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Category Archives: ponderings

A new pet

I’ve been thinking about pets recently.  In that…I want another one.  But I want a low maintenance one.  I have a few of those already, actually.  There’s Seymour and Rosemarie, my pet rocks (they are not officially licensed pet rocks), and my moss ball, whose name is…Mossball.  The thing with low maintenance pets is that they’re…low maintenance.  I don’t count Choco or Yaris as low maintenance pets.  I wouldn’t mind getting another dog, but I think I might be hard pressed to care for it adequately.  But I could handle another low maintenance pet.  Like…a sourdough starter.

Yes, yes, I know you’re spluttering with indignation and shaking your fist at your screen all the while declaring that a sourdough starter is NOT a pet.  But…I say it is.  More so than a pet rock.  I mean, you really don’t have to do anything with a pet rock and they’re perfectly fine.  A sourdough starter involves living creatures.  You have to feed them (flour).  You have to give them a little exercise (stir it a bit).  How is this not like a pet?  It’s kind of like a low maintenance pet hen.  You feed a hen some and let it run around in your yard, and she gives you an egg.  With a sourdough starter, you feed it and stir it and you get some starter to bake with.  See?  Totally like a low maintenance hen.

Actually, I was thinking of maybe getting a pair of starters.  It’s because I really like San Francisco sourdough (sourdoughs made in different parts of the world taste different because of the different types of wild yeasts that live in that different part of the world).  But SF sourdough is pretty sour.  It wouldn’t taste very good as a sweet bread.  So, I would probably get a batch of the Amish friendship bread starter (the way to gift someone inconvenience!) and I could use that to make sweet breads, pancakes, etc.  I wonder what would happen if you mixed them together…hmm…

Or I could just get a pet spider.  I have wanted a Mexican flame-kneed tarantula for awhile now.  And while they’re higher maintenance than a sourdough starter, they’re nowhere near as bad as a dog. PICTURE OF SPIDER AHEAD!

Food mashups (1)

Sometimes I crave certain foods.

Sometimes I crave different types of foods at the same time.

Sometimes I think I should just combine my cravings in some way.

So I present to you, food mashups!

Craving #1 + Craving #2 = Mashup

pizza + curry = curry pizza: I live in California and Californians are always making up weird pizzas.  I could probably do this.

lamb vindaloo + burger = lamb vindaloo burger: which…actually might work out really well because (fake) vindaloos also involve potatoes and potatoes are the perfect accompaniment to burgers, e.g. fries.

Onion + baked apples = grilled whole onion? Not too sure how well this would work out and it wasn’t a real craving. A friend and I were talking about how well a whole onion would hold up to grilling. Maybe a stuffed onion…like a stuffed bell pepper.  And you’d probably have to use a brown or white onion.  A sweet onion would mush up too easily.  You need some structure in the walls still.  The stuffing could be an apple/pork combo or something.  Maybe a little cider…  I should try this.

Ethiopian food + animal style fries = a pile of animal style fries on top of some injera.  This happens a lot for some reason when I have Ethiopian food.  Since Ethiopian cuisine often involves a lot of different stews and salads on top of injera, a pile of animal style fries probably wouldn’t look out of place.  Probably.

Erm…I had more ideas, but I didn’t write them down (of course) and I can’t remember any more right now.  I guess this might be a new series of posts.