Not to mention any names, but a friend of mine recently confessed that she harbors mise en place fantasies.
Autocorrect changed that to “muse en place,” which also sounds useful for a writer.
Maggie Stiefvater improves your life
Here is a way to improve your life: Everywhere you see the word “margarine,” replace it with “butter.”
– Maggie Stiefvater, on Twitter
Everywhere you see the word “low fat,” apply judicious strikethrough to the letters L and O and W.
Also, I give you full permission to compare the nutrition facts of your granola bar with cookies and forevermore eat cookies for breakfast.
Expiration date cooking
Maybe I will have a theme party for New Years Eve. The theme would be every food in the house with a 2013 expiration date. This could make for some interesting combinations.
Cook to perfection
I saw this line in a recipe: “Cook to perfection or until brown on both sides.”
Of course, I imagined this: someone’s cooking chicken. It’s lovely. It smells wonderful. They turn up the heat a little bit, and flip it over. Now they start to get a little anxious. Is it brown enough? Or has it gotten too brown? Is it sticking in the pan? IS IT PERFECT?
Then they remember : it’s cook to perfection, OR UNTIL BROWN. And THIS is certainly some shade of brown. They briefly contemplate writing a “50 Shades of Brown” cookbook before moving on to the next step in the recipe.
I’ll bet Chuck Wendig doesn’t have these kinds of problems when HE’S cooking.
Eggsperiment
Do you know what happens when you microwave a peeled, nearly hard boiled egg at full power for five seconds?
Not much. It barely gets warm.
Do you know what happens when you microwave a peeled, nearly hard boiled egg at full power for ten seconds?
It gets a little warmer.
Do you know what happens when you microwave a peeled, nearly hard boiled egg at full power for 15 seconds?
It gets warmer yet.
Do you know what happens when you microwave a peeled, nearly hard boiled egg at full power for 22 seconds?
It gets hot.
Do you know what happens when you microwave a peeled, nearly hard boiled egg at full power for 28 seconds?
It explodes.
Do you know how long it takes to clean a microwave in which you have exploded a peeled, nearly hard boiled egg?
Fifteen minutes.
You might ask, why would you microwave a peeled, nearly hard boiled egg? Because it was nearly hard boiled. There was kind of a divot in it after I peeled it, and I could see a bit of the yolk, and it didn’t look quite cooked.
I looked at the nearly hardboiled egg, and I thought, aha! I can fix this! I’ll just microwave it! Not too long, though, or it might explode.
So I started microwaving the nearly hard boiled egg, a couple seconds at a time. Due to phase change, the temperature curve may not have been a linear response to linear input, though.
I felt like Scotty when I did it.
Captain Kirk: More power, Scotty!
Me: She’ll nae take it, Captain! She’s going to blow!
It did.
Or it was like Chris Knight in Real Genius. All I had to do is synthesize the excited bromide in its frozen state in an argon matrix, and then apply a field to radiatively couple it to the ground state to yield a gigajoule of energy output per liter!
Or, in this case, a completely cooked egg yolk.
No, seriously! There was phase change when the yolk went from semi-liquid to solid. It must have been. The egg didn’t explode because I was stupid and this was the predictable result of microwaving the egg!
Right?
In my defense, it does appear that the egg yolk was, in fact, completely cooked at the time it exploded.