Sunday Burger and Rice

On Sunday, I went to lunch with Mom and Sis. Mom wanted to get a burger from Tops BBQ, and as a fan of burgers, I didn't have a problem with that.

 

As you can see, I forgot to take a picture before digging in. And as I didn't think that this shot gave you a full appreciation on how big this burger is, I took this one to drive it home:

That is a big burger. And I ate it all. It was really good, as you can see in there they salt and peppered it while it was cooking and they don't skimp on the ketchup when you order it on the burger.

I was so stuffed from this lunch, I didn't get hungry till around 9 that night, so I went with the quick and easy fried rice:

Tossed it in the rice cooker, then once it was done in the skillet with some olive oil, garlic powder, onion powder, some butter, and soy sauce. Fried it up while stirring / flipping it a lot, then cracked an egg into it and scrambled it all together while adding in a little salt and a lot of pepper. It was nice and tasty, a good late night dinner to watch The Newsroom with.

A pattern emerges

Sunday after church, I stopped by the parents' house with the intent of taking (at least) Mom to see Spider-man. She wasn't there, so Sis and I went to get some lunch before catching the movie. We went to Chili's where I had the "Chicken Crispers" which is their battered chicken tenders. They come with a corn on the cob and another side, which I chose mashed potatoes and gravy (big surprise). The corn was ok, not as good as it usually is (needed more butter), but it was cooked very well and was surprisingly juicy (at one point as I took a bite a gout of juice shot across the table. The chicken was ok, a couple of the pieces were very well battered and cooked, but some of it was barely battered therefore almost over cooked. The potatoes were surprisingly good considering, and the gravy was merely ok. As you've probably gathered, I forgot to get a picture of it.

I had a kind of late dinner, and since it was running later in the evening, I decided to go with the somewhat quick (but very easy) fried rice. This one I did all myself, and managed to not screw it up too bad:

It could've used a bit more soy sauce or garlic, as I didn't have any salt (still) to add to it. Overall, though, it was good, especially considering I thought I over watered it in the rice cooker portion.

Even more healthy eating

Nothing looked good for lunch on Monday, and I didn't feel like going out to get anything, so I finished off the frozen sausage balls that were in the freezer at the office, and went with a Coke to stave off a lack of caffeine headache:

The sausage balls were ok, I over cooked them a hair. They may not look it there, but they were a bit dried out.

For dinner, I went with some fried rice:

All that's in there is rice and an egg. I seasoned with soy sauce, garlic powder, butter (margarine / parkay) olive oil, onion powder and some salt and pepper. It was pretty good, I over fried a little bit of it (crispy kernels) but man were they tasty.

Friday Rice

Friday, was a short day at work. I went home and then started playing Diablo 3, in earnest for the first time. I had piddled around in it earlier in the week, but now I had a Lot of time to devote to it, so I did. I looked up somewhere around 5:30 or 5:45 pm and discovered that it had gotten that late. So, I tossed some emails out to see if the usual Friday gang were doing anything, and we weren't. So, I went back to work on D3 some more. An hour or so later, I decided that I was indeed hungry and needed to work on that. So I got some of the frozen shrimp out of the freezer and tossed them in some warm water to thaw up, and tossed some rice in the rice cooker.

Yep, Monday's Bad Idea time had finally come.

So, I attempted to make some shrimp fried rice.

I let the rice finish cooking, then tossed some olive oil into the frying pan, and then some butter and garlic powder. I then added the shrimp (forgetting to de-tail them). Once they were good and mostly done, I went to get the rice out of the cooker. And discovered that I had, once again, over watered it, yay me.

So, I got as much rice as I could mange into the frying pan, and didn't get anywhere near enough salt or soy sauce while I tried to cook it.

This is what I had, and it was actually almost tasty, more so than it had any right to be. I think next time I try this, I will just get Andrew to do the rice part for me, then I can fry it up well.

Sunday experiments

On Sunday, I tried 2 food experiments. #1 was attempt #3 on the fried rice. It turned out ok.

This time, I added too much water to the rice cooker. The rice was a bit mushy, but still perfectly edible, more so than when I added too little water. I didn't have any eggs this time, though. Still, I did good with the seasoning, and I ate more of it than I expected.

I had dinner late, as I had to stay up late to do prep work on the contents of the next post. I tried out some new chicken nuggets. I believe they're a store brand, but I don't remember offhand whether it was from Walmart or Kroger, and I'm going to pretend that the bag isn't in the freezer downstairs as I don't feel like going and checking it out. Anyway, the nuggets were pretty good:

The breading on them was just ok, but the meat (or meat like filling) was really good. If I could get the Tyson breading with this one's filling, it'd be a very good nugget, but no where near as good as the mythical ones I told you about earlier. And unfortunately, I was out of ketchup, as that would've helped out a ton.

Catchup!

No, not as in ketchup or catsup. Catch up.

Sunday, I noticed an incisor was starting to get a hair sensitive. As Monday went on about its business, the tooth didn't get much more sensitive, but the gum above it did. As I was irritable and not in the mood for anything that would tax having to take a frontal bite, I decided to try my hand at fried rice, again. The last time I tried this was ... well last century. One doesn't get make time references like that often, so I take great joy in getting to use it. It was probably in '99 that I last tried to make fried rice. Seeing as it was that long ago, I hope you can infer how well it went.

Luckily, this time went much better. The one problem I had this time was very similar to what went wrong last time, except kind of opposite. I discovered, after this attempt, that what went wrong last time was that I had overcooked the rice before trying to fry it up. This time, it was mostly under cooked. Last time I tried some kind of usual boil rice or something like that and it was just horrible. This time, I used my roommate's rice cooker. It did a fine job, I place the blame solely on me not  adding enough water to the contraption. But the rice was cooked enough for me to attempt frying it up:

I used a bit of olive oil, jasmine rice, salt, pepper, parkay, garlic salt,soy sauce, and a scrambled egg. It came out looking very similar to what it was in the skillet:

And it tasted a lot better than I had expected. Other than the under cooked crunchy kernels, it was really good, I somehow nailed a good combination of seasonings in my rookie attempt. Next time though, I'll make sure there's enough water so the rice is fully cooked, so I can eat it all.

I took a hydrocodone around 11, feel asleep around 2, then the tooth woke me back up at 5:30, so I took another pill. These pills happen to be left over from the last abscessed tooth I had (oh yeah, spoiler alert). Once I got up on Tuesday, I called the dentist, they got me in and yes it was abscessed. Had the first part of the root canal yesterday. It went pretty well, except for when he had to deaden the nerve. In order to do that, he had to pretty much jab the needle right into it. Luckily, it was worth it, by 1pm my mouth didn't hurt anymore and I ate at Genghis Grill around 5:15 for a combined breakfast lunch and dinner.

This is a bunch of chicken, a little bit of pork and some steak with some squash, bean sprouts and a few chucnks of potato with their udon noodles and a combination of 3 different sauces. It was tasty, not the best concoction I've had from their, but far from the worst.

And that brings us to today. I stayed home today, my throat got irritated, as did my sinuses. I'm not sure if it's fall out from the gunk getting released in the root canal or the drastic weather change we've had here, but either way I felt like crap for most of the day. So, I finally got around to making another batch of chicken dumpling soup. And this one was better than the last.

Andrew had a bowl of it also, once he got home and he loved it.

Dinner for 4/4/2012

Welp, so ends the first day (ok, afternoon) of the blog. Tonight's dinner was originally going to be a roast beef sandwich from Arby's, but I changed my mind on the way home, and stopped at the local Japanese steak house / sushi bar, Kyoto (yes, another finely crafted FB link).

I had a bowl of soup:

It was tasty, as always. And the main course was a crunch shrimp roll and some chicken fried rice:

They were good as well, although I came this | | close to over soy saucing the fried rice.