Candy Ladder (Reblog)

Candy day! Noticed a candy ranking up at The World's Fair. How do you rank our traditional American candies? I'm limiting my list to chocolate and chocolate-like confections here.

1. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups
   
2. Butterfinger
3. Three Musketeers
4. Kit-Kat
   
5. Peanut M&Ms
   
6. Regular M&Ms
7. Nestle Crunch
   
8. Junior Mints
   
9. Milky Way
10. Snickers
11. Twix
    
12. Hershey Bars
13. Hershey's Kisses
14. 100 Grand Bar
    
15. Mounds
16. Almond Joy
    
17. Whoppers
18. Milk Duds
    

Lunch Portrait (Chow)

It is fun to class-up lunch sometimes with a little simple presentation. This helps gives me the illusion that I can do elegant meals just like NDM. This is the last of my falafel in a pita with some tahini, along with roasted vegetables on a sleazy store-bought bun.

OK, OK, so to me putting things on a rectangular plate is classing them up. I'm not Mr. Fancy.

Gashlycrumb Star Trek (Recommendation)

Shaenon K. Garrity has drawn a brief adaptation of the Star Trek episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" in the style of Edward Gorey.

Quick Food Bites (Chow)

Still haven't gotten around to further Kitchenarium updates, but we've been eating well nonetheless. Last night we quickly whipped up a red sauce and some eggplant parmesan and poured it over gemelli. Guests from earlier in the weekend (for which NDM made pot pies, mmm, not pictured) left us a nice curiously sweet beer bread which was a good accompaniment.
The earlier week consisted mostly of soups and sandwiches. In addition to the minestrone and falafel I blogged earlier, we had egg salad and roasted vegetable sandwiches.
Then, there was the occasional treat.

Sleeping Couch

Slumber unites everyone in our household. This is a fairly normal evening arrangement on the Sleepytime Couch. You can't really tell from this angle, but NDM and Scylla are also bundled in there. A different approach below still can't find the buried kitty...
Scylla is spending more time on the chair in front of the fireplace than the couch anyway, now that the wife thinks she'll freeze to death in the sixty degree weather without the fireplace on. Below, her ass faces the fireplace while she buries her chilly nose in a sweatshirt hanging over the chair back.
Molpe actually likes to take advantage of everybody sleeping to get some athletic patting in, so I rarely catch her on film at the same time as everyone else.

Pumpkin Carving

This year I carved the sleaziest pumpkin it has ever been my pleasure to carve -- but I really like it.

I got the pumpkin three weeks ago because it was so cheap, so this morning when I finally realized I should get shaking and cut it, its bottom had begun to soften and rot. I decided I needed a carving that only minimally relied upon the pumpkin's shaky structural stability.

I cut the pumpkin completely in half at the mouth, with a third of it on the bottom. The bottom was the weakest part, and since I basically turned it into a small dish it was pretty easy to remove the insides and rotten portions. If I'd just taken a plug out of the top and tried scooping everything out I think that the weight of the upper pumpkin coupled with all of my powerful masculine scraping would have reduced the bottom to pie filling.

For attractive presentation, I rotated the pieces so the teeth don't properly line up. This gives it a nice toothy maw.

I'm so happy with the results, and it was so easy to prepare compared to my normal carving methods, that I may always make pumpkins like this in the future.

My Mom's Kitchen (Chow)

My mother's been busy improving on our recipes. Presumably it is my dad's fault that the pictures of her food are better than my pictures of our food. Above she's done some mild seafood enchiladas, while below she taunts us with some scalloped potatoes and an apple-gingerbread casserole that I've never had before but sure looks good.
This kind of casserole is, I think, based on traditional Scottish recipes. The Joy of Cooking has one accessible recipe -- we may have to try it for ourselves.

Frog Flowers

I'm not a big fan of annuals -- I prefer paying for a plant once and having it around for a long time. Unless our bizarre weather kills it. Or a friendly dog digs it up or eats it. In any case, my relentless oppression prevents NDM from playing with many annuals. This year we have just one, on the back porch in a frog planter my parents gave us.

I must admit I'm warming to them a bit. These things are lasting forever, and it is nice to have some lingering color in the back yard. Plus the planter is apparently too sophisticated for Mag to consume its contents.