Well, really I’m having trouble coming up with stuff to write about as my daily activities have been quite mundane for a while.

As it turns out this week’s food choices have been quite global. We started out we some good ol’ american hamburger helper and then we had Indian last night. Tonight we’re having greek (gyros). Skipping over to saturday we’re having salsa chicken tacos and sunday I’m cooking up some chicken riggies. Those last two choices are only…sorta international, but they still count I think! I’m looking forward to cooking up the riggies as my first attempt revealed some things that need modification, so hopefully I can refine it properly this time around.

Lets see, random news time…work has been pretty rocky the past couple days. Lots of stuff going wrong and I’m finding I’m having increasingly little patience for it. Probably shouldn’t go into that too much, but it’s been pretty un-good recently. And to top it all off, we’re getting new health insurance plans for next year that suck worse than the ones we have now. Increased co-pays (even some co-pays that didn’t exist before, like a $40 X-ray co-pay), the deductible doubled, and the ER visit copay went up from like $50 to $150. All of which the benefits e-mail touted as “features” of the plan. Seems like they were trying to sugar coat it.

I just hope I never have to go to the emergency room.

In relaxation news, I’ve played a couple of games of battletech to ease back into it. I’m playing against myself (which I know is lame), but I dunno if I’ll really be able to do anything different as, like I mentioned, nobody around here really plays at all. It’s just something nice and different that I can do for an hour or so. I’m really more interested in the fiction of the universe at this point than the actual playing.

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The big thing for us is it keeps track of when a meal was last cooked, so we can see stuff that we haven’t had in a while. And we can search by ingredient so if something is on sale, we can get a list of stuff that uses that particular item. Another cool feature is a cooking mode that displays the recipe full screen mode in large type so you can read it from afar. It also responds to voice command so you can advance through the recipe without getting the laptop all icky.

I think it’ll work out well. Our meal planning process was taking much longer than it should have and something like this should help out a lot.

Now to enter all our recipes into the system…

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So this evening I am tasked with helping to fix this situation by coming up with some way to list out and track all of our meal options and when we last had them. It’ll be a lot easier to slot in meals, I think, once we have a big list of stuff we can do. I’ve had the thought before, but now I’m motivated to actually do something about it.

I could just create a little spreadsheet for this, but I think I’m going to be investigating some applications built for the purpose. I want to have a centralized recipe storage location as well…to make things a little easier to manage and hunt down when the time comes to make the food. I’ve been eyeing MacGourmet as my option of choice so I’ll be checking it out tonight to see if it’ll work…

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I'm quite pleased at the moment as I've pretty much finalized the new layout for the redesign that I'm doing of my friends website (Wassyart.com, might as well drop another link plug in). Now I need to rip it out of Photoshop and actually make it into a website, A process which I will be starting in a few minutes here on my lunch.

Pretty happy with how it turned out. I'm undecided if I want to post a little preview image up here or hold it until the redesign goes live. But the process was really rewarding. Well, it was also really frustrating too at times when things weren't working right. But as soon as everything clicked, and elements started falling into place it was extremely satisfying watching it all come together. More satisfying than progress on some of my other side projects anyway. I do think I'll keep doing this stuff as a hobby, at the very least. I'm excited about perusing it more.

Also last night, for dinner my friends and I went a little Indian. Our favorite keeper of the recipes, Pioneer Woman posted one for Chicken Tikka Masala. Considering this is one of our most favorite Indian food items, we decided to give it a shot. I took care of the cooking which went without incident except that I burned myself on the oven door pretty good. Owwww.

The end result was very awesome. I made it just a smidge too spicy so that next time I do it, I'll have to pull back a little bit on the heat, but we're definitely going to keep that dish in the rotation. It's fairly cheap too, now that we have all the spices and such for it. Tasty win.

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I had a little bit of a late Christmas present yesterday. I woke up at around 2 am with a very unhappy stomach. I sat in bed for a little while until it felt like I could move and then went to get a little glass of water. Obviously that was not a good decision as I ended up making a mad dash to the bathroom instead. I ended up not going into work because I was still feeling a little off and very tired. As near as I can tell, something I ate disagreed with me violently, since after that it was a steady progression of getting better all day. Nothing else which indicated that it was an actual stomach bug.

While I was home though I decided I wanted to start my macbook into Windows so I could play some Civilization 4 to pass the time. Before that I had installed the demo for a game a friend of mine (Jay) recommended (Overlord) and…I'm not sure what happened but that seemed to trigger my windows install to totally melt down. So I spent the morning reinstalling windows XP and calling microsoft to prove that I wasn't a pirate.

And the print for my new piece of artwork that has been previously referenced was delayed by UPS due to a late trailer, so that didn't come yesterday either.

Oh, and then I totally screwed up the chicken I was making for dinner, making me get take out.

So pretty much the best thing that happened yesterday was that I didn't end up with a cripling stomach ilness. This week is going to be looong as I'm really looking forward to doing a lot of hanging out with my friends this weekend. Is it friday yet?

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As the title suggests, this post is going to be about two things…food and drinks.

So starting with the food, I just wanted to give a little update on my cooking attempts. I've tried two new recipes this week. First up was some garlic chicken. This one turned out REALLY well and I'm definitely going to do it again. The best part is that it's pretty quick to do, about 30 minutes or so, so it's easy enough to do during the week. It's not terribly sophisticated, but it's very tasty. I think I used a little bit too much of the seasoned salt in this one though…it was a tad too salty, but I'll adjust that for next time.

The next recipe was for baked halibut. I had another halibut steak from last weeks seafood experiments and I wanted to try out this one. I didn't like it quite as much as the garlic chicken, but I thought it was servicable. I think It was a little too tangy, so I might need to reduce the mustard powder and dill weed a bit.

It's a little difficult to do some of these because I'm trying to reduce everything from feeding a family of 4 to one person. Not exactly easy sometimes. Later this week I'm probably going to try out a recipe for baked scallops, and potentially chicken quesadillas. We'll see what I feel like.

As far as the liquid consumption goes, I've been exploring different types of tea and I've arrived at Rooibos, or Red Tea. And man, I wish I would have gotten here sooner. It's now my current favorite tea. I tried it Monday night just straight with no flavoring and though it was pretty good. A little sweet, very smooth and very tasty. Then last night I tried the earl grey version, which is your standard rooibos tea with bergamot added. And it was simply awesome. I forsee myself going through the sample tin I have of this VERY quickly.

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I continued onwards down the path towards becoming a better cook last night by making something entirely new to me. I enjoy seafood, so I decided I would attempt to make a swordfish recipe. It took me a while to find a good one as I don't have the facilities to grill swordfish as it is apparently most enjoyed. However I did find one recipe which sounded like it had promise.

I whipped it up without incident and the end result was merely OK. But swordfish is damn expensive, so I think I won't be having it again. The price to tasty ratio did not fall down in favor of this particular dish. I have one more swordfish steak available so I'm going to see if I can find a different recipe to try that one with. And then, that's the end of the swordfish experiment.

Later on this week I have some halibut to try as well which I'm optimistic about. I must say though, I do enjoy cooking and seeing the final results of the work. It's got a certain sense of satisfaction to it. Of course there's still days I don't feel like making anything elaborate.

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I've been quiet over the past couple days because of one thing: I bought myself an XBox 360 this Friday. I had intended on waiting a bit before getting it, but…I have no willpower and once I set my mind to getting something, I usually just end up with it no matter what. It got down to where I was (jokingly, might I add) convinced that it was going to help the economy and consumer confidence.

But anyway, I got it, along with Tales of Vesperia, because rock band 2 is so darn expensive and I didn't want to pick that up quite yet. I'm really enjoying it a lot. My next big purchase after Rock Band is going to be a decent yet not terribly expensive HDTV though. This thing really needs HD, I can tell that now. I've still got that new toy fever which means it's hard for me to do work type stuff that I want to do, such as keeping up on my programming practice.

There wasn't any hanging out with the friends this weekend because they had a lot of stuff they needed to take care of on various projects and such. So I stayed in mostly which very nearly drove me crazy by the end of the day Sunday. I've got a tiny little apartment and staying in there nonstop for that long a time made it feel like the walls were closing in on me.

But I spent most of the weekend playing the 360, Tales especially. It took a while to get going but now it's got a good story and I've just encountered my first dungeon with totally inexplicable puzzles which is a trademark of the Tales series. Waiting for the first box pushing puzzle now! The one I encountered involved a tower which you had to spin certain gears to get the staircase to the next area to descend. Which, I would imagine, makes it difficult for the owners of the tower to navigate between it's floors… Anyway, good game, and great graphics. It looks like I'm playing an interactive anime game. I'm going to like this 360.

I'm not going to like the price of the games though. Most of them are like $60. I've been considering signing up for a service like Gamefly which would let me rent a couple games to play at a time. So if it's $22.95 a month for 2 games out…at a time…that's going to save me a crapton of money even if I only play 1 game every 3 months. It seems totally worth it, and especially for games that I'll probably only play for a short period of time. And if I like something I can just buy it from them. So I think I will actually do that once I finish Tales.

For dinner sunday night I made the Chicken Cacciatore that I was shown how to make last weekend and it turned out very awesome. I might be able to cook after all! I need to change a few things around since you always make a few mistakes here and there the first time out. I let it simmer for a tad too long because I underestimated the amount of time it would take to boil the water for the pasta. But overall…mmmm…excellent. This week I'm going to be trying Swordfish and Halibut, two things which I've never had before but we're going to give them a shot anyway. Looking forward to seeing how they turn out. I'll probably have more on that tomorrow, since thats when I'll be trying the swordfish.

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I keep meaning to post this, but I should update on my quest to feed myself with more than frozen foods.

After the cooking lesson from this weekend, I decided to try the Chicken Arrabiata thingy (Chicken and Arrabiata pasta sauce over angel hair pasta) I tried last week for the first time again, armed with my newfound knowledge. The first time I tried it I cooked the chicken too fast, so it wasn't as good as it should have been. But this time I did it right and…mmmm. Turned out very nicely.

Tuesday I also did something new. I intended to make this baked flounder recipie (minus the mushrooms. DIE FUNGUS!) but, for the life of me I could not find any flounder. Argh! So I substituted Tilapia for the flounder and gave it a try. It definitely has potential, and next time I see flounder somewhere I'm going to give it another shot. I think it would definitely compliment the flounder a little more than the tilapia.

So basically, things are going pretty well so far. I'm enjoying the end results in any case. Now I just need to branch out a little more.

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As per usual on weekends, my friends and I gathered to hang out a bit. No major "lets go out" type activities this time. This was purely hanging out and watching some TV/anime/mst3k and having a good time.

Wassy also showed me how to make her Chicken Cacciatore which is excellent (part of the reason why I wanted to learn how to make it). She took me shopping for the ingredients so I could see what she got and then explained what she was doing as she was cooking which is the best way for me to pick something like this up. Since I'm a cooking noob, I don't know a lot of the techniques and don't have a feel for when stuff will be done, so seeing somebody do it (while I take notes) is a very helpful thing. Now I need to go out and buy a big skillet.

Conversation inevitably turned to politics because of the presidential debate Friday night. Personally I think Obama did well and responded to McCain just making crap up multiple times. I'm a little biased though since I'm a very strong Obama supporter. I found it interesting how different people are seeing the debate. It sometimes sounds like they weren't even watching the same thing I was. A lot of people have commented about Obama's suposed disrespectful looks at McCain, but I saw it the other way around. You could tell that McCain just can't stand having to stand up next to Obama. He barely kept control of his temper. And he also tried a bunch of rehersed jokes that just fell totally flat.

I just think Obama handled himself better. He agreed with McCain a couple times which I think showed class and a willingness to listen to the other side's ideas. He followed up by explaining where he differed with McCains positions which, unfortunetly, a lot of people seem not to have heard..they stopped listening at "I agree with my opponet". Dah. I also liked how at the very end Obama passed up a chance to keep fending off a McCain attack and told the moderator (who was trying to gain control of the conversation to move on) that he should just move on. A very classy move.

I'm looking forward to the expected bloodbath that will be the Biden vs Palin Vice-Presidental debates coming up this week. I'm going to pop some popcorn for this one. It should be good.

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