Author: phattlmann

Chicken with Mushroom Cream Sauce, Sprouts & Parsnips

Thanks to the fine people over at Dell Canada for the (relatively) free meal tonight. Part of their marketing since COVID has been to do various “join in at home!” type things and this time around it’s a cooking class. They send you everything you need (well, almost in my case) and you follow along with some semi-famous chef. I’m sure there’s a lot of product placement and hyping of their latest technologies along the way, but I really don’t know.

The problem is, this thing is tomorrow night and I’ve got other more pressing commitments. So, I decided to make it tonight. The thing is, the recipe card they sent was horrific. It didn’t list amounts, and the method was horribly basic. I improvised a tad. Here’s what I came up with.

It’s an easy dish that anyone should be able to make with relatively little equipment, although I’ll suggest a cast iron skillet will be massive help over your usual frying pan. Seriously. Go get a cast iron skillet. If you take care of it (hell, even if you don’t), it’ll last forever. Or, better yet – see if your grandparents will leave you theirs in the will. It’s the second best gift a person can get from Grandma besides a lot of love & encouragement in the form of rock candy.

I’d already eaten tonight and figured I’d prep this for my lunch and dinner tomorrow, but seeing as I usually don’t have a ton of time (nor motivation) around 1 in the afternoon while working, I got to work tonight.

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Roasted Chicken Soup with Dumplings

I’ve been meaning to really refine my perfect hearty chicken soup recipe for a while. This got expedited a tad as a friend has been feeling quite under the weather with some health complications. Knowing that they have two young children at home and very little energy from their treatments, delivering a few hearty meals that could easily be heated up was a no-brainer option.

This chicken soup is just as hearty as it is delicious. It’s a riff on what your grandmother likely used to make, only with a bit more intricacy to really bring out the flavour of all the ingredients. I’ll be working on really perfecting the dumplings as while they were wonderful, I’d really like to get a little more punch to them.

While the chicken soup you may be used to from a can is likely engrained in your mind from childhood, that was really a disservice to what this can truly be. If you give this a shot, I promise it’ll be a night and day difference. While the entire thing is hardly as easy as cracking a can of Campbells, if you make it in advance it stores wonderfully in the freezer and re-heats marvelously. Buying your chicken whole will help save a lot of money, and quite honestly for the portion sizes you’re going to get, it’s cheaper than buying those horribly over-salted and under-flavoured cans of crap.

This soup is hearty, rich, and will leave you full. It’s time to level up.

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Support Software. Good Software.

I’m a huge proponent that when you want to use a piece of software, you buy the darn thing. All my copies of Windows are legit, my audio editing software wasn’t a cheap license, I have a lifetime subscription to XSplit, and a variety of other things. I pay for apps I like on my phone. However, I’m still running a cracked version of WinRar, because I’m not _that_ dedicated. Almost.

This is coming from a guy who basically pirated everything under the sun from the dawn of getting online (heck, even before). I remember being quite young when Windows 3.11 was the shit. It came on something like 15 x floppies. Needless to say, pirated. I was one of the first kids with a CD burner. Game on.

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So, I’m an Uber Driver, err Walker

In a desperate attempt to loose the dreaded “Covid-20”, I’ve been walking a lot. Ok, maybe I haven’t gained 20lbs, but I have become a heck of a lot more stagnant over the past 6 months. Like many, I’ve been working from home since mid-March.

Almost immediately my condo gym was closed, so I figured I’d buy some free-weights. Naturally supply and demand dictated that any fitness equipment tripled in price overnight and paying $300+ for a pair of 30lb dumbells just wasn’t a financial choice I could justify. So, I began to go for 5-7k walks 3 times a week. Looking back, this isn’t exactly a lot of distance, but it was something.

I didn’t realize how much I walk in a day until I didn’t. Nowadays, I get up, walk 9 seconds to my kitchen to brew a coffee, then 6 more seconds to my desk. I walk 6 seconds back to my coffee maker, then 6 more seconds to my desk; where I more or less stay for the next 8-12 hours. I’m a damn sloth.

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Knowledge Transfer.

For quite some time I’ve said I hate people calling me an expert in something just because I know more than they may. It makes me uncomfortable. It’s not that I don’t like to talk about things with great passion; anyone who knows me is aware of my penchant to drive on at lengths about a topic. But an expert? No. I feel that’s a label that should only be bestowed upon someone who’s spent a considerable part of their life dedicated to a topic, likely accredited in the matter from somewhere other than YouTube.

Remember when people such as doctors, scientists, and mathematicians were not only listened to, but respected? It baffles me when I run across people who believe the world is flat, vaccines cause autism, or whatever half-cooked conspiracy theory is popular today. It’s as if peer reviewed science means absolutely nothing anymore. That concept is completely lost on so many, facts are meaningless unless they validate your beliefs, and people are cherry picking and manipulating what they do find. It’s backwards. You should be looking for facts that disprove or challenge your position, and it’s only when you can’t is when you have the foundation of a theory you can present to be peer reviewed.

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