Dinner!

I haven't had a chance to really go into detail about my personal "food revolution" (that's what I'm calling it), and I hopefully will some time soon. But last night was my first trial run in this new approach to food, and I think the results were pretty wonderful. I made the following dinner for Jeni and myself.



I didn't really get a good photo. It was too dark to not use flash, and flash just sucks.


What you're looking at is the following:

#1) Couscous cooked in vegetable broth with ground cinnamon, raisins, and pine nuts.
#2) Roasted eggplant, tomatoes, and garlic with sundried tomato and garlic seasoning
#3) Salad of red leaf lettuce, tomatoes, carrots. Dressing made of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, a dash of hot mustard, and rosemary and garlic seasoning.

YUM!

The couscous was my favorite of the dish. I've never roasted eggplant before, but it came out really nice. The salad was pretty basic, but it wasn't intended to be too fancy. The three elements blended well together. The one thing I'd have changed was that I'd have added tofu to the vegetable roast. There was a common consensus between Jeni and I that it was missing something "meaty". Considering I don't eat or cook meat, tofu would have to do. It just needed something a little heavier in protein.

Thanks so much to Sage for the suggestion on the Eggplant roast. I'm sorry I bought tomatoes out of season! It wont happen again.

How to Make a Broken Laptop Screen Still Work

The stupid latch on my laptop broke a few months back after years of use, making it impossible for the screen stay up on its own without flopping flat on its back. It really wasn't a big deal as I still have a desktop that worked just fine, but last week a nasty virus took over, and despite 5 straight days of battle, I finally had to throw i the towel. So to satisfy my internet fix, I had to find a way to make my laptop functional again.

I've had a few designs in my head since the laptop originally broke for a device that would make this work, but hadn't gotten around to making it. I took a rare sun break on a rainy day last week and attempted to put together a very basic form of this design using some scrap wood I had laying around under my work bench. Here's the result.






It works pretty well. I had to eyeball the angle, and I'd say it's a bit too obtuse. I certainly don't want it at 90 degrees, and 135 degrees was going to be way too large. I think I hit it at around 120, but I should probably have made it around 110. Considering that I only had scrap wood and 15 minutes of sunshine (my workshop is my backyard), I think I did a pretty good job.

Ramen Experiment

So a few weeks back I came across Matt Fischer's Ramen Page with a lot of very curious-sounding recipes for ramen. I decided to try a few out, and the results were actually quite pleasant.

Egg & Green Onion Ramen

This one was really simple. As the ramen was cooking, I mixed up an egg with a little bit of milk and soy sauce. When the ramen was done, I threw it in to a pan with a little bit of olive oil and mixed in the ramen and green onions. I gave this a B+


Pad Thai Ramen

This was really similar to the previous ramen I made. I added some baked tofu, carrots, peanuts, and peanut sauce. Very delicious and filling. Super cheap. I gave this an even A.

Mexican Ramen

I just kind of made this one up on my own. Again, after the ramen was done cooking, I pan fried it a little bit with some black beans, corn, taco seasoning, and crumbled up corn tortilla chips. Topped it off with a dash of salsa. This one was a little "runnier" than the other two, mainly because of all of the water in the beans and corn, but the crunchy chips added an awesome change in texture. The flavor of this one really stood out. I gave this an A-

I'll get around to trying some more ramen recipes here soon. I just bought a huge box of ramen, so we'll see what happens.