Category: mmm… food

Since my TV returned to me, I’ve been thinking about how much the box affects my diet. I’m a snacking kind of guy. I can’t watch TV without sneaking over to the cupboard, and while I’m sneakily searching for something to fill that little second supper corner, I wonder why I’m sneaking at all when I don’t have a roommate. Well the tree in the corner often gives me a bit of a guilt-trip when I eat too many Miss Vickie’s potato chips, but I can never disguise the crinkle of plastic followed by that distinctive potato chip munch-munch-munch-gulp.

The potato chips are an easy choice when I have them, but more often than not, I sneakily arrive at the cupboard to find nothing that one would define as a classic snack food. That’s when one must become a creative snacker.

What should I snack on tonight? Peanut butter and celery? Cream cheese and celery? Cheese melts? Leftover penguin? Miso soup? Instant oatmeal? A boiled potato? Um… I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel here. And I’ve had several bad experiences with those barrel-scrapings. The tree in the corner insists that I should avoid ingesting anything that I have to scrape off another object, but it takes several attempts for me to learn from my mistakes.

Aha. Pickles and cheese. There’s something magical about the combination of cheese and pickles. In particular, real mozzarella and kosher dills. Mmmmmmmmm. And a great thing about the pickles and cheese snack is that, unlike Miss Vickie’s, the crunching won’t drown out the dialogue on TV.

What’s that? Oh.

The tree in the corner says I should get a life. F— off, tree.

Mmm. Pancakes. After all that talk about breakfast foods, I began to think seriously about pancakes. And the most serious of all pancakes is the okonomiyaki — a Japanese pancake. If you’ve ever tried one, you know that it’s the most delicious and complicated pancake ever invented (that I know of). Click here for a recipe and photo.

Also, okonomiyaki rhymes with all kinds of interesting things. I bet you could write oodles of poetry on the subject.

Anyway, my stomach insists that I make one for dinner tonight. Here is my quandry: what to put in it? What do you think? Visit the Cubicle Poll on the left to cast your vote.

Oh, and this is my way of saying that I have nothing to blog about today.

Okonomiyaki update

Well, I’m just about bored enough to do this. I dropped by T and T Supermarket for some supplies, now I have all the stuff I need:

Bonito shavings. They look a lot like wood shavings, but they’re so light, they’ll blow away if you’re not careful. A bonito, apparently, is a dried fish.

Instant dashi powder. Makes a clear fish-based broth.

Dried shrimp.

A jar of kimchi — suey choy in a spicey sauce.

Mayonnaise. I wanted to pick up the brand with the Kewpie doll on it, but couldn’t find it.

Okonomiyaki sauce.

Shiitake mushrooms.

Suey choy cabbage.

Other more ordinary ingredients include: fresh salmon, flour, ginger, and eggs. Time to get to work.

Time passes…

As River Selkie pointed out in her blog, the common banana is in serious danger of becoming extinct because they have no viable seeds. People have “interfered with them”, in the words of a co-worker. The same co-worker revealed that it’s possible to obtain seeds for dwarf banana plants, and thereby help ensure a bananaful future.

It occurs to me that, if we were truly serious about saving the banana, all cubicle dwellers everywhere should cooperate and set aside a corner of their workspace for a dwarf banana plant. And then, when the economy collapses for lack of bananas, and civilization falls into ruin, we could step in and save the world with our private supply of the pulpy fruit.

If that works out, we could do the same for the ringtailed lemur. Surely we can save a corner in our cubicles for a lemur or two. We could feed them dwarf bananas.

Arctic wolves, too, are becoming a little sparse. They’re too big to fit in the corner, but if we gave them a cubicle of their own, we could feed them banana-fed lemurs.

As I sit here over a bowl of oatmeal, a thought strikes me. Actually, I’m not so much over the bowl of oatmeal as I am in front of it. Or am I behind it? That’s a difficult preposition.

Anyway, I was thinking, why am I eating this? And then I thought, why am I writing about this in my blog? Then I paused for a moment and pressed Enter a couple of times to start a new paragraph.

Unlike my health-conscious brother, who’s getting a little behind in his bloggings, I can’t stand oatmeal. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the texture, in part. It’s kind of like that paste mix that used to be a part of every art project in elementary school. The kid next to me ate some of it, which was truly repulsive. I bet he was all blogged up for days.

And in part, it’s the lack of any identifiable flavour. Unless you add cinnamon, sugar, apples, or raisins (which, in oatmeal, can be easily mistaken for boiled bugs), it’s like eating a whole bunch of pasty nothing. How can anyone make this stuff a regular part of their day?

I should hardly criticize, I suppose… lately, my regular breakfast has become the grease-soaked “number 4 meal”: the dreaded Sausage McMuffin, a puck-like object that they call “a hash brown”, and black coffee. No kidding, it is just oozing with grease (as am I after I eat it). By the time I get to my cubicle, the bag has a large spreading stain, and the napkins are almost as tasty as the greasy puck they were wrapped around.

And if I can go off on another tangent, how can they call those pucks “hashbrowns”? Real hashbrowns are a flavourful pile of deliciously fried potato chunks. Not a deepfried potato-matter puck!

And now we get to the real reason why I’m blathering on about breakfasts. I finished my bowl of oatmeal, and I still feel like I haven’t eaten breakfast. If only I lived next to the Dutch Wooden Shoe on Cambie. Some smoked salmon hash-n-eggs would truly hit the spot right now.

I’m eating this right now. One part contains:

WHEAT FLOUR, MODIFIED STARCH, CORN FLOUR, SALT, GUAR GUM, PALM OIL, RIBOFLAVIN (COLORING AGENT).

The other part contains:

SALT, SUGAR, MONOSODIUM GLUTAMATE, RED PEPPER, ONION POWDER, SOYSAUCE POWDER (SOYBEAN, SALT), CITRIC ACID, BLACK PEPPER, GINGER, SESAME, KIMCHI BLOCK, DRIED GREEN ONION, DRIED CARROT, ARTIFICIAL BEEF FLAVOR.