Working from Home

Who doesn't love working from home??? As an Admissions Counselor, my office allows for reading days where each counselor takes 40 files home and reviews them there instead of going to the office. Two things really make this day awesome. The first would be waking up in sweat pants and a T-shirt and not having to change all day long. The second would be what I get to cook for lunch. Since I'm home for the day I usually do something small for breakfast like a bowl of cereal and then have fun with lunch which is essentially breakfast 2.0.

What I have here is a pepperoni and cheese omelet (one of the worst words to spell in the English language - and technically it's scrambled eggs because I screwed up the flip in the air) that is inspired by my mother, some toast, and sausage links. It's nothing special, but it blows a normal breakfast like a bowl of cereal or some yogurt or oatmeal outta the water and it's better than a boring lunch like a turkey and cheese or a PB & J sandwich.

 

To close this post I want to throw in a public service announcement.  Don't be afraid to throw random things in when cooking eggs.  For some reason I used to just make scrambled eggs with cheese, some toast, and cooked bacon or sausage for the side.  Don't get me wrong, I love that, but I'm now getting more creative with my eggs.  I like to throw some pepperoni in the pan and warm that up with some olive oil before pouring the eggs in.  Instead of one kind of cheese I might use two or three.  Hot sauce is more or less a requirement at this point.  Spices and seasonings for days.  You can even dice up some fresh vegetables and toss em in there!  My personal favorite is a meat lovers omelet where I'll cook and chop up pepperoni, bacon, sausage, and ham and then mix that with as many kinds of cheese as I have.  We gotta step our egg-game up people!  And kudos to me for not making an "egg-cellent" or "egg-ceptional" type joke in this post.  I was scrambling for other jokes but I cracked under the pressure.  Good thing this post is over... easy does it.  Yolk.

String Cheese

String Cheese - Gotta Have It or Who Cares?

I don't think anyone is ever in the middle on string cheese.  I feel like if you eat string cheese, you love it and it's a frequent snack for you, but if you don't eat string cheese, you're perfectly ok with it falling off the face of the Earth and you never really have a craving for it.  Growing up I know I was on the string cheese bandwagon because my mother bought it for me and I had it a few times a week with my lunch at school.  It was a snack made out of cheese, not mad about it, but it also allowed me to play with my food by peeling it apart and eating thin strand of cheese after thin strand of cheese after whirling it around for a bit.

Now that I'm older and a tad more mature, I don't see the allure anymore.

Toby: (watching Ryan eat string cheese) Wow, you just dive right in.
Ryan: You know, around age 12, I just started going for it.

Although I am a kid at heart, I'm more concerned with eating food quicker than I am with playing with it.  So at the end of the day I would attack it like Ryan from The Office would and dive right in.  When it comes to a snack, who really cares about string cheese anymore?  I'll take a can of Pringles, a granola bar, A PIECE OF FRUIT, or a throwback snack in Gushers any day.

Tenders v. Nuggets

Let me start this post off by saying WINGS are not included in this because they're the classic representation of buffalo magic. This post is to make a distinction between Tenders and Nuggets, something a restaurant in Kingston, NY needs to figure out.

Above is a picture of what I ordered. At first glance you're thinking "Mmmmm those look like good buffalo chicken nuggets (or even bites)" and you'd be right except that I ordered buffalo chicken TENDERS. Someone wanna tell me when false advertising became legal??? I was OUTRAGED to say the least. Thank God I ordered a pizza to go with it, but I wanted tenders and got nuggets. If places are gonna lie about things like this then what's next? I order fries and get a baked potato? Ice cream and I get frozen yogurt? Bacon and I get ham?!?! It has to stop! Bottom line is I hate false advertising and I never want nuggets over tenders. There's more food with a tender and as an AMERICAN I am entitled to more of whatever I want. #America 

Loaded BBQ Beef Nachos

I feel like the title says it all, but just in case, this picture above should help.

Drew and I were hungry one day while home from work and we needed something to eat. Instead of being boring and making a sandwich or ordering Chinese, I had a brilliant idea. Let's use blue corn chips, sprinkle 1/3 of a bag of shredded cheese on said chips, squirt BBQ sauce on that, cook a pound of ground meat and throw that on top (with some buffalo seasoning), then use the other 2/3 bag of cheese, and finish it off with whatever BBQ sauce we had left.  My mouth is watering just thinking about these chips again. They were so cheesy and delicious it's not even funny. I never not want to eat them.

Below is a picture of me finishing off what was left. Every once in a while someone approaches me about my blog and thinks that I don't eat half the stuff I blog about. Well sir or madam, you're an idiot. As this nacho nirvana came to an end, Drew tapped out with a massive amount still in the pan. He challenged me to just grab it and eat it all and I obliged. I know What's Really Good and it's givin the people what they want!

2013 - The Year of the Rice Ball

I just returned home from a 5 day excursion in the great city of Boston where I stumbled upon one of God's greatest creations: DEEP FRIED RICE BALLS.

If you don't know the joy that is a deep fried rice ball, drive to the north end of Boston to a place called Pompay and order at least half a dozen. These things are so good that I had them on back to back nights. A great man named Marty introduced these heavenly meteorites to me and it was like coming back from a war and reuniting with my wife. Tears of joy people. And I need to thank John Volks for deciding to go back for more the next night instead of telling the cab driver to take us to Atlantic City. That might have been an expensive ride...

Either way I think 2013 will be a healthier year for me and what better way to start off the new year, the new me, the new eating outlook of eating healthy than with deep fried rice (healthy part) balls!?!?  Cheers to a new year that promises to bring plenty of ups and downs which is why life is worth living!

White Pizza

In a very sneaky way, White Pizza has flown up my ranks in terms of my favorite pizza. I remember my childhood where the pizza I liked went Pepperoni 1, Cheese 2, and nothing after it. All of a sudden White Pizza just strolls into my life and knocks down a few fan favorites and joins my Top 5. Here's how I rank my pies:

1- Meat Lovers
2- Buffalo Chicken
3- Pepperoni
4- Bacon
5- White Pizza

What's crazy about this list is it can easily change based on where the pizza is from and if they have a certain type of pizza there. Just as an example, if a place makes their buff chick pizza with red sauce or blue cheese instead of ranch, GET OFF MY LIST. Stock in that pizza plummets faster than Tim Tebow's playing time this year (he's bad). Also, certain places use crappy bacon or they chop it up so small you don't get that key bacon flavor when biting into a slice. I'm not mad, but those factors and more allow for White Pizza to make a case for one of my favorite pizzas out there tryna function today.

The Goober

Yesterday was a good/bad-happy/sad day for me because I went with my aunt, mom, and brother to my aunt's house in Rhode Island to more or less close up shop there because my aunt sold the place. It's obviously a sad time because I'll never be going back there for long weekends, but it was really cool driving by places with my aunt and reliving childhood memories.

One of my favorite things to do in RI was go to Casey's Restaurant which was this awesome Irish inspired place to eat. Growing up we went there for dinner almost every time I went to RI so I was stoked to go. I was a picky little shit as a kid so we would order waffle fries and buffalo wings as an appetizer and I'd get another order of wings as my meal. Now that my taste buds have matured, I was ready to look beyond the first page of the menu to really see what Casey's had to offer.

Son. Of. A. Bitch.

We pulled up and there was a sign that said "closed for renovations" on the door. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I was talking about those wings ALL DAY (not to be confused with AP who we need to have a MONSTER GAME today) and now they've been taken from me. After some mental swearing we hatched a new plan and it was off to another fan favorite in Mews Tavern.

I know what you're thinking and no, this was not a Pokemon themed restaurant because it's called Mews. It's a nice lil tavern where I ordered a unique creation called The Goober.

 

At first glance I thought this would be a cheese fiesta of a burger (the likes that would make Francesca proud), but it went in a different direction. The Goober was a bacon cheeseburger with a fried egg (had it before and liked it) and a few globs of peanut butter. I like, nay, love all of those things, but I never thought of combining them before. Kind of a weird concept, but I went for it and had mixed feelings. Overall it tasted good (curly fries were a nice addition), but the peanut butter was a bit over powering in a sense that my taste buds keyed in on that instead of being able to taste the burger itself or the bacon. I like the idea, but I'd more than likely go for a normal cheeseburger next time and just drench that bad boy with BBQ sauce.