Mild Amusement

There are a bunch of everyday tasks around the Mild Home that require waiting some amount of time. Say I put want to put something in the oven, I need to make sure that I take it out after a set amount of time. I mean, bad things happen if you leave food in the oven for a long time. If you're lucky, it's just inedible; if you're unlucky, then the smoke alarm is involved. Quite a few of them involve food (steep the tea for X minutes, uncover the pot after Y minutes, etc.), so that should come as no surprise. However, I recently had to use baking soda and vinegar to help unclog a sink. As I discovered, you don't just dump those things down the sink. You wait 5-10 minutes after mixing those ingredients in the sink, to let them do their thing. Otherwise, it just fizzes for a bit, and nothing really happens. In either case, I needed to wait for a set amount of time. Now, when it comes to setting a timer, I have a few options. There are timers on the stove and on my cell phon...

A few months ago, I tried my hand at making home-made dumplings . It came out all right, and it was definitely passable for a first attempt, but we always said that we should have another go at it. After all, if we liked it all right when we made it with no first-hand experience, it should come out even better after having at least one rep under our belt, right? We found out this weekend. First of all, the Mild Wife helped with the dough preparation this time around. I knew to be wary of making the dough too sticky this time around, but because she has more experience with baking, she was able to guide us through the pitfalls. What really surprised me was just how little water you can/should add at a time. We're talking about a tablespoon at a time when you're trying to make a ball of dough. I mean, I knew not to overwater it from previous experience, but it still surprised me to add in that little water at a time. Still, there was a method to this ( including the trusty sanduk...

I've mentioned here and there that the Mild Wife is a really good cook . I mean, I try to pull my weight and I have a trick or two up my sleeve , but I can't quite make up the differential in time and reps that the Mild Wife has. Basically, she's put in a lot of effort into honing her craft in the kitchen, and it shows. I'm leading with that only because it's the only explanation I can find for some of her inspirations. It's not so much that she's imaginative, it's more that she has inklings that certain ingredients will taste good together. I firmly believe that a good part of the reason for this is that she has worked with these ingredients enough to truly get a grasp on their flavors. Think about it; if you're a carpenter, your experience gives you a good idea what type of wood or nails are best for a particular project. If you then have to build something you've never made before, you can probably guess which materials you could apply. Heck, ...

A couple of years ago, the Mild Wife and I thoroughly enjoyed a trip to Buenos Aires . We have a lot of happy memories about that trip, but one of the more surprising ones was that we had a legitimately good time chowing down on vegetables  at some Asian restaurants. I still somewhat suspect that this may have been a result of the local restaurants near our hotel, but in either case, we genuinely enjoyed those vegetable-heavy meals. One other interesting side effect of this trip was that we also grew to appreciate club soda . I don't quite remember at what point we realized it, but we realized at some point that if we consumed a glass of club soda around meal times, it seemed to help with digestion. I'm sure I can come up with some quasi-logical reason for this, but honestly, I don't know why this is true (it does, however, seem to be true according to WebMd ). All I know is that we felt better if we had more club soda, so we started mixing that in with our meals. Now, it...

Recently, the Mild Wife and I started watching " The Big Family Cooking Showdown " on Netflix. I don't remember whether it was recommended based on previous watching history or if we just decided to pull it up on a lark, but we started watching it nevertheless. If you've ever seen " The Great British Baking Show ," this show has a very similar look and feel. It is a cooking competition, but it's not cutthroat at all. It very much feels like a family-friendly show featuring friendly families. Since this show specifically focuses on home cooking, you get folks cooking things that look like something we might actually attempt to make at the Mild Home. I mean, it can be fun to watch some professional chef cook a giant lobster and top it with caviar and truffle sauce, but I'm never going to make something like that. The stuff that these folks make, though, looks something we might actually attempt to make. We might not make the recipe exactly as is, but w...

Whenever holidays roll around, the Mild Wife and I try to do something to celebrate. We don't necessarily go all out, but we do like to participate in the festivities. We put up Halloween decorations to let the kids know that they're welcome to trick-or-treat at our house, and there was a whole series of posts this last Christmas ( culminating with this one ) about the festivities. Basically, we like to partake in the holidays. Lunar New Year is no exception to this rule, so we usually end up having some form of a celebratory meal and handing out red envelopes to our nieces and nephews. Again, it's just one of those things that we like to do, to honor our heritages and get in on the celebration just a bit. It just makes things a tiny bit more cheerful. This year, we couldn't do some of the usuals. A family gathering seemed unwise given that the pandemic is still a thing, and we didn't want to go to a restaurant, either. So, that basically left us with having a mea...

It's a bit of a running theme in the blog posts around here, but the Mild Wife is a better cook than I am, so it's not uncommon for me to pitch in by doing a lot of the prep work . I can actually make a pretty decent meal from scratch these days, but since the Mild Wife tends to have more of an interest in the process, she often finds the recipes. That usually means that she will take the lead at the stove, whereas I will man the cutting board and the surrounding areas. All in all, it generally works out for us. However, this has had an interesting side effect: I generally know what I'm talking about when it comes to chopping and mincing. I've had to do it a few times, after all. So, when the Mild Wife showed me a video of some celebrity cooking show, I immediately noticed the technique. In this case, it was actually the celebrity's friend at fault, but the lady stood a bell pepper up, with only the tip touching the cutting board. She then proceeded to slice it vert...

As with many people, I tend to spend a lot of time interacting with my coworkers. I mean, it's about a third of your day on any given work-day. Unless you work in an environment where socializing is highly discouraged or you have problematic coworkers, you're eventually going to learn a little bit about them. I know some of their kids names, I've met some spouses, they've met the Mild Wife, and on and on. It's not that I set out trying to make friends with them, it just happened over time. This ultimately means that we end up talking about hobbies or other random bits of life, so the conversation sometimes takes a turn towards daily life. In this instance, the topic turned to food. Early on during the pandemic, one of my coworkers was saying that he was eating a lot of oatmeal. It was something he had available, and finding groceries at the store was a bit of an uncertain proposition. So, I mentioned to him that we had found that miso paste was a quick way to add s...

Over the course of this blog, certain things have come up often enough that they had warranted a series. The " Little Kids Are Awesome " series is probably my favorite one of these (it's up to eleven different entries), but there is a lesser known one about food ingredients that has also started to make a presence. Today's fun is one of those stories . Let's start with adding in a bit more detail about a post from long ago. When the Mild Wife and I went to the food tasting for the Mild Wedding , we had all sorts of fun. However, one detail that I left out was that one of the people there commented that one of the dishes was "really spicy." Since the Mild Wife and I both liked spicy food, we were excited about sampling that dish, and we made a point to give it a shot. As it turns out, the dish wasn't really spicy at all. I don't mean that she and I just had a higher tolerance for spicy food, I mean that we couldn't detect a hint of spiciness a...

Around 18 months ago, I wrote a blog post about a particularly interesting way of making granola . It wasn't the ingredients that led to a raised eyebrow; it was the manner of measuring out the ingredients. In that case, the Mild Wife had used a butter knife to scoop out peanut butter, so that became the rough guide for how much to use. Now, the Mild Wife and I have both looked at enough recipes that we know "however much fits on a butter knife" is not a standard measurement. You will never see that in a cookbook, for example. It's just too variable from person to person, or even from time making it to time making it. In essence, we both immediately recognized that we were playing fast and loose with the rule by describing the recipe in knife-fuls. There was quite a bit of chuckling when I pointed out this style of measuring. It's still a valid way of cooking, though, and it still appears in the Mild Home to this day. The Mild Wife and I joke about how it is the ...

Christmas is one of those holidays that is lined with traditions. From watching Christmas movies to making Christmas cookies , there are lots and lots of traditional activities for celebrating the holiday. Some families also have traditional meals, where certain items make an appearance during the festivities. It doesn't take too much imagination to see how these things happen a few years in a row, and then suddenly it is a family tradition. In the case of the Mild Home, we do appreciate a nice panettone and hot chocolate, but we don't have a go-to recipe yet. Many times we visit our respective families during the holidays, so we have left-overs that we will happily feast on. We did make a seafood paella a couple of years as a means of celebrating, but it didn't stick around as a long-term thing. Basically, we're still experimenting a bit. For this latest go-round, we decided to make a prime rib. We both appreciate it, but it wasn't something we had ever prepared...

Whenever the Mild Wife or I feel like having a snack, there are a few go-to's that we tend to have often. I've mentioned at least one of them before: the peanut butter and nut/fruit mix . In fact, I still have that one fairly regularly. Now, I don't think I can quite explain how these particular items were the ones that became such staples, but over time, we have noticed that we fall back on them. We certainly appreciate the taste of them, or we wouldn't keep eating them. Still, there are a bunch of things that we like eating that we don't have as regularly as some of these snacks. I don't eat mango all the time, for example, even though that's probably one of my favorite fruits. I mention all of this because quesadillas are part of that snack rotation. It's a fairly simple snack to make, and it can be quite filling. All we really need to do is heat the tortilla and cheese on the stove for a little bit, and we're set. In terms of simplicity, it's...

 As I've mentioned a few times lately, we've adjusted the way we cook during the pandemic. To a certain degree, this feels inevitable. After all, lots of things have changed for us during this time, from the way we interact with family members to how long I exercise on work days. In that context, it's not really surprising that we've also had to adjust something that we have to do three times per day. The biggest adjustment has been the ingredients that we get. For a while, we couldn't rely on getting fresh ingredients from the store, so we cooked a lot of canned and non-perishable items. This was basically the period of time that the Mild Wife and I refer back to as " struggle meals " because we ate a lot more rice and beans during that time. We know full well things could have gone a lot worse so we're very grateful to have gotten through that okay, but it still denoted a noticeable change in our cooking and meals. At this point, though, many of th...

As the pandemic has worn on, life has adjusted to what is effectively our new normal. I've mentioned a few of these things on this very blog, as my diet , my pastimes , and even my driving habits have changed as we've all had to adjust to circumstances. We are very fortunate so I'm not complaining, but every now and then, I am reminded that life looks different than it did nine months ago. And every now and then, one of those changes makes me laugh. You see, the Mild Wife and I have focused a lot more time on stuff around the house. Like I said, the pandemic has forced some changes in our routine. It hasn't felt burdensome or anything, but it's just different. We cook more because we can't exactly go out to eat all the time. We spend more time at home, so we try to keep our living space tidy and organized. Heck, I started brewing kombucha because we wanted that particular creature comfort at home. As our attention has shifted, though, the Mild Wife and I have ...

The Mild Wife likes to bake, and she's branched out into various different types of bread and pastries. I've seen her make bread, pizza, and panettonne , among others. Incidentally, if you don't know what panettonne is, it's not exactly the simplest recipe. You have to take some care in order to get it right, but the Mild Wife has knocked out some fairly good ones. Now, I mention this so that you get an idea of how much the Mild Wife appreciates the activity. We haven't been able to do it as much lately (flour has been a little harder to come by), but it is something that comes up around our home. In fact, it's a common enough activity that for a while, we had a sour dough starter that we'd use to bake loaves of bread. The basic idea is that you let the starter grow, and once it's grown large enough, you take a chunk of it to make into dough. The starter continues to grow, and you repeat the process a bunch of times. Now, technically, the starter is...

Now that we've been doing the social distancing thing for a while, we're starting to settle into a new routine. It's still fairly obvious that we're adjusting to the conditions, but we've done a few things enough times that they don't feel out of the ordinary. These things aren't quite automatic at this point, but they are familiar enough that we can do some of them from muscle memory (incidentally, the "21 days to build a habit" thing seems to be a misinterpretation of research) . We're settling into a bit of a groove, basically. The place where that's the most obvious is with meals. We need to eat three times a day, so we get lots and lots of practice cooking and prepping our food. As a result, cooking was probably the one place where we found an equilibrium sooner rather than later. In a nutshell, we found some staples that we liked, ordered them in bulk where possible, and just kept cooking that over and over again. Oatmeal, rice, be...

As I've mentioned several times before on this blog, I have an interesting relationship with cooking. I enjoy doing it, but, frankly, the Mild Wife is better at it. There's no shame in that, that's just how it is. It's also something that's evolving, because there are certain dishes/items that I'm getting halfway decent at (see: the infamous cheesecake ). Still, in terms of general skill level, I'd trust the Mild Wife to put out a delicious meal before I'd trust myself. Now, that doesn't mean that I am completely useless in the kitchen. Generally, I  try to contribute to the process in different ways. It's not uncommon for me to do a lot of the chopping and prep work , so that I still help with the preparation process. And, as that previous blog post pointed out, that particular work is often considered the hard part. So, I don't feel like I'm slacking in my contributions. Still, I feel like there is a sense that comes with having don...

Last time, I described the thought process behind the beverage selection for Friendsgiving  (there were juice boxes). That led to quite a bit of hilarity around the juice boxes, but the juice was not the only item on the menu that led to some full-on laughter. No, the other food managed to make an impression, too. More importantly, it managed to make an impression on the munchkins that were involved with Friendsgiving. I mentioned last time that one of those munchkins was a precocious fourteen month old. I know it's common for parents to gush about their child's accomplishments and potential, but this particular child impressed both the Mild Wife and me by picking up on words and incorporating them into her vocabulary very quickly. She was clamoring for juice a few minutes after walking in the door, and she'd never even heard the word or had the contents before. Like I said, she was a quick study. The really amusing part, though, came after she tasted the food. While s...

I mentioned it recently, but I have a bit of an opinion about valid units of measure. Specifically, I am a fan of the metric system when it comes to temperature . As I mentioned in that post, a system that tells me that the temperature is "negative four degrees" is much better at explaining that it is flippin' cold than one that tells me the temperature is "twenty four degrees." The negative sign matters. Now, as soon as I mentally conceded that the metric system made a ton of sense for temperature, I immediately started thinking that it probably makes sense for other units, as well. I mean, if I'm going to apply the whole "this just makes sense" standard to the ambient temperature, it makes sense to think about mass, volume, and length in the same general way. Why force people to remember that there are sixteen ounces in a pound? Or that, more confusingly, there are eight  fluid  ounces in a cup? The conversion rates just seem arbitrary at that ...

The Mild Wife and I both like to cook, but I don't immerse myself quite as much in the endeavor as she does. I will occasionally suggest an interesting combination of ingredients (grilled onions in a salad is delicious), but she just has a passion for it that I can't match. Why do I say this? Because she doesn't just enjoy cooking, she enjoys learning new recipes, looking at social media posts about food, and the like. To paraphrase the Batman villain Bane , I merely adopted cooking. Now, to be clear, this does not mean that the Mild Wife does all the cooking. I put in my share of effort, to the point where we joke that I am the sous chef . Like I said, I enjoy the activity, and I do like to play with the ingredients to try to come up with something delicious. However, I find new recipes far less often than the Mild Wife. Most of the time, the Mild Wife will find something, and we will try to make it at some point. One of the most memorable instances of this, however, i...