Cabbage with sausage and bacon, beans, spinach, mushrooms

* Soaked the mushrooms first because that takes the longest.

* Pressure cooked 1/4 cup white beans. Who even does that? 

* The cabbage is sweet due to the brown sugar, and apple cider vinegar is actually rather sweet. 

* Damnit, Janet. I forgot the apple. 

Haiga rice with miso and zucchini

Half-polished rice with the germ is supposed to be good for you but I do not know about that. I'll just trust the growers that say it is. I am so credulous. 

The rice tastes calm. 

*Squeaky high pitched ventriloquist voice* "Calm is not an adjective that goes with rice." 

"Shut up, Squeaky voice, it is too. It's my adjective for this rice." It is full and it is calm. Egg really goes well with this rice. So does miso. 

Usually the germ is removed and sold separately usually as oil. It would take just a little more polishing. It's always right there at the edge.

You can see why people would want to continue polishing and knock off the germ to a shiny white granule. It's like, what, 3%. How bad could it be to just lose it when the result is perfect pearly white rice?

Know what's weird?

I just now had one of those, whatcha call it, eh-piff-a-knees.

The germ is the embryo of the seed and the endosperm starch is immediate food for the germ-embryo. 

An egg is the animal correspondence to plant seed. The egg-embryo develops from blastoderm, the  tiny squiggly bit attached to the yolk, and the yolk is food for the embryo. I don't know what egg albumen is for. 

Egg albumen 

Also known as egg white. Depending on the size of the egg, albumen accounts for most of an egg’s liquid weight, about 66%. The white contains more than half the egg’s total protein, a majority of the egg’s niacin, riboflavin, magnesium, potassium and sodium, and none of the fat. The white of a large egg contains about 17 calories.

Well. This whole time I thought egg white was just nothing.

Now I don't feel so bad about that egg white omelet that I ordered by accident twenty-five years ago.

See, there are two of those embryo and embryo-food things going on right here on this plate.

American short-grain white rice with trout and vegetables

This is the rice.

Tamaki Gold California. 

Imagine my surprise to open the bag and see the rice is white, not gold. 

I wanted to see gold rice.

Without using saffron, turmeric or anatto. 

But it's so delicious, why, I could eat ... 1/4 cup of it.

Would you like to hear something otallytay uckingfay upidstay?

Okay, goes like this. 

This is the fourth bag of this rice that I bought. The second for me and the second for my brother and his family. But it's the first that my brother will eat. He told me "they" sliced the bag and there was rice all over the inside of the box so he threw it away.

Oh, how I love my brother so much that I can simply order another bag without making a bfd about it. Another bag will simply show up, and he'll be all, "Oh man my brother sure is ace. He didn't even mention this." 

But that's the thing about loving my brother. All this comes with that. There is a lot of stupid shit that happens. He's expensive. 

This is actually rather common.

I cannot even be cross. Life is temporary. I don't want to mess it up with arguments about this kind of thing. I don't want him to feel bad about something that I wanted him to feel good about. So I'll just try twice.

Some things are not so easily replaced. 

A few years ago I made for him a rather involved birthday card. It was a few pages long. It told the story of Egyptian elite going out to the swamp-like edges of the Nile for hunting / picnic where they encounter a crocodile. The crocodile eats a man. A band is sent out to hunt the crocodile. Models parade around a central pillar wearing crocodile accoutrements. The card is titled "Egyptian crocodile." 

Would you like to see it? 

It's all that we've got. 

The card was lost in the mail. It got so far as his post office then it disappeared. 

That was P.O. Box. 

Actually, knowing my brother as I do, he most likely flubbed it. I think he lost it in confusion. Secondarily I think it was sorted into the wrong bin and the person kept it. 

The thing is, I didn't know this until he told me, he and his wife both saved all their pop-up cards that I sent them. He told me one day that he went out to dinner with friends. He and his wife took a rather large bag containing all the cards that I sent them. Along with the new one. I must say, my brother describing his friend's and the wife's reaction was pleasurable. Learning that they kept all the cards together and that they show them was also pleasurable. "Look at the cards my mad brother sent us." 

Would you like to see an index of pop-up cards? I tell you how to make them.

You know, that one near the top #54, geese flying over a field, is a sympathy card for the survivor of a guy who really liked to hunt. 

The page was originally from another multi-page card that never got made. I got stuck on a page. I made some 30 prototypes for a page and never hit anything satisfactory. The page was a goose sitting on a nest. I got close to a really cool page for this. The nest twists into position and a goose rests down upon it with its wings spread out protectively. 

The theme of the card is a farm. A uni-crop wheat farm. A page shows a tractor sowing a plowed field. Another page shows a field of green wheat. Another page shows a family of mice living within the wheat. Another page shows a spider having spread a web across the wheat. Another page shows snakes in a wheat field. Another page shows a veritable forest under the wheat field with short grasses and weeds with snails and mushrooms, lizards, butterflies and centipedes. 

This page of geese flying over the field.

The last page is underfloor devastation. Wheat cut to uniform height and everyone's home torn up. Pieces of snake hanging from cut wheat stalks, spider web destroyed, little mushroom houses leveled and in the background a tractor drives away in the distance with cut wheat on one side, our side, and brown mature wheat on the other. 

But only two pages got made. So I used one page for a sympathy card. This one. 

And the person who received it was deeply moved. Who would even think of this? It worked perfectly.

Fries, again!

Potato was microwaved for 2.5 minutes. It nearly worked but the potato was just a little too soft.

That tells me to: 

◻︎ Buy bigger potatoes

◻︎ Push on the handle harder

◻︎ Buy different type of potatoes

◻︎ Buy only firm potatoes

◻︎ Use two people to shove the handle

◻︎ Microwave for 2 minutes not 2.5 minutes. 

◻︎ Give this machine to Goodwill like everyone else does

Bugs in Japanese rice

This is the camera's idea of 100%. The photo is not enlarged.  Obviously the bug is smaller than this, duh. 

Okay, here's the thing. 

This is really good rice and I like it a lot but 15 Lbs is just too much for one guy to have around. The bag is too big to refrigerate to arrest the bug eggs. 

The rice is expensive but there is American rice that is even more expensive and I like that a lot too. I have no idea if it will grow insects after a few months because I ran out before that could happen. They also sell a kind with the germ still in it. I read that's pretty good too. I bought both of them. The germ-one is from a different supplier and that will come a lot later. 

These bugs, I could drown them all in seconds then dry out the rice. That is the most reasonable thing. But I'm kind of tired of this and I got to take out a bunch of trash anyway. 

In these trying times *laughs* in which we all pull together to fight an unseen enemy *laughs harder* there is no point in inviting unpleasant pathogens *laughs like a maniac* into our antiseptically clean environments. *dies laughing* 

So I bought new bags of American rice. Better rice. And I bought some for my relatives too. 

Vanilla ice cream without a machine, chocolate milkshake

I was surprised how much air my old little ice cream machine put into my ice cream before freezing it. 

I'd pour in the goop that I made into the machine and its volume would double. 

If the goop was cold, nearly freezing, and if the machine was cold, very frozen, then the flavor goop would rise right up the bowl. 

Here's the theory.

This technique takes the cream in the recipe and whips it to proper whipped cream and then mixes that into the milk and egg mixture with flavors. 

It's all so simple. 

2 cups heavy cream whipped and chilled.

2 cups whole milk heated.

1 cup sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 eggs

The milk is heated with sugar. Two eggs are beaten into a bowl larger than needed for that. Hot milk is ladled into the eggs as they are whisked. Another ladle. Another ladle. And so on to half the pot of milk. This raises the temperature of the egg and lowers the temperature of the milk. This egg-milk is whisked into the original milk. Vanilla added. Chilled to room temperature. Chilled in refrigerator. Chilled in freezer.

To chill it more quickly I fill the sink with cold water to about 1/5 level and place my pot of custard into the cold water making sure the water level is lower than the height of the pot. The pot is small so there isn't much water. 

Then into the refrigerator. 

Then into the freezer. 

The mixture was foamy and light and airy when it was put into the freezer and it was solid a few hours later when fully frozen. The taste is stronger than I had imagined. The milk mixture was strong but I thought that the cream would soften its intensity. But it didn't. It's still very strong. The vanilla comes from Mexico, the land where bees invented vanilla, and it is extremely floral. 

It hardly tastes like vanilla at all.

You'll be all, "Well, it's very delicious, and it does have that fermented full-bodied transformative catalyst-like effect to it, rather like a bitters except it's only one thing, not a mixture, but complex as a massive flower construction. This vanilla has the flavor of a Rose Parade float but you must be thinking of something else. This is not vanilla. You must be confusing it with some kind of curry." 

Potato

It took too much force to process a raw potato. But then my potato was not 100% firm. Somebody online said the manual instructs to use only cooked potatoes but that is not so. The manual does not say that. Although it does recommend to mount it vertically on a stud in the wall. Better leverage.

The potato below was cooked in the microwave.

It's like a baked potato except smashed.

All that for just that.

Fail!

I ate half of it. 

Oddly, all these various restaurant style potato slicers are the same with only superficial differences between them. They all use the same goofy cutting plate that attaches with three screws. 

The thing that kills me about this video for another brand is how they try to be so elegant but the models have the same difficulty that I had and they're doing the same things that I did. The end of the video they're slamming it. As I was. The machine needs to be on a wall braced to a wall-joint. That way, the presumably teenage user can jump up and grab the handle and use his/her full weight to jam the potato through a cutting strip that really isn't that sharp.

But then, if you had six sharp ninja knives lined up horizontally and six sharp ninja knives lined up vertically and pushed a potato through the 6X6 ninja knife-grid then that would be fairly hard too. 

Everybody expects it to be a lot easier. 

My parents had one of these but I never I saw anyone use it. I just saw the machine on the table a couple of times. Something my dad picked up at the flea market. I never saw them together but I think my dad wanted it to work but it just wouldn't. This is his sort of thing. He also had a deep frier and he didn't know how to cook. Now that I used one I can see him getting angry with its failure. Everyone wants this to work.

Dad was the type who actually would bolt one to a wall. Either inside the house or out. Odd tasteless household things like this sticking out of a wall didn't bother him one little bit. Garage or basement. My mom had a machine attached to the clothesline pole to crush soda pop cans. That's how I see him doing that with this. He put up that can crusher for her. 

This machine was tested twice. So far, 2 for 0 fail. 

Microwaving the potato first would work for its first fry. The idea of the first fry is to cook the potato. The idea of the second fry is to dehydrate the potato. 

What if I microwaved the potato half way so it has strength to be pushed but weakness to be cut by twelve knives. 

Actually, it's one thin blade woven back and forth across a grid. 

How do they do that? How do the blades cross? Is one row of blades on top of the other?

No.

It's the same thing as a cardboard carton for bottles. The flat surfaces have slices that are half the width of the blade that intersect with slices in opposite blades running the perpendicular direction, slice inserts to slice, so where the blades meet there is nothing, the opposite blade has a cutout, a line, half the width of the blade. It's the weirdest thing, really, because the blade is going along and it gets to the point of intersection, a line, and there is nothing. The intersecting blade is cut out. But only halfway. The other half of the cutout on the same line in the same spot (line) in the original blade. Emptiness stacked on top of emptiness so that blade halves can cross each other where they meet at a line.

I bet.

I haven't actually looked. 

I'll look when I clean it. Potato is stuck between the blades. And on the plate that holds the potato. And on the opposite plate that pushes the potato. It's all messed up with potato guts. It has to be taken apart and scrubbed. It's a major pain in the B, U, Double-T. And the number of fuckheads who think this is a great idea are numerous, judging by the number of brands. But it's not a great idea. 

Compared to something like, say, lasers.

The laser potato cutter. 

Only one laser. It's tiny. It zips back and forth and traces the slices for french fries across a potato  according to its program, and just watching it is fascinating, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, potato lights up with rapidly moving red lines and the potato is sitting there, lights up, and simply collapses into a pile of potato-logs. 

But n-o-o-o-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-o-o-o

I noticed that all blades are the same on the exit side of the square metal frame while some blades are taller than other blades on the entrance side, as if the blade had altered heights as a wave before it was woven into the frame. The potato hits a wall of knives but not all at the same moment. The blades are serrated and the potato facing them is rounded. 

Pepperoni pizza

What, no bacon? No pineapple?

Notice, after the can of tomatoes is dumped the next photo is the tomatoes pureed.