Gryphood One-Offs

I've mentioned before that I keep a physical version of my Gryphood blog. It's a collection of recipes taken from my cooking blog divided into two binders, one titled "Main Course" and the other "Snacks and Sides". I also keep a copy of the WALES cookbook. Recently, I decided to make another: "One-Offs". 

Usually, if I don't enjoy something that I've made, I won't bother recording it. However, every once and a while there is an exception for this rule. In fact, right now, out of the 127 entries to Gryphood, there are twelve dishes that for some reason, I felt compelled to post, but which I don't realistically think I'll revisit. These are the recipes that I've dedicated my "One Offs" binder to.

I've listed them below, to try and justify why I've given them such a placement.

Cabbage Rolls

I like cabbage. I'm okay with rice, tomato sauce, and  ground beef. It's a simple recipe, made of things I like, but I doubt I'll make them again. I found the leaves got smaller the further I got into the cabbage, leaving the rolls at inconsistent sizes.

I tried making a casserole version of it. Maybe I'll try that again, but I used the food processor and I think I shredded the cabbage too finely. My brother liked it, but to me the whole thing combined to feel like a hot salad rather than a casserole.

Cauliflower Crust Mini Pizzas

I got this recipe from the Diabetic Code cookbook. The crust was actually meant to be for poached egg, but we made pizza. I had a few failed attempts. First I used a dishcloth instead of a cheesecloth when attempting to squeeze the water out of the cauliflower. Then I neglected to use parchment paper. I also thought I could consolidate the suggested four disks into one large crust. I couldn't.

Eventually I got my act together and did everything as instructed. End result was that I could properly cut and lift slices like a normal, wheat-based crust. Lee-Anne said "I hate how much I love pizza" which indicated that I got the desired effect.

In the end though, it's just too labour intensive to make again. I'm glad I finally managed it, and was proud enough to make a blog post. 

Curried Chicken Salad With Arugula

As of this posting, this is the most recent entry on Gryphood. It's the last recipe in The Diabetic Code that we had selected as wanting to make. So by completing this one, we're sort of soft-retiring the book, and this dish represents that accomplishment.

Lee-Anne made it, and while I liked it fine, she says that it was "missing something" and that she wouldn't make it again. 

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

At the end of the book Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, there is a list of recipes from the iconic diner. They are intentionally written in the style of someone who already knows how to cook, and is just using them as a personal reference. So it was fun to see if I could translate this into something useable.

When the season was right I attempted this most signature side for which the book was named. I had to make a batch of bacon because I don't keep enough grease on hand to satisfy the recipe. Makes sense for a diner to have a surplus though. In the end, I found that breading the green tomato slices like I would a cut of schnitzel had a more desireable outcome than the suggestions from the book. 

I did sort of learn through this process how to make these breaded zucchini slices which were a thing from my childhood. Just treat them like schnitzel.

Fried Okra From the Whistle Stop Cafe

This is almost the same recipe as the one above, but using okra instead of green tomatoes. I'd never had okra before, and perhaps if I'd grown up with them my feelings would be different. But as things stand, I found them less appetising than the green tomatoes.

Loaded Baked Potato Soup

Loaded baked potato is one of my top three favourite soups, alongside broccoli cheddar and mulligatawny. I wanted to learn this one as a recreation of the version from my college cafeteria. However, both times I've tried, I failed. And I'm not quite sure what I'm doing wrong, so there's not much for me to build off. I'll just let other people make it.

Macaroni Corn Casserole

I got this from a video for ADHD friendly recipes. Weirdly, it's the Gryphood post that has the most views, with 209. I've wondered if this was someone's favourite recipe, and I've asked the people that I know visit my blog, but no one has claimed to be the one that keeps visiting this page. My brother says that when you see a phenomenon like this, it's probably because someone that comes for the blog in general has bookmarked that specific page.

Apparently it's pretty common for someone with ADHD to have a go-to recipe that isn't very strenuous on the mind, often which they can make a large batch of so that they can have plenty of leftovers and avoid needing to think about cooking more than they have to. For me, it's fried rice. For someone else, it's this casserole.

I thought it was just mediocre. The video I got it from also gave me my chicken tortilla soup recipe though, which is my mom's favourite of the things I make. 

Oven Baked Sweet Potato Fries

It's a lot harder to make crispy sweet potato fries than one would think. If you just make strips, they'll turn soggy under the heat. Like the cauliflower crusts, this took a few attempts and I was eventually happy with the outcome, but it was just a little too finicky to repeat.

Provencal Ratatouille

I made this with my brother. I got the recipe from The Mediterranean cookbook, which has been a very reliable resource. It was satisfying to make and seemed to come together well, but it's very eggplant forward and I don't really like eggplant. Not the recipe's fault, just a personal thing.

Tonkatsu Sauce

This was part of my Okonomiyaki recipe. I decided to splice it off and make it its own unique post, because I have a "Dips and Sauces" section in my Snacks and Sides binder. I'm glad I did that too, because while I've revisited my okonomiyaki recipe many times since, I haven't bothered with the tonkatsu sauce. Tasted too much like ketchup, which I dislike. Also, I'm not sure it's authentic, because when I've described my grievance, I've been told that tonkatsu sauce shouldn't taste like ketchup at all.

Tzatziki From Mediterranean Table

This was my second tzatziki recipe, which I only included because I liked the source better than my first, which I just ripped online. However, the two are extremely similar in their ingredients, most of the difference being in quantity. The Mediterranean Table's version makes a huge amount which is not difficult to scale down with a little mental math, but because I already had a version that doesn't require any editing, it was hard to justify the existence of both recipes in my binder.

Zucchini Fritters

When I had my little health scare a few years back, I felt like zuchini fritters might be a healthier alternative to potato pancakes. However, I had the same issue as I did with the cauliflower crust. Really hard to get enough moisture out. I've learned that any recipe that includes a cheesecloth is going to be labour intensive. I had a few failed attempts before finally getting it right and learning that I just don't like zuchini fritters that much.

Big Storm

A couple weeks ago we had a big storm. I remember being at work and people talking about the weather forecast, worrying that it would hit right around when members were supposed to be getting their rides. Thankfully, it held out just long enough for everyone to get safely home.

It did come though. I got a series of alerts on my phone, the type that sounds out even if you have your volume turned off. One of them said we might see golf ball sized hail. One said that there was a tornado in my cell coverage area. Not a "warning", or "watch" (I can never remember which is worse), but an actual tornado. I've never had an alert like that, although I have no idea of what constitutes my "cell coverage area", so who knows how much danger I was actually in.

Regardless, we live in a basement apartment so I was already in an ideal environment. Lee-Anne was in Kitchener City Hall for a Compass Kitchener meeting. I wasn't too concerned. That seems like the safest possible place to be for a situation like that.

Indeed, they were evacuated to the underground parking garage. She said the worst part was the loud alarms screaming out of everyone's phones repeatedly. I've experienced that once myself, when we were at a WalMart during a similar but lesser event.

My brother was out of town, but I sent a text to my mom to stay inside. After it was all over, she replied that she'd been out in the storm. She had walked to her pharmacy and got caught in it on the way back. Remember, she's still recovering from breaking her leg last year. She said the wind was almost bad enough to knock her over, but she managed to make her way inside relatively unscathed.

After things settled, an image of a tornado touching down circulated around local Internet communities. It was debunked as AI generated. There were a few locations that got pretty intense, where "the air was coming from every direction" and people claim a tornado formed. I know someone who was driving near one of those areas when the storm came in, and she can't confirm but said it felt possible.

We didn't get the golf ball sized hail, but apparently they did in Toronto. 

It was the talk of the town for days after, everybody discussing where they'd been and how bad it got in their area. More than a few trees came down, and limbs were torn from many that survived. There's maintenance work still ongoing from the resulting damage of that day.

Our place was pretty much untouched. The linden tree lost a branch but all our delicate flowers somehow made it. In fact:

 

Since then, three sunflowers have blossomed! This will likely be as many as we're going to get. I always say that even one sunflower is a victory, so even if we had to try a little harder this year, and yielded less, I'm still going to count this as a success.

RIP Ivan

I met Ivan back when I worked as a Summer Program Facilitator. At that time, there was a role called Peer Leader. It was an opportunity for people diagnosed with developmental disabilities to work for wages, helping to run the program. Each facilitator was paired with a Peer Leader, and my partner was Ivan.

Since then, he happened to move into the area where Lee-Anne and I live. I would see him occasionally in the neighbourhood and often at local events.

Recently, Lee-Anne saw a Facebook notice from a mutual friend asking about what happened to him. I did a little digging and apparently he has passed due to cancer. It must have been especially aggressive since it looks like he was diagnosed only about a month beforehand. He was a year younger than me.

https://erbgood.com/tribute/details/18298/Ivan-Vincent/obituary.html 

It reminds me of when I was in college and a fellow student, Bri, got diagnosed with a rare condition and passed at the age of 19. Someone that didn't know her well asked me about it and I said "She didn't seem like the type of person that would die". The person replied, "Everyone keeps saying that. What does that mean?"

I'm not quite sure. Maybe it's just when it happens to someone young with no obvious additional health consideration. I mentioned that Ivan had another diagnosis, but as far as I'm aware, completely unrelated to cancer. Maybe when someone's life has already been impacted by one rare struggle, it just feels unfair when another, unrelated and unlikely misfortune comes along. 

He was a musician. I remember that he'd written a song called "The Old House Mystery" and made a music video on YouTube.  Later, I found his channel. I think he took that specific video down but he had kept making music, so I subscribed. As a courtesy he did the same for me, which I thought was funny because I've never uploaded anything there. Sometimes when people would talk about channel numbers, I would brag about my one subscriber.

Lee-Anne met him at an event hosted by Grand River Hospital. It featured live music by The Strumbellas followed by a drone show. I actually did a blog post on it. Ivan had come for the music and left before the drones came out. This past weekend was the Bestival, which is an event where I'd run into him in the past. Two stages blocking off Belmont ave with live music alternating between them. The type of place you'd expect to see Ivan.