Cabbage with bacon and sausage

Stupid easy.

So, Brainiac, how do make this?

*Short bus voice, totally sincere*

"You take all the stuff and you chop it all up and put it in a pan and turn on the stove and stir it all around and shake it from the pan onto a plate."

Wings again already

They're frozen. They must be limbered up a bit. 

* 50% flour

* 50% corn starch

* 13 Chinese spice mix (What the heck, this is a curry, right? It's balanced toward anise.)

* curry

* cumin

[Here's where it's natural to think of chile flakes. The full range of possibilities. But this is a test for Frank's known to be weak so the impulse is to buttress the capsaicin heat but I'm leaving that alone to see how Frank's combines with the weird Chinese 13-spice. ]

Fried twice. Some of the coating knocked off. 

I liked these a lot. Except for the big piece is an oddball thing. Barely had any meat on it. I gave up digging around it. 

Poke fail

The previous poke that tasted empty was adjusted slightly with a few umami-containing ingredients and the whole thing turned out much worse than before. The whole batch was thrown out. I don't even know why I am showing this. It's gross.

What went wrong?

Shut up. I don't know. Stop picking on me.

The wasabi was steamed with the rice. A lot of it. I guess I'll never do that again.

The tuna was stored for two days after it was cut.

Perhaps it was poorly conceived ... 

Nah.

Perhaps the ingredients were inferior quality ... 

Nah.

No wait. 

There were bugs in the rice. 

I'm not kidding. A lot of them. Alive. Running around. They're still in there. They hatched just now. 

And they're in there orgy-ing it up. They're in there laying eggs all over the remaining rice.

The bugs do not look like the bugs pictured in [rice bugs]. Mine look like centipedes. I think. I was freaking out. Maybe I'm wrong. I'll have to kill one and photograph it. They're too fast to photograph alive. They dig into the rice faster than you can dig after them. They simply disappear. 

Then when I rinsed the rice they came floating to the top immediately.

Except some didn't come up. So I rinsed them again. And a surprising number came up from a small 1/2 cup of rice.

I rinsed them again and more bugs came up. 

I rinsed them again and more bugs came up.

I rinsed them again and no bugs. 

I rinsed them again and no bugs.

But I keep thinking about those bugs. I could microwave them, kill the eggs and bugs before the rice cooks, but then their bodies would still be in there. 

Ew, gross me out.

If I rinse the bugs then the eggs will hatch and I'll have to rice them all over again. 

That rice was expensive. Top quality. It's only 1/2 used. And that is the LAST time I buy any rice from Japan. 

Here. Let me show you. This is the culprit.  It's a premium rice. Reviewed well on Amazon. Tastes great. Could have been my go-to thing. I bought a 15 Lb bag. Maybe that's the problem. Too much rice allowed time for this to happen. Had I bought the smaller bag it would have been used before the eggs hatched. 

It all sounds so treacherous and prehistoric but that's life in the rice patties even this late in history for advanced cultures. Rice is not grown in high rises so far that I know of. They get snakes in those fields! 

But 15 Lbs was a lot for one guy.

This is what I bought before. From Texas, US, America. And it's awesome. It's also a lot more expensive. But that's what it takes for a mono-agriculture to keep out the snakes and the bugs. 

All those geese flying overhead pooping on your rice field. Shoo. Shoo, Geese. Shoo.

Tuna poke

The pineapple was old so it was spilled out and a new pineapple was cut.

With soy sauce, this sample does not hit the spot.

My taste buds are ravaged. 

Very little tastes right and even less tastes good. But it's not hopeless.

Sugar and vinegar, that is sweet and sour, are in the rice. 

I added wasabi too. As an experiment.

I think cooking wasabi kind of disables it. I added a lot. It changed the color. I can hardly taste it. 

The soy sauce tastes strong while I know that it is mellow.

It is missing something. 

It is missing something from the sea. 

Possibly seaweed. 

I'll probably add seaweed to the rest. 

I might run through the 7 magical Asian flavor ingredients and put together a sauce. 

Bread, malted whole wheat

Let me introduce you to the most lackadaisical unfocused loaf of bread in history.

The sponge rim indicates the mass rose to its maximum then dropped. I was supposed to add flour before that happened. It's okay. It'll still work. 

The sponge has all of the salt, all of the water and half of the estimated flour including 1 cup of malted whole wheat but only 1/4 teaspoon yeast.

The rest of the flour is added some 10 hours later. It rises as if I had added fresh yeast. 

But why wouldn't it? 

I don't understand recipes that have you add the regular amount of yeast for the remaining flour as if you hadn't been breeding yeast all night long to its maximum production and collapse. 

The white flexible bench scraper is used to shove the flour down along the sides of the bowl.

It rose in the pan twice. The first time the dough was too wet and it rose to pour over the top. Reshaped again it was baked before it could bulge over the edge. But it did not rise in the oven as it baked. 

This smaller sized loaf distresses me. 

I added 1/2 cup water and a cup of flour more than the last time to prevent this. 

The problem is the malted yeast does not contribute the usual rising quality. The grain has already been baked to stop the malting action so the wheat does not behave as raw wheat. I believe it does not contribute gluten molecules. It's just dead weight. I might back off from one cup to 3/4 cup and maybe even more to 1/2 cup and see how that affects the rest of the flour. 

After all this I was tired and no longer hungry. I'll make a sandwich of this later.