I miss my DS.

I sometimes think my dreams show what my subconscious desires. My DS has been broken for a while, and I never replaced it. This dream might be a hint to me of the desire to play a certain kind of game.

I was on a quest, and a few friends came along. Thinking on it, I should have realized it was a dream pretty quickly, since there were obvious signs. Like how we chose the quest (like in a video game) and it immediately went into a cut-scene in which we enter into a mansion. We were supposed to do something inside and in the garden of the mansion.

We needed to track down a dark wizard, and this mansion was related to him. We wandered through it, but not much happened, until a monstrous man (I'm guessing it was a man, though it might have been a man who was experimented on by the wizard) ran at us. We defeated him, and as he lay there, we moved on into the garden in the back.

As we were leaving to the garden, the building sealed itself closed with solid steel doors. We had no choice but to go on to the garden. We wandered around, but didn't find anything. It was then when we realized that we needed to go back. We didn't know why, but there was something back in the mansion.

Strangely enough, it was open again, and the body was gone. The wizard appeared and we immediately charged. This is when everything froze, and the wizard began to explain why we had to come back. We had not truly defeated the big guy before. Then he projected in our mind an image of what happened as we were leaving into the garden. The monster got up as we were leaving and began to run at us just as the doors sealed, so we never saw that.

The wizard chided us and said we weren't ready to face the monster, let alone the wizard, but since we were here, we could not leave until we defeated the monster. The wizard then transformed the area into an underground cavern, complete with flowing lava (this is when you can notice that my video gaming when I was young still affects my mind). He started to toy with us, creating illusions of mages for us to defeat.

It was about this time that I noticed that we could only move on panels on the floor, much like turn-based strategy games. Interestingly enough, it was turn-based. We were on a magical, transparent, floating platform that the wizard created. The lava was flowing under us. He split the group, so that we would have to wait for our turn, and would give us different scenarios to defeat his illusions. I think this was to train us while we waited for his monster to come back so we could fight it.

Then I got a phone call and woke up.

What's Zopf?

What you see in the picture is zopf.  It's a loaf of swiss bread.

I've been planning to bake a loaf of bread for a while, and I finally got around to baking one today. This was my first time baking bread, so I picked an easy recipe.  The only thing I don't like about it is that I can't smell the yeast. Still good bread, though.

Recipe:

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Zopf/Detail.aspx

Smells Delicious? Couldn't Care Less.

My last post was a while ago.  I'm doing much better, but in the meantime, I realized an annoying effect that the head trauma had.  I lost my sense of smell.  Apparently, it can take anywhere from 2 months to never to heal.  This put a damper on my cooking.

Taste had a severe impact, since I was only able to taste sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (or whatever they call it these days).  I can also feel the burn of peppers, but that's not so much of a taste as a feel.  You can test that out by putting it on sensitive skin... you'll feel it if you rub a pepper on your eyelids.  For several weeks, the foods I ate only had the tastes I mentioned, temperature, texture, and presentation.  I lost over 15 pounds during that time, not because I was on a diet, but because neither cooking nor eating was fun.

Fortunately, some smells are coming back.  This does not mean that I smell a weakened version of what everybody else smells, it just means that I can only smell certain compounds.  I can smell white vinegar, but I cannot smell smoke.  I can taste the difference between regular Pepsi and Pepsi Throwback (a limited time Pepsi made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup), but I can't really tell between Coke and Dr. Pepper.  Vanilla tastes different than vanillin (artificial flavoring for vanilla), but sugar cookies and oatmeal cookies taste the same.

Anyways, so I was making london broil today, but the smoke detector kept going off.  Actually, this smoke detector seems to go off everytime I've been cooking these days.  I checked the broil, but no burning.  I'm convinced that the smoke detector is defected.  The meat was rare, which was how it was supposed to be.  I'm thinking that I'll just cut costs for food and not spend too much on herbs and spices for the upcoming few weeks/months.  What do you think?

I was in a hospital for 1.5 weeks

On Thursday of UF's spring break, I went to FIU. I was visiting a friend who lived on campus at FIU. We had fun, and after saying bye to him around 11pm, I left his dorm to walk to my car. Somewhere between the dorm building and the parking lot, two things happened. I fell and hit my head. I lost consciousness. I have no idea of the order in which they happened. I'm told that a campus policeman saw me falling and came to help me. He asked me "Are you okay?" I answered "Where am I?" Since I was clearly not okay, he called the paramedics. I can remember from the paramedics. I remember that I was praying the whole time. I also remember calling my parents. What I don't remember, but what my mom told me, was that they left so quickly that they forgot to bring a Bible or anything, so my mom told me to recite Psalm 23. Apparently, I did it just fine. Then, I remember throwing up blood and blood coming out of my nose. Afterwards, I was told that if I didn't throw up, then the pressure in my head would have been too high and I could have died. The hospital was pretty boring. Being stuck in bed for 9 days is terrible. There weren't many good channels on the TV, and though I had my Nintendo DS with me, I found out, to my dismay, that I fell on it. The screens didn't work. But I spent a good portion of my time reading a book that I brought with me. And the Bible; the book of Job. On about March 19th, the nurses started talking about how my injury was similar to the one that Liam Neeson's wife had died from. They did not stop telling me how lucky I am. They did not stop talking about it even until I was discharged. I have a skull fracture on the back of my head as well as a blood clot. The fracture has healed a good deal, and the clot is dissolving. My right ear feels like there's water in it, and sounds are a little muffled through it. The doctor said it'll get better. My heart rate drops to something around 30 beats per minute sometimes. The average resting heart rate, I'm told, is around 70 bpm. So the hospital kept me in to make sure this wasn't the cause of me falling to begin with. So from 3/13 to 3/23, I was in a hospital in Miami (Kendall). But I'm free now. After all this, I can only say one thing: Praise God!

The Crockpot

The Crockpot is a brilliant invention. It cooks slowly, so there is a very low chance of burning the food. As a result, there is little care needed for it. Just set it and leave it be for hours at a time. When you get back to it, 4-10 hours later, your food is ready!

This picture shows Harvest Pork Stew. The crockpot is getting close to empty, because it was delicious.

Finally! Pictures!

So I finally decided to start with the bowl stuff of my blog.
I can't draw, so this blog won't be getting any pictures of my dreams. Unfortunately, a blog without pictures can be a bit boring. This is where the bowls come in.
I will have pictures of foods that I either make, or experiment with (even the failures).
Today's food was the Bacon and Mushroom Strata.
So, what's a strata? A strata's essentially a breakfast casserole. It has bread(cubed), eggs, milk/cream, and whatever else you want to throw in there. That "whatever else" happened to be bacon and mushrooms. I had extra of each.
It's a casserole, so it's primary function isn't to look good, but to taste good. It did it's job well.

Noah's... Taco Bell?

So this time, in my dream, I was like Noah... The one from the Bible.

Only my "ark" was a Taco Bell.    It was also a Wednesday in my dream.  Random fact.  

It's kinda complicated.

Anyways, the whole thing with Noah...

It had something to do with either extremely bad weather, an alien invasion, apocalyptic virus, or apocalypse itself.  I don't know what it was, but I needed to keep these animals alive.  So I got a pair of each animal... I think they came to me, in fact, and we took refuge somewhere.

Strangely enough, that somewhere happened to be a Taco Bell building.

Dad was there, and so was mom.  There were other people there too.  But the thing I think was important was that not everyone knew that things were not going to be easy.  I remember saying things like:

"Thursday might be the last sale in a while"

"Noone will see animals for a while."

As an aside, the baby zebras in my dream were really cute.  Oh, and the animals were really smart too.

Anyways, I guess I must have been hungry in my dream.  So guess what I decided to eat?

Yup, Taco Bell.  I got in line (strange... why would an abandoned Taco Bell in the end of the world have a black woman at the counter to give me sass?).

I ordered as many burritos as the loose change would get me.  They had no tacos.  Something about how the tacos always went bad.  So the burritos were really cheap: 1 for 29 cent, 2 for 31 cent.  

When I pulled out the change in my pocket, I had a bunch of big coins.  I had 1 silver dollar among lots of half dollar coins (about 7).  Well, I like big coins, so I didn't want to pay with any of the coins in my pocket.  I found a few dimes, a couple nickels and a penny to play with.

The black woman at the counter gave me some more sass.