24HBD #2: Your Favorite Make-Believe Game

I’d like to talk to you today about Lava Tag.

In progress! So dandy!

What’s lava tag? Well, I’m glad you asked. Lava tag is like regular tag, except THE GROUND IS LAVA. Obviously it would be incredibly convenient to play lava tag in the gaping maw of an active volcano, but for the average tag connoisseur, this is simply not possible.

Lava tag in the olden days.

Lava tag is the direct opposite of freeze tag, in which tagged players TURN TO ICE.

Sorry, 90’s-type superhero businessman!

The best game of lava tag – in the best possible location for lava tag (besides the gaping maw of a volcano) – happened (as referenced here) at a place called Fort La Play Porte in La Porte, Indiana with Mary and her brother Elijah. Here’s a stunning visual:

Stunning! Top-down! Bird’s eye! RTS!

You can pretty much walk around the entire park without touching the sandy, fiery, Mordor-esque ground. I’m not sure why they would make the ground of a playground for children (and childish adults!) so dangerous, but it makes for good lava tag!

24HBD2 #1: How To Make The Food You Eat The Most

 

All right! Off to a good start with a recipe. My kind of blog.

I had to think for a bit to pick the thing that I eat the most often. I eat chili fairly regularly – in the fall/winter, but not other parts of the year. I do eat Ramen noodles a lot, but that would be boring.

Then I realized that I eat pretty much the exact same thing for lunch every day: a turkey wrap.

So here’s how to make my favorite lunch item: a pepper turkey wrap.

Sorry about the pictures – some of them are slightly blurry. I was in a hurry. I only had an hour!

YOU WILL NEED:

• 1 whole wheat sandwich wrap (I like FlatOut)
• 2 slices muenster cheese
• deli pepper turkey – as much as you want to eat in one sitting
• a nice mix of lettuce – I like the “spring herbs” mix from the grocery store. It has arugula, baby spinach, mustard greens, cilantro, and a few other types of lettuce and herbs.
• Miracle Whip
• spicy brown mustard
• horseradish

 

YOU WILL NEED TO:

1. Lay out the wrap – spread on some miracle whip, and lay down the two slices of cheese.
    
2. Spread some horseradish on the cheese.
   
3. Now comes your turkey!
   
4. Now add as much lettuce as you can fit on the thing. Don’t be shy – this makes the wrap! (well, the horseradish and mustard make the wrap for me, but this makes the wrap appropriately healthy.)
   
5. Add the mustard, then roll it up! I use a knife to smash the lettuce and things down into the wrap as I roll – otherwise it’s kind of unwieldy.
   
6. To take this to school, I wrap it up in wax paper, then in plastic wrap so it doesn’t unroll. My coworkers make fun of me at lunch, but they’re just jealous.
    

So there you have it! The thing I eat the most, and how to make it so it can become the thing you eat the most. EAT IT THE MOST.

24 Hour Blog Day (again)! 9/3/11

So, the same friends and I decided that, since our last 24 hour blog day was so successful, we should have another one!

Here’s how it works:

Everyone (or everyone who wants to) contributes a topic. They all get written down and put into a hat (the hat in this case being a small wooden box).

Each hour, we draw a topic and blog about it!

Previous 24HBD posts can be found in the projects page. You should check them out!

Here are my current 24HBD blogs:

1. How To Make The Food You Eat The Most
2. Your Favorite Make-Believe Game
3. What Your Life Would Be Like Without Computers
4. What The World Would Be Like If People Had Gills/Wings
5. Write a Blog From the Perspective of Your Favorite Fictional Character
6. A Look at Yourself Through the Eyes of Your Pet
7. Go Outside. Pick a Starting Spot and Direction. Walk 100 Steps. Find Something From That Spot and Blog About It.
8. Pick a Random Sentence From a Random Book. This is the 1st Line of Your Story.
9. Make a Treat or a Gift For Your Friends and Blog About It
10. Map Out A Road Trip You Would Like To Take
11. Tell the Story Behind the 15th Picture of You On Facebook
12. Create a How-To Manual for Something You Do Well
13. The Nature of Identity
14. Open Your Phone Camera Album. Tell the Story of Why You Took the 5th Picture (from either end)
15. Using [http://watchout4snakes.com/creativitytools/randomword/randomwordplus.aspx], generate a random word. Search it on Google images. Tell the story of the first PHOTO you find.
16. Brag a Little.
17. If Hobbies Could Make You Rich
18. Imaginary Home Remedies to Cure Imaginary Ailments
19. Favorite Thing To Do In a City
20. You Hear a Noise & There Is a Sudden Flash…
21. What Would You Do To Survive Alone On An Island?
22. China
23. Come Up With a Title for a Blog that would be a Pun Headline. Write this story, article, what have you based on the headline.
24. I Wish Someone Had Told Me…

Bacon Egg Toast Bites?

Stumbleupon – the nightmare browser add-on that will keep you up for hours after you told yourself you had to go to bed – is great, because you and your wife can swap recipes and pictures of dogs and cats and other funny things without even talking to each other about it!

So that’s pretty much what we did here.

Stumbleupon directed Mary to this article, and the allure of an entire breakfast in one small muffin-sized area was too great to resist.

If you read through that article, you’ll see that I’ve deviated from that recipe a tiny bit – but not really enough to make any difference. I used wide, thick sliced bacon – which may have actually been the wrong way to go. Thinner bacon would have crisped up faster, allowing the eggs to cook less.

But you be your own judge. This recipe yields six.

YOU WILL NEED:

• 6 slices of bread
• 6 slices of pepper bacon
• 6 medium eggs
• Shredded cheese (I use a chedder/colby mix)
• salt, pepper, or whatever you like with breakfast

YOU WILL NEED TO:

1. Grease a muffin pan. I used butter, since I was out of spray.
2. Preheat your oven to 400. YES FAHRENHEIT.
3. Cut circles of bread out of the slices. I used a pint glass. They fit really nicely down into the bottoms of the muffin areas. Depressions? Pockets? Cups?
4. Press those bread circles down into the muffin places.
5. Cook the bacon on the stove (in a skillet) – but not all the way. Keep them a little floppy, but make sure they’re well on their way – browned a bit. Maybe 4 minutes.
6. Fit the bacon strips around the inside of the muffin places, making a ring on top of each bread circle.
7. Throw some cheese down into each bacon-y cup.
8. Cook in the oven for around 5 minutes – the cheese should be well on the way to melting, and the bacon will crisp up a bit more.
9. Take the muffin pan out. Crack each egg and drop them into your bacon cups.
10. Season, or add more cheese.
11. Put back in the oven until the egg whites stop jiggling when you shake the pan – around 8 or 10 minutes.
12. Remove from the oven – they pop out really easily with a fork or spoon. Eat em!

  

*Mine were a little overly cooked. I made two without bacon for Matt, who is not of the meat-eating persuasion, so the timing was a bit off for getting everything cooked just right. His breakfasts didn’t have the ring-o-bacon protection.

Thanks to The Noshery for posting such a great idea!

Super Party

So every year (for the past 8, anyway) Chicago comedy group Big Dog Eat Child (have I mentioned them?) has hosted Super Party at the Ashbary Coffee House in Willow Springs, IL (basically Chicago). So this year, I decided that Ad Liberation should invite themselves to perform (another parenthesis!)!

Jeez, what an introduction. To rephrase that mess, we performed at Super Party this past weekend! (Neither “this” nor “last” sounded right before “weekend”, since it’s both already and only Monday.)

Well, we sort of performed. Matt and I were the only ones that could make it. So we cobbled together an IMPROV SUPER GROUP from THREE DIFFERENT GROUPS and lots of BOLDNESS.

And we called ourselves Craz Factoration! Our lineup was Lauren and Tom (The Crazy Monkeys), Will and Shauvon (Factory Dinosaur), and Matt and I (Ad Liberation). And if I could be so bold as to say we rocked the house, I would say that we rocked the house. (We rocked the house.)

But!

I am getting ahead of myself a bit, because I am a responsible blogger, and I would like to keep things in at least some semblance of chronological order here. SO, let’s talk talk. And because I sort of feel that this post is long enough, I’ll try to be brief (tee-hee).

In Chicago!

  

S(t)inkhole!

Awesome picture! Of a tall guy!

Green Room Rockers album!

Nerd Games!

Hailstorm!

Funny hat!

Practice at The Second City! Super Awesome!

Matt tried Malört!

 

Terrible Soda!

Now, somewhere in there between practicing at Second City and the bottle of Malört, we drove to the Ashbury and performed. And man did that show feel good. We practiced our format several times with this group to make sure we were ready – including once right before the show – and it really paid off. Big Dog should be posting the video sometime soon, at which point we’ll download it and post it up on our website. I am excited for you to see it – the crowd was awesome, and the energy was really incredible. Stuff was happening. And overall, the show didn’t get (too) inappropriate! Maybe a little, but not too bad. The Ashbary is sort of a hipster-metal type coffee shop (it has a bar upstairs in the venue, so… yeah. That.), so we went with the vibe we got.

And I got no pictures of the actual show or during the show or anything. Oh well. THIS WAY IT’S MYSTERIOUS.

We also got to hang out with Will and Shauvon and Shauvon’s garlfriend Alyson (she’s up in that picture), the latter two of whom were kind enough to let all of us crash at their place for two nights, putting them out considerably. They also have a really adorable three-legged cat named (Sm)Elliot who I did not get a picture of because I am the worst but who I did hold because I am the best.

Oh! And we also got to guest star in an episode of The Expert(MAHAPTE)Cast! You can find it (soon) and other episodes on their website, or you can search for them on iTunes!

Rolo Pretzel Walnut Snack Things

I don’t want to call these “turtles”, really, because I don’t think they’re quite there. But really, they’re turtles. So that’s probably what I’ll call them in the recipe list. And they kind of look more like turtles than other turtles. I don’t know.

And since there are quite literally thousands of recipes for these on the internet already, I’m not sure it really matters.

This is really just a quick recipe to get my back on my cooking feet. Summer is hard. Too many (or too little) things to get in the way of serious blogging.

Anyway, let’s get started! Only a few more lines of text before we’re clear of the opening picture, so we’ll get going very soon.

YOU WILL NEED:

• pretzels
• Rolos
  (On a different recipe, someone put “circular chocolate-covered caramel candies”. Let’s be frank, people.)
• walnut halves

YOU WILL NEED TO:

1. Get your oven hot. Around 325 or 350 should do it.
2. Dump about half of the bag of pretzels onto the cookie sheet. Spread them around!
3. Place a Rolo on top of each pretzel.
   
    
   
4. Put them in the oven. Like 5 minutes. Seriously, not long.
5. Take them out, and squish the Rolos down a bit with a walnut half.
   
    
   
6. Let cool. Put in the fridge for about an hour if you want them to firm up.
7. Eat. Eat eat eat.

Makes as many as you want – there are a lot of pretzels in one bag, so you can use however many. I ran out of Rolos before anything else, so let that be what determines how many of these you can make.

Salty/sweet combinations are always a good thing – especially when chocolate’s involved. These are so easy to make, but everyone loves them. See? We’re not so sophisticated. Plus, you can switch things up. There are lots of different shapes of pretzels, you can swap out the walnuts for other nuts or candies – you could use pretzels dipped in white chocolate for the base. So many options. SNACK ACCOMPLISHED.

Adventures at the Lawrenceburg Roach Motel

Our good friend Mike (you know Mike, you know, Mike? Mike Mike?) recently took a position at some high school (I want to say St. Leon) in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. I know I could look that up, but my hands are on the keyboard right now, and I really want to keep that going. After all, my internet browser is also where my Stumbleupon toolbar is.

Anyway, Mike took the position and moved down there about a week ago. It’s about a 2 or 2.5 hour drive, so we are overall pretty bummed that we’re never going to see him again after his new neighbors walk into his unlocked (we told you not to!) apartment and choke punch stab steal all his things him to death. But that’s getting ahead of myself, because originally he didn’t even have those neighbors!

Why not?

Because he decided to rent a room at the roach motel! For honestly real real! We spent the week after he moved (so this past week) watching him Tweet about the roach infestation he was sharing his new apartment with. Here are some grainy cell phone pictures he sent me as proof for me to post on this blog:

  

There’s also a picture of his kitchen up there. Note the general dilapidated state of everything. SEEMS LIKE A GREAT PLACE, EH BOYS?

Well, there’s where we went first, since we had to pick up a few bits of his furniture and move it to his new (his second choice, mind you) place, which is not only less expensive, but larger, closer to his job, professionally cleaned, and (most importantly) roach-free.

I wish I had more pictures of his new place. It is totally adequate in every way. The window is even big enough to get a desk through!

While we were there this weekend, we:

• Went with Mike to IKEA to help him pick out a couch, during which I think he became slightly overwhelmed.
  
   

 

• Assembled the couch back at his apartment, along with a TV stand. Matt replaced an extremely outdated gold-platey-looking chandelier with one Mike bought at IKEA.
  
    
• Enjoyed some whiskey and texting (if there’s one thing I know about mike, it’s that he loves whiskey and texting). We also played a game with quarters (and assorted European coins) called Minefield.
  
   
• Ate at Frisch’s Big Boy! I had a portabella-cap-capped burger (not pictured), and we split a piece of DEEP FRIED CHEESECAKE which was good, but entirely too much cheesecake for one person to handle safely.

 

 

The whole weekend was a good mix of work (moving Mike in, building furniture, driving, etc.) and fun. It was great to see Mike, especially because he’s dead (to us, mostly) now, and will never be seen by anyone again. We did get to enjoy the experience of our car running out of gas – luckily, right as we pulled (coasted) into the parking spot at Mike’s apartment.

On the way home, we took a slight detour through Clayton so I could drive by and show Matt my old house. It was during that slight detour that we saw this fairly startling bit of scenery:

I know what you’re thinking, and yes, it’s true. Someone finally bought a “D” and put it up on the sign. I would have left it, personally, after the twenty years or so that the store’s been without a “D”, but I guess since I’m not the one who bought and now owns the Clayton FooD Store, it’s not my call.