Category Archives: Food I Prepared

Hello, 2015

Last year was a pretty fun year. I was pulled on stage during a clown show, went stand-up paddleboarding, and went wakeboarding. I attended Katie and Matt’s wedding. I started doing yoga this summer and have stuck with it consistently. I switched to a bodyweight workout routine and have been doing that regularly. San Diego Comic-Con was a lot of fun, and for the first time, the roles were reversed; people asked me for pictures. (I was in my Aquabats costume.)

I attended a ton of concerts, including but not limited to Reel Big Fish, The Maxies, The Originalites, The Aquabats, Koo Koo Kangaroo, GOGO13, Half Past Two, Sugar Stems, The Interrupters, The Holophonics, The Skatalites, Suburban Legends, Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, Los SuperSpies, and so many more. I watched a bunch of improv, mostly at ImprovCity and Spectacles. I attended some Risk! Live. I went to a Teenage Mutant Pizza Party and the Scott Pilgrim Picture Show with CinemAttack! There was Dapper Day, Walking with Dinosaurs, a Civil War reenactment, The Great Gatsby party, the OC Fair, and LA Kiss. There was some Yadi Presents burlesque, a performance of Wizard of Oz, Chicago, Big River – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Man of La Mancha, and other performances. Lots of fun stuff.

Edit: Oh, man, how can I forget the Tall Ships Festival or being a guest on the Twisted Nether Blogcast?!

Work continues to go well. I cleaned out my closet. And yes, that’s worth mentioning. I attended Henley’s first birthday party and gave him a big smile with his present. I finished off Mists of Pandaria and started Warlords of Draenor. Sorry, but a little video games had to leak into this too. I got my backlog (my list of games, books, movies, etc.) that were purchased but never finished down to 340, which is pretty good. When I started counting in April, I had 471 items that needed to be beat/watched/read. I got rear-ended while driving for the first time. That’s not really much of an accomplishment, but I handled it at least. It was my 10-year high school reunion a few months back, and that was a lot of fun. I also cooked a bunch – stuffed bell peppers, pizzas, calzones, salads, salami wraps, pork chops, steaks, a cake, lemon bars, brownies, and more delicious things. I, a straight man, went out for a drink with a man I met on a dating site. I got stung by way too many bees.

It was a cool year.

2015 started with a party with close friends. Just a minute or two into the year I got to witness a friend propose to his girlfriend.

We’re off to a good start.

Fun day for Labor Day

Homies help homies. Always.

Okay, I’ll get to that in a minute. This Labor Day I hung out with gem and Anela. We met at gem’s house and went to the Starplex Cinemas in Woodbridge for Maleficent. It was a fun movie with a different spin on Sleeping Beauty. I also really like to see the backstory of villains; it’s interesting to see how they became bad.

Because Anela forgot her swimwear and gem wanted exchange something at the Outlets at Orange, we headed that way to take care of those things. That’s where gem and I saw this sweet Adventure Time billboard and had to take a photo!

When we got back to gem’s, we started working on lunch. I made more of my salami roll snacks and made more salad. It was sort of like yesterday’s picnic part 2. While the main course was cooking, the three of us headed to the pool. It was busy with lots of people, but that didn’t make swimming any less fun.

We came home to take the ribs out of the oven. They were looking pretty delicious.

No, Anela! Don’t eat all the ribs!

So very much food. I ate about 3000 calories. Whoops.

We look good surrounded by food.

While we ate dinner, we also watched Scott Pilgrim vs the World.

Sumo and Angel will be in for a treat too. We had a nice pile of bones to bring home to them.

After dinner we watched an episode of Too Cute about adorable kittens. For dessert, we had pastries and homemade ice cream. It was really good! Anela took the rest of my salami rolls with cream cheese and cucumber, and I left a bunch of the salami rolls with cream cheese and pepperoncinis with gem. I’m happy they like them!

Labor Day was celebrated successfully! Now I just need to eat less the rest of the week.

Civil War reenactment and picnic

Sunday was the Huntington Beach Historical Society’s 20th annual Civil War Days Living History and Reenactment in Huntington Beach Central Park. I heard about it on Reddit and thought it sounded fun. Luckily, I was right!

After finishing picnic preparations, I picked up gem and Anela and headed to the park. After seeing some tents set up, we saw some troops marching into battle!

We kept walking toward the loud noises. Where are explosions, that’s where the action is, right?

The loud noises were definitely cannons!

As the armies got closer, there were more and more casualties. For some reason, people kept dying in the shade. The shade must be deadly. Eventually the reenactment ended, and it was time for us to do something else…

Picnic Time, c’mon grab your friends…

We had all sorts of delicious foods! I made Caprese salad and three variations of salami snacks – rolled salami with one of two types of cream cheese and either a pepperoncini, pickle, or cucumbers). I also packed Caprisun drinks, two kinds of potato chips, brie, crackers, and some chocolate bread! gem and Anela brought an arugula dip, a chicken dip, celery, hummus, and multiple kinds of pastries. I might be missing something, but there was a lot of food.

Mmmm, snacks.

After eating, we just relaxed on the blanket for a while. Mostly we talked and sent each other stickers on Facebook. Also, I apparently can’t say “sticker” because it kept coming out “Snickers.”

Anela said this series of stickers represented me – before the picnic, during the picnic, and after the picnic. Yep, that’s pretty much how I felt.

She also added this bottom sticker to represent gem since gem was playing her ukulele for us!

When we finally had the energy to get up, we checked out this field hospital. As usual, I’d be content to look without talking, but gem got us into a tent and chatting with some of the performers. It was a lot of fun and pretty informative. There was also quite a bit of music-talk due to the ukulele.

We saw this peep show box, and it was obviously appropriate for me to look if I wanted to act the part, right? When in Rome!

Matilda the goat was very friendly. And by friendly, I mean willing to let us pet her a little while she continued to munch the grass.

When gem saw a man with a banjo, it was time to go talk to him. They talked about their instruments for a minute, and then decided to play together a little. gem used her tuner app to get him in tune, and then they played music for us while we all chatted. It was very nice!

I don’t know a better way to celebrate the end of the Civil War than eating ice cream! We went to Afters, which is somewhere both Anela and gem have mentioned and I’d been wanting to try. I sampled five-or-so flavors before ordering a Milky Bun with Cookie Monster ice cream. The Milky Bun is a donut, either glazed or unglazed, filled with ice cream. I went with the unglazed, but I think I might try glazed next time. All the flavors were super delicious. Obviously I liked Cookie Monster best of the ones I tried, but Milk and Cereal, which includes cereal on top, was a close second. I’ll need to come again!

With our bellies full, we went to the Outlets at Orange for some shopping. There wasn’t really anything I wanted, and nothing jumped out at me, but I had fun shopping with them. Also, a woman working at Forever 21 commented on my Aquabats 20th anniversary tour t-shirt! It was fun chatting with her about them for a minute.

It was a fun and foodful day!

Chocolate loaf cake, calzone, and pizza

I spent most of the last two nights baking. I had Amish Friendship Bread, so I decided to make a couple things. Tuesday night I made a chocolate loaf cake. When I had a piece that night, it wasn’t as chocolaty as I expected. However, my piece Wednesday morning had a much richer taste. I think the first piece wasn’t as rich because it was the end piece and had cooked more. I’m pretty happy with it. I also made dough that I left rising for a day.

Wednesday night my dough was ready. I started with a calzone packed with sauce, cheese, turkey sausage, turkey pepperoni, mushroom, red onion, and red bell pepper.

It was kind of huge.

While the crust tasted fantastic, I probably should have made it a bit thinner. Also, I might have filled it a bit too much.

I also made two pizzas with the same ingredients except I also added jalapeño and pineapple. I didn’t actually try the pizzas yet; the purpose was to have food in the fridge so I wouldn’t have to cook nightly.

When I was all done, I was exhausted and sleepy. I suspect a lot of that had to do with eating most of that calzone. It was so tasty!

Apple cinnamon raisin Amish Friendship Bread

Recently, gem gave me a starter kit for Amish Friendship Bread. It’s a bag filled with some goop along with instructions that basically boil down to “mash the bag most days, add some stuff on day 6, and add more and bake on day 10.” On day 10, however, you add some ingredients, mix, create four new starter kits, and then finish preparing your bread. In this way, you keep passing it forward.

She also included a slice of her bread – blueberry bread! It was delicious.

Here I had everything I needed sitting on the table while I prepared the bread.

I decided to make apple cinnamon raisin bread. You can see the raisins pretty clearly, and the light colored chunks were diced apple.

I almost forgot to take a picture before it went in the oven.

An hour later, I had what certainly looked like bread.

I was anxious to try some because it was getting late, I was very hungry, and I had more things to do that night.

Because I was going out of town the next day, I needed to deliver the starter kits to my friends even though it was almost midnight.

I brought a starter to kit and slice of my bread to Anela first. She was nice enough to not mind me disturbing her so late. Next I drove to my mom’s. They were sleeping, so I left it hanging on their door. One kit went back to gem. My last kit I dropped off the next day at lunch at Purple Yoga for Sean, an instructor there!

Nom, nom nom.

It was super tasty!

Recent dinners – steak, pork chops, and more

Delicious steak, potato, onions, mushroom, and applesauce. I wonder if it would be fun to make my own applesauce.

Pork chop dinner!

Pork chops, Brussels sprouts, and applesauce.

Salad!

Pork chops for dinner

Delicious. Pork chops, potato, and Brussels sprout. The pork chops were super cheap too. I usually stick with beef because I don’t have to worry about undercooking it, but this worked wonderfully.

You can’t forget dessert. I put milk chocolate peanut butter bears (essentially peanut butter cups) in the sliced banana before baking it. I had some Albertsons butter pecan ice cream with it too.

Blueberry brownies

Did I ever mention that I baked blueberry brownies a couple weeks ago? Nope, I forgot about them. I always like blueberries with my chocolate yogurt at Yogurtland, so it seemed like a natural progression. They’re ugly, but I swear they were good.

I also gave some to gem to ship along with her cookies to some friends for their birthdays. Sharing is caring.

Turtle cake for gem’s birthday

gem mentioned to me that she’d like me to bake a cake for her birthday a few weeks ago. I’m not sure if she was expecting me to really do it or not, but I’d been wanting to bake a cake so I went for it. She likes turtle cookies, so I decided to make her a turtle cake, which is chocolate with caramel and pecans. I based it off the recipe Turtle Cake II from AllRecipes.com. I took the recommendations from the comments and used 1/4 cup butter and 2/3 cup evaporated milk instead of 3/4 cup butter and 1/2 cup evaporated milk. I also used a German chocolate cake mix that included pudding rather than one without as specified for the recipe. I don’t really even know the difference, but I couldn’t find one without. However, I actually felt bad about using a mix anyways. It seems like cheating. Oh well.

Here’s a shot of the middle layer of caramel, toasted pecans, and caramel. It’s spread atop the first layer of cake. Thanks to my friend, Hal, for recommending I toast the pecans first! It smelled great as they toasted.

It looked pretty tasty to me before I even frosted it.

Nevertheless, I frosted it and added some caramel decoration to the top.

I wrote a birthday message on it, but in retrospect, I chose a bad color.

I should have chosen something with a higher contrast against the dark chocolate.

I also added a few pecans to the top to give a better indication of what’s in the cake.

Of course, it needed some star candles too!

It turned out delicious. More importantly, gem liked it too. Success!

Sandwich, sandwich

You see that?

That’s a delicious sandwich.

Also known as dinner.

Chicken breast. Sharp cheddar. Lettuce. Tomato. Avocado. Spicy mustard. Wheat bread.

I even came up with a theme song for it. It goes like this. “Sandwich, sandwich,” sung to the tune of the song about Angel. You know, the one that goes like this – “Angel, Angel.” She’s a good dog.