A Tale of Two Casseroles or Why We’re Never Having a Vegan Over Again

So now that our place has been a little cleaner as of late, we decided to try our hand at entertaining guests last night. Three brave (and genuinely classy) ladyfriends of ours voluntarily subjected themselves to our well-meaning hospitalites, against their better judgement I can only imagine. Ben was planning on making a chicken casserole from a family recipe. Problem: one of them is a vegetarian/semi-vegan and all of us are raging meat-etarians. We had no idea what to make for her, until about 2 hours before they were supposed to come over. That was when, out of sheer desperation (and, in retrospect, a good deal of hubris), Ben decided we would attempt to improvise a vegetarian chicken casserole on the fly in addition to the regular casserole. How hard could it be? Substitute tofu for chicken, and cream of broccoli soup for cream of chicken, and all the other ingredients stay the same, right down to the… stuffing. Wait… where’s the stuffing? And that’s when I was sent on an emergency grocery run to pick up the stuffing which Ben had forgotten. At the store, things got even trickier. Every single kind of stuffing contained some variant of chicken fat, chicken broth, or just ambigous chicken flavor. Decidedly un-vegetarian. Being stuffingless for the vegetarian casserole and rapidly running out of time we decided to improvise yet again. Advice for the reader: if you ever find yourself in a similar situation, please be advised that crumbled toast and seasoned shake and bake breading boiled with water and butter will not approximate stuffing. It will be some form of doughy muck that bears no resemblence whatsoever to stuffing. However, being in a similar situation it will be your only option and you will have to go ahead and use it anyway, hoping that it will miraculously come out alright when you bake the casserole. This also will not be the case. Our net result was one fairly normal looking chicken casserole and one pile of tofu, noodles, soup, and sour cream in a casserole dish, with a doughy bread pudding spread sporadically on top. But you know, all casseroles just look gross so what’s the difference really? Being the only person to sample both casseroles I can safely say that the difference is the taste. Our vegetarian friend had several servings and she said that it was pretty good, but trust me, she was just being kind. We’re sorry. We really are. That’s all I can say. You know what though? I got to wear my bitchin’ new cowboy vest to dinner, so I’d declare the night a success no matter what.

Comments

Comment by Ben Lewis on 2004-09-01 21:02:06 +0000

I had totally forgot about this one. I was laughing hard for the whole duration I read it. A classic Clarington Court moment

Job interview with Raytheon went really really well this afternoon, and I was told that an on-site interview was likely but I’ve heard that before so I’ll just wait and see. Is it just me or are only defense contractors hiring these days? I’m not sure how I feel about that, but I’m sure there are other things if I’d just look harder.

Its time to start thinking about where I’m going to move this page to when I lose access to the CIS servers after I graduate in a month or so. I’m pretty sure I’m going to register my own domain, and as much as I’d like to run my own server to host it I’m still clueless enough about security issues to make that not such a good idea for right now. The next question is, what domain should I register? Both gorman5.com and willgorman.net are available, but maybe I’ll go with something entirely different.

The DMCA and What’s Worse

I’ve always been uncomfortable with the DMCA, for a number of reasons touched upon by this article. It seems that we’re laying the groundwork to give copyright holders absolute control over any and all forms of their copyrighted materials at the same time that we’re increasing the duration of copyrights. I think this is really eroding the initial purpose of copyright laws, being to give the creator of a work a limited period of time in which to have the sole opportunity to profit from the work, thereby providing incentive for such works to be created. In addition, the DMCA is worded so that any and all attempts to circumvent access controls on copyrighted material, even by the copyright holder, are illegal. Its like being able to be arrested and punished for breaking into your own house because you forgot your keys. The only solution? Mass riots and cop killing. (with a wink and a nudge, of course)

Rented the Ghost World dvd last night, and though I liked it just fine it wasn’t really what I was expecting. Probably because my only previous impression of it was gathered from briefly flipping through parts of the graphic novel in a bookstore. I’d really like to read the comic now, because it seemed to me that it would be better suited at telling that kind of story and fleshing out the characters than the movie did. Not to slight the movie, which did an excellent job, but it just seemed like something I’d find more fulfilling as a graphic novel, especially the ending (which I’ve heard is actually pretty different in the comic).

Yesterday I hit up some thrift stores with my friend BZ, but was disappointed for the most part. Its mostly “Stone Cold” Steve Austin or Planet Hollywood t-shirts and ugly sweaters (“That’s a Cosby sweater, a Cosby sweatah!“) I did find an incredible fleece-lined leather cowboy vest, but its one of those things that you have no idea when you’ll ever wear it, but you just know that someday the opportunity will arise and you’ll be ready. Or it’ll just sit around forever. At two dollars though, how can you not take the chance? I got a couple plain t-shirts though, because BZ knows how to do t-shirt printing/silk screening/whatever it is you do. I’m hoping to put this picture on a shirt (warning: link contains johnny cash flippin the bird… to the Man!) I love that picture. Man, do I hope it works out.

So what have I been doing with all my hours and hours of free time since I dropped those 2 extra classes? To borrow from Office Space, I’ve been doing nothing and its everything I thought it would be. Only its not. Sure, its great to not be rushing around wondering how you’re going to find time to get everything done, but at the end of the day you’re left with the nagging feeling that you haven’t done anything useful all day because, well, you haven’t done anything useful all day. Its pretty unsatisfying. I figured with all my free time, I’d finally do some programming on my own, port the OSU graphics software to windows, learn how to setup a web server, get a db setup with mySQL, etc, etc etc. Nope. All I’ve done so far is kill a bunch of Nazis, play with faeries, obtain ultimate power, and kick it old school. Lame. In order to feel like I’ve accomplished something every day, I’ve started to become our official house maid. Whenever I get too bored, I go clean something. Its not much, but its a start.

Huh. Google doesn’t index my page anymore. What brought that on I wonder? I think I deserve better than that, Google. You still love me don’t you? Don’t you? Come on. Now where am I going to get my delightfully random search hits from?

When it comes to my favorite video games of all time, Master of Magic would have to be pretty high up on the list, especially since I just found out its possible to get that old DOS relic to run under Windows2000. The game is over 9 years old and looks extremely dated, but I still can’t get enough of it. The only downside is that the game was always plagued with stability issues, and its age certainly hasn’t helped that.

So out of nowhere (well, Utah technically) I got a call and an email from Evans and Sutherland yesterday. This from a company who I was well into a promising recruiting process with (I thought so anyway) when they suddenly stopped calling for 3 months. I even emailed them, but got no reply. I figured they must have just changed their minds, but all of a sudden it looks like I’m back in the running. They just apologized for taking so long to get back to me and asked if I still wanted to continue the recruiting process. Holy freakin’ crap yes! is what I wanted to say, but I left it at just yes.