Cheezies Bread

I’ve had a bread machine for years. I use it all the time.

Recently, I wondered if you could use Cheezies, the Canadian snack food, to make bread using this machine. So I experimented with a recipe for cheese and onion bread from an old Black & Decker machine recipe book, which I use with my newer machine, which is made by Hamilton-Beach and has a single mixing blade in the middle of the bread pan.

Cheezies are made out of corn meal, cheese and other stuff and are horribly addictive. They are a legendary Canadian snack food. I think the equivalent in the USA would be Cheetos which are crunchy (not cheese snacks which are puffy and full of air).

I foolishly bought a large package of Cheezies at Costco in Canada which contained all these 36g Hallowe’en-size bags of the snack. It comes in other sizes as well, as you can see from the Cheezies home page, http://www.cheezies.com

In order to prepare for making the bread (below), I took two of these 36g bags, which weighed approximately 80g (just a bit less than 3 oz.), dumped them into a bowl and using a mortar-and-pestle style method, crushed them up into a powder. You can do the same thing using a blender. This produces about ¾ cup of crushed Cheezies, well-packed.

Anyway, here is the bread recipe:

1½ cups of water – I heat these up in the microwave using a Pyrex measuring cup for around 30 seconds and dump this into the bread pan. If you think the temperature is too hot, by the time all the ingredients are in the pan, it will be OK, trust me.

3 tbsp of powdered milk – I also used just 1½ cups of skim milk, also warmed up, that worked OK too.

2 tbsp of white sugar

2 tsp of salt (original recipe calls for 1½ tsp)

3¾ cups of bread flour or all-purpose flour in Canada; in the USA, **use 4 cups of bread flour** (that’s what the recipe says)

¾ cup of powdered Cheezies (as created above)

1½ tsp of bread machine yeast

Use the Sweet Bread Setting, this recipe is for a 2 lb. loaf. The second kneading for this bread type on my machine is VERY long. Choose the crust you want if there is a selection.

I have also added 2 tbsp of dried onion flakes or 1 tsp of lemon zest or 1 tsp of some mixture of spices (dill and other stuff) to this bread, it turned out fine. On my machine, the bread is first mixed, and then it is mixed really well, with the blade going non-stop. After the non-stop action starts, I open up the machine, and using a plastic scraper, make sure there isn’t any of the mixture on the sides of the pan. I also flick the bread from the corners of the pan into the center using this scraper (there is a certain technique to doing this). If the mixed bread starts to climb up the wall of the bread pan, looking like a giant slug from the movie Dune as directed by David Lynch, I drop a heaping tablespoon of some “thickening” flour (I use rye flour, but others would do) right on top of the “slug.” This should help the bread to form a nice ball which is bounced around in the bread pan. I wouldn’t recommend doing this for more than two tbsp of the thickening flour.

I'm back on Facebook, and it's still annoying

 Why is Facebook so annoying?

If a posting has a lot of responses, it says "49 Comments" at the top, for example. If you click on this, it then says, "View 10 previous comments" and "All Comments."

If you click on "All Comments," it breaks this down into "Most recent" and "All Comments." But when you then start to read what are "all comments" (which is what I wanted to see in the first place), on some of the comments, after what is seemingly some default number of characters, it cuts off and you have to click on "See More" to read the rest of what is posted.

Is there something you can configure so you can see all of the comments (like REALLY >all< of them all of the time) without all this extra clicking?

It's like Facebook wants to intentionally discourage communication between people so they have more time to watch dashcam views of cars flipping over, lame "Just for Laughs" style videos, excerpts from movies about bullies, home movies of people acting like morons and ads which litter the place -- not to mention pictures of women with big breasts.

New Chips from Lay's

 Just announced, new varieties of chips from Lay's:

Rainforest - Using herbs harvested near old growth trees, these chips have a light scent of pine. The bags are specially sealed with biodegradable crazy glue to ensure freshness.

Pemmican - First in a line of indigenous-flavored chips, these tasty morsels will be sold in northern Canadian stores by special arrangement with Lay's to keep costs down, unlike typical other offerings in those stores like Cheerios ($20 a box) or a pound of fresh blueberries ($30).

Brazilian Beef - These chips with a South American tang feature the smell of smoke from burning Amazon rain forests nearby which were cleared to make room for more pasture land.

Sushi Boat - This variety features "Ocean Wise" fish, a fancy way of saying we are kind to the fish before we slaughter them. This variety is personally endorsed by David Suzuki.

Saltspring Salsa - These ones feature pieces of organically grown tomatoes which have been dried in the sunshine as well as other vegetables. There is also goat cheese from goats which have been been raised by the Saltspring Island Ladies' Co-op. These chips are slightly more expensive because of the ferry fuel surcharge connected with transporting the chips to the mainland.

Cell Ding A Ling

I think it's very funny the way in TV shows and movies that when characters get a call on their cell phone the ringtone is usually the default one for that phone.

COVID-19 Humor

 I thought I was getting a cold yesterday and, of course, I was anxious about whether I could still smell anything. I reached around in my room for something to check out my sense of smell and it was some deodorant but guess what? It was UNSCENTED!

I saw some ad on the Internet that says if you have erectile dysfunction that's a possible symptom of having COVID-19. So I guess I have COVID-19.

Annoying CKWX Commercials

 Jerry Brar Mortgages - I look up "Gerry Brar" (at least I got the "Brar" right), which produces "Did you mean: jerry brar mortgage"

Ensign Pacific Chrysler - name of the company sounds like "Enzyme Pacific."

BMO - most of some commercial was this crappy pop song, I couldn't understand a single word which was said. I don't think this commercial lasted a long time.

Ziprecruiter, an employer-based employee search company. They say the same things over and over, including "Ziprecruiter.com -- slash -- Canada ... that's Ziprecruiter.com -- slash -- C-A-N-A-D-A." Huh? Do they think people in Canada are so stupid they can't spell the name of their own country? I think this ad campaign has ended.

[Update from 2023:] Pacific Blue Cross, a medical insurance company, has a commercial saying that kids are covered free when they are included in a family travel plan. This annoying "child" in the commercial wonders if their cat named "Gizmo" would qualify, followed by some chuckles. As someone who, as CKWX's own commercial says, listens to the station "four, five times a day" (if not more), I hear this Blue Cross commercial a lot and I HATE IT.

Many CKWX commercials would benefit by having the name of their companies or websites spelled out, especially if there is no other mention of how you can contact them like with a phone number or whatever.

Someone in the CKWX advertising department recently (2023) thinks it would be a good idea to have a musical jingle at the end of some ads, many of which are unbelievably lame!

Back from the dead (again?)

Time to dust off this old blog so I can post the stuff that I send to friends and just tell them to check the blog periodically so I can avoid sending the same things to the same people.

Should be stiff competition from mistermike.blogspot.com (one posting), mistermikes.blogspot.com (one posting) and mister-mike.blogspot.com (no postings).

BTW, am I the only guy who types blogspost.com whenever looking up an address here?