Hump Day!

I am one of those people that want's breakfast for breakfast. I might also want breakfast for lunch and dinner, but I don't eat dinner for breakfast. I'm not a cold pizza kind of guy. Even a nice steak with garlic mashed potatoes, caramelized leeks and a red wine reduction sauce with morels is just not going to cut it. I want my eggs, bacon, toast, cereal, biscuits, sausage gravy and maybe some pie. That's why I'm amazed that I've developed this particular breakfast habit.

You see, I love eating Jeno's frozen pizzas for breakfast. Today was a supreme pizza. I don't know who invented that pizza meme, but I can think of a few things I'd add to a pizza to make it a little more "supreme." For frozen pizzas, though, I think this is the pinnacle of evolution.

I love the texture of the thing. The crust gets the perfect crispiness to it when you bake it directly on the oven rack. All the pieces are cut small enough to lend to a nice mélange effect while still being big enough to come through as their own entities.

I don't want that DiGiorno stuff or anything that more closely approximates a good fresh pie. These little single-serving bliss-discs are a wonderful way to start your day. Even better, they're really cheap and I can throw them in the oven, go get dressed, brush my teeth, come back and voila, perfect for folding in half and eating on the walk to the train. Or wrap it up to go! It's the perfect food, any time.

I kinda feel like Ron Popeil, right now.

OK, breathing deep,

the feeling is passing.

I am a hollow reed.

I am a hollow reed.

After the Jeno's, I was in a mood for sugar, so I ate a Sarris' coconut egg, the single serving size, not the big, "feed a family of eight" kind of egg that I was carving up on Sunday. If you're puzzled why you don't see the Sarris' brand around, you probably don't live in western Pennsylvania. They are a great chocolatier very popular in the Greater Pittsburgh Area. Nothing too fancy, just honest quality. They pump out some fantastic chocolate pretzels and they make a mean cappuccino meltaway that is probably the fanciest thing in the joint. If you have a chance to sample either, don't hesitate, take two.

Hydration is very important. Especially when you ride a bike every day. I've been refilling my .5L water bottle about 3 times a day, and I still feel a little under-hydrated. In Japan I was drinking well over 2L a day in the summer. It just gets so nasty out. Today I've got a VitaminWater bottle in the mix too, so hopefully the less frequent the trips to the water fountain, the higher my water consumption. You know you care.

I spent the early afternoon munching on wasabi peas. You've probably seen these green globs of awesome at least once in your snacking adventures. The non-wasabi variety are very popular in Japan, but to find the wasabi variety could sometimes be difficult.

Japanese people in general don't eat very much spicy food. The extremes of their palate tend to run more to sour and bitter tastes. Even when eating sushi the wasabi is usually used sparingly as an additive to soy sauce or not at all. Of course, this is not always the case, Korean and Indian food are both very popular in Japan as well as an increasing number of spicy junk food and fast food items, but much like America, this is more the fare of teenaged boys than the general populace.

Then for lunch it was left over pork and beans with hot dogs. Last time I worked in this building I tried to pack interesting, fancy lunches so I didn't feel like such a shlub mixing in with the law school crowd. I have since realized that their diet is mainly cold pizza or boxed sushi, both of which I find atrocious, and that they'd probably be very happy to trade lunches for any given day of my swill parade.

Everyone in this building wants my pork and beans! Well, excepting maybe the guys in yarmulkes.

After lunch I had 4 cheese and peanut butter cracker sandwiches. That's the Keebler ones with the bright orange crackers that look kind of scary but are actually delicious. I saved the other 4 in the pack for later. 8 is just too much orange at one time. Seriously, they make cheezits look a bit pale.

All the onions from the pork and beans and the cheesy crackers prompted a Frisk breath mint after lunch. The blog title does say "Everything..." right.

At home I whipped up dinner for myself and my girlfriend who was coming over. I had a lot of hot dogs and two chicken leg/thigh sections, but my girl friend doesn't like these things. I figured I'd go with tuna. My girlfriend likes tuna.

I was inspired by this recipe I found from a random search of "tuna pasta recipes." http://www.grouprecipes.com/29264/red-bean-tuna-pasta.html

It seemed like a nice divergence from the standard tuna, mayo and green peas casserole I always hated as a child. I also diverged pretty heavily from this recipe, though.I was more in the mood for a European palate instead of her Asian flavors, though I did add a little sesame oil to the olive oil I used to sauté some garlic, onions, celery and carrots. Then I added a can of black beans, diced green pepper and a can of chunk light tuna in water. I seasoned the mixture with a lot of dried basil, some oregano, dill, cayenne and a little fresh ground black pepper and fennel seed and let that simmer on a low heat.

Next I added some lightly cooked spaghetti, a tablespoon of horseradish, a few dollops of MiracleWhip and some sour cream mixed with water (because I was out of milk). I stirred the whole thing up pretty thoroughly, then added some bread crumbs and parmesan cheese to the top, stirring it slightly into the mix, and let it bake in the oven as it cooled from 400F with the Frankenbiscuits.

Wait, you say, wtf are Frankenbiscuits?

Well, sometimes, I get these ideas. Sometimes I imagine that I can read the minds of people who read my blog. Sometimes I do things to food that maybe one should not do to food that one is actually planning to eat. Yesterday I got to thinking that I could mix the light, crumbly, crunchyexterioriness of biscuits with the sweet, moist, full-bodied satisfaction power of cornbread.

If there is one type of cooking where you really don't want to go off inventing things without knowing exactly what you're doing, it's baking. If you want to learn to cook by inspiration and see what difference basil will make to your beef stew, go for it. Buy a crock pot and rock out for a week keeping one recipe going and adding whatever strikes you till you eventually have to throw it out.

This will be good for your cooking in general. Baking, on the other hand, is a delicate balance of conflicting chemistries and tampering with this balance often leads to rocks that taste even worse than rocks you might find by the side of the road leading from a sewage treatment facility.

I would not be daunted by my lack of expertise, though, and to be fair I have made a lot of biscuits in my time, even if my other baked goods are often downright woeful. I started with half of this baking powder biscuits recipe: http://www.seedsofknowledge.com/biscuits.html

To which, in grand swill fashion, I added a box of Jiffy corn muffin mix.

Now technique here is very important. I made the biscuit half recipe up to the point that you added milk (although I added the sour cream/water mixture I mentioned earlier. I wouldn't drink it, but I’ve had great results cooking with it.) and I only added enough "milk" to get the dry ingredients to form lots of little flakes, just till the last of the powder is mixed up into something that isn't powder.

Directly over the soft biscuit flakes I dumped the contents of one box of Jiffy corn muffins, then I added two eggs, scrambled, evenly around the bowl and began to stir, adding more "milk" as necessary till I had a thick dough that was just a little on the sticky side but could be worked with my hands without coating them.

I folded this out a few times on a floured surface, and then rolled it out to about a half inch thick and cut it into squares which I then baked at 400F. I could have rolled them a little less thin, but otherwise they were a fantastic success. I will definitely make them again, and I recommend that you try it too, and then tell your friends you came up with it out of your imagination pants. They will think you are very creative and will ask to borrow your pants.

So after all that, I don't think the girlfriend particularly liked the pasta, though I thought it came out ok. I'll likely be eating it another two days for leftover lunches. We both ate about half a dozen Frankenbiscuits a piece, though. Those things were great. I ate most of them with margarine and honey.

I dont' really like margarine, but I like things that spread easy. You get butter frigid and it just doesn't spread easy. You leave it sit out till it gets nice and spready and it starts to get sloppy pretty quickly. In the New York summer that is on it's way the difference between spready and sloppy is pretty much non-existent.

The lesson I want my impressionable readers to come away with here is spready is good, sloppy is bad. I think we can all agree.