The Lair

I remembered seeing the process of mechanically reclaiming meat a few weeks ago on some TV show (the name of which I cannot recall). Cheap sausage rolls just don’t taste as good when you have to eye the filling suspiciously. In fact, in a most uncustomary sense of food paranoia, I realized that everything cheapish and containing meat products is probably likely to have at least a certain amount of MRM. Makes me recall Cut Me Own Throat Dibbler.

So, how to judge retail cuts of meat.

And in keeping with the theme (yet, completely bizarre) - baconated vodka.

If there’s one thing I hate about the area I live in right now, it’s the lack of decent supermarkets/shops within a reasonable walking distance. It seems like a very simple thing, really - but I actually like to cook. Not particularly domesticated, but I find cooking to be a relaxing activity. Go figure. The thing is, I have a strong opinion about the sorts of food I like to eat (and consequently, cook for myself) and that requires frequent trips to the shops.

I’d like to say I’m militant about fresh produce, but it’s something slightly more old school. I want to look at the item (not online and in pictures) and figure out for myself if I want to buy it or not. I want to see scanned labels so I can check ingredients. Unfortunately, the closest supermarkets that allow me to do this sort of thing are well … slightly far away; so I can only shop once a week at most.

So, sauntering down the road to get my allergy meds from the pharmacy yesterday, I noticed that a new supermarket had opened up enroute. The pharmacy is on Badger Hill, said location always makes me grin a little bit (remember badgerbadgerbadger?). It’s not a route I’d usually take, so I had no idea that a new Somerfield had opened up in the vicinity. Wewt. Obviously, I ducked into the supermarket to grab some food.

Went around buying stuff, noticed an offer for butter. 500g tub, I was told. Buy one, get one free.

Seemed like a fair bit of butter (an entire kilo?!) but what the heck, it’s an offer. I use butter in place of oil anyway, so I run through it fairly fast. So, grabbed me two tubs and went to checkout.

A while later, I connected the “Hmmm. That was a little bit more expensive than I expected” with “Hmm. The bag seems a little bit heavier than I expected” and realized that, in fact, I had bought two 1kg tubs of butter instead. How sickening fattening. But hey, it’s butter. Waste not, want not - maybe Salem and Mitzi like butter on their catfood.

When I got home, i had a slightly better idea. I also have flour, eggs, sugar, dried fruit and raisins (since I eat that sort of thing when I get the munchies). Why don’t I bake a cake? There is just one small problem. I can cook. Baking, on the other hand, is a black art. By which I mean that I expect my attempts to turn out of the oven blackened and charred. Still, I have the ingredients. I have a general idea about what I need to do (I tend to be just a little bit obsessive about figuring stuff out instead of following some prescribed recipe).

All I need now is some icing sugar and a cake tin. Oh, and chocolate powder, I think. Let there be cake.

This is going to be fun.

I find myself remarkably productive when I stay at home, devoid of the distractions provided by the internet. It seems slightly strange, but when I really want to get some work done (D-Day being a couple of weeks away, it’s not like I have a lot of choice) - I stay at home. I unplug myself from the internets, after having gathered sufficient material to get my work done… and stuff occasionally gets done. Oh and I play Capture-The-Flag Quake 3 with bots too. And Tetris. And the occasional round of DesktopTD. Actually, this isn’t about my bizarre work habits or my internet-avoidance-as-work strategy but about diet.

There has already been a post on circadian rhythms and diet so let me hop on the “near enough to be tangentially related” bandwagon. When I stay at home, I eat differently. Specifically, I make myself something to eat roughly (it’s an inexact thing) every four hours. Considering that I fix my own food, it’s really easy to time. Contrast this with the usual workday, where I tend to subsist on random vending machine and junk food eaten more or less every hour when I go walkabout. I also invariably eat lunch when I’m at home, since I can fix my own (hot) food. I got tired of the samey fare and long walking distances involved in lunch at the department a long time ago.

And in random IRC chatter (hilarious in or out of context), there was a too-much-information conversation about confectionary related skidmarks on underwear. No. Don’t ask how that started. Something about missing drawers and going commando, I think it was. That in turn led to interesting marketing slogans for various uh… bars. Complete with juvenile yet funny innuendo.

Snickers has “get some nuts” and Mars has “pleasure you can’t measure” (which works really well with the mental image of sliding a chocolate bar into your pants, does it not?). There is also the local favourite Yorkie bars with an interesting slogan. There is even an official military version of the Yorkie bar (with a slightly different slogan).

Any more confectionary slogans that work will with the uh… inadvertent skidmark theme? No? Me nether (sic).