YJL

No, this is not about the inhumanly, awful Cinnamon Challenge.

Aside: I had no idea someone actually made a Wikipedia page for it. But you really have to watch it to understand how many nuts are out there.

I was watching a cooking video (just click the link and watch first), then totally unexpected ingredient was added:

salt, and cumin, chili powder, and like literally just a little tiny smidgen of cocaine

Its different than Chef Johns humor or double entendre, this is a blooper, a super hilarious slip-up. I have heard of some marijuana cake, but cocaine as spice, thats the first. It takes her literally one second to realize what she have just said, cinnamon and cocaine hardly sound alike, I wonder

Anyway, kids, dont do cinnamon or accept cocaine challenge, they are bad for you! But moms, add some cocaine to spice up your dishes!

I had read some recipes about frying hot peppers, so I wanted to try. I have two kinds of peppers. One is red and hot, another is green and mild heat, that's basically I know all about them.


Before I tried frying, I tested the green chili with baked french fries, because I didn't know how this would turn out. The result was great, the green chili became sweet, so I decided to give red ones a try.

Besides the chili peppers, I also put in two gloves of garlic and some cherry tomato. The tomato were sweeter than ever and frying brought more flavor from charred parts. I left them whole, only poked a few holes with knife, so it's still juicy inside when I bit into it.

The problem was the red hot chili seemed hotter. I made some pasta with the oil after like spaghetti with garlic oil, no need to waste a flavored oil. The oil is spicy and with little garlic flavor and sweetness. I at a fourth of red chili, then drank a whole glass of icy water. My mouth was on fire. Glad I didn't put the whole chili in my mouth.

I was hoping long frying could bring the heat away, but my experiment told me it's not the case. The green ones didn't have heat anymore, what type of chili really matters.

I learned a recipe which basically only needs spaghetti, garlic, and olive oil (+ cheese) to make a pasta dish a few months ago. Since then, I have made it once a while because it's very simple and quick, you virtually only need to wait for spaghetti to cook and you are about to eat.

At first try, I only had garlic fried in the olive oil to release its flavor. You slice a few garlic cloves and fry them in medium-low heat or hot enough but won't burn them. Once they begin to turn brown, that's done.

The second time, I added fresh red chili, I like some heat in my food. This time, I put in some scallions and dry red chili:



I think you can pretty much infuse the oil with any flavors you like to taste with your spaghetti. The dry chili seems to have much stronger heat than the fresh ones. I think onion may also be a good option to flavor the oil.

The best of this dish is you can prepare this oil while you are cooking pasta. When pasta is done, the oil already is waiting, so is your stomach.

This photo was taken from the second time I had this dish You can make more oil than one meal you need, it will stay good for very long time. I like cooking spaghetti in wide pan, you don't need much water than cooking in a pot, also you can use it to mix sauce with the residual heat. Most of all, you only need to wash one pan.



Add some vegetables, especially greens, or other you like, such as mushroom. Everything is cooked in just one pan, it can't get easier than that.

After draining the water, pour back to the pan and add enough flavored oil, one spoonful at a time, mix well until the pasta all coated and glistening. If you use a bowl to eatfor instance, you are hungry like a bear, you use a large bowl for a pack of spaghettithen you can just mix pasta and oil in a bowl, you won't need to wash a super oily pan.



If you are not a vegan, then cheese shall be added as common ingredient. Most of pasta recipes, cheese is essential, so is it in this recipe. But it's totally find without any cheese, at least, fine with me.

It is very easy to cook, well not sure that really counts as cooking. Fifteen minutes to twenty minutes are all you need, and most of cooking time, you are waiting. No salt is added other than in the pasta cooking water, that's only the source of sodium. By my definition, this is a relatively healthy dish if you ignore the amount of oil and the lack of ingredients, though I don't care much about eating healthily.

You can also add some black pepper, but I found that the flavor is already amazing, even with only garlic-infused olive oil. Garlic definitely is one of my favorite ingredients.

Two made from other times:

   

I havent post any cooking video on this blog, but this will be first one, made by smithbitevids, called Chocolate Soufflés with Nougat Whip via Chef John:

Anthony Bourdain has few episodes named Food Porn from No Reservations, but they are totally nothing comparing to this. Just hear the luscious stirring, whipping, pouring, oh man. Even chopping chocolate sounds sexy like hell.

And the visual impact is like there is no tomorrow. Splashing, sprinkling, dipping, dripping, tipping, hooray molee smokie!

Their videos are art.

This is completely accident dish. The recipe (sort of) can be found on Flickr. I also wrote about the background story in the photo page.

Because this is my first time to make noodles, I am not sure how it would turn out. So I cut the noodle wide and I didn't roll the dough to make the noodle very thin. I was afraid of big failure, which they might break to easily. So it looks more like Udon noodles or very wide noodles.

But that doesn't matter, it tastes great and it's slightly chewy which is to my like.

The only thing is not perfect is the cup, it should be ear-less, but the ice tea is okay, though it's still a bit of strange. A regular tea might be more suitable, but I happened to want to make a jar of ice tea.

Next time, I will cut the noodles in thin strips. I wonder how those Soba masters can do that. When I was cutting, I couldn't really cut them very sharply, I don't think it's knife's sharpness problem. I will see next time I make these.

After two failures, I made it at third try:



I wanted to make onion rings but not using eggs and frying method. My first try was using milk as batter, I torn bread with bare hands. A disaster to say the least. The second try used milk and butter, I used blender this time and baked bread to dry out the water. Much better.

I think the coating couldn't get glued on onion is the problem. So, the third time, I baked and blended bread, then baked and blended again. They are pretty fine.



I also added cheese in the batter, so it was thicker.



Using two bowls, so I could cover onion with coating and press the coating tight on onion rings.



I didn't spray oil on rings because I didn't have such thing. But it's good enough for me.

I seem to love cold food recently...

Cold pasta soup

Usually it would be something like pasta salad (cold) or pasta soup (hot).

Fruit salad and tea

Fruit soup

The one great thing about Linux is your can make many easy things happen in simple way with your favorite shell.



Someday, I need to take a nap for about an hour. It turned out with this script:

sleep 1h ; while true; do (aplay /usr/share/sounds/error.wav &) ; sleep 0.5 ; done

It will keep playing the audio every half a second until you press Control+C to terminate this script. I actually didn't put it in a shell script file, just simply run it. You probably noticed that I play the audio in a background sub process, the reason to do that is you can make sure that you terminate the script not the command aplay.



What if you need a precise time? It's easy, too.

while [[ $(date +%H%M) != "1011" ]]; do sleep 1; done && while true; do (aplay /usr/share/sounds/error.wav &) ; sleep 0.5 ; done

It calls date to check the time every a second. Once got the time, it will move to next while loop which plays audio.



Remember to man sleep and man date to check up more options for your needs.



Disclaimer: This post is provided on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. If these two scripts couldn't raise you awareness of whatsoever and caused your loss, it is not my business! It has the possibility that your computer may get damaged if the scripts users are already an alarm clock killer, e.g.






(Hey! the alarm clock, not the chick.)



:-)