spugbrap’s blog

The directions for preparation on a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Spirals are:

1. Boil 6 cups water. Stir in Macaroni. Boil 6 to 8 minutes or until tender, stirring occasionally.
2. Drain. Do Not Rinse. Return to pan.
3. Add 3 tablespoons spread[/butter] (or 1/2 tablespoon unmelted butter for lower fat preparation), 3 tablespoons 2% milk (or skim milk for lower fat preparation), and Cheese Sauce Mix, mix well. Makes 3 servings.

Here’s a simple trick my wife, Lacey, taught me to make step 3 a little bit easier:

After returning the drained pasta to the pot, turn the stove back on, at its lowest setting. Then, add the butter, which will be much easier to stir in with a little bit of heat melting it. Next, add the milk, and stir that up. At this point, the pasta is coated in butter and milk, which makes the cheese powder stick to it better. I leave the heat on until I’m completely done mixing it all up, which also ensures that the finished Mac and Cheese will actually still be warm by the time you dish it out.

Over the weekend, my family and I went over to a friend’s house to carve pumpkins. I was a bit late, so by the time I got there, most of them were already done. Jena asked whether I wanted to carve a pumpkin, or a watermelon from her garden. At first, I was going to do a pumpkin, because I’d never heard of carving watermelons–at least not for making jack-o-lanterns.

But, then she sat down to try carving a watermelon, herself. It didn’t take long for us to realize why this was a great idea! Instead of scooping out pumpkin guts and throwing it in a bowl, we could scoop out the watermelon and eat it! So, I grabbed another watermelon, and proceeded to scoop out and eat the tasty insides.

When I was done, I had a hollowed-out green oval/cylinder shaped thing to work with. I sat for a few minutes, trying to think of something green to make it look like. My first thought was a Mountain Dew can, but I decided that it would be too hard to try and carve all of those letters into the small watermelon. Then, I thought of a turtle, and went looking around the house for turtle faces to imitate.

Luckily, Xander loves turtles, and I found plenty of possibilities. I finally settled on a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, from the cover of a video game. Most of the TMNT faces that I saw kind of needed visible teeth-separations to look good, but I found one that had a good enough facial expression without needing tooth detail.

I started by drawing on the watermelon with a pen, which allowed me to correct mistakes by wiping off the pen with a wet paper towel. I’m not very artistically inclined, so I really didn’t expect it to turn out very good. I was very close to giving up and going with a standard pumpkin carving style, rather than trying to make it look like something in particular. I also came very close to asking Xander to draw a ninja turtle face, for me, because that boy is a great artist, and I’ve seen some of his ninja turtle drawings before. But, I actually managed to draw a face that I was happy with.

Then carved it out with the pumpkin carving tools. I couldn’t decide whether to cut out the whole ninja turtle mask part, or to just cut the eyes out. Dallin suggested cutting out the eyes, then the whole mask, and then putting the eyes back into place with toothpicks. I knew that they’ve done the toothpick thing before, with pumpkins, so I trusted that he knew what he was talking about.

The final product turned out better than I thought it would! It’s easily recognizable as a ninja turtle, and I think I consider it my best pumpkin carving, ever. Jena’s carved watermelon turned out great, too! It’s cool to see this different color scheme: green with red inside, rather than the standard pumpkin orange with yellow inside.

Here are some close-up pictures of the carved watermelons, as well as some pictures of the watermelons next to the pumpkins that our respective families carved/painted:

We all had lots of fun, and look forward to doing it again next year! We will definitely be carving both pumpkins AND watermelons again.

Soooo.. Apparently, paper towels are not “a microwave-safe plate”. Neither are cheapest-of-the-cheap thin paper plates, and–surprisingly–neither are my favorite Tupperware plates. Oops!

I’ve recently started eating Banquet pot pies for lunch, every so often. They didn’t used to have microwave instructions on them, so I didn’t used to take them to work. I feel like, even as recently as 2 years ago, I took one to work, and was dismayed when it said not to microwave it. So, anyways, now that they are microwavable, they make a decent cheap-and-easy lunch.

Unfortunately, I’ve had mixed results with this whole microwave-pot-pie thing. The first time, I didn’t have a plate, so I stuck it on a couple paper towels. When that was part-way done, I noticed a burning smell, and opened the microwave. The bottom of the pot pie container was scorched, and the taste of the food was ruined by the burnt-paper odor.

So, the next time I decided to try microwaving a pot pie, at work, I put it on a paper plate. Apparently that was not a good idea, either. The paper plate was the extremely thin, flimsy, cheap kind that happened to be laying around in the kitchen, at work. Part-way through heating up that pot pie, I started hearing sizzling and popping sounds that I knew were not normal. Again, the familiar smell of scorched paper, this time having scorched a brown ring on the paper plate, and there were seemingly-random burnt areas on the top of the pot pie. This pot pie was ruined, as well.

[hmm, I thought I had a picture of this one, but I can’t seem to find it. insert picture of sad pot pie on thin, cheap paper plate here]

Meanwhile, at home, we’d been heated these things up in the microwave several times, and never had any trouble. So, it was either the microwave at work, that was at fault, or my choice of “microwave-safe plates.” I decided to try using one of my good Tupperware plates, because I was pretty sure we’d used those for heating up pot pies, at home. But, that didn’t work out so well, either.

At least the pot pie was edible, this time, but it did some damage to my previously-invincible Tupperware plate.

I was determined to figure out a way to heat up a pot pie, at work, without hurting the pot pie or the plate. So, the next thing I tried was a paper plate that I’d brought from home. This was a good-quality Dixie paper plate, which has been our favorite kind for years. These plates have served us well, for all manner of cheesy/tomato-saucey/juicy foods. Foods don’t tend to stick to them, and they tend to withstand quite a bit of prolonged wetness before suffering any ill effects–unlike most other paper plates.

Anyways, when I heated up a pot pie, in the microwave at work, on a Dixie paper plate, it worked great! The plate was not damaged at all, and the pot pie was thoroughly heated and tasty. [Note: The pot pie pictured below was pretty broken up when I opened the box; the nasty-looking chin was *not* the result of heating it on a Dixie paper plate!]

From now on, I will only heat up my Banquet pot pies on Dixie paper plates.

We bought some Meunster cheese from the deli at Safeway recently, and it is the worst Meunster cheese I’ve ever had. It looks pretty normal, aside from some little tiny holes throughout it, but it smells wrong, and hardly tastes like Meunster at all. Meunster is one of my favorite kinds of cheese, but I can’t bring myself to eat this stuff. The brand on the label is Primo Taglio.

If this was an isolated incident, I would just chalk it up to one bad batch of cheese. But looking back, we’ve made the mistake of buying cheese from the Safeway deli before. We kept forgetting which grocery store had the nasty cheese. In the past, we bought Provolone, there, and I’m sure it was also Primo Taglio. It tasted like some kind of freak of nature, like 25% old Provolone + 75% extra-smelly Swiss. It even had holes — some of them pretty big, like domestic Swiss. I tried to eat it, because I like Provolone, and I like Swiss, but that stuff was disgusting!

Anyways, I highly recommend not buying Primo Taglio cheese from the Safeway deli. Yuck! Buy some pre-packaged/sliced Kraft or Sargento cheese from the regular cheese aisle instead, or buy your cheese elsewhere!

This morning, I didn’t have enough bread to make my usual breakfast: a peanut peanut butter and jelly sandwich made with toast. Plus, I was extraordinarily sleepy.

So, I decided to stop at Caribou on the way to work, to get a mocha latte and a chocolate caramel muffin.

I decided to take a Vivarin instead, and wait until I was closer to work to get food; specifically, at the drive-thru Dunkin Donuts in Manassas Park. As I pulled into the drive-thru, I realized that I can’t buy donuts that way. I wanted two donuts, but I needed to check what kinds they had, and what looked good to me today, which is something I could not do from the drive-thru.

So, I parked and went into the restaurant. After picking out a drink that looked and sounded interesting, and waiting in line for a few minutes, I ordered two donuts. With the drink, the total came to $3.something, so I handed the cashier my check card. She handed it back, and said that they do not accept credit cards.

This boggled my mind, since this is 2006, and even temporary Fireworks stands, off-brand gas stations, and parking garages accept credit cards. I used to always look for the VISA/MC symbols in a store’s door/window, or ask before ordering something, if I wasn’t sure. But the thought never even crossed my mind, since it’s so rare to encounter a place that does not accept credit cards.

Well, I only had $1 in my wallet, and was not about to try to decide which ONE donut to buy. So I walked out, and continued down the road to the Giant Food grocery store. I thought that might actually turn out to be a good thing, since I could get Krispy Kreme donuts from the bakery section, there. I was bummed to find out that this particular Giant bakes their own donuts. I could have bought a pre-packaged box of Krispy Kreme donuts, but I really only wanted to get two donuts, not 6 or 12, so I went ahead and bought two Giant bakery donuts.

The donuts were too sweet, and not as tasty as Krispy Kreme would have been, so I feel like all of that time and effort was kind of wasted. I think Dunkin Donuts would have satisfied me as well, but unfortunately they are still living in the Stone Age or something.

A few minutes ago, I realized that this is not the first time I’ve been disappointed by Dunkin Donuts. A year or so ago, I stopped at the one in Herndon, and even had my kids all psyched up about getting some donnuts. No credit cards. I do not carry cash much, at all, because I prefer to use credit/check cards to keep track of where money goes. So I had to find a different place to get donuts that day as well.

So, I am hereby doing a “lazy boycott” of Dunkin Donuts. Lazy, because I very rarely go out with the intention of buying donuts, and rarely carry [much/any] cash, so I will avoid buying Dunkin Donuts without expending any actual effort. However, if the opportunity ever *does* present itself (cash + donut craving + near a Dunkin Donuts), I will go out of my way to buy some [pre-packaged if necessary] Krispy Kreme donuts somewhere else instead.

**edit**
Oh yeah, in a quick effort to see if this was a company-wide anti-cc policy, I ran across this funny story, in which (among lots of hiliarious stuff) I learned that some Dunkin Donuts stores do accept credit cards. Definitely worth a read!
http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit_card