Lobster Mornay

Been a long time since I've posted food.  Lobster Mornay with shrimp, mashed potatoes, bread, and some veggies.

Dinner with family.

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?

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.

Curry Ramen

I was playing The World Ends With You last night (instead of studying), and one of the characters kept talking about curry and ramen.  Well today, I wanted something to eat (late breakfast/early lunch), so I looked at my inventory.  I had ramen (the cheap Maruchan brand) and curry (3 kinds: Fresh Market, Tones, and McCormick [I also had all the spices to make it from scratch, but I wasn't going to waste my time doing that for a bowl of ramen]).  So I put a pot of water on to boil, and threw in some curry.  

Then I got to thinking... sure, it'll taste good, but it won't do the ramen justice to just leave it at that.  So I threw in some frozen veggies (peas, carrots, corn, green beans).  After that step, I just couldn't leave it alone, so I threw in some meat I had last night, chopped up some onions, and threw in some minced garlic as well.  

There was still something missing, so I threw in the ramen seasoning packet as well.  I didn't like the consistency of the soup... too thin.  I really hate adding flour to something afterwards to thicken it, because then there is always that raw flour taste.  Fortunately, I had some leftover Bechamel roux, which made things easier.

What I had sitting in front of me was too great for just one measly ramen, so I threw in two ramen.

That's how I ended up feeling too full to study.  So as a result, I spent another hour watching stuff on Hulu.