Showing posts with label cheese. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cheese. Show all posts

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Saturday's Questions have way too many cookies to bake before 5pm today



The best kind of toast is probably rye with some tomato and swiss cheese, but everyone I know cares a lot about basketball today, so I wanted to ask - what's the most irresponsible kind of underwear?

The best kind of toast is lightly toasted Italian with real butter. But rye is a close second, so I'll let that slide.

The most irresponsible kind of underwear is the nonexistent kind you wear when you've forgotten to do laundry. Or thongs. I don't even think that qualifies as underwear.


Are Akron and Cleveland really different cities?

No. Yes. I guess so. I like Cleveland more, but it's bigger and has a lake. I think Akron suffers from not having a large body of water near it. Also from having way too many one way streets. Akron is just smaller, you know. There's less stuff going on there, and a lot of it is related to the university, which is fine, but I'm not interested in hanging out with college kids so much. It's much more an Ohio town, and Cleveland is a Lake town. People from Akron are more Ohioans than Clevelanders. They are closer to the unlit highways with dead deer littered everywhere, to cheese barns and closing car factories, to the snow belt and the tornado warnings and the long stretches of rural road with ditches. Akron is sort of the border, where you really leave the urban grit for the unemployed farmland grit.

Akron also smells like burnt rubber, whereas Cleveland smells like burnt metal and rock water, and I prefer the rusty taste.


What is a product I can purchase for little and sell for a lot?

Love.


What's the best way to tell a girl I love her when I don't actually speak her language all that well?

First, you should learn to speak her language better. That's always a good step. But if you're like me, and terrible at learning languages, then I recommend writing her stories. The good love letters I've saved are the ones that went on for pages with stories maybe having nothing to do with me, but I still have them because they were written for me, to impress me.

And if you're not a writer, then send her photos you take, or sketches you draw. Produce things for her. Girls like things to be made for them.


What's the best way to end my story about walking a dog?

All stories about walking dogs should end with a home break in, or the dog getting dried fish. They should never end with the dog dying. Preferably there should be a boat involved. Dogs and boats are the best combination ever.

Do you think that your online and real life personalities differ?

So when I was a little girl, I used to volunteer to read in public all the time. At church I was a lector. At school, I was always trying to get picked for speeches and presentations. I fully thought of myself as a loud, slightly obnoxious child. Later in life, my friends from grade school told me that I was always really quiet. Even now, I think I talk really loud, and turns out, no one can ever hear me.

My point is that I am not self aware at all, and therefore not qualified to answer this question. I don't think there's much difference at all between me in real life and me online. After all, how much of yourself can you really hide when you've got a blog, and Twitter, and Facebook? I don't mention a lot of the more naughtier things I do, because usually the least interesting things about a person are who they are sleeping with, and how fucked up they are at the time. Maybe sometimes people think I will be snarkier in person, but I try to be fair and nice to everyone who is not a reality show star or a politician. I can devastatingly cruel if someone wrongs me, but that's only applied to 2 people ever in my adult life. So except for certain breakup meltdowns, I'm usually pretty even keeled. If you don't cheat on me with a 19 year old, I probably won't ever be angry at you. My friends are pretty drama free. When I think about it, while I was with the Ex, I was the biggest source of drama in our circles, because of all the fighting and trauma and him making me sad all the time. Poor Bridget's friends. Now I'm a pretty happy person, and I want other people to be happy, and I want my interesting friends to meet all my other interesting friends and have fun.

Unless you've met me in real life, you probably don't understand what a 12 year old girl I am actually. But then I wonder if my real life friends get that either. Really, I should be asking them this question.

Ask Me Anything

Monday, February 22, 2010

Quiche Cliche.

So I'm pretty sure in some cultures, when a woman reaches a certain mature age, such as when convenient store clerks might justifiably start calling her ma'am, she celebrates this longevity by learning to cook brunch foods and party dips.

I woke up yesterday with a craving for breakfast, but not enough time to get any before work. So the eggs craving stayed with me all day. First I thought I wanted a frittata, but when I started searching recipes I realized I didn't want potatoes and eggs, I wanted cream and nutmeg and eggs. I talked Buddy into letting me use his oven in exchange for dinner. We bought the requisite bottles of wine needed anytime Buddy and I cook anything together, and as per tradition didn't actually start cooking till about 9pm.

I've never made a quiche before. In my head it falls squarely in the realm of spinach dip and layered bean casseroles. Which is to say foods that reached their peak in the 70s. I also feel like I should have had some awesome hand glazed stoneware to make it in.



Those aren't potatoes floating around in there. It's chunks of cheese. And flecks of nutmeg. I mean seriously, the apartment smelled so good with the shallots and the nutmeg cooking away.
I definitely wasn't going to fuck with a crust, so I made a "crustless quiche" which worked out really well, I don't see why anyone would need a crust. I didn't really follow a recipe, since this is basically egg pie you can put anything in. So I added Canadian bacon, shallots, and fontina cheese. Let me just say, fontina cheese is now one of my favorite cheeses. It melted so well, so smoothly. I may never use mozzerrella again. Which is a lie, but also sort of the truth.



I really liked it last night, but I liked it even more this morning. I'm not the worlds biggest fan of eggs, but the custard was really light and smooth. I may have discovered my new favorite lunch food. Also, what's cheaper than eggs? And yes, I know that is a shitload of tomatoes on that plate. I happen to like cherry tomatoes a lot. What of it?



Crustless Quiche

ingredients
1/2 cup panko bread crumbs
1/2 cup parmesan
5 large eggs
2 cups heavy cream
1 tbsp nutmeg
1 tbsp pepper
However much filling you want. I used 8 slices Canadian bacon diced, a very large chunk of fontina cheese diced, and 3 shallots diced.
1 tbsp butter

Preheat the oven to 425.
Butter a non-stick baking pan, preferably a 9 inch pie pan or quiche pan
Mix together the panko and parmesan. Layer the bottom of the pan with it.
In a stovetop pan, fry the bacon, and then add the shallots. Cook slowly until slightly carmelized.
Spoon the bacon and shallots into the pie pan. Do not eat the bacon.
Layer the diced cheese on top of that.
Then whisk together the eggs, cream, nutmeg and pepper. Pour that on top of everything else.
Very carefully place in the oven, taking care to not step on cats or let the refrigerator door hit you in the elbow as you're walking past and someone else is getting wine.
Bake for 35-40 minutes, or until set. You may want to cover with foil for the last ten minutes, depending on how browned it gets.
Let cool for at least an hour.



We also tried making these lime-coconut bar cookies, but we forget to put butter in the crumble on the bottom (10:30pm perhaps being the wrong time to make cookies, one bottle deep). So what we got was a cookie with two very yummy top layers, and one very dry oat/flour flavored crust.

I'll try them again sometime and let you know. Turns out sweetened condensed milk is totally the ingredient of 2010.

I'm so old.