Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

I have to rush to type this before the foul piece of excrement that’s known as Internet Explorer crashes for the 87th time this hour.

I feel like shit and I’m grouchy. Mexican farmers light fires every year and cause this hellish haze to settle over Texas. Right now it’s so bad outside that even my neighbors houses look misty. Like it’s foggy outside. The smoke has clogged my head and ears and makes my eyes itch and I cough all night long and have this low droning headache. Allergy medicines don’t help. We haven’t seen blue sky in weeks.

All we can do it just wait until either it rains, the wind changes, or the fires go out. And this happens every damned year. Absolutely freaking ridiculous. I can’t wait to go to Las Vegas where the air is usually clear. I want to go down to Mexico and throttle those farmers and arsonists who can’t seem to grasp the concept that they are making millions of people miserable, even though they nearly burned their entire country in 1998.

Will people never learn?

Feature Price Rejects Bids, Shuts Down

Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, Featureprice.

By popular request, here’s my recipe for cream gravy:

2 tablespoons fat (may use pan drippings, butter, bacon grease, etc. or any combination of the above)
2 tablespoons flour
2 cups milk
salt to taste
fresh-ground black pepper to taste

Melt 2 tablespoons of fat in a pan. Add the flour and stir well. The mixture will become a thick paste (a.k.a a roux). Cook over medium heat until it’s dark blonde in color. This will take the raw taste out of the flour. Slowly add the milk while stirring like crazy. If you don’t stir well your gravy will get really lumpy and almost impossible to salvage. Cook until the mixture comes to a boil, at which point it will surprise you and suddenly thicken to a gravy-like consistency. Add salt and fresh ground pepper to taste.

This is also a good base for such things as S.O.S. (Shit On a Shingle – dice chipped beef, add to gravy, and serve over toast), breakfast (crumble pan sausage into the gravy and serve over biscuits), and scalloped potatoes (layer potato slices, sauteed onions, cream sauce, and sharp cheddar cheese in a pan, cook until potatoes are does).

The recipe is very easy to scale. Just keep X constant and use:
X tablespoons fat
X tablespoons flour
X cups milk