In Which My Attention Has Been Pretty Shattered Lately... Again
Every so often (okay, it's becoming more frequent lately) I have days where I cannot focus at all. I can't play video games, I can't read, I can't crochet, I can't paint, I can't write, I cannot focus on a single thing for more than five minutes... unless I'm so hyperfocused on something that I can do nothing else.
I do not like these bad-attention days. I enjoy being productive. I'd much prefer to do a few things than Just One Thing.
Caffeine does not help. Naps do not happen. I'm snappish and rude and argumentative when I'm scattered.
The good news is, I have been able to focus more today. I'm still a little distractible, but I managed to commit to a strategy on a game I was playing for 2 hours, so that was great.
So that's what happened to Monday's post, I got too distracted and literally could not commit to a project to show you.
Hopefully by Thursday I'll be back in action and able to fulfill any requests made via Ko-Fi. Possible art request categories are: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Geometric, Place. Just a lil shameless plug there, sorry lol.
Anyway, the weather lately has been pretty good (the sun is very hot, but the breeze is strong and the humidity was low). Sadly, today's weather was awful. The sun was bright, but it's about 73% humidity and windy as heck. Tonight's probably going to rain, too.
My mother went and got her 2nd Shingles shot, so it was a make-your-own dinner night. I made a Mi Goreng and topped it with a fried egg, and I have to say... it looked fantastic.
And yes, it tasted as good as it looks!
I learned 2 things making this egg.
1) Use a lid after the white sets so that the yolk can steam a bit - it's better that way.
2) Use a small pan and plenty of oil or cooking spray.
The 3rd thing I'd say if asked is this: The more saturated the color of the yolk, the more delicious it's probably gonna be, so if it's a yellow yolk, feel free to cook it through.
I let the runny yolk coat my hot noodles and then ate it, and honestly? Best food I've had this week.
I do wish I had a coffee though. Even if it is 7:30PM and my cutoff is 7...
I do have decaf...
I should make coffee....
Anywho, here's the plan for the rest of the week/weekend!
Art on Thursday! I don't have a theme locked down yet (though I have taken some ideas under advisement!)
I'll keep looking for games for Saturday
Hopefully I won't get lost in the dozen or so projects I'm working on and I'll have something coherent for you on Monday
Blather Next Tuesday!
Wow the sky is yellow now! The sun is setting through the light sprinkle.
I think I'll grab that decaf and settle in for the evening :)
It's been a heck of a week, and I've been super busy, but I did manage to whip up a couple of simple pixel drawings to share with you guys!
"SM01"
"Egg of Layers 01"
With the Snowman, I'm thinking of going back into the image and giving his arms an outline, then basically cutting them out and putting them on their own layer, same with his hat and the front of his scarf. Then I want to practice making a sprite sheet for him so I can maybe animate it!
As for the egg, I just wanted to experiment with different fill qualities, shading, etc. I'm gonna keep experimenting with shapes and lighting!
I think I'm gonna go play with more pixels and crochet a bunch of stuff lol.
I'll post some more stuff next week, but this week was busy as heck, which is why I'm so far behind!
By now y'all know I like to experiment in the kitchen, especially with leftovers, frying pans, and eggs.
So it shouldn't shock you that I'm coming up with weird egg fried rice knockoffs.
I promise, guys, this tastes really good, so don't be afraid to try it out!
Start with your basic ingredients!
For this Eggy Rice, you'll need:
Leftover rice
2 slices Canadian bacon (sliced into bite-sized pieces)
2 eggs
salt & pepper
ketchup
If you have veggies, definitely add those too, because this? This is pure cholesterol right now. Oops.
Step 1: Slice everything non-rice-or-egg and fry it on low heat.
It's usually pretty good to start low with stuff like Canadian bacon. It doesn't have a high fat content, so putting it in too hot of a pan will cause smoking and smoking is bad for you. This is also when I'd add any veggies if you've got them - peppers, onions, carrots, even corn and/or peas! This would go well with basically any combo of fryable veggies. You could even use tiny cubes of potato or sweet potato.
Basically, you want these things to get a bit toasted on all portions. Feel free to increase the heat if you feel it's not cooking the way you'd like!
As that's happening, let's focus on our eggy rice!
The next thing you want to do is crack two eggs into the bowl (or other container) of your rice.
And then stir it up!
You want to make this into a slightly frothy, fairly homogeneous concoction, with each grain of rice coated in egg. You also want to season your rice with salt, pepper, etc at this time.
After combining the eggs, rice, and seasoning, you'll be adding your frothy egg mix to the pan with the meat and/or veggies! This can look a bit weird, but bear with it, and immediately begin mixing the egg-rice and veggies/meat together in the pan over low to medium heat!
And yes, it's quite... voluminous!
At this point, squirt a goodly serving of ketchup in there and mix well. You can use any kind of sauce you like (uh.. actually, maybe don't use ranch, that separates under heat and could be kinda gross unless you're using a dry mix...) like mustard, soy sauce, etc. Whatever you think would taste good hot with eggs and rice. I might add a few splashes of soy sauce and some gochujang next time...
Now toss it in a bowl and eat it!
Obviously, you want to make sure that the eggs are cooked if you live in America, since our eggs are washed and therefore more prone to bacterial infiltration than fresher, unwashed eggs in say, Japan. You may find that you prefer to cook this over a higher heat until the eggs are more separated from the rice. You may find that you prefer a slower, lower, creamier version making the dish more like a rice-egg-pudding. However you make this, feel free to leave me a picture in the comments or Tweet at me or something (@TheFilthyCasua8)!
And now, since you've been so patient, here's the video version (lol).
In which I attempt to make a tasty English Breakfast
I'm not a very well-traveled person. The most exotic locales I've wandered are Nova Scotia (for a day) and Niagara Falls (also for a day). Besides that' it's mostly just been the occasional trip to Boston with my family. I've never left this continent.
So I've never had a true Full English breakfast.
Which means I don't 100% know what's in one.
I just know what I've seen on the internet, and those components seem to me to be:
Fried Eggs
Toast
Beans
Tomato
Mushrooms
Sausage
Bacon
Sounded simple enough to me! So I set about trying to make a Full English Breakfast, or, as I'll be calling it from here on out, a Fry-Up.
My first step was cutting and frying my sausage. I've never worked with sausage in a tube before, so that was interesting. I was too impatient to let it thaw completely, so my hand-cut patties were... well, the were a mess. Eventually, though, I got them fried up in my big frying pan and started in on my toast. I nicked a couple of English muffins from my bread cupboard for this, but I'd guess any bread product would work.
I used some of the sausage fat to fry up my "toast". It was lightly buttered, too.
Do not attempt this kind of breakfast if you've got cholesterol issues.
Or if you'd like to have a regular digestion for the next few days.
Regardless, I fried up my toast and stuck it on a plate next to the sausage.
Mmmm.... grease :P
All told, though, it looked really good at this point, and I could've easily just scrambled the eggs and served them like this.
A much more glamorous shot of the toast and sausage.
But I'm nuts, so I decided "time to cook" and got to work on that bacon.
Thick, thick bacon.
I also made sure my other ingredients were close to hand:
A couple of eggs for frying later.
I cut the stem out of the tomato.
I also salted the cut portion generously - which was the only salt I used at all!
The mushrooms were inspected and washed juuuuust before I cooked them!
Then I turned my pan onto the lowest heat and added my bacon!
Moments after adding the bacon to my pan, this happened!
I let the bacon fry until it looked moderately crispy, then set it aside while I cautiously fried the tomato and mushrooms.
And it was a harrowing experience.
See, when you're cooking with grease, the last thing you ever want to introduce to the environment is water. Tomato is about 90% water, by my estimation. The purpose of the salt (and laying the tomato out on paper towels) was to draw some of the water out and to make the tomato as dry as possible. There was every reason to believe that the tomato would cause the hot bacon fat to explode all over me when I added it.
Thankfully, this was not the case, and I let the tomato and mushroom sizzle together for a while until the mushrooms were soft and the tomato skin began to wrinkle and split. I took out the mushrooms, but I let the tomato keep going and flipped it onto its skin, so the skin became slightly blistered and discolored. When I figured it was done, I took it out and immediately added an egg to the pan.
Also mere moments after being added!
I never raised my pan above a "2" - so, I'd strongly suggest leaving your stove low if you're making one of these. Will it take a longer time? Yes. Will you burn foods as much? Absolutely not.
While I had been preparing most of the meal, I'd emptied a small can of baked beans into a pan on a back burner set to the very lowest setting. While I'm aware that a proper English Breakfast uses beans with some sort of tomato sauce, that's not very common where I live, so baked beans it was!
Sausage, Egg, Toast, and beans!
The overall breakfast was incredible. Each element was tasty on its own (except maybe the tomato, but I'm not a huge tomato fan), but together, they became transcendent. The biggest shock for me was probably the tomato itself, since I figured I'd hate it. I was wrong. When I cut it up and ate the small pieces with beans or sausage, it went from just a tomato to a sliver of bright, acid morning in the slick midnight of the greasy sausage and bacon. The acidity actually helped boost the sweetness from the beans, too!
Actually, I'm pretty sure this meal had all of the flavors: sour and bitter from the tomato (tomato seeds are always bitter to me), sweet from the beans, salty from everything, and umami from the meats and egg!
Also, it was so much food that it couldn't fit on two plates!
My dining companion and I each had a plate with egg, sausage, toast and beans
and we put the bacon and veggies on a third! Good heavens...
So if you're looking to enjoy the food of another land, but you don't have the money to do it, I strongly suggest looking at their culture breakfast first!
That being said, I don't know how England still exists if this is what they eat for breakfast. Even if I'd been a sane person and just had two sausage patties and a couple strips of bacon, the sheer volume of food was overwhelming, and I shudder to think what calories I consumed...
Back in the 1990s, they would tell us that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day", and even then I called nonsense on that noise. Breakfast is important, yeah, but in a modern society where the cycles of day-night are no longer a good indicator of when people have to be awake to do things like, I dunno, earn money to survive in this capitalist wasteland, it cannot be more important than any other food-to-face moment, nor can it be guaranteed to be taking place in the early hours of the day. Pointless rant aside, I never really bought into the whole sanctity of the morning meal bit, and by the time I was in high school, breakfast was usually a cup of coffee and whatever toothpaste I swallowed by the time I had to run out to my cousin's car.
Generally speaking, I'm still a coffee-for-breakfast kind of person, preferring small snacks throughout the day. That might be why I'm the human equivalent of a zeppelin. That and being a couch potato.
So what I'm saying is that I don't make breakfast very often.
When I do, however, I want it to be fantastic, so I don't tend to settle for cold breakfast cereals (which tend to get really gross and soggy in my house during the summer anyway). This morning, I was lucky enough to find some leftover pieces of ham steak in the fridge, enough eggs that I wouldn't feel guilty about eating them, and an English Muffin, which was buried in the back of the bread cupboard. I looked at my bounty and thought "boy, I'd love me some scrambled eggs and toast with some of that ham steak", so that's what I did.
If you don't feel like reading today, no worries! I have a video of today's cooking adventure (mercifully sans cat) at the end, so just scroll on down, and you won't be able to miss it!
Your ingredients:
Butter, 2 eggs, a chunk of precooked ham steak, an English Muffin, cooking spray,
salt, pepper, and whatever condiments for later.
To start with, I separated out my English Muffin (the package of which you can barely see peeking out behind that container of cooking spray). This can be easier said than done, since for whatever reason, fork-split English Muffins are rarely split evenly, which can be a pain to figure out. Thankfully, this one was even and thick, so I could jam my thumbs into the sides and peel the top from the bottom. I prefer this to slicing through an English Muffin with the bread knife, because I like the crumby texture from the pulling, rather than the smooth, boring texture from the knife.
This is how I like my English Muffins to look.
I don't know if these little guys have another name wherever you live.
I just know they're great with butter and/or jam, especially after toasting.
Once my breakfast bread was split, I took out some soft butter we had stowed in the cabinet to keep the cat from getting into it. It's been really nice the last few days, so we haven't had to worry about swift spoilage from the butter. If it were crazy hot, I'd have been stuck with rock-solid butter from the fridge.
Butter it up! This will get the toast nice and brown.
Once my English Muffin was deemed adequately buttered (which was, to be honest, a bit overkill, but hey, I don't eat breakfast often enough to care how much butter I'm using), I turned on the stovetop to low and set down my pan.
I also sipped at my 2 parts cocoa to 1 part coffee and 1 part Ovaltine mix
I've been mainlining since 2004. Morning Mocha 4 Life, yo.
And here's my English Muffin, sizzling away in the pan.
While the muffin was browning, I cracked two large eggs into a bowl and let them settle for a moment while I quickly maneuvered the ham steak from its package and into the pan with the toast. I figured I'd cook the slower stuff together, since eggs are a quick sizzle and serve, more often than not.
Two big ol' eggs. Yes, we store our eggs in the fridge here in the US.
It's something about the way we process eggs so they don't kill us.
... We still get a ton of salmonella cases every year.
Japan, what is your secret?!
Now, while I had my ham steak frying along, I noticed that my toast was quickly going from "almost there" to "yo, I need out, like, yesterday", so I awkwardly flopped the crispy, buttery English Muffin halves out of the pan and onto my plate. Why awkwardly? Because I still suck at using spatulas, even years into my "I guess I'm eating something I made" stage of life.
Photo blurriness aside, that's some delightfully crispy toast right there!
Meanwhile, I also skootched the ham steak towards the middle of the pan for optimum heating. Centered food is evenly cooked food, regardless of if it's in the microwave or the stovetop. I'm not getting into sous-vide cookery. I have 0 experience there and it terrifies me because it's... kinda... not something we've ever done in my family.
But enough about French water baths, let's check on that ham steak...
Looks like it's cooking along! See the brown marks on the bottom of the pan?
That's the brine caramelizing to the pan. Some people confuse that for blood or something.
This ham steak has been cured, brined, cooked, and refrigerated. If there's still blood, we've
got much bigger problems on our hands than we ever thought.
I like to flip my ham steak (or Canadian Bacon, if that's what I'm using, but I'm not) several times while heating it so that the browning is more even.
And also because it's fun.
Did we forget about our eggs? No? Good. While the ham steak is sizzling along (loudly), you'll want to take your eggs and beat them up with a fork. I use kind of a whisking motion with my fork, but however you find it works, do it. You want to make the entirety of the eggs more or less the color of the yolk.
And if they get a bit foamy, even better. That adds volume!
Don't forget to season your eggs. I used plain salt and pepper on mine, but they're great with a lot of flavors! Try them with cayenne or paprika! Add some chives or green onion! Mix in some milk or cream for extra protein and vitamins! Try a little mustard in there! It's all good!
But you don't want to add these eggs to a crowded pan, so now's a good time to check on your ham steak and see if it's ready to come out.
Mine was! It didn't need to be "cooked", since that happened before we got it.
It just needed to be heated through comfortably! The browning was a big added bonus, though.
Once your pan is free of any other food clutter, you're going to take it off the heat and add your lubricant, since the ham will have absorbed any leftover butter from the toast. I used a little cooking spray. Return the pan to the heat, add your eggs, grab a spatula or something, and start moving those eggs, yo. You want those suckers to keep moving every second they're in the pan so they don't burn. Burned eggs suck. Trust me. I have burned many an egg in my day. Ew.
Once they seem almost done, turn off the heat. The pan will finish the eggs as you carry them over to your plate. Roll them onto the plate and prepare yourself for condiments (and likely condemnation from food snobs).
My lovely meal, before.
After.
Do you see?
And of course, once you're finished cooking, it's time for the best part!
Cleanup!
Lol, no. It's eating. It's always eating. Dishes can wait for a full belly. But ideally, you'll have a chance to finish your dishes before you leave for your day.
You definitely want to eat your food before it goes cold, so hold off on dishes until after you've enjoyed your food!
If you've scrolled down this far, you deserve the video, so here you go:
In which I make Noodles with steak and also make a milkshake!
My mom made steak, which, I may have mentioned, usually means she made too much steak for just her and my father. The leftover steak sat in the fridge for a few days before I finally asked if I could put it out of its misery, and once I was given the go-ahead, I got ready to put it in some noodz!
The Noodz
The Steak!
Some Eggs!
These Noodles came from our August Umai Crate!
Healthy Vegetable Ramen?
Better add some steak.
If you know me, then you probably know I have a somewhat rude and subversive sense of humor. One of my favorite things to do is taking a healthy option and making it as unhealthy as possible - hence adding steak to "healthy" veggie ramen!
Here we see the steak all cut up into strips and soaking in an egg bath
To make this at home, you will need:
Leftover protein
Ramen
Eggs
Spices and/or onion or garlic powder to taste
Cut the protein into manageable pieces, then crack the eggs into a bowl and scramble them up. Once the eggs are a mostly uniform yolk-color, add your protein and let it soak.
This is also when you add any herbs/spices/powders you'd like.
I believe this is garlic and/or onion powder.
Next, you're going to want to assemble the ramen packet(s). I set the brick right in the bowl to hold it, but you don't have to. Basically, you just want to be sure what you have to work with!
The contents of the ramen pack
The Noodz
The seasoning packet
The unmarked and somewhat intimidating packet of ?
Cook your ramen according to the package. Since our package was in Japanese, I used Google Translate, and it was well worth it. The cooking instructions were hilariously dire - "Stop fire when strings become untied".
The strings are not yet untied.
Untied noodz with the steak and eggs added in!
If you're curious as to how I kept things from burning on in the pot, I actually floated the steak chunks on top of the brick before things softened up! That way, the fat started to render out of the steak (what fat was left, at least) and into the noodles, the egg bloomed into the broth, and the overall effect was delightfully easy to clean up after the fact!
Once I'd "stopped the fire" (turned off the heat and moved the pot to a cool burner),
I added the broth packet, which smelled delightful and looked really good!
Now came the moment of truth, however - what was in the unmarked packet?!
Oh. It's veggies. The kind you get in Yakisoba.
Sweet!
This meal did not last that long! We got it to the table and it was devoured in mere minutes. Honestly, there is no nobler fate for leftovers than to be cooked up with ramen. The steak had gotten tough in the fridge, but after soaking in egg and simmering with noodles for a while, it softened right up and became just as tender as when it was first cooked! The egg bath is quickly becoming my go-to trick for working with leftover meats.
Now, if you're going to have hot noodles in the summer time, you're probably going to want something to cool yourself off with, right? Of course you are! So please enjoy this week's video:
Hopefully, you all enjoy noodles and sweets in the days to come.
