The Score
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The Score Monday November 14
This is actually last month's Challengers.
Indian Curry and Pizza have been carried over,
but there is a new November list.I've wanted to talk about The Score for awhile now, but haven't had the opportunity. The Score started being kept the same night that Stamina Ramen came to fruition. Earlier that same week, I had attempted to make deviled eggs, but that experiment ended in failure. Living alone will make one crazy, and following the ramen success, I addressed my kitchen. I believe I said: "How you like THEM apples?", followed by a David Duchovney "Yeah".
That same night, I decided that competing against an anthropomorphic kitchen was way more fun than just cooking, so I sat down and composed two sheets of paper: The Score, which is simply divided into Me, The Kitchen, and Draw / Rematch, and the other sheet of paper lists The Challengers. The competition was born.
I haven't lost since Miso Soup. No matter how hard I try, I can't make a good miso. I have all the proper ingredients; I don't know what the problem is. I had a close call with a stirfry about three weeks ago, but I rematched it and put another mark in the 'W' column.
As you can see above, I'm doing rather well. I judge a success by my desire to eat the result, and my confidence in presenting the result to a third party as a dish. Clearly, this is subjective, but that's all that really matters here. It's my game, I make the rules. Still, the threat of failure is always present, and hubris will only feed the garbage can.
Now that you know about The Score, it's time for today's story. I'm so ecstatic at the moment I can't function properly. I have to get this out of my system so I can do other things this evening.
I ate a decent salad for lunch an hour and a half ago. My stomach was not content with that, though: "Feeeed meeee, Mark... Feeeeeed me CARBS, fattie!" At least, I think that's what it was saying. At the time, I was planning my meal schedule for next week; that's what really hit me.
When I make my meal schedule each week, I incorporate items from The Challengers. Certain nights are more convenient for cooking more complex meals, and I know that certain recipes will require certain foods -- so I have to leave myself time to shop.
While I was looking at the list today, though, my eye kept pulling to "Cookies". Japanese kitchens rarely have conventional ovens, and all I have is a Microwave-slash-Toaster-Oven-slash-so-called-Oven. I had been meaning to give it a whirl to see just what kind of "oven" this microwave-ish box on top of my mini-fridge is.
"Perfect," I thought. "If I lose, I can blame it on inadequate equipment."
I mixed up some normal cookie ingredients: flour, sugar, eggs, shortening, salt, corn starch (I don't have any baking soda), mirin (combination of sugar and Japanese rice cooking wine; I don't have vanilla extract). At first, the mixture resembled vanilla pudding, and I tasted it. Yup, if you add sugar to anything... tasty.
I then took my toaster oven pan, greased it, and dolloped the mixture into five lumps. Setting the oven to 200° Celsius, for which I don't even know the temperature, I baked these little guys for about 15 minutes. They started to brown like normal.
However, when I pulled them out, I realized one fundamental difference between my impromptu recipe and real cookies. Real cookies use baking soda, baking powder, or some other leavening element that makes them, well, cookie-like. I had used corn starch for lack of those other ingredients. This made my recipe a lot more cornbread-ish, but still sweet due to the sugar.
If you can't see the forest for the trees here, what I'm saying is that I unwittingly made scones. Scones! Unbelievable. Tasted the exact same as Espresso's. I ate all five in quick succession.
Mark another entry in the 'W' column, ladies and gentlemen. When I perfect the recipe with fruit and such, I will post it.
