I had a rather uneventful day. Just went to classes and took care of business there. Nothing glamorous. I’m still busy with work stuff and I’m drilling away on that, but I was getting a little bored sitting at the computer so when Lizzie got home I insisted on doing the cooking. It’s always nice having a professional chef in the house and all but most of the time she’s too tired to cook so we don’t exactly have gourmet meals on a daily basis as one might mistakenly expect.

Tonight I made a good old North Dakota hot dish, a recipe I begged my mother to send me at one point. I miss good old home cooking, and sometimes to revisit it I have to take a shot at cooking some of the things my mom cooked. For some reason Lizzie never wants to try, because she’s afraid she won’t make it the same or something. I always loved the hotdishes, no matter their simplicity or culinary illigitamacy. I threw together a good old “Tater Tot Hotdish” Basically all it is is a mishmash of 1 lb. ground beef, 1 can cream of mushroom soup, 1 can Campbell’s Alpha Bet Soup, some rice, topped with a layer of Tater Tots to brown in the oven. Can’t get any simpler than that. Although for some reason it just doesn’t have that mother’s touch to it. And I can never get the tater tots to get crispy like my Mom does!

But basically I make all the simple meals around here. I make the Mac’N'Cheese, ramen noodles, etc. Lizzie just won’t cook that stuff. Strangely, she will eat it though, and usually seems to enjoy it more than anyone probably should. For some reason I always do all the grilling too. Basically Lizzie does all the complicated stuff that I’d probably screw up somehow. I try to help sometimes, but I usually just get booted out of the kitchen. Our kitchen is so small, that there really isn’t enough room for two people. And I hear that I can be a pain in the butt sometimes. I don’t know why that would be.

I’m not saying my mother wasn’t an excellent cook, because she was. I don’t think there was a single thing that she made I didn’t love and don’t currently miss. My mom and Lizzie just come from two very different cooking backgrounds, I guess. My mom grew up on a farm in rural North Dakota, hence the hotdishes and meat & potatoes dishes. Lizzie grew up in Colorado, went to a french-style cooking school here in Minnesota, and has a mother who is obsessed with Italian food. But that’s a good thing, every time I go over to Lizzie’s mom’s place the cooking is amazing. She made a homemade pizza a couple weeks ago, it was absolutely delicious. Italian style, best pizza I’ve ever had. Regular old pizza will never be the same.

So I’m surrounded by excellent cooks, I’m very lucky. Lizzie respects that I refuse to eat fast food, so we never go to fast food places. It’s not that I’m a big health freak or anything, I just don’t like how most of it tastes. There’s a couple of fast food places I’ll go to. I don’t mind KFC so much, and Taco John’s is okay if you stay away from the stuff with ground beef. Something about the beef used at fast food places just absolutely doesn’t settle well with me. I wasn’t always that way, I used to love McDonald’s. At one point it just started to taste really bad to me.

There’s a film out called “Supersize Me” that I’ve been wanting to see. It’s a documentary about the fast food industry, a subject that interests me for some reason. I read Eric Schlosser’s book “Fast Food Nation” a couple years ago, and that really shed some light on why it’s definitely a good idea not to eat at fast food places. I’d recommend reading that, I think it would be interesting for anyone to read. It has some gross out parts where it’s describing the slaughterhouses, but it’s nothing you’ll lose your stomach over. It’s interesting knowing what’s going on behind the scenes while all this stuff is happening just not many miles away from where I live. The most disturbing part, I think, are the worker conditions. That was the part that was most compelling for me.

If you’ve never watched the Food Network on cable/dish (which seems to be on constantly while Lizzie is home) check out Alton Brown’s show “Good Eats.” He’s got to be the most entertaining and brilliant cooking show host I’ve ever seen. He’s absolutely hilarious yet so simple to understand. Every time I watch that Emeril Legasse guy everything goes right over my head, Alton’s stuff actually sinks in even though he’s discussing pretty complicated stuff. Tonight I learned about the history of corn and learned how to make my own homemade corn dogs, creamed corn, and cornbread. He made it look so easy.

Since I’m on the topic of food, I thought I’d share this Olympic-themed Cheerios box that I designed this week for a packaging class. I’m fairly happy with it so far. You just have to imagine this folded up in to a cereal box currently, I have to print it and assemble it and take photographs of it still. That’s one of my to-dos for tomorrow. It was actually really fun. I photographed a spoonful of regular Cheerios, then manipulated the image so the Cheerios are the colors of the Olympics rings logo. Of course you can’t have an Olympic theme without the American flag and on the back I made a collage of flags. The most interesting part was when I was doing the Nutrition Facts on the side, and when looking at an actual Cheerios box I noticed that all their claims at “Only 110 Calories Per Serving” doesn’t include the milk. Once you put the milk in that number skyrockets. Interesting. Anyhoo, here it is:

I should get off to bed, I have classes in the morning. Tomorrow shouldn’t be a very busy day event-wise either. Just work, work, and more work. Talk to you again soon.