Brotteccine Manfredbro

It is a known fact that any word that can be mashed with any of the following words: man; bro; dude; brah, is recognizably funnier than any counterparts.

I felt really Italian last weekend when I went grocery shopping with my mom, so I bought four boxes of fettuccine.  Overkill?  I say nay.  Looked up a recipe for alfredo sauce, and about sixty-three bucks of infinite groceries later, I was home!  And then I made tea and used some of the half & half I bought because Lipton's is awesome with a dash of cream.

Really simple, like most college pasta dishes:

• Fettuccine (obvs)
• Half and half or some sort of heavier-than-milk cream
• Parmesan cheese (note, if you can find this in blocks and just grate it, do so, much better than shredded stuff that I have to deal with because I can't find parmesan at Kroger...)
• Garlic cloves
• Parsley
• Butter

This won't be a long post, because this is really easy.  Sorry.  Absolutely delicious though.  Also, recipe for sauce more or less shamelessly jacked from here.  

So, standard fare with the fettuccine, just get some water a-boilin', then dunk your pasta in that water, keep separated with a fork every couple minutes or so.  No big deal.

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING.

While that's heating up, you need to either chop garlic (just a clove) or parsley (you only need a quarter cup, so really not nearly as much as I have on the right).  This is a nice trick for peeling garlic bulbs, as an aside.  There's really no trick to these, you kinda just put them on a cutting board and...cut.  

You will also need to take your butter (1/4 cup, half a stick) and start melting it in a sauce pan on some level of heat less than the hottest so you don't burn your butter.  When it's all melted, pour in a cup of your cream (hehehehe) and let it simmer for about five minutes.  Your pasta should finish in this time, so go deal with that.  When it's been about that long put in your garlic and parmesan, then stir it with the fury of a thousand angry gods (bonus points for no splatter).  Once it looks sufficiently heated/is sufficiently thick for your tastes, off the heat, put in your parsley and mix it up a bit.  You now have alfredo sauce, and fettuccine!  

Mine looks a little...too green, but I added like...3/4 a cup of parsley instead of just 1/4 because I'm bad at guesstimating measurements.  Still turned out really good though, even if it smelled a little too green.  You can add some meat and make it proteiny, and you could probably add a fried egg if you're more an egg person than a meat person.  This makes a decent amount of sauce, so you can save some for lunch or dinner, or just eat big dinners like I do sometimes.

So, this post has taken a while and it's kinda short, but I figure if I just made spaghetti it'd be kind of bland and old and everyone knows how to make spaghetti.  So here's an equally delicious but slightly out of the ordinary pasta!  It's also fairly cheap and everything used here can be used in other stuff (personally I can't survive without garlic or butter somewhere in my kitchen), so it's not like it has to be for a special night of dinner or anything.  Unless you do something weird like bake tilapia and use that as a meat.

(that isn't a plan at all)

Hope you've enjoyed this week's Fruncoki, 'cuz I sure did.

The Granule of Civilization

History

Many moons ago, in the time before Sigourney Weaver, humanity was on edge.  They had realized, through thousands of years of experimentation, that they could grow wheat.  Despite all of this, they were unsure of what to do with the wheat.  They had silos upon silos of wheat with no use (as whales and sharks had not yet been domesticated), and these great, ominous entities didn't even pay taxes despite the profound effect they had on ancient human politics.  Little did they know, however, the Great Wheat Age was about to unfold before their very eyes.

It was around the time that Jupiter ate its once closest moon that a scientist named Abraham Lincoln decided to devote his entire life to the study of wheat and the resulting forms of government.  It came to pass that as he ascended to the ripe old age of twelve, he ground the wheat into a powder, and then combined the powder with water.  Then he placed it into a toaster oven, and the first bread was made.  He was later made famous for his dissertations on primitive oligarchies and because he made a cannon that repels primate feces.

That's the basic story of bread as we know it today: the ground powder of grains or cereal with a liquid (most commonly water, but other options are available such as milk, beer, etc.), potentially altered with things such as leavening agents (yeast, baking soda) to make it lighter and fluffier.  Beyond that it's mostly  just extras!  You can add fruits and spices and other flavorful things.

The Twist!


So I took the original pictures for this one a while ago, but they were rather lacking (as in I forgot a number of steps and felt like I'd be an ass if I didn't take more at some point).  So now we finally get to the integral method of making BREAD, finally, and because of the similarities in creation, I'll be showing you how to make pizza from (mostly) scratch, too!

Circumexcellence


So pizza turns out to be pretty cheap, all things considered, as everything makes at least two, unless you just really love cheese/sauce/pepperoni/your favorite topping.

So here's our list:

• Flour, unbleached all-purpose (for the bread I ended up making tonight I used wheat, but I have no idea how well this would work with pizza dough...I might try this next time)
• Salt
• Olive oil
• Sugar (unpictured, because I'm bad)
• Yeast
• Pizza sauce
• Probably mozzarella cheese
• Any toppings you want, baby

Kinda looks like soup.

The annoying thing about bread is exact measurements (or pretty close to, at least) are pretty important, so you can't wing it quite as easily.  Also, note that parenthesized measurements will be for bread, unparenthesized for pizza dough.  LET'S GET STARTED.

Modern art.

Take 1 1/3 cups warm water (2 cups) and a tablespoon of sugar (same with bread), dissolve into the water, and then add 1 1/2 tsp yeast (1 1/2 tbsp).  Let it proof (the term for...letting it sit) until it looks like a creamy foam kinda thing (right), and then start adding flour about a cup at a time.  None of the recipes I've ever used were right about how much flour you end up needing, so I've just started adding it one cup at a time until it gets where I need it.  At some point (no picture, my bad) when the dough has started to become like one object instead of a bunch of clumps in some liquid, you'll want to start kneading.  If you have a bowl as I do at right, you can knead in the bowl, but otherwise you'll have to countertop it.  All you really do is spread some flour on a surface, your hands and the dough, then start working the dough by pushing it out and folding it in half, adding flour when it gets sticky.  Doing it in the bowl is basically the same process.  Eventually you get something similar to the second picture, which does not stick at all to your hands, at which point you want to lightly oil a big bowl (I just use the same one I knead in, no consequences so far), turn the dough ball to coat, and cover it with plastic wrap, or a moist paper towel/cloth, or something like that.  Then you let rise until roughly doubled in bulk, which should take anywhere between half an hour to an hour and a half.  So what do I do while my bread rises?

Mah-fucking Skyward Sword, bitches.

One of these days I'll get a real hobby.  Probably the day before I die.

Look ma, no hands, OR sides!

BOOM, adorable.  And wheaty.

Best circle ever.

After an hour or so of valiant evil-vanquishing (evanquishing?  Sounds too much like evangelist), and just as my Wiimote was running out of battery, the dough had risen quite a bit.  The next step, though, is punching, and I was so excited to punch I forgot to take a picture.  It's fairly self-explanatory though - you just take the dough and punch it down.  Lots of fun, you can even get the kids in on it.  Sometimes I go hunt out a hobo and have him punch my dough and count it for community service.  With dough punched, the path now splits between just bread and pizza.  With bread, there's more rising - take however much you have, split into two, and put into two 9x5 loaf pans.  The pizza dough, though, you can just toss onto a pizza pan and start spreading, as below.  With the bread, let it rise another half hour or so, during which I just made some edits to the draft of this post I had before, and added some real directions.  With the pizza dough, though, you can just start topping, but you might want to preheat your oven to 475F (246C, for those non-Americans...which apparently exist reading this blog) before you do so you're not waiting for preheating after you have a topped pizza.  Once you've topped it and you have a preheated oven, stick it in for ten to twelve minutes, or until the crust is golden.  The bread dough, once risen, should be in at 350F (176C) for about half an hour.  

So, I don't have a receipt for any of the pizza stuff nor a decent estimate of the prices, so I'll hold off on cost analysis until my next trip to the grocery store, which should be this week unless I find a way to stop eating. Which I won't. Hope you've enjoyed this entry of Fruncoki, readers! Also, you should follow me on Twitter @ Fruncoki, now that I've remembered my password to it and will be able to post from it!

One, Two, Tea, Everybody Loves Me

Hello again, Fruncoki readers!  I'm trying to get these back on a regular weekend update schedule, so here's to trying for a Sunday post.

This entry is a bit of a gear switch, as I won't be talking about food.  Instead, this post is about my favorite beverage that encompasses a gigantic range of different kinds, that is also potentially healthy for you, very frugal, and excellently delicious - tea!  This next statement is obviously hyperbolic in nature but might as well be true.  The possibilities with tea are pretty much endless.

Also won't be pictures, because I'm lazy and tea is really easy.  If using teabags, even easier.  Take water, boil, let sit for about a minute, pour onto teabag that is in mug, add whatever you want that seems like a good idea.  If not using teabags (in which case you probably know how to do this already, but for completion's sake), put tea leaves into strainer, boil water, let sit for about a minute, pour onto tea leaves, let steep for some amount of time dependent on the tea but pretty generally around a minute to a minute and a half, but only thirty-seconds for green tea.

That's all you need to have yourself some tea.  Good things to add include sugar, honey, cream, more tea - which works especially well with, say, herbal teas you've already used, just add a different kind and add more hot water, so excellent - cocoa powder (not much though!), cinnamon, cayenne pepper (again, not much), vanilla flavoring (I usually do this when I make pitcherfuls of tea with six teabags, a couple tablespoons of sugar and about a teaspoon of flavoring, ends up really good), pretty much anything you can think of has a chance of tasting good in tea.

Generally for black, jasmine, oolong and green tea I just drink them straight, but sometimes I'll add a bit of milk or lemon juice to my black tea.  I almost refuse to drink any other kinds without adding honey, though, partly because it feels better for my throat when I'm sick which is usually when I drink other teas, and mostly just because it's so damn tasty.  It's kind of ridiculous how a tablespoon of honey changes a mug of herbal tea.

As far as making it and what you can do with tea, that's about it.  Now, the pertinent question is, why should you drink tea other than for its taste?  For one thing, it's actually rather cheap - I drink a metric fuckton of tea and I haven't had to buy any new tea for at least two months.  This is partly due to the fact I have no less than ten containers of tea in my kitchen (most of which are boxes of bags, but whatever) and like to mix it up a lot, but still.  For someone who drinks far less tea than I do, restoration periods will probably be about the same length for like, a big loose leaf thing of black or something (I highly recommend loose leaf where possible, teabags are basically packaged, low-quality dust that comes from loose leaf stuff, and is thus weaker and has a different taste), or if you, like me, have an iron stomach and are able to handle just about anything, you can buy a 100ct of Lipton's black for less than five bucks, probably less than three usually.

Another reason is for the caffeine content.  Some teas are pretty low in this regard, like white tea, but black, green and other non-herbal teas have an amount on par with sodas most of the time.  I would go on a bit of a tirade on why caffeine is basically a legal form of crack with severely reduced withdrawal symptoms, but if you're reading this, you're probably in college, so you know anyway.  And shame on you if you drink decaf tea, that's just grody.

That's all I have for this post.  If you want to know more, feel free to drop me a message or a comment and I'd be happy to expand on anything I can, or find you a reliable site that does it better than I could, and thanks for reading!

Taste of the Orient #1

Hello there again readers!  I apologize for this blog post coming rather late, I've been rather busy this past week and it'll probably stay fairly busy for a while.  As such, I'd like to apologize in advance for any future delays in posts.  Also, happy Valentine's Day (or, for people like myself, Single's Awareness Day!)!

With all that out of the way, today we're going to delve into foreign lands a bit.  Today's entry is something that my mom vaguely described to me once when we were grocery shopping at the wonderful little Koyama Shoten  (in Dublin on Sawmill, for those local readers).  She said my dad (the Japanese of my two parents) used to make a funky summer dish that was really fast, really simple, and really good.  Clearly, the weather would have us believe it's not summer, but if you're like me and you keep your room at around 74F with a space heater (my birds seem to be happier at this temperature), it can always be summer.

The things you'll actually need:

• Tomato (just one is fine)
• Cucumber (again, one is fine - I actually only used half)
• Green onion (unpictured)
• Soy sauce (regular variety soy sauce is fine, but I prefer light soy sauce for this)
• Somen (you can probably only find this in a Japanese/Asian market, in the noodles section)
• A pair of chopsticks

The other things are just heavily recommended items to also get if you venture to an Asian market, because damn.  The two little containers next to the curry box are rice seasoning, which is fantastic and fairly cheap for how long it lasts.  Curry blocks are also excellent.  Rice, well, duh.  The little sealed can contains azuki (Japanese red bean), an excellent ingredient for desserts and smoothies!  You can seriously put it in just about any smoothie (pre-blending, of course) and it'll be the most interesting deliciousness you'll ever get from a smoothie, in good ways.  I also highly recommend getting ginger, which I also use for this entry even though it's not necessary, because it's delicious and good for sinuses.  Wasabi powder recommended if you ever want to try making your own sushi (which is balls hard, I would just like to throw out there).  

GREENSSS?  WHAT'S GREENS, PRECIOUSSSS?

That said, let's get this started!

The first thing you need to do, as with most noodles, is get some water to a boil.  For one clump of somen, I believe they say six cups is good, because you need to be able to submerge the whole thing fast, you'll see why later.  While your water gets up to a boil, take your three veggies (you could experiment with more) and chop them into roughly quarter-discs (see right).  Put them all in a bowl...and then you basically wait for the water to finish getting to a boil.  No big deal.  Eventually it'll get there, and then you want to put the noodles in there and submerge them as fast as you can without breaking them.  Then you want to keep the noodles separated with your chopsticks as best as you can for about two and a half minutes.  Once it's been that long, dump them into a strainer and rinse those bitches with cold water.  From there, you can just add to your veggies, put in a healthy amount of soy sauce, stir 'em up a bit, put in a few pieces of ginger if you like, and then refrigerate it for about half an hour.  From there you can keep it refrigerated, preferably covered, for a day or two (second time I tried making this I made some to give to a friend, gave it to her on day three...first and only time I've had a complaint about my cooking, stuff had started fermenting.  I still feel bad about that SORRY TIFFANY).  

That's pretty much it!  Quick, easy, and delicious!

With that, a couple of other announcements:

First, I kindly ask that if you've read this far, you read the post previous to this one, or at least this summarized take-away from it: please, PLEEEEASE criticize me!  I know I'm not perfect and I can't please everyone, but I can't even try to do that if no one tells me what they don't like about what I'm doing here!

Second, if you didn't respond to my Facebook post about it, please let me know if you would be interested in a blog about learning how to program, as I'm considering doing one as a side project in my extra spare time, which I may or may not have until the end of this quarter.  It won't take priority over this blog, so no worries on that front.

Okay, I think that's it for today.  Oh, and my birthday's in two days.  I accept cash, credit, Steam games and Japanese foil Magic cards.  I'm just kidding.  But seriously Japanese foils.

Just a Checkpoint

Hey there readers.  This post doesn't have anything terribly special, just a couple things I'd like to point out.

First, I finally got my first piece of critical feedback today.  While this is unfortunate that I am not perfect as I would like to be, I do appreciate it, because now I'm aware that some of the humor I tried to inject into my posts seemed really contrived and irrelevant, which detracted from the overall quality of posts (according to unnamed reader).  As a result, unless a bunch of people say something against this idea, I'll probably cut that out from future posts.  The big point here is that I do have feelings, but they're being invested elsewhere, so you don't have to worry about hurting them if there's something you don't like.  Criticism is a necessary part of the creative process, which is a category I believe certainly can and does include blogs.  So give me feedback, PLEASE.

That's the serious thing.

The second point is that I am even more of a fool than previously thought, as I realized while reading something today that food prices are not universal at all, and as a result my cost analyses are not universal.  Probably should've come to this rather obvious conclusion earlier, but alas.  A couple of things can happen with this from now on: I can continue to do a personal cost analysis for each entry with the caveat that it does not necessarily extrapolate to all areas, or I can just stop doing them altogether.  I learn towards not doing it at all, because it's easier for me that way to not have to keep and scour for receipts, but I am writing to an audience, so the audience should decide.

That's it for this little snippet, and thanks for reading!