Monday, August 28, 2006

Carrot/Green Bean/Cilantro/Sausage Chopped Salad

2 cups chopped carrot
2 cups french-cut green beans (fresh, seriously, and french them yourself, it's not hard)
8 oz.Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage, regular
half a bunch of cilantro, leaves only.
salt
pepper
(if you want crumbled cheese on this, buy the cheap, but real, cheese and freeze it. Land O'Lakes and Kraft will both crumble after freezing)


cook the sausage in patties, then chop them into crumblies. boil the veggies in ocean-salty water till tender, then drain and saute with the cilantro briefly in the skillet that you did the sausage in. you wiped the grease out first, right? good. otherwise it'll be too greasy.

Add salt and pepper to bring out the cilantro and the meatiness, and dress with something very cold (cause it's best when the dressing is cold and everything else is hot) and flavorful. I used a blue-cheese Caesar dressing. Dash it around, go rustic on it, yo.

Yummy. I'm gonna go back to eating it now. My cast-iron looks BEAUTIFUL tonight after cooking that sausage - it barely needed a paper-towel wipedown, thanks to the veggies sucking up all that tasty sausage fond. Love....

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Red Curry Glazed Peanuts

I don't brag on myself unless it's warrented - and this time, it's warrented. these nuts are fucking awesome.

enough peanuts to cover your pan. I used a 10-inch nonstick skillet.
light brown sugar
half a spoonful of red curry paste
a few dashes of soy sauce

Combine ingredients in a bowl. Stir, whisk, play with your hands, etc, until everything's uniform. Taste frequently.

Transfer to the pan. Turn burner on 3. Every minute or two, taste, flip or otherwise move the nuts around, and taste again. Pull the second you have a perfect one - carryover heat will take the rest to where they need to go.

If you put them in a shaped container, you can make them hold their shape as they cool.

I'm glad I can stop writing this just so my hands are free to eat more. Damn, these are yummy.

Friday, August 11, 2006

I take Ed Levin's Food Rorschach Test

Ed Levine Eats: First Annual ELE Food Rorschach Test: "
* 1) Haggen Dasz or Ben & Jerry's?

Ben and Jerry's, because at least they started out cool before selling their souls to capitalism.

* 2) Skippy or Jif?
Jif Chunky, because it's what's in my cupboard right now.

* 3) Bagel or Bialy?
Bagel. Bialys are for people who are too pussy to eat a fucking bagel.

* 4) Whipped or Regular Cream Cheese?

I whip women, cream, and butter for spreading, but not cream cheese. That's why you toast the bagel. Hell, that's why you USE a bagel.

(after writing this I remembered my mom reads this blog. but she'd be more upset that I censored myself because I was worried about her. yay cool free-speech moms.)

* 5) Relish or Sauerkraut on your hot dogs?

Relish. Saurkraut is just too saur. *har*

* 6) Milk or Dark Chocolate?

Dark. Duh.

* 7) Salted or Sweet Butter?

Salted, because I don't get to the store often enough.

* 8) Pastrami or Corned Beef on a Deli Sandwich?

I know the rule is no equivocation, but fuck Ed Levine, this is my blog. Corned beef anywhere but New York City, pastrami in the Big Apple, because outside of NYC, no one knows fuckall about pastrami, but corned beef requires malevolence to screw up.

* 9) French Fries or Onion Rings?

Onion rings. They're the only Sysco institutional restaurant product that I would pay for.

* 10) Espresso, Regular Coffee or Latte?

Latte, I taste bitter more than most. (vanilla latte, mind you)

* 11) Crispy or Pliant Bacon?

Pliant, crispy edges.

* 12) White or Dark Meat (on either chicken or turkey)?"

Dark meat. More flavor, more room to fuck up when you cook it, can marinate in some intense brews for a long time, resulting in through-and-through flavorliciousness.

I would add a 13th question: What does wasabi taste like?

If you've had real, I think that should count for something.

Oh, and Robyn blogrolled me. YAY! I'm only a bus ticket and a very awkward hello away from cooking a mad bubbling pot of green curry goodness for this woman.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Blatherings

Seriously filling pasta.

marinate chicken thighs in cran-grape juice, ginger, Pink Lady apple peel, and oyster sauce.

cook them in their juices until the pan fills with chicken scum. drain. brown on both sides. add soy and oyster sauce, cook till saucy, then cut the chicken up and cook more.

to a box of boiled spaghetti, add a can of Hunt's spaghetti sauce, three cloves of crushed garlic, and the chicken. cook to combine. when the noodles are saucy, add a dash of your favorite asian garlic chili sauce and toss to combine. serve immediately.

the meat tends to fall to the bottom.

this would be good with sausage too, but then again, i put chicken thighs and kielbasa in everything...because they give me more wiggle room. kielbasa already has good flavors- just get it brown. Chicken thighs are moist and juicy if you brine then sear them. They're more forgiving than breasts, even saggy ones.

also, try this.

1. spread salt on your cutting board. be generous.
2. cut up garlic over the salt.
3. keep cutting, making sure to incorporate the salt. mangle that clove until you get a paste, which can be added straight to what you're making.

5. or be lazy and just buy crushed garlic.

6. but then you'll suck. fresh garlic and a press 0wn5 anything jarred, though I admit to using crushed bottled ginger - shoppers was out of fresh root when I stocked up. (They usually have it - this is a place where you can get Pink Lady apples, lemongrass, chive blossoms, and great huge Mexican avocadoes. Yes, it's gonna be avocado milkshake time!

avocado milkshake
1 large avocado
1 scoop good sorbet (Edy's Whole Fruit is my aeroplane)
plain soy milk.


blend. this is almost certainly going to be way too thick.

This is great when you end up with large, relatively flavorless avocadoes.

Thursday, August 03, 2006

More on the wonderful Pink Lady

The arrival of your care package coincided with me getting a ride to the store. I picked up five apples, two grapefruit, and two hillshire farms sausages. one of those went on the grill last night. (dropped my pronoun, whoops - one of the sausages went on the grill)

on a related note, if you've never had a Pink Lady apple...well, you don't wanna eat your first one in public. They're that good. It's like SweetTarts, a fizzing pear, and Rainier cherries crashed into each other at high speed and somehow formed a new variety of apple. There's a Pink Lady sticker on my door, lower right corner of the Neato Burrito sticker - they're THAT good.

(If you've never been to Neato Burrito, get a buffalo chili burrito and tell Chipotle to fuck off permanently.)

Yes, fizzing. I've never eaten an apple that I could describe as "fizzy," at least not a ripe one.

These apples are so good, they make me want to cook with them. I had to restrain myself from turning my whole load into cobbler last night. They're so good, I don't know what to pair them with - they'd overshadow it. More amazing is that one of its parents is a Golden Delicious (that, and a Lady Williams, wonder which one was the man in THAT relationship, lol) which is something like 3/4 pear and 1/4 something that tastes kinda like apple if you really want it to.

Describing these things is hard without sounding pretentious. Or fucking bizarre, seeing as I've now gushed for onetwothreefourfiveandcounting paragraphs about a single fruit. Once you eat one, you'll understand. My biggest challenge is not eating all the rest of them right now - i know it'd overload my palette and i couldn't appreciate the complexity.

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

On grilled sausage

If I'm eating grilled sausage, I'm almost always happy. Unless I'm crying into the sausage at the time.

If that sausage is encased in crusty bread - 98% of the time, it's all good.

If there's good mustard and the skin pops just right, well, I may just blow a load in my pants right there.

Tonight - chicken italian herb sausage in a baguette with some random yogurt sauce the dude downstairs made. Yum. Also grilled up some Hillshire Farms hot sausage, which is okay, but screams for rough brown mustard, ideally with whole seeds.

I'm in love

with a Pink Lady.

Seriously. It's an apple that tastes like the best Fuji ever crossed with an exceedingly dry pear...and SweetTarts. (Cook's Thesaurus says it's a Golden Delicious crossed with a Lady William. all I can say to that is that I need to eat some fucking Lady Williams, cause I've never had a Golden Delicious that had ANY of these flavors. Pink Ladies taste like the love child from a threesome of Ranier cherries, Asti, and a tart pear, if such a thing exists)

The website says it's a "champagne fizzy taste." Google says "pink lady apple" has about 5,570,000 results.

Cook's Thesaurus says Pink Ladies are good in salads, pies, and for plain ol' eating out of your hand. On the last, I heartily agree. on the others...well, I'm buying five pounds of these on Saturday. I'll keep y'all posted. Cobbler is definitely happening. apple pie may also ensue. We'll see.

Interestingly, the Sundowner is also a cross between a Golden Delicious and a Lady Williams, but it doesn't have that lovely pink blush.

My dream recipe for these babies is a Pink Lady/Ranier cherry/Beaujolais/Everclear cocktail, served in a crazy melon. Yes, I taste the best apple of my life, and I think of how to make Jungle Juice with it.

Such is college, people.

If I ended on that, I'd be doing these apples a disservice. Fucking buy some right fucking now, dammit.

Look for mostly red - the cook's thesaurus pics are spot-on. Mine aren't that ripe.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Stuff I wrote a few days ago and psaced out on

What I'm eatin'

2 boxes Kraft White Cheddar Macaroni and Cheese
a little one percent milk
a pound of chickechicken -italian herb sausage

chef tricks - i sirred the milk into the powdered cheese

anwyay. made a slurry with the powder and the milk before stirring it into the macaroni. it mixed a lot better than usual.

it's tasty. good combo. doesn't need extra cheese. I used a whole stick of butter, which is the secret. yum butter. soften the butter first - thatnkfully it's fucking hot in herre so i just left it out on the counter while i cooked.

oh, and skin the sausage. cut it in half, almost, leave the last bit of skin intack and pull the halves apart. it makes decasing much easier. break it up with your hands before panning and cook with tongs, breaing up and stirring every so foten - remember, browning = flavor.
NoChurchOrState: also, you can cover your cutch overn with your cast iron skillet and use that to preheat the pan.
Bohemian1899: thanks for the info
Bohemian1899: I haven't eaten all day
NoChurchOrState: oh, and don't overcook the noodls. I lways fuckingovercook the noodles.

i think i may be close to cloning Jones Soda FuFu Berry. the label describes its recipe as "strawberry, watermelon, and ?" and the ? tastes much like tamarind. at the very least, it's getting added to my next Jungle Juice.

which reminds me.

Three-Can Jungle Juice
1 can pineapple chunks in juice
1 can Canada Dry ginger ale (any probably would work, but this is what I made it with)
1 can Welch's grape soda (see above)

mix together. Drink in a large plastic cup seriously fucking on the rocks.


wanna do like a pan bread, which you then flip, and build a sandwich on top of, topped by dough, which would need to be flipped again to cook. hmm. if the dough's thin, it could work
NoChurchOrState: put dough into the skillet
NoChurchOrState: cook it on one side. flip it to the other side.
NoChurchOrState: put meat, cheese, and veggies on the side that's now on top. put a layer of dough on top of that.
NoChurchOrState: then, when the bottom part is done, flip the thing to cook the dough on top. start slow, then ramp up to brown it.

pb and j doughnut bread pudding
NoChurchOrState: oooh
NoChurchOrState: 3 jelly donuts
NoChurchOrState: 3 eggs
NoChurchOrState: 1 cup sugar
NoChurchOrState: 1 cup chunky peanut butter
NoChurchOrState: um. milk
NoChurchOrState: i'm ballparking this
NoChurchOrState: lol
GoodFriendWhoShouldJustFuckMeAlready: didnt know you like bread pudding
NoChurchOrState: i ADORE bread pudding
NoChurchOrState: vanilla extract

15 parts cooked rice
2 parts ham
2 parts pork
15 parts mozzarella
2 parts pecorino romano.

mix. make into balls. fry. Thanks, Road Tasted.

Do you watch Hell's Kitchen?

If you don't, and you want to see what it's like to work the line in a restaurant - a real one, not the piece of shit attempt at such that I worked at - watch it.

Then realize this kind of shit happens in every kitchen. Yeeeaaahhh.