Skip to main content

Called Out

If you've been following any of my posts lately, there's a good chance you've heard me talk about cooking more often lately. Not surprisingly, my real-life conversations involve the same topic (I'm nothing if not consistent). The part that I especially like to point out is that I like plating the food, usually with the joke that "I get to play with the food."

In some ways, this is a bit of a departure for me. I haven't traditionally spent tons of time in the kitchen, so it's not like I've had tons of opportunity to realize that I enjoy this. So, in some ways, it amuses people because it is new and different for me. Hell, I'm amused by all of this for the same basic reason.

Now, by itself, that would all be just an amusing factoid. However, apparently I've mentioned that I like plating the food enough times that my siblings and their spouses all decided that my birthday gift should revolve around this. They got me precision tools in order to do this properly, as well as a book that has recipes/ideas. I didn't even realize that there were precision tools for this sort of thing, but I have a set now (if you're curious, Amazon carries a set similar to mine).

When I opened it, my sister-in-law also joked that she now expected to see pretty pictures of all of the food I was going to prepare. Well, hell. I just got called out (I'm reminded of the Russell Peters bit about having your parents call your bluff).

So, I figured I had to step up my game. Not only did I have to keep plating the food in interesting ways, I now had to provide proof of said interesting plating. I had to start taking pictures of my creations. Game on.

I basically started with a couple of salads and shared those with the folks who got me the presents:

I actually added some oranges to this, but forgot to take the final picture

My brother said this looked like an alien
  There was quite a bit of laughter when I sent those pictures, as everyone was amused that I put my gifts to use.

  My favorite, though, actually came from a few days prior. Since the Mild Girlfriend has been putting all manner of vegetables into the food and making me inadvertently lose weight, I decided that I would do the exact opposite. I present to you, the pure protein counter to "vegetable forward:"
That's chicken surrounded by ham. Protein forward, thank you very much
  This food picture thing is kind of fun, I tell you.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Pink

Way back in high school, there was a male teacher that all the girls thought was attractive. It was an open secret that a bunch of them had crushes on him. In fact, the school newspaper even did an article about him that quoted some girl saying, "he's so cute, he even makes pink look good." Yes, he had worn a pink shirt to school one day, and it had apparently been a big hit. I was reminded of this story when my sister-in-law suggested that she would choose pink as the color for her wedding and bridal party. I don't think I've ever made a color look good before, but I remember thinking, "well, I know it's possible to not look stupid in pink as a straight guy, I guess I can try." And I think that's almost exactly what I told her. I also happened to own a gray suit, so I figured the combination would look all right. However, I was pretty much the only one willing to play along. My sister-in-law's brothers wanted absolutely no part of th...

Dreams

Normally, I don't eat very many sweets. I tend to eat pretty generous portions, but I generally prefer savory food over sweet. In fact, I usually prefer things half as sweet when possible. My preference doesn't have anything to do with health reasons, it's just one of those things that I've always liked better. That said, I do inevitably eat dessert, particularly if I'm out with other people. My stance towards dessert is roughly equivalent to those who are social drinkers . If other people want to munch on something for dessert, I'm not about to cross my arms and refuse. That'd be just a tad gauche. So, I do eat some dessert. I even have a few standby favorites that I'll usually order when presented with them (brownies, creme brulee, and apple pie). But left to my own devices, I'm not about to go hunting for dessert. Apparently, this means that the sugar can really mess with my system under the right circumstances. As I've discovered, ...

New York City Trip (Day 1)

After my crappy flight , I was now in Newark, New Jersey at 7AM on a Friday morning. I had done a little bit of reading up, so I knew which bus I needed to take and where I was going to get off. All in all, getting into the city was surprisingly easy. I suppose speaking the language does make things simpler. Through no real planning of mine (a theme of the trip, at least on my part), I picked one of the later bus stops at which to get off, Grand Central. I actually just figured that getting off at Grand Central would give me options, and heck, it's called Grand Central. That just screamed "decent place to disembark that might be close to some stuff" to me, so that's where I got off. However, it also meant that we drove down 42 nd St to get to my bus stop. That just happens to be a big street, and it gave me a glimpse of Times Square as we drove by. My bus stop choice had accidentally given me a rough layout of the city. Go me. I had about 6 hours to kill...