A flurry of things.

[elfs]

Friday, we had fallenpegasus come over for dinner. We had broiled salmon, couscous with raisins and pine nuts, and steamed broccoli and parsnip with garlic and overpriced sea salt. We played rousing rounds of Uno with Kouryou-chan (she won every round, and we did not go easy on her).

Saturday, I was up and out the door upon waking to get donuts, then take the family over to Kouryou-chan's school for yet another round of cleaning the gutters, trimming the hedges. We ripped out one massively invasive vine that was becoming a danger to the power lines. We also ended up transplanting a couch, and I banged up my right hand doing so. When we got home after that I was so exhausted that when I got home I took a shower, lay down, and fell asleep until almost 5pm.

Jan 26: Meatloaf Muffins

Dinner was Omaha's famous meatloaf muffins (note the incredibly lame one picture a day there, all because I forgot my camera on the job site), mashed potatoes (red, skin-on), and steamed string beans with lemon butter. Yum. (FallenPegasus relayed to me a book he'd read about food habits in the 1960s; in 1969, of the 20 or so meals a week that people ate, only three of them would have anything that resembled a vegetable, and most of those came from cans. Yuck! Americans ate meat and starch, and that was about it.)

After dinner I listened to Says You, and one of the words was minovery. You can see from my link that it's in wiktionary... it wasn't before I got to it. (By the way, Richard, you let Paula get away with "The legal term for poaching." It's not. It's "The legal term for poaching by means of a trap or snare." That's important! You'll be getting a letter.) I created a wiktionary account and everything. While I was fumbling around trying to figure out exactly how to improve it (get the plural right, lock down the reference, things like that) three other people and the Wiktionary robot came in and fixed it for me. Thanks, guys, but how am I ever going to learn this stuff if you just do it all for me?

And curse Omaha and her game reviewing! She brought this evil monstrosity into my house called Phlinx To Go. It's a Windows game. I had tried running it on Linux under Wine 0.42, but it didn't work. (Almost all PopCap games work out of the box on Linux, so I'm annoying that Pogo games aren't quite up to snuff. Pogo is a subsidiary of Electronic Arts, which may explain that.) Last night I tried it under 0.54 and it works very well, and I must have blown two hours and gone to bed late playing the damn thing. In fact, it worked so well that I made an entry in the Wine application database about it (although the music sounds a little twonky, though, so it only earned a bronze rating from me), and one of the moderators sent me back an email saying, "You're the first, so you're now the owner of this application in the database." Great. Just what I needed. I don't expect it to get much traffic, so I guess it's okay.

Comments

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

You may have already, but... could you link at the recipe for those muffins? They sound yummy.

[omahas.livejournal.com]

This recipe is where my recipe originated, but really you can use most any meatloaf recipe for this. Just remember to include binders in there; egg and bread crumbs (they use egg and crackers in there), and dollop the ketchup on top. I also use sage in my meatloaf recipes. You can also, when you place the mixture in the muffin tin, place half the mixture in, then put in some kind of stuffing inside before adding the rest on top...like stuffing it with onion/carrot, or mashed potato, or something like that.

It is really a quite versatile recipe, and is ready in 30 minutes or less of cooking.

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

Thankee!

[panthyrr.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, those look better than the meatmuffins I've made...They're beautifully portable and easy to take to work. :)

[(Anonymous)]

My grandmother was one of those 'meat and potatoes' cooks; her cooking skills fell down pretty heavily outside of a very narrow range around that theme. There was a massively awkward moment some decades ago when my grandparents had come down from Pittsburgh to visit, and my mother served a chocolate cake... tall, light, fluffy, moist... and my grandmother insisted on getting the recipe. Which caused the awkward silence; the recipe was one that my grandmother had given my mother (coming originally from the Pittsburgher Hotel); when my grandmother baked it, the layers came out more like brownies than cake... and my grandfather had been eating it without comment for years.