined with the ridiculously long hair, what the ears do instead is provide a sheltered breeding ground for earwax and bacteria. So gross. Cocker spaniels are also blessed with a "soft mouth," which in hunting terms means they have loose floppy lips that are less likely to damage the prey they catch. But in real-life terms, what it means is that they allow water and spit and food particles to leak out the sides of the dog's mouth...and thence, onto the aforementioned long hair.

Whoever invented cocker spaniels was surely a sadist. Messed-up eyes, ears, and mouth aside, what sort of hunting dog needs wooly legs that collect every twig, leaf, and bramble for miles around? Yet that's exactly what they gave them. Combine that genetic cesspit with the coat of a poodle (which is what some have surmised comprises the rest of Bilbo's ancestry), and you get even more hair that's even more curly! His forehead hair was so long that it covered his eyes, which surely contributed to his frequent collisions with vertical surfaces. Total breeding fail. 

I experimented with headbands to keep his hair out of  his eyes.
Not effective.

I made some token efforts to keep his coat under control. I bought an electric set of clippers (which he hated and which couldn't manage to cut through his fur without getting jammed) and finally settled for trimming his legs and face in clumpy patches with a pair of scissors whenever I could get him to sit still for 5 minutes. It was better than nothing, but truly not much good at all.

This entire hairy situation came to a head when Bilbo got fleas in August. Three flea baths, diligent grooming with a flea comb, and two treatments with Frontline did nothing to rid him of the suckers, and I was just about to tear out my own hair!

In late October, I finally called in the big guns: a professional groomer. I found her on Rover, she came to my house, and I let her do her magic. She shaved Bilbo down to the skin and gave him yet another flea bath, and when he came out the other side, he looked...surprisingly cute!

I admit I kind of miss his gargantuan hobbit feet, but his clean-shaven mien left a lot fewer places for boogers to attach to. And he's much more endearing now that you can actually see his facial expressions!

I instantly became a dog-grooming convert...but a cheap one. Professional grooming comes in at around $100 a pop. I won't even spend that much money to get my own hair cut; I'm definitely not going to spend it on a dog! So I took note of what brand of clippers the groomer used (Andis) and promptly bought my own. They paid for themselves after 2 DIY grooming sessions. Admittedly, my technique will never rival that of a professional groomer, but I'll settle for somewhat tidy-looking hair with no detritus in it.

After his most recent haircut by his mom

Everyone who sees Bilbo nowadays marvels at how much cuter he is with short fur. He's even more likable now that he's a bit more hygienic. All this time, I'd been thinking long-haired dogs were the best dogs, but Bilbo was really much improved by the loss of his locks. It's a good thing I didn't name him Samson!

Green Washing

If my plastic-related guilt complex were a book, and its phases were chapters, they would look something like this:

1. Whether to pleather
2. Down on Downcycling
3. Bye, Bye, Bottles
4. Oh, Fork
5. Doing Water I Can

Chapter 6 (today's blog post) is really just Chapter 1 all over again—but this time, instead of just fake leather, I'm expanding my guilt to encompass all types of synthetic fabric.

Fabric is a topic very close to my heart, as you might expect of someone who relishes in having a constant stream of new clothes cycling in and out of her wardrobe.

The problem is, as I have been increasingly made aware, every time you wash your clothes, microscopic bits of those clothes get separated from the fabric and washed out into the sewer system, and thence into the waterways. If the clothes are made of synthetic materials, as most are these days, then the bits that come out are actually tiny fibers of plastic that don't decompose. Once in the waterways, those microplastics float around and get swallowed by animals, which is detrimental, to say the least, to their health.

So back to my conundrum, which is really everyone's conundrum: as a person who likes to wear clean clothes, how can I avoid polluting the world's water supply with the plastic effluent of my laundry habit?

Well, one solution is to eschew all synthetic fabrics. This is not easy. Since falling in love with online thrift shops, I have almost stopped buying any new (as in, not pre-owned) clothing whatsoever, but on those occasions that I'm tempted to purchase something firsthand, I do try to avoid anything that's not a natural fiber. If all consumers were to do the same, eventually, we might have an impact on the supply chain.

But in the meantime, most of the used clothes that are available are still made of plastic-based fabrics, and I'm not ready to stop wearing or washing my clothes entirely.

So what's the solution for the problem of clothing-related plastics? One word: filtration.

I can no longer remember how I learned that it's possible to filter your washing water to capture most of the plastic fibers, but I did! And once I did, there was no going back. I simply had to start filtering my laundry.

While they do sell little (plastic!) balls that are designed to be tossed into your washing machine to capture the microfibers there, I decided that wasn't enough. The best a little plastic ball can do is grab the fibers that happen to touch it, but with all that water spinning around in your machine, there is surely a much larger percentage of loose fibers that never come in contact with it.

So onward to the big guns: drain-hose filtration devices. With a filter that sits between my washing machine and the sewer system, I could be assured that every drop of water in my laundry load would eventually go through the filter, resulting in a much higher capture rate for microplastics.

According to my research, there are really only about 2 options for post-wash filtration devices, and I went with the Wexco Environmental Filtrol 160. I thought it would be a simple addition to my laundry room: Unplug some hoses, stick the filter in between, reattach, and run my washer with abandon!

Well, as with all of my home improvement projects, it was naturally a lot more complicated. There were some wall-mounting woes (not easy in a basement with cinder block walls), some hose-incompatibility issues, and some requisite laziness, all of which caused the installation process to take me about 4 months (2 if you don't count the time it sat in the box while I felt too daunted to start the project).

Finally installed!

Fortunately, once it was set up, it was smooth sailing. I planned to blog about the filter as soon as I finished, but due to the magic of procrastination, it has been 2 months since I installed it. In that time, it hasn't leaked so much as a drip, and it's filled probably about 1/5 of the way. At this rate, I can last almost a whole year on one filter bag (and then I'll probably empty and reuse it, because that's the eco-cheapo way!).

The bottom line for my faithful readers: If you had any qualms about the environmental impact of your clothes-washing routine, installing a filter is a good solution! It's relatively inexpensive, as far as home improvement projects go, and easy enough that any bumbling DIYer can tackle it in 2 months!

Dog Mom Level: 1000

You want to know something ironic about pet ownership? "Cat people" are typecast as antisocial loners who are perfectly content to stay at home all weekend life with a book, while "dog people" are characterized as active, energetic, friendly sorts who are always looking for a good time with good friends. Yet cat owners, with their low-maintenance pets who only require a feed-dispenser and weekly litterbox cleaning, are much better equipped to actually go out and be active and energetic with their good friends; while dog owners, who are (often literally) tethered to their pets and their rigid feeding and pottying schedules, can barely leave the house!

It is really hard to be spontaneous and social when you always have to worry about whether your dog is too lonely at home without you, or about to relieve his bladder all over your bed. These problems are mitigated when you can bring your dog with you everywhere you go, but that is a lot easier said than done.

Even assuming you are lucky enough to know of a gathering place or two where dogs are welcome (it's usually a bar with a patio, and they sometimes even host genuine "yappy hours!"), there's still the matter of transporting your pooch.

Sure, you can drive your pup everywhere in style (or in my case, in a worn-out old utility vehicle), but just try parking a pickup truck in Washington, DC. Just try parking anything in Washington, DC. Really, I dare you! Also, try driving your pickup truck out of DC after you've had a yappy hour drink or three (rhetorically only; I don't dare you on this one!).

There has to be a better way, and that way is public transportation. I'm a huge fan of public transportation (my love for the Metro was one of the things that kept me from ever returning to Ohio), but it has one problem: No pets allowed.

At least, that's what I thought, until I decided to actually check what the pet policy on Metro is. As it turns out, you can bring your pet... as long as it is  "carried aboard in a secure container from which it cannot escape." Well, now, that's a dog of a different color!

Upon learning that tidbit, I spent many hours trying to concoct ways to bring my dog on Metro so I could take him to places in DC without my car. I have been informed that people routinely bring their dogs on the New York Subway in bags from which their heads poke out, but I've never seen such a sight on the DC Metro, so I decided a full enclosure was a safer bet.

Now, my Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit of a dog, but he is by no means a featherweight, so I wanted a carrier that I could wheel around, rather than have to lug in my hand. I contemplated trying to attach a dog crate to a wheeled walker; I considered modifying a large wheeled suitcase to accommodate a canine; but ultimately, I decided what Bilbo needed for both his and my comfort was a stroller. They're already designed for transporting a living being; it should be a cinch to convert one for a dog instead of a baby!

I bided my time, waiting for a stroller at a good price. I actually ordered a ready-made dog stroller on eBay for 14 dollars, but it was too good to be true. It never arrived, the seller closed their account, and I received a refund. But before too much time had passed, a neighbor put a perfectly good Graco out on the curb, and I was in business!

I won't bore you with the details of how I actually made the stroller dog-ready, but it was a process that spanned a few months. In short, I affixed the canopy with a mesh screen that attaches under the seat and to the sides with Velcro. I extended the seat back so it reclines to a full horizontal, to make more room for a dog to lie down comfortably. I also removed the footrest, though I can no longer remember why I felt that was necessary.

After it was done, several more weeks passed, during which I trained Bilbo to hop into it, sit in it patiently without trying to escape, and eventually travel around in it while it was moving. I'm pretty proud of the effort I put into this part; it was so successful that now he jumps into his stroller whenever he gets the opportunity, just because he seems to enjoy being in there!

Our first real-world trial of the stroller happened last Friday. I wasn't really prepared (I had wanted to do a few more test runs around the block and experience some encounters with real people), but one of my Meetup groups was holding a dog happy hour, and it suddenly occurred to me that this is probably the last month of the year that I'll be able to tolerate a happy hour outdoors!

So I rushed home after work, and set out for Metro with my dog and stroller firmly in hand. I let him walk to the station to burn off as much steam as possible, but then I bundled him into his stroller and boarded the train.

The trip passed entirely without incident! Bilbo wasn't as enthusiastic about the arrangement as I was, but I plied him with lots of treats and was able to pet him through the loosely attached mesh, so he didn't try any heroic escapes. I had been girding myself for a confrontation with Metro staff, but I guess women with strollers aren't that odd of a sight on transit. No one said anything, except for one floor cleaner, who, after a second take, told me, "Oh, I thought that was a baby." And then he amended himself: "I guess it is your baby."

So if that's not evidence that I've ascended to a new height of dog-mom-hood, I don't know what is!

Because that is silly

It's been quite a long time since I wrote a blog post about music. OK, it's been quite a long time since I wrote a blog post, period! I make no excuses. But jeez, you guys—writing is hard!

You know what else is hard? Life.

Yeah, life is hard, and one thing that makes it easier is a healthy dose of harmless escapism, in the form of pointless music that refuses to take itself seriously. So today, in an attempt to hop back on the blogging wagon  as well as to impart cheer and levity to a depressing world, here is a list of thoroughly ridiculous tunes that I enjoy. 

I hope they serve to make you laugh. Or at least crack a grin? Awkwardly bare your teeth at me? I'll take anything! I've also compiled them all into a YouTube playlist, which I hear tell is an excellent way to help readers become listeners! Here you go: enjoy all the yuks in rapid succession. Or read about them below:

Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio (John Denver)

Back in the previous decade, when I was last on the online dating scene and meeting lots of strangers unfamiliar with the great state of Ohio, I found that most people only knew one of two things about my hometown, Toledo: a) It's where Corporal Klinger came from, or b) nothing. To introduce them to my fair former city, I took to sending them this unflattering little ditty sung by John Denver. For whatever odd reason, I never felt prouder of Toledo than when I could claim that a famous musician had singled it out to rhapsodize on how boring it is. Not every boring city gets a whole song written about it!

Dead Puppies (Ogden Edsl)

Of all the Dr. Demento songs that I am privileged to know, "Dead Puppies" stands out as a clear winner. It's a stirring adaptation of Pachelbel's Canon in D, complete with dramatic organ harmonics and lyrics about...yes, dead puppies. Most people who I coerce into listening to this song find it morbid and can't understand why I like it, but if you've been hearing it regularly since you were an impressionable youth, it's perfectly normal. And it makes great fodder for derivative works, with which you can serenade your own dogs! Come on everybody out there, sing along, OK?

Short Attention Span (Fizzy Bangers)

If you can only listen to one song on this list, listen to this one—it will only take you 9 seconds. And that's the punchline. I was introduced to this song through the CD "Short Music for Short People," which my mother gifted my brother as a humorous nod to his attention deficit disorder. (Yeah, as a family that routinely makes fun of each other's psychiatric diagnoses, it's not so surprising we're also amused by tunes about dead puppies!) This song kicked off the album and stuck in my head (perhaps ironically?) for pretty much ever after.

Dugong (Mr Weebl)

If you haven't noticed yet, the songs on this list are arranged in chronological order, and we have finally reached the YouTube era, when all manner of ridiculous music began making it onto the Internet in video form. One of my early favorites is the tune "Dugong," which is not only a cute little cartoon with a tune, but also a veritable lesson in marine biology! Listen and learn!

Brodyquest (Neil Cicierega)

Introducing the category, "Songs that are also internet memes," now comes my pick for the silliest song on this list—as long as the video counts as part of it. It's a goofy upbeat electronic composition, which stands alone as something fun to listen to if you like beeps and boops and the lyrics "Adrien Brody," but it really comes into its own when enjoyed with the accompanying animation. Who doesn't want to watch a bouncing starfish follow a handsome Hollywood actor as he wobbles his cheerful way around the planet and beyond? I know you do!

The Fox (Ylvis)

The first time I heard this song, I thought it was stupid (It gets off to a slow start, and the childish lyrics don't even rhyme!). But by the third time I heard this song, I knew it was going to be one of my favorites! Its catchy dance beat is enough to put it on any list of fun songs, but when you stop to think about its central premise (all the completely implausible sounds that a fox might hypothetically make), it becomes fun and hilarious. That is, if you're easily amused by nonsense words.

So there you have it: six silly songs that make me smile! I'm sure there's more out there! Readers, what did I miss? Share with me your comedy music masterpieces below!

The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins

Did you know that there actually is a song out there called "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins?" There is, and it is sung by none other than Star Trek's Mr. Spock, so if you're a sci-fi/fantasy geek, please rejoice and enjoy!

However, if you're not into song and dance, then you may prefer to just hear a less musical tale, the one about the Bilbo Baggins I call my own.

It's quite a saga in itself, beginning sometime early last spring, when my boyfriend's friend decided to get divorced. Naturally, when you're going through an acrimonious divorce, the first thing you want to do is get the kids on your side, so the wife in this story took the only sensible course of action: she went to Korea and bought them a 5-month-old cocker spaniel puppy.

She discovered quite quickly that caring for a puppy was beyond her skillset, so the work was outsourced to the husband (as were most of the responsibilities in this marriage—you begin to see why it was ending!). But of course, the husband was overwhelmed with other tasks — tasks like getting divorced — so he began searching for a new home for his puppy.

The first (and let's face it, probably only) person he asked was Mr. Dog Person himself: my boyfriend. At this time (late July), he and I were knee deep in raising a puppy of our own (Kodiak was only 5 months old himself), and I was not enjoying it. However, the worst (peeing every 30 minutes!) seemed to be over, and I was actually starting to feel pretty confident in my puppy-rearing abilities. So I told my boyfriend, who relayed to his friend, that if he absolutely could not find anyone else to take the puppy, we would do it.

And so we did it. 

 

Here's one of my first and favorite pictures of him.

For some unfathomable reason, the wife had chosen to name this beigish-whitish creature "Cocoa" (or maybe Coco or Koko, which were equally terrible names since he was a male), so the first thing we did upon acquiring our new charge was to saddle him with a new name.

There is no particular reason we chose "Bilbo Baggins"—Al simply threw out a couple of suggestions that I didn't like, and this happened to be one that I did. But over time, he grew to suit his name. As his hair grew out, his paws became shaggy and enormous-looking—just like hobbit feet are supposed to. 

The first few weeks of owning him were rough. Although he was supposed to be 5 months old according to his papers, he acted much younger than his brother Kodiak. We suspect that his vital stats had been fudged in order to clear him for export to the United States. He was a hyperactive whippersnapper with too much pep in his step for my taste, and he wasn't even remotely house-trained. I was all in favor of passing him on to yet another family, but my boyfriend would only give him away if it were to a person he already knew and trusted. That left us precious few options, and everyone who claimed to want him got cold feet soon after. As the months passed, it seemed unfair to uproot him for the third time in his short life, so I accepted him as a permanent part of mine.

Although I still wasn't terribly fond of the little fellow, when my boyfriend and I went through our own divorce of sorts, I offered to take full custody of Bilbo. At the minimum, I think I disliked him less out of the two of us.

But he grew on me slowly. Having a dog around was something of a consolation prize when I suddenly had to face up to being single after almost 7 years of near-continuous couple-hood. And although I'm still not keen on Bilbo's insatiable desire for constant activity, I do enjoy being the recipient of his also nearly insatiable desire for companionship.

 

What's sitting still?

Although he's a lot of work, he's also my buddy, and I'm sure we'll have many stories to come!

Texting for the brave and true

Today, I'm supposed to be writing about text messaging, a topic that provokes much anxiety for me because it's a form of social interaction, which is never my strong suit. So before I get into that subject, let's digress a little bit about the title of this post!

"Texting for the brave and true." Where did it come from? Well, at first, it just seemed to pop into my head, but it wasn't long before I realized that I had lifted it from a session at a conference I attended a few years ago. The session in question was "Testing for the brave and true," and please allow me give it a shout-out. While I completely missed it at the conference, I was so fond of the title that I found the video after the fact and watched it, comprehended almost nothing, but still remembered it well enough to title a blog post after it.

But where did that title come from? Well, I  fed "for the brave and true" into Google and was overcome with results, every single one of which was about some book called Clojure for the Brave and True—Clojure apparently being some sort of programming language. I find it extremely fitting that the title for my blog post on one the traits most commonly associated with dorks, geeks, and nerds (an ineptitude with common forms of communication), was quite accidentally modeled on two separate titles also on topics commonly associated with dorks, geeks, and nerds (software development and testing).

And let's not forget the semantics of the whole thing.  If "brave" were a synonym for "completely terrified," and "true" could be substituted for "socially awkward," then "Texting for the Brave and True" would be the perfect title for this blog post. But since neither of those are the case, it becomes a hilariously ironic title that no one will laugh at except for myself.

And thus concludes my digression. I suppose I should get on with the actual subject, which is still (although I'd forgive you if you'd forgotten by now) text messaging. Over the past few months, I've made a concerted effort to be more social, which has mostly played out on the field of textual communication. Consequently, I've learned a lot of things about texting, including some techniques to make it all bearable, even when just looking at your phone is enough to give you the heebie-jeebies.

Pre-texting rituals

When the mere thought of reaching out to another human makes you weak in the knees, you can minimize texting's stressful impacts through the time-tested (and more and more time-tested!) technique of  procrastination. The entire first four paragraphs of this post are a prime example of this classic strategy—I avoided having to think about texting by instead droning on about entirely unrelated topics.

Other ways to indefinitely postpone the actual sending of a text include:

• Embracing your inner perfectionist, composing and recomposing the message in your head until it conveys every nuance of meaning that could possibly be wrung out of it.
• Planning a schedule for sending the text (such as "when the recipient is likely to be off work," or "when the recipient is likely to be sleeping"—you know, depending on whether you prefer them to be able to read the text immediately or further extend the procrastination period through their own inactivity), preferably at a point far, far in the future.
• Typing out the text and then suddenly getting caught up in a very important task that just occurred to you.

Post-texting rituals

Let's suppose you've run out of procrastination techniques and have somehow roped yourself into actually shooting off a text message. In the immediate moment, you'll probably notice an immense feeling of relief. After all, that wasn't nearly as hard as you thought it was going to be. Why, it was nothing more than the push of a "send" button (plus hours and hours of preparatory anxiety, no biggie!)! But that rush of good feelings will soon fade (probably in just a few seconds), so what is your next step? Why, it's nothing other than Self-recrimination! Misdirection!

At this point, you might be tempted to immediately regret the text that you sent. You might worry that you came across sounding stupid, or you might wonder why the recipient would ever want to hear from you. You might now start to worry why you haven't received a response, or if the response you are about to receive will be a rejection. You might be coming to the conclusion that sending this text was a bad, bad idea.

The key to derailing those thoughts is to immediately lose all interest in the text that you sent. Forget you ever sent it! It's out of your hands now! The past is past, what's done is done, and you have a very important task that needs to take up every iota of your concentration (I hope you held at least one of these in reserve during the procrastination phase!). Whatever you choose to do to distract yourself from the horrible tactical error that was your text message, do it with gusto! As long as you keep busy, then you won't have any time to regret your actions.

With these pre- and post-texting rituals firmly in hand, you — yes, even you, you quivering bundle of perennial anxiety — can overcome your fears and dash off text messages with the lighthearted nonchalance of an honest-to-gosh extravert. You might even begin to feel a small, glimmering smidgen of self-confidence!

Texting for the brave and true—maybe it wasn't such an ironic title after all!

Palak Paneer, the wimpy American way

What do you do when you love Indian food, but you can't tolerate spiciness?

Well, for one thing, you can never buy pre-packaged Indian food or seasoning mixes, because they will burn your tongue off on the first bite. You basically have two options: 1) You can order all your Indian food at a restaurant and request that they prepare it "mild," or 2) you can learn to make it mild yourself!

After many years of trying Option #1 with varying degrees of success, I finally moved on to Option #2. But like any good wimpy American, I imbued the process with my close-held values of laziness and ingenuity in equal measure. The result of this  Adventure in Cooking! is a recipe for one of my favorite foods, palak paneer (spinach with cheese cubes), with 90% of its Indian-ness stripped out and modified for an unadventurous palate!

The hardest part of developing this dish was getting over my fear of Indian recipes, which always seem to have 1,001 ingredients, most of which I don't even possess. I realized that the most daunting part of almost any Indian recipe was compiling the vast number of spices required for that distinctive flavor, so here's where the ingenuity comes in. If I were to mix all the spices in advance, I would have a seasoning blend (you know, something like "Italian seasoning" or "Chinese 5-Spice") that I could just toss into my spinach and be 50% of the way there already!

I surveyed a number of palak paneer recipes on the internet, and came to the conclusion that most of them had several spices in common. I figured out a sensible relative quantity for each of them, and then mixed them all together.

So here is Part 1. Prepare in advance and thank me later!

Part 1: Palak Paneer Seasoning

• 1 tsp onion powder
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1/2 tsp coriander powder
• 1/2 tsp garam masala
• 1/2 tsp cumin
• 1/2 tsp ginger
• a pinch of cardamom

Feel free to adjust the amounts of each spice to your own taste. Being an allium-hater myself, I was very sparing with the garlic and onion, for example. Some recipes also called for curry powder, and while I think that's actually a spice blend of its own, you could throw it in if you were so inclined!

I found that one bowl of palak paneer required about 1/4 teaspoon of this seasoning mix to acquire sufficient flavor, so this mix recipe should get you through about 16 servings of palak paneer! Labor-saving at its finest!

Part 2: Palak Paneer

Once you have the seasoning, making actual palak paneer is a cinch! I happened to have some creamed spinach that had been – you guessed it – sitting in the freezer for over a year, so that saved me lots of bother cooking spinach, mixing it with cream, etc. All I had to do was reheat the spinach and add some cheese.

Naturally, being an American, I did not have paneer lying about, but I did have some Grandpa's Cheese Barn grilling cheese, which has a texture very similar to Indian paneer, with the added benefit of being more salty. Much better for my blood pressure!

So preparing the dish is now a simple 4-step process:

1. Put creamed spinach in a bowl
2. Mix in 1/4 tsp of palak paneer seasoning
3. Toss in some cubed pieces of paneer (or grilling cheese)
4. Microwave for approximately 88 seconds.*

*Pro tip! No Indian curry would be complete without a side of flatbread. You can put your bread plate upside-down on the curry bowl while cooking, to minimize the inevitable splattering that will occur.

I have to say that I'm pleased with the way this recipe turned out. I will probably keep the palak paneer seasoning as a regular resident of my spice cabinet, so I can throw together a curry in record time whenever the mood strikes!

Musings of a Dog Mom

I've come a long way since I reluctantly made room in my life and home for someone else's cute but annoying canine companion.

Since then, I've cared for one dog through his final days, raised another dog from puppyhood, and dog-sat so many friends' furry friends that I've lost count. I've written about them so much that I gave them a dedicated tag in my blog, held a dog-themed housewarming party, and finally admitted that I like my dogs more than I dislike them. Although the only pet I ever really wanted was a cat, it has become clear over the years that I'm proud of my role as accidental "dog mom."

Dog-mom-hood is not for the faint of heart. Dog-mom-hood means getting way too comfortable with every bodily function you could ever imagine, and accustoming yourself to the unflinching cleanup of the results of every one of those bodily functions, when they inevitably get performed in an inappropriate place such as your lap or pillow.

Dog-mom-hood means adopting a vocabulary that sometimes consists of nothing more than "Sit," "Stay calm," "Good boy," "Look at me," "Stay calm," "No jumping," "Good boy," over and over again until your world has narrowed to just you and the dog-child you are desperately trying to coax some manners into. When you leave home with your dog-child, you can expect your only conversation with other humans to consist of apologetic one-liners such as "I'm trying to teach him to meet other dogs without freaking out!"

Dog-mom-hood is waking up at the crack of dawn to the sound of your dog chewing on a piece of furniture, and dragging yourself out of bed so you can take him to the park to play fetch before work starts, and falling asleep before 10 every night because you're so exhausted from your weirdly early morning (dog-mom-hood is very hard on those of us who need 9 uninterrupted hours of sleep every night!).

Being a dog mom is a lot of work, and sometimes the only reward is a faceful of stanky dog tongue that you'd probably be happier without! But sometimes, your consolation prize is a holiday dedicated just to you.

Today, apparently, is both Day of the Dog at Congressional Cemetery, and National Dog Mom's Day, and I'm celebrating by taking my dog on a long walk through the city and having a picnic with other dog-loving women, because there's no better way to shun traditional motherhood than by making a huge deal out of your lesser – but much cuter and furrier – responsibilities. Dog moms unite!

Being a dog mom is quite a task and quite an achievement, but you haven't truly become a dog mom until you've become a single dog mom—when all the work is doubled. Such an honor was bestowed upon me back in early March, when my boyfriend of nearly six years ended our relationship, but told me magnanimously, "You can keep a dog."

I had two dogs to choose from, one of which was the aforementioned puppy we raised together, and one of which was Bilbo Baggins, who has never before been mentioned in this blog! We acquired Bilbo thirdhand back in August when he was around 5 months old, (and one of these days, I'll tell you more about that story and the dog himself, because he's the one I kept!).

Since my breakup, with no one else to lavish my love upon (cue the sad music!), I've devoted myself whole-heartedly to the care and maintenance of my sole companion. I have clocked countless hours training him, exercising him, policing his behavior, letting him interrupt my yoga sessions, walking him aimlessly around the neighborhood just to feel less like a homebound loser, and of course grooming him. Oh, the grooming! I could groom him all day and all night, and he'd still look scruffy. It's totally pointless, but I do it anyway, because he is my sole companion! I perform all these many duties without complaint (in fact, with some degree of enjoyment), and feel guilty when I can't be performing them—for example, when I need to be out doing normal single-woman activities, such as finding Bilbo a new suitable dog dad.

Being a dog mom makes dating so much harder! But it looks like there is hope for me. As I was researching National Dog Mom's Day, I found out that our glorious festival of self-congratulation was actually invented by Dig, "the dog person's dating app." I'd never heard of it before, but it sounds just about right for a newly single dog mom. Whenever I'm ready to dip my claws into the heretofore uncharted waters of dating by app, guess which one I'll download first!

Adventures in Cooking: Oyster mushroom tacos

You know what they say: Behind every great taco is a great story, and behind every great story is a great mycelium. Here is the story of my mycelium.

One day recently, a friend called me from a farmer's market, and asked me if I wanted to grow my own mushrooms. Sure, I said. I couldn't see why not.

An hour or so later, said friend showed up at my house with a large plastic bag filled with an unsightly gray-and-white mass. It did not look appetizing, but it was, apparently, the substrate upon which I was destined to grow my own oyster mushrooms. It did not come with instructions. I asked my friend how it was supposed to work, and he said something about putting the bag in a humid spot like the bathroom. That was all he had.

I looked online for further information, and eventually discovered a couple of tutorials that featured mushroom bags similar to my own. The mass inside, supposedly a mixture of sawdust and mushroom spores, was supposed to be a mycelium (immature fungal colony) which would sprout when exposed to the the right conditions—namely a lot of humidity and just a little bit of indirect sunlight. I was supposed to cut a few slits in the bag, place it somewhere shady, and mist with water twice a day.

The home I chose for my mycelium was on top of a wardrobe. About a week of spritzing later, the first fruiting bodies sprouted from one of the slits. I was excited. Over the next few days, my oyster mushrooms grew in size until they could be ignored no longer, until I harvested them with great pride.

Then my excitement promptly turned to anxiety. How on earth was someone who never cooks supposed to eat these mushrooms?

As usual, the Internet was my saving grace. I found a couple of oyster mushroom recipes, and among them, one for oyster mushroom tacos. Tacos would be the perfect food, since I have lots of taco ingredients stockpiled over the course of several visits to Mexican restaurants!

Once I had skimmed over the recipe and gotten the gist of what comprises a mushroom taco, I decided to wing it—that's how Adventures in Cooking are born! So without further ado, let's see the recipe:

Mushroom Tacos Taco, Rube Goldberg style!

Prep time: a few months + 1 week + 15 minutes + 1 night + 5 minutes

Servings: four one

Ingredients:

• Oyster mushroom mycelium
• Taco seasoning...or any old bunch of miscellaneous spices
• Olive oil
• Flour tortillas
• Maybe some nutritional yeast, why not?
• Cheese? Sure.
• Something green and leafy to put on top of the tacos
• Sour cream would be nice, but if you don't have it, NBD.
• Guacamole

Steps:

1. Visit some Mexican restaurants and acquire the following: a huge collection of tortillas because your boyfriend always orders fajitas but doesn't eat carbs; guacamole; some of those black beans that always come as a side dish but that no one ever eats except the vegetarian (you). It would be nice to get some sour cream during this process, but if you don't, NBD. I hope you're not hungry yet, because this step will take a few months.
2. Grow oyster mushrooms from mycelium. Ripen for 1 week.
3. Cut mushrooms from mycelium.
4. Pour some olive oil into a heated skillet—no need to measure, just put in as much as you think you'll need to properly sauté whatever quantity of mushrooms you have.
5. Dump mushrooms into skillet.
6. While the mushrooms are cooking, sprinkle with taco seasoning. If you have taco seasoning, but are worried it will be too spicy for you, you can use some taco seasoning recipes from the internet as inspiration. These recipes seem to all include the following: ground chile, onion, garlic, oregano, cumin, paprika, salt, and pepper. Sprinkle the mushrooms with a small amount of each of these spices according to your taste. If you don't like spicy food or alliums, put hardly any chile powder or garlic or onion, but go heavy on the oregano.
7. By the time you're done sprinkling spices, the mushrooms should be basically cooked. Taste one, and immediately realize two things: 1) Despite barely using any chile powder, the mushrooms are too spicy, and 2) they are almost uniformly as tough as leather!
8. To solve #1 above, rinse all the mushrooms under running water to wash off as much of the spiciness as possible.
9. To solve #2 in Step 7 above, cut off and discard the stems of each mushroom. By this point, you will have barely enough mushrooms to fill one half a taco. That's OK, it just means you'll need less spice for step 10!
10. Re-apply all of the spices as in Step 5 above, but in smaller quantities...and leave out the ground chile.
11. You had originally planned to mix this taco filling with corn and cilantro to make it a proper Mexican dish, but you have since realized you do not have any corn. To help fill out the really pitiful amount of mushrooms, sprinkle them with nutritional yeast, which you just happened to find in the spice cabinet. It's a vegan cheese substitute, so it should add a little oomph to the recipe!
12. As a base for your tacos half-taco, you will need one tortilla. Unfortunately, all of your tortillas have been in the freezer for a few months, and they have become desiccated and inseparable from each other. Find a different frozen tortilla that was stored singly and still has a little give to it, and hope for the best.
13. Pack up all your ingredients and store for later consumption. The next day, bring the ingredients to work, because the best lunch is one that needs to be assembled on top of the office mini-fridge.
14. Upon arriving at work, realize that you have some black beans in the fridge from Friday's visit to the taqueria that you had totally forgotten about! Heave a sigh of relief. Between the mushrooms and the beans, there should be enough food to make your half a taco into a whole taco!
15. Spread the beans and mushrooms on top of the tortilla. Add a dollop of guacamole (also left over from Friday's taco run) and some shredded cheddar. It would be nice if you had some sour cream, but you don't, so NBD! Garnish with arugula.
16. Attempt to eat your taco, but find that even this slightly-less-desiccated tortilla is too crunchy for human consumption, so instead eat the filling with a fork.

You survived your first foray into making oyster mushroom tacos! Now you just have to wait for your mycelium to produce more shrooms (it's supposed to fruit about 3 times before it's depleted), and then you can try it all over again!

Sunday Chef

You might be surprised to learn, since one of the recurring topics on my blog is Adventures in Cooking, that I'm really not a fan of cooking. It's time-consuming, and the results are never as good as what I'd get from even a box of something frozen, so why bother?

Theoretically, there are financial benefits to cooking for yourself, but only if you diligently and consistently use up all your ingredients and cooked meals before they spoil, which is apparently really hard for people to do. Some folks find a creative outlet in cooking, but while I consider myself creative in many ways, gastronomically is not one of them. I do not enjoy the process of cooking—food is for eating, not for laboring over. And lastly, there's the simple problem of time management. By the time I'm ready to think about a meal, I'm already too hungry to endure the long effort of converting raw ingredients into something fit to eat. I want to eat now, and cooking first is not a viable option.

So for many years I've been content to live off restaurant food, leftovers, packaged dinners, and zero-prep foods like nuts, cheese, and fresh vegetables...but a lot of things have changed over the past few months. 1) I decided to reduce the amount of cheese in my life and replace it with low-fat protein. 2) I decided to stop eating protein bars for breakfast every day, and mix it up sometimes with vegan whole foods. 3) I haven't been eating in restaurants as much.

These things have necessitated a change in the way I provide for my nutritional needs: I have been cooking a lot more.

Well, "cooking" is not entirely accurate—most of what I've been doing is not so much cooking (which has to involve the application of heat), as just mixing a couple of ingredients together and calling it a day. But I am making my own food, and it hasn't been that terrible. Still, terrible or no, food prep is something that I'd rather not spend my time on, and as such, I have found ways to make it as quick and efficient as possible.

Like many other people on the internet, I have come to embrace Sunday as the optimal day for food prep for the week. In this way, I can assemble all the foods I will need for the foreseeable future in one fell swoop, and I can do it first thing in the morning, before I'm too ravenous to think straight.

The fruits of my labor

This past Sunday was a real marathon of food prep.

I whipped together a batch of chia pudding (mix chia seeds with coconut milk, shake and put in fridge!) — a batch of quinoa (dump quinoa in water, boil for ten minutes, put in fridge!) — a batch of no-bake cheesecake (blend cream cheese and condensed milk in mixer, put in fridge!) — and even a very ambitious (though small) serving of mushroom taco filling (which I put in the fridge).

Of course I have bloggable thoughts about all of the foods I made on Sunday (if there's one thing that makes cooking for yourself worthwhile, it's being able to brag about it in a blog!):

• I am becoming a real chia pudding connoisseur. Since sharing my recipe for pista-chia pudding, I've made the dish with all sorts of different liquid bases and mix-ins, but my favorite variation yet is a coconut milk base. It gives the pudding a thicker consistency that makes it more fun to eat, and look less slimy too!
• My mission to find appetizing ways to prepare quinoa continues apace. Since my first adventures with the ingredient, I tried mixing it with fruits and beet powder as a breakfast food, but that was also a no-go. Finally I threw in the towel. The one and only way to make quinoa enjoyable is ... to mix it with cheese powder. Yes, this totally defeats the purpose of quinoa as a low-fat, non-cheese protein source, but at least it will help me get through my remaining supply of uncooked quinoa (how does one quart of quinoa last so long!?) without cursing its very existence.
  

  

  This is as good as I've ever seen quinoa look.

• No-bake cheesecake is hardly the kind of healthy food that one should be meal-prepping on Sunday, but I still have a sweet tooth that will not be denied. Since I learned how to make this very simple mixture, I have been unable to eat real cheesecake (unless it's from the Cheesecake Factory and has a ton of mix-ins), because this version is so much better! So creamy, and not dry at all, and versatile! You can toss any kind of candy or fruit into it to enhance its flavor and texture profile! It is one of my favorite treats to have waiting for me at the end of a long day!
• Ah, now we get to the mushroom taco filling! Can I condense this all into one bullet point? No! Should I make it into an Adventure in Cooking all its own? Sure! Stay tuned, readers! My next post should be lots of fun(gus)!

Adventures in Cooking: Quinoa

I don't normally make New Year's resolutions, but this year was, kind of coincidentally, an exception. A few days before 2019 began, I took stock of my eating habits and concluded that the largest portion of my protein intake came from cheese. Now, far be it from me to knock this most wonderful of foods, but I did decide it wouldn't hurt to cut down on the cheese and focus more on lean – ideally vegan – protein sources.

And thus began my relationship with quinoa. While I was cleaning out the kitchen cabinets in a post-Christmas organizing frenzy, I found a 2-quart carton of uncooked quinoa, a holdover from one of my boyfriend's many brief flings with ambitious cooking. I don't recall what recipe he tried to make with quinoa, but he never made it again, and the quinoa has been sitting in the cabinet for at least a year since then. Quite convenient for me, since quinoa is practically a vegan superfood. It has one of the highest protein contents of any grain, and it's a rare vegetarian source of all 9 essential amino acids. Unfortunately for me, it is also unappetizing to the extreme.

When prepared, quinoa resembles nothing so much as a bowl of coarse sand. It has no flavor to speak of, so consuming it is only slightly more appealing than eating said sand. It's slightly more chewable than sand, but being likewise comprised of tiny particles, it doesn't provide anything satisfying to bite into.

There are many recipes on the internet for quinoa, but like any good Adventurer, I decided to go my own way. The first time I prepared the stuff, I followed the simplest cooking instructions (1 part quinoa, 2 parts water, boil until the seeds have absorbed all the water). I figured I'd flavor it with cumin and fresh cilantro and have a quick 15-minute sort-of-Mexican meal. And I did! But it was so boring, I could barely choke it down. In spite of all the spices and all the salt (and more salt! And more!), my healthy dish was as bland as health food is reputed to ever be.

The next time I made the quinoa, I followed an actual recipe. It called for sauteed greens and curry powder. The greens added texture (a slimy, stringy one, of course), but I still felt like the soul was being sucked out of me with every bite.

The third time I made quinoa, I decided to really rock the boat and mix it with cashews! While not as low-fat as pure quinoa, at least a few cashews scattered throughout the bowl would give me something solid to bite into from time to time. The spice rack did not offer any inspiration as to how to season my delicious dish, so I consulted Google and came up with a mix of garlic and turmeric. I threw in some more dried cilantro leaves for the heck of it. And salt. More salt! 

 

 

The turmeric gave the quinoa a bright yellow color, so at least it looked fun, even if it wasn't going to be any fun to eat. And it wasn't. But it was better than my first batch. Either the turmeric or the cashews or perhaps both imparted a slightly sweet flavor, that made the eating interesting, if not exactly delicious.

The going has been ploddingly slow, but I'm learning something about cooking quinoa. The best way to enjoy quinoa is to just make sure you eat it with a lot more stuff that's not quinoa! My next Adventure in Cooking is totally going to be quinoa-sprinkled ice cream!