Cooking stories!

- One of the food-goodies Mom brought down on her last visit was amaranth seeds. Yay amaranth! (It has a really dense nutty flavor to it, it's pretty darn yummy. Though I have to admit an awful lot of my fangirling over the stuff is due to my Phisto connotations.) I sorted through all my Heidi-recipes, and found one for a nice cheesy souffle with amaranth seeds in it. Not only had I never tried to make a souffle, but, I'm pretty sure I'd never eaten one before. Tom said they were successful, so we'll assume he's right. :) The silly things were *delicious*, vast amounts of Gruyere cheese, and the nice rich flavor of the amaranth (which cooks up similar to quinoa, a bit like couscous...or in normal-person terms, it's a bit like the texture of cooked rice). Really savory, and I felt all cooking-saavy about it. But I realised, as Tom and I were eating, that while *I* really liked the amaranth, I was pretty sure he wouldn't be too big on it.

Sure enough, when I peered over to see how much he'd eaten - he was just finishing scraping off all the egg'n'cheese top layer, leaving the amaranth-dense bottom almost perfectly untouched.

- Kellie, in her amazingness, sent me a Twinkie cookbook. It is AMAZING. There are tons and tons of desserts, trifles and cakes and things, but also some more unexpected things, like pancakes with Twinkie slices, and sausage nestled in a sliced-open Twinkie (similar to pigs-in-a-blanket I suppose). And while I was skeptical at first...the more I looked, the more I realized these silly things looked really, really plausible.

So I broke down and bought a box of Twinkies. (You do not get enough Twinkies for your money.) I decided to try a pumpkin bread pudding, using Twinkies in place of bread or pound cake. HOLY CRAP was it delicious! The Twinkies had the perfect consistency for that sort of thing. Recipe called for making a sugary syrup to drizzle overtop, but we have a bottle of happy local maple syrup in the fridge, so I went with that instead. *Awesome*. (Tom liked it too! ...recipes always go over better if he tries some before I tell him what all is in things.)

- Due to the previous, I had leftover pumpkin puree in my fridge. Pumpkin is delicious, I always forget how much I love dense squash-type things. (I picked up a frozen dinner for myself last week - pumpkin ravioli! it was SO good!) I'd spotted a recipe for pumpkin soup over on Heidi's blog, and it sounded pretty darn yummy. I wound up doing some tweaking - obviously, I took the lazy way out and did not bake up fresh pumpkin, though I can only imagine how much more delicious that would have been. I threw in a loooot of garam masala, and not so much curry paste (since the flavor of mine tends to distract from flavors around it). A few other tweaks...and I'm not sure how I feel about the thickness of what I ended up with, but I can always adjust that when I re-heat later. It is DELICIOUS, the absolutely perfect fall food.

- With the coconut milk from the pumpkin soup in my mind, the other recipe I decided on for the day was a coconut rice recipe, also from Heidi. Quality Market was lacking any purple rice, and I forgot until afterwards that I might have a bit still in my own cupboard, but I picked up a nice bag of jasmine rice that'll keep me happy for awhile. I recently realized that Quality actually *does* have shallots, so I picked up some of those to finally try (I usually sub in green onions, since they're so easy to deal with). The recipe's really simple, but surprisingly delicious, salty and sweet and rich.

...so I'm having pumpkin soup and coconut rice for my dinner, and it is a pretty perfect combination. Which I'll probably continue to have for lunch for the next several days. <3

- Tom wants to eat at home, rather than fast food, more often again. Eating out always costs so much, not to mention, y'know, that it's awful for you, and there's a fair chance of your stomach getting revenge on you later. So this is good, except that it requires having Tom-food around. I'm still doing casseroles, I was doing fewer through the summer, but now that it's getting cooler I can bring a few more back in. But Tom doesn't like eating the same thing twice in a day. And, given time limits (and his own lack of patience), the food has to be something that's ready in about five minutes, maybe ten tops. So, at his request, I picked up some random pre-made frozen things today...we'll see how it goes. Tops has a better range of boxed meals, but either way it's pretty impossible to find something that doesn't require meat being browned and added, and is under $5. WalMart actually has a decent selection of (mostly) freshly-made food, and I know he's burned out on their popcorn chicken and potato salad, but the enchiladas I snagged for him a few days ago, he enjoyed pretty well.

...I haaaate buying the pre-made stuff. Not only is it disproportionately expensive, but the portions aren't anywhere near Tom-sized, and I know the food isn't half so healthy as what I'd make at home. I should start making notes on sauces and basic combinations again, so Tom can throw together the same kind of random stir-fries and Ramen concoctions and things I usually make.



In other news!

- Since I've spent the last forever working on crochet projects for other people, I splurged on some me-yarn a week or so ago. I got some sock yarn, and made that scarf I was spazzing about awhile ago. I got some ridiculously soft light blue stuff to make arm-warmers with (so I can continue wearing my t-shirts into the colder weather). I also got a ball of Noro, just because it makes me happy. <3

...and I have a whole bunch of pictures of things I've made lately (including Tom's throw, which I FINALLY finished!!!), but I can't for the life of me find my camera cable. I have a sneaky suspicion that is Tom's fault, and his pile of computer-cables is even scarier than mine, so those will have to wait.

- Work was going along just fine, until I had to print the 2 giant 44.5" x 26' banners for Basil's. About 24 feet were done on the first one, I was all happy it was working so well...and all the sudden, within like six inches, the whole design went peeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwww angling straight off the edge of the material. I'd no idea what happened. I tried some other things, and then we noticed these LINES OF DOOM. On the purple background I was trying to do, there was a little pink line, and a little blue line. When I tried other things, the lines were still there. Something in the heads just weren't hitting those spots right, like it would spit out all but one color in that one area. I tried EVERYTHING I could think of, I spent probably five or six hours doing every test, running any procedure I could find in the manual, scouring the internet, cleaning everything I felt safe touching in the printer...nothing.

So I thought, well, let's try just printing something that's narrow enough that it won't have to print at the bad spot. First inch looked perfect. After that: peeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww my rectangle became a serious parallelogram.

Thus, on the...either Friday or Saturday starting off Labor Day weekend, Chad declared the printer out of commission until we could get a repair guy in.

A repair guy, based all the way in Rochester, who last time wasn't able to come out for like four or five days - and that wasn't a holiday weekend.

Basil's needed done asap, I had a job due Tuesday, three for a guy on Wednesday, a big 4'x8' for Thursday, a potential one for Friday, and a seriously obnoxious 18"x14' one for Saturday, as well as another I didn't have a clear date on.

...needless to say, I've been pretty panic-y lately. Thankfully, the repair guy was out Tuesday afternoon. After lecturing us on using pre-grommetted material (which Chad promised we weren't really using anymore...and we hadn't, except for the Basil's banner of DOOM), the guy worked miracles and got the printer running *beautifully*, teaching us all kinds of nifty tidbits about the machine in the process. (I was in a bit of geek-heaven, learning all this stuff about how the thing works, and why it was doing what it did. This guy knows *everything*.)

Somehow, we are now back on schedule - despite one customer adding another three banners needed for Thursday, and a request for 300 little 2" stickers coming in, and me having to deal with new kids and being short-handed with Ann and Bruce on (a MUCH needed) vacation. I wish I'd gotten a picture of the Basil's banner - I wanted to spread it out so it would dry properly, but, where in the Paper Factory is there 26 feet of open space?? So I did something I'd been dying to try for ages:

In the very back of the store, is Bruce's frame shop. Half of it is open up to the roof, and there are gazillions of long pieces of molding he makes into frames, as well as mat board EVERYWHERE, the scary guillotine cutting machine, the giant laminator, the table we trim banners and do shrink-wrapping and t-shirt making on, and all kinds of crap laying around everywhere. Running alongside of this is a stairway up to the loft, which is a handy little sawdust-covered storage area overtop of Bruce's smaller framing room (which has a normal-height drop ceiling).

Now there's never enough space for me to even trim banners back there, BUT... there's nothing at all taking up the space between all of our crap and the ceiling.

So! I hauled the banners up to the loft, and let them unroll down toward the floor.

...at which point, I learned that the loft is only about 14 feet above the floor. Fortunately, by draping the banners over a few stacks of boxes in the loft, and then down over the banner-trimming table, dipping down toward the floor, and then up and over the laminator, VOILA! Twenty-six feet of purple banner! It was a pretty impressive/ridiculous sight.

(And then I remembered I still had to trim and seam the ends of the stupid things. At which point I panicked again.)

Somehow, by last night, I was able to stay up front and keep an eye on the new kids. We still didn't get out on time, and I was still panicking a bit at the end of the night, because things weren't getting done that should have been obvious to have gotten done... but I was pretty darn happy when I got home.

Today, of course, I had residual emotional issues, and flipped out over stupid things and felt tense and angry that I wasn't enjoying my day off enough (which is ridiculous, but happens, and makes me even crazier). Successful recipes helped worlds, as did finally getting R.E.M.'s "Murmur" album into mp3 form and listening to it about four times in a row.

- ahhhhhhhhhhh why is it 9:30 already??? I'm dying to go back to the weeks of working four days, having three days off. I really think I was saner then. I feel like such a wimp, not being able to handle a 40-hour week, and the money has been reeeaally nice. Plus everyone but me has classes now, and there are five new people to train with only two "good" people and two pretty-good people to train them, given that half of last year's batch are still fairly useless. sigh. It is going to be a loooooong Halloween season this year.

- On the bright side, I have an AWESOME costume set aside. '80s pop dress! Cyndi Lauper-ish, pink and black and lace. Too many good accessories at the store, and I might crochet some fingerless gloves, and I've done a test-run on my hair (which, yes, will still go into the perfect level of '80s poofiness)... and I'm actually honestly considering really dying pink streaks into my hair. (I'm getting bored again. I found some nice browns I might try now that summer's over, but, there are also fuchsia streaking kits. That could be fun.)

Labels: cooking, crochet, printshop, work