Jenn Dolari @dolari@driveinsaturday.org

Question for the bakers out there.

I've been trying to make cinnamon rolls for a while now, and except for one time, they've all come out like this...where the rolls swell, but only at the bottom and they come out less like rolls and more like "mounds."

Can anyone tell me where I'm going wrong here? The bread is good, and the rolls are tasty...they're just shaped badly.

Advice?

This Week's Fancy Pants Meal: Yeto's Superb Soup

My unexpected favorite cold weather soup. You wouldn't expect pumpkin, feta and salmon to make a good soup, but oh my goodness does it ever. AND it's Zelda inspired, which makes it doubly happy making for me.

There are some substitutions from the original recipe from Cucco's Kitchen. I use canned pumpkin filling instead of fresh pumpkin as that's fairly seasonal around here. And I had to substitute chicken broth for fish broth, as fish broth is very rare around here, and certainly not available during a last minute 12:30AM grocery run.

# Yeto's Superb Soup

Cucco's Kitchen

2.0 pounds canned pumpkin
4.0 cloves garlic (minced)
0.5 cup white onion (chopped)
1.0 cup carrots (chunked)
2.0 whole potatoes (chunked)
1.0 cup celery (chunked)
4.0 cups fish stock
8.0 oz feta cheese
1.5 cups heavy cream
salt
pepper
1.3333333333333333 pounds salmon

1 - Add the onions and 3/4 of the garlic to a pot with some olive oil and cook under medium high heat until brown.
2 - Add in pumpkin and add fish stock. Cook at a simmer covered for 20min.
3 - Add your stock to a food processor or blender along with the goat cheese and heavy cream. Purée until well incorporated.
4 - Add some oil to a pot and add the rest of the garlic till it browns.
5 - Add the rest of the vegetables and sauté them for 3 minutes.
6 - Then add in the purée and cook on low heat covered for 5 to 10 minutes.
7 - Cut 1/4 inch deep slices into your salmon on the skin side, and add salt and pepper inside the cuts.
8 - In a pan on med-high heat add the salmon and cook skin side first for 4-5min.
9 - Flip, cook for 3 more min and then flip back to skin side.
10 - Take off heat and rest for 3 min.
11 - Cut your salmon into pieces and add to your soup.
12 - Season the soup to taste.

9 servings at ~400 calories per serving

Calories 417
Total Fat 24g
Total Carbohydrate 21g
Protein 23g

#thisweeksmeals #cooking

The weirdest thing for me about prolonged sub zero weather is ice.

These ice pellets fell shortly before the temps dipped below freezing, about two days ago. It's not gone above freezing since. My brain had trouble comprehending that I've can get to a point that it won't melt. The first time I saw that in Pennsylvania, after nearly a week of sub zero temps, my brain broke.

Dammit, Try Guys.

It's 10F/-12C out there.

Since the beginning of 2022, I've made a big effort to digitize all my archive of...everything (and re-digitizing some of my older stuff).

I've been concentrating on optical media since I started, and after almost two years, I've hit my first milestone: all my audio CDs are re-encoded. I will likely have all my CD-ROMs also ripped shortly.

The Blu-Rays and DVDs not so much. Oh my goodness, the DVD stack is HUGE.

I was glad to know her, and sad to see her go.

It's going to get very cold. That means it's time. TIME FOR YETO'S SUPERB SOUP.

Looks like it'll be cold, but snowless. Still gonna grab groceries early Thursday, though - Any rain or snow that freezes later in the day is just gonna freeze solid and stick around until at least Wednesday.

[Thoughts Before Bed]

Pre-transition Jenn at 13: "Oooh, racy! I wonder if I can get away with drawing this on my school book covers."

Post-transition Jenn at 49: "If I sat that way, I'd lose all my feeling in my lower legs. YOU GIRLS ARE GONNA CRAMP YOUR CALVES SITTING THAT WAY."

I made iced tea that tastes EXACTLY my grandmother's iced tea.

I never really knew how she made it, but all I did this time was boil a teapot full of water with TEN teabags, pour the tea into a large one gallon pitcher which I then filled with water...but left the tea bags in to steep while it cooled.

Sucralose and lemon, and it tastes JUST like hers. I guess she left the tea to seep a REALLY long time.

Well, my power is out, my dinner is frozen and the microwave unusable. Time to actually use one of these for the reason I got them!

Tonights Sunday Night Movie

Cindy Morgan
1954-2023

I watch a lot of anime in my house, sometimes very late at night. Anime has a LOT of screaming, and I sometimes wonder if the neighbors can hear it.

And I really wonder what they think when they hear it at the same time my house lights turn red, and you can see that from the windows.

This Week's Fancy Pants Meal: Skillet Lasagna.

Not quite a lasagna, more of a Hamburger, Spaghetti Sauce casserole. The chicken breast slices don't really do anything lasagna like to this but does bring the carb count way down.

It's tasty though. I'd do it again, but without the expectation of it being lasagna like.

# Skillet Lasagna

Quick & Easy Ketogenic Cooking

1.0 pound ground beef
2.0 tsp sea salt
24.0 oz marinara sauce
4.0 slices roast chicken breast (deli slices)
1.0 cup mozzarella (shredded) (divided into portions)
1.0 tsp oregano

1 - In a 10-inch cast-iron skillet, brown the beef over medium-high heat, seasoning it with the salt, until cooked through, about 5 minutes, breaking up the meat with a spatula as it cooks.
2 - Add the marinara sauce and stir well to combine.
3 - Remove the sautéed beef to a bowl.
4 - Layer the sliced chicken breast on the bottom of the skillet.
5 - Top the chicken with a half of the shredded cheese.
6 - Scoop the beef on top of the deli meat to create an even layer.
7 - Top with the remaining half of cheese and sprinkle with the oregano.
8 - Cover and heat on low until the cheese is melted.

5 servings at ~400 calories per serving
Calories 430
Total Fat 23g
Total Carbohydrate 19g
Protein 25g

Yields 4 servings normally

#thisweeksmeals #cooking

While it may be for a female alien civilization at war with its men, I'm glad to see Lisa Hayes managed to find employment after that whole SDF-2 debacle on Earth.

It's looking more and more like we're getting into Yeto's Superb Soup temperatures. AND SNOW! FINALLY!

Comics are coming.

As part of my big backup, I decided to gather up all the hard drives sitting in my closet, sort them by how old they are, and then reshuffle all my backups so the oldest backups use the oldest drives. The old backups are good to have, but if I'm gonna lose one to a hardware issue, best it be an old drive.

I'm kinda glad I did it, because it turns out the drive that originally held my 2017-2019 backups went bad AFTER I pulled stuff off it. Originally, I encrypted that drive with BitLocker, and apparently removing BitLocker on the drive trashed the way the drive is set up. Any write access hung Windows, and Linux just wouldn't even find the drive. I couldn't fix the issue with a low-level format, so that drive is toast.

Secondly, I have a whole extra hard drive I didn't know about, which is 6TB of blank space. That's at least 4 years of future backups there, so I should be good until 2029 for new drives. :)

Also, I think it's hilarious that my 2006-2008 backups all fit on 250GB while 2018-2020 filled a 4TB drive.

The backup had the pre-crash copy of the Recipe Database! I'm saved! WOO!

Next time, delete the incremental backups AFTER the full backup!