Leftovers? Amster to the rescue!

In this episode we see how Amster can take an ordinary leftover Thanksgiving dinner and turn it into ... well ... warm leftover Thanksgiving dinner.

I peered into my fridge and looked at the Glad container holding the take-home portion of my Mom's Thanksgiving dinner. Turkey, stuffing, and some potatoes. (The cranberries are in a separate container.) Seeing as how I have to find a way to eat this before it turns green with mold, I fired up my favorite deep pan. A little butter melted on the bottom and the stuffing were heated until that good golden brown started showing up on the stuffing. Then I set it aside and tossed into the pan some turkey (shredded up) along with a little olive oil followed by a dash of sea salt. Once that was all nice and hot I recombined then tossed a few times. Boston Market sells a beef gravy that's pretty good, so I put some in the bottom of a bowl then folded in to hot stuffing/turkey mixture. Let sit a couple minutes to bring the gravy up to temperature and voila, a repurposed turkey dinner brought back to life. Pan frying really helped to drive out a lot of the icky moisture and concentrated the turkey flavor...

In the next episode I'll talk about how to make a natural adhesive with cranberry sauce.

Cows on the rampage?

Yes, it is true. I decided that I needed a blog to go all emotional and vent stuff out. So, the Fire Breathing Cow is now in existence...

TWiT humor...

For those in the know, This Week In Tech is a weekly podcast hosted by Leo Laporte (of TechTV fame). At the end of every podcast session he wraps up the show with "another TWiT is in the can!" Well, in a related story, he brought up on a podcast that he'd love to have like 20,000 Frappr pins for all the TWiT members around the world---Frappr is a Google-based map hack.

Anyways, so I was browsing around looking at England and when hovering over a point I saw this precious picture...


LOL!

Gee, would you like to reinforce stereotypes?

No, really. I've been looking for housing and on this one message board this ad was posted:

Reply to: XXXXX@xxxxxxx.com
Date: 2005-XX-XX, XX:XXPM PST

Beautiful secluded room in top floor apartment in XXXXXXXXX near XXXXXXXXXX; hardwood floors; washer dryer; stylish living room; room is a little small; clean and quiet; full kitchen; maid; with two young male professionals;prefer asian female; should be quiet, easygoing & nice.

Like all Asian girls are supposed to be "quiet, easygoing, and nice"? Oh puhlease. What the heck is up with this stereotyping? Are they looking for "tiny Asian girl who give good massage, make big men dinner, and make no sound when ask to bend over"? Good grief, guys.

Butter me up...

Recipe calls for:
- 1 qty. Amster
- 3 tbsp. olive oil

Preheat oven to 350°. Grease Amster liberally with olive oil.
...

As an interesting side note I found a great use for olive oil: removing permanent marker from one's skin.

On Saturday, Bo-Bo, Tri-Girl, and I did a relay-style triathlon. (Which was a lot of painful fun, but that's another story. Ow.) Well, at the triathlon staging area you go up to one of the volunteers and get yourself marked up with your race number on your arms, legs, and on the tops of your hands. Which is great when you need to be IDed, but looks kinda uncool later. Especially because they also write your age on your leg.

Bo-Bo pointed out that oil was a good way to get the stuff off. Really now? Seriously, just put a tablespoon of cheap olive oil (margarine or butter works) and rub over the pen marks. I never thought of it as a good surfactant until now. Yay!

A rant against Sony BMG

Hello Sony Music and Sony BMG, I would like to personally thank you for helping to change my entertainment purchasing habits. After reading a discussion of your secretive inclusion of DRM (please see Mark Russinovich's blog), I consider my privacy violated and my trust in your company broken. While I fully support copyright protection, I also believe in full disclosure of one's methods of doing so. As a result I will cease buying Sony CDs immediately. From now on I plan to buy all my music through Apple's iTunes store and play this on my newly-purchased iPod using Apple's FairPlay DRM. Thank you again, -- <me>

Good grief, what has this world come to? I didn't want to necessarily use this blog for ranting, but this one just chaps my hide. If you haven't heard about the whole Sony BMG rootkit scandal going on right now, you ought to go and read about it. Don't worry, I'll wait...

*Jeopardy music plays*

OK, done?

So, I'm enraged. This is misleading and an obvious compromise to computer security in general. How did Sony BMG believe they were going to get away with something like this? Anyways, as a thank-you to Sony for doing this I'm halting my purchase of their CD products as of now. I will be using iTunes whenever possible.

And now back to your regularly-scheduled happier-mood programming.

Pretty chuffed...!

Tonight was another Amster Original Dinner™. (Also known as the gee-what-do-I-have-in-my-fridge dinner.) And, it came out pretty good, IMNSHO!

I'm thinking to myself this afternoon that I wanted something soft, with rice, and a dab of meat. But then I started feeling icky so I left work early and went home to take a nap. When I got out of bed around 6:30-ish I really didn't want to go out to eat. So I opened the big white door...

Hm, old fruit...that's gotta go. Hey, I have a package of firm tofu. And some leftover Thai red curry... And a leftover onion. The freezer has a bunch of meat, but there's "lap xuong" (Chinese sweet sausage)...

So I started up a pot of rice and put the lap xuong in it to diffuse some of the flavors. Then pulled out the frying pan, sauteéd the onion (cut into chunks) and added a couple pinches of salt. Setting that aside, I braised strips of tofu and as a final touch added a little KC Masterpiece BBQ sauce over it. The Thai curry was revived in the microwave.

The net product is a mound of rice, braised tofu and onion, with cut sausage, graced with Thai curry. And I have to tell you, it's sweet, soft, and rich! Not bad for someone who doesn't know what they're doing, eh?

...

Speaking of not-knowing-what-I'm-doing-but-it-still-turned-out-good, my Halloween costume finally came together! Yay! To make a very long story short, I wanted to do Alice (from American Mcgee's video game) but I didn't like any of the costumes out there. So, being the engineer that I am ... I made my own Alice costume!

The boots and striped black/white tights and the knife were the easy parts. The dress and smock were altogether a different part. You see, until about a week and half ago, I had never used a sewing machine in my life. But I'm thinking, gee, it couldn't be that hard. Turns out, it isn't but it was a lot of work. I mean, it's not like there's a pattern out there for making this costume---even if there was I wouldn't know exactly how to use it. So in between staff meetings at work I would be drawing out how to do the skirt and the smock and stuff.

The ingredients for this turned out to be mostly from *cough*Walmart*cough!*. (You can tell I'm not a fan of that store, but hey, materials are cheap.) So I got some navy blue drapes (yes, drapes), a couple white flat sheets, a lacy window covering, a white scrubs top, button snaps, and a whole bunch of sewing supplies. (See the pillows-o-crap entry.) With a lot of imagination and a bit of jury-rigging, it all came together. In the end, instead of a dress I did a navy blue skirt and navy blue top because it was easier...

So the final product is a blue "dress" with frilly underskirt, white smock decorated with all sorts of symbols, boots, knife, and some goth makeup.