Finding vegetarian and vegan substitutes for foods I like is so much easier than when I first stopped eating meat decades ago. There's just so many options out there. But I'm not always loving those options. Cheese, for example, is always tough. I've bought so many fake cheeses that I can't even count them. My favorite vegan alternative so far is from Chao, but it's still nowhere near being as tasty as real cheese. But I keep looking.

Fake vegan meats I like are far easier to find.

My latest obsession is Ground Bef (textured soy protein)...

I love it most on nachos...

It's also great on taco pizza and taco burgers because it picks up seasoning so well. I've tried making Sloppy Joes out of it, however, and was not a fan. Any time I put it in a sauce (like a red sauce for pasta) it gets kinda rubbery, I think. I did like it in Chili though.

My next recipe from my childhood I'd like to try is Spanish Rice. Rice, tomato sauce, bef, peppers, and spices. If I can keep it from going rubbery, that will sure bring back memories.

I think.

I haven't had the stuff in probably 40 years.

My favorite hot dog is a Chicago-style hot dog made vegetarian. It's a plant-based dog on a poppy seed bun with yellow mustard, diced onions, neon relish, a dill pickle spear, tomato slices, pickled sport peppers, and topped with celery salt. A phenomenal culinary experience.

But I also like the local version here in Washington State, which is a Seattle-style hot dog...

When is Seattle, I seek out a plant-based dog in a plain bun that's been smeared with cream cheese... then topped with grilled onions, a few dabs of yellow mustard, and a few pickled jalapeños on top.

It's a darn good dog. And I'm happy people are starting to discover it.

When I was in high school, there was a pizza joint in town which had some of the best pizza I've ever had. The secret was in the sauce. It wasn't just bland tomato sauce. It wasn't loaded with Italian spices in a failed attempt to make it interesting. It had a unique flavor which straddled the line perfectly and also had this kinda wine note which wasn't interfering, it was just there in the background keeping things delicious.

My favorite pizza they made was their famous Taco Pizza. Basically a cheese pizza with taco ingredients on top... ground beef, lettuce, cheese, tomatoes, and hot sauce. Delicious. After I graduated, I still ate there quite a bit, including after I became a vegetarian. I just ordered the Taco Pizza without the beef, and it was still amazing.

I have never found a frozen pizza that's any good. And believe me, I've tried ever one I can get my hands on.

I have never found a pizza place which had that amazing sauce.

But I still crave that Taco Pizza, so I've come up with the best approximation I can. And I'm sharing the recipe today! Here is what you'll need...

• Tony's Cheese Pizza. No, this is not even close to what the original was. No, it's not even the best frozen pizza out there. But it does seem to marry with the pizza toppings in the best way I've found. And the crust is good for what we're building.
• Vegetarian Ground or Ground Beef. This is entirely optional. Most of the time I skip it. If you use it, season with Taco Seasoning.
• Shredded Lettuce.
• Shredded Cheddar Cheese.
• Diced (or sliced) Tomatoes.
• Crushed Taco Chips. Not found on the original. I added these because the salty crunch tastes phenomenal.
• Cholula Hot Sauce. My favorite Mexican hot sauce, but feel free to use your own favorite.
• Sour Cream. Optional.

Because the lettuce and tomatoes will turn sludgy if stored in a refrigerator, this is not something you want to have leftovers with. This recipe serves 2-3 people so, if you're dining alone, use a bread knife to saw the frozen pizza in half (you can put the cut on the edge of a breadboard and snap it in half, once you've sawed half-way through). Then wrap the other half and stick it back in the freezer.

Cook the pizza according to directions, adding heated seasoned vegetarian grounds or fully-cooked seasoned ground beef on top half-way through.

Once cooked cut into slices then top generously with shredded lettuce, shredded cheese, tomatoes (diced or sliced), and crushed taco chips. Top with dashes of hot sauce, then put a small dollop of sour scream on each slice if you wish.

Grab a fork and enjoy.

You're welcome!

   
• noPhone! Well, shoot. Guess I'm saving my money and not buying a new iPhone 18 Pro Max after all. Turns out the only thing I give a crap about, the new variable aperture, is a non-starter because the photo sensor on the iPhone is so small that the aperture doesn't really have much of an effect when it comes to depth of field...

And so... maybe next year. Because right now the camera on the 18 Pro is not enough for me to switch just as the 17 Pro wasn't before it.

   
• Eyesight! On Friday I had to run to the Big City for work. While I was there, I dropped by Costco. Where I spent way too much money. I bought new silverware because my old stainless steel stuff (which I love) is starting to get messed up... I bought new reading glasses, because it's time I bumped up from -1.5 to -2.0, alas... and I also bought a 2-pound tub of Rojo's Street Corn Dip, which I will end up eating in less than a week...

Because it's just that insanely delicious.

   
• The Great Beyond! After Costco, I ran by Fred Meyer to pick up five packages of Beyond Stack Burgers. But before I picked up my online order, I went inside and picked up an additional five packages because they were on sale for a crazy good price. Thank heavens I bought that small freezer for my garage!

So now I have 80 burgers ready to go. Since I eat them morning, noon, and night, I figure they might last me until mid-November sometime. Hopefully they will go on sale by then, because they're way expensive when they're not on sale. Of course, I'd rather pay full price than have them discontinued by Fred Meyer, since they are the only store in the entire valley which has them.

   
• Reach for the Sky! The latest season of Reacher was incredible. I was very sad it was over and I'm having to wait months or years for new episodes. However... we did get a new series to help lessen the blow, a Neagley spin-off!

The show is amazing, as expected. And, talk about lessening the blow, Amazon Prime may have given us Neagley... but they canceled Ride or Die, which pisses me the fuck off. The show was highly regarded, highly rated, and had great promise for a second season. How the hell do they decide where to spend their money?

   
• Rarity! Now this is fucking cool as all getout...

Isn't stuff like this incredible? Doesn't it just blow your mind that a substance like this can exist?

   
• Interplanet Janet! Alrighty... we're going from cool shit dug out from the earth to cool shit we're doing in space! This is an incredible video. And the visualizations they're using are some of the best I've seen. Well worth your valuable time to watch...

We are capable of some truly great things as we reach for the stars. Sadly, we would apparently rather spend our time fighting in the dirt. What a waste.

   
• The Incredible Shrinking Food! Thanks to idiotic fucking tariffs plus out-of-control fuel costs thanks to an idiotic fucking war, the price of food is insanely expensive now. And once again food companies are trying to camouflage it with shrinkflation. My hummus was advertised as having a lower price... BUT THE CONTAINER WAS NOTICEABLE SMALLER...

And don't even ask me what the fuck this is. According to the company who makes these chips, this is a full bag. Seriously, I haven't touched a single chip yet!

It's all so fucking insane. We're paying record prices for "LOWER GROCERIES ON DAY ONE" yet getting fuck-all for it.

   
And now back to being even more bitchy than what I can blog about.

I woke up this morning to piles of the most stupid levels of willful ignorance I have ever encountered.

It's a call to boycott a beloved family-co-op-owned Pacific Northwest brand: Tillamook. A company which is most famous for their cheese, but they make all kinds of dairy products... all of them amazing. Sour cream, yogurt, cream cheese, butter, ice cream, and the like.

And why a boycott?

Was their owner found to be in the Epstein Files 38,000 times? Or tried to incite an insurrection? Or has been found guilty of sexual assault? Or has been credibly accused of sexual assault by numerous women? Has bragged about grabbing and kissing women without consent? Has bragged about going into dressing rooms where women are in various states of undress or are naked? Or has been convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records? Has openly been abusing their position to steal wealth and power from the American people? Has been caught in so many lies that you would be forgiven for thinking that they are incapable of telling the truth?

No? None of that?

Then what? What could it possibly be?

Telling people which of their products are safe for people observing halal? Are you fucking kidding me?

The absurdity here cannot be understated.

Food manufacturers put all kinds of marks on their food products! Non-GMO marks, Gluten-Free marks, Vegan marks, Organic marks, No Corn Syrup marks, No Seed Oils marks, Kosher marks (for observant Jews), and Halal marks (for observant Muslims). And that's just the beginning! There's all kinds of marks for all kinds of people to help them with all kinds of dietary needs and dietary preferences.

And it's not just Jews who use Kosher marks and Muslims who use Halal marks. Many people use them. PEOPLE LIKE ME! Kosher Pareve marks tell vegetarians and vegans that the food contains no dairy, meat, or poultry. Halal marks tell people that the facility producing the food adheres to strict cleanliness standards. If you don't care about that kind of thing, THEN JUST IGNORE THE FUCKING MARKS, LIKE I IGNORE NON-GMO MARKS!

For non-Muslims, Halal marks on Tillamook cheese merely says that the facility is clean and free of disease, and if the cheese contains rennet that the animal from which it came was killed by a Muslim in a humane, clean way with all effort made to keep the animal calm and free of distress. And, oh yeah, the Muslim doing the slaughter must kill the animal while saying "Bismillah, Allahu Akbar"... which means "In the name of Allah, Allah is the Greatest." Which is the same idea as Christians offering prayer and thanks to Almighty God before eating a meal. It's a "God is good, God is great, let us thank him for our food" kinda thing.

That's it.

Lord, Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, Adonai, Elohim... just different names from different faiths and cultures for the same God of Abraham. And for the offended Christians out there: in Islam, Jesus is a major prophet, the Messiah, and considered a messenger of God. So your Savior is revered and respected in the Islamic faith as well.

So let's sum up the ritualistic slaughter of animals for it to be Halal, shall we? The kill is made in the name of God in a humane way, since God is merciful and is the only one who should take a life, then they say "God is the greatest."

Yeah, totally boycott that.

If you're an ignorant Islamophobe.

As for me?

I don't eat a ton of dairy any more, but when I do I support a local, farming-family-co-op-owned business with the highest possible quality standards who wants to help people find products suitable for their diet.

Whatever that diet may be.

   
• Dolly Redux! I have spent a lot of time thinking about the legacy that Dolly Parton left behind. What's most amazing is that she seems to have somehow transcended politics, despite the fact that she was fairly apolitical. Of all the interviews and videos I've watched over the past several days, I think this one is where Dolly's legacy should lay...

And you know what? I don't think Dolly would mind one bit.

   
• Slop! Something I think Dolly would mind very much? The death of shitty fucking AI songs eulogizing her. It started when I happened across a song by Enya on YouTube which was a tribute to Dolly Parton. I started listening to it and realized it didn't sound like Enya. Then I saw a shit-ton of other AI-generated shit and realized that everybody and their dog were "creating" AI slop tributes by real people who never made them. It's so fucking disgusting. And it pisses me the fuck off that YouTube isn't cracking down on this crap. Because I don't want to hear it. Ever.

   
• Skylines! This looks like it's a glorious LEGO mashup of SimCity and Animal Crossing...

Yeah, can't wait for that. Any time I can spend in a fake world is bound to be better than what we've got going on in this world we've got for reality.

   
• Lanterns! Nothing has me laughing my ass off harder than people claiming that HBO's Lanterns has ruined the character by going "woke." Race was a huge... massively huge... part of the comic book series. This small exchange is but a drop in the bucket...

The introduction of John Stewart was specifically made to add perspective to Black persons in the situations which were normally occupied by white people...

I wasn't reading comics in 1971, as I was five years old, but I very much remember reading the stories as back issues later in life. I was a massive fan of Green Lantern (his comic, along with The Flash, were the first I had ever bought) and I read through many back-issues where these foundations were made. The fact that the characters are being dusted off and revised for modern audiences is not an accident. It's what the foundation of the book has always been. I think Lanterns is honoring the source material very well. I just wish there was more action going on. I'm trying to be patient, but we're running through the series quickly without it.

   
• Dantzig! I never tire of hearing this story, which popped up today. I've copied it from his Wikipedia article...

During his study in 1939, Dantzig solved two unsolved problems in statistics due to a misunderstanding. Near the beginning of a class, Professor Neyman wrote two problems on the blackboard. Dantzig arrived late and assumed that they were a homework assignment. According to Dantzig, they "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for both problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue. Six weeks later, an excited Neyman eagerly told him that the problems he had solved were two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics. He had prepared one of Dantzig's solutions for publication in a mathematical journal. This story spread and was used as a motivational lesson demonstrating the power of positive thinking. Over time, some facts were altered, but the basic story persisted in the form of an urban legend and as an introductory scene in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting.

   
• Recall! Recall! Recall! Can anybody keep up with all the foods being recalled? I sure can't. Which means I'm probably going to die any day now. Which is strange given that everybody said I was going to die from all the COVID vaccines I've had (11 and counting!). If only there was some kind of government agency responsible for keeping our food safe. That wasn't dismantled. By assholes who keep cutting necessary government agencies so their billionaire owners can get even more tax cuts.

   
And now back to my post-vacation nonsense, already in progress.

   
• I Love L.A.! But L.A. is not loving me, because it's absurdly hot with not a cloud in the sky. That's kinda rare this time of year... but record-setting heat is getting less and less rare every year. This is our normal.

   
• Paradoxical! I've noticed this, but never actually thought enough about questioning how it works...

So now you know. And so do I.

   
• Naturalized American! I'm a huge Kraft Deli Deluxe American Cheese fan (the stuff that's not wrapped in the plastic it tastes like). But I finally stopped buying it because the cost is prohibitive. How can it be 4 times more expensive than sliced cheddar? So a big thanks to Safeway for carrying Sargento American Cheese, which often goes on sale to become affordable!

Great taste, and they put waxed paper between the slices for easy access! I don't eat nearly as much dairy as I used to, so when I crave a grilled cheese, I make sure I have a dreamy, meltable cheese to make it with.

   
• The Truth is Out There! I love LEGO. I love The X-Files. And I am in love with Gillian Anderson. Which is to say that this is really great...

I want it. Even though I have no idea where I'd put it.

   
• Where have you been all my life? Dorielotes... a combination of "Doritos" and "elote" (Mexican Street Corn)... is something I will absolutely have to try before I die (even if it's the cause of my death)...

Looks like it's got Nacho Cheese Doritos, corn, butter, sour cream, mayo, salt, lime, more salt, chili powder, Oaxaca cheese, nacho cheese sauce, and more corn on top. Amazing. But probably not healthy.

   
• Religious Bigotry is Still Bigotry! The amount of time I spend telling random bigots off TikTok to go fuck themselves has me thinking I’d be better off not looking at TikTok...

I have no idea when common courtesy became an opportunity to be such a fucking asshole about everything, but what in the hell do people care what other people want to be called? Who gives a shit? People dying to be persecuted for their beliefs, that's who. Pathetic.

   
And now back to my regularly scheduled vacation.

Why is good American cheese such an expensive commodity?

I can get Colby-Jack, Swiss, Provolone, Havarti, Muenster, Pepper Jack, and a variety of Cheddars (along with many others) at ridiculously low prices for slices. I got an 8oz. Package on sale for $1.79 not too long ago, and don't think I've ever paid over $2.50. But if I want American Cheese of an equal quality (none of the individually-wrapped crap that's not real cheese and tastes like plastic), it's $4.50 to get 8oz. of Kraft American Deluxe... or even $6.00 to get 8oz. of more premium brands...

And I don't get it.

American cheese that's real cheese is just a blend of cheeses mixed with sodium citrate to make it creamier. So why is it double the price? It seems absurd. But American cheese is the best-melting stuff you can buy for a burger, so I end up paying the price because nothing else quite compares.

And the Big Cheese Cartel knows that, so they are able to charge big money knowing people will pay it.

I should probably switch to Cheddar or Colby-Jack to save my hard-earned cash.

"It don't mean a thang if it ain't got that twang!"
                                        —Duke Ellington (maybe)

I have a longstanding love affair with mayonnaise. It's far and away my favorite condiment. Then I discovered Dutch mayonnaise and things got taken to the next level. Then I started trying to eat more vegan and switched to making my own egg-free mayo. But it never even comes close to what I love about the stuff.

So while I eat considerably less real mayo now-a-days, I do still eat it.

The Dutch mayo I obsess over has gotten very expensive, so I went back to Best Foods (AKA Hellmann's East of the Rocky Mountains). But then one day Duke's mayonnaise somehow showed up at the grocery story. It was on an introductory sale cheaper than Best Food's and so I gave it a shot.

When I got home, I saw that the jar said It's Got Twang! on the lid.

And, sure enough, it does. Duke's doesn't have any sugar and includes a hit of apple cider vinegar, and that's where the "twang" comes from.

I was not a fan.

At least not immediately.

The "twang" was competing with the other flavors on my sandwich or burger. So I decided to use up the jar in potato salad where I could adjust the ingredients to offset it. Problem solved.

But then... I ended up using it in other places from time to time until I started... enjoying it?

And now it's my go-to mayo. Unless it's not on sale and Best Food's is cheaper. Because given the INSANELY FUCKING HIGH PRICE OF GROCERIES, the only thing that tastes better than "twang" is savings.

Given how the price of everything has skyrocketed, you can't fault restaurants for having to raise their prices.

Except... it really, really seems disproportionate to the rate of inflation in this heinous Trump economy. Because while they've raised their prices, they've also slashed the amount of food you get WHILE slashing the quality of what they're serving! And when people complain? Restaurants blame the consumer!

As if that wasn't bad enough... now we've got restaurants and servers saying that if you can't tip 25%, don't go out to eat? That's a bold statement given that half the time you eat out the service is ass. I ain't tipping 25% for shitty service. It's not an entitlement, it's a tip. I never know if it's a bad day for a server, so I rarely tip under 15% even when service is subpar... but 20%-30% gets reserved for exemplary service.

And since most all of the ingredients are just cheap Sysco crap that's not as good as what you can get at your grocery store, how is eating out even an option now-a-days? $16 for a grilled American cheese sandwich and fries made from frozen potatoes? Seriously? For that kind of money, I could buy an entire loaf of bread, better cheese, and a bag of frozen fries to make a better meal.

The only time I eat out any more is if it's social... I'm meeting up with friends and we need a place to gather. Or I'm traveling and don't have any choice.

Though it's beginning to feel like "not having any choice" is just making expensive excuses. A half-gallon of ice cream and a bag of potato chips from a nearby grocery store is probably half the cost and is a more tasty meal.