You know what that means.
I’ll give in to my base instincts! Which, as we’ve discussed before, involve robots, space monsters, monkeys, spaceships, rayguns, and the food to feed my Mighty Brain. Some of those are Monkey Business, so I cover them on Devil Monkey (Planning a relaunch in July), but some of it you get to see right here. Especially what I plan to cook both for my weekend Feasting and the following week at work.
I started the weekend off with a bang. Since I had to swing by the hostibule anyway for a bucket of prescriptions and Portillo’s is more or less on the way home, my lunches for Friday and Saturnday consisted of takeout from Portillo’s. Friday I had a Chicago Dog with everything on it and fries with their giardiniera sauce.
Saturday I plan to eat the Big Italian Beef (extra dipped, with hot giardiniera and extra gravy on the side). They saturate the bread for that sandwich so thoroughly it has the consistency of snot and the foil wrapping feels like a full diaper. And it’s in a plastic bag. I’ll have had it festrating in my office fridge for about 20 hours before I eat it. All the flavors will do their thing, it will congeal into a unified whole, and all kinds of Indescribable Goodness. That’s why sub shop sandwiches taste so good – that waxed paper they wrap them in does a lot. Then I have a little cup of gravy to dip it in, kind of like a French Dip made by Al Capone.
I’ll be taking my shirt off and wearing a bib. Probably taking a shower afterward if I don’t pass out from the Meat Sweats.
It will be Glorious. So Glorious, I was describing my afternoon to Stacie as “no pants, GWAR in the music player, the house to myself, and a sanmich that feels like a full diaper. I think I’m living my best life.”
To which she replied “Christ you’re easy.” Yep. She’s been paying attention – I am a simple creature. Good food, some entertainment, no pants, and I’m a Happy Guy.
But I digress. It isn’t like Portillo’s is paying for my commentary on their food.
My planned menu for the rest of the weekend is:
- Shakshuka for Saturday and possibly Sunday breakfast. It’s a big recipe and I’ll eat a bunch of it, but it’s all vegetables and eggs, served over bread. It’ll be well within my carb limit.
- Night Food Saturnday will be a tomato-vegetable risotto. The recipe looks promising, but it cold be hit or miss because I’m fairly inept at risotto – it usually comes out like a bucket of glue.
- Lunch Sunday will be crackpot skrautenbratten. It’s a simple recipe. Place skrauten in the crackpot, add a couple of other things, and lay the bratten over the top. Cook it all morning, and it’ll be good to go.
- Night Food Sunday and lunch at work will be torgo bowls. Because I like them and they’re fairly low carb. That’s another crackpot recipe.
- I’m also going to make a batch of chickpea salad for sanmiches at some point. I found a recipe, and it looks good and monkey-simple to prepare.
You’ll notice the crackpots feature heavily, as does takeout and leftovers, and the chickpea salad can be prepared simultaneously with other stuff and thrown in the fridge to festrate just like the Big Beef. This is deliberate. The shakshuka and risotto will be somewhat labor intense, but the shakshuka especially needs to festrate for a while. I can do other stuff while I let it go on the stove.
With so much of my food this weekend being largely hands-off, it also frees up a lot of time for other projects. As I’ve mentioned before, I effectively work two jobs and I’m a full-time student on top of it – go multitasking. I build robots for my day job, and I can largely do that on autopilot, which lets me take some of my classes through my headphones. The headphones also drown out Pugsley’s stupidity, so that’s a bonus. That means I am largely off the hook for cooking, while cooking pretty healthy stuff. Which means I’m free to take my classes, do household maintenance, and take care of the cats without other responsibilities.
I’ll update this again with after-action reports on the shakshuka, sanmiches, and risotto.