Jenn Dolari @dolari@driveinsaturday.org

He's still alive! And dare I say taller and with bigger leaves? I've been leaving him out on the patio to get sun and and fresh air. Today while I was working in the living room, I bought him in to spend a little time with him.

Yes, he's now a pet as much as an ingredient. I did pick one of the leaves to taste, and sure enough, that's holy basil. Hope he didn't mind.

And yes, he is a he. I'm getting "he" vibes from the plant, and I've been casually calling him my "beautiful boy" so yeah. Boy plant.

So as I spend time more and more in VR, I find more and more that the household servers are disrupted. This is because I run all my stuff off the office machine and the servers work in Linux. The VR, though, only works in Windows. So I go into VR, I lose all my servers.

Last night, I finally moved my file and Plex servers over to my living room machine. It's always on as is, rarely gets used, and while underpowered, it works just fine to serve files and transcode video. And now I can jump into VR without losing the house servers.

There was a side effect I didn't expect, though - I can now pipe live TV through the house via my Plex server. I don't watch much live TV, and mostly just use it for news, but I always had an issue "piping" that video to my office computer.

Usually, I have my TV hardware record the video to a file in the living room, and then I watch that file in the office. Roundabout way, but it works. But now, with the Plex server out there, I can turn on Plex, tell it "Channel 7" and poof, I get channel 7 in the office.

Also - Whose Line in the office is very nice. :)

Thoughts Before Bed:

Went out to see if I could catch a glimpse of tonight's Aurora. Didn't get any because of cloud cover...but what I did get was rather lovely....

There is Indian food in Monroe. WHY WAS I NOT NOTIFIED IMMEDIATELY!

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....