What guy doesn’t love a good burger? OK – what carnivorous guy doesn’t love one?
I’ve tried lots of methods and recipes of cooking burgers over the years – and I’ve made a lot of pretty decent ones – but never one that I’ve really felt a need to make another one exactly like it again. I’ve had burgers like that – but always from a restaurant. Will Alton Brown’s be any different?
Burger of the Gods is people!
Officially titled “That Ol’ Cap Magic” – but that isn’t really particularly descriptive, is it? Ah well. Being that Emily doesn’t usually eat meats anymore, we’re always looking for ways to get mushrooms into our diet since they generally work well as a meat substitute. Stuffed mushrooms are one of my preferred hors d’oeuvres, so this was one that I was looking forward to.
Tossed with 'enough' olive oil and herbs
Naturally, apples are the main ingredient.
Let me state right now that I love apple sauce. It’s one of my favorite side items. For the most part, I love Mott’s. I grew up on it, and I compare all others to it. This one will be compared as well.
I probably make grilled cheese sandwiches for Emily or myself at least once a week. They’re delicious, light and quick snacks. Plus – cheese. I have my own method of cooking grilled cheeses that’s pretty basic but it works really well. Grilled cheeses themselves are about as simple as they come, so this was more of an experiment in using Altons cooking method.
Grilled Cheeses made with suggestions from Alton Brown
One of my favorite add-on’s for Firefox is Woot Watcher. Displaying the current woot, it’s usually just a small convenience since there’s only one item a day. During Woot-Offs, however, this is an invaluable add-on. No more keeping a separate window open and refreshing it. No more forgetting to check to see if those damned shun knives have finally sold out. Just glance down at the bottom right of your browser and check to see what the current woot is, the price and how many are left (by percentage).
The problem is that Woot sometimes changes the structure of the page and essentially breaks the add-on. For a while now, the add-on has just displayed “Woot: One Day, One Deal” and a price. The structure of the page had changed again, and the add-on has not been updated in a while.
So here’s how to fix it yourself. It looks long and complicated, but it’s really not. You can do it in under a minute following these simple instructions.
Much to the delight of Emily, I’m sure, I’ve finally finished Final Fantasy 13. Emily was not a fan of this one, and stopped paying attention back at about hour 7 while I logged a little over 66 hours total. I’ve given myself a few days to reflect on the game and let some of the thoughts become coherent enough to put them down .
Final Fantasy games are a little hard to quantify though – like the stories of The Crow franchise, they’re meant to stand completely alone with a few obvious exceptions. Is it fair to compare Final Fantasy 13 against the original Final Fantasy, or even the 9th? In the end, I decided that while the games may be disconnected, the invocation of the Final Fantasy franchise name makes the comparisons apt and permissible.
I’ve never actually eaten fruitcake before this. I had seen them before, but they all looked horrible and nasty. They have always looked like they were made of Jell-o, full of things that would chip your tooth. In his episode about fruitcakes, Alton talks about the bad reputation that fruitcakes have and that they deserved a second chance. I was willing to try out his recipe, but I wasn’t really looking forward to this one.
Before getting her tattoo a few years ago, Emily wanted to check out the tattoo parlor and meet her would-be artist. Since we were going to be driving out to Ybor, we decided to try a local restaurant. I don’t remember why we were looking for Irish restaurants, but we ended up going to MacDintons. It was an odd experience, but the food was good. The dessert, however, was fabulous. It was the first time any of us had “lava cake”. When I saw that one of my assignments was chocolate lava muffins, I was pretty damned excited.
Due to the location of our TV and gaming systems, I was forced to use wi-fi connections for our game consoles. Thankfully, the PS3 and Wii have built in wi-fi. Unfortunately, the PS3′s connection – particularly for downloads – seems to be dog-ass slow. Yes, that’s the technical term. The Wii’s connection has never been super speedy – downloads aren’t too bad, but they’ve always been pretty small.
I’ve never really had many problems playing games over wi-fi on the PS3, but I don’t do it that much to begin with. My online PS3 gaming has been either on Fat Princess or LittleBig Planet – both of have servers that tend to lag themselves at times. I had gotten used to setting PS3 demos and add-ons to download just before going to bed – so that they would be done in the morning. Song packs for Rock Band totaling at about 250mb would usually take a few hours to download. Sometimes, if I hit the servers at an unbusy time, I might be lucky and get that in about an hour.
I grew up eating rice dishes and I could probably eat rice every day. I think that the combination of being asian and being raised by a mother serving Puerto Rican dishes combined into some sort of ultra-love for rice. Still, the only way I could ever get my own rice to come out perfectly was either to use a pre-seasoned packaged rice or to use a rice cooker. Our rice cooker broke a few years ago, and we just never got around to getting a new one – so I’ve spent the last few years trying to figure out how to get that perfectly fluffy rice. I recently started buying jasmine rice, and while it was fluffier than before – it still wasn’t quite right. To say I was hopeful about trying this new cooking method for rice pilaf would be an understatement.
I was a little bit nervous about putting this in the oven
