your goose is probably only half-baked at this point

In my quest to a) eat healthier and b) replicate the amazing soba salads at  Bon Me , I have stumbled upon  a delightful recipe  for spicy Moroccan-inspired chickpeas.  However, the recipe is buried under too much scrolling through words and pictures I don't need when I'm hungry , and then when I'm trying to follow the recipe, it throws up pop-ups and calls-to-action and that makes me hangry , which nobody needs. So!  Here's my version of their recipe, ad-free and prefaced with only one photo and very little text.  You're welcome. Bowl full o' healthy Spicy Chickpea Salad Ingredients 1/2 medium yellow onion, coarse-diced 2 cloves garlic, minced Spices: - 1 Tbsp chili powder - 1 Tbsp cumin - 1 tsp garam masala - 1 tsp tumeric - 1 tsp sea salt - 1/4 tsp cinnamon - 1/8 tsp cayenne pepper 28 oz tinned chickpeas, drained 28 oz tinned diced tomatoes WITH liquid 2 cups frozen spinach For the rest of the salad, I include: - Greens - Shre...

Omurice (omelette rice) is something of a staple comfort food in Japan, and Loco Moco is something of a comfort food in Hawaii, and since both traditionally contain meat, I've not gotten to enjoy either since I became a vegetarian in 2014.  Five years I've gone without my favorite comfort foods, and that is just not okay. Well, until now.  I've fixed it now. This meal's kind of a pain in the ass to read through, instruction-wise, but it's not all that hard to make, really.  You invest about an hour in it the first time you make it, but then you get leftovers sufficient for like 4 more meals-for-two, and making it after you've gone through the trouble the first time is easier than falling in love with Luke Skywalker again , ask me how I know any of these things. It's also really delicious and really impressive and goes unnecessarily well with green tea, beer, and butter mochi .  Ask me how I know that, too. Don't let the ingredient list or instruc...

Beer cheese soup is one of those dishes I first had when I was in graduate school, and it was ... fine.  I had it at a pub, and it was all right, nothing wrong with it, but it was just ... it was just fine , not earth-shattering or anything.  My partner loves it, though, so I went online and found a Wisconsin native's recipe for the stuff, and after several attempts and tweaks, now have a beer cheese soup that I will fight folks over.  It's just unnecessarily good. For my own record, this iteration of the recipe originally had 2 carrots and 1 zucchini in it instead of the full dose of carrots because I'm the genius who goes to the store to buy carrots and a bag of sugar and comes home with neither item in my shopping bags.  GO ME. Beerbelly Beer Cheese Soup Note :  You need TWO soup-pots for this nonsense, and it's best if one of them is nonstick. Ingredients 1 Tbsp olive oil 5 carrots, cut into 1/2" coins 1 lb Brussels sprouts, halved 3 stalks cel...

Japanese curry is one of those comfort foods that tastes and feels good all year 'round, no matter the weather or your stomach or ... anything, really.  This is my favorite way to prepare it, with plenty of vegetables and some nice scrambled eggs for texture.  Doubling the recipe is super easy, and it makes fantastic leftovers for work-nights that aren't otherwise conducive to cooking. My sense of humor's napping right now, so no jokes here.  Just good comfort food. Eat Your Veggies Japanese Curry Ingredients 1 tbsp olive oil 3-4 large carrots 3 medium yellow potatoes 2 medium onions 1 lb frozen brussels sprouts, halved 3 cups water 4.25 oz instant Japanese curry sauce (I use Golden brand) 15 oz coconut milk Dash red pepper flakes 3 cups frozen spinach 6 eggs 1 tbsp olive oil Sliced bread for toasting Instructions Heat oil in a big ol' soup pot. Cut up carrots into 1/4"-1/2" pieces. Toss them into the pot and stir them around, then...

Back in 1999, I'd never seen a single Star Wars  movie, but it seemed the entire nation was freaking out over Episode I: The Phantom Menace  coming out, so being the good conformist high school sophomore I was, I bought tickets to the opening night showing and went with all my friends (including and especially the dear soul who would six years later marry me) to see what all the fuss was about. It was a party!  People showed up in costume, carrying brightly colored plastic swords (my dad bought me a red one for the event, I'm pretty sure that means he's cool with my Dark Side tendencies?).  The high school marching band came into the theatre and performed the Title Crawl and Imperial March live (which was AWESOME).  And there was just this ... I don't know, this aura of sheer jubilation suffusing every square inch of breath in the room, a generation of parents who'd raised their children on the orig-trig getting to see a Star Wars  movie along with their...

Several years ago, I found a recipe called  Fat-burning Cabbage Soup , and where the ingredients all sounded delicious, I'm not a fan of recipes that make declarations about my corporeal form, so it took me approximately eight thousand years to actually get around to trying it.  The results were ... okay, I guess.  The soup was SUPER bland and tasted like something you'd only eat if you were desperate to meet some sort of social standard for your physical appearance (which is stupid and you shouldn't do it -- you're beautiful how you are). However, I had this GIANT soup-pot of disappointing soup to deal with, now (this recipe makes a LOT of food), so I added some spices and garlic and an egg on top, and all of a sudden, I had a dish that I really liked and my partner couldn't get enough of.  Seriously, the look on his face when I said I was going to make another batch?  You'd've thought Christmas and his birthday had both teamed up to bring him cheer and h...

I have a VIVID childhood memory of stopping somewhere between my grandparents' home in West Virginia and my home in Ohio to eat lunch at a Burger King that had a wall painted dark blue with stars and moons on it and a white quarter-fed pony ride indoors, near that wall.  I don't know if it's real or if I dreamt it, but I suspect the former because I also  have a distinct memory of eating a burger there that was burnt and dry and just really not all that great, and you'd not think that would feature in a dream about a magical Burger King.  Or at least I wouldn't. Anyway, that's kind of where I feel my relationship to burgers started, and started going downhill.  I'm just not really a fan of the things, for all that I get a bee in my bonnet every few years and decide I want to make them.  I've posted turkey burgers , blue cheese turkey burgers , and chickpea burgers over the last decade, and where the latter two in that list are legitimately good, they...

Moonstruck  has been a fascinating cultural experience for me. I first saw it when I was in my early teens, maybe tweens, and I loved it (it's got Cher in it, how could I not  love it?). Six or so years later, I attended Thanksgiving with my long-suffering partner's extremely  Italian family, and I fell in love with Moonstruck  all over again because oh my god they weren't exaggerating anything in the movie Italian-Americans really are this amazing . Then four or five years after that, I visited New York City for the first time and got a taste of the city in which Moonstruck  is set (though 2010 NYC and 1986 NYC are vastly  different places), and finally had all the pieces I needed to truly enjoy Moonstruck  in its entirety. (I still love Cher, don't be confused, but Olympia Dukakis as Rose is absolutely 100% the best part  of that movie. "You've got a lovebite on your neck." I CAN'T.) Now fast-forward to October 2016. We'd gone to see a play,...

I've been accidentally making quite a lot of vegan, gluten-free, soy-free, low-fat, low/no-cholesterol dishes lately, which is interesting because a) I'm not a vegan, b) I'm not even trying  to make dishes that fit any of the above categories, and c) all of these dishes are wicked  tasty, which is not something one generally associates with vegan-gluten-free-soy-free-low-fat-nice-to-your-cholesterol cooking. I mean, I guess there wouldn't be any vegans if vegan food tasted bad or boring or whatever, but still, considering how devastatingly deep my love of cheese and eggs goes, I've been pleasantly surprised to learn that my twin vices aren't actually needed in every dish I eat. That said, whenever I take this soup to work for lunch, I find that I heat it up and expect it to be boring. Like, every single day. Even though I ate it the day before and loved it. I still  expect to dislike it the following day. I suspect this means that I am a) biased, b) indoctri...

Ahh autumn. It comes with cool nights and sunburned shoulders where the days are warmer than I'm expecting them to be, comes with sneezes from the leaf-mold allergies I stalwartly insist I don't have, and best of all, comes with a ravenous desire to make soups, stews, and other combinations of veggies boiled together in a big ol' pot. This is normally where I'd tell you that Cloud City's a big ol' pot where crazy's all boiled together, but that's a stretch even I'm not willing to make. So we'll just go with the fact that Cloud City's got fluffy white clouds all around it (truly the creativity in naming is jaw-dropping, Lando what were  you thinking). For my next act of grandeur, I'll be making this recipe with carrots, Brussels sprouts, and mushrooms. For now, though, this is potato soup how you didn't know you needed  potato soup to be. You're welcome . Cloud City Potato Soup Ingredients 2 tsp olive oil 2 tbsp butter ...

Not so long ago, in a galaxy just parallel to the one far, far away, it turns out that we're  the ones who eat the sarlacc, not the other way around ... I've recently discovered the absolute treasure trove that is Star Wars . Yes, I know I'm about 38 years late to this party (which is, in-and-of itself impressive, since I'm only 32), but in my defense , my introduction to Star Wars  was that godawful trilogy from the early 2000s that we don't talk about, okay . I half-watched the orig-trig in its entirety in about an hour before going to see Ep II after half-convincing myself that my unfamiliarity with the franchise was the reason I'd disliked Ep I so strongly (spoiler: that wasn't the reason, the reason was that the movie sucked ), and then after I sat through Ep III a few years later, I decided that yeah, Star Wars  wasn't my thing and went back to lavishing all of my attention on Star Trek  and anime. But then this Christmas, we went to see Ep...

Being vegetarian at Thanksgiving is trickier than I'd thought it would be. My first Thanksgiving not eating meat, I was hungry after the big meal, which led to me pouting for a solid year. My second Thanksgiving not eating meat (this Thanksgiving), I ate so much I was actually concerned that I'd throw up after the meal because Aunt Linda recognized my plight and decided to be her usual awesome self about addressing it. One of the dishes she made for me was roasted portobello mushrooms. Now, I had never eaten a portobello mushroom before and was wary, but these things were AMAZING. They had an almost meaty flavor to them, which led me to think about turning mushrooms into a meat substitute, which led me to thinking about making a steak 'n cheese out of mushrooms, which led to quite a lot of steak 'n cheese happening in my house after we got home from visiting family. The filling is now how I like it, so it's the same if you're going to make a sub or an omelet...

I honestly don't remember why we bought the enormous bottle of sweet Thai chili sauce that's been in our refrigerator for the past ... probably three years. I suspect it was for a Thai dish (duh) but I make so many of those, that doesn't really narrow it down, like at all. Anyhow, because the bottle's been in the 'fridge for ages, and it had seriously like 2 oz used out of a full liter, we figured we should use it up. Or use it at all, you know. So I went online and looked for recipes that used sweet Thai chili sauce, and happened upon this recipe , which was pretty damn excellent, especially after an hour of DDR, 25 miles of bike-riding, a trip to the hardware store (I got to buy a power saw, I am SO EXCITED), and some pathetic attempts to do press-ups and chin-ups. Semi-related note: my arms have way more in common with cooked soba noodles than they should. I am ashamed. Here's my version of the recipe, complete with more veggies, less leek (seriously, l...