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Food Experiments: Mayonnaise

I don’t remember where I got it in my head that I wanted to try to make my own mayonnaise. Might have been Alton Brown. Might have been my Cooking Club magazine. At any rate, it seemed pretty simple.

Tonight was the night I decided to go for it.

Attempt #1 began with two egg yolks, a cup and a half of olive oil, hot water, lemon juice, and seasonings. These items were poorly combined in my food processor, with oil poured in entirely too quickly, and the mayo never set up for a myriad variety of reasons. I even tried pouring it into the blender instead, to no avail. Batch #1 was a miserable failure, and went straight down the kitchen sink.

Attempt #2 began with a different recipe, from the book my Memaw bought me about a year before she died. Every time I have a stupid, basic cooking question, I crack open my copy of How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman, and I say aloud, “OK, Memaw, how do you make _____?” as I flip through the index. This time, Memaw and Mr. Bittman taught me how to make a basic mayonnaise — including the proper technique.

One whole egg, ¼ cup of peanut oil (as a basic neutral oil), 2 Tbsp of lemon juice, and identical seasonings went into the blender. Then I slowly, s – l – o – w – l – y added another 3/4 cup of oil as the blender blended.

And, holy shit, I had mayonnaise.

It’s a little excessively lemony, and a little runny, so I think I know which ingredient to back off next time. That’s OK, because I’d intended this batch mainly as a base for tartar sauce; but I do want to perfect the method and the recipe before I move on to something a little different. After I get the basic thick mayo downpat, my next version will use diluted vinegar instead of lemon juice, and will include some Splenda, for a more Miracle-Whippy type of mayo.

My homemade mayo will never be like Hellmann’s, but it’s fun to make — and maybe I can stretch out our “real” mayo just a little and spice things up by having something a little different in the fridge.

otaku

My Geeky Worlds Collide

So, I was reading the novelization of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home — you know, the funny Star Trek movie with the whales — when I came upon a scene that was removed from the final draft of the screenplay, but was left in the novelization. I remembered reading this before, but it made a little more sense this time.

In late-20th-century San Francisco, Mr. Sulu is approached by a young Japanese boy, who asks if Sulu is his uncle. Actually, he says, “Ah! Hikaru oji san desu ka?” (Which, truth be told, don’t you just use oji for your own family, but ojisan for someone else’s? Not sure about the proper politeness factor on this one.) Then the boy asks casually what his uncle is doing here. I recognized the words tokoro, nani o, and desu ka, and the rest of the sentence made sense with the author’s prose around the Japanese.

At this point, Sulu replies with some vocab that I don’t know, but I can at least recognize the sentence structure. From the English context clues the author provides, he is responding (in antiquated Japanese that he learned from classes on literature) that the boy has mistaken him for someone else. The boy exclaims, “Honto desu ne,” which I think means something like, “Really!”

The boy starts to get all creeped out and back off, but Sulu asks the boy to wait with some other words I don’t know. Then he asks the boy’s name, which I totally understood, and the boy responds that he’s Akira Sulu. According to the author’s English paraphrase, Sulu of the Enterprise then tells Akira Sulu that he will live a long and happy life, to which the boy responds, “Ogisama arigato gozaimasu,” before scurrying off.

I know my Japanese skills are still severely limited at best, but it done my heart good to recognize some Japanese spoken by Hikaru Sulu’s great-great-great grandfather. ^_^

health & fitness

Stuffed

Didn’t pack a proper lunch today. Had only eaten 400-some-odd calories by the time dinner rolled around.

Made turkey burritos with lettuce, salsa, sour cream, and cheese. Ate two. Then ate a taco-salad-ish affair, swapping out the tortilla for some seasoned brown rice.

I am now too full to even think. Bleh.

Note to self: packing lunch the night before remains a major priority if you want to be properly fueled all day long.

randomness 4 Comments

Birthday Weekend 2007

I hadn’t been going to blog about this weekend, until my cube-buddy James mentioned how much stuff I’d been telling him that I did this weekend. I hadn’t really thought about it, but I suppose Birthday #31 was a pretty jam-packed weekend.

Saturday began with a little evilness: lunch at the Happy Rose Buffet. Afterward, we went next door to Lowe’s and purchased a square shovel and potting soil. (I need to remove the dead grass from the edges of our sidewalk, and I need to repot my houseplants.) Then we made our weekly pilgrimage to Goodwill, and of course found nothing of interest.

Earlier in the week, we’d gotten an advertisement from Banner Mattress and Furniture in the mail, touting their latest “No Interest, No Payments Until…” deal. The magic year: 2011. Four years to pay off a minimum of $1000 of furniture. We are in need of some new furniture — and not just “new-to-us” furniture like we’ve been using all our adult lives. It’s time to grow up and actually buy a couch.

So we did.

We meandered around Banner Mattress for probably a half hour, deciding on a large sofa, recliner / massager, and an understated dining room table and chairs. The financing didn’t work out quite as we’d hoped, and we ended up with one year instead of four to pay off our $1700 of new furnishings, but that’s still quite do-able. The couch and dining room set will be delivered sometime on Saturday, and the recliner will arrive in six to eight weeks (we just *had* to special-order the green color instead of taking the burgundy that was in stock). Due to the financing snafu, we ended up being at Banner for much, MUCH longer than we’d originally intended… but that’s OK. I think the new furniture’s worth the wait. Plus, we got to get all up-close and personal with our intended couch while we waited. 🙂

That evening, Aaron took me to birthday dinner at Red Lobster, where I indulged in some lobster and shrimp, and we shared not only stuffed mushrooms as an appetizer, but also the Chocolate Wave for dessert. We then came home and enjoyed a short stroll around the neighborhood, to take in the fantastic weather and get our dinner moving along.

After our walk, Aaron let me open my birthday present.

He got me a new iPod. 30GB. With a screen twice as big as the one on my Mini.

I wasn’t expecting that AT ALL. I promptly synched it up to my iTunes, then ordered a belt clip and a nifty brushed aluminum case online. Even with my entire iTunes library on my iPod, it’s not even half full. I was swapping out music left and right on my Mini, to keep the songs I liked and still switch out some fresh music. This is going to be friggin’ sweet.

And that was Saturday.

Sunday was a bit more normal, more low-key, but no less enjoyable. Lunch was grilled BBQ burgers at home. After lunch was a trip to Oak Openings for an hour-long walk on the nature trail. On the way home from Oak Openings, I caved in and requested a stop at Dairy Queen, where we both got Blizzards. (Smalls, of course, although they still had 61g of sugar apiece. Hell, it was my birthday. I didn’t care.)

Then the day went into the more ordinary: I did laundry, and Aaron left to do shopping. When he came back, he made me peanut butter chicken for at-home birthday dinner, we relaxed for a while, and we had birthday snuggle-time.

Overall, it was an exceptional birthday weekend, and not just because Aaron got me an iPod. ^_^

the ongoing saga of my job

Spring Fever

Here I sit, manning the reception desk at work, watching the gorgeous weather outside, wishing I could be out there. I’m all caught up on the work I needed to get done by week’s end, and now I’m just helping out the rest of the department and stalling until it’s time to go home… without being too obvious about it. Not that there’s much of anyone to bust me for slacking; this place is dead today. Anyone with any sense must have decided to play hookey and go golfing.

Of course, now that I have some time to blog, I can’t really think of anything I’d wanted to say. Figures.