Rice balls and cupcakes

I love onigiri. In the simplest of forms it is easy to make, minimum involvement required, yummy, and cheeeeeeeap.

My pantry is in a sorry state at the moment, but I always have something like 5 varieties of rice on hand and my last can of tuna was some roasted-garlic thing I bought a few weeks ago on a whim.

Plain, steamed white rice, a little bit of mayo in the tuna and nothing more (the Daughter is picky about tuna)... I didn't even use any seaweed today, although I did put Tabasco sauce and pickled ginger in mine.

And because I honestly just don't feel like doing anything complicated today, I finally used that box of Cherry Chip cake mix that's been in my pantry forever, to make it into mini cupcakes. I have some buttercream icing in my fridge from the last time I had to make some (same recipe as here), I'm probably going to put some malt powder and food coloring in it and call it a day.



UPDATE - Throw in a frozen blueberry on top of that icing, baby. Oh, yeah.

Caramel popcorn

It's been a very long time since we've bought microwaveable popcorn. I used nothing but the minimum amount of vegetable oil to pop the corn.

A couple of tablespoons of brown sugar and a nice sprinkle of sea salt over low heat, couple of tablespoons of butter, once that's well dissolved about a tablespoon of milk. I may have added a bit more to thin it out.
And in hindsight it may or may not have been better to let the freshly popped corn cool off just a little before assaulting it with melt-your-skin Hot Caramel, but it was ai'ight. Poured caramel in a thin stream while stirring a bit, and when all the caramel was in I shook the hell of the lidded pot for a while. Let it sit, shake some more. The pot was still very hot, so then I moved them to a large bowl and moved them around until they were cooled off, because I wasn't looking for popcorn balls.

Tasty.