Derping Along...

Yup.  Not much of worth going on around here today.  

Well, I lie a little.  I postponed some of the cooking tasks for this weekend from yesterday to today, so I got all of that done.  

I'm a diabetic.  I've been watching my blood sugars regularly, but every so often I get into ruts, and things tend to get a bit wonky.  

For about the past year, I'd found a quick-and-easy sort of breakfast.  For some time, I'd been making myself a rather large batch of what my son calls "Dad's Quiche" - so what I did was start with a couple of pie crusts down on the bottom of a rather large pan.  That pan is also typically used for Tater Tot Hot Dish when I feel particularly naughty.  But when I'm trying to control things, I start with a pie crust - two, actually, the pre-made sort you find in the store.  I slice off the overlaps and place them over the empty spots, then I carefully place about 3 pounds of pre-cooked breakfast sausage (thank you Costco), and then cover that with a mixture of about a dozen eggs, some thinly sliced white onions, some bacon bits, and about a pound of shredded cheese.  I bake it in the oven at 350 until the middle no longer wiggles like jello, pull it out, let it cool, then portion it off into about 24 breakfasts.  

So no, I didn't keep an eye on the calorie count, but I did know that the carb count on a breakfast like that ran about 2 grams.  As I'm supposed to limit myself to around 40 a day (the doctor said "40 to 45" but I figure if I aim for lower, I'm a little better off).  But then the pandemic hit.

And I got lazy.  I stumbled across some breakfast sandwich things.  First I found biscuit sandwiches with a disk of egg, bacon, and cheese.  I looked at the box.  About 24 grams per sandwich.  Well, since I wasn't eating a whole lot, I figured I could get away with that.  Then I found out that the biscuit sandwiches were pretty hard to find, but I could regularly find a sausage and english muffin thing, with cheese and egg, and those were about 20 grams.  Not too terrible, but after going through the microwave, the "english" muffin (like no other Americanized "English" muffin I'd ever had) turned hard and rather rubbery.

Then I stumbled across some "croissant" variety of the same sandwich.  All apologies to my French reader (if you're still there), these resembled a croissant in that it was spelled with a "c" as the first letter.  Beyond that, there were no flaky layers, no slight crunch when you bit into it, but it was a sort of bread, and didn't turn rubbery or hard in the microwave.  Downside was that it was 26 grams of carbs.

So a few weeks ago I decided I needed to put the pedal back down on the carb stuff.  All things in moderation, yes, but I needed to reduce.  So I looked around and saw a commercial on TV for the Taco Bell breakfast.  And it rather intrigued me a bit.  I know that potatoes don't belong in my breakfast (unfortunately), but if I could jury-rig some sort of concoction built with a tortilla, it might work.

So the brain started working.  I talked my wife into a package of bacon, a package of bacon bits, some deli ham, some shredded cheese, and a few white onions.  I started by cooking the bacon about 2/3rds done in the oven (I also pre-peppered it - I do like "candied bacon" where we put brown sugar and pepper on it before putting it in the oven at 400 for about 20 minutes, but that's not exactly going to help with lowering my carbs).  Once the bacon was out, I popped a small frying pan onto the stove, dropped the slices of deli ham in to get some color and get rid of the stringy fat around the outside of most of the slices, and then ... got stuck.  

We have a rather broad range of kitchen gadgets.  My wife likes them, I like gadgets, and I like keeping her happy.  For a number of years, birthday and Christmas presents were easy - just a kitchen gadget or three.  Until one year I thought "hey, a home-made ice cream machine."  She used it once.   And that was the end of that.  Though I did see where she recently purchased a new single-serving ice cream making machine, all we have to do is pre-freeze the bowl in the freezer, and the other parts, so that when we have whatever it is ready to go into the ice cream maker, all we do is add it into the pre-frozen bowl.  Nope.  Not going to say anything.

But we've got a Ninja coffee bar (highly recommended by those in the household who drink coffee, I am not of their number), a Ninja blender (which still works, after making iced coffees most mornings and my son's most-evening bedtime snack of a peanut-butter-chocolate milkshake), and we have a Ninja Air Fryer, and a few other gadgets.  What we do not have is a quesadilla maker.  We had a gadget that you put into the microwave with everything in it, then put a top on that pre-portions it into eight, four, or two, depending on the lid you use.  So it goes.

What I was looking for after the first attempt at placing one of my creations - a tortilla with a little shredded cheese, deli ham, a slice of bacon, pre-cooked scrambled eggs with seasoning, bacon bits, and onions, and shredded cheese - failed miserably in staying together, what I really needed was a dam of cheese around the eggs to keep them from coming out, or a device which would hold my creation upright and apply heat from either side.  

"It won't do exactly that" she says, "but we do have the George Foreman Grill."  Ah, yes.  The version 2.0, with the removable cooking plates.  We've purchased three of them, over the years.  The first, as a couple, to make quick dinners.  Then, with several children, we bought the larger one that allowed us to make six burgers at a time.  After cleaning that by hand more than a few times, it became obvious that was a non-starter when we misplaced the special cleaning tool...  So we did the lazy cleaning method, where you thoroughly soaked a dish towel, then folded it so it covered the entire griddle surface, and closed the grill and turned it on.  The steam cleaned the grill.  

But we didn't use it all that often, so we gave it to my mother in law who had burned out the original two-patty one we'd given her after we outgrew it and she used it regularly.  Somewhere along the line, we found one with removable grill plates that could go straight into the dishwasher.  So that's the one we still have.  It worked, sort of, to finish off this batch, but I do believe that I'm going to build a small jig to hold the grill upright as I put my item in the griddle, then close it, then lower the griddle to flat so it can properly cook and drain the stuff.

So I got that to plan, which should keep me out of trouble.  Other than that, after making 3 weeks worth of breakfast, I chucked four pounds (of the thirty we bought this weekend) into the big dutch oven and made a batch of chili.  Which, after feeding four of us this evening, left five other nights of meals.  Gee, I thought I'd get a little more than that, but so be it.

Hopefully your weekend was as productive.  Now, if I go silent for the next few weeks after tomorrow, you can cross your fingers that maybe I won that big powerball drawing.  I could do a whole heck of a lot of good with $600,000,000 in the bank, but I'd certainly start by taking care of some of the folks who took care of me.  As my parents are gone, not much to do there, but I'd certainly look into starting my own wood shop and building inexpensive furniture of a standard which the Habitat for Humanity folks might want to use to help furnish people's homes.  I'd charge the whopping fee of $1 per piece of furniture I sold to them, but of course, I'd also donate some money to help get some families into homes they can afford, because I've been there.  Still am, some days, but at least I know I have a roof over my head that isn't going to go away any time soon.  I'd like to make that a reality for some other folks.  

Hey, I can still dream.  The odds are long, but $2 is a pretty cheap price to pay for the dreams and fantasies.  I might travel a little, I'd probably buy a motorhome and go do tourist things. I'd definitely plan a tour to go see some European castles, just because.  And yes, after I built the house.  Don't want to try anything stupid...