Apple galette

This crust is made the little old pie-making lady way. Butter and lard rubbed into flour. The flour is sweetened and seasoned with the things that I like.

The crust was pre-baked 1/2 way. 

There is a layer of ricotta seasoned with more of my favorite things and acidified with half a lime. 

The topping is superfluous. It is a topping prepared earlier for macaroni  and cheese. I used it because it has butter and I didn't object to the oats. The pie would be as good without it. I think. 

Two granny apples, cinnamon, ginger, mace.

Do you know what mace is? It's a red layer that coats a nutmeg. You know how a nutmeg resembles a piece of wood in the shape of a football? Mace is like a red glue drizzled over the nut drawn in pathways with spaces. Then there is another shell surrounding that like an egg shell. The mace is like a shock absorbing layer between them. Then there is yet another layer of shell a softer outer shell that is thicker and more massive than all the other parts. Mace tastes very similar to nutmeg. It is very easy to overuse. Good for all kind of dessert type things. 

Halibut cheeks

Now that I've enjoyed it and done with it I realize the tomato was omitted and everything is ruined. 

Kidding. The halibut cheek pieces were fried in a hot pan for one minute. They were seasoned first and steamed up with a splash of white wine at the point that was apparently hottest, and the heat cut off, it was all very quick. 

This will get you off prepared dressing permanently:

* Drizzle a little honey into an oversized bowl, about two teaspoons.

* Add a little mustard and mix with a fork or whatever is convenient, about 1/2 teaspoon. 

* Drizzle enough vinegar to loosen the mixture, about a teaspoon.

* Drizzle oil sufficient to coat whatever is being coated. 

* Salt and pepper

Corn flakes cereal with orange

You play with your food too much.

I do not.

You look at your food too much.

I do not.

You need to play around a lot less and eat a lot more.

I do not.

You're underweight.

Am not.

You are resistant to suggestion, criticism, and self-improvement.

I. Am. Not. 

You are contrarian.

Not.

I meant to say how much I liked Dreamsicles and thought they were brilliant. Whoever invented them really knew their ice cream and fruits, and I meant to say how this comes from that. 

The fact is I detested every flake. I made a mistake and picked up the wrong kind of corn flakes, the frosted version. Frosted with sugar and it is disgusting. 

The oranges are fine, the 2% milk is tolerable, the corn flakes are disgustingly cloyingly  saccharine, ruined with sugar. 

I ate it anyway. I think I'll throw out the rest and start over with non frosted version. Now, whoever invented this sugar frosting sprayed over corn flakes, really, what  were they thinking? Do you think they would give their kids candy for breakfast? Don't tell me they were thinking of the children.  

Grapefruit and fusilli salad

Oddly, grapefruit have nothing and I mean nothing to do with grapes. I cannot account for this conflating fruit name thing except maybe laziness or maybe even meanness. Maybe it happens when cultures collide. Culture clash. Do they appear to grow in clusters on the tree? They are so big they would have to touch each other along the branches. 

That number up there on the De Cecco, the number 34, that's vitally important. Vitally. It means everything in the world. It means a name. It's a name. A number name. Like Chanel Nº5. We're led to believe it's the fifth attempt the fifth trial or fifth essence, the quintessence or whatever. They're doing that to the pasta. Naming it with a number to imbue it with gravitas. That's what the numbers on pasta mean. It is not the gauge or whatever. 

Only if you would like more.

Egg with polenta and meat sauce

This is better than I thought it would be. That's a nice surprise. No cheese and that is strange because I passed on three logical cheese opportunities. 

The corn is my favorite thing. I think it is considered nutritionally suspect. This is two types of corn combined, regular pulverized dent corn with everything in it, and masa harina for tamales. The combination is pleasant, I don't know why it is not famous. 

The sauce is a regular Bèchamel, the sort of thing you do for gravy, butter and flour in equal proportions and milk to form a sauce. Plus nutmeg. This has ground hamburger meat and a few other sausage-type spices.

My dad used to make a similar thing, an idea that he picked up from the military. He poured his hamburger sauce over toast and he called the combination SOS, which we were allowed to say, and which in the colorful and piquant and sometimes amusing nomenclature favored and perfected by military personnel is an acronym for shit on shingles, and would be a compliment to the chef, and another potty-mouth word we were not allowed to say. As kids we liked it just because of that -- we could say the letters and laugh about suggesting the forbidden words and still be well-behaved naughty little children -- but we probably would have liked it even if it had a nice name because it was bland and that is what we demanded. This is like that except tastier and much better. 

The SOS, now that I'm recalling it, was ghastly. I did try it a few times. Each time I was thinking the whole time that toast was wrong and so is the sauce. It was completely wrong. The toast gets strangely both soggy and difficult to cut. Eventually mush. So glop on top of  mush with edges that are difficult to cut. 

Do you know what? I take it back. I'm all wrong. Forget everything I just said. I am sorry. The stuff is probably still called SOS because it looks and tastes like shit and even airmen know it. 

I did something different with the hamburger meat too. Instead of breaking apart the hamburger or smashing it, the meat was pulled apart using two forks to gently separate it following the pattern made by the machine, the opposite of compression, to increase the browning surface. 

Once a bird came over from work and we were fixing up something together that involved hamburger. Her job was to stand there and brown the hamburger. She did what I told her to do. But I didn't tell her when to stop so she didn't stop. She reduced the hamburger to a particle size that impressed molecular scientists. <-- partial lie. There was no texture or sense of meat remaining, just a million tiny brown caramelized dots. <-- contains exaggeration. It occurred to me she had absolutely no idea what we were doing. <-- 100% of truth. 

That's not a bad thing, Persy. 

I mean, per se. 

It's just not anything I expected. 

Shrimp and grits

This meal was cooked by the warmth that I feel in my heart for all of humanity and by an electric burner set to medium, but mostly by an electric burner set to medium.

That's a joke I picked up from AceofSpades and it cracks me up every time he pulls it. His readers see it from a mile away. 

* lots and lots of wonderful spices that all live together in harmony, and in butter but mostly in butter. See? You can do the joke everywhere.
* A whole pile of childlike wonderment and little bit of flour to thicken, but mostly a little bit of flour. We tend to take these jokes too far.
* Smart diplomacy and about a cup of chicken stock forms a sauce, but mostly a cup of chicken stock. Stop it.

Buttered toast

These little things are fine for now. 

But eventually I'm going to have to make a proper meal. Or else go out and score one. 

And when I'm out scoring a meal maybe I will see a person and help them score one too. Or whatever it is they score. 

That is my attitude that I told my friend to answer his attitude which is different. My friend shot back that they will buy alcohol. I said, I know. It usually happens immediately outside the bottle shop down on street level anyway, but so what. People buy me drinks all the time. We were at a party with a tended bar. My friend ceded the point by admitting, yes, he said, when you move in the right circles you get free drinks all the time and it ended there. It has nothing to do with the right circles, I do not think, but we did not argue beyond that. He missed the chance to point out that in both our cases alcoholism has not cost us our marriages jobs or homes. That would have shut me right up, but I was already shutting up. Anyway, at some point I am going to have to come around and make a proper meal. 

Pecan and gruyère on bread strips

The other day I made a plate of fruit and cheese and nuts, to pick at here and there. My favorite combination on that plate was the cheese and pecans together. It was an odd combination but it was so good. That would be perfect by itself. One pecan half with one little bitty piece of good gruyère cheese X 25.  

The pecans have a weird mouth-covering thing happen when they're raw so they must be toasted. Then they are excellent. The combination with this particlar cheese, which I discovered by chance, is extraordinary. I thought the bread would be a good neutral way to carry it. But then I added my own mustard and honey. That is all a little too complex. It is still very good, and I am not complaining, but it is not as good as the other day. 

Fusilli

Snack.

This started out as something else.

Now I'm right back to thinking about the original thing. 

Potato and sweet potato, sesame seeds

It is vegetarian if you don't count all those deer ticks. 

Kidding. Those are toasted sesame seeds. 

Spicy potato. Not hot spicy, but happy spicy. 

My favorite spices that I think will go with this, into a pot with butter. And onion. And garlic. 

Except I forgot turmeric.

It also has tamarind paste and mango curry.

So lots of happy sweet things, cinnamon, and such along with savory spices all mixed up, a little bit of chile pepper flakes, but not much.   

The spices in the pan with butter or oil to excite the oils within the seeds, mostly seeds, but all the spices have oil of some kind that does become activated with heat, and then it exhausts. So to prevent spice exhaustion the whole business is doused with water once it gets going. Aroma escapes, water captures it. Water that cooks the potatoes. 

The water boils down while cooking the potatoes which get all spicy inside by soaking up the spiced water as they cook and tenderize, and then the spiced water concentrates to a sauce which is assisted in viscosity by the tamarind paste and by the mango curry. Water was added twice and the heat cut back because the process kept racing ahead.  

Snack, apple, orange, cheese and pecans

Hey, you are the apple of King Tut's eye.

Do you want to hear something that I think is funny?

Every now and then you hear King Tut's name pronounced like King Two Tank Amun and this is wrong. Tut is right and Tank is wrong. Right after I wrote that I heard the name pronounced like that some 10 times by a guy on the History Channel. It was a very good show otherwise. If anybody ever says Two Tank Amun in front of you then think of this:

I'm not even going to link this because it's all over the place. Pick any random hieroglyphic site and look at the sign for the letter W and notice it is a chick. They will say the chick stands for the near consonant W and sometimes U. 

The chick stands for W and sometimes U.

The chick stands for W and sometimes U.

The chick stands for W and sometimes U.

The chick stands for W and sometimes U.

The chick stands for W and sometimes U.

The chick stands for W and sometimes U.

Over and over they say that. Then, 99% of the instances the chick really does indeed translate to W, or so it is thought. Sometimes you get lucky and have solid cross references, but most of the time you do not. It is not known for certain if any vowels occur before or after or between the known consonants, and here is a near consonant, W, and not even a real one. Vowels are not denoted in hieroglyphics, and U is a vowel. 

How do I know it is tut ankh and not two tank or two tankh? 

Because the symbols say so. 

The word  'tut' means 'image' and the sign sequence looks like this:

But we've been told over and over that means twt, and it does. The ankh, of course is clearly an ankh and is pronounced as such. The t does not go with the ankh so there can be no tank or tankh. 

The ligature offers kerning possibilities. Yes, the Egyptians were early kerning specialists. Because the chick is drawn at a diagonal, it provides space that is not to be wasted for the preceding and for the following 't' and that's another way we know the letters go together in a group and are not sounds floating around or part of another group.

And that is how you always see it. It looks like a percent sign immediately, %, see it? I'm not moving until you say you see it. Okay, fine, a backwards percent sign. 

But we are taught the chick is a W and  infrequently a U so our eye catches this percent sign and our mind reads the twt as twat, perhaps twit.

So, king Twat. That's a potty-mouth word in English. That's what I see every time I see the name and I do see it frequently. 

Now who else is going to tell you these things?