"Things You Should (Not) be Doing with Your Food: Ish #2" or "My White Whale"

Now my other sister has also started a blog (awesomely titled Pizza Bribe) which she is academically obligated to populate on a semi-regular basis for school it seems. Hopefully having that competition will motivate me to keep up with this guy up to date a little better.

And now I'd like to talk about meat.

I cooked my first steak ever for my girlfriend Jen (<--- see I mention you!) on Memorial Day and it was amazing... despite the fact that I dropped it onto our soggy deck after I finished cooking it. But still we ate it... and legitimately it was one of the best steaks I've ever tasted. Apparently all it takes to make great steak is $3, a $30 charcoal grill, and eight or so minutes on each side. Seriously, if you like steak, I don't remember what it was called or the brand or anything, but we found it at Kroger. It's some kind of organic brand and you get two cuts of it that are correctly proportioned so that it doesn't make you TOO fat and it's only $6. The same steak I cooked for $3 would have easily cost $20 to $30 in a restaurant. Good lookin' out!

I on the other hand did not have quite as much success with my Memorial day meal... I attempted, for the second time, to create the Minneapolis staple Juicy Lucy, as made famous by "Man vs. Food". As you can see from the image here it's a burger in which the cheese is actually cooked into the burger and it's supposed to pour out all steamy, hot, and liquefied when you bite into it... Mine did not.

I believe my first problem is that I used Kroger's pre-rolled patties of ground chuck which is both not very good and not very moldable. I used two patties that probably came in a little under a quarter-pound each, seasoning both sides and topping one with cheddar cheese. I then attempted to simply place the second patty on top of the one with cheese and mold the edges together with my hands to seal the cheese inside. So now I had a burger that was a solid three and a half inches thick with some cheese in the middle that I expected to cook through.

Well I threw it on the grill and cooked it with the lid closed for a good eight to ten minutes. At this point all was well. It was in tact and I figured it was about time to flip it because eight minutes on one side for a burger already seemed like overkill. Well I scooped it up, tossed it over and low and behold, the outer layer of the thing is barely done and the side starts pulling apart revealing that the middle hasn't even started to brown over. I attempted to get it back to the first side for a few more minutes but I was already starting to lose hope. Four or five more minutes with the lid closed and I figured the sum'bitch had to be done on at least that side. I open the lid and smoke is simply pouring out everywhere. Pieces of the burger had started to slide off and detach falling onto my charcoals. I figured, "No big loss, this thing was too big to cook all that junk anyway," so I went ahead and gave it a flip... the other side starts pulling away into the grill and I'm now starting to see the inner core of cheese.

God damn it!

Well, this went on, back and forth to each side trying to get the damn thing to cook through; each time checking it a bit more meat falling on to the charcoal and stinking up the place. Finally I was left with a shell of a disfigured burger; cooked well done on the outside and still mushy and very pink on the inside with no signs of gooey cheese anywhere.

My second attempt at the Juicy Lucy was once again an utter failure. I nibbled on the cooked edges of it for a minute and then decided it wasn't even worth it at the risk of food poisoning as raw meat tends to do to me and tossed the thing. It was a sad day for meat.

I bitterly munched on my baked bean with potato chips on into the night wondering how the Lucy had evaded me once again and dreaming of our next bout together...

Old Games Mean More Old Truths!

First off. You chumps have been slacking. And by you chumps, I mean the other blogs I am subscribed to. I just scrolled through my Dashboard reading list thing and the top ten or so most recent posts all belonged to Brendan Kelly... I can only read so many posts full of references to male ejaculate before I need something else thrown in the mix. So to you five or six other people I'm subscribed to, get posting.

I have more news in video games this week because for some reason playing through Zelda just got me way back into older games. There was that and a long discussion about how X-Wings work. Mitchell, Kyle, and I were all discussing the finer points of how specific space crafts in Star Wars work and after a while we all came to the realization that our common knowledge on this subject was derived mostly from the Windows 95 classic "X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter"... I had to play it again. Well, we were at Mitchell's house and found that he still had a retail copy of the original X-Wing, which would have to do for the time being. As it turns out, when you pop the disc for a 17 year old DOS based video game it a computer running Windows XP it doesn't really care to work so well. I then had a project for the night. It seems the primary issue was that Windows only allocates a very small amount of RAM for the DOS command prompt and it's not enough to launch X-Wing. That was all fine and dandy so we altered a Windows Config file to tell it to take some more ram... that didn't work either. After a solid two hours of wrestling with this and scouring the internet for clues I sadly gave up for the evening and went home.

As a fun side note, I did temporarily break Mitchell's computer so that it no longer knew how to launch Windows... Oh man. That would have been funny if I didn't know how to fix it.

When I got home I went ahead and downloaded a torrent of X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter... Yup. I illegally downloaded a 15 year old video game that I owned at one time... so sue me. The next day I burnt the ISOs to a disc, launched it up, and! ....nothing except a frozen installation menu. Well crap.

Thankfully a bit more searching found me a couple patches, one to make the game able to be read in XP instead of Windows 95, and another to make the audio work with newer versions of Direct X, and I was installing the greatest space flight simulation combat emulator OF ALL TIME! And I must say, while graphic enhancements haven't been kind to this game; the ship models are rigidly polygonal and "flight simulation" means little white dotsfly past your face and every now and again a clunky 3D model of a ship comes into view, but the gameplay is still actually kind of amazing. There's a pretty stiff learning curve which keeps you engaged for quite some time. I also remember the "realism" that I felt from playing it and what made it so much better than any console game being the amount of things I had to do to maintain control during flight. Pretty much every key on the keyboard has a useful function and many two button combinations also have a function and you have to learn them all swiftly maneuvering and dodging Proton Torpedos to stay alive and complete mission objectives.

The biggest downside of this game is the fact that we'll probably never see anything like it ever again. I don't think there's been a game ever since that required such an intricate mastery of controls. Everything now a days is, "right trigger right trigger, look around for new bad guy with joystick, move around with other joy stick to dodge... Oh shit there he is! RIGHT TRIGGER! RIGHT TRIGGER!! Blow his fucking head off!" Seriously, I'm so sick and tired of the same old re-skinned first person shooter/war game. How did the video game industry dupe us into this trend? Why are people willing to drop $60 plus $5 in presale reservation and then wait in line at midnight the night of launch to get "Shoot Dudes in the Face Vol. 187: This Time it's Aliens and a Few Different Guns!"?

Video game nerds are constantly fussing about going, "Why does Nintendo make so much damn money? They don't make 'hardcore' games for 'hardcore' gamers." When they say "hardcore" they mean those same old first person shooter rehashes because these games generally have the biggest developers attached to them, they have 'realistic', adult characters encountering 'adult themes' and the most up to date graphics... this apparently makes a game "hardcore". Nevermind the fact that Nintendo created a game and exercise device that is so fun to use that it got millions of people who normally sit on their ass blogging and watching Scrubs to not only get off their ass and use it, but they fight over the limited supply of the damn game. A tiny bit of innovation people... that's all I'm asking for. Then maybe I'll rejoin the Non-Nintendo or Square-Enix-"Games that were made after the year 2000"-Circuit.

Until then I'll stick with my DS and playing ROM emulations of my old favorites. By the way, I just beat Mega Man X3 the other night and god damn, does my thumb ever hurt. More on that later maybe... For now, I need to find something more useful to do.