Recipe: Red Bell Peppers with Chorizo Stuffing

Made this recipe up today with a few fresh ingredients and stuff I scrounged from the fridge, and it was delicious!

Red Bell Peppers with Chorizo Stuffing
Serves: 4-6

Ingredients:
4-6 medium sized chorizo sausages
2 cups cooked rice (white or brown)
1/2 cup crumbled feta or 1 cup shredded cheddar cheese (optional)
1 cup frozen corn
1/2 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley
4 cloves chopped garlic
1 tbs chicken/pork grill seasoning (or salt and pepper to taste)
1 large red bell pepper per person being served. Select peppers that will sit upright on the baking tray.
Bread crumbs and/or parmesan cheese, if desired

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 375
2. Split open chorizo sausage casings. Remove sausage filling from casings and chop or crumble filling into small pieces.
3. In a large bowl, mix together sausage filling, cooked rice, cheese, corn, parsley, garlic, and seasoning.
4. Cut the tops off the red peppers. Hull and rinse them, then place on the baking tray and fill with the sausage mixture.
5. Top with bread crumbs and/or parmesan cheese, if desired. Bake for 45 minutes or until peppers are done. They will be done when the skin starts to wrinkle, but before the peppers have browned.

How to Do Business 101

We're planning some great outings with friends this summer. A weekend camping trip to Rock Point Provincial Park with some World of Warcraft buddies and a week in Mont Tremblant, Quebec with some of my college friends.

Of course, that means somebody else has to take care of our feline "children". It's our first set of trips since we got Mr. Chet, our second cat, so I decided it was time to find a cat sitter instead of boarding both cats.

After searching the Internet and narrowing my choices down to licensed and insured places, I thought I'd found the perfect choice. Unfortunately, we were outside their service area, though they were very nice over the phone. OK, I moved on to the second choice, which seemed fine on paper, but I wanted more information because the "fees" section of their website was mysteriously broken, even at the source code level. So I called the local number given for the company.

"Hello, Company Name X. Garblegarble volumedroppingoff."
"Hi, I wanted to get more information about your cat visits."
"OK, let me get some information about that." ::Medium length pause, then starts reading the text I'd just read on the company website::
"Uh, thanks, could you tell me if I'm in your service area? I'm in North York."
"OK, let me get some information about that." ::Extended pause:: "We have offfices in every city in..."
"Yeah, thanks but I don't think you're able to give me the information I need." ::click::

I don't have a lot of patience with poor business practices. For the love of the commerce gods, people. Put somebody who knows what the hell they're talking about on your main contact line!

I ended up doing a more focused web search and finding a company not far from where I lived. It was a family-owned outfit, and the owner (who answered the phone) was kinda quirky and a bit abrasive. That really doesn't bother me in animal people, though (well, quirky never bothers me at all). They're animal people and not people people for a reason. The important thing is that she knew what she was talking about and asked the right questions. Her sister the "cat expert" is coming over to meet our critters next week.

Business. It's about confidence, competence, and taking for than 5 minutes to train your employees. Man, I should be one of those consultants that gets paid way too much to go to businesses and tell the employees really obvious things. Except then I'd have to use buzzwords, and I fucking hate buzzwords.

E3

Been watching E3 with my usual mix of interest and amusement. Reading the Penny Arcade forum commentary on the various press events is often more fun than watching the live feeds themselves.

I'm not thrilled with all the Microsoft stuff, since most of it was shooters, and I don't do shooters. I continue to hope that the woman being highlighted in all the FF13 coverage is actually the main character, because JRPGs could really use more female protagonists who aren't the white mage/token love interest/leather-clad slut. Really, Ashe of FF12 should probably have been the player character, and Vaan didn't need to be in the game at all.

Aaaanyway, Nintendo's showing generally pleased me, certainly much more than last year's. Golden Sun is fun, and I'm sure I'll enjoy Mario Galaxy 2 as much as I enjoyed the first one. The trailers (and the game itself, when I'm not cussing at the more difficult platforming challenges) just evoke such a feeling of simple joy.





For a final note, I don't have Rock Band, and I'm not sure I want it. As a vocalist, I much prefer to be able to improvise than to be put on rails and told I need to sing just like the original. However, this trailer for Rock Band Beatles is pretty awesome whether you're interested in the game or not.





We'll see what Squeenix and Konami have to offer today!