Foodsperiments and complaints
Last night Hillary and I were facing the eternal question every couple faces in the evening: "What are we going to eat tonight?"

After a bit of debate, we decided on some frozen tortellini that we had lying around - it had served us well when we made the first half of the package. However, tortellini alone does not a dinner make. At least not a very complete one. The go to for pasta-related side dishes for us is typically garlic bread. Hillary makes a mean garlic bread with some mozzarella and adobo as well as other things that don't immediately come to mind.
Lacking proper bread and mozzarella (and with no one wanting to go to the store) Hillary set her sights on the only bread product available - some tortillas left from making quesadillas a previous evening. With the concept of garlicy tortilla goodness in mind, my lady went to google and found a few recipes that fit the bill. One involving butter and garlic cloves, another involving oil and garlic salt.
I guess she found both lacking, so what follows is hybrid she created, single handedly saving dinner:

Garlic Tortilla Bread

• 3 tortillas, cut in quarters
• about 1/4 stick butter
• one clove garlic, minced
• salt and pepper
• olive oil
• parmesan cheese

Instructions: Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Melt butter in a bowl. Add all ingredients that are not tortilla or cheese into melted butter (just a reasonable amount of the olive oil). Spread this mixture on top of tortilla quarters, placed on some sort of baking sheet. Bake somewhere around 5 minutes or until the pieces look like they are crisping up a bit (our time was closer to 3 minutes I think). Then flip tortillas and put parmesan cheese on the upward side - bake another 3-5 minutes until looking crispy.

The resulting pieces are quite good - combining a bit of chip crispiness with a bit of bready give and a garlic bread like flavor. Hillary thought next time we should substitute garlic salt for the clove, since in the flipping we lost a lot of garlic. What a lady - and she says she has no inclination toward cooking!

Last night we also discussed the idea for a machine called the complain-o-tron, which would listen to complaints and reply "Tough noogies." While not practical, it has a certain elegance to it. It gave me the idea for a website with a single form for inputting your complaint - and then one (or maybe more!) responses. The interesting part would actually be storing the complaints (anonymously, naturally) and then providing some fun statistics about them, like "80% of complaints contained the word 'Buns'". It would be a nice oppurtunity to work on some text parsing scripts.
The whole idea might be a little too close to a certain achewood comic. We'll see.