I don't remember who it was that posted the link to this recipe on Facebook, but, holy crap, their thumbs-up for it was an understatement:

White Chocolate Chip Cookie. As the page itself says, this makes the perfect chewy little chip cookie. It's an IDEAL setting for white chocolate, which is making me very, very happy.

Also - Tom apparently doesn't like white chocolate in his cookies. Fantastic! These will last more than the afternoon! (Even though half the batch - which was like 4 dozen total for me - is being donated to the Kosciuszko Club's bake sale to benefit Relay for Life. Paper Factory crew LOVES making food.)

Labels: cooking

 
P.S. Tom DID notice the eggplant...though I suspect he didn't at first. He was finishing up the last of the casserole last night, and picked out a bit of eggplant. He glared at me. "Stop. Just... stop." sigh. I tried. And he still ate some, even if it made him cranky, and he picked them out last night.

Also - I have my Zune. I am seriously loving it. The size is not so bad as I'd feared. I'm getting the hang of the touch-screen, though it's taking a bit. It does not appear that I can snag files off my computer from the Zune without plugging it in (though I can send them from my comp to the Zune), but we'll see if I can't set it up to sync on its own and maybe do it that way. (I have waaaaayyyy too much of everything to let anything sync automatically. ever.) I'm a little annoyed that I can't play/pause without looking at the screen, and that the screen brightness is only "low - med - high" (the iPod had a full range of 0-100). Also... is there no sleep timer?! I counted on that every night with my nano...

Though, as Tom has pointed out, the screen issue I ran into with the nano might have been the result of me rolling over onto it in my sleep. I *tried* not to do that, but if I got tangled in the headphone wires, I'd sometimes pull the iPod over into the rolling-onto-zone. That happened briefly last night with the Zune, and Tom suggested what I'd already been considering:

Use the nano to fall asleep to. (The screen is already iffy. I don't need the screen to play/pause, or even navigate to some degree. Also: it HAS a sleep-timer. ...and, I feel awful neglecting something that I used to share basically every waking moment with. ^^; )


...but, I should give some positives on the Zune. Because I really do like it - the things mentioned are the oooonly downsides. (Well, that, and I suspect the headphones they sent are crap.) I can set my own picture as the lock-screen image, yaaaaay. It's pretty. It's REALLY pretty - the interface, the screen (I don't think I've ever seen a black like this on a screen... even *I'm* drooling over the OLED!), pretty much everything. Flipping through albums is a nightmare for me, because, as Tom put it, "Things are designed to work with the PERFECT music collection." I don't have album art for everything! Good lord. I'm lucky if 3/4 of my music has the basic tags filled out correctly. But, you can flip through your stuff via artist, album, playlist, genre, the usual mix. AND! You can shuffle a playlist on the fly! And if you don't like it (it shows in tiny-print what the next three tracks will be), you can unshuffle, and then RESHUFFLE!!! There was NO reason for my old nano to not have had that ability, and it always irked me.

Interface is insanely intuitive. I'd read somewhere how to "go back" in a menu, so I was ready for the brief moment of confusion when I tried to do it - but once I saw it (at the top of the screen, there's a zoomed-in cropped chunk of your previous menu's name - tap on that), I reeeeaally liked it. I can get from one thing to another really fast, and it all just feels really fluid. The visual style of the thing is just really, really nice, it's very sleek and modern and simple but stylish.

...which is WEIRD. The Apple interface feels old and chunky next to the Microsoft one. Who'd-a-thunk.

Labels: cooking, life in general, product whoring, technology

 
I found daikon at my Tops. I was pretty psyched. I'm not entirely sure why, but it's such a large silly component of various anime, that I've always been intrigued. Also, it just looks slightly insane. It is HUGE, and it is white.

And is a radish. (Which is what it tastes like when raw.)

So, in light of this, I decided to make a mess of Japanese-ish food for dinner today:

- Heidi's Sushi Bowl. I used white rice, but it actually has enough flavor that it would make brown rice taste pretty good. The rice-fixin's were DELICIOUS in my book, and while I doubt I toasted my nori correctly, I'd thrown in a blend of nori, sesame seeds, and some other stuff that I picked up at the store awhile ago, so I think it balanced out. Great summer-food.

- Edamame Salad. This was also really light, and I forgot how yummy edamame is. (And it's such a pretty shade of insanely bright green!)

- Japanese Zucchini and Onions. A good generic heavy-soy stir fry thing. Really yummy.

- Cooked daikon, and Red and White Salad (aka daikon slaw), which I found by scrolling aways down here. The boiled daikon.. is really not very appealing. It's way better raw. The slaw is pretty yummy, not really anything too unusual, but a delicious little condiment.

- A large bottle of fairly cheap sake (because O'Malia's has been out of our favorite little bottle for a few weeks now).


Tom enjoyed the sake.

And the soy-soaked onions.

While I continued happily eating away at my mini-feast, he cooked himself a couple of hotdogs. siiiiiiiigh.

lmao. It was a little ridiculous, that I managed to not make a SINGLE dish that he liked. Even the rice! Apparently he's not big on citrus flavored foods, despite the fact that he munches on raw lemons. He was sure to tell me that, though he didn't LIKE any of it, he still really appreciated all the effort I went to etc.

He has now heated a smaller bottle filled with sake, and gone upstairs. I am left with enough food to basically feed myself for an entire week. Which is not totally a bad thing, I was low on lunch-food anyway. Still... I've got to find a way to combat his insanely strong dislikes. hmmmmm.


...though, this does come on the heels of an AWESOME victory yesterday. I cooked this:
Baked Ratatouille-Sausage Penne. Which sounds way more complicated than it is - it's a pasta bake with sausage and stuff. BUT. It contained one entire eggplant. I was a bit nervous about that. The sauce obviously coated everything (once I added a small can of tomato paste and 473902 spices - the recipe doesn't really make much sauce as-is, and Tom needs flavorful sauce), but...

When he came downstairs to eat some, I was almost beaten.
"So before I eat it all, what's in this?"
Brief panic, and feigned casualness: "Eh, basically what it looks like. Pasta, and sausage..."
He asked no more. He ate. A lot. He never asked! Never complained! I'm so psyched. That is an INSANELY healthy casserole, and so long as he never learns there was that much eggplant in it, I can make it again. XD (Also - he didn't say anything about the whole wheat pasta. I may be winning him over on that one.)

Labels: cooking, health, life in general