I just achieved the holy grail of veg cooking...

I cooked perfect seitan. *falls to her knees, fists balled up, tears falling from her face*

Let me elaborate on the preparation of seitan so you can understand why I'm currently flipping my shit. Seitan is one of those foods that's more an art than a science, a really difficult and unforgiving art. Everyone has their own recipe for it, and for the best kinds, there's always a long list of things you have to do (or not do) for it to come out right. Start with cold water (if you don't do this you are just fucked), keep it at a simmer while cooking (allowing it to come to a boil will unleash the demons of hell itself), knead the dough a certain amount (pray you never find out what happens when you knead too much), mix a certain proportion of wet and dry ingredients together (you only get one shot at this DONT FUCK UP), and the list goes on. And even if you've made seitan many times before, there is still a chance you could, oh, I dunno, NOT ADD ENOUGH LIQUID TO YOUR POT and all the angels of heaven will descend upon you to cast you into eternal hellflame. And even the best recipes are usually only ok until you do yet more things to them. Plain seitan is just not very appetizing. It's all about getting a certain texture, flavor comes later.

So maybe, if you have never cooked seitan before, you are beginning to understand why this is so very...very important. There is a reason they call it seitan. It is because making seitan is the cooking equivalent of having a guitar duel with Satan himself.

But I somehow, through an intervention by fate or God himself (glory!), have cooked the PERFECT BATCH OF SEITAN. It is JUICY on the inside and FIRM on the outside! It is FLAVORFUL! It is DELICIOUS! It is FIBROUS! (Something I thought only possible to achieve with modern machinery)

*Victorious, she stabs her chef's knife into the cold earth and looks off into the horizon while epic soundtrack music plays*

...

.......................I just hope I can cook it like that next time >_>. Honestly I have no idea how I did that :P. I loosely followed one recipe and it ended up totally different than normal, lol. I'll write down what I did and if it works the same way next time, I'll post the recipe here. As far as seitan recipes go, it was not difficult, so I won't feel bad sharing it and putting others through my pain hahaha.

Finally got a Tegaki E blog. All my visual entries will go there.

For all those people out there who have a clue about why this stuff isn't possible (for now).



Comedy gold.

I just made myself a new drink. I call it "A Good Week". It's the bastard child of a margarita, a mojito, and a midori sour.

Ingredients:
-An entire ice cube tray worth of ice (or more if you want more of a slushie consistency)
-Half cup of tequila
-Quarter cup of midori
-Juice of half a lime
-One and a half cups margarita mix
-Sprig of mint

Blend everything in a blender except for the mint. Pour into glasses and garnish with mint leaves.

Yes there were times, I'm sure you knew,
When I bit off more than I could chew
But through it all, when there was doubt,
I ate it up and spit it out, I faced it all
And I stood tall, and did it my way

Had a totally epic dream last night.

First, let me describe the setting. Imagine a vast canyon in a desert. Suspended in the center of it is an immense darkly radiant spherical sac suspended to the sides by black webs. There are places in between the webs that wind around the sphere where it's soft enough to dive in. Once past the initial membrane, you would find yourself in a dimly lit space that seems to stretch out even further than it appears on the outside. The atmosphere on the inside is like cool air in every respect except you could swim through it like water to get around to the hundreds of smaller spherical building/planets suspended on the inside.

I swam around this place for a bit with my companion. I think he was human, or appeared human, and I was something else, but still vaguely humanoid in shape. Eventually we met a colossal whale with six tails whose eyes alone were bigger than I. It was something like a seer, and said I had to go on a quest to find a hidden power that would allow me to stop a tornado that would otherwise rip through the canyon and destroy the sphere.
My companion and I agreed to help, even though all the other beings that lived in the sphere heckled us, said it wasn't possible, that fleeing was the only option. We ignored them and left to follow the vague clues given by the enigmatic whale creature.

Anyway, cue long adventure sequence that I've forgotten much of. I think we stopped at a tavern at one point to get directions but that's all I remember about that part.

Eventually I did find the thing the whale was talking about and took it into myself. My companion and I made it back in time to see a large tan-yellow tornado entering the entrance of the canyon. Most of the people had already fled, and my perspective shifted to third person view of the cockpit of the flying ark that the denizens of the sphere had used to get to safety. They saw me run for the tornado, and all yelled at me to give up, to not throw my life away, but I continued forward. As I closed ground on it, I felt something changing in me. I leaped into the air while spinning around and transformed into a blue tornado twisting in the opposite direction and clashed with the yellow tornado with equal force. Quickly, the yellow tornado slowed, then dissipated altogether. Everyone in the ark cheered that their home had been saved. I shifted back into my normal form, but the momentum of spinning so fast flung me from the hot desert air into the cold dark sphere. I swam back to the whale to tell it I succeeded, and that I would be leaving to continue my travels, but the whale said it had another adventure for me, and told me to follow. Then I woke up.

The tornado symbolism is of some note to me, since friends have dreamed about me turning into a tornado on more than one occasion.

For what is a man, what has he got,
If not himself then he has not,
To say the things he truly feels,
And not the words of one who kneels,
The record shows I took the blows,
And did it my way

Tonight, I gotta help a friend kick some outta control homunculus ass. That's my mission for today. Let it come, my companion and I will take it on.

We need to shoot more engineers at gongs. I'm thinking the Carol of the Bells for the encore.

In more appropriate news for what should be a blog about me, I did an on-site interview today for a job back at Rockwell Collins (where I was working before). It seemed to go well. When I got home and called my recruiter, he also had news about a different interview I had done last week. They made an offer.

So. I'm only a couple steps away from a job. I want to hear back about how things went today, but already having an offer is a large load off.