Made beef gyodon with some purple rice in the rice cooker. Pretty much quick marinate the beef and then put it on top of rice and onions. Then add water and shoyu and let that all cook in the rice cooker. It’s not a pretty dish because I added the purple rice to it but it is tasty.
It probably could have been prettier but it’s dinner and I wanted something that was just good. I did have a couple of packets of mala tofu rolls that I got from Yami. And I put two of the enoki mushroom rolls and two of the bamboo shoots rolls on the side so that they could steam along with everything else. I did not add the chili oil sauce that was in the packet just the rolls.
They were very good. And honestly for $1.99 for a packet of I think six, it’s a really good deal. They had a nice little crunch to them they had good flavor but that mala numbing chili oil would definitely have kicked my ass if I had added all of it. As it is, the rules are saturated in it so just adding the rules and letting them steam didn’t necessarily add a lot of that flavor to the rice and the beef but I was okay with that. This was my first time using them so I wasn’t sure if they were going to be edible. They’re pretty decent. I would say on a spice level they are probably 8 out of 10 without the rest of the sauce. The numbing lingers but the heat wears off at about 5 to 8 minutes. I definitely would recommend using them for something like ramen or even in addition to a hot pot. They could even go into a jjigae if you wanted something that was spicy.
Again this is not a pretty dish and I wasn’t going for pretty. I was going for good and food. And it definitely hits the spot. Mind you, as you can see the tofu rules don’t look like the package does but that’s just what you get.
I had a bunch of leftover stuff sort of floating around in the freezer. Lap Cheong. A couple of shrimp. Some peas and carrots. And of course rice from yesterday so I was planning on doing something with some chicken but the night got away from me and this is just easier.
It is funny how I am constantly doing nothing but at the same time it seems like there isn’t any space to add to my day for the things that I need to do. I am in an odd cycle of trying to get my body back into some kind of semblance of working order, scratching at a day job which takes up a lot of my brain, and then trying to grab the tidbits of writing that are floating up into the stratosphere of my thoughts.
I have a great desire to write. And I’m angry that I don’t have access to that subspace that I’m very comfortable in but I think it’s a matter of exercising that muscle again. Because in a lot of ways it is a muscle.
Oddly enough, I’ve also been fighting with my dictation software because for some reason it keeps uninstalling itself. There is obviously a glitch and the tech desk has opened up the ticket because we haven’t been able to replicate it once it’s installed again. So now it’s pretty much on a watchlist stand if it misbehaves again there will be a coding spank.
The hardest thing that I’m having to do is to remember how to dictate. They really can’t be any modulation in your voice which you would think would be easy for me because you know… Autistic… But after so many decades of masking and forcing social interaction through my voice, I find myself modulating even when I don’t need to. The weird thing is that my modulation isn’t really that good. I used to think I had an expressive voice but I have discovered after speaking to people that know, there is still a monotone aspects to it and I guess that’s just something I can’t break away from. But apparently for Dragon Speak it is enough of a modulation for it to tell me to fuck off and it will do what it likes with my words.
I do like dictating because it allows me to pretty much stare off into the distance and shuffled through the words that come up to describe the images that I have sculpted out of the brain vomit. Writing is an odd thing. I also find it amusing that I dictate my writing rather my stories which goes into a Word document, gets chewed through editing cycles, gets formatted into e-book and print making it a tangible object of sorts; a digital imprint as well as a paperback book. And when that is all done, someone else takes those words and turns them into an audiobook. A full circle if you will. Because we start with sound and then we end with sound.
If I’m lucky enough to get stuff in audiobooks.
The creative structure and the process of what we ll go through is always fascinating. And of course it varies from person to person and from media to media. There are some creators that I absolutely adore and they don’t update as often as I would like them to. I know that refrain. But when they do it’s all such a delight me and that’s real is so short. You just want to savor it but you can’t. It’s that little tidbit of chocolate that melts away as soon as it touches your tongue.
It is going to say I don’t know why this web comic hits every single one of my buttons but it does. I can explain it. But I absolutely adore their ongoing series and the characters and even the art style which this isn’t normally an art style that I prefer but for me with this content the quirkiness of it and the storylines, it just becomes this wonderful thing that brings me joy happiness.
So, if you like a little bit of strangeness but at the same time, something filled with great heart and little delights here and there, I recommend it
Oh credit for the part that I’m including goes to Pocketss and I’m just including it so you could get a sample of a little bit of the craziness but yet the art style for some reason just rocks.
Woke up with a headache because the pressure of the thunderstorms keeps coming and going so that’s a thing. But it’s raining which I do love and it’s about 81° F so a decent temperature.
The cats are all sleepy and except for the southern belle, Harley, who thinks that every time I get something to eat that it means she gets something to eat. That is not the case. And she’s the tiniest one but sometimes the most gluttonous.
Today’s lunch is miso tonkotsu ramen with egg, shrimp, lap cheong, tofu, and green onions.
One large can of pineapple chunks in juice. Drain the juice and keep at least one cup of it. This is optional. If you do not have pineapple, you can use a cup of water.
One small bag of baby carrots
One cup shoyu (soy sauce)
One cup sugar
1 cup white distilled vinegar
1 tbsp minced ginger, optional
1 tsp minced garlic, optional
Salt and pepper to taste. A couple of shakes will do.
You can also add chopped daikon to this if you have it available. Jicama also is a good substitute for daikon if you have that instead but it isn’t a must have.
Either toss all of this into a pot and let simmer for 45 minutes or throw it into the instapot on high for 15 minutes. If you want, thicken the liquid with a cornstarch slurry.
You can brown the meat before you throw everything else in there but I haven’t seen a significant difference. Still, optional. I was lazy. I didn’t do that.
Serve over rice. Meat should be tender.
A huge thank you to my mom who gave me the base recipe. She rocks.
FYI…The base simmer ratios are 1-1-1-1 1 cup water or pineapple liquid 1 cup sugar 1 cup shoyu 1 cup vinegar
The salad kit I got which was not from the bad batch… Turned out to be mostly cabbage despite what It was advertised as.
I find that to be true of most chopped kits and that’s kind of rough on the stomach.
Since I still had two of the kits left… Off one of them went into making shoyu noodles.
There was some lettuce in the kit but honestly you can also stir fry lettuce. Just in case you’ve got lettuce that is sort of at that edge of a little bit too limp for salad… But makes for excellent addition to a stir fry.
Tonight’s dinner is rice cooker bulgogi and onions. On top of rice of course.
Shaved steak marinated in a bulgogi sauce which was shoyu, a little bit of oyster sauce, sweet chili sauce, garlic, ginger, and a little bit of water. And I just let that sit in a Ziploc bag until it’s nice and happy.
Wash two cups of rice, put in almost enough water so maybe a couple of milliliters below the index finger line. Slice and onion very thinly and put that on top of the rice with the water. Do not mix.
Then put the meat on top.
Then into the rice cooker and hit the cook button.
Finish with green onions and a drizzle or sesame seed oil. And salt and pepper if you still need it.
Late Lunch: Rabokki tteokbokki, noodles, tempura gobo fish cake, quail eggs, green onions and gochujang sauce.
One of my favorite foods but it takes a while to assemble so I don’t need it as often as I like. I also need to get the right kind of fish cake because I love the fish cake that I’m eating today but the thinner fish cake that comes in sheets would be better for this kind of thing.
Okay, one of the worst things that can happen when trying to get a post written is that my dictation software decides that it just wants to dump over a decade of accuracy training and just not work anymore. It is a pain in the ass because I pretty much have to retrain it to understand everything that I have ever written. And since a lot of what I write isn’t in English, a really big pain in the ass.
One of the benefits of using the Dragon software is that you can upload documents that you written and it is allegedly learning from them. So I end up uploading things from the McGinnis series, Kai Gracen series, a couple of Sinner’s Gin, and a few others. All in the hopes that it will recognize things like the Sidhe words for black dog. Apparently the software does not remember pronunciation so I am going to have to go in and train it.
I really don’t want to spend an entire weekend teaching a piece of software how to pronounce words when I’ve got other things to do but apparently that is going to be my life.
Why do I use dictation software? Because it does go faster than typing and it saves my wrists.
This isn’t a cheap software. It’s about the price of a decent laptop but for the long term, it is a really good investment. It does help me write faster and with a greater accuracy because my fingers sometimes can’t keep up with my brain and things get confusing.
The retraining is necessary but it sucks. Still, the software is a great tool and puts up with a lot of my shit.
And that’s all you can really ask for from an application.
Now if it would only hear me when I give it the command to add a period to the end of a sentence.
Oh… and if you’ve made it this far in this very boring post, have you ever found the Dragon One Off story on this site? If not, here’s Tatsu.
