Even when you’re not remotely ready to think about Christmas yet and yet it keeps getting closer every second.
Even when the house is an absolute shambles and trying to rectify that is one step forward/one step sideways/three steps back/now put your hands on your hips and wait, what was I
supposed to be tidying again?
Even when the electricity keeps yo-yoing every few minutes as the country continues to be battered by a storm.
Even when you spent most of the evening in the hospital with your injured child and then most of the night habitually getting up just to reassure yourself he’s still breathing (he’s
fine, by the way!).
Even then, there’s still the comfort of a bacon sarnie for breakfast. 😋
After a morning of optimising a nonprofit’s reverse proxy configuration, I feel like I’ve earned my lunch! Four cheese, mushroom and jalapeño quesapizzas, mmm…
For some reason, the breakfast chef assumed that when I asked for two eggs benedict that I might want them on two separate plates. As if I WEREN’T totally planning to scoff them both
myself! 😂
You might reasonably have assumed I’d have already enjoyed pickled onion crisps. After all, I not only enjoy actual pickled onions but also the far more “acquired taste” of
pickled eggs, shown.
There’s a need for somebody… anybody… to eat Pickled Onion Monster Munch in our household, because we have a bit of an oversupply. In order to reliably get both of the
other flavours that people like (Roast Beef and Flamin’ Hot, respectively), we end up buying multipacks that also contain Pickled Onion flavour, and these unwanted extras pile
up in the snack cupboard until we happen to have a houseguest that we can palm them off onto.
Yes, I’m aware that there are multipacks of individual flavours, but none of our local supermarkets seem to stock multipacks of Flamin’ Hot, which is objectively the best flavour of
Monster Munch and anybody who claims otherwise is wrong.
My entire life, I’ve claimed not to like pickled onion flavour crisps. As a kid, I would only eat salt & vinegar and ready salted flavours, eventually expanding my palate into “meaty”
flavours like chicken and roast beef (although never, absolutely never, prawn cocktail). Later, I’d come to also enjoy cheese & onion and variants thereof, and it’s from this
that I realise that I’m probably being somewhat irrational.
Because if you think about it: if you want to make a “pickled onion” flavour crisp, what flavouring ingredients would you use? It turns out that most crisp manufacturers use a
particular mixture of (a) the ingredient that makes salt & vinegar crisps taste “vinegary” and (b) the ingredient that makes cheese & onion crisps taste “onioney”. So in summary:
I like pickled onions.
I like salt & vinegar crisps, which include an ingredient to make them taste vinegary.
I like cheese & onion crisps, which include an ingredient to make them taste onioney.
Therefore, I ought to like pickled onion crisps, which use two ingredients I like to try to emulate a food I like.
I should like this. Right?
Maybe that deliberate and conscious thought process is all I need? Maybe that’s it, and just having gone through the reasoning, I will now like pickled onion crisps!
Conveniently, I have a cupboard in my kitchen containing approximately one billion packets of Pickled Onion Monster Munch. So let’s try it out.
The first time I’ve tried a pickled onion flavour crisp in almost 30 years, captured on camera for your amusement.
It turns out they’re okay!
They’re not going to dethrone either of the other two flavours of Monster Munch that we routinely restock on, but at least now I’m in a position where I can do something about our
oversupply.
And all it took was stopping to think rationally about it. If only everything were so simple.
This morning’s actual breakfast order from the 7-year-old: “A sesame seed bagel with honey, unless there aren’t any sesame seed bagels, in which case a plain bagel with honey on one
half and jam on the other half, unless there aren’t any plain bagels, in which case a cinnamon and raisin bagel with JimJams on one half and Biscoff on the other half.”
Some day, this boy will make a great LISP programmer. 😂
I like pickled onions. And I imagine that the flavourings used in pickled onion crisps are basically the onion flavouring from cheese & onion and the vinegar flavouring from salt &
vinegar, both of which are varieties I like.
I’ve been working in Milton Keynes the tail end of this week while my kids attend a ski camp at the X-scape centre. While eating my lunch today I came out for a walk to find this
geocache.
Approaching from the direction of the car park was definitely the right route and I was soon standing at GZ alongside a likely host. I had to search for some time, though, before I
found this surprisingly we’ll-concealed cache.
(I was hindered perhaps by my own eagerness to check the hint, which left me searching several feet lower down than the container eventually turned out to be!)
RotatingSandwiches.com is a website showcasing animated GIF files of rotating
sandwiches1. But it’s got a problem: 2 of the 51 sandwiches rotate the
wrong way. So I’ve fixed it:
The Eggplant Parm Sub is one of two sandwiches whose rotation doesn’t match the rest.
My fix is available as a userscript on GreasyFork, so you can use your
favourite userscript manager2
to install it and the rotation will be fixed for you too. Here’s the code (it’s pretty simple):
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// ==UserScript==// @name Standardise sandwich rotation on rotatingsandwiches.com// @namespace rotatingsandwiches.com.danq.me// @match https://rotatingsandwiches.com/*// @grant GM_addStyle// @version 1.0// @author Dan Q <https://danq.me/>// @license The Unlicense / Public Domain// @description Some sandwiches on rotatingsandwiches.com rotate in the opposite direction to the majority. 😡 Let's fix that.// ==/UserScript==
GM_addStyle('.q23-image-216, .q23-image-217 { transform: scaleX(-1); }');
Unless you’re especially agitated by irregular sandwich rotation, this is perhaps the most-pointless userscript ever created. So why did I go to the trouble?
Fixing Websites
Obviously, I’m telling you this as a vehicle to talk about userscripts in general and why you should be using them.
But the real magic is being able to remix the web your way. With just a little bit of CSS or JavaScript experience you
can stop complaining that a website’s design has changed in some way you don’t like or that some functionality you use isn’t as powerful or convenient as you’d like and you can fix
it.
A website I used disables scrolling until all their (tracking, advertising, etc.) JavaScript loads, and my privacy blocker blocks those files: I could cave and disable my browser’s
privacy tools… but it was almost as fast to add setInterval(()=>document.body.style.overflow='', 200); to a userscript and now it’s fixed.
Don’t want a Sports section on your BBC News homepage (not just the RSS
feed!)? document.querySelector('a[href="/sport"]').closest('main > div').remove(). Sorted.
I’m a huge fan of building your own tools to “scratch your own itch”. Userscripts are a highly accessible introduction to doing so that even beginner programmers can get on board with
and start getting value from. More-advanced scripts can do immensely clever and powerful things, but even if you just use them to apply a few light CSS touches to your favourite websites, that’s still a win.
Footnotes
1 Remember when a website’s domain name used to be connected to what it was for?
RotatingSandwiches.com does.
Every pizza is beautiful. Except for the half of this one that has huge chongin’ black olives on (eww!).
Do you know what I love about pizza? Everything. Every little thing1.
First up, it’s a bread product. Bread is magical. You take flour, water, a pinch of salt, and a certain other magical ingredient, knead it, let it rest, knock it back, and bake it, and
you end up with food. The magical ingredient is yeast, and it’s a tiny living organism that eats carbohydrates and excretes a lot of carbon dioxide and a little bit of alcohol.
Humans use both, but whether you’re brewing beer or baking bread the process feels somewhat mystical and otherworldly.
But it’s not like rising a loaf nor is it like finishing a flatbread. Pizza dough is risen, but kept thin to act as a base for everything else. And already there’s such
variety: do you spin it out in a classic thin Neapolitan style to get those deliciously crispy leopard-print cornicione bites? Do you roll it out thick to hold a maximum depth
of tomato sauce and other toppings when you pile it high, per the Chicago tradition? Do you go somewhere in-between? Or perhaps do something different entirely like a calzone
or panzarotto? There’s no wrong answer, but already so many options.
Pizza is cooked fast: the relatively thin surface absorbs heat quickly, and you keep your oven hot, baking the bread and heating the toppings at the same time. If you’re
feeling fancy and fun then you can add some extras as it cooks. Crack an egg into the centre, perhaps, or drizzle some chilli oil across the entire thing. Or keep it plain and simple
and let the flavours combine as the dish cooks. Whatever you do, you’ll be enjoying delicious hot food within minutes of putting it into the oven: the cooking-speed to deliciousness
ratio is perhaps the highest of any savoury food.
Many pizzas2
include tomato sauce and cheese as basic toppings, which is already genius: both are rich in naturally-occurring monosodium glutamate, which coupled with the rich fats and saltiness
in the cheese and the sweetness and mild acidity of the tomato makes them frightfully moreish even before you’d added your favourite meats or vegetables.
Pizza is incredibly versatile, not just in the diversity of ways in which you might prepare and serve it, but also in the ways in which you can eat it. Sit at a plate with a
knife and fork. Divide it into slices and pick up one at a time (with optional “New York fold” if it’s otherwise too limp). Carry a large slice on-the-go, al taglio. Fold it into
a portafoglio so you don’t risk losing a single jalapeño off your hot-and-spicy meal, if you fancy. There’s no wrong answer.
If my favourite meal is pizza3, my second-favourite has to be leftover pizza. Because it reheats easily and makes a great next-morning snack. Or can be enjoyed cold,
hours or days after the fact. It’s even suitable for parbaking and chilling or freezing, making it an excellent convenience food4.
It’s widely produced in a variety of styles (and qualities) in restaurants and takeaways wherever you go, and its convenient shape means that it can be boxed and stacked with little
more help than, perhaps, one of those little plastic “tables” that stop the centre of the cardboard box sagging onto it.
Yes, please. This, please. Now, please.
So yeah, I’ll take a slice to go with mozzarella, peppers and red onion for my snack, please.
Footnotes
1 If you know me well, you’re probably well-aware of my love of pizza, although you might
previously have seen it articulated so thoroughly.
2#NotAllPizzas! You don’t have to feel constrained by the
bread-plus-tomato-plus-cheese-plus-other stuff paradigm. Swap out the tomato sauce for barbecue sauce on the base of a meaty pizza with a spicy tang or omit it entirely for a
pizza bianca. Replace the cheese or remove it entirely for a vegan or lactose-free alternative. Or dispense with both entirely and spread pesto on your base, topped with
roasted vegetables! The sky’s the limit!
4 Obviously I prefer a lovingly-crafted hand-stretched pizza, freshly-made under ideal
circumstances. But pizza is so good that it’s still usually perfectly acceptable even when it’s mass-produced at economy scale and frozen for later consumption, which is more
than can be said for many foods.
In his latest Last Month video, TomSka took the “is a hot dog a sandwich” argument into a whole new arena by saying:
I’m a firm believer that the sauce and toppings should go under the dog. And that way, I don’t have to put it all in my moustache when I eat it.
My initial reaction was: What the hell are you doing‽ They’re toppings, not… bottomings, I guess?
But on the other hand:
Previews of other movies you might like to see are still called trailers, even though nowadays they’re normally shown before the film.
This actually looks like it might be good for preventing onions falling off, which is my biggest problem when I eat hot dogs (I don’t mind moustache toppings: they’re a treat for
later on).
So yeah, I might try doing this. But if I do, I’m definitely going to start calling them “bottomings”.
I swear I’m onto something with this idea: Scottish-Mexican fusion cookery. Hear me out.
It started on the last day of our trip to the Edinburgh
Fringe Festival in 2012 when, in an effort to use up our self-catering supplies, JTA suggested (he later claimed this should have
been taken as a joke) haggis tacos. Ruth and I ate a whole bunch of them and they were great.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good: if I did it again, it’d be haggis and clapshot with a thick whisky sauce… all in a taco.
In Scotland last week (while I wasn’t climbing mountains and thinking of my father), Ruth and I came up with our second bit of Scottish-Mexican fusion food: tattie scone
quesadillas. Just sandwich some cheese and anything else you like between tattie scones and gently fry in butter.
These were delicious as they were, but I think there’d be mileage in slicing them into thin fingers and serving them with a moderately spicy salsa, as a dip.
We’re definitely onto something. But what to try next? How about…
Bean chilli stovies?
Arroz con pollo on oatcakes?
Carnitas and refried beans in a bridie?
Huevos rancheros with lorne sausage sandwiched between the tortilla and the eggs?
Kedgeree fajitas? (I’m not entirely convinced by this one)
Rumbledethumps con carne?
Caldo de leekie: cock-a-leekie soup but with mexican rice dumped in after cooking, caldo-de-pollo-style?
Something like a chimichanga but battered before it’s fried? (my god, that sounds like an instant heart attack)
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