At least not completely. 🙂 Sometimes, however, you’re left short of normal ingredients and have to improvise. The whole premise of the Food Network program “Chopped” is about being able to wing it like that via combining a basket of mystery ingredients into a meal. Sometimes winging it works, sometimes… well… not so much.
Such is the case with a recent meal I put together. We decided on my world famous meatloaf for that night; simple and hearty. Well, as it turned out, the meatballs I was going to mix in with the hamburger had gone bad. Not wanting to run out to the store again, I found some linguica in the cold drawer of the fridge.
Oddly enough, the brand we buy down here.
Linguica is a Portuguese sausage that’s good in a wide variety of dishes. Most notably (although I’ve only seen it on the West Coast), it’s one of the world’s greatest pizza toppings. Try it that way if you can find it in your area. You’ll love it.
So, determined to try something a little different and keep the meal on course, I diced up the linguica and mixed it into the meatloaf
Baked it as usual, since the weather didn’t allow for smoking it on the grill. On the surface, it turned out fairly well:
After coming out of the bread pan
The one drawback however, was that linguica can be as greasy as chorizo… almost anyway. Thus despite having both bread crumbs and egg as binding agents, the meatloaf didn’t hold together too well.
The meatloaf did have enough grease to leave us both with mildly upset stomachs though. Not a horrible dinner, but not the success I’d have wished for either. The flavor of the linguica really did add to the meatloaf though.
What I’d Change:
So what lessons can we take from this? The first and obvious answer is to use a less greasy sausage if you want to use sausage as a second meat in your meatloaf. The other option that came to mind us to use something like this meatloaf pan from Bed Bath and Beyond:
You can get something like this almost anywhere with a little searching. The interior rack allows grease to drain off the meatloaf (which would have been a big help in this specific instance), and allows you to easily remove the meatloaf from the pan.
Worth the investment? I guess that depends how often you make meatloaf. It’s a bit of a rarity here, but still something we enjoy on occasion.
I decided to do a little Sunday (non-religious) motivational today. I read another blog where an aspiring author was (or sounded) severely depressed about the inability to get going as a writer. I left some heartfelt encouragement there. I’d been struggling with the same issues myself for the longest time after all.
I think there are other writers out there that could use similar words of encouragement. With that in mind, I want to pass on what’s helped me make my breakthroughs.
First, one of the biggest causes of writer’s block is simply self-doubt. That, in turn, frequently comes from being too externally focused. That means you’re basing your sense of self-worth on the input of others. The problem with that is people are almost always negative if you have a dream different from where they’re at or aiming for in life. Why?
Because they’re secretly jealous that you have the courage to try something different and chase a dream. If you succeed, it’ll make them feel all the worse about themselves that they never even had the courage to try.
The million different rationalizations you’ll hear will all be cached in terms of protecting you, not wanting to see you fail, wanting you to be realistic, etc… The truth is though that they’re scared of what they THINK your potential success means for or reflects upon them. They’re probably not evil, just worn down by life and rationalizing on a level so deep that they don’t even realize why they’re truly attacking you.
In terms of dealing with the negative feedback, the best option in my opinion, is to turn it around in a friendly positive way. Ask them about their dreams and then encourage them to chase those, “even if it’s just a hobby or side gig”. That last part will make it sound less threatening for them to do so.
The main thing though, especially with breaking through the writer’s block and struggling, is you have to let go of the self-doubt and have faith in yourself. You’ll struggle, you’ll fall, but THAT’S OK. It’s part of the learning process. Accept that, gently analyze where you came up short, and work to do better next time.
Beyond that, you have to do it for YOU. NOT to prove others wrong, (although that does work for some people), not to get an inflated ego that will block your learning and growth either. Write show yourself that you’re capable, to grow better, and because it brings you joy. When you can give yourself permission to do that, it won’t matter how many books you write, or how many you sell. You’ll be a success because you’ll be growing as a person. Work at it though, and the financial success will likely follow the emotional and spiritual success. 😉
ALMOST everybody has the talent to be a good writer. Want to know a secret? Almost everybody has the talent to be a great ANYTHING. You just have to be willing to work at it. Michael Jordan and Lebron James were NOT born great basketball players. They got to be legends among professionals because they worked at it 8 or more hours a day, every day. I guarantee you they were rough at first also. They were determined to work at something they loved though and gave themselves permission to fail as long as they learned from it.
Likewise, realize that you CAN do it (whether it’s writing or anything else). It WILL be slow at first, and you WILL have to be dedicated to continually improving yourself. Time, effort and patience, especially with yourself, is all it takes.
As far as some writers turning out tons of books a year… I guarantee you very few people doing that are turning out QUALITY work. At least not their best quality. Even a good portion of James Patterson’s books are ghost written. Maxine Paetro writes all his “Women’s Murder Club” books, for example. On the flip side, Michelangelo took 4 years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but everybody remembers it. Ergo, it’s OK to work slowly, just keep going.
Oh sure, you got that brief blurb at the end of Deathly Hollows where he’s sending the kid to Hogwart’s, but what REALLY happened to him? I’ve got the scoop!
After Harry graduated, he tried to pursue a boring 9 to 5 job in the mundane world but quickly bored of it. He traveled to Vegas and quickly became THE act to see on the strip with his magic.
Unfortunately, his unbelievable and unequaled act also earned him the jealous wrath of Penn and Teller, and a few other stage magicians. A vicious smear campaign on social media and elsewhere led to Harry being ran out of town on a rail.
He took the remainder of his savings and settled into small town Tennessee where he opened a couple of gas stations with convenience stores. He’s lived there quietly ever since. His stores are super popular, as they always seem to have everything in stock, and his gas prices have been described as magically, almost unbelievably low. 😉
Famous SNL skit turned into meme fodder on the internet
I’m back after sorting out several things that may or may not get blog posts of their own. Right now however, I want to revisit the idea of conspiracy theories. I lost at least one (apparently unhinged) reader when I refused to embrace the idea that the Nashville Christmas bombing was actually a government missile attack… or a government space based particle beam weapon if you’re REALLY REALLY out there.
Christmas morning picture of the bombing aftermath in Nashville
I had some FUN with that attack in the post linked to above, but it was only fun. These people seriously believe that the government used a cruise missile to damage an AT&T facility because said facility was supposedly investigating the voting machines and election fraud. This based on an out of focus picture from a different angle than the original pictures and video. Said picture supposedly shows a fragment of a vapor trail “from a missile”:
Yes, it apparently started out as it was “an NSA spy hub” that was hardened, but still somehow damaged by a missile that couldn’t even completely destroy the cars on the right hand side of the street (first pic). Yes, this is the start of applying Occam’s Razor to this idiocy.
So let’s go back to the blatantly obvious based on the two pictures above:
A) That blurry line could be almost anything. If it’s a vapor trail from a missile, where is the rest of the trail? Why did nobody report seeing a missile?
B) Even the most basic amateur forensics would show that’s NOT a missile hit. There’s no crater. How did it destroy a “hardened spy facility” undreground and not even leave a crater? The blast radius wasn’t even sufficient to completely destroy the cars on the left hand side of the street. The debris pattern doesn’t even indicate a center of the street hit like many whackadoos are insisting.
On top of all that, there’s just the reality of how the government works. Trump also for that matter. ANY investigation into electronic tampering with the voting machines would have been done publicly for the sake of transparency. Trump also would have been screaming from the rooftops that the proof was coming. His whole election rigging theory hinged on it. Even after the fact, he said nothing.
The government doesn’t need an AT&T switching center in Nashville to do such investigations either. The internet was started as a US Government construct named ARPANET. The government still has it’s hands all over the internet with back door access to backbone routing systems at the heart of the internet. Any person who has spent any real length of time in the IT field knows this. Things like Operation Able Danger barely scratched the surface of what the government could do if it wanted to.
Even setting aside the cloak and dagger stuff, the FBI Cyber Division is one of the best cyber forensics teams around. They would have likely been leading any investigation into tampering with the voting machines from their headquarters. Trump had already cleaned out anybody who had opposed him at the FBI also, so one can’t simply claim bias as an excuse here.
So, NO, there was NO INVESTIGATION and NO CRUISE MISSILE ATTACK to stop it and ‘save’ Trump’s presidency.
Let’s take Occam’s Razor a bit further however…
Why would the government spend $850,000 dollars (the cost of a tomahawk cruise missile) to launch a blatant and highly messy attack when so many easier options are available IF there was something going on that needed to be covered up?
For starters, they could just “spike” the target area with a virus or malware of some sort that would take out any software based evidence and potentially damage hardware as well. Any PEOPLE that present a danger can have Clinton administration style accidents & suicides (ie Vince Foster shooting himself in the head and THEN throwing his own body in a dumpster), OR simply discredited as conspiracy nuts and Alex Jones fans.
If I wanted to put together a far more plausible conspiracy theory around the bombing, it’d be something to this effect:
The RV carried a black ops team that went in and neutralized the troublesome area. They went in unseen via a trap door in the bottom of the RV and went into the sewers before breaching the AT&T building. The gunshots heard at 4:30 and 5:30 were the team taking out security or witnesses. After the job was done, they detonated the RV to cover their tracks, escaped via the sewers to an unmarked delivery van, and drove off. Other people in the NSA immediately put out the story of this rogue AT&T contractor obsessed with 5G and coronavirus, and the public has a cover story. The broadcasted warnings from the RV about a bomb were more about drawing attention away from the black ops team’s escape than actually keeping innocents safe.
The difference between THAT and the missile strike theory? TONS of money and much more surgical level control over the operation and it’s outcome. It’s still about as likely as my Die Hard theory in the post linked above though, LOL.
5G and COVID
While we’re at it, let’s BRIEFLY tackle this one also. Let’s start with 2 seconds of background.
The whole conspiracy took flight when a holistic medicine doctor named Thomas Cowen (a few unverified sources say he was barred from practicing “real” medicine), posted a YouTube video about how 5G and the “electrification” of the Earth’s atmosphere was causing coronavirus. All it took after that was a couple of celebritards tweeting about it and BANG; the theory went wildfire level viral.
The trouble here is that none of the above people have any sort of background in radiology. For the record, I don’t either. While I *do* believe that all the radiowaves put into the air may be having some sort of negative effects, I also know something else:
Radiation (and all types of electromagnetic energy are broadly classified as radiation) exposure doesn’t cause or mimic the symptoms of contagious diseases. The effects are completely different. On one extreme, you have cancer as an effect. THAT takes strong radiation. Much further down the line, we have the vertigo and impaired thinking / brain fog and moodiness caused by directed microwave attacks on US personnel at the Cuban embassy.
So, while I’d be more accepting of the modest possibility that 5G is responsible for all the mentally addled people on the far left and right who only want to fight with others and see threats everywhere, it’s NOT responsible for COVID-19. If anything is, it’s the Wuhan Institute of Virology(which another reader has argued doesn’t exist, because their media told them so, never mind the website and ability to find it on Google Maps).
Conclusion:
My point with the last (Wuhan) remark and the Clinton one earlier is that there’s enough legitimately shady stuff going on in the world without having to invent wild, unsupportable shit to explain every little thing that goes bad. That’s actually my biggest gripe with conspiracy theorists and theories:
They draw attention away from legitimate wrong-doing and are used to discredit anyone who wants to hold government and big business responsible for those legitimate wrong acts.
The fact of the matter is the missile attack nuts and other fringe theories out there actually discredited any legitimate effort to look into voter fraud. And the voter fraud was definitely real. Trump didn’t gain a single vote after the polls closed and lost substantial leads in 8 states. I kept track of the numbers over that time, and what happened is a mathematical and statistical impossibility. It would mean every area left uncounted at midnight on election night voted 100% Democrat.
I don’t miss Trump one bit. He was a toxic, narcissistic bully. The areas remaining to be counted after election night all normally leaned Democrat also, so it’s possible Biden might have won regardless. I’m only concerned about making sure the process stays untainted.
OK, enough of that, I said I was done with politics. That above situation is a perfect example of how conspiracy nuts actually HURT the cause they’re trying to promote though. THAT is why I brought it up, and to point out that one can see something fishy without going to extremes to rationalize it.
Before anyone on the Left posts a comment about all the right wing idiots out there, keep in mind that the COVID thing is a universal idiocy not limited to the far right. Likewise there’s the conspiracies spun by leftists that all cops are out to murder black people and that the military is full of terrorists ready to repeat the storming of the capital and completely overthrow the government. Glass houses & stones and all that…
All y’all crazy people need to get your heads straight. And I’m done venting, LOL.
Yes, officially. Per the Guinness Book of World Records no less:
Hacksmith is the same group that invented the other lightsabers I posted about ages ago. This has a fully retractable “blade” though.
OK, it’s really an insanely hot oxy-propane cutting torch with a LONG flame. Still… They’re getting closer.
I figure we could all use a little fun and geeky coolness right about now also. 🙂
It got them to 10 million YouTube subscribers also, and earned them the coveted Diamond Play Button award from Google / YouTube… Which they promptly cut in half. O_O
An old video, but I just saw it featured on a cable TV show earlier today. Funny as hell too. Antelopes are very territorial OR this one has NFL / WWE dreams:
Am I the only one that thinks this video needs to be set to the Theme from Cops? Bad boys, bad boys… Whatcha gonna do when the come for you?
I’m overdue for a food post here. 🙂 I did this one a while back, and have just had too much drama to deal with.
Yes, UN-Fried Chicken
The Backstory:
Almost as fun as the cooking for me. It all started with the bottle of spice in the upper right corner of the picture. We found a cute little shop that sold spices for just about every kind of cooking you can think of. One of the bottles we bought was for fried chicken seasoning.
When it came time to do the chicken for dinner though, we were already behind schedule for the day and stressed out. I just plain didn’t feel like the mess of creating a batter dredge for the chicken. The end result is we decided to put the chicken on the smoker just using the seasonings without all the extra flour and oil.
Net Result:
Chicken that tasted exactly like fried chicken but with a deep smoke flavor also. It was really juicy and tender. Total winner; all the flavor of fried chicken with none of the fat and carbs!
Delicious!
We had it plain the first night, but the leftovers got served with veggies and topped with a bit of cream of mushroom soup as gravy:
This one was a fun experiment that turned out much better than I expected. It just goes to show that there are options for making classic unhealthy food into something healthy that still tastes great. It’s a process of discovery I’m enjoying more and more.
While I did mine on our Rec-Tec pellet smoker, this could just as easily be done baked in an oven. I’d recommend on a wire rack to let the skin crisp just a little as it bakes.
I teased in a reply to my burger post that I would be doing NY Steak tonight. I did too! The equally fabulous side dish ends up SORT OF getting the headline though. For those who don’t know, I *love* Tex-Mex cooking. Three peppers in particular are my absolute favorites; Chipotle, Tomatillo and Hatch.
Hatch chilis are green chilis grown around the Hatch, New Mexico area. They can get as hot as Jalapenos, but typically are fairly mild. Great for when you have somebody who doesn’t like hot food, but can appreciate savory, OR you want to add some flavor to an otherwise delicate food.
Trying to tell Hatch that they’re not the chili capital is like trying to tell a Texan they didn’t invent BBQ by the way. LOL. More on the side dish in a minute. First lets take a look at that slow cooked New York Steak:
Just a hair overdone today. They came out on the low end of Medium. Slow smoking them meant they were still moist and tender though
Slow smoked for almost 2 hours at 185 degrees (85 Celsius). You can see that delicious Hickory and Mesquite smoke ring in the first picture. Topped off with a little Sucklebusters 1836 seasoning rubbed in before cooking, and it’s nearly perfection.
Not an affiliate link BTW, just one of the companies I trust to do right by people and make a killer product. All their rubs and seasonings are good.
The show stealer turned out to be the baby Yukon Gold potatoes with hatch pepper seasoning though. Just something I found at Kroger. Fabulous flavor, and something I’ll try again. 🙂 Next time, I’ll try to do the Hatch seasoning myself and will hopefully have a recipe for you all.
Oh, and did I forget the Chocolate Sea Salt Caramel Mousse for dessert? 😀
I was going to do something deep and philosophical today but I ran out of mental energy. Instead here’s something fun; scenes from “The Mandalorian” explaining The Child’s dialog.
😀
Silk Chatters 