A ninja Thanksgiving...

Halloweenja

It's gonna be a little slow around here for the month of October, my goodly ninja peeps. I'm doing a lot of work for that other website. But never fear, I'll be checking in occasionally with some more ninja treats, and maybe even a few tricks. Keep your eyes peeled.

White Trash Ninja Stick-Up

Female 'Ninjas' Rob Richland Gas Station With Sword, Dagger
September 22, 2007

RICHLAND TOWNSHIP, Pa. -- Police said two women dressed as ninjas were responsible for the hold-up of a Richland Township gas station Saturday morning using a samurai sword.

 

Police said the two women -- one with a dagger, and the other carrying the sword -- entered a Sunoco station in the 5600 block of Route 8 at about 3 a.m. According to police, the women tied up the clerk and robbed the store of cash, cigarettes and lottery tickets.

"They were all covered in black and carrying swords, so it did appear that they were dressed like ninjas," said Chief Robert Amman of the Northern Regional Police Department. "Swords, daggers could be used to seriously harm victims, so this is a very serious crime." Police said the clerk was not harmed and is OK. No arrests have been made and no suspects have been identified.

 

Rick Lekki said it was hard for him to believe that a robbery occurred across the street from his business, R and J's bar. "It's shocking. Things like that just don't happen out here. I just can't believe it happened," Lekki said.

 

Anyone with information is asked to contact police.

Ninjas Don't Fade Away

by D.J. Kirkbride; art by "The Night Watchman"

 

Ninjas never fade quietly away
    into the calm night.
For the strong, proud, badass ninja that just
    doesn’t seem alright.
 
While ninjas are quite silent assassins
    and pass unnoticed,
They ain’t wanna get all feeble and old.
    That’s shit, truth be told.
 
Ninjas live really big, exciting lives,
    though in the shadows.
But they are people with people’s needs and
    live it up like ho’s.
 
Ain’t no way a ninja would fade away
    when it’s his last day.
 
Like Jon Bon Jovi
    ninjas go down in a blaze of glory.

Back In Black

It has been exactly forty years to the day that I posted my last message on this blog. Why the delay? I'm not a ninja who likes to rush himself. If I've got something to say, I deliberate. I take pause. I reflect and find the perfect choice of words. Perhaps I take a few months off to kill them what needs killin'. In the end, I do it because I care. I care about YOU.

I'm not just gonna get on here and post some pointless update. Not gonna put up some cool looking picture that'll hopefully make you forget that I've not given you any ninja goodness in two damn months.

No, that's not what YOU need. You came here looking for ninja info, links to interesting ninja information, news on the latest and greatest ninja movies, comics, and literature, and by god, that's what you're gonna get.

Eventually.

Finally, a place for my ninja homework...

Nothing screams "Hey, look, I've got a ninja folder!" louder than a guy who's screaming "Hey, look, I've got a ninja folder!" into a microphone plugged into a professional concert amplifier and output through a Cold War era air-raid siren speaker array. But if something were to be able to scream that as loudly, it would be actually owning a ninja folder for real. Well, color me a screamer, baby, 'cause I gots me a ninja folder! HELL YEAH!!

Not only is this a totally sweet folder, but its a great gift for the indecisive ninja. Like all ninja, the one on the cover of the ninja folder is a lot more than meets the eye. He's a spinner, allowing you to flick his feet and spin him until his powerful ninja magic has shown him the best course of action for your particular circumstance. Lets face it, as a ninja, you've got a lot of options at your disposal in any given situation. But sometimes you just don't feel like making up your mind. Well now you don't have to. The ninja folder knows the path you should walk, and unlike parents or television or religion, the ninja spinner cares enough to to tell you in a very specific manner exactly what you should do. And it is never, ever wrong.

"Silence Opponent" is my favorite option, by the way. So sinister, yet so wise. The other ninja out there will back me up on this. Its almost always the way to go.

The inside flaps, which help you hold your otherwise willy-nilly ninja papers neatly in place, also offer much helpful ninja advice. The left flap, pictured above, offers advice to any hapless non-ninja who may come across the folder, while the right flap, below, offers a multitude of information for ninjlings*, much of which is considered required knowledge by the ancient council of ninja masters. Click the pic for a larger, more readable view.

* - A ninjling is a pre-ninja. Use of the word ninjling is understood to imply a ninja who is very young and not yet fully capable of the full range of adult ninja lethality. Most ninjlings are three to six years old as measured in the Earth realm, and only the rarest of ninjlings are able to battle and defeat more than 25 well trained heavily armed human warriors at once without injury. Most ninjlings are born to ninja parents, others are created via training or black demon magic, while some ninjlings are actually hatched from rare and treasured ninja eggs. Not a lot of people know that.

Ugh...

My cousin H-Bomb and I went out last night and got plowed on syrupy girl drinks and Cuervo shots. Still too much poison in my bloodstream for me to think straight. We're going out tonight to do it again. I'm too old to drink like she does. I can't afford the lost brain cells. I'll be mentally retarded after this girl is through with me.

What a night, though. Finally met H-Bomb's friend Heather, who is easily one of the ten sexiest women I have ever met in my life. Seriously, my dick woke me up this morning to talk about her, and even after our long, heartfelt man-to-hand discussion, we're both still obsessed. Before the night was through I'd seen her panties at least three times, felt her tits and ass so many times I can't remember, played with her gorgeous nipples, and had a blast hanging out with her boyfriend, who made me promise I'd party with them again after we did a double shot of some god awful scotch that burned so bad on the way down I thought maybe I'd accidentally swallowed a lit caution flare. It was that kind of night. God knows what's in store for this evening. I'll try to have a new article for you on Monday if I'm still alive.

See you on the other side, Ray.

Hungarian Sausage Loaf

The recipe sounds really good, but it confuses me. Scroll down and read it again; its either unfinished or very poorly edited. Step 2 is the problem; do you combine the mushrooms, eggs and breadcrumbs together and use it as a crust for the sausage loaf, or do you combine all that stuff with the sausage and then form the whole mess into a loaf? MARY MOTHER OF GOD, SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP ME!

In order to untangle this culinary mess I turned to our Hungarian Cuisine Correspondent, Szélső Fa. Her advice was this:

"As a practicing chef-at-home, housewife and mother of two I have the right to claim that you combine the things to cover the sausage - to make a crust, as you suggested over the sausage.

On the other hand, forming the whole bunch of ingredients into ONE SINGLE loaf does fit Hungarian gastronomy as well."

Do you see why she's my very favorite Hungarian of all time? She's so slippery. I love the way she claims confidently that the breadcrumbs are most definitely there to form a crust, but then she totally takes it all back with her next sentence, leaving me exactly where I was to begin with. This lady is slick; she should have been an ambassador. So still we don't know for sure how this is put together. There was no other choice. I had to know.

Unless you plan on making your own sausage, this recipe is very inexpensive and simple, and would be great to work on with kids who are of the helping age. The most labor intensive part of the job was dicing the mushrooms, which didn't really take that long considering I was doing it left handed with the wrong kind of knife on a paper plate on an over-crowded counter top while trying to take pictures with the other hand. I'm not a professional, folks.

Once I got the 'shrooms ready, I cooked 'em. I'd never bought fresh mushrooms before, let alone diced and sautéed them. Holy shit, these things smelled so good! I almost didn't have Hungarian Sausage Loaf because I was very sincerely tempted to just sauté a bunch of mushrooms for dinner. I knew when I was cooking these I was going to like the final product, just because they smelled so fantastic.

I have to report that Szélső Fa was wrong... and right. I told you, she's crafty. The point is, there are WAY too many bread crumbs to form a crust. It just wouldn't work, no matter how hard I tried. It was gonna have to be a loaf, and even then putting this many breadcrumbs into this amount of meat took a lot of kneading. A LOT. There were several times I was certain that there was no way it was all going to come together, but determination, true grit, and my manly piledrivin' fists of steel eventually pummeled the mass into a cohesive whole which I was able to shape into a loaf. I don't have pics of any of this because my hands were covered with smooshed up pork and raw eggs, and I thought it best not to touch my camera.

Ain't that purty? One teaspoon of paprika doesn't sound like a lot, but for a loaf this size its a ton. I thought about leaving some out, but I decided I follow the recipe to the letter and see how it turned out. Turns out its not too much after all; baking it really mellows the paprika and gives it a sort of smoky flavor, which was very nice.

If this were a kosher recipe, this would be the place where I would make an ill-advised Holocaust joke in poor taste. Guess I'll have to save it for my Hanukkah article.

You'll notice that I don't have any pictures of the final cooked loaf. That's because by the time it was done baking it smelled so good and I was so hungry that I looked at the loaf, thought about this article, and said "Fuck it" out loud to the empty kitchen. Hungarian Sausage Loaf is damn tasty, folks. The next time I make it I will experiment by upping the mushroom content to 1½ cups sautéed in 3 tablespoons of butter along with a quarter cup of finely diced onions and a half teaspoon of cracked black pepper, but really the recipe is just fine as is.

Hungarian Sausage Loaf is dense. I don't know who Cutco was planning on feeding back in 1961, but this makes WAY more than four servings. Since pork sausage is mainly considered a breakfast food here in the States, and since I had plenty left over, I decided to make a breakfast out of it the next morning. I fried two eggs, a hash brown patty, and used the rest of the mushrooms to cover the slice of nuked loaf. Serve with a tall glass of OJ and a pat of salted butter melted over the loaf. Phenomenal.

I also made a second loaf, only instead of pork sausage I used goetta. For you poor, poor pitiful people who don't know what goetta is, its a very mild German sausage made with pork, beef, oats, sunshine, baby smiles, the laughter of children, and the love and blessings of all the holiest of holy people whom have ever lived, all mashed up in a solid gold meat grinder, and packaged by the highest choir of angels, who seal each and every roll with a divine kiss. It is quite simply the best meat product ever made by human beings, and it is very popular here in the greater Cincinnati area. I thought, being the food of whatever god or gods you might believe in, it would be almost guaranteed to bring the loaf to new heights, but no. The flavor of the goetta is too delicate, and it gets lost in the flavor of the breadcrumbs and buttered mushrooms. You're better off sticking with the stronger flavor of pork sausage. Its good eats.

For Szélső Fa

20th CENTURY WIENERS

Although decidedly non-ninja, check out this amazingly wonderful piece of 60s weirdness. The night before Easter a lot of my family ended up at my aunt and uncle's house in Indiana. My aunt makes a legendary goulash which, in my 31 years on this planet and despite my endlessly hearing about how amazing it is, I have somehow never got to try. I sense a conspiracy. Anyway, she chose the night before Easter to reveal her big secret to us: the goulash recipe in question was not handed down from her Germano- Austrio-Slavic ancestors as we had all assumed, but rather came from a cookbook she had conned from a traveling kitchen knife salesman in the early 60s.

In retrospect, the truth is actually a much cooler story than the handed-down thing. Apparently this guy had been told that my aunt and uncle were newlyweds, and he waited for my uncle to be gone from the house before making his move on what I can only presume he thought would be a financially inexperienced new housewife. But like I said, my aunt has Germano-Austrio-Slavic ancestry. That's gypsy blood, people. You can't con a gypsy. That's like trying to outrun a Kenyan, or out-long-divide a Japanese guy, or out-sexist a 1960s traveling kitchen knife salesman, or out-bigot an overweight pretend ninja web author from Kentucky. It just can't be done.

The gypsies are a savvy people, and in an instant my aunt was onto him like a shark smelling chum in the water. That poor, dumb bastard never stood a chance. He promised all sorts of fantastic deals and confusingly worded installment plans, and my aunt just nodded and acted more and more interested until, convinced she was hooked, he started offering free stuff just for "thinking it over." BAM! She had him. He left her with a few free things, not the least of which was the 1961 Cutco Cook Book: Meat and Poultry Cookery, Volume One by Margaret Mitchell. Of course, when he returned the next day, she was strangely uninterested in the knives, but she thanked him kindly for all the free gifts, and from that day forth my uncle has enjoyed the benefits of marrying a clever woman in the form of endless meals of heavenly goulash. Or so I've heard. I've never actually been allowed to eat any. Did I mention this? Not that I'm bitter.

Anyway, my aunt pointed out that she had never had any interest in making anything from this cook book other than the goulash, which is evidenced by the fact that the goulash pages are well worn and ingredient splattered from years of use, while all the other pages are pristine. I reasoned that if something as good as the goulash came from this book, then it might contain other treasures as well, and was therefore definitely worth investigating. It didn't take long to find what I was looking for. It was like being down in The Well Of Souls with Sallah and opening the ancient Egyptian crypt that housed... 20th Century Wieners.

I shit you not, I thought I was going to piss myself when I saw this. 20th Century Wieners. How in the hell did they think that name up? After I laughed myself into a frenzy, I passed it around and let the fam get a kick out of it. That night I stopped by and picked up the ingredients, and come Easter we dined on 20th Century Wieners. They're okay, I guess, but I don't like tomatoes that much. Everyone else seemed to love them, 'cause they were gone in no time. So here's the recipe for all the world to enjoy. Bon appétit!