I haven’t had television for several years now. I mean I have a physical television set covered with a thick coat of dust and collecting more (totally intentional since I think the thick coat of dust will protect the TV set in case of it being knocked over or something despite its size and weight… you never know… it could happen!) in the living room corner but it doesn’t have any input unless I pop a DVD into the DVD player because I don’t subscribe to cable or satellite service. The main reason for that: I loved TV too much. You could say I was addicted.
For the longest time, I had resisted getting cable TV and just used rabbit ears. I didn’t really feel the need for cable TV except for better picture quality and not having to adjust the rabbit ears whenever I changed channels. I didn’t understand why people would complain about not having anything to watch on TV, and these people had cable or satellite TV with several premium channels. I always had something to watch. The show didn’t have to be good. If I started watching a show, I tended to get sucked in no matter how bad it was. Also, I never got sick of reruns even if I had seen it more than once already.
Do you remember my infomercial purchases? You don’t seriously believe I only bought thirteen items off infomercials, do you? I mean, consider the extreme lameness of the things I listed there. There are A LOT more convincing infomercials hawking products that look and sound much more practical and promising. You can infer that I probably watched almost all infomercials out there at the time, and you’d be right. I did. Many times, I could be found watching an infomercial at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. Most of the times I would resist the temptation to dial that 800 number and place my order, which led me to watch the same fucking infomercial over and over and over whenever it came on until I finally decided to make the call.
Now you see why I hadn’t needed more channels. But I finally caved in and subscribed to cable TV after watching a couple of episodes of The Sopranos at a friend’s place and got completely hooked. Now there were still more shows to watch, and I started losing sleep trying to watch TV. If you know me just a little, you just KNOW how much I looooove sleeping and so you might understand how much I was addicted to TV. And when I moved to a new apartment with Dish Network, I had even more to watch!
I realized I had a problem, but it was still hard to keep away from TV. All these years, the first thing I had done when I came home from outside was to turn the TV on, and it would be on until I had to go out again or until I went to bed. It was hard to break that habit. And did you know realizing you have a problem doesn’t make you stop loving the shows you’ve been watching? So one day, I canceled the service after convincing myself that it would save me about a grand a year. I missed it terribly for the first couple of weeks, but afterwards, I hardly thought about it except I occasionally missed Late Show with David Letterman, my all time favorite TV show.
It seems there are much more good TV shows to watch nowadays because I constantly see plurks or tweets about TV shows and how much they love them and how much they have waited for the season premiers, etc. But these TV talks have never really affected me other than feeling a little left out. It hasn’t really made me want to get cable or satellite service. UNTIL NOW, that is. Yeah, I have the itch. It’s been itching for a couple of weeks now ever since citizenjaney and some others live-plurked the goings-on of the first episode of What Would Brian Boitano Make on Food Network. And I must say, my eyes were glued on that plurk. Yes, it’s a cooking show and it’s highly unlikely I’ll ever make anything Brian Boitano makes on that show. But it was hilarious just to read about it and I can’t imagine how fucking hysterical to watch the actual show!
I’ve searched the net for a video, but I haven’t succeeded yet. So for two weeks, I’ve been agonizing over this question. Should I get it? I know it’s a lot of money just to watch a 30-minute cooking show, but once I get it, I will be watching more than just one show, so it would be worth it, right?And I would like to know what Brian Boitano would make every week. Is that so wrong? And Letterman every night to boot? That’s a fair price to pay, no? But will I fall off the wagon and devote my already too short time at home to watching TV? Should I, or shouldn’t I?
To fulfill the promise she made, although she’s not quite sure if indeed she made a promise. She might have said something like, she would update her blog but no promises or some such thing instead of she promises to update her blog. But some friends of hers are insisting that she made the promise and all she really remembers is the word “promise”, so here she is, yoonamaniac is updating her blog.
yoonamaniac asks, first of all, WHY THE HELL NOBODY TOLD HER THAT HER BLOG THEME CHANGED TO THE DEFAULT THEME????? She hates the default theme, SHE HATES!!!! Please, you guys, PLEASE let her know if that happens again while she’s busy plurking.
Now the first of all is over, second of all and third of all, etc upto last of all is this; she has been busy, as she pointed out in her previous post, feeding her Plurk addiction. And when she says she’s been busy, she means she’s been busy, quite literally. There are always plurks to respond and people to plurk. It got to the point where she always has 250 new responses waiting for her when she comes back to plurk after a few deplurked hours. 250 is the limit, you see, which means she really has more than 250 plurks she hasn’t read or responded to, but plurk displays 250 only. So now you understand, she really IS busy.
Anyway, she thanks her friends, namely, PrincessGinger, Tortilla, EssenceOfInsanity and vibrantandzany, who joined Plurk using her invite, which counts for some rewards in the form of cool smileys like Pulp-Fiction-dancing smiley, etc, when the number of friends who joins Plurk reaches 10. Baja-Ma, however, hadn’t checked this blog for such a long time, she hadn’t seen the invite and joined after hearing from Tortilla, most definitely not giving yoonamaniac a reward point. So yoonamaniac is a little ticked about it.
yoonamaniac made some wonderful new friends on Plurk as well, most of them brand spanking new friends, and some newish friends who she “met” on twitter. There are so many wonderful people she enjoys plurking with. As of now yoonamaniac has exactly 100 plurky friends and on account of not wanting to offend anybody, she is not going to list any of their plurky names here although she highly doubts anybody would come read this blog anyway since she has no plans to advertise her blog updates there. But she’s being cautious just in case. And if any of her new plurky friends is reading this, howdy! Plurk y’all laters!
P.S. To yoonamaniac’s friends and family not on Plurk, it’s hard to explain why she’s writing in third person. You just have to plurk for yourself. But yeah, honestly? Speaking in third person is the number one reason yoonamaniac loves to plurk. Who knew she is secretly one of those weirdos who drive everybody nuts by speaking in third person? But she is and if you join Plurk, you might be pleasantly surprised you absoplurkinglutely enjoy it too.
Yeah, I plurk. I might be addicted. So… umm.. gotta get back to plurking. Sorry, blog y’all laters.
If you want to join me in plurking, sign up! 
I usually obsess about something in my backyard when I take the dogs out. And the unfortunate objects of my obsession changes, usually according to the season change. This last winter, I was obsessing about rabbit poo, this early spring about dandelions, and up until 2 days ago about bird poo and the poo of another mystery animal which seems to drop by just to go potty; can’t blame the creature, really, cause everybody else does, but is it too much to ask to at least introduce him/herself and go in certain area and stand there a little apologetically for a while until I identify the spot instead of sneaking in only when I’m not there and defiantly leave the poo in different places that I need to search for?
These days, I’m obsessing about mushrooms. With all these animals, including my dogs, feeding shit to these mushrooms, they tend to flourish in my yard during the season. I remember obsessing about them last year and the year before. When I noticed mushrooms in my backyard for the first time, I started picking them because I didn’t want my dogs accidentally eating them (if you didn’t know, mushrooms are toxic to dogs in varying degrees from vomiting and diarrhea to death). So as with everything else, I started obsessing about ridding my yard of those mushrooms, annihilating all colonies, and I comb through the entire yard every chance I get. This year, I started noticing mushrooms just the day before yesterday. I have picked more than 1,000 mushrooms from my backyard in three days. Since yesterday was sunny and dry, I only picked a little over hundred mushrooms this morning.
There are quite a variety of mushrooms in my yard and I realized that I kinda consider them as something more than fungi. For instance, when I see a little colony of brownish mushrooms with pointy heads, I feel like I’m looking at a family with wee little kids. When I see a mushroom with a very thin head that looks like a cocktail umbrella, I pick it very cautiously imagining it viciously attacking me because it reminds me of the frills that belonged to the dinosaur called Dilophosaurus I saw in Jurassic Park.
Yeah, sometimes I think to myself, yur crazy. Maybe some of these mushrooms are psychedelic and they affect my brain with their smell? Are there such shrooms? Cause these mushrooms smell weird like gasoline or something.
I finally cooked again, and it wasn’t disappointing. I made this chili 3 times before, and it’s the most delicious chili I’ve ever had. Granted, I don’t usually order chili at a restaurant, but out of the few I’ve tasted, nothing could beat this one. This is what I call “crunchy” chili as opposed to “soupy” one. The original recipe is inside the quote and my notes are at the end.
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 onion
pinch of chili flakes
2 garlic cloves, crushed
4 oz mushrooms (1/2 of a container)
1 red bell pepper (or green or any bell pepper available)
1 lb ground beef (lean)
1/2 tsp cumin
14 oz canned tomatoes, crushed and keep the juice
1/4 cup red wine (or beef broth)
1 tbsp tomato paste
1 can of Kidney Bean, rinced under cold water
2 tbsp cilantro, fresh, chopped
Tabasco sauce if desiredFirst I’ve got to tell you that I always buy either lean or extra lean ground beef, even though it’s a bit more expensive then the regular. Just think of all of the fat you pay for when you buy the regular one, in the end it costs the same.
As for the tomatoes, well, a can is usually 19 oz, so just take a little bit out of the can. I usually freeze what I have extra, and put it in a soup.
Always rince any kind of canned bean under cold water, it removes the stuff that makes you get gas. And did you know that the more you eat beans, the less you have problems with gas, you system learns to break it down more easily.
Chop red bell pepper and sliced mushrooms and set aside.
Chop the onion and set aside.
Pour the vegetable oil in a pan and brown, at medium-high heat, the onion with the chili flakes. Add the garlic near the end of the step, it usually takes a few minutes to brown the onion, so put the garlic when the onion starts to look translucent. Garlic tends to burn very easily, and it gets bitter then. Also, for onion (and anything else) to brown properly you can’t stir it all of the time, you have to let it cook a bit and then move it around and let it cook again.
Add mushrooms and bell pepper. Cook for about 3 minutes, until the veggies are tender.
Add ground beef and cumin, and cook, this time stir often, about 5 minutes, until the meat is all cooked.
Add tomatoes, tomato paste, wine (or beef broth), Tabasco sauce (if desired) and kidney beans.
Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low and simmer for about 1/2 hour to 3/4 hour, but the more you let it simmer the better it is.Add the cilantro.
A few things I did differently:
As always, I used shit load of garlic.
I added about 1/4 cup of sliced jalapeño peppers as well as lots Tabasco sauce.
I didn’t put cilantro and chili pepper flakes, but not intentionally. I just forgot to add them.
I used a can of diced tomato because I thought I had crushed tomato at home and didn’t buy one when I went shopping. I found I had a can of diced tomato, so I used it.
I put just a little bit of salt after it’s done.
with cooking. I didn’t post any recipes the last weekend or this weekend because I didn’t cook. There are a few reasons. My virtual cooking instructor hasn’t posted any new stove top or crock pot recipes, and since my oven is still dead, I don’t have any new recipe to try. I could have made something I’ve already tried before, but I haven’t had the time. I worked both Sundays. And Saturday mornings were spent on running errands, and the afternoons were spent on napping – yes, napping as in sleeping in between the time I should normally sleep. As I wrote about it in the Early Bird entry, I’m still very much sleep-deprived, and it helps to compensate with a few hours of nap on Saturday. I doubt I’d be able to cook next weekend either, since I’ll be working again on Sunday. What can I say. Gotta pay the bills and I should be grateful about it, right?
… if I had not cooked this past weekend because I didn’t make an entry about it, I did. But I didn’t want to bore you with the same exact recipe as the week before. Yes, I made jambalaya again. I already had all the ingredients except peppers and onion. I made it a little spicier putting more cayenne pepper and Red Hot sauce. It’s delicious. Heavenly. Try it.
Oh speaking of the rest of my life… Have you heard of this doomsday theory interpreted from Maya calendar? I’ve never heard of it until today when Baja-Ma mentioned that 12/21/2012 would be the day the world ends, according to Maya calendar. Any experts in this area? I need to know if I should start racking up even more credit card debts, discard any attempts on my part to pay them off, and start making only minimum payments? I need a guarantee that the world would most definitely end that day without a shred of doubt – I need concrete solid proof. Because it would suck more than anything that has ever sucked before to wake up in the morning of 12/22/2012 suffocating from credit card debts and the world is still going strong as usual.
I’m usually incredibly intimidated by a recipe with a large number of different ingredients. But this recipe didn’t because, as with most crock pot recipes, after chopping and dicing, you kinda dump everything in the pot and cook the shit out of it. So don’t let the number of ingredients fool you.
Makes 11 servings
1 can (14-1/2 oz) diced tomatoes, undrained You can also use canned whole tomatoes chopped by yourself, if that’s what you have, as my teacher did.
1 can (14-1/2 oz) beef or chicken broth My teacher and I both used chicken broth.
1 can (6 oz) tomato paste I mistakenly bought tomato sauce, but luckily I had frozen tomato paste (I used like a 1 tsp out of the whole can a few weeks ago)
2 medium green peppers I’m having hard time determining how big is big or medium or small because all these veggies in the store look gigantic in size.
1 medium onion Again, the same trouble about the size.
3 celery ribs In case you don’t know, one celery rib refers to one stick of celery.
5 garlic cloves, minced Hehehe… Me loves me garlic… I used more… hehehe…
***You can put the following 5 seasonings all together in a small bowl so that it’s easy to mix them in later***
3 teaspoons dried parsley flakes I don’t like parsely taste and my body rejects it as well, so I dropped this completely.
2 teaspoons dried basil I forgot to buy it yesterday when I went shopping, so I had to make a special trip.
1-1/2 teaspoons dried oregano I bought this yesterday, but turns out I already have it. Oops.
3/4 to 1-1/4 teaspoons salt to taste The original recipe calls for 1 and 1/4 tsp, but my teacher thought it would be too salty, so she only put a little less than 1 tsp and she said it was perfect. I put 1 tsp.
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper to taste The original recipe calls for 1/2 tsp, but my teacher is not too fond of spicy food, so she put 1/4 tsp. I put 3/4 tsp.
1/2 teaspoon hot pepper sauce If you don’t like spicy food, you can drop this completely just as my teacher did. But if you love it as I do put a little more… hehe
1 pound boneless skinless chicken breasts About 2 big chicken breasts.
1 pound smoked sausage My teacher used polish sausage she already had. I bought Hillshire smoked sausage.
1/2 pound uncooked medium shrimp, peeled and deveined My teacher had some shrimp that were already cooked, deveined and peeled in the freezer, so she used them instead. And I bought cooked shrimp after reading that cause it obviously is less work to use shrimp already cooked.
Hot cooked rice To eat jambalaya with.
****Cooking Trick #1: When you know you’ll have to do a lot of chopping, and cutting, and you don’t want to use lots of chopping boards and knives, start by doing the veggies, ending with the onion and the garlic, then do the meat.
****Cooking Trick #2: When you cut up a green pepper, to chop it, always remove the top, the white part and also the seeds. The white and the seeds are bitter tasting.
Chop celery, green peppers and onion into medium sized bits. Not too finely or too big.
The recipe calls for the garlic to be minced, well it simply means it will be chopped. Again not too finely or too big.
Cut the sausage into two halves or four quarters lengthwise, according to your preference. Then cut them into about 1/4-inch slices.
Remove fat from chicken breasts and cut them into 1 inch cubes.
In a 5-qt. slow cooker, combine the tomatoes, broth and tomato paste. Mix well.
Stir in the green peppers, onion, celery, garlic and seasonings. Mix well.
Stir in chicken and sausage. Mix well.
Cover and cook on low for 4 hours, then add the shrimps, and cook for between 15-30 minutes, depending on if you are using raw or cooked shrimps. If they are raw, cook until shrimp turn pink.
At the same time start cooking the rice.
Not much to add about the instructions since I, surprisingly, didn’t make any booboo, and I’m kinda tired (see the previous post). Mine is still cooking, and I need to add the shrimp in about 5 minutes.
Edited to add…
Dudes and dudettes, you really gotta try this. It’s my new favorite food!
Today is Saturday, which means that I cooked. This time I cooked something I did a few weeks ago because my virtual teacher hasn’t made any new stovetop dish – my oven is not working and I screwed it up trying to fix it too, so I can only make stovetop recipes until I get a new stove. The reason I chose this one to make again, of course, was because it’s the easiest recipe.
I also made mashed potato to eat with it. My first attempt at mashed potato was a few weeks ago, and I was so surprised that I’ve never had better tasting one than mine!!! Probably because most mashed potatoes I’ve had were instant kind. I could mash it the way I like, too – a little clumpy, not silky smooth.
I didn’t like the way the last recipe post looked with my blue comments all over, so I’m trying the blue on the actual recipe this time.
Ingredients
2 lbs of beef stew meat A package of beef stew meat contains beef cut in cube-like shape if you don’t know what it looks like – it’s a pain if you have to look at the description on every single package, you know.
1/2 cup ketchup I suspect most of you know what ketchup is.
1/2 cup chili sauce I didn’t know what chili sauce was but apparently Heinz makes this thing. I found it right next to Heinz ketchup. No, I don’t work for Heinz.
1/2 cup water Water was the only ingredient I didn’t buy when I made it the first time.
1/2 envelope of onion soup mix I didn’t know there was such thing
1/2 tsp regular yellow mustard I bought the mustard, but when I got home I found out I already had it… from 2 years ago. Is it still good after 2 years in the fridge?
1/4 cup vinegar Just normal vinegar without any color.
Instructions
In a bowl, mix all of the ingredients except the meat and set aside. The first time I made it, I mistakenly put the entire envelope instead of just half, so the teacher had me put more water while it’s cooking because it would have been too salty otherwise. She warned me that the sauce would be soupier because of added water, and it was.
Brown the meat at high heat, like a steak. Only a little bit, you don’t want to cook it all the way through.In other words, browning the meat means just cook the outside of the meat until it’s brown.
***Note: In all the crock pot recipes where you need to cook meat, except with ground meat, it is written in a lot of books that you need to brown the meat first. It helps keep the juice in, and also kind of caramelize the meat a little, like when you cook a steak.
Put the meat in the crock pot, pour the sauce on top and mix well. Cook for 4-1/2 to 5 hours at HIGH. Don’t remove the cover until the end. Whenever I cook something with a cover like this, I’m sooooo tempted to open the cover. I don’t know why but I’m always itching to open the cover and take a peek inside. Does anybody else have the same problem?
Hmmm… I’m not sure if this one looks any better than the last one. Any suggestions?
Serious Stuff. Seriously
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.NaNoWriMo
Yeah, I'm gonna try this time. I must be crazy... not surprisingly.
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