A Boy in His Throne

I haven't written anything for a while now... so I just published a catch-up video and back-dated it.  Leo is returning to this blog's spotlight as I have another video to share.  I am fully aware that I may be oversharing with the amount of videos of my son.  In my defense, if you don't think he is the cutest thing of all time, something is clearly wrong with you.

I should figure out the lighting situation for future videos as it is pretty dark, but it cracks me up.  I wanted to get a video that shows how much he likes his bumbo seat, but I think it does a better job showing how much he likes putting things in his mouth.

Catching Up: Leo and Grilled Cheese

I think it’s time for an obligatory catch-up post.

Leo has been up to his tired old act of being cute. Here’s video proof:

That boy is a genius! Just don’t ask him to open any of the others. I really need to figure out how to edit videos, because you really just need thirty seconds of this.

And from last week, I should get a video of him actually in his exersaucer, which he got for Christmas and absolutely loves, but this is much better:

For the record, he did this for at least five minutes straight and I took several videos, but none are timed right… you see, the chameleon only has three colors, each with their own tune, and then a fourth compilation tune worthy of The Monkees from back when psychedelic movies made sense. I went with the shortest one, because they all are pretty anti-climactic. The most anti-climactic is on YouTube.

I also ate another grilled cheese sandwich! Here’s a video:

It wasn’t that it was a bad sandwich; it is just that it was far from perfect, and perfection is what I seek. It was a learning experience, though, as I think it failed in one key area: gooeyness. Gooeyness is an important factor. The macaroni filling might be worth revisiting, just with more gooeyness.

I did not use any ketchup though. Despite my earlier suggestions, ketchup might be obligatory. (You see what I did there?)

YouTube Treasures

Yesterday, my YouTube videos netted me $3.58.  Today, I am feeling rich.

$3.58 might not seem like very much, but in the world of Google AdSense, anything more than a few pennies is cause for celebration.  Recently, I have actually been doing very well and have already earned over $18 this month... and the month is far from over!  In fact, after years of waiting before getting my first $100 check from Google this past July, I am very close to earning my second $100 check.

And what exactly did I do to "earn" this money?  Oh yeah:

That video has over 118,000 views!  That number boggles my brain.

There are, of course, a few other hand selected videos that I have put advertisements on that are boosting my totals, but nothing close to that.  I imagine that pretty soon, Leo will be giving me a run for my money pretty soon, as all his videos have ads attached to them, and he is much cuter than I am!  Speaking of my boy, here's a special Friday edition of Thirty Seconds with Leo that is closer to Ninety Seconds:

Isn't he talented?  So the last three videos of Leo have all featured him rolling.  In the next episode, we bid farewell to Leo as he leaves to join the circus. The circus, it turns out, pays more than $3.58 every day!

The Grilled Cheese Taste-Off

Gooey goodness.

This weekend, my wife and I played host to a couple of her old college roommates.  I seized the opportunity by forcing them to participate in the first grilled cheese taste-off of the year.  A taste-off is a great way to experiment and test out grilled cheeses on my pathway to perfecting the grilled cheese sandwich.  Here's a little starter video:

What that video lacks in substance, it more than makes up for in charm. *emoticon smile!*

I was surprised with the results, both in my favorite and in how varied the opinions were. Each sandwich was rated 1 through 10 in four categories, overall taste, presentation, bread, and cheese.  Here is a rundown of each sandwich and how they fared.

Four sandwiches, ready to be judged.

Grilled Salt & Pepper Cheese

 This grilled cheese is simple American cheese on the whitest white bread imaginable with a bunch of salt and pepper added to it.  The results were mixed.  Three out of four judges rated this the worst of the bunch, but the fourth judge considered it the favorite due to its "classic" nature.  Speaking as one of the judges, this was terrible.  There was way too much salt and I was left with a dry mouth for hours after this competition.  Cheese, I'm learning, has some salt to it, but I believe this sandwich bore the blame for my dry mouth.

The Cinnamon Sugar Grilled Cheese

 This is the same concept as the salt and pepper sandwich, just with cinnamon sugar instead of salt and pepper.  I also covered the top of the sandwich itself with a light cover of cinnamon sugar as a final step.  I was excited about this one as my wife usually puts cinnamon on her grilled cheeses, a trick she learned from her grandmother.  Speaking for myself, this was an excellent sandwich despite the fact that it rated last by three of the four judges, despite strong numbers and good comments from all.  If anything, it was hurt by the other sandwiches as it was definitely the only sweet option available.  Don't be fooled by the numbers... it was good sandwich.

The Double-Stacked, Double-Stuffed Cheesey Grilled Cheese

 So this is a big sandwich with big ambitions.  It has plain white bread on the outside, with the inside being layered like this: 1 American Cheese, 1 Muenster Cheese, 1 American Cheese, 1 separately grilled slice of Potato Bread, 1 Muenster Cheese, 1 Cheddar Cheese, 1 Muenster Cheese.  It was pretty good, and a lot of fun to make.  That being said, I can't help but blame it for the constipation that followed me for the rest of the day.  The judges all agreed that it was not their favorite, but it did rate as the favorite if you only look at the numbers.  This is because in my scoring system, presentation was equally waited with taste, which you have to admit, this was pretty impressive looking.  



Our new camera helps its on-line presentation.



Cheddar on Rye

I have to give credit to my wife's aunt for this sandwich.  I have been wanting to try it since she mentioned it was her favorite, and... oh my god, it was so good!  I would never have thought to use rye bread for any sandwich before this Perfect Grilled Cheese Adventure began, but now I want to try it for all my sandwiches.  It sounds totally gross but I can't wait for tomorrow's return to work with a Peanut Butter and Jelly on rye.  Three out of four judges rated this very highly, even though it wasn't much to look at.  The only complaint was the two pieces of cheese didn't melt together very well, which was kind of weird, but that is cooking error and only makes me wonder how good this sandwich could be.

The simplicity of this sandwich leads me to think that the best Grilled Cheese will be the easiest to make, cheese, bread, butter, heat.  None of these sandwiches though had any crunch to them, which I hope to add in soon. 

All in all, it was a fun event with pretty tasty results.

Leo Keeps on Rolling

Last week, I finally got Leo rolling from his tummy to his back.  This week he mastered the roll in the other direction.  Bedtime is now so much fun... (sarcastic eye roll).  Here's him in action:

He is a rolling fool now and does it just for the hell of it.  I put him on the floor for maybe five minutes here.  He happily rolled back and forth and back and forth almost non-stop, until he knocked his head on the coffee table and cried for the next hour and a half.  (Most of that crying was just him being tired.  He fell asleep as I was putting him in his swaddle.)

Here's another video.  He isn't doing anything here, but it is the first video of Leo that I tagged as "the cutest baby ever."  The keyword there is "first".  Here it is:

For some reason, YouTube darkens everything... that's a shame, but I think it still holds up to its tag as the cutest baby ever.

Improving the Blog Would Be Difficult

This is the third part of a 43 part-series on ways to improve my blog. Improving this blog seems like an easy task as there’s nowhere really to go but up… and no one to really impress. The series, like the blog itself, might be best summed up as delusions of grandeur.

A couple days ago I posted about my travel time to and from the lake where I eat lunch often. It was a pretty good addition to the virtual treasure trove of excellence in fine writing found within this website. It did however have its flaws.

I have already had to make one correction. I probably could make many, many more.

I mention at the end of that post that the main point I wanted to convey when I began writing was not the one that I stressed the most. In writing the thing, I had a realization that changed my perspective on the issue. I feel like a true writer would have at that point scrapped what they had already written and started over.

I typically don’t do that, but a better blog needs that. A better blog needs someone to give it the old once-over to make sure it makes sense and is focused and on-target. Posts should be easy and enjoyable to read, but I freely admit that sometimes these posts can be a challenge to read. (Heck, more often than not they are a challenge to write.)

Perhaps, the blog needs someone else at the helm. This person would not only see my vision but mold it into a better vision. This means that they would appreciate my John Duffy-glorification and meaningless babble, maybe resulting in meaningless glorification of John Duffy babble.

A big problem is that too often I operate under a unique, self-imposed interest-crunch. Similar to a time-crunch, I try to write as much as I can about everything loosely connected to what I’m writing about until I run out of interest in it. Then I hit publish. While I try to catch mistakes as I go along, I hardly ever go back to edit any of the content in it. It would not be easy to put the extra time into it or to delete lines that I thought enough of to write down, but that’s exactly what I need to improve, editing the content.

If the aim is simply to improve the blog, however, perhaps I should begin by editing the small stuff. It wuold be nice not have any glaring errors like misspelled or dropped words.

For what it’s worth, I tried to rewrite this post from scratch after my first attempt wasn’t very good. They are quite different, but similarly uninteresting, as I follow the same path of stuffing each post with random thoughts of interest that I allude to in both. It can be seen after the jump if you have any desire to read it. I am impressed and grateful that you’ve read this much, so congratulations! You’re done!

Grilled Cheese: Round 2 - The Iron Skillet

My grilled cheese adventure turned another page this weekend with the introduction of the long-awaited (by me) iron skillet.

A man and his skillet.

The iron skillet may look brand new, but don’t be fooled. I bought it over a year ago thinking my wife would love to have a hardy new pan. You would have thought by her reaction to this thoughtful, unexpected gift that pans and skillets are mortal enemies, and we, as by-standing chefs must choose a side. My wife never once used the iron skillet, calling it unprintable names, claiming it is dirty. All the while, I have never wanted to cook with something more.

My wife also says that it will absorb flavors as you cook, so everything would end up tasting like everything else. If this is true, it is a legitimate concern. You don’t want to be making pancakes that taste like fried onions. For this reason, the great grilled cheese adventure is a perfect fit for the iron skillet.

Mmm.  Grilled excellence.

The first attempt with it led to mixed results. It may lend itself to picturesque cooking, but it heats up really fast and I burned my second sandwich.

Study this picture.  There will be a test later.

As you can see, the two sandwiches are very different. In this process, part of me wants to take a gradual, organic exploration of what is out there, and part of me wants to go crazy and try wild things. I did a little of both.

The top sandwich here is simple American cheese on potato bread. Last week, I discovered that whole wheat bread is not suitable for grilled cheeses. It’s too hearty and substantial. I looked online for the best grilled cheese sandwiches and found recipes that call for “quality potato bread.” This is Martin’s Potato Bread and it makes a world of difference. This was a much better Grilled Cheese sandwich. (Unfortunately, the potato bread replaced the whole wheat bread on the grocery list and today’s lunch of Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich took a hit. It’s going to be a long week of lunches.)

 The bottom half of the picture is a blackened sandwich of American cheese on Pan de Leche, or milk bread, which my wife bought off the reduced rack. The price was right. We’ve toasted this bread up to go with pasta dinners and it really is delicious. As a grilled cheese it did alright. It was a bit sweet and almost chewy. Its downfall was user-error as it bore the brunt of my skillet inexperience. For one thing, it cooked too fast for the cheese to get good and melty.

Another problem though wasn’t with the skillet at all, but that it did toast evenly. I should have expected this though as it isn’t cut into flat slices. I don’t want one mishap to rule all rolls and buns out altogether, but it is something that I’ll need to figure out a solution to.

Overall, not a bad effort, but as you see in the picture, I was generous with the ketchup. As my wife says, a great grilled cheese sandwich won’t need any help.

Leo Rolls in Thirty Seconds

As a parent there are milestones that you look for in your child.  I have been trying to catch as many of them on film as possible for my weekly Thirty Seconds with Leo, but as its usually a new skill, I end up holding the camera in front of him for a long, long time.  The Hello Hands video, when he first started playing with his hands, stands out in my mind cause it took nearly an hour to get a good one... albeit it was a very fun hour.

This week's Thirty Seconds with Leo features my boy rolling over.  He's been rolling from tummy to back for awhile now, but we have never been able to catch it on camera.  Today I was determined to finally get it regardless of how long it took.  It took thirty seconds:


I think last week I said that I've been trying to get him laughing on video too.  Last week's video was a pretty good example of this, but I'm still hoping to get a better one.  Here's one from Thursday when my wife was at the store:

Leo is cracking up at me dropping a pink sheep stuffed animal from way up high and catching it before it hits him.  It's a pretty good video of him laughing, but with that description you can probably guess that the funniest part of it is an outtake from a different angle:


Totally unrelated, but yesterday I found another video on my computer from New Year's Eve of Leo being amazing.  My boy's so advanced.

Corrections

In a January 6 story about a couple’s resolution to reduce their carbon footprint, the Muted Guerrilla incorrectly reported that the two had been married for three years. The couple have been married for four years.

My Lunchtime Footprint

Another item on my annual to-do list is to reduce my carbon footprint. While it is a noble cause that does concern me, I should admit that the only reason why it was included as a New Year’s Resolution was a random comment that my wife made last week. “Do you think we could reduce our carbon footprint?”

After three years of marriage, I know better than to guess at my wife’s inner-thought process, but I believe it was an earnest question. We don’t travel much. We don’t consume very much. We very rarely eat meat. Our biggest offence is arguably having a baby, who goes through a lot of diapers. Plus, I’m guilty of taking long showers… the water just feels so good.

I’m sure once I take a better look at my life I can make meaningful changes to reach my goal, but that’s not what today’s post is about. Today, as I often do, is about my lunch by the lake. Today’s Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich was surprisingly good despite my bread being the heels of the loaf.

This is my stock picture of the Lake Where I Eat Lunch Often.  It's not so green this time of year.

The Lake Where I Eat Lunch Often is a daily sanctuary away from the fluorescent lights and cubicled computer screens of my office. There are many days that I spend my morning working towards my lunch visit and spend my afternoon reminiscing about the glorious tastes of my peanut butter and jelly that linger in my mouth. It is however about two and a half miles from my office. That doesn’t seem like very much, but like everything, it adds up fast.

Let’s do the math: 2.5 miles each way makes for a 5 mile trip. I work a compressed schedule 4-day work week, with 52 weeks in a year for a total of 208 work days, but after factoring in holidays and vacation days and days I don’t go to lunch for whatever reason, let’s say I make the 5 mile trip to the lake and back 150 days each year. That makes a grand total 600 extra miles each year.

600 miles! 600 miles for a trip that I don’t even think about. That is a staggering amount… even to my 33 mpg Honda Civic eyes. Going further… 600 miles at 33 mpg is a little less than 20 gallons. A gallon of gas currently is a little over $3, so I’m looking at a $60 expense each year to go eat a lousy peanut butter and jelly sandwich! Woah.

I don’t even want to think about my 25-mile commute to work each day.

I suddenly feel the need to defend my daily visits to the Lake Where I Eat Lunch Often, and I can’t stress enough the need to remove myself from my workplace to recharge for the rest of the day. In my head, I have justified my lunch locale as simply enjoying nature. I have felt some guilt about the travel distance in the past, which I notice as I’m rushing back each day after my hour is up, but I tell myself that sure I’m hurting the environment a tiny bit, but otherwise I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it.

When I started writing this, that last line was going to be the central point I was trying to make, that I am all for saving the environment, but not at the cost of not enjoying the environment. That $60 expense, though, is nagging at me. And that’s just the cost to get there. If I were giving the park $60 to spend an hour a day in their peaceful environs, I would gladly pay up. Instead, I’m burning $60 of toxic fumes into the atmosphere each year.

I may have some more thinking to do on this subject before I do anything rash… I know the perfect place I can go to mull it over in peace.

Grilled Cheese: Dreaming the Impossible Dream

With just one attempt so far, my Grilled Cheese Quest is off to a slow start, but don’t fret the epic journey will continue soon with attempt number two. In fact, it is likely to be principally a weekend effort. That being said, it is with great anticipation that I await the weekend.

Part of me truly want to believe in the power of intention, so it did not surprise me that the morning after announcing my grilled cheese ambitions that a grilled cheese recipe sat atop a pile of scattered recipes on the conference table at my office. A coworker must have gotten a one-a-day Food Network calendar recently and left it out for folks to sift through.

This is a picture of a recipe!

The recipe in question looked delicious from the picture in the corner. It called for a grilled sandwich with Portobello mushrooms, scallions and manchego cheese. Now, the mushrooms raise a question of how much extra stuff can go into a grilled cheese before it becomes something else. This is something that needs to be addressed soon, hopefully after I decide where to draw the line. This post though is about the mysterious second ingredient, the manchego cheese.

Manchego cheese is new to me, and everything about it intrigues me. As my wife can attest, I love saying it – Manchego! – because it makes me feel a bit like a Spanish bull-fighter. Wikipedia tells me it comes from La Mancha , Spain , home of the legendary quest-goer Don Quixote, and is usually sold with his picture. It is made of the milk of sheep. Mmm.

At lunch today, after a delicious Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich by the lake, I escaped the cold by going on a cheese hunt at the grocery store. There are a lot of cheeses, and manchego I found way off in an easily over-looked corner of the cheese display. I can only assume that the manchego cheese at this grocery store was aging nicely.

It is only sold in wedges, which I was expecting, but means it is not very grilled cheese friendly. It bore the seal of the Man of La Mancha and was wrapped in tinted cellophane that sharpened its red exterior. Surprised how hard it was, I turned it over in my hands, looking for a soft spot that would make me believe it could make a good grilled cheese. That’s when I saw the price.

Admittedly, the first number I saw was the price per pound of $17, but the unit price was still close to $9. I had seen the prices of some of the other cheeses and was already feeling discouraged about my Grilled Cheese Quest, but this was truly disheartening. This resolution suddenly appeared to be much more expensive than I was prepared for.  Perhaps with this resolution, I'm just tilting at windmills.

Long story short, while there are many types of cheeses and breads, I predict the bulk of my search will deal with cooking techniques and garnishes.  Maybe if I get another check from Google this year I can try to be a little more adventurous, so remember to support our sponsors... or at least click on their ads, often.

Leo Video Bonus

In my ramblings from my earlier post today, I mentioned sweet potatoes, so I feel like this video from today is somewhat on topic:

This sweet potato trial run was deemed a huge success and there are several videos of it on Leo's youtube page.

Organic by Nature

Recently, I found myself at a natural foods market. My wife and I gave the gift of Spicy Hot Relish this year, which is surprisingly hard to find and can only be found at such places. We considered ourselves lucky to buy the last jar.

It was my first time at this particular store, and after finding the relish that had brought us in, we spent some time perusing about the store. Despite the full shelves of jars and homemade dips and soup packets, the stacked crates of fruits and vegetables, and the humming refrigerators along the back wall, the store felt oddly barren. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I felt like I was shopping in somebody’s cellar.

The store did hold some pretty cool stuff though. There were side-by-side crates for sweet potatoes and yams, which could never be mistaken for one another. I’ve been using the two terms interchangeably, but the sweet potatoes had a purple skin whereas the yams looked more familiar. (Wikipedia says the two are the same thing. What do they know?) I would have gotten a few each to test the difference had I not just bought ten pounds of “Sweet Potatos” from CostCo for $7. Maybe another time though.

In the ten minutes or so that we were looking around, there were two shoppers. A man bought a huge amount of meat. They sell local organic meat, which is noticeably more expensive, and I am pretty sure the man spent close to a hundred dollars on ground beef. That’s a lot of beef! And a woman came in to buy four gallons of local organic milk. That’s a lot of milk!

A quick note about organic beef: I have had two organic hamburgers in my life. One of them was the best hamburger I have ever eaten and the other is the best hamburger I have ever cooked. It is expensive, but it is well worth it.

The milk lady though sparked my imagination. She came in with four empty glass bottles in a convenient carrying case, handed the bottles to the cashier and went to fill up her carrying case with four more glass bottles full of milk. Only after she left, did I go check it out. The milk is not only organic but has a hand-written note saying which local farm produces it. I’m half surprised it didn’t mention the individual cow’s name… now that would be something.

I can just imagine… “No, I had the Suzy milk last week. It was good but I think I’ll go with Bessie this week.” That would be farm-fresh. Next, they could bring the actually cows to the store to promote their milk over their competitors. “Moo,” Suzy would say enticingly as I would be clearly impressed with Bessie bow.

(Did I take that too far? That’s what happens when I try to post regularly.)

My wife and I buy organic milk, so this local organic milk in glass bottles interests me. I even like the idea of the two dollar deposit attached to the glass bottles.  It just adds to the organic-ness of it all.  A while back, I was at a supermarket buying milk among other stuff.  I was looking through the expiration dates on the milk cartons, when a boy maybe 8-years old ran up beside me and grabbed a carton of organic milk.  The father, a big man with scruffy beard, grabbed the carton of milk from his son's hands and simply said "no."  He put it back and then explained that there is milk that doesn't cost so much.

Perhaps I silently judged him at first, but the part of the story that I keep thinking about is that I soon found myself asking why I buy the expensive milk.  The answer, it turns out, isn't so much in my disgust of animal cruelty or distrust additives and preservatives but lies in how much milk I've thrown out in my life.  Organic milk lasts for like two months without going bad.  It's the closest thing to a miracle of modern milk that I've discovered since strawberry powder. 

For me, milk is more of an ingredient than a beverage, so it needs a pretty long shelf life.  Quality ingredients are important to any dish, and for quality ingredients, I choose my local natural foods market. 

And for quality endings to meaningless posts...

2012: Grilled Cheese to Perfection

I am a man brimming with unrealized potential. The possibilities that lay before me are limited only by my own imagination. I strongly believe that now is the time to test what can and cannot be done. I believe that now is the time to take hold of who I could become and become the man I want to be. I believe that now, 2012, is the year when the world bares witness that anything can be done, that anything is possible, that anything can be imagined. I believe that now is the time to begin my epic journey.


No stone will go unturned, no whisper will go unheard, no axe will go unground, for 2012 will be the year that the Grilled Cheese Sandwich is mastered.  I will be its master.

I'm not sure where this year of gooey cheese will take me but let's begin with what we know.


A quick note about the video itself:  All in all, I'd say it turned out well for only four takes... hence the crispy sandwich.  Oh... and by "oven" I mean "stove top"... in all four of those takes.

To recap, the first grilled cheese sandwich of 2012 was a basic grilled cheese: Stroehmann's 100% Whole Wheat Bread, 2 pieces of Kirkland's American Cheese, and butter.  The end product was admittedly not so great.  The problem was the bread.  It turns out that the best Peanut Butter and Jelly bread is not very good for Grilled Cheese as there was just too much of it.  My wife actually ended up tearing off the crust which I don't think I've ever seen her do.  So, a change in bread seems imminent.

In time, hopefully I can perfect my grilled cheese explanation posts as I work towards perfecting the sandwich itself, but I'll leave this be for now.  One attempt down... so many more to go.

A Happy Leo New Year!

Happy New Year's from Leo. I’ve sputtered a bit on my weekly installment of 30 seconds with Leo. He has had a great first holiday season though and there are videos of him from the past few weeks, including him opening Christmas gifts. Here's another one from today:

It's not the best of videos, but it catches him laughing which is very difficult to get a video of.  Earlier this week we kind of caught him laughing at the television:

I have no idea what the guy on TV is trying to talk about. It was something about a cat sneaking into a house so you need to find a dog. Leo thought it was hilarious.

I say we kind of caught it on video though, because this video was actually taken after the fact and it wasn’t quite as funny the second time around, but he’s still smiling. Actually, I think it was probably the fourth or fifth time watching it before we got the camera out and started recording.

We were able to re-create the scene though thanks to the power of our DVR 30-second rewind button. I love that feature. Soon after we got it, I found myself frequently wanting to rewind the radio in my car… to the point where I go to reach for a button while I’m driving before I realize that it doesn’t exist. Then this weird wave of anxiety and shame washes over me for making the mistake that feels a bit like déjà vu. It’s true.

With Leo though, I have started wanting to rewind my life and relive the last thirty seconds. So often the best moments with him are frustratingly quick. The little expressions and sighs and streams of babble that make him so great never last very long and he’s back to staring at some inanimate object. His laugh is contagious but very hard to predict, as the things that make him laugh seem to change from one minute to the next. Hopefully we can catch him laughing facing the camera, because he really is pretty darn cute, if I do say so myself.  (Oh... I should add that to my resolution list!  Get good laughing video.)

And yes, it is scary that Leo is full-on watching tv and clearly paying attention, as he laughed at the same part each time.  It might be time to turn off the television for the next ten years or so.

PS.  I just posted another video of him laughing on Christmas Eve that my wife's aunt took.  Check it out!