And now for something completely different.

Back to more of the norm, then: a post not about food! Don't worry, foodie readers, I'm sure I'll come back to it. I still have an entire spellbook - I mean, cookbook - full of notes to ramble on about. But today's post is going to be about something else close to my heart.

That's right, I mean Dwarf Fortress. It's an awesome game. I don't just like it, I love it. While the graphics may be simple, the game itself is dangerously complex. Dangerous I tell you!

Okay, so crazy ranting aside (making this a rather short post!) it's a fun game for those who can get past the ascii art graphics. The amount of fun you can have with the game, and in what different ways, is spectacular. The main idea and goal is to use the small number of dwarves that you're given in your expedition to create and keep up a stronghold in a randomly generated fantasy world. The world isn't pre-generated (although you can get some that are if you'd like), instead they're procedurally generated each time you decide you want to make a new one. Don't feel like ever making a new world? The one you already have is persistent, and everything you do in it stays, in one way or another. Things even down to the legends of heroes gone are generated for the world's backstory. The world generation alone makes it one of the most complex games I've ever played. But it doesn't end there.

Your dwarves can master tons of skills, make things as simple as copper picks and as complex as drawbridges that lift with the pull of a lever to magma pumps to bring molten hot rock up to the surface to melt the faces off of kobolds at a whim. There are no set rules for the game, no boundaries, nothing to follow but your own very whims.

Therein lays the problem of the game, though: I've already started three fortresses, and lost one, and I'm still trying to get all the way through the tutorial! There is quite a learning curve on the game, and that's probably (this is all speculation, mind you) why they've kept the graphics so simple. Not only to make it so that the complexity of the game is the forefront, not the looks, but also to help dissuade any who might be looking for just some simple easy thrills (for that, I suggest Unreal or maybe even The Sims if you're looking for a similar genre).

TLDR? If you're ever looking for a good way to waste hours of your life with something very complex but incredibly fun, download Dwarf Fortress.

OMG readers and suggestions!

For those of you who just want my ganoche recipe, here's the TLDR link to it below.

Just as a warning for what's about to follow: I'm a bit high on my meds right now. I had to not only come home early from work yesterday but to stay home today because I have just contracted a latex allergy! I wasn't aware this was something you could just spontaneously get from working around and with latex, and I'm sure not happy about it. I'm rashy (although even after not even twenty-four hours of meds, the blisters are already drying up and the rash looks tons better) and dizzy and exhausted. I slept for close to twelve hours last night and will probably nap later. As long as I'm sitting, things aren't too bad, but standing up makes me want to sit down again. Whoo.

Anyway, back to this foodie business. I love food. I'm fat and while I'd be happier if I, say, had a little more definition to my chin, I'm content the way I am. I can walk to work comfortably and only occasionally get winded when climbing up small flights of stairs. And I love food. Maybe not as much as, say, Anton Ego, but I love it. I used to be picky as heck - I wouldn't eat pizza because it had tomato sauce on it and I don't like the taste of tomatoes, but ketchup and spaghetti-os were fine - but I've been growing into more food as I get older (pizza is phenomenal!) and loving to try to cook with more and more ingredients as time passes. I love keeping fresh garlic and onions in the house and peppers for as long as they last, all three things I think my parents would be shocked to find that I not only eat but enjoy now.

Of course, like any fat person, I like chocolate. Any form of chocolate is great, but I really enjoy dark. I'd say 'The darker the better!' but once it gets to a point, dark chocolate just isn't tasty anymore. Don't believe me? Go take a big bite out of some baker's chocolate and you'll see what I mean. Man, that was a mistake.

But all this is getting to the main point: ganache. My wife tells me that I have a request to post my recipe for this wonderful concoction, so I thought 'Hey, if someone's going to make a request, I'll totally do it!' So here goes.

Actually, oddly enough, the wikipedia article I posted a second ago has pretty much all you need to make a good ganache! But I'm not going to leave it there, that'd be silly. And lazy. And while I'm typically both of these, I'm medicated today, so here goes!

I've used ganache a few times. I was first introduced to it by the Dove Ice Cream containers (probably vanilla caramel pecan): they pour a layer of ganache on the top of their ice cream before they ship it off. I remember bypassing this ice cream a few times before my food evolution, mainly because I had no idea what ganache was and didn't have a good phone like I do now to look it up with. I got it once, and was hooked, but I still didn't get what made ganache so friggin' tasty. I figured it was something so far out of my league that I'd never be able to do it at home and just left it at that. Then, watching Good Eats (Oh, that wonderful Alton Brown...) he threw out a ganache recipe as a frosting recipe in Art of Darkness III, kind of as an afterthought if I remember correctly. Or was that the chocolate sauce? It's been a while and I'm medicated. He made it look so simple! It's just equal parts dark chocolate and cream. And heck, I love both of those ingredients (I should do a post on my favorite uses of cream at some point...) so I thought, what the heck, let's give it a go! I don't remember what we used the original batch for - it was so good, I think we just ate it with spoons from the fridge, though I do remember pouring about half of it onto the tops of some Ben and Jerry's we had in the fridge and letting it sit for a bit to indulge in some Dove-like chocolate love. When my wife's most recent birthday came around, I knew I wanted to make her a fantastic cake - at the time, we were not doing so great financially so the cake was about all I could get for her birthday, so I wanted it to be as great as possible. So, after finding an awesome cake recipe online (I looked through Alton Brown's, but fell victim to his sciency-overcomplicatedness far too easily, and this recipe had the most irresistible URL ever) I decided to make a ganache frosting for it, like Alton Brown suggested in the first place!

I came across some problems with the ganache frosting, though. It was lovely in consistancy when beaten with a whisk, but it was too bitter, because, of course, I used semi-sweet chocolate to make it. So how to fix this, I thought to myself? Well, if it's too bitter, why not add some sweetness? I'm afraid I was silly enough not to be making notes at this time so I'm going simply by memory now, but I know I added sugar and a little vanilla. I used confectioners sugar at the time because I didn't want it to be grainy but I bet superfine sugar would work just as well. I believe the recipe went something like this:

Simple Ganache

16 oz (2 cups) of heavy whipping cream
16 oz (2 cups) of semi-sweet chocolate chips

Pour both in a microwave-safe bowl. Microwave in small intervals (15-30 seconds, depending on the strength of your nuker), stirring after each interval. Continue until the chocolate's melted and the two can be mixed. Mix!

For the frosting, the basic recipe had this added to it:

1/2 cup confectioners sugar
a dash (somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 tsp, to taste) vanilla

Once the chocolate and cream are mixed, add the sugar and vanilla and mix again until combined. Cool to room temperature (if you're lazy or pressed for time you can toss it in the fridge, but keep an eye on it) and beat with a whisk until to the desired consistency. Spread over cooled or frozen cake and enjoy!

Chocolate Syrup

It's been a while.

There, with that out of the way...

K and I, I might as well admit, are crunchy. At least, that's what she tells me! It doesn't bother me either way, really, it's just a label. But I do like the cloth diapers, and making our own stuff when possible, and the organic food really does seem to taste better. My favorite part is totally making our own food, like the things that we would normally buy prepackaged and over-processed.

My most recent was chocolate syrup, like you'd use to make chocolate milk. Hershey's Syrup for those with trademarks on the mind. Well, after checking out the ingredients and looking around, I decided to try to make my own. The fact that they had to add the word 'flavor' after the words 'Genuine Chocolate' had no small part in this decision.

First, I found Alton Brown's recipe from the Art of Darkness II episode of Good Eats. Man, I love that show. One part mad science, one part cooking, one part crazy. But some of his recipes, though incredibly smart and tasty, are way over-complicated, or require some very hard-to-get things for a dad on a budget. This recipe isn't any of those things, but I still didn't like it. It called for corn syrup which, well, lets just say I'm wary. So I left out the syrup, but the result was less than satisfactory: it was watery, over-sugary, and not very chocolaty.

So I found another recipe online, through another blog, and tried that one out too! Turns out this one was much the same, watery and not chocolaty. So it was time to experiment.

On a basic level, the recipes are all pretty much the same: a simple syrup of 2:1 sugar to water, and some cocoa, about 1/4 as much cocoa as syrup, a dash of salt, and some vanilla. So I thought, hey, what if I use some of these chocolate chips we have in the fridge instead of cocoa? Maybe that'll make the flavor right. So with some backwards conversion, I ended up taking out a little of the sugar for the syrup and boiling it all with some chocolate chips instead. It didn't really help, and it ended up adding some unnecessary oils, too. Not a big deal, mind you, but still. Simple ingredient conversions aside, it was time to think about what the real problem was.

It wasn't chocolaty enough! It just tasted like I added some sugar water to the milk with a hint of chocolate in it. And usually the vanilla taste overpowered the chocolate. So, easy solution: reduce the syrup, increase the cocoa (well, not both at the same time) and remove the vanilla. So that's what I did, actually double the amount of chocolate chips I put in. And it was better! But still not great. You could taste the water, in the milk, and it was off-putting and weird. Yeah, I know, water is tasteless and blah blah no it's not. Even if you add some water and then boil it away you can still taste it, which is why so many cooks on the Food Network add other liquids like stocks or juices or alcohol when they need to make their dishes more watery instead of just water. It makes things taste cheap. So, what's the solution? Well, what am I going to be mixing this stuff into? Milk!

Well, the conclusion for me wasn't that cut and dry: I actually did some other research first, upon thinking to myself that I wanted to make it taste like fudge. Actually, specifically, I wanted it to taste like my mom's fudge syrup. (Story behind that: Mom used to try to make fudge when I was really young, and unfortunately fail - I think it was the lack of a candy thermometer so she'd know when it was hot enough, with a touch of impatience: I mean, it's fudge! You just want to eat it. Her fudge trials would end up being this sticky liquid goop that tasted oh-so very good on vanilla ice cream and made an awesome shell when it cooled. Not the kind you'd have to crack, but it sure did stick to your spoon.) I'd asked Mom before where she got her fudge recipe, and she'd told me her old Joy of Cooking, which I'd gotten a copy of from my brother as a birthday present. If you don't have one and you like cooking, go get one! It's kind of old and stuffy, but the information and techniques are incredibly useful. I jokingly refer to it as my master's spellbook, while I'm writing my own spell book with my own, translated spells in it (OMG D&D REFERENCE WHO'S SURPRISED). So I looked up the fudge recipes in there, and was surprised to find the basic recipe was the same: simple syrup of 2:1, about 1/4 as much cocoa, and some salt. Of course, as cocoa, they involved a lot more boiling and getting to the right temperature, and then usually adding a little butter at the very end, but the basics were the same. But, one of them (fudge cockaigne, whatever that means) called for milk as part of the simple syrup instead of water! Perfect!

So I tried it. And it was awesome. So here it is:

1 cup milk
6 tbsp cocoa powder
1/8 tsp salt
1 1/2 cup sugar

Bring all of this almost to a boil at low heat, stirring often. Let stand to cool, then add to milk until the desired color and flavor. Best if stirred with a whisk.