The Shadows on My Wall Don't Sleep

Pillsbury's Sugar Free Devil's Food Cake Mix can be improved significantly with these simple changes:

• Use an extra egg
• Use butter instead of oil
• Add one packet of sugar free cook and serve chocolate pudding mix

We have jumbo eggs, and sometimes they have two yokes. This particular cake therefore had four eggs in the mix with five egg yolks. The texture turned out to be just what I want in a devil's food cake.

... not so much for coffee, but they're great for loose tea.

We have some Russian fruit infused black tea that hafoc bought a while back. It's really good, but it's a hassle to brew because it's loose and we have to mess around with tea balls or strain it through a sieve if making a pot rather than just a mug. But with a French press, well, now it's a snap.

You can't leave it in the press while you drink a cup of course, it just keeps steeping and getting more and more bitter and astringent, but if you pour it out into a pot or pitcher....

Today I'm having it sweet, chilled, and "seasoned" with a splash of apple juice... yummy!

I've been saying that those single serving microwaveable baking mixes were a waste of money... then I actually tried one.

Betty Crocker Warm Delights Fudge Brownie to be exact. hafoc bought a couple on special so the price was $1.25, I'll have to check the normal price later.

Mix a bit of water with the powder, microwave for less than a minute, apply fudge topping and wait 2 minutes (I suggest getting a glass of milk and a cat free comfy spot to sit) and you have a warm gooey brownie about four inches in diameter and about three-quarters of an inch thick. It sure beats making a box mix for instant gratification, and you only make what you plan to eat.

So yes, compared to a box the brownie you get from one of these things is expensive, but when you consider the time and cost for oil and eggs with a box mix, and the fact that you will probably eat more brownies than you should, it's not so bad. It's even comparable to the cost of an inferior brownie at the checkout.

As Hafoc commented, the chocolate to sweat ratio on these things is incredible.

I can't help it, I saw the name and I was intrigued.

Ben & Jerry's Black & Tan

"Cream stout ice cream swirled with chocolate ice cream."

So I bought it and I'm eating it, and here's my opinion.

Stout flavored ice cream is Weird. It's almost... meaty, in flavor. Fortunately Ben & Jerry's takes the swirl thing seriously so you only get the stout by itself if you skim the very top of the pint.

The chocolate isn't some mild little milk chocolate though, it's the "black" portion of the black & tan. Imagine a nice block of semi-sweet, maybe even bittersweet, chocolate. Now add just enough cream to make it the right texture for ice cream. Yeah, it's a really nice semi/bitter chocolate ice cream, it's as close to black as chocolate ice cream can get and it's got the bitter chocolate after bite too.

The stout ice cream by itself would be pretty icky, the chocolate by itself would be edible only in small doses, together they make a pretty decent chocolate ice cream. Together, you can't taste the stout and the chocolate is cut to manageable levels.

The cats incidentally started begging/trying to get into the ice cream as soon as they smelled it. I gave them a little bit of the stout flavored part. The seemed to have liked it but apparently it's way rich for them because they spent a long time licking their whiskers and didn't finish what I gave them. But they seem pretty pleased with themselves for getting some.

Good, not sweet refrigerator pickle recipes.

Actually what I'd really like is something that spells out the minimum required amount of vinegar and salt (in proportions) in the brine. I know someone, somewhere, has studied that. The USDA probably has, but damned if I can find it the information (without wading through the very, very long and tedious USDA documents anyway).

I want to make a decent amount of pickled cauliflower but the recipes I'm finding fall into three categories: sweet (YUCK!), hot (I mean, really hot, the amount of habaneros one recipe called for terrified me), or weird (cooking my cauliflower in oil flavored with toasted cumin, coriander, and turmeric before pickling for instance, or including Coke in the brine.) None of those is what I want. I want a nice, not too sour but not at all sweet, refrigerator cauliflower pickle, dilled is good but not required.

This is the closest so far, though I wasn't really thinking of making 4 quarts of it (unless it turned out really, really good). I think I'd just leave out the dried chillies and hope for the best. The fact that it uses white wine vinegar (low acid, yay!) and no sugar is good but I have to wonder if that's enough vinegar.

Rose hips are, frankly, a wee bit creepy.

They resemble an unholy cross between a somewhat gelatinous looking red-orange berry and a Shadow vessel. Add to that the disturbing crackling* sound they make when you trim off the blossom end (the taint of Shadow), a childhood spent with a garden that used very minimal pesticides, an active imagination, and a deep fear of bugs and you get one kitty-dragon ready to leap across the room and commence climbing walls. Or, given my size, breaking through them.

*A rose hip is basically a thin sticky shell used to enclose rose seeds**. When you trim them your knife grates on the seeds, hence a crackling sound.

**Anyone that has read that they are related to apples will have a completely erroneous preconception of what these things look like inside. Think of them as a ball of seeds, loosely bound by some hairy fibers, wrapped in a bit of jelly***, just enough to hold them together. A couple dozen seeds per rosehip, easily (I haven't actually counted but there are LOTS).

***Have I mentioned they are sticky?

So now I know what a rosehip tastes like. I can see why the most common recipe for them is jelly, and it's not the taste. The big fruit on this rugosa is about the size of a quarter and most of that space is taken up with seeds and hairy fibers (actually, they remind more more of snips of cotton twine). It would be a major pain in the ass to seed out a few quarts of these things. I'm definitely making jelly and not mucking around with anything that says I have to seed these things. And the gumminess of the one I tried explained well the lack of pectin in the recipes I found, they don't need any more than they have naturally.


And they taste like apples, tart apples. I think that's the megadose of vitamin C the things pack.


I might seed out a few and see if I can get some new rugosas from seed though.

I don't know when fish, rice, and miso soup became comfort food for me but it has. It's probably a knee-jerk reaction to the beef and potatoes diet my father insists on. I've always been fond of Americanized Chinese food and in recent years friends have gotten me hooked on Japanese food (though my tolerance for sushi has died out, even for unagi) and if I avoid the hot stuff I enjoy Korean as well (no kim chee, thank you).

Anyway, the day is looking better now that I've had my miso, rice, and fish. And I even managed to find some mp3s of The Pillows. Now I just need to get my anime fix in and I'll be bolstered for the usual evening bitchiness around here.

Life has been uninteresting and busy lately.

My work schedule looks like a slice of swiss cheese. I only have two students this time (for those wondering, I teach Solaris system administration on a contract basis at a corporate training center) so anytime one of them can't come to class it's turned into a day off. I still have 35 hours to teach for the course and only one official topic to cover, Jumpstart. I'm going to have to come up with stuff that Sun doesn't put into their certification exams to teach these guys, but still keep it relevant to the real world (not hard) and 'small' enough to cover in the remaining hours (not so easy). Any sys admins out there have suggestions?

Outside of work... I saw a computer system that I want. My current system is one I built back with a 300Mhz AMD K6-2 was just off the bleeding edge. Yes, that old. This new system isn't exactly up to geek nirvana standards, it's at BJ's (local wholesale club), but 2.8Ghz with 512Mb RAM (expandable to a gig), DVD-RW, 7 USB 2.0 ports, etc. is pretty nice. And the 17" flat panel monitor that it comes with is very nice. And the case has a gee whiz factor with the sliding, spring-loaded panel that conceals the front access USB, firewire, memory card slots, and floppy.... Now to find a spare $1200 (and $60 for tax if I can't find it at the New Hampshire BJ's). :P

I just activated my new Tracfone. One of my birthday presents, received late due to shortages at the stores. We'll see how this works out. My 'local' calling area is weird though, if I drive 5 miles north into New Hampshire I'll get roaming charges. If I go to El Paso, TX I'm still local.... 8)

Other than that, nothing going on here. Dad was a pill and got himself kicked out of accelerated rehab so he's going to be home sooner than expected, with little training for moving around with a walker.

And I cooked ostrich burgers last night. They're comparable in price to better grades of ground beef (and cheaper than some) so I figured that while Dad wasn't around to make faces and disgusting comments about the nature of my food choices (don't let the man see you eating rice, particularly in a cream sauce) I'd try them.

For a giant feather duster they taste awfully good. :)