Teejay Green and I initiated Operation:Fat Bet today. We’ve each set a monthly weight loss goal and will owe the other person $200 each month we fail to meet it. Teejay rightly pointed out that there’s a spot of a Prisoner’s Dilemma to the thing. If either of us finds ourselves hopelessly unable to meet our goal, there’s a strong imperative to make the other person fail as well. Should June 10th roll around and my success should prove fleeting, I’m going to need to find a way to either hypnotize or master Jedi Mind Tricks to force Teejay to eat an entire turkey.
Category: Moment of Fatness
Donut Derby
Marketing’s recent return to our office clime has resulted in some odd collisions. As a thank you to engineering, they left out donut holes for us assumably the night before as I saw no marketing folk in when I arrived at 5 AM. There was a box on each photo copier and the coffee area and each of my passes about those areas netted two more donut holes, a habit some other early risers also picked up. When the first marketing person did arrive the donut holes were largely gone and consolidated into one box that I wound up finishing the next day as no one wanted to take the last one, despite having no qualms with consuming this lone survivor’s numerous kin.
I briefly convinced myself I’d not consumed in excess until I calculated that each box would have had to have been about 1/4 mile away from each other to create sufficient calorie expenditure to equilibrate input with output. At least if I stuck to the two furthest boxes I could be fine within an order of magnitude. That’s good enough in many sciences, I hope nutrition’s one of them.
Cake-pliment
I’m incapable of down-scaling a recipe. I can make a double, triple or quadruple batch but not a 1/2 sized one. So, when I made a cake that produced two rounds instead of my normal 3 I had to get create in icing. After dismissing the idea of frosting the bottom, I started cutting divets to create holes across layers that became cream cheese frosting veins to connect the strata of sugared cheese and butter. I was unsure if it’d turn out too rich and my answer came from a comment from a coworker: “Terry, the frosting with cake in it was wonderful.”
Further confirmation came from the guy who kept coming in with fake questions so he’d have an excuse to coyishly have more cake.
Cake Heresy
I’m not one to protest cake combinations but today’s rasberry chocolate vanilla pound cake was simply a travesty. The cake used a royal icing which consists mostly of powdered sugar and egg whites. The lack of an emulsifier or other softening agent creates a frosting that could be used to forge a murder weapon. Being one of the lucky ones, I landed a corner rose only to howl in pain when the rose/spear hit the portion of my gums recovering from being hit by my overzealous toothbrush. Lesson learned, piece two received a haircut and the office praised me for my wisdom.
The the vanilla on raspberry on chocolate. Any two of those layers together tasted fine as later confirmed by rigorous empirical testing but the three together somehow created a melange of tongue violence. Normally, when there’s a fight over the last piece until volumetric deference kicks in and it is brought to me by supplicants, no longer. Today, this amalgamation of sheets made me fail in my role of gourmand of justice. :-(
Fatman Gambit
Office equipment is periodically reapportioned by our facilities people and Friday was one such day of reckoning. I came in late that day and was greeted at as a hero by office mates.
When facilities came to claim our superior chairs reclaimed from departed coworkers and pulled from executive dumpsters these minions of austerity were cowed by fears of angering the “Large One”. They left once told that the only chairs in the building that could accommodate my carriage were the really really nice ones that just happened to have a larger seat pan, an independent-spring back, adjustable arms and six casters instead of four. Furthermore, since I was a temp, I could theoretically work in anyone’s cube at any time so all the chairs had to stay instead of just mine. Further proof I work with geniuses.
Burrito Zone
It’s been a bit of an office ritual that a coworker of mine would scan my clothing for food stains. Â Most have some sort of culinary christening as despite my best efforts I usually get hit with something. Â Recently, I somehow got a bit of egg under my dunlop. Â The next day, I somehow managed to get a blot of ketchup on my shirt and pants positioned symmetrically about my waist like I’d dropped the Heinz bottle and caught it by kneeing myself in the bosom.
But something magical happens when I’m driving.  While eating while driving lies somewhere between road-head and the radio in terms of lethality I can safely consume an entire chicken cheese steak while driving.  Today I stunned my coworkers by eating a Chipotle steak, rice and pepper burrito one-handed with not a blot show.  Maybe if I got a MarioKart wheel or simply played Radar Love I could emulate this road-borne success at the work desk.
Source of Keyboard Gunk
My G15 keyboard probably isn’t dishwasher-safe because of the LCD screen so I opted to pop off the keys, put them in a mesh bag and send them through the dishwasher. This worked quite well as all my keys are now shiny and clean again. I wondered how my keys got so dirty, not just scummy but dirty having a literal coating of dirt on the 1-5 keys and the Q key. The answer became apparent when I had to put down the barbeque sauce-coated ribs to do the first draft of this post. Maybe it’s time to get some Wet-naps.
Fake Chicken Disappointment
The man who invented the pre-cooked chicken strip is singlehandedly responsible for doubling the happiness index of those who’ve ever found themselves with 20 minutes, a toaster oven and a hankerin’ for chicken. Not just any chicken and certainly no kind you’ve ever seen before. It’s uniform, possibly spherical, dipped in spices that never existed in any traditional spice cabinet and completely recookable with little loss of flavor from what was probably once a GM chicken. It’s been chopped, diced, defatted, reconstituted and extruded to little balls of flavor.
Today, I tried a new brand of the above chicken-type and was met with the unfamiliar. It was crunchy in some places and not in others, it was stringly and didn’t have the texture of tofu and an Arby’s Roast Beef. I think into the delicious fake chicken I was expecting someone may have snuck real chicken . What were they thinking?
Inferior Scissors
The haircut was dull. I asked them how long they could buzz hair and got it buzzed to that distance. Somehow, there’s still a divet in my hair despite it being easier to generate than a bowl cut. I don’t mind getting “the bad barber” as I don’t care enough to complain when my bangs are uneaven, my sideburns disappear against my wishes, the cowlick is accentuated or head turning into a follical ski slope.
The person next to me asked his barber how many shears he had, and the barber responded five. I asked my barber the same and he said twelve. Apparently, that’s the recommended maximum and the selection is the barber’s choice, much like the clubs of golf. I learned that a good pair runs about 50 dollars and cheaper ones “rips out hair rather than cutting it” and “can’t cut paper”. I asked to see the catalog and expected an LLBean shears catalog with attractive people leading interesting and well appointed lives through the usage of their scissors. I was disappointed when it turned out to be much more utilitarian containing shears, combs, razor equipment and barber-specific first aid equipment. Apparently, the black leather bag on many stylist workspaces is a first aid kit. I supposed I’d be sceptical of going under the hollow straight-edge if there were a massive first aid kit immediately behind me.
I also learned that the turn around time for shear sharpening can be up to five weeks. That’s ridiculous. My local sharpening shop can do a whole knife set over a weekend and I can get an embedded device battery done in about a week. Either there’s a reforging process involving aging in fine charred oak casks or there’s room to start a shears-oriented startup that will make the current fat-cats of scissors sharpening quake in fear.
DIY Nacho Dip Fail
I love salsa and cheese dip or the aptly named salsa con queso and decimate several loaves of Velveeta annually creating this magnus opus of chip toppings. But the one failing of this East-meets-West culinary paragon is that it doesn’t store well, turning into a form of cheesy cement that doesn’t reheat well. But magically, the store-bought stuff can happily sit on either countertop or refrigerator shelf maintaining its always dippable texture due to some dark deal a food-scientist made with Satan to defy food physics. I must make my own.
Reading the ingredients list, the storebought dip large consisted of cheese parts (whey, lecithin, squirrel) and a few chemical stabilizers, oils, fats, actual cheese (holy crap) and the always present maltodextrin. Knowing I could create dextrin from baking corn starch and isolate the requisite sodium salts from other household goods I set to work. I melted the Velveeta and set about adding the various meth-lab reductions to prevent the Velveeta from hardening at room temperature while reducing the salsa after a bath in some decade-old molecular sieves. Final step: Create an solute of oil and Velveeta to reduce the melting point. So, I melted and mixed. And mixed, and mixed and mixed. So looks like, despite the fact that Velveeta is 62.5% fat, it won’t dissolve into oil. So, I have what looks like amazing nacho dip, with this puddle of greasy spittle floating on top of it like tard-drool on a math test. I went so far as to add a small amount of rendered lard as an emulsifier and put it in a blender and once again the non-emulsion laughed at me wearing a hat of corn oil. I tried some, and it tasted like it looked, really good nacho dip that had just gotten into a baby-oil soaked girl-on-girl cat fight. Our dog Max loves the stuff.