Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Rice Balls



Well I'd like to be the first to challenge my own proclamation that the holiday episode was a "rollicking success," both on grammatical and factual grounds. Anyway onto the episode, the rice balls came out really, really well, and it seems like a nice way to take some leftovers that are probably too meager to use otherwise, and resuscitate them into a late-night snack. Amy dined on some leftover vegetable curry that I had hanging around in the fridge, and I took some hoisin sauce, soy sauce, onions, and frozen shrimp, and sauteed it up rather quickly. The point is though, that you could really put anything in there (ground beef? Chicken? Chocolate???) and it'll turn out nicely.

As for the unnecessary apology at the beginning of the video, we know that there was nobody calling us out on the state of our oil, but it was pretty reprehensible. We have since found some religion on the subject and would like to proffer the following websites as sources for good deep fryer (and oil) maintenance:


American Heart Association Guide on Deep Frying

Easy and Informative Best Practices from some website named "stop the clog."


I plan on posting one (or a series) of entries regarding deep-fryer maintenance, but for now, here's a quick link on how to properly dispose of your used oil. This applies not only to deep frying, but any kind of oil used in cooking.


I would also like to take a moment to correct myself and state that the solution should not have a 90%/1% ratio. These are the hazards of the semi-live vlogosphere. And I'll take a second here to apologize to Sir Isaac Newton for uttering the phrase "the Law of Continuity of Matter."

The key for these rice balls was, as usual, temperature. The rice was too cold and dry to work into a ball at first, but the more we worked with it, getting the heat from our hands into the mixture, the more cohesive and moldable it was.

Anyway, as you can tell, Amy and I are not huge fans of Aida and her Tech whelp Noah. To date, no response has come to our email, but we’ll keep you, our faithful viewers, posted.

To back up our libelous rhetoric, here’s her wikipedia page, which details her background, which is decidedly light on actual cooking experience. And even though she could most likely cook circles around Amy and myself (though the straight-faced inclusion of "scrambled eggs" on her show might suggest otherwise), the premise of her show is still ridiculous. To have viewers ask questions and have them answered is one thing; to have them utilize the internet, in some cases even taking the time to send videos(!!!) to ask questions that they could just fucking google is patently absurd. It's as if you required your viewers to write their questions in the margins of the encyclopaedia page on which the information is found, and then mail it to you. And obviously having a "tech guru" on board whose job it is to simply check email is laughable.