Kamikaze Pancakes

Early in our relationship, Kevin introduced me to The Egg and I, a restaurant in Uptown. I opened the menu and fell madly in love and may never recover. There in black and white were the words I had always fantasized about reading: "Kamikaze Pancakes." They are made with buckwheat flour and bananas, blueberries, and walnuts are baked in. Then they are topped with more bananas, blueberries, and walnuts.

One pancake is the size of the plate and leaves you stuffed. Never being much for moderation, I always get two. Come on now - we only go there once or twice a year, and all things should be taken in moderation, including moderation itself.

Since we sometimes need a kamikaze fix in between visits, I modified an oatmeal pancake recipe to include buckwheat. If you use the 1/4 C spoon to make them they will fit nicely in the toaster the next day.

If you don't have any buckwheat or buckwheat flour, go ahead and use rolled oats instead. If you are missing some fruit or nuts just leave it out or substitute a different kind.

Kevin likes to say, "You eat one," while holding a single finger in the air to illustrate just how dense these are. If you like light fluffy pancakes, don't bother making these. They are hearty and filling. (But really I eat more than one at a time. More like 2 on the first serving, 2 for the second serving, and several bites into the second serving I realize that I might explode if I take one more bite.)

Yum. I can hardly wait to dig in.

Is there even a pancake underneath all this topping?

Kamikaze Pancakes

1/2 C whole wheat (or soft wheat) flour
1/2 C rolled oats
1/2 C buckwheat flour (or more rolled oats)
2 t baking powder
1/4 t salt
2 T sugar
1/3 C powdered milk
2 eggs
1 C water
2 T oil
1 mashed banana
1/2 C washed blueberries
1/8 C chopped walnuts


Mix all the dry ingredients together. Mix the wet ingredients and beat it a bit with a fork, then mix in the mashed banana. Make a well with the dry ingredients, pour the wet into it and mix until just moistened. Gently fold in the blueberries and walnuts and bake on a hot griddle. Top with more blueberries, banana slices, and walnuts, and also your favorite pancake toppings, such as applesauce or maple syrup.

Penzeys Spices

Kevin is the best husband in the world. I know, I know. You think your husband is the best, but that is simply impossible. You only think it is because you have never been married to Kevin. Let me indulge myself in a little brag session. Please try to contain your intense jealousy; it will eat you up from the inside out if you do not get a handle on it.

The moment I see Kevin when I return from a shopping trip, his face lights up and he asks if I will show him my new treasures. Then, with genuine interest, he discusses each item while I tell him what I like about it and why I chose it.

If Kevin comes shopping with me, which he loves to do, he will wait outside the dressing room with my purse. If I head towards the dressing room without handing my purse to him, he will ask if I would like him to hold it for me. Each time I come out, he will tell me how cute I am in the clothes. If, while he is waiting, someone asks about the purse he is holding, he grins and says that it matches his shoes.

The only time he got embarrassed was when he was shopping alone for lingerie and the price wasn't ringing up. He tried to say he didn't need to buy it, but the clerk insisted it was no problem and ran to check the price. She was gone a long time, leaving him with a pair of sexy women's underwear at the front of a long line of suspicious stares.

This weekend Kevin, the amazing husband extraordinaire, accompanied me to a Penzeys store. We first heard about Penzeys two weeks ago at the symphony. Kara told us that it was a fabulous spice store that sells really good spices in 1/2 cup jars for cheaper than at the grocery store. I had the urge to throw my 5 year old spices in the trash and start fresh with a whole new rack but, alas, my thrifty nature dictates that each used Ziploc bag be used two or three times, and therefore getting rid of a cabinet full of old spices is completely out of the question. Being a cheapskate is a heavy burden.

As I made my final selections, Kevin went through the store and gathered every edition of the complimentary magazine distributed by Penzeys. Then we spent the entire 45 minute ride home enduring sharp hunger pains as I leafed through the recipes [and Kevin glanced over while driving extremely safely], complete with delectable pictures. Each page we turned revealed something more appealing.

Here is a picture of our fabulous new spices in our nifty new spice rack.

And this is a picture of some of the displaced food items that were made refugees by the new spice rack. The middle shelf was 1/2 inch too short to fit a rack, so we took it out and stacked the racks, and are now seriously short on shelf space. Bye, bye old food. We don't know where you will go, but you are no longer welcome here.

New Girl on the Job

Do you know any engineers? There is a reason they are called "geeks." They consist primarily of the kids who got beat up in high school. Their identities were founded in their intelligence because they just couldn't rely on their physical prowess.

Fast forward to the "real world" where most people look wincingly back at how they treated others in school. Most adults are very kind and certainly never intentionally humiliate anyone. That just ain't the case with most engineers. They got picked on, they didn't deserve it, and now they can retaliate by putting in place the intelectually inferior minions surrounding them.

It is worse when a group of engineers are in close proximity to each other. Like if they work together. Let the gnashing and gnarling of teeth begin. Each one wants to be the smartest engineer and being average will simple not suffice. This can create a very hostile environment and "idiot" is the word used most often by engineers.

My first year working at my job was terrible. In fact, it was worse than that. I worked with a group of 4 young engineers who, like me, were trying to prove their worth. I remember my first "code review." "Code" refers to the computer program that a software engineer writes. A code review is when a group of other engineers look at your code and makes comments on it which helps to remove all the bugs. One more thing you should know is that every software engineer thinks all other software engineers write horrible code.

When I was assigned my first project I thought it was very hard. I wasn't sure if I should even be a programmer, or if I was in the wrong field. I slaved away for weeks before I completed my program and finished testing it, and was incredibly proud of my accomplishment. As I sat basking in finally finishing, Jason walks in and sees that I am finishing my test, and he takes it upon himself to make sure I did everything correctly. When I tell him to leave, he physically rolls my chair away from my computer, pulls in his own chair, and starts looking through my code with an intensity I have not seen since.

With each line, his lip curls a bit further in disgust. My insecure self is withering with each passing second and after a few pages, he sigh and then growls, "I can't believe you wrote this s**t!" He turns to glare at me and waits for a response. What is a poor, kind girl, who would never dream of treating anyone else like this, supposed to do? I dashed for the bathroom to cry.

In the subsequent weeks and months, Jason evoked this response many times. Strangely, he would alternate between incredibly charming and downright mean. Sometimes he would be very fun for a few weeks. Then, all of a suddon, his mean side would erupt and he would spurt horrible, demeaning remarks. I was not the only victim of his lashings, but I was the newest member of the team, so I got the brunt end of his mean stick.

It was a strange time in my life. I had officially entered the adult world, and was thrilled to be supporting myself. But my job was nothing like I had imagined and every morning I would have to drag myself out of bed and force myself to face the environment that I now know is caused by insecure engineers trying to prove their self worth. In hindsight, I could have gone to HR and the abuse would have stopped. At the time I thought that it was what the "real world" was really like and that I would have to learn to handle it.

Thank goodness I am now on a team that is sarcastic but never mean spirited.

Déjà Moo: The feeling that you've heard this bull before

Amanda sent me an email with a bunch of puns and this one happened to stick out. It reminds me of my job.

There are three viable solutions to a problem we are trying to solve. We have discussed, in detail, the merits and limitations of each many, many times. Steve wants option #1. It will be the simplest to implement, but will require more maintenance, which we are notoriously bad at providing. Everyone on the team who lives in Iowa wants #3, which will be incredibly tricky to implement but very nice once it is finished. Kurt, Todd, and I want option #2. It is a combination of #1 and #3 and it will take a little more time to implement than #1 but less time than #3. It will also require less maintenance than #1.

*whew* Did anyone make it through all that blabbering? Several times each and every day I hear Kurt tell someone, "We just need to pick an option and go with it. None of them are perfect but any of them will work." Each time he says it he gets a little more irritated. These discussions have been happening for a couple of months.

Since Kurt is in charge, he will probably get his way. He usually does.

Oh So Very Gullible

The afternoon rush was interrupted by an urgent email:

See me in Stillwater immediately

Thanks,
Kurt

Stillwater is one of our conference rooms, and this email sounded really urgent, so I stood up, walked to the conference room, and saw that it was completely empty and the lights were out. Huh?

The moment I turned around I could see Todd and Steve standing up in their cubes watching me with huge grins plastered on their faces. Then I remembered seeing Steve sneak into Kurt's cube right before I got the email.

When I realized that Steve had sent me an email from Kurt's computer a hot flush rushed to my face, and I walked back to the Pentagram of Trust. No words could possibly account for such behavior except, "I'm so gullible!"

A Rose By Any Other Name

Why do certain people constantly attract nicknames and others get called strictly by their real names? I love nicknames. I dream of being called a multitude of nicknames. Like Megalicious. Or Megan the Maniac. But hardly anyone ever calls me by a nickname. Aunt Linnie calls me "Meglet". Dallas Edeler called me "maggot" in 5th grade because he said I was round and pale just like a real maggot. A college boyfriend called me "Little Weirdo." And that's my entire list of nicknames.

In a strange twist of normalcy, I have recently acquired a few nicknames, and all of them have been from coworkers:

1) Smiley
Wayne calls me "Smiley" every time we pass in the hall. I can't explain this one.

2) Megasaurous Wrecks

Todd and Steve like to tape cut-up pieces of Post-It notes to our name tags so that our names can transform into a multitude of variants. I like to put a blank piece over the "T" in Todd's name making him simply "odd." It seems to fit. One of his favorites for me started as Megasaurous, and soon morphed into Megasaurous Rex. Then I broke a piece of equipment and the name became Megasaurous Wrecks. It has a fun wring to it.

3) Eye Candy
Susie, a very attractive, single, 26 year old has been in our group for about a year. We like to go on a walk together every afternoon. Stacy is a 32 year old single guy who sits one aisle over. He is good friends with Kevin S, both of whom like to join us on our walks. Just to make sure there is no confusion, "Kevin S." is my coworker and "Kevin H" is my husband. I am continually recruiting more walkers, but for whatever reason most people don't want to take the time to walk around the outside of the building.

Sometimes our walks end up being just the 4 of us, and one time last summer, Stacy and Kevin S. were ready for the walk but Susie wasn't sitting at her desk. Stacy raised one eyebrow and stated that he wanted to wait until his 'eye candy' was there.

Dumbfounded that he would say such a thing right in the middle of the hallway, I asked what he meant, and he said that Susie was very attractive. He thought she was eye candy. Kevin S. responded that his was already there.

Being particularly slow, I asked if he thought she was cute, too. He responded, "No. I meant that you were already here so I am ready to go." Ummm....that makes it awkward. To make it even more awkward, Stacy jumped in and called me "Eye Candy" in front of one of our administrative assistants AND in front of our HR representative.

Susie doesn't know that Stacy refers to her as eye candy and he is embarrassed that she might find out about it someday.

White Chicken Chili

We've got beans. Bunches and bunches of them. Right before Christmas we ran out of beans in the freezer. We usually cook up a couple of pounds and freeze them in sandwich sized bags. I went downstairs to the food storage closet and *GASP* there were no more black beans. How could this be? Immediately I called Amanda, my sister-in-law, and told her that I absolutely needed some beans. Would she pick them up from the bean mill for me? I wasn't playing games - I needed 50 pounds of white beans, 50 pounds of red beans, and 100 pounds of black beans. Now we have our year's supply of beans, and now we are in dire need of some recipes to actually use them.

As it turns out, the black beans weren't ready so we still don't have them. It makes me tear up a little. *sniff*

I have been wanting to try a white chicken chili for awhile. We were both leery of it because chili just isn't chili if it doesn't have any chili powder. Alas, we had to leave our preconceived notions behind and take a leap of faith in our bean-using adventure.

This is a simple recipe. Basically, you throw all the spices together, let it simmer, and then throw in the beans and chicken. One bite and we realized that it is really very good. Really really. The cumin, which I usually don't like, gives it a familiar chili flavor, and it is very filling.

Here is the original recipe.

White Chicken Chili

1 small handful food storage onions, or 1 small onion
1 can chopped green chili peppers
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper
3 cups chicken broth

2 cooked chicken breasts
3-4 cups cooked white beans (or 3 cans)
1/3 cup shredded white cheese (I used mozzarella)

1/8 cup parmesan cheese

Bring a pot of water to a boil and throw in the frozen chicken breasts. You do not need to thaw them first. Let them boil for a few minutes, until they are white all the way through. Then chop them into bite sized cubes.

If you are using a fresh onion, saute it in a little oil. Otherwise, put the food storage onions, green chilies, cumin, oregano, cayenne pepper and chicken broth in a soup pot and let it boil a few minutes. Throw in the beans, chicken, and cheese and stir it up. Heat everything thoroughly then take it off the burner. Alternately, you can add cheese to just your own bowl.