Slider Week Friday: Burgers

I decided to end Slider Week with a classic style burger. Let's look at the assembly:

Bottom bun, swirls of ketchup and mustard.

Burger.

Bacon and cheddar cheese.

Lettuce, Maui onion, roma tomatoes sliced the way I intended to do yesterday with the BLTs.

Top bun.  I made sure to cook the burger quickly on high heat, but not to overcook it, to ensure that the juices didn't run out and make the burger super dry.  This worked well, and these burgers were an excellent end to Slider Week.

No salad today, as I used up the last decent looking lettuce on the burgers.  I'll need to pick up more tomorrow.  I'm thinking about going to the Ala Moana farmer's market, since I've been getting up fairly early this week (probably a residual jetlag thing).

See? I've been getting early enough to make delicious bacon and peanut butter topped cinnamon raisin bagels. Om nom nom!

Today's linkstorm:

• Google's trying a bit. Coloring links is helpful, and I've noticed this evening that the annoying "All items" bar in full screen mode goes away as I scroll.  Going to the next item with "n" doesn't quite format things correctly, and the space that bar took up is still there, but it now shows the bottom of the previous item.  It's a start at least.  Shame they don't care to make sharing useful again.
• And nothing bad ever happened. Ever.
• Pokemon Snap was a wonderful game.  I seem to recall the catching Charmeleon was hard, but I don't remember if this was why or not.  I think he was just before a cave, too, so you had a really short time to get him.  I should try to get my N64 working again someday.
• Dogs aren't very smart.

Slider Week Monday: Mahi Mahi

Why is it slider week? Because I decided it was going to be.  Yes, I know that sliders are overrated and not cool anymore.  I don't care. I want to eat tiny cute sandwiches.  Therefore, it's a theme week.

Today is mahi mahi slider day.  My first step was to dress the buns:

Toasted bun with some green onion slices and macadamia nut "butter" and red pepper flakes.  My idea with this was to take the concept of macadamia crusted mahi mahi, and convert it.  I had intended to toast the nuts before running them through the food processor, but completely forgot to do that.  That probably would have enhanced the butter's flavor.  In any case, I made the butter by taking a handful of nuts, pulsing them in the processor, and adding in a bit of olive oil and honey to sweeten and bind it all together.  It has a dry texture, not really being smooth like peanut butter.  It's very good though, and I kept eating bits of it from the dish.  

Adding the fish.  The portions aren't even because the filet I got wasn't symmetric around the center line.  Also: slanty fish + rolly green onions = slide-y top buns. I guess that covers the "slider" aspect of things.

Plated.  Handful of chips and a quick salad of romaine + spouts in a super simple dressing of apple cider vinegar and olive oil.  I have tomatoes, but didn't feel like slicing one up.

The sliders were good, but again, the macadamia butter wasn't really strong enough to match the fish.  I guess I could have put the buns under the broiler for a bit to simulate toasting, but I didn't think of it at the time.  Still, when I did get butter to come through (the one with the smaller fish worked better at this), it did exactly what I wanted.  The fish gave an oily base, with the butter balancing with a sweet nuttiness.  

Friday: Valentine's day

I've been saving this for a week.

 But it's also Julie's birthday, so I can't just say we should blot the day out of history.  And now I want cake.

I decided last weekend that I was bored with lunch sandwiches, and decided to try lunch salads:

Like this.

 I haven't sorted out the best way to do this.  This one has baby lettuce, sundried tomatoes, slivered carrots, croutons, ham, and that really tasty gouda that WF always has presliced like that.  The problem is the balance between dressing and not having soggy croutons.  I made a quick red wine vinaigrette, but it doesn't coat things very well, and putting the box's lid back on and shaking it around magically does three things:

1. all ham immediately finds the closest ham, and they stick together into a chunk.
2. all carrots and sundried tomatoes flee to the bottom of the box, so once you eat that last bit of lettuce, you find a secret pile of both of those.
3. the dressing vanishes, no matter how much you put in, only to appear again later in a puddle around the edge of the box.

I clearly have some work to do.  I've also thought this would work for a chicken caesar idea as well.  I do need to get better croutons, as the ones I have were designed by an idiot, so they crunch perfectly fine, unless you get one with the solid grains in it, which cannot be crushed by a molar, and exist only to break teeth.

Plus, I've done seafood the past two days:

This soy-honey salmon recipe was a lie.  The sauce did not in any way "form a glaze," and I shortchanged your cooking times and still ended up with overcooked fish.  I guess that's what I get for not marinating it overnight.

WF fish counter crab cake.  I kind of want to do slider week again, and put this in as one of the sliders.

I also came up with a brilliant idea today for a product that doesn't exist but totally should.  I have lots of books.  Like think of some books, and I have like twice that.  Maybe more if you thought small.  However, I have insufficient shelf space for all of these books.  This means, I lot of my library is in stacks on the floor, or in double-packed shelves (one layer of books, with another layer of books in front).  The problem is that I have a limited amount of wall space, and you have to put shelves against a wall.

Instead of doing things like this, they should make filing cabinets that are designed for books.  This stores the books like a normal shelf, but it's perpendicular to the wall. This makes is stick out further than a regular shelf, but you usually don't put things in front of a bookshelf anyway.  Instead of just pulling a book off the shelf, you open the drawer, and then pull the book off of that shelf.  Here, have a quick doodle-y sketch:

It's nearly legible.

The important thing is that the sides have to be kept as hollow as possible, so my quick idea uses a set of six rails to support an open drawer:  each side has a top and bottom one, plus there are two tracks on the bottom.  Since regular filing cabinets don't fall over (due to the trick that opening one drawer locks the others closed), this would be similarly stable.  The slidey bookend doodle isn't something I've made up, my filing cabinet has that, so I assume it's a standard filing cabinet thing.

This would be significantly more expensive than the cheap flat pack shelves that are common, but I think the storage density would help mitigate that.  The other benefit would be that since the books are isolated, there'd be less chance of dust/light/bug damage, so the books would be safer.  In conclusion, I really want to have a filing cabinet style bookcase.

• I read Paul Krugman, so I saw this.  Then I did a search on twitter (assuming this was something recent), and discovered this and this.  The WSJ has had grammatically incorrect advertisements out for two months.  Holy unprofessionalism, Batman.
• Pika-jollnir?
• This title is completely accurate.  There's using technology for good purposes (like cool filing cabinet bookcases) and then there's using it for bad purposes (like building eyesores that inevitably leak because you don't understand what you're doing).  I'm not kidding.  Like all of his buildings leak.  Or try to set LA on fire.  I can't come up with more fundamental purpose of architecture than a) don't let the rain in; and b) don't burn down the fucking town.  You suck, Frank Gehry, and I don't care how many rich assholes you fool into paying for your shit.

Slider Week Thursday: BLTs

In my continuing challenge to eat different animal based sliders each day, today was BLT day:

This also is why I suggested BLTs to Julie yesterday. I already had the idea in mind.  Admittedly, my tomatoes aren't big like hers were, but they are nice local roma tomatoes.  I had intended to slice them the other way, but forgot until I had it half done.  Same sides as the rest of this week:

I am going to steal Julie's idea of posting random links in blog posts, since I can't share them via google reader anymore.  Thanks a lot for ruining everything, google+. I used to think you were cool.  Anyway, I'm catching up on my feeds that I didn't read over vacation.

• Where google blatantly lies to everyone.  I'm finding that it's not faster, and even in full screen mode, it still eats up a bar to tell me I'm reading "All items."  Thanks. I'm dumb, and forgot that fact between funny cat picture 9, and funny pokemon picture 7.  Also, it's great that I can't just directly share things with a single keypress.  If you wanted to tie this to google+, why not just have a "share to your default reader group"?  Then again, that'd still suck, because everyone would have to go to google+ to read things.  That's why I'm thinking about doing this:
• Share in Google Reader Again.  It's a pain to have to set up an RSS feed for the things I share, and then try to get other people to do the same so I can read interesting things I don't see in my regular feed, but since google thinks no one needs that, I guess that's the only solution.
• Funny Pokemon picture 7. I think Oshawott is my favorite new Pokemon in generations.
• LOL.  Is Mario Batali even on food tv anymore? I assume not, since otherwise they'd probably be angry that he's making fun of the douchebag they put on every chance they get.
• This looks good.  Ok, not that one, but the concept of a bulgolgi burger sounds really delicious.
• Krug-Man!
• I'm pretty sure this one didn't make my Boston terrier Halloween posts.
• I have a lot more links than I expected. Ok, last one for today. Funny Halloween math plot jokes.

My goal for this weekend is to get the rest of my vacation posts finished.

Slider Week Wednesday: Buffalo Chicken

Again, not terribly challenging.  Take boneless skinless thighs, pan fry in butter at reasonably high temperature until cooked, and then add a few big glugs of Frank's:

Place on bun with a bit of lettuce (to get that "lettuce that sits under the wings" feel) and some Stilton (that you melted instead of softened, because you forgot to pay attention to it):

Plate with the now standard "salad and chips" sides:

The sauce was a bit mild for my taste, with minimal nose-running.  The Stilton covered the blue cheese flavor well, but since the sauce wasn't super strong, the cheese kind of overwhelmed it.  In any case, it worked reasonably well to cover the Buffalo chicken experience I was looking for.

Slider Week Tuesday: Shrimp

Not too difficult today:

Since I now know that I like sriracha, I bought a bottle, and used it on these.  The shrimp were just quickly fried in a pan with some green onions.

Lazy salad and chips again.  I used the leftover macadamia paste from yesterday, thinned it out with a bit of oil and vinegar, and used that as the dressing for the salad.