Christ, I hate cooking.

I suck at cooking so much that I thought the internet needed to know about it. Every night, I'll either post that I had spaghetti, or describe the disaster that resulted from trying something other than spaghetti.

[christihatecooking]

food update

Long time no see, my faithful readers!

Tonight I had: half a Jimmy John’s roast beef, tomato, lettuce, cheese sub, a Persian pudding, and rotini with butter and salt.

Tonight’s cooking tip: we all know that macaroni with butter and salt is delicious, and basically the ultimate meal for when you want to relax. But, did you know that you can have something almost as good that ordinary people might recognize as a meal? It’s true! Just sub in tri-color rotini (white red and green; spinach and carrots) for the macaroni, and suddenly you have a classy... “austere pasta salad” let’s call it. Sub in olive oil for butter and no one can say anything to you. (Just say you did, though, don’t actually do it.)

[christihatecooking]

red kidney bean scare

I had a little scare with some beans tonight! I bought a bag of mixed dry beans back in 2011, when I was living on my own for the first time and ambitious about cooking. Well, here in 2015, I’ve just finished moving to a new apartment, and part of turning over a new leaf is throwing away cooking and eating 4 year old food. So, I let them soak overnight, then put them in the slow cooker until tonight. 

I started eating them maybe 100 minutes ago, and after getting about 1/4 of the way through, started second guessing my preparation method (because red kidney beans are poisonous if not cooked correctly). WELL, turns out

http://dadcooksdinner.com/2010/09/slow-cookers-and-red-kidney-bean-poisoning.html/

that the only thing* more dangerous than a raw kidney bean is a not-quite-hot enough kidney bean, such as one cooked in a slow cooker on low for 13 hours. I was burning my mouth eating them, so I’m hoping I’m ok, but we’ll find out! I’m about halfway into the period of time when symptoms are supposed to show up. Either way, I feel like this episode is pretty reasonable justification for hating cooking.

*among beans

[christihatecooking]

christilovedrinking.tumblr.com

I invented an actual good (variation on a) mixed drink! The white pirate: a white Russian with spiced rum substituted for the vodka.

[christihatecooking]

Christ, I hate cooking turned 2 today!

yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay

Maybe now would be a good time to change my picture, since I made probably 3 plates of spaghetti in the last year...

[christihatecooking]

quinoa prices are ASTRONOMICAL

I came back from break to find that quinoa now costs $6.90 a pound at my local hippie mart. Hopefully that's just some sort of seasonal fluctuation. Oh well, buckwheat is fine, and it's still like $2.50.

[christihatecooking]

excellent jazz apple

I just ate an absolutely perfect apple. It was a Jazz apple. I don't know anything about apples, so I don't know what that means, but I do like jazz, and I definitely liked this apple! You know how fruity shampoo will smell better than any fruit can taste? This apple tasted as good as those shampoos! Seriously, this apple tasted like shampoo, in an entirely good way.

[christihatecooking]

First of all, tonight I cut into a perfect avocado. Absolutely PERFECT. The knife (just a butter knife) slid through it more easily than any other avocado I've ever experienced, and I knew that was good news, because it also definitely wasn't mushy. As I suspected, when I looked at the inside, the coloration was absolutely perfect.

Avocadoes (or the ones I get, at least) often have blemishes and soft spots and whatever, and you deal with it because it really doesn't affect the quality much, but it's still slightly annoying. So, hooray for this avocado! It should be proud of itself.

In other news, I tried making macaroni and cheese with vodka-preserved milk for the first time today. It tastes fine, and if anything, maybe slightly better than usual! I think I will call it a screwdriver, since it's orange, has vodka, and I have spiral pasta.

[christihatecooking]

ugggggggh

i ate so much, this should be called "christ i hate eating", not cooking

[christihatecooking]

daylight saving time forever

According to the man, DST ended early this morning. Now I'm sitting here and it's 5PM according to their rules, and it's already more dark than light. So you know what? I'm just staying on DST forever. The clocks in my apartment are staying as they are. Just by following my normal schedule, I'll be going to bed/waking up an hour earlier, which is a pretty good goal, right? Even if I completely forget that I'm doing this and mess up a time for a scheduled thing, all that will happen is that I'll show up an hour early.

[christihatecooking]

Paula Deen is my antithesis in a number of ways, not least because she loves cooking. Naturally, I decided to set audio of her on Oprah's show to the theme from Mirror's Edge.

[christilovetoast]

multigrain, tomato, avocado

[christihatecooking]

"it's basically instagram"

[christihatecooking]

Christihatecooking is totally on its way to becoming a legit cooking blog. How awesome is that? Pretty awesome indeed, actually, if I can actually use it to start developing a repertoire of good, varied meals to make for myself.

Anyways, what we have here is tilapia over cooked plain ramen noodles. Actually, the noodles are a little too plain, so I sprinkled on a tiny fraction of the ramen flavor packet. Here's the "recipe", such as it is:

Get some tilapia

Pour some oil over the tilapia, on a baking sheet

Pour your spice cabinet on the tilapia

Bake the tilapia in the oven until it is cooked

Cook the ramen

Drain the ramen

Put the tilapia on the ramen

That's it! As Julia Child would say, "SECRET french govt likely to award artillery contract to england stop bon apetit full stop"

[christihatecooking]

Basically what's happened here is that despite (or maybe because) of my hatred of cooking, I have developed a pretty incredible meal: macaroni and cheese, spinach, and avocado. It tastes insanely good, is pretty nutritious, and is barely more work than plain macaroni and cheese. Here's what you do:

Wash some spinach in a colander.

Get your macaroni (as in Kraft, although I use an equally good generic store version) cooking in a pot.

While the macaroni is cooking, set the colander on top of the pot, so that the spinach gets steamed.

After you've mixed in the cheese packet, scoop out an avocado and combine it all.

And there you have it. Make sure to eat it directly out of the pot to minimize cleanup, but you already knew that.

[christihatecooking]

great minds think alike

T-Rex speaks some incredibly true truths: http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2464

I especially like the reference to pasta. Could T-Rex secretly be a follower?!?

Also good: http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2259

[christihatecooking]

do all your shopping.... at walmart!!!!!!

[christihatecooking]

[christihatecooking]

I visited the Computer History Museum in the SF bay area today. It was pretty good, but once you got to the 1990s it got pretty... corporate. There was a single paragraph blurb on Linux and Linus Torvalds in the whole place, and nothing about Richard Stallman or any other free/open source software types. ....maybe no rms is for the best, though. He'd scare the children!

I saw the actual Utah Teapot, and one of the two complete difference engines that were built a few years back. I didn't realize this, but apparently the planned full version that Babbage never fully constructed was for evaluating arbitrary polynomials. The machinery was about as impressive as you would expect from a bunch of gears that are supposed to somehow evaluate polynomials. Pretty cool!