Jenn Dolari @dolari@driveinsaturday.org

This Week's Fancy Pants Meal: End of Days Bolognese

As I continue to mine my YouTube cooking channels for recipes, I came across this one from "Nat's What I Reckon." I figured I'd give his Bolognese a try.

It's good, if a little sweet for me. I dunno if that's because I tend not to like a sweet tomato flavor or not...I salt my pizza. But the carrots certainly made it sweeter. It was very tasty, though, and I'd certainly make it again.

This makes a lot, since it's also really a sauce recipe, not a dish recipe, so scale accordingly.

Recipe follows. In the spirit of "Nat's What I Reckon" I kept the recipe in his very...specific...style. Get the kids out of the room. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw_Ze9zIafM )

# End of Days Bolognese

Nat's What I Reckon

3.0 stalks celery
2.0 whole carrots
1.0 whole red onion
200.0 grams pancetta
500.0 grams ground beef
500.0 grams ground pork
300.0 grams tomato paste
2.0 cups chicken stock
1.0 cup milk
1.0 cup red wine
2.0 tbsp butter
2.0 tbsp vegetable oil
1.0 sprig rosemary
salt (to taste)
pepper (to taste)
parmesan (grated) (to taste)
dried parsley (to taste)
52.0 ounces spaghetti

1 - Right, so dice the onion, dice the carrot, dice the celery, bang in a bowl.
2 - I'm gonna put the pancetta in there. You can put bacon in there as long as the fuckin' bacon or pancetta isn't fuckin' zucchini. So once you've cut that up bung it in the same bowl
3 - Right, so once it's cut up, fuck off over to the stove.
4 - Right, so get yourself a big pot or pan crank the heat up and fuckin' bang it on then.
5 - Then bang in some butter, a little splash of oil, then bang this shit in (the onion/carrot/celery/pancetta).
6 - Give it a kick around the butter and oil keep your pan nice and hot. You want to fry the fuckin' shit out of it.
7 - Next add the beef and the pork. So the idea is to try and fry all that off. There'll be a lot of water and piss in it that you'll try and cook off. This might take a sec but it's worth it. A hot tip for breaking up minces: use a whisk - it breaks it off evenly. Don't worry if it sticks to the bottom of it, once we bung the wine in that'll fuckin' sort that out.
8 - Right, see here's a moment we can choose to put a bit of rosemary in. If you don't want to put rosemary then don't worry about it. You can put thyme in, you can put a couple of fuckin' things in. Fuckin' put the whole rosemary thing in. It'll fall apart. You'll find the stick, doin't worry about it.
9 - See that watery shit? You want to cook that out. Keep cooking it till it's frying. It's not the fuckin' the end of the world if you don't, it's just better if you do.
10 - Right. once you fry the liquid off then fuck it up with some wine. Make sure you do this in the right order. Don't fuckin' put the stock in and then put the booze in. If the booze...just fuckin' don't.
11 - So once the booze is cooked off a bit, add the tomato paste. Stir that through.
12 - Next is the bit that I know fucks with your head but just trust me. Put the milk in and then add your stock, a good pinch of salt, a good crack of pepper, and bang in a couple of bay leaves. Give it a stir.
13 - Turn the heat down, bang the lid on it, and cook it for fuckin' as long as you like. The longer you cook it the nicer it is. Minimum 45 minutes, maximum forever. Just keep giving it a stir every now and then it you'll be alright.
14 - Right, so while that's cooking salt the fuck out of some boiling water and bang some pasta in it.
15 - Check on your sauce. If it looks a bit dry, add some more stock to it.
16 - If you look on the pasta package and it says 12 minute pasta I cook it for 11 minutes Better to undercook pasta then overcook.
17 - Right, I'd drain the pasta bang it back in the pot, ladle in some sauce, give it a kick around in there, and fuckin' serve it up champ!
18 - Grate a bit of cheese on it. Grate a lot of cheese on top.
19 - Chop up a bit of parsley, if you like. Put some of that bullshit on it.

Makes 26 servings at ~400 calories per serving

Calories 499
Total Fat 13g
Total Carbohydrate 46g
Protein 16g

#cooking #thisweeksmeals

So I have a Yen Ta Fo recipe, and, ho boy, I'm gonna wait to make this until after I have a job. I gotta buy a LOT of stuff for it.

[Thoughts Before Bed]

So with my avatar pretty much finished, with both jeans-and-sweater look as well as a tank-top and jeans look and a tanktop and boxers look, she's pretty much all finished.

I'm noticing I take a whole lot more selifies in VR than I ever did in real life. On top of that, I often hang out in my cabin wearing the boxers-and-tanktop look.

It's odd - I finally feel comfortable in my skin, as it were - and suddenly, I'm taking more pictures and getting very comfy with the body I gave myself. That avvie is still not 100% what I want, but it's so close I'm fine with it. And to be honest, how many of us are 100% what we want? I'm fine with 83% considering my meat body is down there at about 13%.

It also doesn't hurt that my avvie looks about thirty years younger than I do, but I DIDN'T HAVE THAT CUTENESS WHEN I WAS 20.

One of the few desk toys I kept around from my Nintendo days.

After last week's success with bread, I decided to try one more time. Nothing special. Just white bread. Followed a video super tightly, ignoring time suggestions and going by matching what the video was showing.

I actually overworked the dough twice. I threw it out each time and started over - if this is going to be my last loaf of homemade bread, I may as well just burn up the ingredients. The third time seemed to come out okay and matched the video I was watching.

I let it rise twice, again, ignoring the time suggestions and going by poke test and doubled sizes. Baked it as the video said, again ignoring the time suggestions and going by seeng if it matched the video.

And it's still too dense and super chewy.

So I'm finally done with bread making. It's been two years, and whatever I'm doing wrong, I can't figure it out. While I can make a pretty decent pastry bread, I'll leave the loaf-of-bread-making sorcery to the professionals and buy bread from here out.

Please don't die, little guy. I was never good at keeping plants, but I'm gonna try....

Did some vegetable harvesting today with members of A Supportive Community For All at First Light Farm. Grabbed some cucumbers and tomatoes. Some of these went straight into a salad that night. Farm-to-Table in under 10 hours....

When I found out they had some holy basil, I asked for some. Thinking I'd only get enough for a meal, I was gifted an entire plant. So this is my new roomie. Now I gotta figure out how to keep her alive. I don't have the best green thumb....

This is actually not bad, and tastes like a Dutch processed chocolate soda. Surprisingly good.

But ho boy is it rich. About halfway through the bottle I was done with it. It's good Oreo flavor...but it's a LOT of Oreo flavor.

Thoughts Before Bed

Watching some Star Trek for Star Trek Day. While Trek is officially 58 years old, this episode is pushing 60....

Made a special treat last night off some Carne Guisada. Bare bones, but bare bones is still super good. I can never judge how long to stew it, but it usually comes out good regardless....

Finding a reliable source of good watermelon out here is changing my meal planning. Here we see four Jenn sized servings of watermelon....

This Week's Fancy Pants Meal: Creamy Pancetta Pasta

This was that crazy recipe I mentioned a few days ago that was 3100 calories per serving. In order to not die for 600% of the Recommended Daily Allowance of Fat, I took the recipe and removed the spaghetti from the equation and then broke it down to something more manageable.

I do think this recipe is really for a large amount of sauce, and they added spaghetti to the recipe because they did it in the video. Once it broke down to 10 servings, I then added back an appropriate amount of spaghetti.

What I ended up with was a pretty good creamy parmesan sauced spaghetti. If you like parmesan, you're gonna like this cause it's got a MASSIVE amount of it in the sauce. Careful with the saly and pepper, the parmesan is pretty salty as it is.

Served hot, it's great and creamy. But if it cools too much the sauce will congeal due to the amount of cheese in it. Reheating it also didn't seem to work real well, coming out more oily than creamy. In the future, I'd make it for immediate eating, but not for meal prep.

Yes, the recipe really did say "Boom Skiddly Bop."

# Creamy Pancetta Pasta

Mythical Kitchen
10.0 servings

0.5 pound pancetta (diced)
3.0 cloves garlic (minced)
1.0 cup heavy cream
salt (to taste)
pepper (to taste)
8.0 ounces parmesan
10.0 ounces spaghetti

1 - Cook pasta as per box instructions.
2 - Add pancetta and garlic to a pan and cook until pancetta is crispy and the fat has rendered.
3 - Scoop out pancetta and garlic and set aside.
4 - Add cream to pan and heat over very low heat.
5 - Grate in a hefty amount of cheese and add salt and pepper.
6 - Add in cooked pasta and pancetta and garlic and toss.
7 - Boom skiddly bop, pasta’s done.

Makes 10 servings at ~400 calories per serving
Calories 395
Total Fat 26g
Total Carbohydrate 22g
Protein 14g

Normally only uses 2 ounces of spaghetti for one serving, but that could cause...death.

#thisweeksmeals #cooking

I really love the Breakfast MREs and wish they did more. This one had a maple muffin top (aka a pancake) with syrup , and maple bacon flavored spam slice. They used to also come with dehydrated cereal.

I can see why these could be comfort food for those out in the field. It's NOT quite what you get at home, but the flavors are there.

[Thoughts Before Bed]

One of the things become more and more apparent as I dig deeper and deeper into VR is the feeling of "embodiment."

I think I talked about how a few weeks ago, I locked my avatar into a T-Pose in order to work on her hair. I accidentally jumped into that locked body and had a minor panic when my movements weren't moving the avatar.

A few days ago, there was a major change in how Resonite animates it's avatars, and my avatar's movements were literally out of control. Everything was over driven, and my legs were stomping and moving far too jerkily and too powerfully.

It genuinely upset me because "this is not how I move." I spent two days talking with people on how to fix this, installing pieces and fixing movements. And while it's still not 100%, it's far closer to what it was.

But the tought process as I was doing this was "my body is not working." Not "my avatar isn't working" but "my body isn't working." The same feeling I got when my pinched nerve and suddenly my arm just wouldn't work anymore.

And I began thinking "is this how folks with dystonia feel? They try to move their arm a certain way, but the muscles and nerves don't do it correctly?"

Embodiment, proper embodiment, is a wierd sensation in VR. I know it's not real. And yet I react as it if it is. The pic below was literally me sitting in bed, as my avatar was sitting in bed, and realizing "these hands are MY hands."

Of all the movies I'd love more information about its preproduction, it's TRON. The concept art dating back to when it was going to be a traditionally animated movie points to a pretty altered story.

A design point I really would have loved to see in the movie is that you can see the MCP castle from EVERYWHERE because it's so huge. Something I think about when I see Mt Ranier and realize it's 70 miles away.

BRING BACK BIG GLASSES YOU COWARDS THEY WERE ADORABLE

Non-Fiction on the Left, Fiction on the Right.

Personal life philosophy.....

Tonight feels like a Disney Channel Special Sci Fi Double Feature Night, so tonight, we're watching The Black Hole and Tron.