Cookin’ for Dad

Happy Father’s Day, everyone! I hope you have all had a great day with your families.

My sister and I typically have a tradition of cooking breakfast for holidays centered around mom and dad. Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, birthdays, etc. However, this year we decided to do something a little different by cooking dinner instead, since we had breakfast with the more extended family yesterday.

Figured that would make for perfect blog fodder tonight. Though I probably won’t spend too much time fiddling around here because of the whole. You know. Time with the family kind of stuff.

That in mind, hope you’re all ready for some Eggplant Parmesan.

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After breakfast yesterday, Aly and I stopped at a grocery store to pick up everything we needed. Eggplant, bread crumbs, pasta, eggs, marinara sauce.

There was only one thing we missed… But I’ll discuss that later for anyone who cant figure out what just yet.

Using the eggs, along with some half-and-half, we made a batter to stick the eggplant slices in before coating them in the breadcrumbs.

From there the slices got fried, which was primarily my job since I’m fairly well known around these parts for being the guy who does things like cook the bacon.

Then once all of the eggplant was done we moved on to the rest of the meal while letting it stay warm in a 200 degree oven.

We hit the pasta and sauce at the same time, one on each stovetop.

Fun fact, Alyson decided to grab angel hair nests in some grandiose attempt to make our meals look fancy…

And I was right telling her that they would just fall apart in the water anyway.

So take that, Aly.

Once those portions were finished, the only step remaining was putting it all together:

Delicious.

Now, for the attentive viewers out there, you might notice that our Eggplant Parmesan was missing a little something.

… The parmesan.

Yeah somehow we managed to make a meal while completely forgetting an ingredient that literally comprises half the name of the dish.

It takes an impressive amount of screwing up to do that, frankly.

Luckily we had SOME cheese in the house to make the meal better. It just wound up being Eggplant Provolone more than Eggplant Parmesan in the end.

But hey, it was still just as tasty.

All we needed to wrap up the meal was a good old fashioned Western. Thank goodness Westworld was here to save the day.

Get it? It’s a spaghetti western.

Haha. Ha.

I hope the joke was worth it, because the episode was heavy this week. Like… Wow.

But hey that’s neither here nor there. Again, I hope you all had a great Father’s Day, and thank you for making my silly series of cooking pictures a part of it.

The sweet taste of success

I’ve been playing Duel Links even more obsessively than usual since the 2017 World Championship Qualifiers began last Wednesday, determined to hit Platinum Rank 1 so I could get the mysterious Super Rare card reward. It has been a long, hard road so far, as it seems like everyone has been bringing out their best decks for the competition.

However, thanks to hard work, plenty of determination and – most importantly – the reminder to believe in the Heart of the Cards from my buddy Aaron (a funny and great guy who is also a pretty phenomenal copy editor that I’m sure is going places now that he’s a Cal State Fullerton graduate, so check him out on twitter), I finally did it:

Finally reaching this goal is especially exciting as it’s the first time I’ve ever made it to a rank this high! It was a fairly lofty goal I set for myself at the beginning of this event that I’m happy I was able to reach.

Granted, the last victory I got leading to it was from the rage quit of a guy I got a really solid opening hand against…

But hey, a victory by default is still a victory, right? I’d say so, especially when that victory leads to the big prize.

One thing you might notice in that victory shot is the lack of Yami Bakura and the fiend deck I spent so much time talking about in my last post. Well… As it turned out, that deck was far less perfect in execution than it was on paper. I’m looking into some possibilities for making it better, but what I have at the moment didn’t take me that much further than the early Silver ranks. At the very least I need more powerful fiend monsters to fill out my ranks, which I’m working on now.

Luckily, I had a deck using Hammer Shark summoning tricks as Mako Tsunami and a very meta-saturated “Gravekeepers” archetype deck with Yami Yugi to carry me through.

Don’t worry, I won’t subject everyone to my long-winded discussions of the cards in each of those decks. Those can potentially be subjects for another day. Just wanted to say that those are what ultimately got me to my prize.

Now just what was the prize I was working up to in the end?

As it turned out, what I thought was the promise of a brand new and unrevealed Super Rare card was actually the opportunity to choose a Super Rare card for free out of a pre-determined list.

The list of cards to choose from came from the available pool of Legendary Duelist rewards and from the cards available to obtain via the Card Trader. Thus, they’re all theoretically able to be earned in other ways… But considering how difficult many of them can be to get, it’s still a welcome and much appreciated reward.

My only real problem with the prize was the sheer amount of choices to pick from. I counted it out, there were 115 possible cards. Seriously, you never truly come to see the problems with having an abundance of choices until you have to pick one out of 115 options.

Eventually I did come to a decision and chose my third copy of Enemy Controller, which is a Super Rare reward card you can receive from dueling Seto Kaiba.

Enemy Controller is arguably the best, most versatile spell card in Duel Links. Both of the effects it can activate (at close to any time you want since it is a Quick-Play Spell) are useful in a variety of situations. The first, switching the battle position of an enemy monster, can save your side from attack or allow you access to their weaker stat spreads. The second, tributing your own monster to take control of an opponent’s monster, has a hugely diverse range of possible effects. Tributing your own monster can trigger a number of things in its own right, but then once you have the opponent’s monster in your possession you can activate any effects they can use, attack your opponent with their own power or tribute it off to summon a different powerful monster.

It’s a great card overall, and having three of them will give me plenty of usability going forward, even if it meant sacrificing quicker access to more Gravekeeper monsters or cards I don’t yet have like Sage’s Stone.

Now that I’ve hit that benchmark I’ve been desperately clawing my way toward, I’ll likely continue to see if I can get to King of Games… But the amazing decks everyone seems to own at this stage of competitive play certainly won’t make that easy.

For now I’m just happy I was able to make it to the personal goal I set. To celebrate, I even made myself some homemade burgers.

These cooked slabs of ground beef, like my victory over a small army of duelists, taste oh so sweet.