observations

When A Port-A-Potty Is Eye Candy

Posted on May 6, 2022 by pauldelancey

Eye candy

This house has had home improvements going on for two months now. It’s still torn up out front. However, on the plus side, there is a rather whizzo, spiffy Port-A-Potty(TM) out front. It’s painted in a rather nice bright blue color. It’s white trim makes the outhouse a rather cheery contrast to chaos around it. Here’s to you, Port-A-Potty, may you be eye candy for months to come.

Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

French Pan Bagnat

Posted on May 4, 2022 by pauldelancey

French Entree

PAN BAGNAT

INGREDIENTS

1 garlic clove
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
¼ cup olive oil
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
⅛ teaspoon pepper
¼ teaspoon salt
1 16-inch baguette or 2 ciabatta rolls
½ green bell pepper
¼ cucumber
¼ cup Nicoise or Kalamata olives
2 hard boiled eggs
⅓ red onion
1 large tomato
2 5-ounce cans solid white tuna, drained
2 ounces anchovies (optional)

Serves 4. Takes 55 minutes.

PREPARATION

Mince garlic clove. Add garlic, Dijon mustard, olive oil, red wine vinegar, pepper, and salt to small mixing bowl. Mix with whisk or fork until well blended. Cut baguette along its length. Use brush to spread garlic/ mustard/olive oil over both baguette halves.

Seed bell pepper. Cut bell pepper and cucumber into slices ½” thick. Cut olives in half. Dice hard boiled eggs. red onion, and. tomato. Spread tuna over baguette bottom. Place bell pepper and cucumber slices on tuna. Sprinkle bell pepper and cucumber with diced egg, olive halves, red onion, tomato, and anchovies.

Place baguette top on egg, onion, and tomato. Place baguette between 2 flat surfaces (such as cutting boards, baking sheets). Place heavy object (such as a skillet) on flat surface. Let sit for 20 minutes. Cut baguette into 4 mini baguettes.

TIDBITS

1) This dish, Pan Bagnat, is an anagram for “Tan Pan Bag.”

2) How do people in France transport their pans? They use bag pans.

3) Tan is the color of the baguette, a food vital to emotional well being So, in France, only chefs may own a tan pan bag. France. All other people must pick a different color. But if you do own a tan pan bag and you’re not a chef, you may expect a midnight visit from the police. Now you know.

Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

Categories: cuisine, international, observations | Tags: apocalyptic, Chef Paul, chefs, Comic Chef, cookbook, De Lancey, entree, French, good food, Lutheran, pan bagnat, Paul De Lancey, Paul R. De Lancey, police, recipes, tan, thriller | Leave a comment

400 Blogs in a Row

Posted on April 15, 2022 by pauldelancey

This is my 400th blog in a row. Thank you, gentle readers, for reading them. Writing for you takes
my mind off problems in my life and in the world around us. Blogging also exercises my brain. It’s
always good to take the brain for a walk around the block.

In honor of this, I’ve just learned how to insert a moving image into my blog. Go me! Go us!
Let’s go for another 400 more blogs.

Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

Categories: observations | Tags: 400, apocalyptic, blogging, brain, Chef Paul, Comic Chef, cookbook, De Lancey, gif, good food, hunks, Lutheran, murders, Paul De Lancey, Paul R. De Lancey, problems, recipes, thriller, we | 2 Comments

Why Death Does Not Scare Me

Posted on April 14, 2022 by pauldelancey

Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

Categories: apocalyptic, observations | Tags: apocalyptic, Chef Paul, Comic Chef, cookbook, De Lancey, death, Lutheran, murders, Paul De Lancey, Paul R. De Lancey, printersgravestone, recipes, thriller | 2 Comments

Life Observations – Mess

Posted on April 12, 2022 by pauldelancey

Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

Categories: observations | Tags: apocalyptic, Chef Paul, Comic Chef, cookbook, De Lancey, hunks, life, Lutheran, messy, murders, neat people, observations, Paul De Lancey, Paul R. De Lancey, recipes, rush, thriller, tidying, virtuous | 1 Comment

Vanilla Pudding

Posted on April 10, 2022 by pauldelancey

American Dessert

VANILLA PUDDING

INGREDIENTS

3½ tablespoons cornstarch
⅛ teaspoon salt
½ cup sugar
2½ cups milk
1 tablespoon butter, softened
½ tablespoon vanilla extract

Serves 4. Takes 1 hour 45 minutes.

PREPARATION

Add cornstarch, salt, and sugar to saucepan. Mix with spatula. Add milk slowly, while stirring gently with spatula. Heat for 5 minutes using medium heat or until mixture thickens. Stir constantly to prevent burning. Remove from heat. Add butter and vanilla. Stir gently with spatula until well blended.

Chill in refrigerator for 1 hour 30 minutes or until mixture firms into pudding.

TIDBITS

1) Stars are made from vanilla pudding. How do we know this?

2) Stars are white.

3) Vanilla pudding is white.

4) The Sun is hot. That is because it’s yellow and not made from vanilla pudding.

5) If you were somehow able to catapult your vanilla pudding millions of light years away it would be far too small to be seen, even by the Hubble telescope

6) Indeed, you would need to buy trillions of pounds of: cornstarch, salt, sugar, milk, butter, and vanilla extract to fling a visibile vanilla-pudding star into the far reaches of space.

7) But don’t do it. Every van in the world would be needed to deliver your ingredients. The global economy would collapse. Oh my gosh, we’d have nothing left to make cake! For millions of years! What would we do for birthdays? I beg of you, reconsider this giant-star project!

Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

Categories: cuisine, observations | Tags: American, apocalyptic, birthdays, cake, catapult, Chef Paul, collapse, Comic Chef, cookbook, De Lancey, dessert, economy, good food, Hubble, hunks, light years, Lutheran, murders, Paul De Lancey, Paul R. De Lancey, recipes, stars, Sun, thriller, vanilla pudding | Leave a comment

French Jambon Beurre

Posted on March 14, 2022 by pauldelancey

French Entree

JAMBON BEURRE

INGREDIENTS

1 24″-baguette (ficelle style, if you can find it)
¼ cup salted butter, softened
9 ounces ham, sliced
9 ounces Gruyère or Emmental cheese (optional)

Serves 3. Takes 10 minutes.

PREPARATION

Cut baguette open lengthwise almost all the way through. Open baguette. Spread butter evenly on top and bottom. Place ham evenly along baguette bottom. Distribute cheese, if used, evenly on top of ham. Close and press baguette. Divide into 3 8″-long sandwiches.

TIDBITS

1) In 1972, Neil Diamond recorded the song, “Song Sung Blue.” It is a great song and has remained justly popular for 50 years.

2) If you substitute the words “Jambon Beurre” for “Song Sung Blue” you still have a truly great song. Okay, sing the song in your head with the new lyrics. See? Ya see? The song’s still superb.

3) Jambon Beurre is a simple, yet great sandwich. French sandwich lovers have eaten them for many, many years.

4) How many?

5) I don’t know.

6) But I do know that the French devoured a little over a billion jambon beurres in 2013.

7) That’s not current. That’s from about nine years ago, as of press time.

8) But it takes a long time to count that high. If a French woman, say Farine du Ble were to count one such sandwich every second, it would take her about 33 years to complete the tally. Clearly, the task is more than a one-woman job.

10) Perhaps France could eliminate all unemployment by hiring all those without jobs to count the jambon beurres being consumed. In February, 2022 had 2,977,000 out of work people. If these people were hired by the state to count a billion jambon beurres and took ten seconds to count each sandwich, it would take them about an hour. Maybe longer if the counting involved travel.

11) Now you know how important arithmetic can be.

Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

Categories: cuisine, international, observations | Tags: apocalyptic, arithmetic, Chef Paul, Comic Chef, cookbook, De Lancey, entree, French, jambon beurre, Neil Diamond, Paul De Lancey, Paul R. De Lancey, recipes, thriller, unemployment | 2 Comments

Mary and Laundry

Posted on March 9, 2022 by pauldelancey

Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

Categories: observations | Tags: apocalyptic, Chef Paul, Comic Chef, cookbook, De Lancey, good food, hunks, laundry, Lutheran, Mary, murders, mushrooms, Paul De Lancey, Paul R. De Lancey, recipes, thriller | Leave a comment

When Scammers Merge

Posted on February 16, 2022 by pauldelancey

The world of commerce becomes ever more cutthroat by the day. The motto of money is “Go Big or Die.” Small businesses simply can’t compete against the resources of mega-corporations. Sometimes small businesses just go bankrupt. Sometimes the big companies merely buy out the smaller ones. Mostly though, companies merge to form one bigger unit. Airlines merge all the time. So do accounting firms. And now, so do scammers.

Face it, the scammers’ audience shrinks every year as more and more people become hip to scams. There’s simply not enough innocent customers out there to justify keeping the same level of scam callers and spammers on the payrolls. So the scammers are merging. Expect to come across the scam shown below very soon.

Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

Categories: observations | Tags: apocalyptic, bankrupt, businesses, Chef Paul, Comic Chef, commerce, cookbook, De Lancey, dictator, extrended warranty, good food, hunks, Lutheran, merge, mergers, murders, Nigerian, Paul De Lancey, Paul R. De Lancey, recipes, scam, scammers, scams, spammers, thriller | Leave a comment

Evil Things – Printers

Posted on February 14, 2022 by pauldelancey

Evil incarnate

Two days, I assembled tax forms. I entered some data as well. All was right with the world. Indeed, the bluebirds sang.

Not so much yesterday. The bluebirds fell to cussing as evil stalked the land.

In the form of a printer. My previous printer, which was as a goodly a printer that could be expected. It would read both sides of a two-sided document. Then it would scan or copy the forms, depending on the chore. The bluebirds sang.

But it died. The bluebirds cried. I supposedly bought the replacement model. It cost a bit more.

Little did I know that Satan had breathed a bit of his evil spirit into the new printer. It didn’t scan both sides of a page! That’s so important to me. And what the heck, how can a replacement model, a more expensive model, cost more and not do as much.

The evil onslaught continued. It took me 8.5 hours to get the printer to do any sort of scanning at all. Apparently, Hewlett Packard had not seen fit to provide 8, eight!, necessary updates. So, now I can scan, but I have to do manual steps and this takes much longer. We are living in perilous times, gentle readers. Watch your printer. Just don’t show fear. They can sense fear. When they do, they’ll ruin your print job and steal your soul. Take care.

Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

Categories: observations | Tags: apocalyptic, bluebirds, Chef Paul, Comic Chef, cookbook, copy, De Lancey, evil, fear, good food, Lutheran, murders, Paul De Lancey, printers, recipes, scan, thriller | 2 Comments

observations

When A Port-A-Potty Is Eye Candy

French Pan Bagnat

French Entree

PAN BAGNAT

400 Blogs in a Row

Why Death Does Not Scare Me

Life Observations – Mess

Vanilla Pudding

American Dessert

VANILLA PUDDING

French Jambon Beurre

French Entree

JAMBON BEURRE

Mary and Laundry

When Scammers Merge

Evil Things – Printers

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observations

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PAN BAGNAT

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American Dessert

VANILLA PUDDING

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