CombODDnation: Sausage Foldovers (+bonus:organizing)

 So, I've made stuffed sausage before, though I've never shown it to you.  Here, I'll show it to you now.  It will all be clear in a moment.

Then after I thought I had the stuffed sausage idea perfected, something even more yummy happened one day.  Sausage foldovers.

Don't worry, clarity will be obtained momentarily.  I promise.  And the above idea will be clear as day, and then you'll be able to do both stuffed sausage and sausage foldovers.  I promise.

But first!  Yeah, I like doing this whole tangent thing whenever I have your attention.  Have you noticed?
Anyways.
Yeah, so, first...
Let's talk about organizing!  (Huh?  Why?)
Well, I dunno, I'm a really busy person with nary time for keeping up with my trappings and even less motivation on the idea.  I like knowing where things should go but I really suck at actually consistently putting them in the spots I've decided on.

Results are that I end up with a sort of broken binary system; seriously: "It's either here, or it's there.  No?  Maybe either here or there?  No.  Well then I just don't know where it is, it's lost."  If you've ever lost something so well that the house ends up cleaner from the effect of looking for it, then you definitely understand me.  If not, then you can ignore me, you don't need my input.  Skip to sausage.

So my key to success is making it easy to put things away.  My favorite key is having "away" be the same place where something is most frequently used.  Second favorite key is labeled bins.  I'll show you each then I'll shut up about containers and move on to food.

Labeled bins... pick categories and use your shelves to the max?

I really love how I can just throw things in these bins haphazardly and they'll still be easy to find the next time I need them.

Baking supplies has in it...

Spices has in it...

The heavier things go on the lower shelves, or they're darned much a struggle to lift down.
Tea is what it sounds like.  Remedies is all basically herbals, vitamins, prescription leftovers, cold remedies and the like.  The wooden box is.... actually band-aides.  The little one called Measures segues me to the next thing.

Lives where it's used:

I have several sets of measuring thingies.  This has been accomplished by clever use of rummage sales.  In addition to the bin labeled "measures" which serves as the staging ground for measuring other sorts of what-not, I have several containers of dry stuffs that have a measure that "lives" in there.  The most commonly used measure employed for the item is the one destined for this purpose.  Tablespoon in the cocoa powder.  Cup measure in the corn flour (one with lines on it marking 1/4 and 1/2).   Etcetera.  It's that simple, really.

Only other thing to say for right now is that I store stuff I use frequently in clear containers so I know when I'm running out of it.  Coconut shreds, beans, and popcorn kernels, for example.  And, I think I've bored you enough, so...

Yeah, we're back to Sausage.  Starting with the spices!

 Put a table spoon each of fennel seed and cumin plus a teaspoon of hot pepper flakes (or to taste) on a large plate.  You'll be working with about 3 pounds ground meat product for this amount of spice and it will be pretty hot.  Feel free to use any spices that make you happy.  Fennel, Cumin and pepper heat makes me happy.

In portions, kneed the ground meat onto the spice plate, folding until the spice is well incorporated.  Make several, set them aside.

Smoosh each of these patties very flat on the plate, put a leaf of chard on top, then a dolup of cream cheese on top of that.  Fold the meat over to enclose the cream cheese, allow the chard to extend past the now taco-shaped foldover.  The picture shows construction clockwise from bottom right :)  At the top is a cooked and completed one.  Very thin pressed ground meat allows for the foldover to cook at higher temperatures so that the cheeses melt nicely.

 Cook on each side for about 15 minutes on oiled skilled medium-low heat.  Cook up the extra greens while your at it, they make a great fried greens side dish.

Enjoy!  Have fun with it!

CombODDnation: beet chicken roast

First off, look at this cute web covered in dew in the morning in my fence.  So small and intricate, I can't get over it.  This is a concession, I'd really LIKE to show you the up-close zoom picture of the large and amazing looking arachnid colored black and gold in my garden, but I'm sure that won't sit well with many.  So a cute little web in a fence finial bedazzled with shimmering dew, it is.

So I made beet chicken.  I said something about it in my soft diet post a bit ago.  And here it is!

This was so yummy and so simple.  Here's what I did.
Stick a chicken in a pan.  (Make sure there's not gizzards still in the cavity.)
Cup up beets (these are from my garden) put some in the cavity and the rest in the pan around the chicken.
Pour about 2 cups water in pan.  (Make sure not to drown the chicken because the beets make it so red that the submerged parts will be hard to tell if they are fully cooked, you'll have to watch your pop-up timer and also cut into the above-beet-water part of the bird to test for done-ness.)
Drizzle with molasses (optional, nice touch.)

It'll look like this and be ready to stick in the oven.

So, my joy of cooking says cook at 400 degrees until thigh registers at 180 degress, which for a 4 pound bird is 55-65 minutes, plus 8 minutes for each additional pound.

So that's what I did.  This was a 5lbs bird so I cooked at 400 degrees for an hour-10.

And cutting into it, it looks gorgeous, except that it's blurry.  Steam.  Yup, steam makes for blurry photos.  Sorry!  Anyways:

 It just fell apart on the fork, so tender.

The thigh and leg took on a lot of the color of the beets, bright and cheery!

So there you have it, enjoy!

CombODDnation: flip-spiced eggs

I've been getting Amish eggs at the farmer's market.  Not only do they accept my copiously collected egg cartons (dang do I ever have too many)  but these eggs are delicious and the chickens are well kept and I actually get to meet the people who produce them.  Basically, I'll be sad in winter when this luxury is no longer right outside my workplace door every Friday.  I'm such a sucker for convenience it's downright sad.

So I have this lovely little trick for what I call flip-spiced eggs.

Preheat your skillet on low and gather up your spices.  Once the egg's on there, you're gonna have to act fast!

To spice my eggs this time, I used: fresh sliced garden cayenne and whole fennel seeds.
(You can use all kinds of whatever suits your fancy, cumin is fantastic, hot pepper flakes, curry, or whatever you like to have, go for it.)
Whatever you're spicing with, have it ready now, before you get started.

Oil the skillet and spread oil evenly.  I use olive oil.  Put the egg(s) on.

Now's the time to ACT FAST: put your spices on your egg before it cooks.

If you don't like runny eggs, you have the option to cut the yoke now, which I did on my second batch to show you.

Doing more than one egg will require you to divide the eggs before you can flip it, which is easy peasy to do. Just use your flipper to draw a line down the middle and they're separated to flip one part at a time.

Now flip the egg over when the middle starts to look mostly well done.

Cook it on side two for just a moment, long enough to finish cooking through, and then serve!  Add more oil to the skillet if you're going to cook a second batch.

Wasn't that easy?  Enjoy!

EatNote: Soft Diet Survival

Who wants to know why September was such a slow month?  WELL!  I think the title says a lot already.  A split filling led to the worst sinus infection I've ever had.  That was a little bit back, couple weeks ago, and I've been generally well in most recent weeks, there's just so much to catch up on! I broke the fast with a beet-stuffed chicken (which I'll show you later) I'd been on a soft diet for nearly two weeks due to pain.

I only lost 7 pounds, which is VERY good, because most weight loss is muscle mass loss for me.  When I lose size, I stay the same weight, or end up heavier.  I have an interesting metabolism.  So minimizing weight loss during a period of abnormal eating is important; I am smaller, but didn't suffer drastic weight loss and I can still lift the same weights I could before I was ill.  Hooray!

Managing a soft diet while maintaining gluten free is a little different than the average.  Doing it while taking good care of your body requires an extra special touch.

Part of the key is to watch out for too much sugar in whatever you are eating, since much of the misery of existing on soft foods can be found in the effect of the sugar high/crash cycle.  It's also a very good idea to avoid chemically processed ingredients (fake sugar and other fake stuff) with more care than usual since you won't be eating the substantial items that usually serve to dilute the effects of those, they'll quickly lead to a rather blah feeling.

If you're ill enough that you can't eat solid food, the most important thing is to look after your muscles.  Your muscles need protein, and you can't over-do it.  Simply be aware that you should never exceed 75% protein in your diet.  You can supplement the protein with either fat or carbs, and many progressive dieticians are starting to advocate that fat is the healthier choice, since it seems the body more readily converts carbs into fat, and science argues the body may actually be converting fat into beneficial acids and vitamins.  This is what the Palean noise is all about, but you can take your pick on that.  Everyone's metabolism is unique, just like I was saying about my need for cows.  Human dietary needs are much more complex than we generally give credit.

So what proteins are truly soft?  For two weeks I lived primarily off of yogurt, gelatin, bananas, and those crazy baby tomatoes.

Yogurt from whole milk contains 10 grams of protein per 8 oz, and just 6 grams fat.  Knox gelatin contains 8 grams protein and basically nothing else!  Bananas are good fiber and vitamins and are easily squishable.   The baby tomatoes are just always there.  And spiced dark chocolate cocoa, too.

All of these things are ridiculously easy.  I live alone, and the cats can't prepare food for me.  The first couple days I was fussing with making grits, too, but with as bad as I was feeling, even that was effort.  Effort I didn't necessarily want to expend.  Are you getting the idea that I felt horrid, from all this?  Because I definitely did.

The yogurt was all basically lego yogurt style.  I ate a ton of yogurt due to the antibiotics being horse pills.  Sometimes I smooshed bananas into the yogurt.

Knox Gelatin is the only not-obvious bit of all this.  I warmed fruit juice and dissolved the gelatin packet straight into that!  45 seconds warming of a mug of juice in the microwave on high gets cold (straight out of refrigerator) juice to a nice dissolving temperature.  And then just drink it warm, toss an ice cube in it to make it a cold drink, or heat it up another minute to make it hot like a tea.  I used a generic equivalent of juicy juice because I didn't want the extra sugars that are so inherent to most commercial juices.

There are plenty of foods out there, this was just my approach to getting through a very unpleasant time.  Considering most suggested soft food diets focus heavily on bread, and since I had such success as far as not wasting away even with having to maintain it for nearly two weeks, I wanted to let you all know.

That new "greek" yogurt that is so readily available would be a good idea, it has about 12 grams protein  which is impressive.  Cottage cheese, and just about anything you can throw in a food processor, peanut butter (or any nut butter, really) hot cereals like grits or oatmeal, sliced overly ripe peaches, grapes, deviled eggs, cream cheese on tomato slices (oh gosh that's so good), egg salad and lots of other things are also good options.

Hey, STAY HEALTHY!  This isn't any fun.  Glad to be back in action here and back at posting things for you.

A G-20 anniversary post

In honor of G-20 having ended in Pittsburgh three years ago today, I wanted to re-post my immediate thoughts following the event.  This is from the blog site I had at the time.

A day in the life working during Pittsburgh's G-20 in Oakland.
Originally posted 9/27/2009 11:12:26 AM

No, no recipes or garden notes today, I simply would like to write down all the events from yesterday while they are still fresh in my mind.

I work in the Pittsburgh area, in Oakland, right where the most damage to windows occurred on the night of Thursday, September 24th 2009.  Thursday I took a vacation day, on Friday I worked.  This is because I have was on the skeleton crew that day.  Thursday I spent the day scoping out where I would park, and also saw the riot police setup for the Lawrenceville riots - no,  mind you, not on purpose.

I'm the kind of person who does not care to see, I only care to ensure that I am as safe as I possibly can be.  Never the less, due to my location yesterday, I still saw what seems like a lot to me.

I caught the bus from about 10 miles outside of the city, parking in a public park that was far enough away that it was not going to be a staging ground for any protestors.  While waiting for the bus I could hear a police radio, which was very close by, but I could not see anyone.  That was a bit eerie, especially since everything else was so amazingly quiet.  My bus came and I was the only one on the bus for the first 20 minutes.  My bus driver was talking to me about his experiences he'd had already that morning.  At 7am that morning he had already needed to have the secret service come collect a person who was handing out fliers for a protest that had no permit.  This is illegal because the bus is government property, apparently.  Nine secret service agents arrived, he told me, within moments of his radioing in to traffic command reporting the problem.  The man was arrested.  My bus driver was a bit shaken up, I could tell, and I was just talking to him about staying safe.  He told me also that he had to go through two military check points every time he ran his round that day.

Then we got to 5th and Craig, we all noticed a riot police formation organizing at the corner.  Our bus driver stopped, got out, crossed the street in the middle of the block through traffic, and talked to an officer on the other side.  After about 3-5 minutes he got back on the bus and kind of murmured "I just got commandeered for police transport."  He sat back in his seat and began to drive again.  I asked him quietly whether he needed us to get off.  It would not have been very inconvenient, since this bus comes past very frequently and was running ahead of schedule.  He explained that he would take each of us to our destinations and comes straight back after that.  As I exited the bus I felt a bit badly for him, so I pointed out to him that he would be much safer today with a bus full of police officers than possible protesters.  He agreed, and maybe looked a little less stunned in response to that.  As I walked from the bus stop, I was noticing the official vehicles.  Remembering the look of the FBI vehicles that arrived in response to a bank robbery that I was working at the bank at the time, I noticed more of them, I think.  Black Cadillac sedans and SUVs were everywhere.  As I walked down the street that had all the broken windows, it was not the boarded windows I noticed, but the Australian secret service sedan that pulled up next to me to park.  They are marked with a sticker in the windshield with the  national flag.  They were all in black suits with the ear-bud feed, I was actually surprised the windows weren't darker, but if they were darker the car would not blend in as well, I guess.  Will all these things just on the way in, I was glad to see that my main lobby doors still had glass, and that the doors were locked so I had to use my key card.  When I arrived upstairs, I arranged to have all but the door by me (I'm receptionist) remain locked, by placing scotch tape over the key holes.  Only two coworkers even bothered asking why, each of whom readily accepted my answer that it was so I could keep a better eye on the security of our suite and quickly secure our floor if needed.  The lobby doors automatically unlock for access to our building in the morning, then lock again at night.

Most of the morning was very quiet, though the nervousness of my coworkers was evident from how much everyone was gravitating toward telling stories of what they'd seen or experienced related to the G-20.  Things were no longer quiet shortly before 11:30, the scheduled start time of the protest.  Outside our building I heard the barking of many many dogs.  We looked out the windows to see that the K-9 squads had just arrived, well over 30 k-9 units of Shepherd and Malinios breeds were barking quite angrily on the street below, just outside our front door.  Then three public transit buses arrived and around 150 riot gear police piled out and went into formation.  Just across the street a small group of protesters were dancing, and then some of them threw poo-burgers (human fecal matter carried in a hamburger bun) at a store front.  The police group just got out the bullhorn and announced "Clear the sidewalk now or you will be arrested."  The group dispersed immediately into all directions, and the sidewalk was cleaned and hosed off, literally within 3 minutes, I've never seen a sight get cleaned up so quickly.  It was like it never happened.  The k-9 and riot police units then deployed to their stations where the protesters march was to take place one block up from my building.  I felt bad that the k-9s were mostly really going nuts.  I imagine that the dogs could smell drugs and were doing exactly as they were trained to do when they smell illegal substances, which is pull against their leash and bark a lot.  A very intimidating sight.  Once again, this whole group came and went so quickly it was as though they had never been there.

Several officers were stationed on our corner for the rest of the day, and soon we could see the marchers going by on the street they had a permit for, just a half block up from us.  Several of my coworkers left to go take a look then after a while came back reporting that they had stopped the march just before the birmingham bridge and they felt concerned that there may be stand-off.  Turns out the stop was only temporary, seems something had to be cleared from the scheduled parade route.  Soon after I got a notification from our public transit that they were halting all bus service into downtown outside of city limits on federal orders.  That was repealed around 4:30pm.  Between about 2 and 5pm everything was pretty quiet.

I left work at 5, and proceeded to head toward my bus stop, which I had double checked on our public transit's twitter feed to make sure my bus would not be re-routed in any way.  At that time, every bus stop on 5th and Forbes, going in both directions, from Craft to Craig, all had 2-5 riot gear police stationed within 10 feet of the stop sign.  One young girl at my bus stop was trying to engage an officer in a conversation about some cause she supported, and he was just laughing quietly about it and letting her talk from about 7 feet away from him.  The other two officers there were looking quite purposed.

As we drove out of oakland I saw many people who had obviously been demonstrating earlier just hanging around.  Some had their banners still, some had their faces painted up, some just otherwise looked the part.  I was glad I was leaving, because while it was generally an atmosphere of celebrating a sucessful day, and there were joyful lawn games and people playing music, I also felt there was some lingering tension that was probably going to build into another potential problem once the evening carried on a bit longer.

I got a call and a text message from my employer's emergency notification system later that night stating that conditions may be deteriorating in the Oakland area.  At around midnight I was still at an all-night diner in a town near my house, the diner is about 4 miles outside the city, and 6 miles from Oakland.  My friend and I left around then because a group of young people arrived who were acting very strangely, some still wearing face paint, they started practicing gulf putting, clapping, cheering a bit, and otherwise loitering in the parking lot.

I believe this covers everything I witnessed yesterday.  I just wanted to write it down while I still remember it all pretty clearly.

In parting, a picture my co-worker took while going to check out what was going on outside:

I wonder if that was my commandeered bus from the morning?  ^_^

(Originally posted 9/27/2009, unedited from original form.)