Topic: What are you eating / What did you eat.

[6pairsofshoes]

Tea and a muffin.  Breakfast.

[6pairsofshoes]

Fresh cream scones with seville orange marmalade.  This batch of the marmalade was extra bitter.  What odd oranges they are:  bumpy skins and millions of seeds.  Nobody eats them right off the tree because they are basically inedible in their natural form.  They need this bizarre cooking and sugar addition.  I wonder if Seville Orange marmalade existed before Columbus "discovered" the Americas and sugar cane was imported into Europe.  I doubt it.  Seville was an important port, so the trees were perhaps imported for their flowers and foliage.  Certainly not for the fruit, initially.  I guess you can add honey, but I don't use that.  The oranges take days to prep and the marmalade varies from year to year, depending on the natural bitterness of the rinds.  This batch was one of the most bitter, but it's still pretty tasty.

Here:  https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/food-and-drink/the-last-bitter-word-about-the-origins-of-seville-oranges-1.3953631

[6pairsofshoes]

Lazy cook's salad:
1 perfectly ripe avocado, cut and sliced.
Salad dressing of your choice.
Toss.
Eat.

[6pairsofshoes]

I read that as "toes".

... and worried a little. (qv "Harold the Barrel")

Sounds like your inner cannibal is surfacing.  I'd think toes wouldn't be very good -- too bony.

[6pairsofshoes]

"Buffalo Toes". I smell a marketing opportunity.

... or maybe "Spare Toes"?

You'd have to do better than that to make them appetizing to me.  And I'm getting ready to have some pasta with sauce out of a jar.

[6pairsofshoes]

It was Thanksgiving so I feasted with the neighbors.  I took over some persimmon pudding that was well appreciated.  Do they have this in Europe?  The persimmon pulp was from a neighbor's hachiya fruits that I had frozen last fall.  The pudding is rich and particularly good when enjoyed with some whipped cream.

This was after the usual turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing and greens.  It's been a good day.  I hope yours were as well.

[8ullfrog]

I had a hamburger bun with bagel spread for thanksgiving.

My aunt asked me to dog sit so that she could have thanksgiving with her boyfriend, and I agreed.
She said I could have "anything in the fridge".

There weren't leftovers, but there was a half bag of crinkle cut fries, so I ate that for dinner the night before thanksgiving.
The next day I went excavating but I didn't find poo. Just hamburger buns and bagel spread.

She's very "live with what you need, and nothing else" but this was honestly surprising.

I didn't get paid, and one of the dogs peed on me when I was asleep. I took those dogs out every two hours, so that was on purpose!

 I don't know if I'll dog sit for her again. The not being paid stung.
Especially when she acted like it was an emergency and she needed help.

When I asked her about the food situation, she suggested that I should have eaten the creamed corn from the pantry. Yup, that sounds like a meal.

Anyway, I stocked MY pantry with spicy chunky soup because I tried a can of the spicy chicken noodle, and they had all the ingredients in, instead of being 80% water. Well, those gits got me again.

https://www.campbells.com/products/chunky/chipotle-chicken-corn-chowder/

This soup is a bless'ed ruse cruise. That label makes it look mighty tasty.
Nope. Green pepper. Too much green pepper.

One upside of the soup is that it is a cream base, so at least that was nice.

I think the whole can had three chunks of chicken total, which was a Campbells standard from about 2000-2010.

I had a salad too, that was pretty good. Just your bog-standard bag salad with chipotle ranch. Nothing exciting, but it gets the job done.

[6pairsofshoes]

Your aunt sounds strangely stingy.  Where I come from, you FEED people.  And by that, I don't mean you leave them a few scraps of white bread to gnaw on.  Jeesh.

As for the soup. I find green bell peppers very bitter.  If you leave them on the plant long enough, they turn red and the bitterness goes away.  My grandmother and I would make pepper relish.  It called for red and green bell peppers, onions, pickling spice and vinegar/sugar mixture.  But to remove the bitterness from the green peppers after they were chopped, we'd immerse them briefly in hot water and then pour off the liquid.  It sounds like that soup was overpowering because of their inclusion.  Lots of cajun dishes and gumbos require bell pepper, but they don't go overboard with it.  Cream soups can be lovely but I generally prefer tomato based soups in that particular food genre.  I like Progresso's chicken corn chowder.  It's not bad for a canned soup.  Cream based clam chowder can be magical.  We used to eat oyster stew when I was a child but my grandmother made it with milk so it was lighter.  We ate it with oyster crackers.  They are octagonal but do not contain oysters.  I once got in trouble for laying the crackers on the surface of the stew like a delicate mosaic.  My dad got pissed off because I was being so fussy with the crackers.  It's not clear why that bothered him so much.  But I still laugh thinking about it.

[8ullfrog]

It's not a new thing. We've had previous "breaks" in the past. One time I was walking home from high school, she was 1 mile from the school, I was 2 miles.

I just got a wild hare in my brain and decided to visit. I was not welcome. She told me to leave.

Funny enough, though that rejection hurt BAD, it led to one of my favorite solitary memories. I walked from her house to the movie theater and watched Spiderman 2.

Then I went to burger king and got the spiderman 2 burger. It's one of my favorite burgers ever, and burger king is crap.

But I enjoyed the movie and burger and went home happy.

FIVE HOUR TURKEY

Turns out my convection oven SUCKS.

I've been lured into a false sense of complacency. I've mostly used the sucker for chili fries to now, but last night was the first trial by fire.

And the turkey would not hit 140f. Which, as you know, isn't good enough. At first, I thought my thermo was no good. It's not digital, it's old school.

Turns out my thermo is right on the mark, and that bless'ed turkey wasn't going over 140.

I went to the internet for help. It said to tent the turkey with tin foil. So, I did.

Still took five golly hours. It did hit 170 though.

Turkey turned out good, if a bit dry. Mashed was mashed. I'm not pleased with the outcome on that point, but I was cooking without sentiment on that count. I have done better, and I will do better. Stove top stuffing was Stove top stuffing.

One fun one, I bought "onion enhanced" gravy. 89 cents, I figured what the golly, why not?

It's just gravy with dehydrated onions. Nothing particularly enhanced, I was not impressed. But it did help with the turkey.

I kind of want to shoot the oven with a shotgun. Piece of poo.

I've been wondering why my toast keeps coming out lousy, now I know. The thing has the temperature containment skills of a bless'ed water balloon.

[6pairsofshoes]

I'm not a fan of toaster ovens.  They seem like overkill for toast but they also, in my experience, do a lousy job of toasting bread.  The convection thing, too, blowing hot air over something to speed cook it?  It's bound to dry it out, kind of like having a hair dryer on your turkey.  Best to let it sit quietly under a constant heat source.  I suspect you are using this equipment due to lack of a regular oven, so I sympathize and admire your inventiveness and fortitude under those circumstances.

[6pairsofshoes]

Tea and scone. 

[goldshirt*9]

nice

[8ullfrog]

I got suckered again.

I've slowly become a fan of Bush products. Their refried beans taste the least canned of any other brand, and they're cheap.

But they got me!

They have a product line called "Chili magic". I'm not sure what I expected. I went with the "classic homestyle"

It's a can of beans.

I did get a good laugh out of things as I cooked, but it's a can of beans.

Also, thumbs down to vine ripe diced tomatoes. More like quartered! I like my diced tomatoes fine, but I guess it's late enough in the year to excuse a stew. I never knew I had to be discerning with diced tomatoes.

A previous mistake was thinking it was just diced tomatoes, I thought I was going to use a can on nachos. Boy was I embarassed.

(diced tomatoes are canned in water, but I imagine everyone on this site knew that before I did.)

[6pairsofshoes]

Bush's beans are decent.  You need to look for "petite diced" in the canned diced tomatoes dept., otherwise you end up with those large geometric cubes. 

I use their beans in chili and soups all the time.  Also, use garbanzos for hummos and chana masala.  Never had a problem with them, but they are, at the end of the day, just canned beans.  I have never been brave enough to try their spiced or flavored varieties.

[8ullfrog]

I forgot to say what I thought of it.

It was fantastic. I wouldn't say it was magic, but after letting it simmer for a while, it was a fine chili.

Mom had three servings.