Here is where I write stuff

So I've spent ten hours today taking recipes from my computer, LJ memories, The Pioneer Woman's website, and my "recipe box" on allrecipes.com, and putting them all on LJ. They are all posted to foodisnommy, and they are all tagged by type, major ingredient, season, theme (Italian, Mexican, etc), and anything else I could think of. The ones I've made all have ratings up to five stars (*****). Oh, the magic of tags. The Pioneer Woman has her own tag, and so does Alton Brown. Because I love both of them and wish they would have babies together, except their respective spouses would probably object.

There are 139 recipes as of right now. My goodness, that's a lot. And I still have to go through the foot-tall stack of magazines my mom lent me.

....I think I'm done for the night though.

So I have some pictures I've been meaning to post. I got my cats a new gold litter box, and they like it. Also there are a few random pictures of them being cat-ish. Then there are pictures of the my new silverware, and also of muffins I made today, because ohhhhhhhh they are good.

( Pictures of kitties and muffins )

PS: My mood icon is 112% perfect for this post. Because I am full of muffins, and so is Pat. There are even muffins in the picture! I love my Wonderfalls mood theme.

Woooooooooo garlic.

I got some fresh garlic at the store tonight, and mmmmmmmm fresh garlic. I made my own Caesar dressing and I knew it was good when I was looking at my empty plate and realized I was about to start licking it. I love Caesar dressing. And home-made means I can make it really good! Less oil/egg, more garlic!

Also I found a better way of mincing/grating the stuff. I used the cheese grater notlikeyourmom gave me a while back, and it was awesome. I grated two cloves into my PastaRoni (I made two boxes so I have leftovers for a few days) and about four cloves into my dressing and MAN I have garlic breath now. But the grater performed wonderfully- it made a lovely paste of the garlic, perfect for adding to recipes. I am clearly a genius.

Now I have bratwurst cooking in the crockpot, in watered-down teriyaki sauce, to take for lunches at work with my leftover PastaRoni. I am rocking the meal planning this week.

ALSO: The LJ Halloween layout is crazy. The black makes the pages look so much smaller! The header is keen, though, with the zombies and yeah.

ALSO ALSO: I'm getting more into the "excited nervous anticipation" part of NaNoWriMo, and less of the "unmitigated panic". I think it's funny, though, that in trying to work out the details of my plot today I basically wrote a scene in my head where my characters were talking about it. They knew all about how it worked, and I learned it from them. The fictional characters. In my head. NaNoWriMo: making people crazy since 1999.

Right. Now for more plotting, and homework. Probably should do the homework first.

SO. In an attempt to kill my arch-nemesis, kandigurl, I suggested to her that we go to the Texas State Fair to consume fried foods. You see, every year there is a competition to create the most delicious and bizarre and creative fried foods, and the winners are served at the fair, along with a whole bunch of other delicious things. This year's winner, for example, was chicken-fried bacon.

No, really. They took strips of bacon, breaded them, and deep fried them.

So today we went to the fair and busted out the fried-foods map and tried to kill each other.

( I, of course, took pictures )

The results are in!


The poll Made my decision for me. Really, I had no choice.

Especially when aishy posted this:


( My arm was thoroughly twisted. )

I have discovered a new noise to make to annoy my cats. It's kind of like an extended "vvvv" sound. It is amazing.

Every night, when I get into bed, Hawking tries very hard to get into my pants. No, really. She tries to crawl up the leg of my pajama pants. Unfortunately, my leg gets in the way, so she only gets her head in the pants leg before giving up and making pathetic "woe is me" noises. Then I roll over on my back so she can sleep on my chest/throat because I am a sucker.

I talk about my cats far too much. I can't help it! They are endlessly amusing creatures. Except when Hawking is destroying wires (She did it again today! Good thing I had a spare set of computer speakers) or unplugging things. That's not so much amusing as incredibly frustrating. CHEW ON THE CATNIP TOYS, KITTEH, OR I LOCK YOU IN A TINY BOX FOR A YEAR.

By the way, I think it was my breakfast that had me all queasy. I tried a crockpot breakfast recipe, and while it tasted good, I've noticed that just thinking about it makes me feel nauseated. I don't think I'll be having the leftovers again tomorrow.

Also! I might be murdered in my sleep by robots! They are clearly out to get me. I've gotten no less than SEVEN calls from an unidentified phone number, and each time it only beeped at me when I answered. I decoded the super secret message and it said "DIE, HUMAN, DIE". Trufax!

Okay, not really. But I did get 7 weird beepy phone calls. I eventually just started making beeping noises back at the killer robots on the other end of the line.

So much capslock in this post. I'm so tired and woooo. Bed time.

I really wish I had a pantry.

I just got home from my mom's store, with three boxes of food + a couple bags of food + a mop.

See, my mom's store is closing, and basically whatever is left in the store will be written off and given away, and I got first dibs. I got some neat stuff, and I have enough to last me through an apocalypse or three. Well, provided there is electricity after the apocalypse, so that I can cook the stuff.

Cans of pineapple, tomatoes, soup (italian wedding soup FTW!); jars of cherries, Worcestershire sauce, teriyaki sauce, soy sauce, BBQ sauce; boxes of pancake mix, Texas Toast, fish fry, stuffing (7 boxes! oh my), velveeta shells&cheeeeeeeese, pudding... and who knows what else. A small stack of frozen dinners. A couple individual ice cream things. More pasta than you can shake a stick at. A ton of little things of Meow Mix wet cat food. Telsa is chowing down on "beef with gravy" right now, and it actually looks like beef! Beef jerky, that really good kind that is really expensive, I have a couple bags of that. A six-pack of bottles of Dublins. A bag o' candy. Apparently candy is a slow seller, so my dad was telling me to take it all. I did take all the butterfingers, and most of the twizzlers, plus good amounts of other candies I like. I don't know why I grabbed so much, because I rarely eat candy, but oh well. I'll probably take it to work. Oh! And SPICES. I have enough spices now that I could probably make cardboard taste good. And also a pizza, because there is a pizza oven in my mom's store, and she made pizza for lunch. bacon+pineapple ftw.

So basically I'm not going grocery shopping for about a month. My fridge is packed full, and the overflow is on my counter, because I don't have a pantry.

And there is a whole box of diapers and wipes and baby food and the like that I'm taking to work to give away to a lady who has a baby. Her baby is exactly the right age for the baby food and the diaper sizes my mom had, so that works perfectly.

So, last week when I made bread, drthemoworm suggested I make lasagna. I realized I had never made lasagna before, and then I realized that this was unacceptable.

So I made lasagna today. I's pretty tasty! Kroger brand sketti sauce, ground italian sausage (half mild, half spicy) ricotta, and far too much cheese (I know, I know, there's no such thing) on top.

The only thing I'd change is the noodles. I got lazy and bought the no-boil noodles. They kind of suck. The bottom and middle layers were okay, but too thin. I like thicker noodles. The top layer didn't soften up right, and the edges were crispy. Bah. So next time, I'll get proper lasagna noodles.

Also: there is totally room in my made-up recipe for a layer of frozen spinach so that I can pretend this is a little bit healthy. Because a little bit of spinach justifies the use of 50 pounds of cheese, right? Right.

Also also: Oh man, I could totally make a batch of spaghetti sauce using this sauce as a base. That would make this lasagna divine. Make the sauce in the recipe, then add a can of tomato sauce to turn the whole things into spaghetti sauce... Oh my goodness.

In other news, I have bread rising in my crock pot. Someone in cooking suggested it, and my dough is practically rocketing to the top of the crock. I turned it on warm for about 20 minutes while I was mixing and kneading the dough, then turned it off and coated it in a bit of oil to keep the dough from sticking. Plopped the dough in, put the lid on, and magic. Extra bonus points: The lid is glass, so I can check it without lifting the lid. Handy!

Next I'm going to make chex mix. It may or may not make it to our Heath Ledger party today. We'll see.

Cooking makes me happy :-)

I just remembered the other thing I wanted to mention last night. Tesla! She is loving this apartment. I am very happy about this. She likes sitting in the windows, she likes the afternoon sun that comes in, and she especially likes my new comforter. She disappears underneath it and just hangs out under there. Nutty little kitty. She's not being clingy at all, and she's eating normally, and she's very content. Hurrah! I was a little worried she might not like the move.

Guys, be proud of me. I had fish for lunch. I'm still working on the whole "hey I don't really hate fish!" thing, so I went to Long John Silvers and got a fish/chicken combo thingy and actually ended up eating only the fish. It was pretty good! Also I got malt vinegar to put on the fries. Man I love malt vinegar. But anyways, yes! I had fish, and I enjoyed it! This is still a novel concept to me.

Also I called a place in Dallas that miiiiiiight be able to help me find shoes that would enable me to run without my bum ankle exploding. If they can't help me, I'll try the podiatrist. I'm gonna go there this weekend, hopefully.

Okay, back to the floor to work on this calendar.