kartooner

As far as blog­ging is con­cerned, I’ve been a bit out of the loop lately. You could attribute it to the daily rit­ual of let­ting life’s respon­si­bil­i­ties take focus or another excuse could be that I really haven’t had much to say of as late.

Hon­estly, I could wag, point or wig­gle a fin­ger in the direc­tion of either excuse if it really came down to it, but instead I’ll just relin­quish any excuse and steer my atten­tion towards main­tain­ing a sense of sta­bil­ity in regards to the life­line of this site.

That said, I’d like to share with you a few snip­pets, which in some sense could also be nuggets of infor­ma­tion, so I’ll call them “snuggets”. If you’re like me and love using com­pletely made up words in every­day con­ver­sa­tion, then feel free to use that in future dis­cus­sions around the water cooler.

And now, I present this week’s worth of snuggets:

Blingo

As it says in the About sec­tion on the Blingo site: “Blingo is a search engine with a twist. Each search on Blingo is also a chance to win a prize.” It’s really that sim­ple. In fact, just moments ago I was ran­domly selected to win a free movie ticket and because Colin Devroe invited me ini­tially he’ll also receive the prize.

The Case of the Burnt Grilled Cheese Imprint

Word to the wise; when cook­ing a grilled cheese sand­wich at your inlaws remem­ber to check the pan to see if it’s non-stick. Last week I made the mis­take of prepar­ing a grilled cheese sand­wich and then cook­ing it on a reg­u­lar pan.

It didn’t help that the stove was gas burn­ing and that I had set the tem­per­a­ture on high. As soon as I slapped the bread into the pan, it stuck to the bot­tom of it like glue and left behind a burnt toast-shaped imprint.

After dous­ing the pan in vine­gar and an esti­mated 20 min­utes of furi­ous (elbow grease) scrub­bing it looked close to as good as new.

Eat­ing Bugs for Protein

I’ve often thought about and won­dered why cer­tain tribes eat bugs for pro­tein. Ask a tribe mem­ber and he or she will tell you it’s for nour­ish­ment, good health and vital­ity or, sim­ply, that it just tastes good.

I once ate a hand­ful of chocolate-covered ants and thought it was one of the most dis­gust­ing things I had ever eaten, taste and tex­ture wise. Ask your­self this ques­tion: Would you ever eat a bowl­ful of cock­roaches for $1,000,000 dol­lars? The money aspect is tempt­ing, but could you endure just how utterly dis­taste­ful that would be?

The Inven­tor of the Slow Cooker (a.k.a. Crockpot)

Who­ever invented the slow cooker, thank you, from the bot­tom of my “I really didn’t feel like spend­ing a great deal of time prepar­ing din­ner” heart. Who­ever you are, you’re right up there with the inven­tors of Silly Putty (NASA, I believe) and water-expanding, insta-grow dinosaurs.

If you’re ever in a bind for time; cut up some round steak, toss in a can of stewed toma­toes, sweet pep­pers, a drop or two of Red Hot and switch to ‘High’ and in 5–6 hours you’ll be enjoy­ing pep­per steak.

Choco­late Shell Ice Cream Topping

On a sim­il­iar note to the above snugget, thanks to whomever came up with the choco­late shell top­ping. If you’ve never tried this, it’s basi­cally the same choco­late solu­tion that you would get in a real ice cream shop, that hard­ened choco­late coat­ing on an ice cream cone. In this case, it’s for home use and makes a bowl of vanilla ice cream that much more tantalizing.

That’s it for this round of snuggets. If you’d like to add your own, please per­suse the com­ments because we all love tid­bits of what some would call use­less bits of infor­ma­tion, but what I like to call Snuggets.