12-inch-12-am Carrot with Trader Joe's Vegetable Masala Burger and Potatoes O'Brien

It was a late dinner tonight; it's a long but interesting story that I will share below. I ended up eating around midnight and wanted to put something together quickly. My wife had eaten on her own, so I was just cooking for myself.

I recently purchased from Trader Joe's a non-soy Vegetable Masala Burger that includes vegetables and Indian spices. I was looking forward to trying this and still need to make it for my wife to try. I simply heated each side for about 4-5 minutes on low-medium heat with a little bit of oil. I served it on a toasted English Muffin. I also cooked for about 10 minutes some prepared frozen Potatoes O'Brien. And I served this all with perhaps the largest carrot I've ever seen, measuring over twelve inches! The burger was reasonably good. When I serve it for my wife, I'll try to add something other than just ketchup and tomato to make it a bit more interesting.

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Earlier, I was a math and computer science judge in the annual NC Student Academy of Science, which I've enjoyed serving as for a number of years now. I get to read sometimes surprisingly advanced papers by motivated middle school and high school students and hear their presentations, then make positive suggestions. For example, one paper today was about a statistical hypothesis about easily measuring a dolphin's appendage to help in predicting susceptibility to temperature disturbances, one was about a neural network created to recognize letters and shapes, and one was about encryption algorithms.

They were supposed to provide us with boxed dinners, but mine turned out not to be vegan. I had enough time to stop at home and have some soy yogurt and toast before leaving with my wife to see a very interesting 1925 documentary, Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life about the Bakhtiari tribe in modern-day Iran and their migrations (what an amazingly rugged people!).

When we came back, my wife was ready for bed but I was excited because I had today picked up nine screeners for films to be shown at the upcoming Full Frame Documentary Festival (I'm the film reviewer for Saathee, a magazine that targets the S. Asian population of the Southeast U.S.), and convinced her to stay up for two short films. (We saw Salim Baba about a 55-year old man in Kolkata who takes a portable film viewer out on a cart to entertain with, and Jay Rosenblatt's Beginning Filmmaking about his trying to teach his 4-year-old daughter how to make a film.) Hence my late dinner!