Keep Your Turkey Away from my Chili!

There's this guy in the office who eats chili every day. OK, he may not eat it every day, but he eats it so often that if I smell chili reheating in the microwave, I assume he's nearby.

His chili smells really good, and one day I asked him for his recipe. He told me his recipe wasn't authentic, and Ireplied that I didn't believe there was such a thing as an authentic chili recipe. But then he told me that his was made with ground turkey and lima beans, and I changed my mind.

Then again, I eat lentil soup that tastes like dirty water.

Anyways, Spousal Unit bought organic, free-range, antibiotic-free, all-natural, old cow ground beef the other day. I asked him if, for the love of all that was good and true, he could, for once, not insist on making spaghetti with meat sauce with it. He asked what I suggested, and I suggested chili with black beans.

Spousal Unit hates black beans -- but he loves lima beans, ironically enough -- but he made it anyways. I brought the leftovers for lunch. He made himself a turkey sandwich instead.

Not authentic, but lima-bean-free.

100th Post! Polenta! Chicken! Cheetos!

Hello everyone -- if anyone is reading this at all at this point...

Welcome to the 100th post here at Food I Have Eaten.

Posts have been few and far between lately. I have an actual deadline approaching at work and a toddler who doesn't believe in sleep, so I have almost no time to actually write anything that doesn't go something like, "When developing a custom component, ensure that you have imported all the SDK libraries."

To top it off the God of the Snack Closet i.e., Linda, the office manager, was on vacation for a while before and after the Christmas/New Year break. This meant that the snack closet was bare. There was literally nothing in the closet. It was so bad that people started eating the sugar. I kid you not:  By the second week of the new year people had eaten through the whole giant box of sugar packets and everyone had to have their coffee -- espresso included -- black.

Needless to say, mutiny was imminent.

Fortunately Linda came back from vacation and the closet was replenished. And what bounty! There were chocolate chip cookies, Two Bite Brownies, chips, crackers, and, the piece de resistance, Cheetos! And not just any Cheetos: The crunchy kind!

The chocolate chip cookies and brownies disappeared within a day and a half. I had two cookies on the morning the package was opened. That was it.

The sacred imprint of crunchy Cheetos!

But Linda, in her wisdom, had provided us with a family-size bag of Cheetos. Oh how we pigged out on those! We had them for breakfast; we had them as lunchtime condiments; we had them with our coffee; we ate them as a late-afternoon snack. It was glorious!

During this time, spousal unit and I decided that we were sick of  making food that consisted of opening a can and heating it up. Just because there's a resurgence of 60s/50s nostalgia doesn't mean we have to eat like we're still on war rations.

Anyways, as such we made chicken cacciatore with polenta.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking how two people who seemingly can't get a lentil soup to not taste like dirty water can make a chicken cacciatore with polenta that doesn't suck. Well the answer's simple: chicken cacciatore is easier to make than lentil soup. You can't really fuck up a dish that involves chicken, tomato and wine -- it practically flavours itself. Meanwhile, you can totally screw up flavouring lentils boiled in water.

As for polenta: it's deceptively easy to make. You should try it. It's very tasty.

Easier than a lentil soup! Faster than a beef stew! It's chicken cacciatore!

Slightly Less Awful Lentil Soup

You know what sucks about winter? It's that no matter how much climate change makes it warmer and less snowy and generally less gloomy, the produce still sucks ass. So you're basically stuck eating root vegetables or canned beans for a few months.

Sure everyone says that frozen veg is great and awesome and tastes fresh and whatnot, but it's all a lie. Frozen broccoli tastes like nothing. And you can never get just regular frozen broccoli; it's always vegetable mixes, filled with vile crap like snow peas and sliced anemic carrots. Lastly, who the hell knows where these vegetables are from! They could be grown on toxic waste in a Chinese industrial city for all you know.

Anyways, the long and the short of it is that I don't like frozen veg and I'm not a big fan of root vegetables (screw Jamie Oliver!), so it's cans for me all winter. All. Fucking. Winter.

You know what the easiest thing is to make in winter? Canned lentil soup. It takes talent to make canned lentil soup taste like anything beside dirty water. You have to add spices or balsamic vinegar or tomatoes to it, and you have to do it in such a way that it doesn't just taste of whatever you added in.

A long, long time ago, my mom had a crunchy granola vegetarian recipe book that included many unremarkable soups that tasted like the inside of a health food store smells. However, there was this one recipe for curried apple lentil soup that was actually pretty good. My mom only made it once because she hates curry -- and because my mom is a traditionalist who will forever make lentil soup the same way.

The other day I found a bunch of bruised apples in the vegetable crisper. They were starting to go bad, but were still salvageable. So I said to myself, "Self, why don't we give curried apple lentil soup a try! We have a bottle of random curry powder in the pantry, so let's do this."

So I made it. It turned out OK, though not quite as awesome as I remembered it. But it was better than regular lentil soup.

Less Terrible Than Usual

As usual, I brought leftovers for lunch the next day and had one of those stupid low-fat yogurts for "dessert".

Lean Mean Smoke Meat Machine

Spousal Unit and I were all on our own one day and decided that we would go for lunch at the Deli down the street. The deli is owned by expat Montrealers who actually know what smoke meat is supposed to taste like.

Lean smoke meat makes more crumbs than medium smoke meat.

For some reason the place was ultra-packed. It was 2pm; why would so many people be having lunch at 2pm? This is a question that remains unanswered, but the result was that they were all out of the medium smoke meat, so I had to settled for lean.

Lean smoke meat is not quite as awesome as medium smoke meat. Medium smoke meat is soft and velvety on the tongue. Lean smoke meat tastes like meat. That said, any kind of smoke meat is better than no smoke meat.

The meal was finished off with a slice of apple pie à la mode. Unfortunately, because I decided to not be all Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, the apple pie was cold. Tsk.

A Tale of Two Yolks

You know that Italian hash I make? So the yolk is technically supposed to remain intact. I never managed it, ever, and was frankly thoroughly puzzled as to how one could even achieve a non-broken yolk when dealing with fried bread.

Success! Unbroken yolk!

But then a miracle happened!

OK, it wasn't a miracle. I just figured out that to not break the yolk you needed to make a little well in the middle of the fried bread, hot pepper and cheese and put the egg in there. Then you had to be very, very careful about flipping the entire concoction (yes, it requires flipping).

Failure. Broken yolk and sheepy cheese.

And this was how I managed to not break the yolk for the first time ever. Big round of applause for me!

I was so impressed with myself that I then decided to demonstrate my new mad non-egg-yolk-breaking-skillz to Spousal Unit. Unfortunately, I managed to break the yolk in the bowl before even dropping it into the pan. (Yes, I always crack eggs in a bowl first. This way I can check whether they're fertilized or bad. Yes I do realize this is somewhat crazy.)

Spousal Unit looked at the broken egg and asked me exactly what I wanted to show him. I lied and told him that I wanted to show him how if you mix Crotonese cheese with the Parmigiano it gets even gooier and tastier. And then Spousal Unit said that he didn't like sheep's milk cheese and that was the end of that.

O Xmas Bleuch! O Xmas Bleuch!

That's some strong coffee!

O Xmas Bleuch! O Xmas Bleuch!
That's some crazy-ass caffee-ine;
O Xmas Bleuch! O Xmas Bleuch!
That's some crazy-ass caffee-ine;
Not only strong in Espresso roast,
But in VIA form it packs the most.
O Xmas Bleuch! O Xmas Bleuch!
That's some crazy-ass caffee-ine!

 O Xmas Bleuch! O Xmas Bleuch!
Much jitters thou has given me;
O Xmas Bleuch! O Xmas Bleuch!
Much jitters thou has given me;
How often has my heart raced
After consuming you at a fast pace!
O Xmas Bleuch! O Xmas Bleuch!
Much jitters thou hast given me.

Soup for Breakfast

Yeah, you read right: soup for breakfast.

If you can have cereal for supper, you can have soup for breakfast.

Culturally-insensitive mug, meet your soup bowl counterpart.

Do you need backstory? Fine. We all woke up Sunday morning to no eggs, no bread and no OJ. It wasn't like it was a surprise: we had seen this coming for a week. Spousal Unit had a plan to go out and buy us breakfast. So off he went, forgetting that the time change would make The Toddler and me ravenous by 10am. The Toddler is happy having Cheerios at every meal, so there was no problem there. The problem was me.

All I wanted was hot soup because I had this nasty-ass cold that had decided to squat in my upper respiratory tract. We had leftover matzoh ball and kreplach soup (in chicken broth, natch) in the fridge. I warmed it up and the kreplach expanded to about 12 times their normal size.

At this point I should ask: do you know what kreplach is? Don't bother answering because I can't hear you. Also I am typing this in the past. Anyways, kreplach are dumplings filled with stuff, in this case mystery meat. We got them from the deli down the street because we're not really a dumpling-making family.

I ate the broth, the half-matzoh ball that was left and the two kreplach, then I washed it all down with an espresso because I didn't need a caffeine-withdrawal headache to amplify the sinus headache I already had.

By the time Spousal Unit got back with the breakfast sandwiches (sadly not Egg McMuffins), neither I nor The Toddler were hungry. Spousal Unit ate alone.