Scallops and Butternut Squash

Irregular updates seem to be a bit of a theme with me, but school will do that to you I suppose.

Anyway, today’s dinner came together as one of those “Lets see what I have in the fridge,” affiars. That’s quite common to me, as I usually don’t plan out what I’m eating more than a few hours in advance. So when I went and visited my grandparents on Thanksgiving I walked away with 2 butternut squashes, homegrown by one of their friends. So I’ve been keeping them around for these few weeks trying to come up with good things to do with them. Well I made soup with one of them, which was kind of disappointing, so I will have to try it again and get it the way I like it before I pass the recipe on. But today I realized that I had some scallops in the fridge from Trader Joes, so I thought I would whip up some seared scallops and butternut squash puree. This turned out rather nicely, so I added some toasted Parmesean bread on the side, as I thought the dish could use the dry contrast of the toasted bread to the soft scallops and squash.

This dish was actually quite easy to make, although it did take a decent amount of time.
You will need:
1 Large Butternut Squash
12 or so Large Scallops
Several Slices of good bread (slightly stale bread works even better for this)
Parmesan Cheese (I prefer to use the slab of Parmesan, as opposed to a shaker here because it tastes better and melts on the bread better, but if you have nothing else I guess that work.)
Butter
Salt and Pepper
Olive Oil

So as you can, ingredients wise, this is rather simple.

First, skin, the butternut squash, and remove the seeds. (This is a deceptively difficult step, as butternut squash are very hard and have tough skins. Use a sharp knife and be VERY careful! Skin it first, then cut in half, and remove the seeds with a spoon)
Then cut the squash into pieces no bigger than 1 in square. (They don’t really have to be uniform, you are going to mash them anyway, it just makes cooking easier.)
Then put them in a pot of boiling water until the are soft enough to poke with a fork easily (about 10-15 min.) Enjoy the smell, its awesome!
While this is going on, preheat your oven to about 400-425 degrees.
Take your bread, and cut it into decent size pieces. You are going to be picking these up and eating them with your hands so they should be maybe bruschetta size.
Put the bread on a cookie sheet or roasting pan, and drizzle with olive oil.
Pop these in your oven.
After maybe 10 minutes when these are a bit crispy open up the oven, and throw the cheese on top. The close up the oven again and cook until everything is nice and melty.
MMm, Delicious...

When your Butternut Squash is ready drain them out of the pot, leaving just a bit of the water left. (Lacking a strainer I just used a slotted spoon to transfer the squash pieces from one pot to the other, then added a few spoonfuls of the water afterwards)
Add a hunk of butter to the squash and mash as if you were making mashed potatoes

Here I am going to go on a bit of a tangent about the wonders of my new immersion blender. I bought this off amazon to make my squash soup and it is my new favorite toy. It makes everything! I made soup with it. I made amazing mashed potatoes for Shepherd's Pies and I used it to puree the squash. Its amazing. I love it.

Anyway, so now you should have an awesomely delicious squash puree. Add some salt and pepper to that, just a bit, to make the taste pop a bit more.

Now, in a frying pan, turn the heat all the way up and add some butter and olive oil. Once that is nice and hot, add your scallops.
This is the tricky part. Scallops cook REALLY quickly, your whole thing will be done in less than 5 minutes, so you should have everything else basically done at this point, because you really need to only pay attention to the scallops.
So when you just have raw scallops, notice how flabby and sort of jello-y they are. When you cook them they firm up, but if you cook them too much they firm up to rubber. You want them in a nice middle where you can easily cut them with a fork, and they are incredibly tender, but not raw.
So you basically have to watch them.
So throw them into the frying pan, and let them cook for about 2 minutes. Then flip them over and cook them for another 2 minutes. If you’ve done this right, the outsides should just have hints of brown on them, and the insides should be a good solid white (not the sort of translucenty color that the raw ones are.)
If you can just slice through them with a fork with no problem you are great!

Now all you need to do is throw it on a plate and eat!
Lay down a bed of the Squash, and put the scallops on top. Add the bread to the side and enjoy!

I paired this with a Harpoon Winter Warmer, which was a nice ale with a rather good amount of spice flavor that went with the scallops quite nicely.

Here’s a picture of the final product!
Happy eating!

What I'm Eating: Classic Mac and Cheese

So after experimenting a little last time, I decided to go back to making something a bit more classic, and simple. Mac and Cheese! I was also craving it at the time, so there is that too.

You will need:
Butter-About 2 tbs
Flour-About 2tbs as well
Milk-About 2 cups, but you can eyeball it.
Cheese-Lots of it!
Pasta- I use about ¾ of a pound and its REALLY cheesy, and you end up with a bit of extra sauce. But thats not a bad thing!
Any veggies you care to add, I like peas.

Its actually a really simple recipe. Make a basic Cream Sauce, add cheese, pour over pasta. Eat!

So a cream sauce is basically just thickened milk.

First, put on some nice Prog-Rock. You are gonna need some good cooking music. You can't go wrong with some King Crimson, but I'm feeling some Mahavishnu Orchestra. Get that going nice and loud so you can rock out and cook. At the same time!

NOW!

Start of with a nice mid-sized saucepan.
Melt the butter in the bottom of the pan. Once its all nice an melted add in the flour.
You are looking for a nice 1-1 ratio of flour to butter here. You want all of the flour to be completely coated/dissolved in the butter, with none left over, so tweak accordingly. I trust you.

Once you have that, add in the milk.
Keep this over the heat, stirring basically constantly until its almost about to boil. You DON'T want to boil this milk. It creates a milk-disaster. Trust me. I've cleaned up many a milk-disaster kitchens.

This should be getting pretty thick as the temperature increases and the flour dissolves.

Once you are at a nice heat (don't worry if it isn't as thick as you want your sauce, the cheese adds a lot of thickness) you can start adding the cheese.
I sure hope you grated it ahead of time, or have the big bag of pre-grated lazy-man's cheese. If you don't, PANIC! AHH! HOLY CRAP EVERYTHING IS GOING TO EXPLODE....
Or not. (Remove from heat, grate cheese, put back on heat. Continue...)
Now add cheese. Lots and lots and lots and lots of cheese. Pretty much anything and everything works. In mine I added Cheddar, Monterey Jack, and Parmesan. It was super tasty. Use what you like!

Add the cheese in handful by handful stirring constantly.
This is my favorite part, I love melting the cheese...
Now stir this until all of the cheese is melted and you have a nice consistancy.
Here you are pretty much done! See, I told you it was easy.
At this point you can add any veggies, (peas... do it, you mother always said to eat your veggies, and what better what that covered in delicious cheese!) And some seasonings. I like to add some fresh black pepper. Makes it tasty.

Now, put your pasta in a bowl, top with cheese sauce and chow down! Its super good!

Variation I haven’t tried yet:
Adding beer.
You should be able to add a nice dark beer to this cheese sauce to give it some extra flavors, but I haven't figured that out yet. Need to do some more research. I keep drinking the beer before I can put it in the sauce..

Let me know how it turns out!

What I'm Eating: The Chicken Cacciatore Experiment

Hey guys, so I know its been a long time since I've posted something here, seems to be a bit of a trend, and every time I promise to be more regular. Well I'm not gonna do that again, but I do want to keep posting things. Well anyway, here's a new thing that I might keep doing if people like it. I'm calling it what I'm eating, and I'm gonna post recipes and things that I've cooked, so that if you want to try them you can.

I decided I wanted to try to cook Chicken Cacciatore tonight after shopping and seeing that chicken thighs were on sale. Thats what I get for shopping hungry. Anyway, I had a general idea of what Cacciatore was, but I'd never actually cooked it before, so I looked online to find a recipe as a bit of a guideline. I found one on the Food Network site, and with the danger of losing any interest people might have in me, here is the link: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/chicken-cacciatore-recipe/index.html It is literally the first thing that pops up if you type “Chicken Cacciatore” into google.
Anyway, so from the recipe I learned that you basically need to fry/brown chicken, and then simmer in it a sauce for a while, then serve it over pasta. Easy right?

So here's what you are going to need.
Chicken Thighs. About a package should be fine. I used 6, a few were pretty big, and a few were small, so just use what you got.
Tomatoes-2 cans. (14oz) I used diced tomatoes, but you could use whole ones too if you wanted. Just make sure you have enough.
1 med/large onion, yellow
Garlic-A whole ton. I loves me some Garlic.
Olive Oil
Flour
Pasta
Chicken Broth

This is all I used, but this recipe is pretty versatile, you can throw in other veggies if you have them or want to. Mushrooms if you are so inclined (I'm not), Bell Peppers, Squash/zucchini could be fun, just whatever you have around/looks good at the store.

Anyway, what you are basically going to do is dredge the chicken in flour, then fry it in the pan. Take it out of the pan, throw in everything else, wait, then re-add the chicken and cook.

First, take a lesson from me, skin the chicken. You might be saying now “But Stefan, chicken skin is delicious, and I want to keep it!” To that I say, “Well you are weird, skin is gross... Also it makes it harder to cook the chicken. So get rid of it!” (I made the mistake of leaving it on, and I had to re-cook some of the chicken after everything else was done.)

Now, most recipes would have you dredge (fancy cooking word for coat) the chicken in flour. But to that I say, “Boring!” So I spiced up the flour first. I added Onion Powder, Basil, Oregano, Salt, Pepper and Rosemary to the flour, mixed it up, and coated the chicken with it. I like spices. They make food taste good. You should like spices too! I just put the flour on a plate, mixed in the spices and coated the chicken. This kept me from having too much excess flour at the end, because I didn't need to put too much in the plate.

Then I added the olive oil to my pan, a large saute-pan. Don't use a frying pan! You are going to need something with high sides, because you going to be adding a bunch of liquid to this.
When the olive oil is nice a hot. (Quick tip-you can tell when its hot enough when its viscosity goes down. The faster you can make it run around the pan, the hotter it is. Try it sometime! Put room-temp. Olive oil in a pan, then tilt the pan. Then heat up the pan and tilt the oil around. Its a good indicator) Put the chicken in the pan ex-skin side down. You want to just brown both sides a bit. This shouldn't take more than 5 or so minutes, depending on your stove.
When the chicken is all nice and brown, remove it, and put it on a nice CLEAN plate (Raw chicken=salmonella and that=bad so get a new plate!) Leave all of the delicious chicken-y juices in the pan. Mmm, chicken-y oil juices!
Your kitchen should smell great at this point, and your roommates should start asking you whats for dinner. Now depending on how nice you are, you could tell them, or you could tell them to go to hell!

Now add your garlic and onion to this. I cut my onion into nice big pieces, but if you arn't a fan of big pieces of onions, 1) Shame on you, and 2) cut the onion smaller! Its really up to you.
Cook that in here a bit, and add any more veggies you might want to add.
Then throw your tomatoes and about 1/2-2/3 of a cup of chicken broth to this. You can just eyeball it.
Also, if you have some wine laying around, you can add that to the mix too. Red or white, doesn't really matter, but I like red. Spice this! Use some of the same spices from your flour mix. I also like to add some cracked red pepper, but I'm just adventurous like that.

Let this cook for a few minutes and throw the chicken into the mix. Make sure you put it in ex-skin side down. Thats where all the meat is, and you don't want to waste heat cooking the bones and stuff. ( I made this mistake.) You can flip the chicken a bit past half-way through too to make sure you are getting an even cook.

You are going to want to let this simmer for 20-30 minutes. Simmer means a bit of bubbling, but not a whole rolling boil. Thats no good. Simmering is the name of the game. The sauce should simmer down a bit. This is good, intensifying flavors and all fo that.

Maybe 10 minutes into this, you can start your pasta, I used some nice Bow-ties, but really any pasta will work well. Pick something you like!

Then after the 20 or so minutes, check it to make sure its done. Cut open one of the thighs. You want NO pink. Just fully cooked delicious chicken.

If your chicken and pasta is done, then so are you! Just put the chicken and sauce over a bed of pasta, add some Parmesan if you so desire and eat!

Its easy and tasty!
I had this mean with a Black Chocolate Stout from Brookline Brewery.
http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/45/680/
This went really well, as its a very dark, almost bitter stout, with a big bittersweet chocolate taste that went really well with the dark flavors of the Cacciatore.
So serve this with a big dark beer, on a chilly fall day like today if you are on the East Coast with me, or just imagine a chilly day if you are on the west coast (While you are at it, pity me... its cold....)

So yea thats it! Let me know how it turned out if you try this! Let me know if anything is unclear, I'll help you out!

Here's a picture of my finished product!

Its Beer Time!

So I said I would write a blog entry about beer, so now I am.
I found a cool little craft beer shop a few blocks from my apartment, so I've been going there and sampling all sorts of different beers. This is going to be reviews of 4 of them. I don't know where you can get all of these. I know you can find at least on at most Bev-Mo's if you are on the West Coast. But other than that, I dunno... Sorry.

First up is the Podge Belgian Imperial Stout.
This beer is an import from Belgium, and its not from a very big brewer, so you might have more trouble finding it. Their website, www.alvinne.be is all in dutch, so its also hard to understand, even with google translator.
I poured this 12 oz bottle into a pint glass, it had a very dark body, with a thin tan head. It was a very nicely carbonated beer, with some nice textures and tastes. It was smoother than I expected, with some dark, chocolate and a bit of coffee taste. However overall, it wasn't exceptional. It was a good beer, but I don't think it is completely worth the money. Being an import it runs about 5 bucks per 12 oz bottle, and if you want a comparable beer you can but the Rasputin Imperial Stout, from North Coast Breweries for less than half the cost. This beer would be great if it was cheaper, but as it stands, it is simply too expensive. It is a quality stout, but not good enough to warrant the price tag. I would gladly drink it again, but I won't be buying it.

The next beer is the Three Philosophers belgian-style ale by Ommegang. The website for this beer is http://www.ommegang.com/index.php?mcat=1&scat=4 However, I didn't like this beer too much. My main problem is that it is very sweet. Too sweet. I enjoy belgian beer, and all of its fruity after taste, but this beer was so sweet it was almost syrupy, and the cherry aftertaste was absolutely overpowering. As soon as you taste it, you get the taste of a nice mild ale, but then it gets completely washed away by the aforementioned cherry flavor. Its almost syrupy, its so sweet. It reminded me of drinking Port, or some other dessert wine. I can see this working better if it was a bit more bitter, or went easier on the sweetness. Overall, I wouldn't buy, or drink this beer again. Finishing off the 4 pack that I bought was kind of a chore, each time I though I would get a different, or better experience, but each time I was wrong. However, people who generally don't like beer because of its bitterness, might want to give this one a try, as it is basically the opposite of bitter.

On the subject of Belgians, I was redeemed by the Unibroue Maudite. This is a Canadian beer, brewed in Quebec, whose name, Maudite means Damned. (This was basically why I bought this beer, I mean its named Damned...) This beer was excellent. It was exactly what the Three Philosophers should be. A bit more bitter right off the bat, with a lighter, sweet aftertaste that tasted slightly of cherries (its the type of Cherry lambic malt that they use in Belgians). A very nice, easily drinkable beer. I really enjoyed it, and am looking forward to drinking the rest of the 4 pack. It was mildly expensive, but not excessively so, and I feel that I will be putting this one in the rotation of good beers I will buy regularly.

The final beer that I will be quickly reviewing is Mayflower Breweries Porter. This was another very good beer. I was looking for a nice strong dark beer, and I got it in the Mayflower Porter. It is a nice, decently bitter dark porter. It isn't immensely carbonated, but I didn't find that this detracted from the beer at all. Its rather smooth and has tastes both chocolate-y (but not overly so), and with a bit of coffee. It was a very good beer, and being a Massachusetts micro-brew, it was rather cheap. This is another one that I will have to be sure to keep stocked in my refrigerator, and I advice you to give it a try if you happen to run into it.

Well thats it for my beer reviews. If people liked this, I might keep at it, and do a regular sort of “What I'm Drinking” sort of thing...
So let me know! Also let me know if you find these beers, I'd be interested to see how far west some of these get.

The First in a Series of Posts

So I haven't blogged at all recently, but all of a sudden I have a bunch of things to say, so I'm going to spread them out over a few posts as opposed to one big gigantic uber-post.
This one is about my life! Subjects to come: Beer, Music, Kurt Vonnegut

So,
I moved to Boston.
That actually happened! Yay!
I arrived in Connecticut, and stayed with my family for about a week, seeing everyone and slowly moving my stuff up to my apartment in Boston, but about 2 weeks ago I took the whole plunge and made my permanent move up.
My apartment is nice. Its small, and only really has two rooms, but its good enough for me. I would like some more counter space, and maybe some more storage, but I really can't complain. Its going to work out just fine for me.

I also joined the Boston College "Screaming Eagles" Marching Band, so I had a full Band Camp experience for 10 consecutive days. That was incredibly exhausting, with me re-learning how to march and stuff. It was really long too, from 9am to 11pm every day. But at least they fed us, so not paying for food for that whole time was nice.
Its also interesting being at a school with a large, well-respected marching band that gets support and has facilities and all of the normal things bands should have, but that UCI does not. Like I have a band locker to store my trumpet. Thats a new concept. But the people are cool, and apparently never heard a trumpet player hit high notes before, so I get basically free reign on taking things up and stuff.
We had our first game on Saturday, which was quite the experience. I wake up at 7:30 to get to school by 8:45. I have to ride my bike so that tacks on some extra time there. First we eat breakfast, (Provided) then go out on the field for a quick rehearsal, then come back and do a "team walk" where the band marches around campus, through all the dorms and everything, meets up with the football team, and marches into the stadium.
Then we went back to the band room, eat lunch (provided again...) change into our uniforms and go warm up for our little pep rally thing we do. THis pep rally thing is basically the band standing on the steps outside the band room (which is adjacent to the football stadium) and play some pep tunes for the people that gather there. And people come and listen! They aren't just like "Meh, band, whatever..." People think its cool and come and hang out.
Also there is a whole shitload of tailgating thats going on, so thats kinda cool to watch. Its like actually being at a college gameday, as opposed to game day at UCI where only the band and the athletes know that there is a game going on.
Anyways, after that, we go march into the stadium, and play our little pre-game set, go into the stands, play for the game, do a halftime show, finish off the game and then go home.
Odd things about BC Football:
Their student section are called the "Superfans" and they all have yellow t-shirts that say "BC Superfan" on them.
BC colors are technically Maroon and Gold, but all of that red and gold I see still makes me uncomfortable, because, FUCK USC.
During touchdowns the superfans like to crowd-surf. In stadium bleachers. Its really safe and intelligent....
The fans fucking love the band, and shout out songs they want to hear. Like they know what songs we play, and want to hear certain ones, and they have dances and stuff they made up to go along with some of the songs we play.

So yea, thats about it for Band, I haven't started any of my grad student-y stuff yet, so it almost feels like I'm an undergrad still, but I have faith that it will all change and I will want to kill myself with all the work that I have to do soon.

I went grocery shopping today, and had to take the train/subway. It was weird not having a car to throw all of my crap into.

But I cooked my first real meal in my apartment today. Lemon-pepper chicken with tomatoes and onions over pasta. Yea, you're jealous of my skills...

So now I don't have anything really big to do until thursday. I mean I have band on tuesday, but its not really that big of a deal, just a few hours at night. I kinda want to go explore Boston, but I don't know where to start. Well, I'll figure that out tomorrow.

Thats pretty much it. I'm excited for grad school to start, and I hope I'm not getting too over my head, but whatever. It'll work out!

Stefan's Shipping off to Boston: Day 6 the Final installment, This time it's serious.

My final day of driving, and it couldn't come soon enough. It was interesting and even a bit fun, but waking up and driving 8 hours a day really takes its toll.
So today the day started in North East, Pennsylvania. Thats the actual town name BTW. North East. Yea odd. Anyway, it was an 8 hour drive on little 2 lane New England highways. These highways are cool because they wind through the hills and mountains, surrounded by forests and whatnot. This makes them really pretty.
The downside however, is that they are only 2 lane roads and if there is any construction or anything, they slow to a standstill. And that happened just before I crossed the border from New York to Connecticut. We came to a screeching halt, and I just sat on the road, moving in car length intervals for a good 45 minutes, maybe even an hour. After sitting there, and listening to a whole album, I was like, screw it. So I got off as soon as I could, and decided to attempt to find a detour around this construction.
Next thing I know, i'm driving pretty much randomly around this little town. So I just decided to head easterly, and try to find the highway again. Surprisingly, it worked out pretty well. I didn't get too lost and I feel like I found the freeway and got back on the road faster than I would have if I just stayed in the traffic.
Another part of this drive was the rain. It rained 7 out of the 8 hours I was on the road. I basically followed the rain from Chicago to Connecticut.
But finally, after 6 long days of driving, I made it to my grandmothers house in East Hartford, CT.
It is worth noting at this point, that my family is crazy. I arrive to the beginnings of what would be a flurry of chaos and excitement. Within minutes of my arrival, basically all of my family is at my grandmother's house, and we are grilling corn and steak, cooking lobsters in beer kegs (an interesting operation that involves mounting a modified keg on a propane burner, putting water in the keg, and dropping lobsters into it), and mounting all sorts of chaos. It was awesome.
Anyway, I'm gonna wrap up my last blog, with a “what I learned sort of thing”
1) Nebraska Sucks. Never go there. I'm never going back.
2) I do well at long drives. I sort of knew that before, as I've driven long distances before, but knowing that I was able to drive all the way across the country by myself is pretty cool.
3) I like blogging. I'm gonna keep doing it. Not as regularly, but I want to keep it up.
4) I'm feeling better and better about moving to Boston. I was a worried and a bit nervous, but having this extended amount of time to think made me more confident in my decision.

I will have an epilogue with all of the final tallies of mileage and MPG and stuff like that in a bit. I'm going to enjoy my time relaxing in CT first though.

Stefan's Shipping off to Boston: Day 5

Of course, the last night has to be the difficult one. Apparently I didn't book my hotel right last night. I don't know how it happened, but I had really crappy internet in the Chicago hotel, so it may be that, or I just might be an idiot. Anyway, so when I got to my hotel, there was no reservation, and they were really full, because apparently its tourist season in Erie. I'm also not exactly IN Erie, as all the hotels were super expensive, so I'm a bit north of Erie too.
Anyway, I'm in a small smoking room in this Super 8. It doesn't smell too bad, and I have all the fans on. I should be alright for just tonight, and then I'm going to bail early in the morning.
Well, lets start at the beginning then.
I stayed longer in Chicago that I have in other cities. This was because I went out to lunch with my friend Lana. We went to a cool little pizza place in a suburb of Chicago. It was tasty and fun.
Anyway, this caused me to leave Chicago pretty late, like 1pm. The drive today wasn't that long, distance-wise, under 500 miles, but it felt like forever. It was also oddly expensive. There were quite a few toll roads between Chicago and Pennsylvania. All of Ohio was one big toll road that cost me like 10 bucks. And then there was another one as I left Chicago. It was uncool. I also realize that that is backwards geographically.
Anyway, the entire drive it looked like it was going to rain, but it never did. Maybe I'll catch up to that storm front tomorrow.
There was also a giant ton of road construction on the drive today. I would estimate at least a third of it was construction, which is stressful because you have to watch your speed and the roads are all messed up and super annoying.

On a completely different note, I made an observation about truckers today. I feel I've passed several hundred of them on the road this trip, so I feel uniquely qualified to make this completely unscientific judgement.
One the back of nearly all of the trucks are advertisements for employment at whatever trucking company they are working for. Sometimes they will be little witty saying or something, but mainly they are just like, “You should work for x company, we will pay you.”
So I started thinking about this. Who are these ads targeting? It can't be people like me, who are on long road trips, because if you are driving across the country or something like that, you have something going on. People don't drive to look for a job. People who are on short trips probably aren’t looking for a job driving long distances.
So these must be for other trucks. But this would mean that truckers jump ship enough to warrant massive advertisement.
So now I have a mental picture of truckers as road-bound mercenaries, always looking for a better deal. This is how this scene plays out in my head:

Its an office, shot in black and while like old film noir. The Venetian Blinds cast horizontal shadows across the mahogany desk where the overweight boss is sitting, smoking a cigar and sipping a glass of scotch. He goes to put the scotch down, but his desk is covered with paper and files. He finally decides on the least important stack of papers, and sets down his glass, and leans back in his high-back leather chair. It is at this point that our trucker hero bursts into the room. He wears dark jeans, a leather jacket, a 3 day old beard, and a trucker hat pulled low.
“Hey boss-man,” he grunts
The boss nods, “Whadda want?”
“Alright Boss, here's the deal” [At this point he goes on and lists a bunch of things that annoy truckers. I really don't know what this would be, but probably lots of drives through Kansas or something like that.]
“Yea so?” The boss-man replies indignantly, he takes another long puff of his cigar, and lets the smoke hang over the small office.
“So I'm leaving. Got a new gig. Payin' me more.”
“The hell did you find a new job? You don't even know any other companies.”
“The back of another truck. It had a number, gave 'em a call. They're paying more.”
“You son-of-a-bitch. You know I can't compete with truck-back advertising.”
“Damn straight. I'll see you around.”

And with that, he pulls out a pack of cigarettes, puts one in his mouth. Grabs a pack of matches, lights his cigarettes with one, and tosses the match into the glass of scotch.
He then turns and walks out the door.

The boss, visibly angry, throws his cigar into the glass as well.

[And Scene]


Milage today was 467, and I haven't gotten gas yet today. So no MPG yet again.
The plan for tomorrow is to drive through upstate New York, then cut down through Massachusetts and then into Connecticut where my trip is done!