Scaling Another Culinary Mountain!

Oh yeah! Roasted my first ever leg o' lamb this past weekend! Stuffed it with homegrown rosemary and baked it for the prescribed time plus ten minutes per pound extra due to our underperforming oven. Turned out quite nice, if I and my wife and our neighbors do say so ourselves.

How I Have My Morning Coffee

I've begun writing again. Not just rewriting manga, which I edit for VIZ Media, but real, all-mine writing. Every morning it's out on the front porch or the back patio with a mug of coffee, a couple of pieces of reading matter, and my journal. The hardware of this journal is paper bound between cardboard covers, while the OS is a biro. Didn't realize how much I missed working on things of my own with no electronic assistance.

The reading matter is usually composed of one piece of fiction and one piece of non-fiction. I'm currently tackling The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides and The History of Mr. Polly by H. G. Wells. I'm sure the first is non-fiction and the second fiction, but I have to say that at times I can't quite be sure of that. Good reads, though.

The coffee's brewed up from beans from Costco, usually with Safeway fat free half & half and a shot of sugar free hazelnut Torani syrup. Sometimes I get wacky and grate some nutmeg into it.

Menu for Wednesday

Baked a cake today. A sheet cake. Standard triple chocolate cake mix, frosted by melted chocolate chips. Then it was on to dinner: pounded chicken breasts, fresh corn on the cob, and curry green beans.

Nothing remarkable, but it was all my doing. Yes, I am…a husband who cooks! Hoo-ah!

Flapper Food

Chicken wings. Baked, microwaved, fried…they make life worthwhile. But if you're serious about chicken wings, you can't just cook 'em, you have to be ready to do some serious seasoning and/or saucing. Home cooked is best, as it allows you to flavor them to your taste. And when you bake or microwave, you get a rich dripping that is truly culinary gold. This dripping provides the basis for a sauce that turns a side of rice – preferably with plenty of fresh veggies mixed in – into a taste of heaven. It goes nicely on potatoes too, but rice is best.

Restaurants and saloons just don't have quite the requisite touch, though some do a decent job on good nights. (The local brew pub gets closest, and for the best price.) And you don't get the side benefits of the dripping and, for me personally, the unalloyed joy of munching on the wingtips. 

Chicken wings. Nature's most perfect food.

The Dawn of All-You-Can-Eat Asian

I love buffets, especially chinese buffets. My first chinese buffet experience was at the Golden Coin, in Tempe, AZ, back during Christmas of 1973. It was housed in a defunct burger joint of unknown provenance, and had a single small serving line that featured fried rice, chow mein noodles, sweet and sour port, a couple of entrees, egg foo yung, and fried wonton chips. My life changed forever.

Fast forward to May of 1977, when I moved from Missouri to Arizona, and started going to the Golden Coin as often as I could manage. Friday was the best, when they had their fried fish. But the place was busy, being the one chinese buffet in the town that also featured ASU and the Sun Devils footfall team. Many a night, while I tucked into my own heaping plateful, I'd espy several college footballers piling small mountains of fried rice and noodles onto their plates and then going back for seconds, thirds, and fourths. It was an amazing sight, and I rather envied their ability to get the most bang for their bucks.

Much has changed in the intervening years. That particular Golden Coin is gone, though one still exists in Phoenix, and chinese buffets have evolved into far more elaborate establishments with many islands and various asian cuisines. I enjoy these a lot, but they'll never quite match the experience that Golden Coin offered.