Bacon substitutes

I found myself craving a BLT, but I've never cooked bacon and I wasn't sure we had any. But I did find a can of bacon-flavored SPAM. The result was this:

I'm sure it would have tasted just as good with regular SPAM, but I wanted the vague bacon flavor to remind me of what I wasn't actually eating.

It's worth noting that the SPAM is much more consistent to lay on the bread, as actual bacon requires time-consuming, careful placement for a comfortable-to-wield sammich. And this was one comfortable-to-wield sammich.

"Lots of Good Stuff" Giant Shell Pasta

After finding out about giant pasta, I decided to build upon my previous nutella and pasta food experiment. This time, it's giant shells, and instead of just nutella, I filled some with peanut butter, and a few with marshmallow creme. Then I poured honey all over the top. If it looks like there's not all that much nutella in some of them, that's because it's a tip of the iceberg kind of deal.

Honestly I think this is kind of too intense, and I would not eat this for dinner every day of the week. Maybe only on special occasions or when I'm not thinking clearly.

I rate this food item one out of two.

Fluffy Tapioca Cream

As someone who's only ever made instant pudding, the idea of using a 20-year-old box of Tapioca mix that requires egg and sugar and vanilla extract to be mixed in should have seemed daunting. By the way, here's the box:

It looks older in-person, not quite as vibrant, and you can see the old-fashioned type as you turn it over.

Anyways, it should have seemed daunting. Everyone was saying I should just use the instant mix, and be done in 5 minutes. But no, I wanted this:

And it tastes like tapioca! I'm hoping that when it cools it's also fluffier. That nice bowl of it was made using just three tablespoons of tapioca mix... so next time I'll use double the ingredients and take pictures of the process. Something tells me I should use up that box.

Oh, and yes, I post here now. There can never be enough food-related internotes.

Nutella Spaghetti

I was about to pour alfredo sauce on some spaghetti when I realized the one thing that my pasta was missing: chocolate. So I put some nutella on top of it instead. It turned out just as awesome as I expected it to too.

Here's the recipe:

- cook some pasta
- when you're about to dump tomato sauce or pesto or something on it out of habit, STOP! instead dump nutella on it

I rate this food item two out of two.

Laptop Sound Fix

If you're like me, the biggest problem on your laptop computer is the volume knob. It's always getting in the way when the computer is in your lap, changing the volume way up or down without you knowing. And mine is even worse because for whatever reason, it's messed up and turning it both to the right AND to the left will increase the volume. There's only one choice: to destroy it.



The main issue here is that it's way in there and hard to get at, so you're going to need a few tools to do this. Pliers may seem like what you need at first, but they're just too big for this job, so you should get your hands on some curved arterial forceps. You might think to move down to a thin tweezer like from a swiss army knife, but those just won't provide the kind of grip that you'll need even though they're just about the only thing that's going to fit in there.



So what needs to happen is to cut open some more working space around the top and bottom of the volume knob. A wood saw is pretty good at removing some of the plastic, but you might want to file it after you're done to get rid of any jagged edges. Once you've done that, just take your forceps and get a good grip on the knob, then bend and pull until you bread off enough pieces of it. You're probably not going to be able to remove the core of it unless you actually open up your laptop, which may not be an option for you if you're already ground out the screws on the back in a previous operation. Also, opening up the back will probably mean you should turn the power off first and we want this to be a simple outpatient procedure.



After you're satisfied with how much you've torn apart that volume knob that has been causing you endless torment all these years, it's time to close up the wound. Caulk might be a good choice, but chewing gum is a lot more prevalent, in fact you probably have some in your mouth right this second, so just take off a piece of that and fill up the hole you've made. Once it's dried up, you'll have a nice battle scar to impress chicks with.

A Secret Post

Here is a comic about how ebay works.

Candy Blood

I got a chance to try this Halloween themed candy at some point. [sentences removed for adding nothing to the post] Anyway, it was taking forever to finish eating this thing - I had been going at it for a couple hours, and all the while, the candy blood was giving me this awful burning feeling in the back of my throat. It was also way too sweet. I ended up not eating all of it and having fun refilling and emptying the pouch with water at the sink. At some point later on, I found out that there was supposed to be like 50 servings of candy blood in it, so maybe that had something to do with it.

[Here is a better picture]

Since it's Halloween themed, I'm changing the post date to October. This may or may not be related to the fact that there was no internote in October.

Fried Eggiwegs

I had a bunch of eggs, and since the first thing that comes to mind is to smash them, I started frying eggs in a pan. I smash them open on a flat surface because that seems to work best for me. But since my stove is electric and I had never used one before in my life, I had some problems with frying them at first.



Electric stoves don't make any sense! It's all a flat surface and then it turns red in color on the one spot and gets super hot somehow. Except that you can have your pan sitting on there for like 5 whole minutes and it still won't have reached some sort of temperature equilibrium. I had the dial at number 6 at first, and it felt like it wasn't hot enough to cook anything, so I turned it up to the max, and things were cool for a bit, but then it was way too much! I would butter the pan and before even a second could pass, the butter burned up. I guess in the end, my strategy was to turn the dial to the max, and try to get all my cooking done in that moment of time while it's still getting hotter, but before it's crazy ridiculously hot.



This is what they looked like once I got better at cooking them. I cooked most of them easy over, and after I got the hang of it, I was able to go through a half dozen eggs without breaking any of the yolks. And before eating them, I poured on some barbecue sauce and cock sauce because those make it taste great.

Canned Sardines

I've never had the guts before to eat weird canned fish stuff, although I guess I do love to eat smoked oysters a lot, so I decided to eat canned sardines. King Oscar seems like a really classy guy, so he can't be wrong about flavor. I picked the sardines that were in tomato sauce instead of just oil or water or whatever the other ones were. It just felt like tomato was the only real choice for it.



They smelled really bad at first, but then when I started eating them, I couldn't get enough! From now on, I will associate the smell with excellent flavor.

Foods that are better not crispy

This is a list of foods that I prefer to be flaccid:

- pizza (sometimes)
- taffy
- beef jerky
- souffles
- lunch meats
- gelatin
- soft cheeses
- ramen (sometimes)
- cookies
- bananas
- pop tarts (no wait, I think I like these more crispy)
- bacon
- pears