Tuesday, November 07, 2023

and then they put you on the day shift

I had a lovely day, all in all. I spent the morning doing various desk tings (including a little bit of writing stuff), and then I spent the rest of the morning making lunch. I had intended to prep some of it last night, but I was feeling lazy then, so I had to cook this morning so that [censored] and I could eat. I made the fixings for cobb salads, which took a bit of prep, but it means that I now have four jarred cobb salads in the fridge waiting for future lunches. I feel like I'm almost past the season where I'll be in the mood for a cobb salad, but it tasted good today.

Then I cleaned up, did a bit of work, and went into town to get allergy shots. They reacted as usual, but not terribly, so I'll take it. After my shots, I grabbed a couple of groceries, came home, and wrote for a bit. But I mostly let myself get sidetracked by other things I needed to take care of, which was fine with me.

When it was time to think about dinner, I decided to experiment with a chorizo fried rice recipe. It came out of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's THE WOK cookbook, which I got last year for Christmas. He contributes to one of my favorite online recipe sites (Serious Eats), and I follow him on Instagram, so I knew it would be good. I usually don't modify a recipe on the first attempt, but I decided to add some shrimp, increase the amount of rice, and scale up the soy sauce / sesame oil accordingly.

After I'd diced the chorizo, shrimp, onion, green pepper, and scallions, and defrosted the frozen corn just a little bit, I turned on my induction burner as hot as it would go so that some I could heat my skillet (note: I bought a wok but I haven't fully seasoned it). It turns out the turbo burner on my induction stove is perhaps faster/hotter than gas, because my fried rice produced so much smoke that [censored] and I had to open a bunch of windows (and the front door, and briefly the garage door) and I was coughing as I finished cooking. But that level of heat produced some absolutely delicious fried rice. There were some lovely smoky bits, some perfectly crusty lattices of rice, and yet none of it was overcooked.

So this is a hard one, because from the taste alone + the ease of making it, I would absolutely add this to the rotation. But the smoke level was definitely carcinogenic (not to mention pervasive through the house). I think I'll try again at a slightly lower temperature point and see if 20% less flavor yields 80% less smoke.

Ssssanyway, after [censored] and I enjoyed our rice (and cleared out some of the smoke), we watched a bit of TV (including an interview the Please Don't Destroy guys from SNL did with Jimmy Fallon), and then we watched three episodes of OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH. It continues to be absolutely absurd, which means I love it.

And now, I need to sleep since I have a million tings going on tomorrow - goodnight!

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