You can imagine my interest in expanding my menu, hence the sopes yesterday. The thing is, though, I’m also trying to avoid a whole bunch of time spent cooking. When I’m in the mood to cook, I don’t mind spending hours in the kitchen, but I’m not in the mood to cook every single day. So, I’ve been on the look out for foods that meet my dietary criteria, and can also be prepared in half an hour or less.

Bonnie and I both love this noodle recipe that I’ve been making for a couple of years. I think I wrote about it a few weeks ago – – yep, I did. I have to be in the mood to make it, though, because it takes so much time. The other thing is that I started making it because I wanted ramen, but it’s not ramen. I use Barilla gluten-free fettuccine. It’s just not the same. So, while I was walking through the store yesterday, I had an idea. What if I added a can of mixed veggies to a box of rice noodles?

The result was something closer to ramen, but there is much room for improvement. Had my local grocery store sold gluten-free ramen, I would have bought it, but rice noodles were the closest thing they had, and they weren’t great. The flavor was good, but it will take a few tries to perfect it. I seasoned the dish with salt, pepper, and garlic sauce, and I chopped up a green onion on top.

I’m going to order gluten-free ramen online, and try it again because the noodles were definitely the weakest link in this recipe.

In Other News

I made a bracket to hold this little stool, so that it has a place to live, and isn’t always leaning against something and falling over.

The post Gluten-Free Ramen Hack appeared first on Retro Active Lifestyle.

It’s An Illness

I had to make a lot of decisions today. Some of them were tough, like whether I should get rid of my router. I hate routers. They’re noisy, and I hate the way they fling sawdust all over me. I want to make a bunch of dovetailed drawers, though, so should I keep it?

Other decisions were very easy. There was a shocking amount of shit stashed away in my garage, and I don’t know what a lot of it is or what it’s for. I guess my logic was that when the time came that I needed it, I would spontaneously know what it was for. That’s insane!

Hoarding is definitely an illness. The whole time I was out there cleaning, I was thinking about what I might need every little nut, bolt, and tool for in the future. It’s been 46 years already, and I haven’t needed any of it so far, but its time is coming! I started to stress about getting rid of something only to need it later. Like, I have an 18″ long 3/4″ drive breaker bar out there and exactly one socket for it. It’s 1 5/16″. When the hell am I ever going to need to break loose a 1 5/16″ bolt? And, in the highly unlikely scenario that I do, I also have a 24″ 1/2″ drive breaker bar with a 1/2″ to 3/4″ adapter. So, I’m covered.

What Now?

So, now there’s more room in my drawers, but instead of being discreetly stashed away out of sight, the detritus of my garage is piled in the middle of my work table. What do I do with it now? Throw it in the trash? Drag it out to the curb? Sell it? Where? eBay? Craigslist? Facebook? Garage Sale? It’s all so time-consuming, and in the meantime, I have to find a new place to store it all.

The whole point of going through everything and culling the excess was to make room in the garage, but now there is less room, and I have to spend more time dealing with all of this shit. I suppose I should be grateful that this is currently my biggest problem. Folks in Pacific Palisades have real problems right now. Of course, if I lived there, this problem might have been solved for me last night.

The post And It Begins appeared first on Retro Active Lifestyle.