the egg is now in a nest made of shitty swords and soft puppet ass

I can safely say this thing is the best $20 I’ve spent on a kitchen doodad in a long time. Mostly I got it to make takoyaki–or, well, ebiyaki or some other kind of yaki, ’cause I ain’t eating no tentacles–and while the resulting puff is bigger than the standard takoyaki ball, it seems to work just fine. My ebiyaki were delicious. I used it tonight and made one batch of “breakfast takoyaki” which were regular pancake batter balls with chunks of veggie sausage in the middle, and one batch of plain pancake balls with the batter left over from that. I really want to try some corn fritters or some such.

It’s cast iron, and some of the Amazon commenters seem to be baww’ing about the stuff sticking (haven’t seen it–if it’s sticking, chances are it’s not ready to flip yet) and it being too hard to flip the puffs with skewers (it’s not that hard, really), but I have seen neither of those problems.

Also I got a steam cleaner for my carpet and immediately used it to attack that spot in the hall where Mini-Me likes to pee. It worked very well.

Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.

I just made the peanut butter pie for tomorrow’s Christmas Eve festivities at Aunt Boss’s house; tomorrow I’ll make the one for Christmas proper.

It’s very easy. An idiot could make it.

You need:

• 1 package Neufchatel cream cheese
• 1 tub Cool Whip (I used the fat-free kind and nobody will ever know)
• about 1 cup creamy peanut butter (I used the Smart Balance Omega-3 kind and nobody will ever know; you could probably use crunchy but I don’t know how a hand mixer would react to that, I just have visions of machine-gun peanut chunk fire all over the kitchen)
• About 1/4 – 1/2 cup powdered sugar to stiffen it up and make it nice and sweet
• 1 graham cracker crust (homemade or prefab)
• 1/2 bag chocolate chips, melted
• 1/2 bag peanut butter chips

Leave the cream cheese out on the counter until it’s room temperature and soft. Throw the cream cheese, Cool Whip, and peanut butter into a bowl. Beat until smooth. You can do this by hand but even with properly softened cream cheese it will kill your arms; you really want mechanical assistance. And I don’t recommend stick blenders for this, either–I tried it once and it was almost worse than doing it by hand. Use a hand or stand mixer or a food processor.

When it’s all nice and smooth, add some powdered sugar. Beat that in really well and taste. If it’s not sweet enough, add a little more sugar. When it tastes good, spread it out in a graham  cracker crust.

Melt the chocolate chips and pour on top; try to cover cover the whole top of the pie if you can. Then sprinkle on peanut butter chips.

Put it in the fridge to chill–a couple of hours should do it, leave it overnight if you can.

Also I read my new TV’s instructions and figured out how to make it pick up UHF channels. Also the DTV channels. Hot damn, DTV looks good. Is it can be February 17 nao plees?

Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.

I have a new theme on my blog. Those of you who normally read my crap via LJ are invited to come on over and take a peek, because it’s adorable.

I noticed after I upgraded Wordpress on the blog that it has a few sets of automagically-generated avatars, so that when people who have no Gravatars leave comments it will do some Arithmancy thing and assign them a userpic based on e-mail address entered. And one option for the generated avatars was cute little monsters.

That, I decided, was awesome. But it was not compatible with the Fake Livejournal Comments setup I had. Bawww.

So I’ve meant to go shopping around for new themes anyway, and while I was at it I figured I’d get one with built-in Gravatar-or-cute-monster support in the comments. I meant to get something kind of cool and slick and dignified, I guess.

And then I saw this theme and said I MUST HAVE THIS. Well, it goes perfect with the little cute monsters.

OM NOM NOM NOM.

Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.