Eating a lot of fresh beets will make your urine turn vaguely pink.

This is something you should be told before you eat a lot of fresh beets and then use the bathroom.

People I am watching the absolute funniest cooking show ever on one of the television channels I get in DC (NHK World). It is called Your Japanese Kitchen and stars a very tall guy with a slight Scottish accent and a very small Japanese lady. The format is them making a dish and then a terrible, terrible interview/trivia portion that is very, very Japanese. I have no other words to describe it.

It's informative. The recipes look tasty, though I doubt I could find half the ingredients (I have no idea where I could get Chinese soup paste for instance or even really what it is). But even more important, it's entertaining because of its hilarious badness. This is not a high budget show to be sure. I can only hope I catch more episodes of it.

Really if you see ever get a chance to watch an episode, do so. I know it amuses me.

Tonight I got home and poached three chicken breasts. I've never poached chicken before, but it turned out great. Very moist. This was immediately shredded and some of it was put on top of cheese pizza I had in the oven. MMmmm... good stuff. I'll use the rest in chicken salad and possibly chicken tacos/burritos.

I have also started walking to and from work. It's a good 30 minute walk one way, which means if I walk both to and from work, I get an hour's worth of exercise. The people at my job act like this is a horrible thing. "Well, Tsaiko says her commute is walkable..." And it is walkable.The scenery is pleasant, I'm on a trail that's offset from the road, and I pass the grocery store/bank/drug store on the way meaning if I leave work a little I can do some shopping on the way home. They keep telling me to just wait till it's raining, but really, they have an invention called umbrellas for a reason.

With the eating in and exercising, maybe I can actually lose some of the weight I gained why frantically trying to finish my thesis.

I packed a small box full of knick-knacks from my room today. At least now I can say I've started packing.

I am also baking pumpkin pie. It remains to be seen whether this will be delicious pumpkin pie. Alas, I could not find the recipe I used last year to make awesome pumpkin pie.

miome decided that the only thing to do after making inedible pancakes was to play Pandemic 2, name her disease "bad pancakes," and proceed to wipe out the entire world population with it.

I <3 my girlfriend.

miome just made the most inedible pancakes ever by accidentally substituting baking soda for baking powder.

It looked so delicious. THE PANCAKE WAS A LIE.

Tonight I treated myself to a big plate of crab legs. While cracking them, I managed to slice my finger. Ouch.

That's okay though. Because miome made delicious watermelon lemonade and it's tart sweetness will sooth away the pain. Especially when I add a bit of the mint syrup I made this afternoon to it.

I have all these ideas for writing and absolutely no urge to write. It's like as soon as I open a blank document, my mind goes blank as well. Hopefully once the thesis is done this will go away. Of course, I keep saying that about a lot of things. "Once the thesis is done I will read more books... write... update my webpage... work out more... be able to think once I get home instead of just vegging..." Getting a Master's degree is hard.

miome is attempting to make banana bread pudding with rum sauce. I get the feeling it's not going well. I get this feeling from the fact that random curse words keep coming from the kitchen.

( And now, have some pictures! Very picture heavy. )

In an effort to avoid any and all Super Bowl TV, miome and I stayed in today. We had pizza for lunch. Papa John's was having a special with 1 large with unlimited toppings, so we loaded it up with veggies, chicken and bacon. Then we took a nap in the afternoon and I woke up and made meatloaf. I'm not really tired so I might make some more mint syrup. We're almost out of the last batch I made. It's awesome in tea and I still want to try making mint sugar cookies with it.

Right now I'm watching Wipeout, which is an American show that reminds me of Takahashi's castle only without the ridiculous costumes the contestants sometimes wear. I am really surprised they haven't gotten the crap sued out of them. But until they do, I'm going to laugh at people making fools of themselves and falling on their asses.

In the Southern US, one of the New Year's traditions is to cook black eyed peas usually with salted pork or bacon on New Year's day. The wikipedia article states they are for luck, but in my family it was always the number of peas you ate was the amount of money you'd have in the new year. So load up. Since miome and I had gotten a huge (and I mean huge) pork loin on sale and cooked it just after Christmas, we had the pork. All we needed was the beans.

So we since we had to pick up a few things anyway (like kitty litter before the cats killed us in our sleep), we went to the store.

Only to find no black eyed peas. There were none dried and none canned. Miome and I searched high and low. What kind of heathen place had we moved to that didn't have black-eyed peas? Miome was sure they had them. Couldn't find them.

Until I noticed a small bare spot on the shelf. Sure enough the tag read "black-eyed peas." I guess that's what happens when you wait to get something like that on New Year's Eve. Though I must admit, I was really surprised that so many people seem to have heard of and follow that tradition here in Indiana.

My peppermint plant was growing way too leggy, so I trimmed it right before I brought it inside to keep it from getting killed by frost. Since that gave me an entire zip lock bag full of peppermint, I went ahead and made mint syrup. It's now steeping on the counter for 30 minutes. After that I'll put it in a container and stick it in the fridge. I need to get an air tight container/bottle for it. If I do that, it'll keep for up to a month. I'm looking forward to a month of ice cream with mint syrup, hot chocolate with mint syrup, and peppermint tea with an extra dose of mint syrup.

Also, I want to use my completely NSFW fabulous icon. I had it sitting on my hard drive and since I was uploading the grumpy intestines icon, I went ahead and uploaded it as well. Taste the rainbow indeed. XD

This was originally posted to my blog on Feb. 2002. kayay mentioned French Onion soup in my previous post about cooking onions and I could not resist the urge to dig this story on up. The next post to the old blog was reposted in my lj because that was when we set an oven mitt on fire.

Really, that was just not our week for cooking. XD

Tsaiko's Instructions on how NOT to make French Onion Soup

1. Start at 4:00, having carefully calculated that the recipe should be done between 5:30 and 6:00. Watch as the recipe laughs at your calculations.

2. For starters, you need to use a cookbook with vague instructions such as "cook the onions gently." How the heck do you cook onions gently? I don't know. Or stuff like "turn down the heat" without every telling you how high to turn the heat in the first place. This will confuse you and make you want to hurl said cookbook out a third story window and into a bonfire. Great place to start.

3. Your cookbook should also have strange ingredients that you've never heard of and can't find at the grocery store. What is vegetable stock? I don't know. And how the heck do you get stock from vegetables? Another mystery. Substitute beef stock and hope for the best. It should be noted that I now know how to make my own vegetable stock, or barring that, where to purchase it. For the longest time you could not find any vegetable stock at a regular supermarket in NC. Most likely because it is the land that believes that even vegetables should be cooked with meat.

4. Decide that the measurements given by the cookbook are off. The four large onions we got must have been twice as large as the ones used by the authors because we cut up three and filled our medium saucepan to the brim. Of course, I'm making the assumption the authors attempted this recipe in the first place, which is doubtful all thing considering.

5. How to cook: Start the onions. The cookbook says that it will take about 45-60 minutes to cook into a nice mahogany brown color. It lies. You cook the onions for 60 minutes. Transparent. So you up the heat. Cook for another 60 minutes. Kinda yellowish. Up the heat again. At this point, forget about cooking gently. Violate the damn suckers by nuking them in the microwave if you have to. Just get them done.

6. At this point be sure to send your roommate out to get you dinner, because guess what? Assuming these onions ever turn brown, you still have to simmer them in the broth for another thirty minutes.

7. Eat the dinner your roommate bought. It should be about 7:00 at this time. Your onions should be a very dark yellow but no where near the desired colors of brown or mahogany. Decide they are close enough and dump them into the beef stock. Set beef stock to simmer for thirty minutes.

8. Thirty minutes later, guess what? The beef stock is not simmering. Up the heat and let that sucker BOIL.

9. At 8:00 your soup is ready. Your apartment (or house) should now smell like onions for the next week or so. Your soup should look nothing like what's pictured. Take the whole pot and stick in the fridge.


If you follow these simple instructions, you wind up like me. With a pot of soup that may or may not be edible sitting in your fridge and four hours of your life wasted. And I wonder why I eat out so much...

miome is cooking a big thing of onions in the crockpot. I love when she does this because it makes it super (and not supper like I originally typed) easy to use in stews or to serve over beef with mushrooms. I cannot stand half-cooked onions and this guarantees that they will be done.

The problem is that for the duration of the cook time, we cannot be in the apartment because the air because thick with onion vapor. Meaning your eyes get irritated beyond belief. The cats don't see to mind or care, but it drives us both bananas. As soon as Miome gets out of the shower, we're going to find something else to do today.

Sigh. And I was hoping to have the first draft of story finished today. Still might. Though before I'm posting it, I'm going to rewrite it because it needs it.

miome and I went to one of the local farmer's markets today where we cleaned out their bruised tomato stash. This place usually has a box full of fruit that got bruises or is slightly damaged in transit, so they are half off. Seven pounds of tomatoes for $7. Miome then cut these up, added some white wine and bullion, and is letting them cook down in the crockpot right now. Tomorrow we shall have delicious marinara sauce.

Also, I'm working on the Desert Marriage story again. I've added some notes, wrote a bit of what will probably become a side story (which is currently tacked onto the end and will get moved to a separate document as soon as I have enough of it to justify one), and decided that I didn't like how it was starting in the middle of things. So I'm backing up a few scenes and am going to write the build-up to Osmond actually getting kidnapped. Might even back up even more in the story and write Amenan going through the ritual at the temple and talking about the kidnapping. I think that'll set up the whole story better.

Right now it looks like crud because of this, but I'll clean it up when I get what I need to done. Also added a line at the top with the date of when it was last updated since I realize Google Docs doesn't automatically tell people this information.

I think I'm also going to include an email in case people stumble across it and want to contact me.

I desperately want to write Nankah's story. I will remain strong and wait until I've got Osmond and Amenan's done. Or mostly done. Because really, I have the willpower of an eggplant.

Phase pink of the super secret project is behind schedule. ^_^;; I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. Still, I will work extra hard next week to get back on track and start phase blue.

In other news, miome and I have had a busy weekend. We went to the mall in downtown Indy yesterday and then saw the Incredible Hulk. It was a enjoyable movie. Certainly not movie of the year, but still awesome. Today we went to an Italian Street Festival put on by a Catholic church. Good food, but not much else. Oh well. Still worth it if for no other reason than the cannolis.

Right now I'm working on the secret project and doing laundry. miome is making a huge batch of pumpkin pancakes so we can have them for breakfast during the week. Life is good.

There are very few things I'll splurge on food wise. For the most part, I'm a generic kind of person. I like generic foods and don't mind using the cheap stuff. There are a few things I refuse to by generic. I won't get generic apple juice with vitamin C (it tastes like battery acid). I won't get chocolate (and even Hershey's gets a miss because it's like eating a chocolate scented crayon). And if I'm going to get milk to make pudding with, I'm going to get the organic whole milk from the local dairy. WORLD OF DIFFERENCE.

I may never go back to pudding cups again (though if I could find chocolate pudding mix that requires not only milk but also egg yolks to make I would be in HEAVEN. Because while I don't want to make pudding from scratch, it tastes so much better if you at least have to heat and stir it).

The thing I like most about living where I do is that there is a dairy just down the road. They make organic milk, yogurt (plain and raspberry) and soft cheeses. All of it is very fresh and just tastes better. Yesterday miome kept making eyes at one of their herb soft cheese. We passed by a display of crackers and she mentioned the cheese for like the fourth time. So I told her to go get it. It didn't take much prompting for her to do so. I just had some of that cheese spread on crackers. Delicious. Then I suggested that the cheese would go really well baked into phyllo with salmon.

Miome agrees. Definitely something to try.

Today for dinner I am going to make rosemary lamb chops. You can get the lamb chops from Trader Joe's fairly cheap considering its lamb. The marinade calls for pineapple juice. Since you can't buy straight pineapple juice around here (trust me, I've looked) I usually buy canned pineapple with juice and drain the juice off. I figured since I was going to have pineapple around anyway, I'd make pineapple upside-down cake for desert. I also found jarred artichoke hearts as one of the sides for the lamb. I'll raid the freezer for another vegetable.

Today is going to be a day of homework and good eating.

Thanks to kayay for pointing me to the recipe I made tonight, bacon wrapped tofu. Next time I'm making dinner for my family, I need to make this as an appetizer. So very good.

Today for lunch I was feeling uninspired and lazy, so I made myself a tuna melt. A tuna melt involves tuna salad and cheese (and in this case, lettuce and tomato). Which got me thinking. I've had tuna salad at many people's houses and in many restaurants, and everyone does it a little bit differently.

In my family there's two ways of making it: with hardboiled egg and without. Both have tuna, mayonnaise, and dill pickle relish. One just requires a little more time and effort to boil an egg. In my great-aunt's family they make it with sweet relish and add saltine crackers to it.

How do you make tuna salad? Anyone in your family do it differently?