food – Page 3

Trifle for Breakfast

The fifth day of Christmas, and perhaps my last opportunity of the season to justify having trifle… for breakfast.

Bacon Solves Little, Improves Much

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. 😋

Quesapizza Lunch

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…

Dos Huevos

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! 😂

Double Sausages

This child is eating sausages with one hand while playing a video game about eating sausages with the other.

Is this life-imitating-art or the other way around? Who can possibly say?

How I Learned to Enjoy Pickled Onion Monster Munch

Duration 4:55

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

Right in time for International Crisp Sandwich Day (St. Crispin’s Day) tomorrow, I’ve taught myself to enjoy Pickled Onion Monster Munch.

Three jars of homemade pickled eggs; one in each of a chilli-spiced vinegar, balsamic vinegar, and white vinegar. — 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.

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.

A packet of Pickled Onion Monster Munch, held in a hand. — 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.

Note #24625

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. 😂

Pickled onion crisps

Why don’t I like pickled onion crisps?

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.

Dan Q found GC2GR3Z The Brass Bands of MK – Secklow Brass

This checkin to GC2GR3Z The Brass Bands of MK - Secklow Brass reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

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!)

Right, back to work for me! TFTC.

Stolen from Costa

Reversing Sandwiches

Fixing Sandwiches

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):

    // ==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.

Userscripts fix and improve websites for you. Whether you want to force Reddit to stay “old Reddit” as long as possible, make Geocaching.com’s maps more-powerful, show Twitter images uncropped by default, re-add the “cached” link to Google search results, show prices on shopping sites in terms of hours-of-your-life of work they “cost”, or just automatically click Netflix’s “yes, I’m still here, keep playing” button for maximum binge-mode, there’s a script for you. They’re like tiny browser plugins.

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.

² I favour ViolentMonkey.

[Bloganuary] Pizza

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

What snack would you eat right now?

Pizza.

Always pizza.

Forever pizza.

A pizza slides off a peel into a wood-fired oven. One half seems to have salami and olives, the other half perhaps just cheese and tomato. — 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.

A circle of pizza dough on a worktop, a rolling pin atop it. — Making pizza, like making any bread, is a wonderful experience. But pizza can be brilliant even if somebody else makes it.

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.

Close-up of a pizza whose four quarters contain four different toppings. — 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.

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!

³ It is. What gave it away?

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.

Monster Munch Sandwich

Experimenting with some unusual combinations in anticipation of International Crisp Sandwich Day.

This one’s Roast Beef Monster Munch on Farmhouse White.

(I hereby release the crisp sandwich photo into the public domain / CC0 license; your choice.)

Bottomings

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”.

Scottish-Mexican Fusion Cookery

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.

A hand holds a crisp taco containing haggis, mashed potato, rocket, and a blob of sour cream. In the background, JTA can be seen eating his dinner in a more-conventional way: off a plate. There are glasses of wine on the table. — 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.

A pair of tattie scone quesadillas sizzling in a pan. — 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)