String Cheese Strategy: Pocket Warmer
When eating string cheese, I find that I'm typically looking for a different flavor experience than when I'm eating regular-old-mozzarella. Not only is string cheese a "fun" cheese that I expect to shred apart with my hands, it's a different thing altogether.
What I'm getting at is... I like my string cheese warm. Not cold like I prefer balls or slices of mozzarella.
How do I get it warm? I'm glad you asked. My favorite snack-strategy developed at my new job is the string cheese pocket warm-up. It's pretty simple:
- Grab a string cheese from the fridge
- Put it in your pocket (keep it wrapped, please!)
- Walk around and talk to a few people.
- Get back to work
- Then... remember you have the string cheese in your pocket.
- Promptly remove and devour.
Wonderful.
Terrible Ideas I’ve Had: Sour Cream and Onion Cereal
There was a time in my life when I wanted all of my breakfasts to be tasty treats. I went through the Lucky Charms phase (on several different occasions, actually), the Frosted Mini Wheats phase (during which I once exploded in anger like a brat to my Mom because she'd accidentally bought Frosted Wheat, not Frosted Mini Wheats), the many different varieties of Cheerios phase (including regular Cheerios covered in sugar I'd add every morning), and more. I was never into the over-the-top, clearly-only-candy-in-disguise cereals (though Cookie Crisp often mesmorized me with that awesome dog in all of their commercials), but I wanted the sweetness.
This love of sweet breakfast foods was combined during early high school years with a desire to combine things I liked into things I thought I'd really like. That's when the madness was born. I wanted, once (just once, I swear) to figure out how to combine oat, potato, sour cream, and onion into a delicious cereal you could enjoy with milk.
Potato Chips? Good! Sour Cream and Onion Potato Chips? Even better! For breakfast!? Oh my god!
It was going to be like a Super Bowl party in your mouth every morning! Or at least that was what the commercials were going to say.
Truth be told, I never investigated the process or the combination of oats and flavorings, so there was never a prototype. Sometimes my mind wanders back to this potential invention and I want to try it... but then I think better of it.
But be warned if I ever ask you to try "this awesome new thing" for breakfast.
Cheesy Hot Dog Scramble
Living on my own in a house with a few other people you'd think I'd have all sorts of opportunities to cook and prepare food and learn the ins and outs of the kitchen. Preparing new dishes and making old favorites would become a daily happening, yes? No. I tend to work fairly long hours, grab a bite to eat when I can on my way to or from somewhere else, or whip up something that's tried and true -- and pretty standard. Occasionally I stray from old standbys by mixing elements of a few together to make something delicious. Here's my first foray.
Now this is not groundbreaking stuff. I'm probably somewhere between the fourteenth and four-hundred-thousandth person to think this one up, but here's how I went about it.
Cheesy Hot Dog Scramble
Ingredients
- 2 Hot Dogs
- 4 to Six Eggs
- Shredded Monterey Jack Cheese
- Fresh Ground Pepper
- 1/2 Tbsp Butter
Preparation
- Cut the hot dogs into small pieces (as you would for a wee tot) while sizzling the butter to a melt in a frying pan.
- Fry up the hot dog bits on the frying pan, flipping them often enough to prevent burning
- While frying up the hot dog bits, whisk four eggs with ground pepper and shredded cheese in a small bowl
- Remove the hot dogs from the frying pan, leaving the resulting grease in the pan.
- Pour the whisked eggs, pepper, and cheese into the pan and prepare as scrambled
- When the eggs have coagulated enough, add the hot dog bits and mix all together.
Serves two. Delicious on a toasted sandwich or by its lonesome!
