Chicken Dog Redemption

Prices subject to change

Some foods just suck. It's best that you learn this fact now and accept it, instead of living a lifetime of foolish optimism only to have your heart broken on the regular by white chocolate. And let's be honest: few things strike as much fear into the hearts of a family than the words "chicken dogs." There's something just kind of...off about them. They're doing their absolute best to convince you that they're totally hot dogs, but all it takes is one bite to remind you that they definitely aren't. Maybe it's something in the texture. They're also crazy cheap. I'm pretty sure that in some of the more sausage-heavy states in the union, it's illegal to charge somebody for chicken dogs. Ending up with chicken dogs is price enough. Which got me thinking that if there were some way to actually make these jellied chicken tubes tasty, it could be an absolute game changer. Fortunately for all of us, I apparently have the kind of free time necessary to make that absurd pipe-dream a reality.

Ingredients:

1 pkg Chicken Dogs
1 32 oz. can Crushed Tomatoes
1 standard issue Onion
1 Bell Pepper
2 cloves Garlic
3 cups Water
1.5 cups Green Lentils
1/2 tsp Cumin
1/2 tsp Oregano
1/4 tsp Black Pepper
1/4 tsp Cayenne Pepper
1/4 tsp Cardamom 
1 average-sized human's pinch of Saffron
Salt
Oil
Cilantro

This dish has layers, both literally and figuratively, but don't let that freak you out. There are pretty much three distinct parts: the lentils, the sauce, and the chicken dogs. It sounds overwhelming, but I cooked it in like 25 minutes, and I didn't even have this recipe to guide me. Also, I had to walk to the store to buy ingredients. In the cold. Uphill, both ways. So step one is to just slow your roll and calm yourself down using whatever combination of breathing, meditation, and opiates you like. Now It's time to make some lentils, and since lentils are pretty much just an uppity kind of split pea, that means we're gonna spend some time washing them. So rinse your lentils and pull out any weird things that may be in there like small stones or tiny tiny bears. Then throw them (the lentils) in a pot along with your water, saffron, and possibly a pinch of salt. Some people say that adding salt in to your lentils too early will make them mushy, and you should add salt in after they cook. I don't know if that's true or not, but I do know that it's a very small amount of extra work that I have no interest in. Follow your heart. Bring your pot of possibly doomed lentils to a boil, then cover them and cook on low for about 15-20 minutes.

It's been pointed out that a red plate wasn't the best aesthetic
choice, but I'm not made of plates, dag nabbit.

Chop your onion into chunks and, using a deep pan, saute those chunks in oil and a pinch of salt over medium heat. Let them cook down for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, before adding in your chopped bell pepper along with your cumin, black pepper, cayenne, cardamom, oregano, and another pinch of salt. Stir that nonsense together and cook it down for another couple minutes before adding in your garlic, which you've totally minced by now. You can tell you're on the right track if your entire kitchen smells amazing at this point. Let your garlic join in the fun and mingle for about a minute before dousing everything with your crushed tomatoes. Now that your vegetable party has become a pool party, stir it together to get everyone mingling, and keep it on medium heat for about 5 minutes. During this time, take some oil and get it nice and hot in a pan. Then, carefully because the gods of grease fires and third degree burns owe you a smiting, add in your chicken dogs. Let them crisp up for about a minute and a half on each side. They'll bubble up a little bit. This is normal. Well, it's not normal, but it's normal for weird chicken pseudo-sausages. Now it's time to just stack everything together. Lay some lentils down on a plate, slather them with some of your sauce, and then top the whole thing with your crispy chicken dogs. Chop up a little cilantro, throw it on top, and call it a day. Or night, or whatever. I'm not judging.

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Who doesn't love a nice gourd lobotomy?

It's the end of October, which means that it's that time of year again. That time of year when we have feasts and celebrations, sprinkle the blood of an animal sacrifice on our doorway, and light some bonfires to ensure good luck and keep our cattle alive through the winter. Or at least that's how we did it back in the middle ages in various Celtic countries. Nowadays we celebrate Samhain mostly by freaking out about somebody slipping a razor blade surreptitiously into our kids' M&Ms, and by dressing up as a sexy meerkat. Oh, and pumpkins. We carve human-ish faces into pumpkins, kind of like some sort of grotesque gourd serial killer, and then leave the mutilated pumpkins outside of our houses as a warning to the other vegetables. Which means we're left with the classic serial killer dilemma: what to do with the goopy insides that we methodically removed from our victims.

Ingredients:

1 Pie Pumpkin (A pie pumpkin is a pumpkin typically used for pie making. We've genetically bred them to have characteristics that make them ideal. If sentient gourds from outer space ever visit the Earth, this is what will spark intergalactic war)
1/4 tsp Chili Powder
1/4 tsp Garlic Powder
1/4 tsp Onion Powder
A largish human's pinch of Salt

 The first thing you're going to need to do is dismember an innocent pumpkin. But I've been pretty open about that up to this point and you've made it this far, so I'm going to assume that you're OK with that. So let your pumpkin say goodbye to its loved ones, eat a final meal, and then chop its head off like your name is Robespierre. Or the guy who killed Robespierre. Either way. The point is, pull out all of those gross pumpkin innards. This is where we encounter our first problem. Namely, the fact that pumpkin innards like being innards, and have little-to-no interest in making the leap towards being outards. So, using some unholy combination of kitchen implements, your hands, and more gumption than you can shake a stick at, just do your best. Remember, they say that nobody's perfect. Which just goes to show that there really isn't any excuse for coming in second place. Take your pumpkin guts (Or maybe pumpkin brains? I never really thought about it before) and separate the seeds from the other nonsense. Rinse your seeds off and then get ready for the trouble you're going to have with the rest of the ingredients.

Perfect for snacking while you watch TV, read
a book, or lie to friends about reading books

Haphazardly throw the rest of the ingredients on top of your seeds and mix them together. Not everything has to be a challenge. Spread your seasoned seeds down on a baking sheet. It's important to keep them as close to a single layer as possible. If your pumpkin is abnormally fertile or you're just doubling the recipe, use multiple baking sheets rather than clumping your seeds all together. Bake them in a 300 degree oven for about 30 minutes, making sure to wangjangle them around every ten minutes or so to get even crispiness and no burning. And there you have it! Delicious spiced pumpkin seeds! You also have an entire hollow pumpkin which you can mutilate to your heart's content and leave around neighborhood. Or you can cook it. But more on that next week. Happy cultural appropriation holiday!

Lettuce Wraps

Not pictured: the 20+ boxes behind me

Food has a magical quality. A good home-cooked meal can help make you feel at home even when you're on some godforsaken rock somewhere waiting for your connecting flight to some garbage place like New Jersey. That's why it's a little disappointing that my kitchen at my new apartment isn't quite functional. You see, there was a mix up where the gas company actually wanted to read the meters, but the meters were hidden from passing meter bandits behind a locked door to which I don't have a key. Who could have guessed, right? At least those pesky meter marauders won't catch me with my metaphorical pants down. Or eating any food cooked in my kitchen. But times of hardship show us what we're really made of. Innovation, determination, and several other importation "ations" can let you have the comfort of a delicious home-cooked meal despite not having the ability to technically cook. Oh, and for those of you interested, it turns out I'm mostly made of oxygen and reruns of 90s sitcoms.

Ingredients:

1 Rotisserie Chicken (Yes, grocery store chicken is totally a thing. In dire circumstances it can be super useful, and if you take the time to doctor it up a bit it can be tasty and versatile as well. But if you're not careful you'll end up regularly eating grocery store chicken. And that's exactly what my hardy forebears left their turnip infested homeland to avoid)

1/3 cup Coconut Milk

3 TBSP Natural Peanut Butter (In general, you're looking for peanut butter with little-to-no added sugars. If you can't find it or don't want it, just leave out the honey. Oh, retroactive spoiler alert. There'll be honey)

1 tsp grated Ginger

1 tsp grated Garlic

1 tsp Rice Wine Vinegar

1/2 tsp Soy Sauce

1/2 tsp Honey

Lettuce (You're looking for any lettuce with leaves that are big and pliable enough to use as a food receptacle. I like a little bitterness and crunch, so I used radicchio and some bibb lettuce. You use what you like)

Green Onions

Since we're not, technically speaking, cooking anything here, the first step is to get a bowl. We're mixing a bunch of crap together, and you can't mix nonsense without some kind of bowl. Winston Churchill said that. So take your British bowl of freedom and unceremoniously dump in your peanut butter, coconut milk, ginger, garlic, vinegar, soy sauce, and honey. Pretty much everything except for the chicken, green onions, and lettuce. Stir all of that together until it forms a kind of beige homogenous goop. Set your bowl of beige aside for the moment and get cracking on your chicken. You're going to want to take the meat and get to shredding. If it's hot, you can totally do this with two forks, using an awkward jerking motion like you're a T-Rex trying to bust out some sweet dance moves. If your forks are lost somewhere in a sea of boxes that is your life right now, you can totally do this by hand. Maybe make sure to buy some soap and paper towels first, because if you don't know where your forks are, who knows what else is lost in the cardboard abyss?

Adding insult to the injury of my not-quite kitchen is how
much better this kitchen is than my last one. 

Pretty much all that's left is the assembly. Take your vaguely cup-shaped leaf of lettuce and fill it up with your shredded chicken. You want to stuff as much in there as you can without risking it all falling out when you try to pick it up and eat it. Then liberally splorp on your peanut goop. Use a little bit more than you think you should. The top may look like it's got a bunch of sauce, but if you're anything like me then your pile of chicken runs deep. Also it's where most of the flavor is coming from, and why settle for less flavor? Finally, thinly slice some green onions and sprinkle them on top. All that's left is to settle on to your couch in front of your TV and eat while you pretend like you're totally going to unpack something during the commercial break. See you next week! You know, assuming I can find my computer.

Pickles 2: The Ginger-ing

All you vegetables are just pickles to me

Pickles are awesome. This is an undeniable fact. Some of you might remember that I have strong feelings about pickles, because I've actually totally made them before on this very blog. To be honest, that might be my favorite post that I've made, and not just because of the multiple links to the exact same video clip from the Little Rascals. I'd say it's like 50/50 delicious easy pickles and Little Rascals. The point is, last week when I was supposed to be sitting home alone writing a blog post in a pile of sadness caused by not traveling, I totally was in south Florida instead. It was incredible despite, technically, being in Florida (The gator wrestling capital of the world). And while I was there I ate at a restaurant that served me the best damn pickles I've ever had in my life. I seriously considered asking for the recipe. And by "seriously considered," I mean "I totally did, but they shot me down." You know, like when a guy at work seriously considered asking out Candace from accounting. The point is, they wouldn't give me the recipe. And I only know one solution to that sort of rejection.

Ingredients:

1 English Cucumber (While the nationality of your produce isn't really my business, in general English cucumbers don't have big seeds, and are longer and narrower. All of which are good things since we're going to be cutting everything in to bite-sized slices. So just this once, god save the queen)
2 standard-issue Carrots
1 Red Onion
3 cloves Garlic
1 standard-issue hunk of Ginger
1.5 cups Water
1 cup Apple Cider Vinegar
3 TBSP Salt
1.5 TBSP Honey
2 tsp Black Peppercorns
1/2 tsp Saffron threads
1 Star Anise pod
1 Lime

Now, I just want to be clear. I started experimenting with weird pickle flavors because of the pickles at this restaurant, but I didn't re-create them. Much like Jack Black said, this is just a tribute. A tribute which happened to turn out tasty and super easy to make, which worked out as a nice bonus. That said, the first thing you're going to have to do is make your brine. So throw your water, vinegar, peppercorns, honey, salt, and star anise in a pot and set them to boil. Yes, boiling vinegar will make your whole kitchen smell like vinegar. Yes, it'll be worth it for the food. Plus, you neighbors will stop complaining about you never inviting them over for meals. While this is going down it's time to deal with your vegetables. Peel and roughly chop your ginger and garlic and throw them in to some container with a lid. Peel your carrot and slice it into thin rings. Similarly, slice your cucumber into thin rings, and then peel your onion and slice it in to...not rings. Cut your onion in half and then just slice it relatively thinly. The exactitude of each knife cut isn't important. These are pickles. They'll turn out ok even if they look a little weird, just like children. Just make them bite-sized and as uniform as you can, and then throw them in your container along with your saffron. Slice your lime, add it in to the party, and you're like 99% done with this recipe.

Delicious on tacos. Or burgers. Or cardboard.

Once your brine boils, turn the heat down and let it simmer for about 10 minutes or so. Then dump it all over your jar of vegetables. Let the whole mess get down to room temperature before throwing a lid on it and dumping it in to your fridge. Now here's the deal. Since you cut everything thinly, these pickles will take shape pretty quickly. After about 4 hours they should already taste pretty pickley and delicious. That said, the longer they sit, the more intense flavors will get packed in to them. They should last for a couple of weeks in the fridge. Or, more accurately, if they were in your fridge for a couple of weeks they'd still be good to eat. There's no way they're actually going to last in your fridge for more than a couple of days though. They're just so tasty. Also, pickles are super refreshing on a hot day. Which is all that Florida knows how to do, I think. The locals there start wearing heavy coats and boots when it drops below 80. I'm pretty sure it would take me all day to explain to them the concept of what snow even is. Anyhow, happy pickling!

Savory Sweet Potatoes

Cayenne is shy, but was socially obligated to be in the picture

Happy 4th of July! It's a special time of year when we Americans prepare burnt offerings for Uncle Sam in hopes that he wakes from his enchanted slumber and smites our enemies. And like any good holiday, it's got a pretty heavy food component to it. The traditional fare is usually grilled meats, like burgers, hot dogs, chicken, which are awesome, but it's side dishes that really make it in to a festive event. Think about it this way: if you were on the run from zombies, or ninjas, or gluten or whatever, and you had to stop briefly to make food, you'd totally char some meat over a trash can fire. But you probably wouldn't make cole slaw, potato salad, and succotash. Or sweet potatoes, which brings us to today (roll credits).

Ingredients:

4 Sweet Potatoes

1.5 TBSP Olive Oil
1/2 tsp Chili Powder
1/2 tsp Cumin
1/2 tsp Garlic Powder
1/4 tsp Onion Powder
1/4 tsp Smoked Paprika
1/4 tsp Oregano
1/4 tsp Cayenne Pepper
Salt
Black Pepper

The first thing you're going to need to do is get over your hangups. There's often a stereotype of men doing the grilling of meat, and of being weirdly territorial over their grills. Other men are forced to sit in huddled groups talking about classically manly things (killing spiders, Babe Ruth, and Monty Python), while women are relegated to the kitchen to prepare vegetables and talk about traditionally female things (eating salads, dealing with Time Warner Cable, and multi-tasking). Personally, I doubt that this is an actual phenomenon that ever happens outside of television ads and sitcoms. Don't get me wrong, I know plenty of people stupid enough to insist based on some weird gender-based pride that they have to do a specific job. I just don't know anybody willing to play along, especially when that means eating subpar food on a rare day off in the summer, just to satisfy some idiot's need to feel important and special. Anyway, the point is peel your sweet potatoes, and cut them in to long thin wedges, roughly shaped like french fries. Congratulations, you've done like 90% of the work for this recipe.

Delicious, healthy-ish, and orange. Living the dream.

Take all of your spices and mix them together into a giant spice concoction. Or blend. Or whatever. Dump that nonsense into a bowl along with your sweet potato wedges and your oil. Mix until everything's coated, and then spread your sweet potatoes out on to a couple of baking sheets, keeping them in one layer as much as is possible. Throw that into a 400 degree oven for 35 minutes, and you're pretty much done. All that's left is to eat your delicious sweet potatoes along with your traditional meal of beer, charred meats, pickles, and beer. And to watch a fireworks display, in which we fire explosive devices into the sky, symbolizing the American dream to eventually wage war on the clouds and bring their sky-treasure back as tribute. Happy 4th of July!

Honey Mustard Parsnips and Carrots

A rare image of wild parsnips running amok

Parsnips are interesting things. If you're not aware, they're the albino-carrot looking things that you walk past without buying at the grocery store. Which seems crazy, because parsnips have a kind of nutty, peppery flavor that's completely delicious. The thing is though, it makes sense that you'd overlook them. They're kind of like the root vegetable equivalent of chameleons. Or maybe ninjas. They just seem to blend in perfectly with whatever you cook them with. Also, they may have played a role in assassinating several feudal lords of ancient Japan. And sure, that last thing I said probably isn't true, but we don't know for sure. Uncertainty is a powerful tool, for man and root vegetable alike. Anyhow, the point is that parsnips aren't carrots. Despite this, they do taste good with carrots. Which just goes to prove the old adage: if two things look similar, you should probably put them together and eat them.

Ingredients:

1 lb. Carrots

1 lb. Parsnips

1 TBSP Honey

2 TBSP Dijon Mustard

3 TBSP Olive Oil

Salt 

Black Pepper

The first thing you're going to need to do is get over the fact that we're cooking root vegetables in late June. Sometimes life throws you curveballs. Sometimes those lifeballs come in the form of a semi-regular box of misshapen produce that you're paying to have delivered to your apartment, and in the weird produce choices that said box has been stocked with this week. You can sit and cry about it, like the family of an assassinated Japanese feudal lord, or you can make something great out of your random box of assorted nonsense. So grab your vegetables, peel them, and get to chopping. Now carrots and parsnips tend to be skinny at one end and fat at the other. Skinny chunks of food cook faster than large chunks of food, and since we want all of our food to finish cooking at the same time we're going to have to deal with that. I like to cut them in half to make them easier to work with, a principle which I apply to many of my culinary and business dealings. Then I halve the skinny ends, and I quarter the fat ends. Once you've finished your root vegetable trigonometry, toss them into a bowl along with a smallish pinch of pepper, a large pinch of salt, and 2 TBSP of your olive oil. Throw that mess on to a baking tray, doing your best to keep it in a single layer, and then toss it in to a 400 degree oven for 1/2 an hour. 

This here is why the rice kingdoms fell

Halfway through this process, make sure to take everything back out of the oven, stir it all around, and ineffectually poke at the vegetables with a fork while contemplating whether they'll finish cooking in time. After contemplatively staring at your parsnips for about 2 and a half minutes, throw it all back in the oven for the rest of the cook time. Stir together your honey, mustard, and the rest of your oil until they form a homogenous goop. After your half hour of cooking is up, pour that goop all over your vegetables, stir that nonsense together, and throw it back in the oven for another 15 minutes. You'll know it's done when you start to get some color on the vegetables, everything around your oven begins to smell fantastic, and when 15 minutes have passed. And that's it! Or, well mostly it. Take your vegetables out of the oven. And that's it! Serve them as a snack, a side dish, or a warning to the shinobi tribes operating in the shadows of your local produce store.

Fridge Cleaning Chicken Salad

Strawberries that have terrifyingly gained
sentience agree: you should make this salad.

So I recently signed up for one of those services that are constantly being advertised lately. You know the ones I mean. Where they'll send you misshapen unloveable produce that's still technically good to eat and charge you only a fraction of what you'd pay in the store. You help reduce food waste, and you get to save money! It sounds great, especially with the added enthusiasm of that exclamation mark. And after one week so far, it seems to technically be accurate. The only thing they didn't mention is that the fraction of the supermarket prices that you end up paying is roughly 1/1 (Math jokes. That's why people read this blog, right?). I still feel mildly good for myself about the alleged food waste reduction, and it's easier to buy healthier things when you're picking them out on the internet and you don't have to contend with the allure of the whiskey and cans of frosting aisle at the supermarket, so I'll probably stick with it for another week or two at least. But now I have an unreasonable amount of stone fruits and leafy green things in my fridge that are threatening to turn in to some sort of viscous goo and probably attract fruit flies if I don't actually use them. So I'm going to actually use them.

Ingredients:

1 head of Butter Lettuce
2 Nectarines
1 Carrot
1/3 cup Chopped Walnuts
1/2 a Red Onion
1/2 a Lemon
2 tsp Apricot Raspberry Preserves (For those of you not awesome enough to have access to dual apricot raspberry preserves, just pick one and go with it. I'd pick apricot, but what do I know?)
1 tsp Dijon Mustard
1 TBSP Olive Oil
1 average sized human's pinch of Salt
1 smallish sized human's pinch of Black Pepper
Leftover chicken (Fried. Grilled. Whatever. If you don't have any leftover chicken, either leave it out and have a sad chicken-less salad, or go buy chicken, don't eat all of it, and then you'll have leftover chicken)

The good news is that this is a salad, and that your chicken is already cooked. That pretty much means that all you have to do is assemble ingredients and throw them together in a bowl. The bad news is that you're going to be eating a salad. Fortunately, this thing is going to be so tasty that even people who talk about how they're carnivores because they can't tell the difference between personal preference and actual biology will be gulping down seconds (Biology jokes. That's why people read this blog, right?). So take your lettuce, cut off its butt, and soak it in water to dislodge any dirt or "extra bits of protein." Then roughly chop it and haphazardly throw it in to a bowl. Choppity chop up your nectarines, walnuts, and onion and throw them in to the party. Extra points if you removed the pits from the nectarines. Then shred your carrot, chop up your chicken, and throw them in there too, and you're almost done.

Red tinge to this photo courtesy of the weird lighting
at my apartment today for some reason.

What's left is the dressing, which is where a lot of people go wrong. People either don't understand that you need to actually mix the dressing ingredients together before adding them on to the salad, or they don't add enough dressing, or they add way too much dressing. It's a mess. The basic rule is just be a normal person. If you don't add dressing to your salad, I've got exciting news for you. Acid and fat help you to actually absorb nutrients from the vegetables. So you've been making your food taste worse, and getting fewer health benefits from it. Isn't that great? Whereas if your salad typically looks like it's swimming in a pool of thick goop, you've clearly got some issues to work out before you can be trusted to make food at all. So like I said, just be normal and things will probably work out. Mix together your preserves, mustard, oil, salt, pepper, and the juice from your lemon until the whole mess looks homogenous. Now there's just one last pitfall to try and trip you up. Salad, once dressed, does not hold up well for later use. So if you're feeding a group of people, add the dressing in and mix the salad just before serving it. If you're eating alone in your apartment while binge-watching reality TV and feeling good about yourself for sobbing into a salad for once instead of junk food, dress only the salad you're actually going to eat at that time. And maybe leave out the salt, because the tears will add that for you.

Strawberry Banana Bites

Dramatic reenactment: every picture on the internet ever

A while back a sensation took the internet by storm. To be fair, it's not all that hard to take the internet by storm. Cats and babies do it on a regular basis. But this happened to catch my eye. People make fake ice cream by blending frozen bananas with other flavorings. According to vegan hipster adherents to the trend, it's totally incredible and it tastes exactly like ice cream, and isn't nature wonderful, and by the way if you're not vegan you're basically a war criminal but worse. According to literally everyone else, it's kind of cool. And it tastes...like bananas. If you're expecting ice cream, don't get your hopes up, but if you like bananas then go for it. You see, the thing is, I do like bananas. But since the ice cream thing is a flop anyway, I figured why not blend it up with something that actually tastes good with bananas? And also why bother blending it all up in to an ice cream shape if it doesn't taste like ice cream? Also, I may not have a blender.

Ingredients:

4 Bananas

1 lb. Strawberries

Some of the more mathematically gifted amongst you may have come to the realization that there's not a whole bunch going on in the ingredient department. That's because there doesn't need to be. Bananas are delicious. So are strawberries. They taste great together. End of story. Except I haven't told you how to make them yet, so more like beginning of story. End of the intro of the story? All I know for sure is that the story begins with bananas. As they ripen, bananas turn from green to yellow, and finally to brown. If you leave them too long, to black. If you leave them way too long, probably back to green again. This is important for us to know because bananas also get sweeter as they ripen, as the starch in them is broken down in to fructose. As you may recall, our recipe doesn't have much in the way of ingredients, so we want to make the ones we have count. This is all a long drawn out way of saying that you should make sure to use ripe, sweet bananas. There shouldn't be any green on them, and you should have some brown spots marring the yellow of your peel. Then wash your strawberries, lovingly chop off their green leafy heads, and throw them in a bowl with your bananas.

So what if I like it when my food tries to high five me?

Take your favorite implement of destruction, be it forks, your bare hands, or miscellaneous, and mash the crap out of your bowl of fruit. It doesn't need to be perfectly smooth, but you shouldn't have any major lumps anywhere. Think of it like jazz. If it's too rough, nobody will be able to appreciate the awesomeness. If it's too smooth it loses all of its character and becomes flat and uninteresting. Got it? Good, now let's never speak of this analogy again. Throw that nonsense in the freezer, and then take it out again after about 45 minutes. Mix it together again, breaking up any clumps and crystallization that may have formed. Then splorp it in to some ice cube trays, or the silicon molds you may have bought during your last adventure that you still aren't sick of. Freeze them until they're solid and then enjoy. They're delicious, fairly healthy, and technically frozen which makes them perfect for absurdly hot days. Speaking of which, it's supposed to be in the mid 90s in this weekend in Chicago. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you let me stay at your place this weekend, I'll totally bring you frozen fruit mush. Chicagoans need not apply. 

Yogurt Muesli

I grabbed this hipster cat picture for the muesli pun, but
it's honestly pretty adorable. 

Breakfast times are serious times. They say it's the most important meal of the day. Who this mysterious "they" are, and why they're so deep in the pockets of the French Toast industry has yet to be uncovered by Wikileaks. But unless you want to hear your friends and coworkers constantly lecture you about how terrible it is to skip breakfast, you'd better give in and start eating it. And making sure that you're eating something at least plausibly healthy, or else you're still in for idiots talking to you about your food choices. Isn't peer pressure fun? The problem here, aside from everything, is that while many breakfast foods are undeniably delicious, none of the good ones seem quick or simple to make. You can't roll out of bed 5 minutes before you have to leave for work and make pancakes, fresh squeezed orange juice, and an omlette. So we're faced with the burden of finding tasty, healthy-ish food that we can just grab and go in the morning. Which brings us to muesli.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup Steel Cut Oats
1/4 cup Greek Yogurt
1/4 cup Walnuts
1 TBSP Orange Juice
1/4 tsp Honey
Assorted Berries

The first thing you're going to have to deal with when contemplating muesli is its dumb name. Based on some cursory internet research, there seem to be two schools of thought on how to pronounce it. Thre's team "stupid hipster name for a cat "(Mewsly), and team "describing someone who looks kind of like Bullwinkle" (Moosely). Which of these pronunciations is right? I stopped caring like a week before I even thought about making this. On to the actual food. The goal here is to prep this the night before, so you can just grab it and munch in the morning super quickly. Normally I'm not a fan of this sort of devil's math where you sacrifice free time at night for free time in the morning. But this stuff takes like a minute to put together, so it's actually pretty worth it. Mix your oats, yogurt, honey, and orange juice together in a container with a lid. In another container, crush up your walnuts and toss in some berries. Don't worry about crushing up your walnuts, because it's super easy. Walnuts are the cowards of the nut world, and they tend to crumble at the first sign of trouble, as opposed to better organized nuts such as almonds or pistachios. The point is, take your two containers and shove them in your fridge. This entire process should have taken you about 2 minutes. Then go do whatever it is you do at night. Sleep. Drink the blood of innocent. Whatever. The less I know the better.

Frozen berries make this even faster and
easier. You're welcome.

When you wake up in the morning, and the alarm gives out a warning, and you don't think you'll ever make it on time, you'll be grateful for the 2 minutes of work you put in last night. Because you pretty much did all of the work last night, and it wasn't even much work. Just grab your walnuts and berries, toss them in with your yogurt and oats, and consume. You don't even have to mix them together if you want to just go at it parfait style. Whatever floats your muesli boat. It's pretty simple. It's also pretty tasty, healthy, and technically food. Kind of everything you need to consume to not have to listen to the guy from mail room going on for 25 minutes about the health benefits of chia, or his acai bowls, or whatever other absurd fads that nonsense people with no sense of personal boundaries are into these days. Probably yak's milk mixed with powdered horseradish and chamomile tea. You laugh, but it's only a matter of time before internet hipsters are doing that. Anyhow, enjoy your morningtime food and freedom.