separated at birth.

Shoep! Welcome back to Vegetarian Duck, my name is Mark and I'll be your host for the next 5 days or so until I disappear from view again due to real-world commitments.

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Bah. "Real world," my ass. Whatever kind of world it is, it involved an emergency DJ gig opening for the lovely and talented dj/rupture (or here). As soon as I found out about it I was highly psyched (mr. rupture's Gold Teeth Thief was the first CD we ever purchased for our now-defunct CD shop, disc number 000001), but the reality ended up being that I played for 3 hours, about 3 times longer than I normally like to play, and I became unshakably bored with myself after the first 90 minutes or so. It's like listening to yourself talk uninterruptedly for 3 hours, you just get tired of the sound of your own voice. I was also doing the laptop/sampler version of myself, and it's just not interactive enough to be entertaining for that long. I wished I'd brought some vinyl and borrowed someone's turntable skillz.

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Consumption summary: lots of sandwiches, as tends to happen during "the crunch". Mara unleashed her Sjako's Speciaal: egg, mayonnaise, and sambal badjak:
































We (I, actually) bought some TVP cheeseburgers (Tivali's Kaasburgers to be precise), and dressed them up in standard Americano fashion: mustard, ketchup, mayo on a bed of onion and tomato, lettuce on the side waiting to also be dressed:
















And the gooey photo at the top of the page is evidence of the completed gross cheesiness of this sandwich. Much better than it looks.

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In addition to the standards featured above, I also discovered some especially complementary taste pairs: two ingredients that just seem separated at birth, meant for each other, filling in each others' blanks and walking hand-in-hand down the beach in the sunset of your mouth (nurse? administer a urine test, stat).

One: toast with fig jam and mascarpone cheese. I'm sure this combo would be fine with non-fig jams simply because what doesn't taste good with mascarpone cheese (don't answer that). But anyway, do this soon, it's decadent and luscious and completely removes any urge you might have to go get some pastries from the mediocre bakery down the street. Nothing they can sell you will be as good as fig/mascarpone toast.

Two: papaya and ketjap manis. I'm really enjoying papaya these days, which I'm still surprised by, because I've never liked it before. So, ja...I've been eating it in my cereal mostly, but then this week I made some bulgur with ketjap manis for a quick breakfast, and threw some papaya chunks in there, and....kablooey! Good thing I was wearing my safety goggles. Or googles, which I also typed. Very very good. Now I need to find a delivery mechanism for serving this to people...maybe beef? Shrimp? Spoon?

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OK, up next: I joined the rat race. Less of a race, actually...more of a love-in. Basically I just joined the rats, no race whatsoever. But you never hear about the positive rat stories, do you? Well, you will.