naughty meals

I wasn't really supposed to eat today, but I did. I feel a bit guilty about this, but all the food was pretty damn good. Some of it was leftovers from Friday's meal. Another thing was a pie that was originally supposed to go to Charles, but for this and that reason, I wasn't able to get it to him, so the pie ended up in my office, where we all tore it to shreds. Lastly, there were still enough leftovers, at the end of the work day, for me to take the remaining rice tortillas home—with some lettuce and sour cream—to combine with some at-home ingredients to make one decent quesadilla. I want to walk you through the following photos, but here's some background first.

My boss wasn't there on Friday, when the luncheon happened, and while there was still a bit of burrito/fajita filling left, there wasn't enough for the boss to eat anything on Monday. So Friday afternoon, I went downstairs to the Hanaro Mart—a grocery in the building where I work—and bought some shrimp and some beef, since that's what my coworker's wife had put together as a burrito filling. Personally, I liked her surf-and-turf combo, so I was eager to stick with that. Now, she had used skirt steak as her beef, and I didn't see any skirt steak at the downstairs grocery, so I noodled a bit and decided to go with a small package of Korean brisket. Unlike US brisket, Korean yangji (I've talked about it before) is marbled through and through. With that much intramuscular fat, you know you can fry and fry the meat without worrying about it drying up. I pan-fried the meat until it was just cooked and just acquiring some color because I knew that, on Monday, I'd be reheating the meat for the boss and thus cooking it the rest of the way. I treated the shrimp I'd bought with equal delicacy, taking it to the just-cooked stage. Today, I mixed the beef with the Missus's burrito filling, reheated the whole mess, tossed in the shrimp at the last minute, and got everything up to a proper temp. I served that to the boss, but even after the boss had eaten his fill, there was still enough material to make one more legitimate taco. And that's what you see below: the final taco—

the Missus included a lot of onions in her filling, which I avoided
(the onions you see are from the Missus's pico de gallo; I don't mind 'em cut small)

Gotta say: that fresh cilantro made a hell of a difference.

Next up: what should have been Charles's pie. This wasn't merely an apple-pineapple pie: I also added heavy cream and vanilla. I had initially thought that cream was one of the flavor notes to come out of the artisanal beer that inspired this pie, but I was wrong. Too late—the cream had been added. In the end, the cream affected the look but not the flavor of the pie, and the vanilla barely registered. From now on, I'm going to make this pie the way I made it in early August, when I fed my old teammates—just pineapple, and nothing fancier. Still, today's pie was quite tasty. Charles and his wife would've liked it.

A slice:

The rest of the pie:

instead of an egg wash, I did a heavy-cream wash before sprinkling turbinado

I couldn't find any vanilla ice cream at the local convenience store, so I got some weird Haagen-Dildo concoction that was part chocolate, part raspberry, and part vanilla. Best I could do on short notice.

Pictured below is the quesadilla I made. There were still two rice tortillas left from the Friday/Monday office meal, along with the remains of a tub of sour cream, plus some shredded lettuce that no one in the office ate. I took all of the lettuce, a couple spoonfuls of sour cream, and the tortillas. I then went to the grocery in my building and bought some pre-prepped chicken breast (edible straight from the package), along with some smoked duck, which tastes pretty much like bacon. I diced the chicken finely, combined it with the already chopped-up duck (after frying up the duck and leaving the grease in the pan), got out my Costco "Mexican blend" shredded cheese, assembled my quesadilla, and fried that fucker up in the same pan I'd used for the duck:

quesadilla, fried in duck fat—glorious

One thing I was lacking was tomatoes. I wasn't interested in buying a package of tomatoes because I plan on eating nothing tomorrow and Wednesday, but I did want something red on my quesadilla to complete the presentation. Solution: harissa powder and a goosh of sriracha. Lettuce, sour cream, and my jalapeños completed the picture:

I sprinkled the harissa powder close to my fan.

So, that's the story of today's gobble. I wasn't supposed to eat at all (I normally try to fast Monday through Wednesday), but I gave in to temptation, rationalizing my extended binge by saying the leftovers needed to be taken care of so as not to waste them. Well, I have the next two months to buckle down yet again, and after my walk, I'll visit my doc and, I hope, have some good blood-test numbers for him.

Oh, yeah: the rice tortillas were perfect for quesadillas.