Burning Myself Frequently

Amazing lemonade

2010-05-08T15:21:00.000-07:00

So I made lemonade the other day thanks to allrecipes. Equal parts lemon juice, water, and sugar. Yum. Add the zest of one of those lemons.

Then I made another batch. A woman who won't be alive much longer really enjoyed that one. That brought me great joy.

Then I made another one. Just for me. Equal parts lemon juice and mint/purple basil turbinado simple syrup, over a glassful of ice. Love.

The only place with mint worth a fuck in this area is Broad Street Market. If you really want to get some, call the day before. They'll cut some special.

I love you butcher/love you Broad Street

2010-01-18T21:26:00.000-08:00

All the meat in my latest recipe was purchased from Lebanon Valley Meat Products at Broad Street Market, Harrisburg PA. If you're in the area and around on market days, you can call in orders to 717-236-2518.

They have something I'd never seen before - beef bacon. It's smoked thin-sliced beef with a ribbon of fat down the middle. Cooks up just like bacon, and is distinctly bacony, but in a beefy way. (Description of the year and it's only mid-January)

Always know your butcher - when she saw I was interested in the beef bacon and asking other customers about it, the woman helping me not was not only very helpful but showed me a strip up close - then wrapped and gave it to me to taste. You cook it like regular bacon.

The other butcher at Broad Street has some too. An African-American man at LVMP's counter told me he goes for the beef bacon because he chooses not to eat pork. I'm thinking a religous adaptation might figure into its popularity.

Here's how to make it!

I deboned my loverly dish and spooned up a bowl. It's really fucking good. I didn't spice the main mix at all, so it's just individual flavors bringing their gusto. The multireduction was a great idea that I will continue to refine and make even more ridiculous.

Next time, larger oxtails, cause I love the chewy meat on them. And a beef shank.

I won't be buying lunch at work for a while.

Shoutouts are in order for the whtie onions to Brandt Farms and for the garlic, shallots, and red onions to Shady Nook. Shady Nook first knew me as "mojito guy" then as "beef stew guy" and now they're getting used to "guy with very, very specific needs cause he's on blood thinners but refuses to stop cooking."

Other details that escaped me initially - I used Kitchen Essentials veg and chicken stocks (because I know their flavor profiles) and Emeril's beef stock. Yes, I know. He's the antithesis to all things that are good and culinary. So fucking what? His stock reduces wonderfully.

The onions for this dish are added last and left on top for as long as possible, with mild stirring every half hour so they don't burn. This is because I filled my pot full tot he brim and had to cook down the onions before adding the beans.

This amount of ingredients in this recipe is enoguh to fill a seven-quart pot to the brim. it'll get lower once you pull the bones out. Make sure to separate the nastiness and bone of the short ribs from their luscious flesh.

A good dose of salt is essential in the flour mix. more updates as events warrant.

What does the end result taste like? Like oxtail soup met beef stew at the bar, then took it home to meet chili, who ended up calling french onion soup to really get into it.

Tried to make chili, this ain't chili but it worked out well regardless

2010-01-17T21:05:00.000-08:00

Chili.

Here’s what I usually use. Here’s what I need to do better.

Meat. Previously chopped chuck. Today, boned short ribs (the real fucking thing, and they better be this time or I’m gonna murder someone with that giant knife I’ve been using lately), actual chopped chuck (seamboned, natch) and a beef shank at the bottom. A gigantic one. I fucking love those lately.

Beans. Previously canned richfood brand. This time…hmm. Not chickpeas, cause I’m on blood thinners at the moment.

Sausage – before, hillshire farms kielbasa. Now, leidy brothers kielbasa. (ended up being Karns pork sausage, which worked fine. Two links, about 26 inches)

Allium family – no green onions. Again, blood thinners. White onions as before, and a biiig fat Vidalia ifi can find one. Interesting that word autocapitalizes Vidalia. Also, farmer’s market garlic, and for the first time ever in one of my chilis, shallots. Possibly. (Turned out to be two sweet white onions and two heavy onniony onions and three small reds, as well as twelve shallots and two heads of garlic, peeled and sauteed before going into the pot whole)

Tomato – previously, canned paste. This time, tomato gel? Ro-Tel, always.(actually, none..fuck tomato.)

Base – this is where shit’s gonna get absolutely fucking ridiculous. I’m going for absurdity. Three quarts, one each of beef, chicken and pork stock, each reduced to half of its previous volume. Then added over a hot pan that contains the sautéed aliums and a cup each of carrots and celery. Word to the mirepoix. The French know so much about food. (I skipped the mirepoix)

Spices – I wanna go mole. Thinking dark chocolate in addition to chili, cumin, salt, black pepper, garlic powder, and a bit of bacon salt.(I have no idea how i spiced it)

Meat gets its own spice rub. Salt, pepper, bacon salt, and flour. Gotta get it all browned off perfectly.

I will be rocking all four burners at once. Three will be reducing my stocks on low, which will be spiked with the sautéed veggies. Numero Quattro will be my gigantor “The giant blue thing is coming to feed you!” cast-iron Martha Stewart pot. Everyone I know has a red one, but I love the deep blue.

Although this could make me change my mind. Sex, in pot form. (first google hit for query “bud shots”)

Workflow goes like this – peel and prep EVERYTHING. Including the kielbasa – leidy’s casing sucks. Start the stocks on ¼ temp. (the goal is a low simmer, anything more is overkill with the amount of time you’ll have.

Splash the cast iron (it doesn’t have to be cast iron – anything nonstickish with a lid that’s big enough for the whole shebang will be fine) with some oil. Once it’s hot, bloom spices until you can smell them, then add the meat. Sear on all sides, then remove. Repeat with all the protein. If you get too much of a crust on the bottom, just hit it with red wine and some silicone persuasion – the results go nicely into any of the other three pots you should have on the stove right now. Reduce the stocks an additional quarter after mixing them together.

Ideally, you’ll make it through this process with lovely brownness on the bottom of the pan. Quickly add more oil, bloom more spices, and clean the pan with the onions, garlic, celery, shallots and carrots.

I haven’t addressed beans at all. Hmm. Fresh would need soaking. Maybe canned is the answer? I hate kidney bean sludge tho. But I love kidney beans in chili. It’s not really chili without them. Maybe a different brand of can. Or….they’re already cooked….maybe I don’t have to tweak out every single aspect of this recipe. So kidneys and white northerns, in pretty much the same ratio as before, is the answer. I can live with that.

What to serve it with? I recommend cornbread or a half/half mixture of Israeli couscous and quinoa. Steamed white rice is never a bad move. On top of roasted mashed fingerlings would be lovely as well.

After cooking, I reread the recipe and see I forgot the shank, bought oxtails isntead, forgot the mirepoix, did the stock reduction to perfection and it was worth every second of bs. Only had two burners to reduce on, so i did it in two pots. Also, it's important to use one can light, one can dark, one can white northern beans, all the same size. still delicious.

finally nailed macaroni and cheese

2010-01-09T17:28:00.000-08:00

two pounds pasta, your choice, i used maffado, i think.
two pounds kraft natural cheese.
half a pound shredded sharp cheddar
butter
flour
bread crumbs, your choice, i used buttered panko
A small glass less than a half gallon of skim milk.

put water on to boil. salt it, please.

milk into its own pot. stir occasionally on medium heat. when tiny bubbles appear, begin cooking equal parts butter and flour mashed together first. let it get to caramel, and then add it to the milk. silicone-coated tongs are great for scraping the roux into your milk.

whisk like a motherfucker.

once the thickening begins and the sauce comes back to heat, start adding the cheese, a handful at a time, whisking until you don't feel the lumps of cheese anymore, then you add more cheese.

to add the cheese wtihout burning yourself (which i did three times before figuring this out) drop it from as low as possible onto the whisk. or be a wuss and use a silpat, you lamer.

burning myself frequently is the name of this blog for a reason.

anyway, once the sauce is all cheesified, taste it, do the napé test (dip a spoon in the sauce, look at the back, then draw a line through the sauce with your finger. if the line stays clear, it's thick enough)

By now your pasta should be done. Cook it al dente, and salt and pepper it aggressively. Place into the eventual cooking vessel. I used my bitch-ass Martha Stewart cast-iron enamel. Blue, like the one Rick Bayless used on his show this morning.

Once the sauce is both thick and tasting the way you want it to, scratter the shredded cheese in the pasta by hand, then add the sauce. quick stir to combine, then top with buttered breadcrumbs and into a 350 oven for minutes.

It needed 15 more minutes. But it was yummy. Photos on my cell, you know the odds of those actually getting uploaded.

(slim to none)

Tonight's stew

2009-10-10T14:12:00.000-07:00

amazingly, before I make it.

Check a pork neckbone in a baking pan. In another baking pan, bacon salt baby carrots and a chicken sausage.In another, baby fingerlings that have been olive oiled, salted and peppered. Put in an oven at 350. Cook until done.

Saute one chopped white onion, one small container chopped mushrooms, one small container prechopped celery. (lame, i know, but you can't buy one stalk of celery anymore). When half done, add some beef stock, and cook down further. Reserve.

Sear off two beef shins and add them to the final pot. cover with half subtle cider (not a sweetbomb) and half beef stock. A little red wine is always welcome. Sear off thee pounds of pot roast and add it, then add more liquid to barely cover.

When the pork neckbone is done, that goes in to. The chicken sausage doesn't go in at all - I get hungry when I cook.

Braise the meat until awesome, then remove the sauce (and neckbones), reduce by two thirds, and return to all the ingredients.

Eat.

this is life. what a fucked up thing we do. like drinking mojitos days before october. y'all know how i roll.

2009-09-29T21:09:00.000-07:00

omg greatest mojito ever.

i made the syrup from demerara sugar and water, 1-1, and put in a shit-ton of mint. let it steep for an hour, and then muddled it right before bottling. (old trickling springs milk bottle, in case you're wondering - stuff goes fast but it goes bad spectacularly when it does - we'll miss you, delicious/beautiful amazing zest of one orange in equal parts demerara and water syrup whcih made great sweet/sourjitos with a wedge of orange mujddled alongwith and the rum pured over the grater, but i digress)

The mint is from Shady Brook in Broad Street Farmer's Market. They know me as :"beef stew guy." We had the following conversation

Guy who works there: "Okay, we've got your potatoes - both kinds, the peeled garlic, twelve shallots, three big whtie onions - did you need anything else?"
Me, checking down the list but panicking before I hit the bottom, "WHERE'S MY MINT?"
Owner of the stall: "You need mint? I got mint."
Me: "I see two bundles. Can you do two?" I'm nice, if he's saving it, that's fair.
Him: "I can do as much mint as you want. How many do you want?" He had me at "mint."

The stew from that shop, btw, along with two pounds of beef back ribs and two pounds of pot roast, my roasty potatoes, and some caramelized onions, is in the bottom of my mom's fridge. She liked it, I haven't tried it yet. It's lunch, tomorrow, and I 'll get steamed rice from a vendor at Broad Street which is always nice for lunch. Burned the SHIT out of myself making it, so much that I bought tongs at the kitchen supply store. Comically long tongs. Those will be good for a laugh. I could turn burgers without leaving the toilet with those.

Anyway, this mojito is in a Mason jar. It's full. I poured layers of syrup and rum (they eventually disintegrate, but it looks cool, now to do it for real) and then dropped in a bunch of mint (not a whole bunch, but like ten sprigs and a lime nad a half, muddled the shit out of it, flipped the muddler to the proper side, muddled it to much greater effect, and then added most of a small can of Jones Spookiwi seasonal kiwi soda. It's crisp and tart like their Green Apple, which I'd love to use in a mojito if I could fucking find any.

It's good. I stuck a three-cube section of ice cube into it, stirred by pushing that around, and am loving it now. Is strength is responsible, in part, for this loquaciousness.

I.wrote.a.fantastic.recipe.and.then.life.happened

2009-09-12T21:11:00.000-07:00

So, I wanted to cook an incredibly awesome beef stew recipe I wrote recently. That didn’t end up happening. Instead, I cooked this, even as I got a great peer edit on my written original recipe.

12 shallots

Four sweet white onions

A pound of short ribs

Two country style pork ribs (three pounds)

30 pearl onions, peeled

4 carrots

Red wine

Beef broth

3 large turnips

3 pounds chuck, pot roast meat.

Two pounds baby potatoes

One pound of bacon.

One pound sliced white mushrooms

Chop large onions and carrots. Peel shallots and pearl onions. To peel pearl onions, cut an x in the root end, toss in boiling water, then pull after just two minutes. Pop into an ice bath, let cool, and pop out of the skins.
Get the shallots and pearls into a pot of half decent red wine and half beef stock. Put on medium, leave alone and uncovered.
Chop turnips. Braise bacon a’la Julia Child’s boeuf bourginon. Dry on paper towel. Put to the side.
In another pan, cook the sweet onions in butter until they turn light brown. Stir frequently. Add to later bowl when finished. Same with the mushrooms, except they go in the allium braisefest when cooked.
Once bacon is dry, saute it in a little olive oil until it gives up its fat and gets tasty. Remove with a slotted spoon, then get the pan really fucking hot. Pat-dry all your protein just before addignt ot he pan. Sear the country style ribs on all four sides until nice and brown. Same for the short ribs – bone side first.
As meat finishes, throw it into the pot you’re cooking all of this in. Don’t add the shallots and pearls until the very end.
Chop the chuck into relatively uniform pieces (it’s stew, relax) then redry with paper towels. Toss with flour and immediately place into absurdly hot pan. If you don’t have enough room in one pan for all of it, get another one hot as fast as possible – floured meat will get soggy fast. It should be dry to the touch.
Turn when browned, brown on other side before adding to pot. Then dump all the onion on top. Then all the root veg. Then realize the root veg won’t fit. So spoon it out and bake it in the oven next to the pan for the first hour and a half it’s in the oven at 350. At that time, pull the veg, taste the sauce, adjust with whatever, and then stir in the roasted veg. Braised and roasted – cold weather is certainly upon us.
The stew should be finished with mostly beef stock and enough red wine to cover everything, as well as a bunch of thyme and three cloves of garlic, smashed. I dumped in half a bottle of malbec instead of what I was looking for, the cabernet sauvignon I used for the boeuf last week, but it tastes better at half an hour left than the sauvignon did two days old.
This is a dish, as mentioned just words ago, that keeps VERY well. Unless you’ve got a better tongue than mine, wait til at least an hour and a half in to adjust the sauce.
So what happened to my previous recipe? The butcher shop sold all their neckbones, but their country style pork ribs (which have bone, one of my requirements) were beautifully marbled. I couldn’t find fucking parsnips anywhere. ANYWHERE. Sorry, Lisa.
The guy at the Broad Street produce shop (third building or first building, depending whether you park on the end closer to the Army surplus store or the elementary school) was out of parsnips and mint (cry, their mint is a dollar and amazing) but charged me just under fourteen bucks for all the produce in this recipe. For comparison, the shallots alone at Karns would have cost fifteen. Although I would’ve liked my itemized receipt. Regardless, amazing quality and absurd prices. Go when they’re getting rid of everything, around 3.
Finally, the short ribs? I’ve wanted to work them into something for a while, since I freaking love braised anything, and I talked to one of the Karns butchers (great meat, great seafood, absolute shit for produce, and horribly expensive mediocre-quality mint) about using beef bones in the recipe. We discussed the various merits of baby back ribs (may try that later) and then settled on the short ribs. Two came out to a pound, which was 2.50. Sold. I spent more on novelty potato chips.
So where’s the awesome recipe I teased at the beginning? It’s not here yet. It needs enough reworking that it needs retyping, and I’m just barely awake enough to type this as a single-shot stream-of-consciousness transcribed babble.

it's meatloaf day

2009-08-08T11:59:00.001-07:00

what i learned about meatloaf today

raw onion, garlic and shallot
ground veal, ground lamb, ground turkey thigh - third pound each
fine-chopped carrot
one egg
handful of panko
ten strips cooked bacon, cooled and chopped into lardons.
trader joe's soyiyaki
old bay
fresh black pepper
kosher salt

cover with bacon. it's done when the meat is cooked to your liking. which for me is completely. hence the bacon, so it stays moist.

what i don't like in meatloaf

thyme
raw bacon
ketchup

the perfect mojito

2009-06-14T09:22:00.000-07:00

You're going to need silver rum. I used Bacardi. You'll also have to make some syrup.

two cups sugar. Eighty percent white sugar, twenty percent light brown. trust me.
two cups water.

put in a pan. bring almost to a boil, stir to combine, then add

zest of three limes
ounce and a half of ~~lime~~ mint, mashed, twisted and chopped.(yes, I was hungover enough to forget the mint in a fucking mojito recipe)
five inches of cucumber, quartered and chopped (not smaller - these will turn into your garnish)
any other leafy green aromatics you like. I've heard cannabis trim works.

Let the syrup steep for half an hour, then strain. You're now ready to make mojitos.

There are two different kinds. One's the best version of a bar mojito you've ever had. The other is a more mature, sipping mojito. The third (i'm hung over) is a dragonfruitjito. It's more about the technique.

recipe one, in order

tall, narrow glass
three ice cubes
one shot syrup
one shot rum
Splash of Sprite.
wedge of syrup-candied cucumber

If you like fizz, shake before the Sprite, then stir lightly after. If you don't, shake after the Sprite. This is a candyjito - sweet, fruity, and easy-sippin'.

recipe two, in order

tall narrow glass
four cubes
one shot syrup
one shot rum
one shot syrup
one shot rum
generous squeeze of lime

Shake. Sip. Don't drink like th first one. This is stronger. It'll mellow and change as the ice melts.

Recipe three, in order

three cubes
one shot syrup
one shot rum
one shot syrup
one shot rum
squeeze of lime.
stir.
slow pour of dragonfruit vitamin water on the very top . this, done properly, creates a layer that'll survive walking around and sipping.
Garnish. by the time I drank this version, i was putting on two big chunks of candied cuke. nothing like a fun bite wtih your drink.

what's the nest step? watermelon juice instead of vitamin water. and seeing how many distinct layers i can pull off.

It makes enough syrup to make five candyjitos and at least five adult mojitos. 20 ounces of Sprite is barely enough for five sweeter versions. that many drinks equals most of a 750 mL bottle of Bacardi.

Substitutions? Sure. Poland Spring lime sparkling water instead of Sprite. Rim the glasses in syrup and then in crushed nerds or sweettarts. I haven't tried it with dark or spiced rum, but there are enough crazy flavors going on here. If you wanna be crazy, drink through hollowed sugarcane out of a pineapple shoved up your own ass, you fancy, fancy bastard.

Making beef stew again

2009-01-30T22:50:00.001-08:00

a little secret i picked up with the beef stew - the ends of your onions and carrots and such should go in a side pot to simmer in chicken stock, wine, or whatever liquids you're using in your stew. add one at a time to reduce down before adding a different one. multiple reductions equal layers of flavor.

When it gets all the way down, hit with butter, then flour. strain into the main pot. If too thick, pour something through it. I kept adding little slices of orange zest as it reached full thickness. Also, the juice of half an orange.

This time I'm using up my freezer stockof Trader Joe's sausage in the stew along with my usual meat, fingerling sweet potatoes and Washington baby white potatoes, along with a load of carrots and a pound of sweet peppers.

Yum. Should be good. Using cheap burgundy and PA apple cider. Saved the chicken stock for the side reduction pot in the beginning, because if you simmer veg ends in stock and stop there, it's still good. But I was an overachiever tonight.

Last, I added bucatini. Add it vertically if you try this. Laying it on top, even in a pot as large as mine, does not work. Also, add water - enough so you can stir it all with a large spoon. Once it reduces by half, I'm hitting the sack.

Wake Up a Kitten Stew

2008-12-05T13:53:00.000-08:00

mix a pound of stew meat with flour, salt, pepper, and other seasonings. set aside to come to room temp

chop a large white onion and a large yellow onion. put in a large pot with hot oil to cook down. season the oil with garlic powder before adding the onions. let them cook down a bit until you finish chopping hte sweet peppers and carrots, which should go in together.

chop sweet peppers. Add.I used six ounces, .

chop carrots. add.

chop red potatoes into quarters. add.

add amber ale and apple cider. Stir and cover. (For cooking's sake, use a microbrew and a cider that you like the taste of. I don't enjoy Fat Tire, but I only tasted it from the bottle and I knew it'd be good with browned beef in a stew - I'm not the first to do it. My cider is amazing local Iowa cider, which is like getting your throat massaged by a Pink Lady. (it's an appple, look it up.)

Brown the beef and two good pork chops, chopped and floured like the meat, in a separate skillet, then add to the main pot. then add apple cider or beer to the saute pan and scrape off the brown stuff, cook it down a bit then add to the stew. Stir. If the liquid looks like it's getting low, taste it then add beer or cider or water. Fuck water, but that's just me.

there are a couple secrets to great beef stew - time, great beer, basic ingredients, and long slow cooking.

Most people use beef stock in beef stew. Fine by me, but this recipe used a 22 oz bottle of Fat Tire Amber Ale and a few generous pours and a pan-cleaning quick reduction of the meat saute-pan of gorgeous amazing local Iowa apple cider. The meat, always floured and seasoned befrore all being browned, benefits from slow-cooking. Two hours after I set this on low and let it bubble gently, the beef has gone from five chews to three. THe pork is tender, juicy and tastes throughout the chewing process.

Potatoes should be roughly equal size, of width that you'd hold your thumb and forefinger apart to indicate somone has a very small penis. Larger if you're cooking it longer. Carrots can be any size - I chopped up a bunch of baby carrots with this chopper thing in my friend's house. Only knifework was chopping hte onions in half so they fit in the chopper.

I spiced everythign perioudicially with lawry's seaoned salt and some random cajun seasoning that was on the counter. stuf was salted and peppered. the goal is layers. It worked out well.

If you were to sneak some halved carrots down to the bottom while it's finishing, you'd be rewarded. I see why people cook with Fat Tire. Didn't really enjoy the taste, but man it goes great in gravy.

I used red potatoes.

The onions were cut rather large but more or less disappeared. Pearl onions would be delicuos in this, as would fingerling potatoes.

Also, there's some cheap whiskey added midway through cooking. I'm not sure why. But there's a little extra smokiness at the end I can't place.

Don't sweat burning some of the onions at the very beginning.

Good apple cider is worth it. Pay extra for local if you can. The fruitiness will get more complex and bring all the flavors together.

Damn, how could I forget.. After you get all the ingredients together, crank your burner to high and let it bubbble away madly. when it's super=hot, add enough flower to cover the top and let it cook for a bit, then stir in. Give it five minutes on high and then drop to a low simmer, and give it two hours, stirring occasionally.

I would eat this on brown rice cooked in chicken stock with trader joe's soycutash and garlic salt. my favorite fake fried rice.

Speaking of stock, sure you can use stock in this. I would have, but I forgot to buy it - yay fucking up as the mother of invention.

As for how much cider I used? No farking idea. But it's great with whiskey. Gonna have some now. And a little more stew. g-dspeed.

p.s. Why "Wake Up A Kitten Stew?" I put the dish down next to a sleeping kitten to shoot for this post, and the kitten jumped up instantly and began lapping away.

I love whiskey in watermelon juice

2008-12-04T16:43:00.000-08:00

But whiskey in Iowa apple cider is even better.

Dead-Simple Candied Sweet Potatoes

2008-11-22T11:23:00.000-08:00

Cut sweet potatoes in half lengthwise. You can cook as many as can fit cut side down in your pan. Try to match thickness.

Heat two cups good maple syrup and four tablespoons of butter in your pan. Bring together, then add salt and pepper before putting the potatoes in, cut side down.

Cook on medium heat until the mixture reduces down. Flip the potatoes onto their peel-side, add enough whiskey to cover the potatoes halfway, swirl to combine, and cook down.

Then add enough Senorial bottled sangria to cover the potatoes. Switch to high, flip the spuds one last time, and cook down until you've got a savory syrup with a fruity aftertaste. Potatoes are done when a fork penetrates them more easily than a squirming virgin on prom night.

Alternate version. Same thing, but baking pans. Preheat your oven to 350. Rub the sweet potatoes lightly with evoo and add to the oven, cut-side down. A glass pan won't get yummy browning, but will otherwise work fine.

Bring enough maple syrup to come 1/3rd of the way up the potatoes and butter to heat in a pan, stirring frequently. (Half a stick of butter was enough for 13 halved large sweet potatoes)

Open the oven, avoid the initial whoosh of steam, and add the syrup to the pan. Do not lift the potatoes - the syrup will bubble under on its own.

Set the oven timer for 20 minutes and reduce whiskey in the same pan on the stove. The goal is to cook out enough alcohol that your oven doesn't explode. I used half a bottle of Crown Royal (yeah, yeah, I know) for this one.

Pull the potatoes and put them on your stovetop. Flip them peel-side down (if you peeled them, die in a fire, the peels are the best part) with a fork and add the whiskey. You should have enough to go halfway up the potatoes.

20 minutes later, open the oven door, avoid blinding yourself with steam, and remove the pan. Add enough apple juice (cider would probably be great) to almost cover the potatoes. Return to the oven.

You may need to crack the oven, turn on the hood fan, or open a window. Ridiculous amounts of steam will result after this step. It looked like I'd hotboxed the entire apartment.

The potatoes are done when they're done. Probably another 20 minutes.

What I'm going to eat at Good Stuff Eatery tomorrow

2008-08-22T16:36:00.000-07:00

Spike's Five Napkin
onion rings
black and white shake.

Damn good sandwich

2008-08-02T19:31:00.000-07:00

1/3rd of a kielbasa, split.
a tangy-sweet onion/pepper condiment
an onion roll, split and toasted.

brown the kielbasa on both sides. this breaks up the casing and develops flavor.
put the halves of kielbasa into the onion roll. Hollowing it out might help.
Spoon condiment over the sausage. Eat.

Yeah, I want another one right now.

Down With The Sickness Chicken Soup

2008-08-01T12:06:00.000-07:00

I feel like crap. Body aches, swollen sinuses, congestion, and a sore throat. And my head's swimming so much that typing is challenging.

Time for soup.

1 rotisserie chicken
1 bag eggless egg noodles
2 1/2 quarts chicken stock (i use free range organic, you should too)
4 cups water
vegetables in the fridge that are too gone for salad but still edible (in my case, one green pepper, one red pepper, one cucumber, and one zucchini)
one pound mixed frozen vegetables
one pound frozen broccoli ends.
sriracha
lots of garlic.
garlic salt

put on water for noodles
debone chicken.
put chicken stock on to heat. Add garlic and garlic salt, along with vegetables. Cook on high.
Add shredded chicken.

If I were feeling better I'd make this complicated by reducing two half-boxes of stock by half in separate pots by half, and then adding the other half, and then reducing further. Then addding the chicken. And using tortellini instead of egg noodles.

Time to go back to bed.

Bone-in Ribeye with Trashed Red Potatoes

2008-06-04T11:18:00.000-07:00

1 inch-thick bone-in ribeye steak. Mine was .8 pounds.

a pound of new red potatoes
extra virgin olive oil
kosher salt
fresh cracked black pepper
garlic powder
milk
a quarter-stick of butter.

Pull the steak from the fridge half an hour before cooking. Salt and pepper liberally on both sides. (you CAN overdo this) Rest on paper towels to absorb moisture. Pat dry every so often as it rests.

Cut the potatoes into semi-identical pieces, slather with extra virgin olive oil, kosher salt, fresh cracked black pepper and garlic powder. Put on the bottom shelf of your oven at 350 for half an hour, move them around, then return to the top shelf for another half hour. I used an enamel casserole dish for this, but anything that's deglazable will do. I wouldn't use cheap nonstick, but then again I almost never do anyway.

Rub butter on the bottom of the pan you're using for the steak. Use something heavy. Make sure it's big enough for the steak. (mine wasn't really, sigh) You only want enough to coat. Heat thoroughly at 3/4 power (for me, anyway) until butter shimmers.

Add steak, laying away from you. Once that side has a good sear, flip the steak and add an eighth of a stick of butter. swoosh it around the pan to make sure it distributes evenly, and lift the steak so it can get underneath. This is not enough butter to baste with.

(It is, however, enough butter to set off the smoke alarms in my house. In the time it took me to run outside, put the pan down, and open enough windows to kill the alarms, the steak went from medium to well-done. If you live in a New York apartment, this may not be your dish.)

Pull potatoes from the oven. Deglaze the pan with milk, rubbing with a silicone spatula until all the brown bits are off. Occasionally poke at a potato chunk to break it up, but just keep stirring - the heat will bring everything together. Add butter to taste. I didn't want any more salt or pepper. Mash until as creamy as you want.

When the steak's gorgeous on both sides (may need to flip again to brown the top) serve it on top of the mash. Yum.

So why are the potatoes trashed? Because they're baked and mashed! At least they're not fried. *rimshot*

Stuff I want to try next

2008-05-31T16:43:00.000-07:00

brining the pork shoulder first. ideally in apple cider.
more variations on baby carrots baked with soyiyaki and chicken broth.
cooking steak in butter

Tailgate MexiMac

2008-05-31T13:53:00.001-07:00

1 family size box Kraft Macaroni and Cheese for Americans, or Kraft Dinner if you're not.
1 pound chorizo
milk
2 pounds cheddar cheese
buckwheat flour
onion powder
garlic powder
ancho chile powder

Cut the cheese into small pieces or grate it. Uniformity is unimportant here. I only rough-chop, though grated cheese is needed for one of the last steps.

Boil the noodles in water spiced with the onion salt and garlic powder. drain, and add onion powder and garlic powder. Toss and let rest.

Brown the chorizo on both sides till dark. Remove, scatter a handful of buckwheat flour spiked with ancho chile powder (toasting is tasty!) in the pan, and mix with a silicone spatula before adding milk.

The fattier the milk, the faster this will come together. You can do it with skim milk, but it'll take longer. Whole milk is best. 1 percent will take longer than 2 percent and so on. If it really isn't coming together and it should be by now, add flour or coat the chorizo with flour and add them.

I would not recommend using buckwheat flour with skim milk, but it's feasible. Whole with all-purpose is WAY faster. Don't cook the roux too long - you want it as blonde as possible, and remember like Emeril says, you don't know total thickness potential until it boils. With less fat in the milk, until it boils for a while, the same applies.

Stir constantly. If left unattended, this will froth over and destroy things. Like your hand if you grab the wrong part of the pan to move it to a cold burner. Ow.

(Ironically, while I was finishing this dish, my housemate's cocoa bubbled over just like my sauce did.)

Once it gets thick enough to pass the "draw your finger through the middle of the back of a spoon coated with the sauce, if it stays clear, your sauce is thick enough" test, add the cheese and don't fucking stop stirring. Failure to maintain vigilence now is an error exclusively for the weak-minded.

Once the sauce is tasty, balance its flavors. I added some more of that divine Gettysburg barbecue sauce because I always want vinegar and tomato in my mac and cheese, even if it's not coming from ketchup. Two dollops balanced an aggressive saltiness, which happened because I added the stock cheese packet as well. So if you do that, use some type of tomato and vinegar, be it ketchup or someone's homemade apple cider barbecue sauce. (Must go see Bill again.)

Fresh black pepper would be nice right here, and its flavor won't be wasted especially if you add it right before serving.

Top with breadrumbs and grated cheese, and put under the broiler until pretty. Let cool until non-molten. This isn't as thick as my other macaroni attempts.

Yum.

Pork shoulder part 2!

2008-05-26T12:55:00.000-07:00

the wet rub

tumeric
ground coriander seed
acho chile powder
hungarian hot paprika
hungarian sweet paprika
garlic powder
onion salt
two forkfuls goya orange blossom honey
Torchbearer Sauces #11
grade b amber pure maple syrup
Mist of Gettysburg Apple Grilling Glaze (apples, sugar, cider vinegar, tomato paste, onions, herbs and spices) If you don't live in PA, you're SOL on this one.

annnd one pork shoulder. I used a Smithfield Paula Deen-brand bone-in model. About four pounds, if I had to guess - and I do because I threw the packaging away hours ago.

score the fatty part of the shoulder with a knife. cut through the top part only.
rub all over the bone-in pork shoulder
put in a part of your oven that gets indirect heat at 275 for...well, it's 4 now. we'll say six hours and check it at five.

I would normally add mustard to the glaze, but it had so much flavor my mouth nearly exploded.

After an hour, I wanted to do something else to the pork, so I spread baby carrots along either side of the pork, dropped a little water on the bottom of the pan, and then spread a Nance's sweet-hot mustard/light brown sugar/Mist of Gettysburg/onion salt/minced garlic paste all over everything.

Photo at my non-food blog, The Noodle Incident.

UPDATE: Seven hours later, I pulled the pork from the oven. The carrots were perfectly flavored (I stole the mustard glaze on carrots from my dad's significant other) and the pork fell apart on the way out. Good thing I took shots first.

Then, take the liquid you've got at the bottom of the pan, and toss it on high in a saucepan. Cover until boiling, then add more light brown sugar and a slice of butter. Reduce until one-third of its original size.

Add garlic powder and steak rub at the very end for garlicky heat to offset the sugar. Add pork to the saucepan, break apart in sauce, and bring to heat. Then remove and find your white bread, it's eatin' time.

Ow

2008-04-25T21:03:00.000-07:00

There is nothing like a bowel movement consisting entirely of Cheez Whiz.

That fucking hurt.

As if I needed any more reasons to never enter a cheesesteak-eating contest, ever.

Ow.

Paste-poached pork shoulder.

2008-04-24T11:36:00.001-07:00

So this is something a little bit different. I have been obsessing over Mark Bittman's pernil recipe for months, and finally bought a big hunk of pork and did it like he said.

The result was good, but not great. Reason? I used the picnic ham, not the boston butt.

This time I made the paste like so.

A few heads of garlic
two large white onions (Vidalia would be lovely)
two Pink Lady apples
orange juice
lemon zest
juice of one lemon (watch the seeds! fishing is painful)
whole black peppercorns
kosher salt
a few grinds of black pepper
one habanero, ribbed and seeded (wear gloves.

Chop and otherwise prep everything. Core but don't peel the apples - their peels are the best part. If you have extra peels, this is a perfect use for them. Cook for a couple hours on low until soft. Blend until it's paste. Make sure the blender has enough liquid to process the fruit - precooking makes this much easier. A food processer would let you skip the precook and that's how I'm doing it next time.

Then rinse and pat-dry your pork. Put it and the paste in a zipper-seal bag overnight

Pork shoulder!

2008-03-24T17:57:00.001-07:00

Take a pork shoulder. Rub a paste made out of an onion, ten cloves of garlic, some red wine vinegar, salt, black pepper (ground and peppercorns), cumin and chili powder onto it, poke some holes, and park it in a bag in the fridge overnight

the next day, pop it on a roasting rack, put a little water in the bottom of the pan, and roast at 300, turning once an hour until it's done. mine took five hours.

it's mostly mark bittman's recipe.

Cubano's tasting notes

2008-03-16T18:22:00.000-07:00

different dining areas done in different bright colors - red, yellow and lime green.

got a weird look for ordering in Spanish. Order in English - they're assimilated here, even though all waiter-waiter conversations are en Espanol. pricey. top entree eighteen bucks. empanaditas (hardly diminuitive) in either picadillo beef or chicken are 5.95 for two. I ordered one of each, and got strange looks.

They brought us bread anyway. It was delicious inch-thick hunks of French baguette with a nice toast and subtle garlic on one side. One piece of the bowl survived.

After a decent wait for what was supposed to be an appetizer (probably because it's all we ordered) out came two plates of golden brown empanadas. Fried, dusted for some reason with parsley and covered in little bubbles, burst and not, from the frying.

I hate to make the sloppy joe comparison again but the beef has the nubbly texture and mildly tomatoey sauce, as well as a little onion and a nice vinegar tang. My notes read as follows: "beef red pepper chili vinegar yum." The beef empanadita had more of a thick, crunchy snap to the crust especially on the edges, while the chicken didn't hold its crunch through the trip home until the writing of this article.

fried empanadas for the win!

served on doilies. they didn't know what to make of us for just ordering two of the same appetizer. worth it to Metro it. Nicely refined, but now i want the best possible.

crunchy crust that comes only from making your crust with lard and then frying it hard. why the fuck was there parsley on these?

The chicken empanada, filled with shredded poultry, a little more onion, and a yellow (adobo?) tint, was equally as good. Bits of red pepper highlighted the tangled mess of chicken threads.

3 blocks from Silver Spring Metro.

white paper on white tablecloths.

light wood floors in the dining areas, big rustic red tile in the bar. They sat us near the cachaca. You haven't known temptation till you've sat near the cachaca.

The crust tastes like there's pig fat inside (a good thing) and is still crunch after six hours sitting on the counter. as I finish up the leftovers for this post and these notes.

St. Patrick's Day with a Jewish girl who doesn't eat cabbage

2008-03-15T16:35:00.000-07:00

so we made a fusion potato pancake. a couple parts boxty, a couple parts latke, and a gigantic mess - of the kitchen, that is. the pancakes turned out great.

Most of a five-pound bag of cheap white potatoes
three pounds corned beef
one large red pepper
two medium purple onions
vegetable oil
extra virgin olive oil
two egg yolks. (no white, goddammit)
four cloves crushed garlic
one squeeze deli mustard
matzoh meal, standing in for breadcrumbs.

The night before, toss the unrinsed corned beef in a crock-pot, add the sesoning packet and extra black peppercorns, cover, and leave on high until simmering, then turn to low, and cover with something heavy to weigh the cover down.

Peel and shred the potatoes in a food processor. Salt and pepper immediately after shredding and spread on a paper towel to drain (or use a colandar - no lo tengo). Moisture is death in this recipe.

Process the veg next, chopping everything as small as possible. Salt it a little (kosher salt, btw, as if you'd use anything else) and set on towels or in another colandar. Salt helps draw out water. The problem is that your corned beef is salty too and you need salt at the very end. Salt to your leisure.

De-fat (relax, it's all on the top) and shred the corned beef and then chop it so it's not stringy. Add to a large bowl with the veggies and potatoes, along with the mustard and garlic. Cover, in a colandar/on paper towels, for half an hour. Go take a nap. Cooking is tiring.

After you wake up, pull the pancake mix and fuck with it a little. Make some balls. Stir it around. Have extra liquid? Add matzoh meal. You'll feel when it comes together.

Get enough oil into the skillet to cover the pancakes most of the way. You're not going for thin and crispy here. Make patties, squeeze out as much liquid as you can over the sink so it doesn't glom up the rest of your mix, and fry. For easy adding to the pan, use a metal spatula with a little oil on it. Slap the patty onto the spatula, and slide it into the oil with something that burns much less than your hand , for which you will be grateful when the oil spits on you. It will. Believe it.

Have paper towels or a drying rack ready. About eight minutes on each side, but keep them going until they're deep golden brown on both sides. You want a molten exterior, and that's harder the thicker they are.

Serve with car bombs. Boom.

My Pennsylvania eats list

2008-03-13T09:01:00.001-07:00

1 Neato Burrito, likely buffalo with chili.

Chinese food at Ho Wah, who somehow manages to do takeout Chinese just a step above every other takeout Chinese place on earth.

Nosh at the farmer's market in Lemoyne. The amazing sandwich place is so long gone I can't even remember the name, but I still remember the sandwiches - hooray the Nuclear Waste, six kinds of cheese stuffed into a styrofoam go cup and topped with turkey, nuked, then slapped onto a bun with lettuce, tomato, onion and a squirt of ranch. It was brutal. It was heaven. There's still really good sausage there and crazy Amish specialties. You haven't lived until you've seen bacon-wrapped chicken livers in a hotel pan.

a bubba's takoeut sub, white bread, mayo, tomato, provolone, turkey. with onion rings. cause no one does it better.

Farking amazing.

2008-03-01T19:26:00.000-08:00

The best meals I eat aren't in restaurants, but private homes. Today was one of those days.

I'm nibbling on a Puerto Rican empanada which in most other cuisines is a pocket pie, but in Puerto Rico is the best fucking chicken-fried steak ever. got a rough recipe too.

marinate pounded cube steak in garlic, adobo, and a little cilantro. (Safeway has good cube steaks, my source confided) Bread with...she didn't tell me, but it tastes like bread crumbs, via the method where you put egg on the meat first, and fry in corn oil. an electric skillet is your friend here. you want dark brown.

yum. just fucking yum.

...many thanks to the daughter who breaded and pounded and the mother who fried. double thanks for the leftover unfried one, roughly the size of my calf. it'll feed me three or four times. sometimes life really is awesome.

Shepherd's Pie!

2008-01-22T11:45:00.001-08:00

Heat some extra virgin olive oil in a skillet. Fry ground beef in it with pepper. Drain, set aside. add thai chili sauce to ground beef. mix throughout. don't add too much.

Drop a hunk of butter into the skillet. Let it brown. Add finely chopped sweet peppers, tomatoes and half-moon carrots. Let it brown, then add a handful of flour. Cook the flour, and add red wine.

Cook the red wine down to a third of its previous state. Add a fruity wheat beer, like Leinenkugels Sunset Wheat, and reduce to original height. Then add the ground beef, and stir to combine. Then add one Guiness, stirring continuously throughout. Once it's reduced again, add more flour and stir throughly until at proper thickness. You want it mega-thick.

if you haven't already put a pot of water on for potatoes, do so now. boil them. then run them through a food mill, along with a chunk of butter and a good amount of milk that have been microwaved in the same glass.

beat potatoes until creamy. add salt. Put in piping bag. Pipe potatoes over meat mix, that's been placed in a pan, and fluff with a fork before popping into a 350 degree oven until the top's brown.

Meatloaf!

2008-01-14T18:46:00.000-08:00

one small white onion, peeled, chopped fine
one medium red pepper, deveined, deseeded, chopped fine
four small sweet yellow and orange peppers, deseeded, deveined, chopped fine.

enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the pan. I used organic extra virgin.

cinnamon
kosher salt
fresh cracked black pepper
garlic powder
cumin

breadcrumbs

i used 88% ground beef - it came in a six-pound block from Costco and I used...fuck, maybe a pound and a half..

heat the olive oil in a pan. once it's warm, add the dry seasonings and let them flavor the oil. then add the finely chopped veggies and saute them down.

meanwhile, dose the ground beef in garlic and teriyaki (i used Trader Ming's Soyaki) and work it in with your hands, which will need washing immediately afterwards.

once veggies are done, toss two handfuls of breadcrumbs into the pan and stir until the oil disappears. add this to the meat, stirring first with a spatula, then your hands.

spread the mix into a 9x9 pan, and top with leftover pineapple hand glaze after stabbing holes in it with the pointy bit of the spatula.

if you don't have the most awesome glaze in existence, top with more teriyaki mixed 50-50 with ketchup. Top that with bacon.

bake at 350 for an hour. use a meat thermometer to make sure it reaches 160 in the middle. leave out to cool, then chill for storage. Eat within a week.

I want to eat this as a sandwich with mozzarella on fresh laffa, but my current location is much, much too far from Pita Plus and Liora's awe-inspiring Israeli flatbread.

Yummy ham glaze

2007-12-25T18:01:00.001-08:00

Thank you, Smithfield brown sugar hams.

their glaze packet
one can of crushed pineapple in its own juice
a splash orange juice
two dabs peach preserves
one dab apricot preserves
one shot good triple sec (i used patron)
a squeeze of brown deli mustard.

bring to heat. chill thoroughly. then either serve cold over hot ham (my way) or warm for service. Yum.

My new favorite drink (for winter)

2007-11-16T22:41:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I'm missing fresh watermelon being available. Sigh.

Here's what I'm sipping right now.

half oregon chai apple cider chai, half cookies and coffee Milwaukee frozen custard, stirred in a vintage McDonald's Garfield glass. Served with a spoonful of the custard on top. YUUUM!!!

Oh yeah. One shot good triple sec (Patron, perhaps) and one shot amaretto on top, then stir gently and sip. tasty drunky.

Crazy Fries Revealed! (PHOTO)

2007-08-24T18:00:00.000-07:00

I finally got to try crazy fries. They were indeed crazy. Ingredients - blue cheese, hot sauce, nacho cheese, and ketchup.

I thought crazy fries were fries with EVERYTHING nonmeat they had, but whatev.

Unfortunately, the fries melted two holes in the box.

Today's cooking was awesome

2007-08-13T20:25:00.000-07:00

If you don't know why chili dogs are awesome, you're beyond any help I can offer. These are made with toasted whole-wheat buns, my homemade chili, superbeefy franks, Nance's sweet-hot mustard and dashes of cilantro-infused everclear.

The result? Drunk food that gets you hammered. I'm either brilliant or retarded.

New York strip steak. I marinated it overnight in Cholula chili garlic, and it was delicious. This is the only good picture.

My new favorite drink

2007-08-06T21:47:00.000-07:00

20 oz. fresh watermelon juice
one shot of Gentleman Jack

yum. Now that's a sippin' drink.

My ideal cheesesteak

2007-08-01T19:01:00.000-07:00

thin-sliced ribeye in slices, not shreds, lots of caramelized onions, provolone and whiz.

you'd order it as "provo and whiz steak, extra wit"

Falcon Ridge Chili

2007-07-22T20:28:00.000-07:00

Feeding a fuckton of people? Make this!

(between paragraphs, cook for an hour, partially covered, stirring every ten minutes.)

Cover the bottom of a gigantic pot with extra virgin olive oil. Saute four large Vidalia onions, chopped, with one head of elephant garlic, minced and two heads of regular garlic, pressed.

Cook on low until translucent. turn up on high and cover to brown. push that to one side and add three chopped kielbasa - one turkey, one lite, and one polska (all Hillshire farms or whatever's better - each is one pound) to the other side. Let it brown. Then, chop 3 tomatoes into small pieces, drain, and add. Stir. Add cumin (easy does it - I can't tell you how much - add some, stir, taste, repeat) then stir once more.

Cut three pounds of cubed chuck into smaller pieces. Toss in a 50/50 mix of fine cornmeal and flour. Add to pot. Be vigilant about stirring at this stage - it may be easier to remove everything from the pot before browning the meat. Some would brown it first, but I'm trying to more or less describe how I actually made it.

Add one large can dark red kidney beans and one large can light red kidney beans. If you like beany chili, feel free to MAKE IT YOUR OWN DAMN SELF OR AT LEAST NOT BITCH WHILE YOU EAT MINE. (Very little I write makes me laugh, but I titter maniacally whenever I edit this part)

Pour in a carton of organic chicken stock and a carton of water.

Brown one pound of 80/20 ground beef in a lot of chili powder. Drain, add. brown another pound of 93/7 ground beef in paprika and cinnamon. Drain, add.

Add one can Ro-Tel Mexican tomatoes and jalepenos and one large can of diced tomatoes, along with one large red and two medium yellow peppers, grilled, skinned and chopped roughly. They'll break up.

Empty a bottle of Cholula Chili Garlic (with the brown top. I originally did this with the original, which is fine, but I'm a garlic fiend) across the top of the chili. Turn the heat up. Let it bubble around for a bit until you see the sauce start to meld on its own, then turn the heat back to normal and stir.

Add two cans vegetarian baked beans and a whole bunch of crunchy sprouts - i like garbonzo, pea, and lentil - nothing stringy. I used a pre-pack mix with pea, cow pea, red lentils and chickpeas, a total of 36 ounces.

Turn up a little too high and cover, then rescue before it burns too much on the bottom, then scrape it off. If you've made enough and haven't burned too badly, this'll make the whole pot smoky and awesome. If not, then you blew a lot of money on tons of ingredients and burned them. Good job.

Simmer until thick. Let cool in fridge until fully chilled, then ladle into huge Ziploc bags. Stack and freeze these.

now the fun part - what I did wrong!

If I was on the ball, I'd have browned ALL the meat off first - that way, the excess flour and cornmeal (which you'll get if you try to coat too much of it at once) caused burning issues but only mild stickage. That would also have let me drain grease from the kielbasa, but my chili benefits from the leaching of the flavors - and everythign else in the chili is dense and meaty - the kielbasa becomes soft, much like in the traditional Polish cabbage and 'basa, and gives its flavor to the chili.

I may have gone overboard in the direction of dense and meaty with this chili, but here's my tip for taking care of that - legit, not-from-concentrate no-artificial-anything orange juice. In a pinch, you can use orange soda, which actually works better. Tomorrow I'll simmer, taste, and perhaps hit it wiht a shot of low-acid orange juice concentrate if the flavor portrait is too dark. (I know I just said not from concentrate but guess what? I can't afford that, and this is the same stuff but more potent so I can use less of it)

Last time I cooked with olive oil I used plain 'ol olive oil. Never again. Store brand extra virgin is miles, MILES beyond it and the difference was evident the second my pot started getting hot. Rachael Ray may be evil for many, many reasons, but she's right on always using extra virgin. (I refuse to call it what she does)

I like chili on rice, with enough rice that it's more of a chili-rice amalgam - even though the gravy on this one is fucking delicious, I'd rather have it infusing grains. It'd be lovely on couscous, or mashed potatoes. Stuff arancini with it for all I care. (hmmm.....)

Summer salad

2007-07-02T07:34:00.000-07:00

one head romaine lettuce
two Anjou pears
one ripe peach
two avocadoes
three medium Roma tomatoes

After washing the lettuce, lay it parallel with the edge of your cutting board and cut perpendicular, making half-inch wide ribbons. Stop when it starts getting light green. Chop everything else and squeeze together by hand. it shoudl create a light avocado dressing. i accented with garlic powder and season-all, which is delightfully chintzy but tasted good so fuck off if you don't like it.

Then I nuked some grilled kielbasa too long until it dehydrated, making meaty croutons. Yum.

I like pain

2007-06-15T21:26:00.000-07:00

well, certain types of pain. the feeling right after you burn yourself on cast iron while making breakfast - that adrenaline jolt from half-awake to very much so and not stopping anytime soon, thank you very much - that's nice. I also like hot food.

The best Indian in College Park is down University, more into Langley Park, definitely a little sketchier territory than CP (two women who were joining us for dinner didn't come after averting what appears to have been an attempted carjacking) but Tiffin, oh my fuckin g-d Tiffin is worth it.

i'm a heat freak. i ordered extra spicy. then i clarified. "Try to kill me," I told the waiter. "A Korean waitress once told me I take heat well for a white boy."

He laughed. I knew I was in trouble when it came out and everyone was stealing looks at me, waiting for the first bite.

The hilarious part is that i went ot the bathroom and then the food came, so my spicy chicken was in the middle of the table, and i was eating wiht a tableful of people who ordered as mild as possible. (wusses!) but two of the three ended up with some on their plates.

they didn't realize which was mine. one had to create a barrier on his plate wiht his knife to avoid his food touching the oil from mine (jesus, what are we, six?) and one ate a small piece and felt warm from the neck up the rest of the meal (which i have no complaint about, yay trying).

Korean heat is bad,yes. Sichuan heat is bad, too, especially with the right peppercorns and the numbing sensations they bring, but the numbing makes it hurt less.

Indian food doesn' thave numbing, and this sauce didn't have any fat. Breaking my wrist hurt less than dinner tonight, but it was managable pain because I could stop it whenever I wanted. We had traditional super-mild creamy pile-o-ghee dishes on the table too. I let it flame for about five minutes, drank six glasses of water in rapid succession and then hit up the mata paneer.

i'm eating the leftovers now. g-d it burns...burns so good. I should note that the flavor is still there, it's just a little outweighed. i'd order this regular spicy next time because the flavor depth is a little overwhelmed by the heat.

Today's rice noodle spaghetti

2007-05-29T08:03:00.000-07:00

1 package rice n00dz
1 can of the leftover crushed tomatoes from yesterday's curry
the rest of the chicken stock
a couple onions
a package of ground beef (about a pound)
one kielbasa
one pound mozarella cheese

it's not going to be anything fancy. i'm just hungry.

EDIT - it came out well. I added some fresh mozz thanks to my crazy housemate D and next time I'll cut back on the overall amount of cheese. Fresh legit mozzarella is much better than Kraft part-skim, that's for darn sure. This is not a red-stained noodles dish - the sauce is more background, and I like it that way.

An email to my mother turned into somewhat of a recipe

2007-05-27T20:49:00.001-07:00

but I didn't take pix because it looks like meaty diarrhea. Tastes great, though.

"The natural chicken" is Perdue chicken in a similar package with green highlights. It's air-chilled, no antibiotics, and I really should get to the store to document it because I can't find it on Google.

Total thumbs-up on the natural chicken. It has texture and it takes flavor WAY better than any I've used since I started cooking. I did a quick marinade in Cholula chili garlic (knew i was gonna use that), seared them while I caramelized onions in butter on the other side of the pan, then added it to the gyro-sliced (flat, thin ribbons) kielbasa. Topped with a can of coconut milk and a knife-edge-ful of red curry paste (just eyeball it, seriously) and a dollop of crushed tomatoes, I schushed it around in the skillet until the sauce was a uniform color, let it cook, then repeated that two-step a few more times. As the sauce cooks, it'll separate a little - don't let it go too long or the kielbasa will leach all its flavor. five minutes tops on that step.

then i served it on rice that had been cooked in organic free-range chicken broth.

the rest of the broth is freezing now. after it's nice and solid, i'm going to cut the box off and serve slices of it on something hot.

yum.

- Hide quoted text -

Lettuce Lunchmeat Maki

2007-05-27T15:07:00.000-07:00

Lay down six top leafs of romaine lettuce, overlapping them mostly, to form a slighly larger rectangle of romaine. top with miracle whip and sharp/creamy mustard. add bread and butter pickle slices, as well as sliced ham torn into small pieces. roll. eat by hand for the maki version, or batter and fry for sheer insanity.

Sauce Number 36

2007-05-19T07:25:00.001-07:00

brown a pound of ground turkey in the pot you're going to use for sauce. meanwhile, boil water for noodles.

drain and remove the turkey, then brown off a pound of lardon-style-cut kielbasa. After that, saute finely chopped onions until translucent. Deglaze with tomato sauce. Spike tomato sauce with red thai curry paste.

Add meat to sauce, melt a block of mozarella in there, and serve over noodles.

Damn. I'm so hungry I'm gonna go make it.

Chicken-Fried Take 2

2007-05-17T15:36:00.000-07:00

When some people can't focus, they clean, masturbate or get high. I cook.

Pound out cubed steak to half its previous size. Drench in Cholula chili garlic sauce.

Prep your cast-iron skillet with enough oil to immerse the steaks. Turn on.

Set up the stations - apple-cinnamon pancake mix spiked with steak rub, eggwash, more spiked mix.

When the oil's hot, coat the steak with flour, shake off the excess, egg it, flour it again, then fry that sucker until golden brown and awesome.

Pictures posted as soon as...yikes, I left my camera in the kitchen.

The Ham and Cheese Omelette Experiment

2007-05-15T07:50:00.000-07:00

I usually eat Dannon All Natural yogurt for breakfast with a piece of fruit. Lately I've been craving something more substantial.

Three eggs
frozen ham
cheese you've grated yourself (don't buy prebagged shredded cheese. it's a trick on people who don't own graters)

i like the ham cut into confetti, as small as possible. cook it in the pan until the pan dries up, then transfer it out. grate the cheese, and leave the cheese and ham in two piles on a cutting board near your pan.

Pull the eggs from the fridge at the last possible moment. Whisk briskly and add to a hot pan that you've greased with a little butter that's then been allowed to brown.

once the omelet starts to set up, poke it down to the center with a silicone spatula. this is pretty much an essential tool for cooking. buy one now.

once you can get under the egg with the spatula, see which side's setting up more. sprinkle the cheese and ham on that side, then flip the uncovered side over to form a half-moon.

I can usually do this with one spatula, but today I tried a second or two early and ripped my omelet. No fuss - I just flipped the other half over and served it on the other side. Two silicone spatulas would be as close to foolproof as possible for this one.

Serve with fresh salsa made by my awesome bud Brenda and a little Cholula chili garlic sauce. Yum-o in under 30.

I've been using colby jack cheese in this lately, and it's worked nicely, but I need to up the ante with some fun sausage and smoked cheddar. Too bad the eggs here suck. Maybe the organics will have more flavor.

EDIT 2: Organic eggs DO have more flavor. Aidells sausage, however, is ludicrously overpriced. I also did the dish with smoked cheddar and chopped honey ham and I'm not doing that again - way too much smoke for something with eggs. Smoked cheddar alone, with the outside shaved off, would probably be fine.

EDIT: Jessilee, who I fantasize about more than she knows, asked a good question in comments. Why the fuck DO I chill eggs before whisking them?

Because I tried letting them sit out for a little while to come to room temperature versus as cold as possible when I made breakfast for the fam on Sundays (my initial foray into cooking) and the cold eggs came out better on all fronts.

Since I forgot this too, I like to use a stick of butter directly on the pan to butter it, THEN whisk the eggs. It lets the butter brown. Brown butter is awesome.

Pita Pit secret menu exposed!

2007-05-14T13:46:00.001-07:00

Now, Pita Pit doesn't have a secret menu per se. They're all about customization normally, so asking for grilled spinach, steak, and gyrom meat is no big deal. You can even customize orders placed via campusfood.com.

The one thing they have made, however, is called the Heart Attack - gyro meat, philly steak, extra cheese, and bacon. It was created to mock sorority girls who order double meat double cheese with a diet soda.

South Street Steaks secret menu exposed!

2007-05-13T18:41:00.000-07:00

A late-night mid-study munchie run proved most fruitful.

South Street Steaks mixed my buffalo fries with equal parts ranch, blue cheese, and hot sauce, a mild variation of the menu option.

This got me thinking, and I chatted up the man working the grill.

Yeah, there are a few things you can order off-menu there. Like crazy fries, fries "with everything that can go on fries."

Then there's the Philly Steak Frite, fries topped with steak topped with Cheez Whiz. "It's great if you want something unhealthy but not a cheesesteak." Similar to the Pittsburgh Primanti Brothers' style, but minus the coleslaw, in case it sounded familiar to any Stiller fans. (Go Burgh!)

The cheesesteak hot dog is still in the works. "I tried it once, and it failed spectacularly."

An attempted chicken ceasar cheesesteak is impossible to try now, and you wouldn't want to anyway. "I think we sold, like, two." They don't have the dressing anymore either.

All quotes courtesy the grillman, who identified himself as the restaurant's owner. Last I checked, they have three, two of them male. I should've gotten a name. If it helps, he likes ketchup on his steaks like me.

This is a Burning Myself Frequently exclusive.

Ideas?

2007-05-09T22:00:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking of taking on a cross between Chinese boneless ribs in a brown sugar chili sauce and a gyro. Any suggestions?

Can-based Chicken A La King

2007-04-30T06:47:00.000-07:00

2 cans cream of something (mushroom, celery, chicken, whatever. don't use two of the same unless you suck)
a pound of processed leftover chicken. I chop mine.
1 can diced tomatoes
1 can chickpeas
a big handful of parsley

drain all the veggies, remove all the soup, add to one large pot or pan or whatever the fuck. chop the parsley rough, then add it and the chicken. stir briefly and finish with fresh black pepper.

reheats well in the microwave. it's breakfast.

serve over whole wheat egg noodles.

The Mother Sauce Rap!

2007-04-28T08:46:00.001-07:00

Need I say more?

"Veloute is made with stock...."

Plans for this weekend

2007-04-27T07:58:00.000-07:00

M-A-R-Y-L-A-N-D Day is Saturday, so I'll hit up campus for free nitrogen and Dairy ice cream and a journalism school notepad.

Then we fire up the grill and do some beer can chicken. I'm stoked.

While Googling for "beer can chicken" I found a link to a site called Cooking For Engineers, which amuses me in name only - that's rare. I'll have to check it out later - deadline is, as always, my main focus.

Pictures I've been forgetting.

2007-04-27T07:39:00.000-07:00

This time we've got the rice noodle spaghetti (aka Clean Out The Fridge Pasta) and some skillet porn.

Egg rolls - yum

2007-04-22T12:42:00.000-07:00

So good, I didn't take pictures. But I did shoot one of my skillet after a scrubbing and good fry session - I can see myself in it.

The trick with these is practicing. Try it the way they show you on the box, then roll a few taquito-style, then fold the sides before you roll, then roll it like a...hand-rolled cigarette.

Oh yeah - it'll suck unless you use a thin skin - the ones that had a double layer were way too chewy.

The fried ones were done in a cast-iron skillet with vegetable oil high enough to go halfway up the egg rolls. I make fat egg rolls, apparently.

I also baked some in an oiled pan, and they turned out nice, but I flipped them too early. They require flipping to get GBD on both sides, but they've gotta be hard on the heat side to be worth flipping.

Cheesy Psuedokonomyoki

2007-04-16T08:31:00.000-07:00

1 package rice noodles
leftover frozen baby vidalia onions, warmed through and chopped
1 block mozarella cheese, chopped half fine, half in 16ths.
butter
garlic
red curry paste.

when the noodles are boiled, throw them into a large pan that contains the rest of the ingredients, and combine with tongs. Eat immediately, or let cool, freeze, then microwave for a psuedo-noodle cake.

I write about restaurants that haven't opened, too.

2007-04-15T09:55:00.000-07:00

Like in this story, which is the first google hit for "diner-type restaurant"

It ran on the bottom left of that day's front page.

A1, yo. It's not about the steak sauce, cause the steak sauce sucks - it's about eyeballs.

Braised Drumsticks

2007-04-14T13:29:00.000-07:00

I did this with smoked turkey drumsticks available at my local supermarket. They're cold-smoked, so they need to be cooked all the way, meaning this recipe could be done with a drumstick of pretty much anything. My inspiration was the Disneyland turkey leg, even though I've never had one.

Place two drumsticks in a pan. Fill the pan half way with a 6 parts to one mix of cranberry juice and good apple cider barbecue sauce. Cover with foil and put on the top rack of your grill or oven at 350. Check and baste every fifteen minutes because I'm too lazy to recook this one.

If you're using a grill, get extra drums and toss a few on the hot part with a little oil. Flip when you see the bottom golden, and cook half as long on the other side. Hold the bone with something head-resistent, and you've got a snack until your braised drums are done.

Wine Journal - Episode 1

2007-04-14T12:44:00.000-07:00

If I keep drinking wine but not taking notes, I'll never remember anything, and what's more Web 2.0 than monetizing your brainfarts?

2004 Matthew Fox Merlot. California. Obtained from groovy lesbians who were moving out.

I drank it with leftover Ledo's pizza. (Go to Ledo Restaurant, not the ripoff bullshit Ledo's Pizza places) It was good. Tannins weren't too heavy, and the sweet Ledo's sauce danced nicely with the fruit.

I used a glass that had been left out for two days in a sauce, chronicled in the last post, and it was very noticable. This one definitely needs decanting and would be great in sangria.

Cleaning Out The Fridge Pasta

2007-04-14T10:40:00.000-07:00

Boil smoked turkey wings in covered pot. (I can buy these, along with smoked necks and drumsticks (much better) at my supermarket. If you can't, ham hocks maybe?)

Cut up 1 knockwurst and 2 bratwurst, grilled and slathered with grainy brown mustard. saute the pieces until they get some color.

remove the sausage and brown a pound of ground beef.

when the wings are done, pull them out and put them in the freezer - they're too hot to work with just now.

Boil rice noodles in the turkey water after rinsing them - the gelatin in the water leads to clumpiness otherwise.

When you can hold the wings without severe pain, tear the skin off, grab them by the ends, and twist like you're giving someone an Indian burn. (each hand in opposite directions) peel the meat, bite off any nasty stuff at the ends, then chop to your desired consistency. I didn't beat it up too badly, but I love all things gummy and chewy. If you can't stand gummy and chewy at all, make this recipe with only a kielbasa for the meat and you'll be happy.

when noodles are done, drain them and build the sauce in the same pot.

1 can ragu four cheese spaghetti sauce
the meat
a big lump of sauerkraut
leftover sauteed onions and apples

stir together and serve over rice noods. i added a glass of leftover merlot and it worked nicely. no parmesean, amazingly, though now that i write that, i'm tempted to add it. there's sriracha in there too, like everything red i eat. habanero would be overkill, but a small dab at the beginning of the sauce-building would be great with the merlot - yay fruity.

Psychoactive Casserole

2007-02-16T09:08:00.001-08:00

So good, you'll think you're high. With the optional illegal ingredient, you will be.

2 cans cream of chicken soup

1 pound whole-wheat egg-free egg noodles

1 pound kielbasa

10 oz. leftover chicken.

1 Strongbow hard cider (it's very dry, so a Woodchuck would result in a much sweeter sauce - something I didn't want here)

black pepper

Cholula chili garlic sauce

3 cloves of garlic.

Put a pot of water on to boil. Pour 1/4 of the Cholula in with the water. Peel a clove of garlic, chew it up, and spit it into the water. This is how I deal with not being able to find the garlic press.

In a separate pot big enough to hold the finished dish (aka something big, duh) mix the cream of chicken soup and the Strongbow. Stir to combine, cover, and simmer on medium. Taste, then add less black pepper than you think you need, then taste again. Add a whole clove of garlic, get the flavor straight, then turn it off. I didn't add salt.

Cut the kielbasa into four pieces. Cut the pieces in half lengthwise, then cut those pieces lengthwise. You should have little fingers of sausage. Cut dice-size chunks from the fingers and saute 'till brown.

My chicken is always frozen, so it has this weird texture that I really like. I soaked it in water and broke it up by hand, then tossed it in a skillet and emptied my bottle of Cholula on there. Cook till heated thoroughly and fully Cholula-stained, then add all ingredients to the pot with the sauce. Fold to combine, then add....

Kif. Just put it on the top, then fold it in, leave over heat for three more minutes, then serve with a Strongbow.

Tried new fruit for breakfast today

2007-02-05T06:44:00.001-08:00

I used to work produce, so I'm pretty jaded when it comes to fruit - the more you see and handle, the better you get at picking the ripest.

My honey tangerine wasn't super-juicy. It had that exoskeleton quality some oranges get where they're rough around the outside but orangey in the middle. The honey flavor wasn't pronounced. I had to eat half of it at one time to get any real honey goodness.

The Cameo apple BEGS to be made into hard cider. It's subtle, sweet, and soft, like a cute girl in a cashmere sweater. Just like said girl, you'll start eating this apple and won't be able to stop until there's juice running down your face.

...memories....

Pigs in a blanket!

2007-01-12T07:43:00.001-08:00

Hooray for Hebrew National hot dogs and Pillsbury Garlic Butter crescent rolls, this recipe's only two ingredients.

Pics to follow...

Absurdly Meaty Pasta Sauce

2006-12-15T12:43:00.000-08:00

1 can Furmano's chunky crushed tomatoes with basil, oregano, and garlic
1 can Hunt's Four Cheese sauce
6 cloves garlic, pressed
half a big knob of ginger, ground or chopped medium
1 kielbasa
1 package maple sausage
canned artichoke hearts
1 block marble jack or cheddar (not sharp) cheese

Process the garlic, ginger (peel first!) and artichoke hearts. You could food-process the lot right now, or brown it in the pan first. I want you to brown it in the pan, cause it'll make yummy brown fond on the bottom which we'll then release with the crushed tomatoes. Set that pot on high and turn your attention to a skillet and paper towels for draining the meat after it gets all tasty.

Those cook together while we brown and drain the kielbasa (cut into thin rounds) and maple sausage (broken up into small pieces). Wipe out the grease but leave the brown bits if they're not burnt, then transfer some of the tomato mixture into the skillet. Toss it around to deglaze, then add everything back to the main pot.

Add the canned sauce. Put on medium and cook until it's the way you want it. Add much fresh black pepper and the cheese. Poke the cheese around while you stir the sauce, and it'll eventually break up. Keep stirring, and it'll permeate throughout the sauce. Yummy.

Fried Ravioli with Thai Cream Sauce

2006-12-03T19:20:00.000-08:00

This one really gets the kitchen dirty, but if your ravioli fry better than mine, it'll be great.mine's still yummy. the sauce makes it.

Take ravioli out of package.
Deep-fry it. (no, I don't fucking know what temperature - mine didn't stay crispy)
mix coconut milk, chunky italian herb spaghetti sauce, fresh-cracked black pepper (I have a grinder now, so get used to this ingredient) and salt

i'm food-logy. so good.

3d Pong!

2006-12-03T19:00:00.000-08:00

Vector Ball: 3dimensional brain exercise

You wish your mom's brussel sprouts tasted this good

2006-12-03T08:39:00.000-08:00

15 brussel (brussels?) sprouts
two slices bacon
butter
salt
pepper

peel the sprouts.
hold the root end with your left and slice rounds with your right.
(thinner slices = tenderness and faster cooking, but if you can't cut it thin, at least cut it evenly unless you want a mix of firm and tender)
cook the bacon in the pan.
eat it.
leave the fat.
add the butter to melt.
get it hot.
toss the veggies in.
let them sit for a bit.
flip it a few times.
let it sit longer.
flip a few.
repeat until sprouts are way reduced (greens always do this) and season with salt and fresh black pepper. Taste for softness first, then for flavor.
look for slightly translucent sprout with good browning. brown, as always, equals flavor.
If you're hardcore like me, eat it out of a Pyrex measuring cup with a plastic fork and then go out for barbecue.

Google Ads ensue

2006-11-26T12:18:00.000-08:00

I can't say I'm serious about monetizing my content unless I'm actually doing it - so here's some Google ads.

I don't expect to pay for anything significant with these, but it's a quick way to add a little more upside to content I produce anyway.

Green Curry Soup with Brown Rice Cakes and Lime-Glazed Peanuts

2006-11-12T10:25:00.000-08:00

I can coconut milk
1 can peas
green curry paste
brown rice cakes
redskin peanuts
brown sugar
1 lime
Old Bay

Don't separate the cream from the milk - fry the curry paste in the milk before adding the milk. I also added a can of water, but had to cook a while to thicken.

Add the brown rice cakes as soon as the milk and cream come together. Add the juice of half a lime and the water from the can of peas. Mash the peas before adding. They'll turn the curry a nice pistachio green.

In a skillet, toss lime juice, brown sugar, and peanuts until glazed and toasted. New at this? Taste frequently and use low heat. Don't add to the soup until right before eating.

This is hearty as-is. Those desiring overkill should cook it until very thick and add some kind of meat - the beautiful thin ribeye I saw at Grand-Mart yesterday would've been perfect if sliced into strips and sauteed briefly.

The perfect scrambled eggs

2006-10-23T17:36:00.000-07:00

Trust me.

You need a ten-inch skillet, heated, but not hot. Keep it on medium, with butter coating the cooking surface - rub the stick on it. Too much butter will fuck things up.

I do three eggs at a time. Crack them into a small cup, stir viciously with whatever floats your stirring boat, and pour into the skillet.

Let it sizzle for a few seconds before pushing from the bottom up with your spatula. Done right, a layer of cooked egg will push up, clearing your skillet until the liquid egg on top rushes in to fill the void. Repeat this from side to side and top to bottom until they're just about done. Don't chop with the spatula - just push.

Transfer to a plate and add black pepper. Some swear by sriracha, but I prefer Thai Kitchen's red chili garlic sauce. The 'ach just doesn't do it for me on eggs.

Also, chill your eggs. I like to add a little milk and occasionally shredded cheddar, but stick to mild cheese. Sharp cheeses overpower the egg flavor, and if you don't want to taste the eggs, eat some fucking cereal.

Finally, brown some sausage in your skillet without oil. Wipe it out with a towel, and then cook eggs as described above - you'll deglaze the yummy sausage fond into your plate o' scrambled.

Ideally, at least one of the finished

I was writing my mom an email

2006-10-20T00:40:00.000-07:00

and this recipe was born. Hi Mom!

3 a.m. spaghetti

1 box whole wheat angelhair
half a kielbasa
1.3 pounds ground turkey - 97 % lean
1 can prepared tomato sauce
1 can crushed tomatoes
sprinkle of brown sugar (you need the sugar to counteract the acid in the tomatoes)
less cinnamon than you'd think. It goes great wtih tomatoes, but a little goes a LONG way.
1 onion, diced
4 cloves of garlic, chopped.

Put the sauce and crushed tomatoes into a pot. Put on low and cover. Brown the meat (in a skillet), then the onion and garlic in its grease. (turkey - seasoned with black pepper on medium heat, then kielbasa on medium-low followed by the onion and garlic on high, always moving. As stuff browns, add it to the sauce. After everythig's in, stir to combine and leave for ten minutes. Come back, taste it, then adjust with salt, pepper, and cinnamon.

You should have put some water on to boil first. If you did, the pasta will be done by the time you prep the sauce - add it to everything, stir to combine, cook on medium for a few minutes, then stir again. Sprinkle with Parmesean and serve.

This is quite a lot of pasta - probably enough to eat for all my meals today with leftovers. it fills my red ceramic pot and a nice-sized plateful to boot.

The culinary equivalent of Snakes on a Plane is anything on a stick

2006-09-11T18:52:00.000-07:00

YouTube - Minnesota State Fair On A Stick

Carrot/Green Bean/Cilantro/Sausage Chopped Salad

2006-08-28T18:45:00.000-07:00

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....

Red Curry Glazed Peanuts

2006-08-26T10:20:00.000-07:00

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.

I take Ed Levin's Food Rorschach Test

2006-08-11T21:50:00.000-07:00

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.

Blatherings

2006-08-09T20:33:00.000-07:00

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.

More on the wonderful Pink Lady

2006-08-03T10:54:00.000-07:00

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.

On grilled sausage

2006-08-02T21:11:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-02T20:16:00.000-07:00

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.

Stuff I wrote a few days ago and psaced out on

2006-08-01T04:42:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-08-01T03:50:00.000-07:00

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.

Signs you're note ating enough mayo

2006-07-31T23:34:00.000-07:00

It's separated, and when you stir it back together, it's more of a souplike consistency.

Ewww. Yet for some reason, unopened mayo is shelf-stable, so I had two more in my pantry - one of the few things I had left, yay shopping on Saturday.

Sriracha mayo is fantastic. Try this out.

three slices rye toast
feta cheese
sliced hangar steak (or any cheap, tough meat - you slice it thin, that's the trick)
juice of half a lemon
mint
parsley
sriracha mayo (mix sriracha into mayo. if you fuck this up, relax, breathe, and try it again. Mine starts innocuous, then zings me with chili before backing off - there's no long afterburn. If you like afterburn, add more. also, make it in something that's not wide and flat. I made mine on a glass dish, and it wasn't ideal. a coffee mug would work fine. no need to whisk unless you're anal-retentive - little globs of mayo just make it interesting)

assemble as follows - one slice rye toast,
sriracha mayo, seared hangar steak, feta, mint and parsley, squeeze of lemon.

Mayo the underside of the next piece of toast and repeat.

Top with one piece of bottom-mayo'd toast.

Eat on a plate you don't like, then think about something you want to forget, and smash the plate.

Coming up next: I have no idea. but right now I'm thinking about pork fries.

Yes, I realize that makes no fucking sense. That's one of the reasons it amuses me.

I always loved Cuban roast pork. What if you did it to a tenderloin with Thai seasonings via an outer spice rub and a bunch of injections...and fried it like a turkey?

a tenderloin wouldn't cook all the way through like that. You'd need to butterfly it.

Maybe cut it into strips

Beer-battered tempura strips...

Ladies and gentlemen, Cuban/Thai pork fries.

That one was stream of consciousness - my thought process preserved as a blog post. Pretty cool.

g-d, i need to stop eating this mayo...

It Was Gonna Be Pasta Salad

2006-07-31T20:56:00.000-07:00

angelhair, cut in half
extra virgin olive oil
roasted garlic
the following, cut into strips as thin as you can manage: some type of cured meat, fresh mozzarella, a red pepper, a yellow pepper, a seeded habanero, prosciutto.

if you want it cheesier, skip the EVOO (Rachel Ray is awesome, fuck all the haters) and put nonroasted garlic into a colby jack bechamel, which I'll post a recipe for as soon as I learn how to make one in a cast-iron skillet.

Mad props to Sylvia for helping me come up with the recipe, which was born in about a minute in the kitchen today.

Oh, and sriracha sucks in scrambled eggs. Put it on top instead.

Be good to your skillet!

2006-07-29T10:55:00.000-07:00

I spilled strawberry Jell-O brand gelatin dessert in my skillet today.

long story....

To get it out, I tossed some salt in the pan, then ran upstairs for cooking oil. A spot of oil and a bunch of rubbing with a clean cloth later, my pan was both shiny and clean.

My skillet is the same style as the one in the "This is your brain on drugs" ad

2006-07-26T18:16:00.000-07:00

Really.

Recipe Notepad

2006-07-26T18:15:00.000-07:00

The good thing about constantly writing, no matter where you are or what you're doing, is that you never have that horrible sense of regret after losing something you know was good.

Instead, you have that feeling when you can't remember which notebook you put it in.

That's why I keep a Notepad file called Recipe notepad on my desktop. I keep it for any food-related musings. Here's what it's accumulated so far.

Southern Cinnamon Roll Bread Pudding
cinnamon roll krispy kremes
butter
eggs
milk
vanilla
clove
salt
oats
pecans
pralines
crushed pecan sandies (instead of flour?)

cast-iron okonomiyaki?

quesadilla
marinate boneless skinless chicken thigh strips in a paste of oil and jerk seasoning.

fresh mozarella, thin tomato slices, basil, chicken. caprese quesadilla. lightly coat outside of tortilla with olive oil and a sprinkle of good salt.

free lunch program replaced by there is no such thing as a free lunch program

mmm. tasty.

I was going to bake brownies tonight, but I got as far as mixing the water in and about half the oil. Then I grabbed a fork. Yum.

Hey, this looks like the shit I used to cook...

2006-07-25T22:40:00.000-07:00

"Super Size" Sampler Platter

Chorizo Hash and Eggs

2006-07-21T18:32:00.000-07:00

Slice chorizo into rounds while your pan heats. (The potato prep takes a little longer than i'd like to do it while the pan's hot, so do that first) brown the chorizo then remove from pan. pat excess grease out, but leave it slick, and throw in two cups cubed potatoes. brown. remove. then three scrambled eggs, one fine chopped green onion, paprika, a dash of whole milk (all whisked together) and saltnpepper. scramble the eggs. when they're half done, turn off the burner and add everything back into the pan. stir to combine and keep moving it until the eggs firm up. then get them off the skillet and into plates, otherwise, they'll overcook - cast iron holds a heat like the Bush family holds grudges.

Potato Salad Skins

2006-07-21T18:31:00.000-07:00

cut baby red potatoes in half. hollow out. spread across the bottom of a cast-iron pan that's been coated in olive oil. toss in an oven at 350 until it gets all baked-like - after you put cheddar cheese and bacon on it, that is. when it gets out, spread a sour cream/cream cheese/dill/tarragon/chive blend on top.

Wisconsin/Alaskan Scalloped Saganaki Potatoes

2006-07-21T18:28:00.000-07:00

smoked cheddar
yukon gold potatoes
butter
bacon Everclear (cook bacon. cut very small. macerate in everclear. alcohol burns off, flavor stays.)
bacon (cause hey. mmm bacon)

pink x p0ptart: you should do one involving mashed potato
pink x p0ptart: and maybe cheese
NoChurchOrState: well, you can do that crazy greek flaming cheese dish on cast iron.
pink x p0ptart: can you put potato in it? I think you should
NoChurchOrState: could do a saganaki scalloped potato
NoChurchOrState: fry slices of....oh, idk, a good smoked cheddar, pair that with good bacon and yukon gold potatoes.
pink x p0ptart: sure!
NoChurchOrState: flambe each serving on its own.
NoChurchOrState: licorice doesn't go with those flavors though. so the flames would have to come from soemthing that's not ouzo. Like bacon-macerated everclear!
pink x p0ptart: you need actual flames to cook potatos?
pink x p0ptart: with an E
NoChurchOrState: no, but otherwise, it's not flaming greek cheese
NoChurchOrState: chedar gets mild the warmer it gets. that'll work very well.
NoChurchOrState: you slice the potatoes, cover the pan, add cheese, repeat, then add heavy cream on top and make a coating. but not us this time, cause we'll flambe later and a topping would burn.

Cast Iron Nachos

2006-07-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

cast iron nachos. cubed chicken. two different grated cheeses. mashed avocado. corn/lime/cilantro/habanero salsa. chips. layer of chips. chicken. salsa. cheese. chips. salsa. cheese. repeat until tall enough. stick in a 350 oven for long enough to open, pound, crush, and recycle one canned beer. remove. garnish with avocado, salsa, tomatoes, jalepenos, and ribbons of cilantro.

Yes, I know this isn't a real recipe. I'll get back with amounts later. For now, deal, and try it anyway.

It's been a hard day's night

2006-07-21T18:21:00.000-07:00

and I've got recipes like you wouldn't believe, but first, some tidbits about cast iron that would otherwise languish unread in my recipe notepad.

Cast iron isn't always perfectly nonstick..but you CAN make pancakes in it. The secret is lots of butter and ignorng the recipes on the mix box - pour a little powder in the bowl, then add a little water. and mix. see how it looks. try it out. this is how you learn. fuck recipes.

top chili with that corn flour-heavy cream weirdness? keep in mind I've only made it with regular flour and no flavor before. (i mixed the whole milk and spiced flour i was using for the chicken-fried steaks...the post is down the page if y'all forgot already)

if you're making a sandwich, toss the skillet on medium for five minutes before you start making it - by the time everything else is ready (veggies cut, meat chosen, condiments applied to bread, cheese, etc, and cleaned) the pan will be hot - by using that pocket of time, you leave yourself nothing to clean but the pan - and toss the meat into the skillet. let it toast. let it get brown. brown is flavor.

i have to make a "use the back of the pan" fajita recipe. do it with chicken. do it korean style. oh hell yeah.

also, i know i can make green curry in a cast-iron skillet.

the cookbook we're writing here? call it... Pan American

the cast iron skillet is uniquely american
what we put in it is a melting pot of the cultures that make america great.
from lemongrass to chorizo, pirogi to pancetta, this cookbook's about great food, solid recipes, and the original nonstick cookware.

cover shot - me in chef jacket and jeans, steeltoe boots. flag bandana, stars out.(or in?) head down. holding my skillet up by the handle to cover my face.

pictures - this is a package of rice stick noodles. this is a package of rice stick noodles separated into chunks. this is how many of those chunks you should use.

and here are two quickies:

Guarana steak

for those times when you need a slap of beef and a buzz. buy a decent piece of meat for once - ribeye, ny strip, something like that. leave it out of the fridge for 15 minutes to bring it down to room temperature.

(you did remember to inject it with a mix of Crystal hot sauce and Goya Guarana soda that's been simmered down, right? Good)

Poke repeatedly with a fork, then hammer furiously with a blunt object. Rub with a paste made of pureed chipotle peppers in their adobo, garlic, white and black pepper, and my secret - a little brown sugar.

Sear on high, then kill the heat and keep flipping after both sides are brown. Chefs just flip it like a pancake. I use tongs. It's your call.

pork tenderloin with a woodchuck cider (one amber, one pear) pan reduction, in which sauerkraut is simmered for a long time to make it taste milder.

Bitterwaitress says

2006-07-21T00:02:00.000-07:00

kiss my bitter ass

na na na na.
na na na na.
hey hey.
fuck my ex-restaurant.

currently drinking: Boing!, mango flavor. contains fifteen percent mango pulp and not much else. yum. i've gotta mix this into my next punch.

It's cobblerin' time!

2006-07-17T19:35:00.000-07:00

2 Fuji apples
1 Granny Smith apple
equal parts brown sugar and flour. about 1 1/2 cup
1 stick butter
powdered cloves (1/3rd as much as the rest of the spices)
cinnamon
nutmeg
1 cup pecans (I didn't try this, but it tastes so nutty and praliney already that it'd be a perfect match)

Core the apples and chop them so they're roughly the same size and thickness. Put them in your cast-iron skillet. (Yes, cast-iron again. I'm sensing a cookbook theme.) I didn't peel these because I'm lazy, but I like the texture it brings to the table.

Combine brown sugar, flour, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg in a separate bowl until it comes together into a paste. Clean your hands by playing with the apples in your skillet until your hands are clean and they're coated with flavor. Drop the rest of the paste on top of the fruit to eventually make a crustlike thing - don't stress, it'll spread.

Cook on 350 in the middle of your oven for an hour, then crank the heat to 450 and move the pan to the highest possible rack in the oven and leave it there for ten minutes. Pull when almost too dark brown. Let it sit for 20 minutes before serving. Waiting longer will result in soggy topping, wating less time keeps the fruit/sugar/flour/spices from gelling.

This is the best recipe I've ever written. It works. It's probably better than your cobbler. Make it, dammit.

How I'd do the curry differently

2006-07-17T18:03:00.000-07:00

I'd skin the sausage. It keeps getting in the way.

Also, cook the beans like this: wash them in a colander, then leave them there and use that colandar to drain the rice noodles after you let them rehydrate a ltitle. By the time all the flavors come together, your beans will be perfect - and mine stayed green without an icewater bath.

What I mean when I say "Fuck recipes"

2006-07-17T09:30:00.000-07:00

I use recipes, but only as a starting point. I use them to learn proportions and specific techniques that I never would have picked up on.

Great example - the curry I made last night sugggested stirring in fish sauce and brown sugar at the end. I would've thought of fish sauce, which I had downstairs already, but I had to run upstairs for the sugar.

I think I could make green curry from scratch (with a recipe, mind you, but without a ton of measuring) but this Thai Kitchen green chili paste has a fantastic ingredient list: chili, lemongrass, garlic, galangal, salt, onion, pepper, rhizome, lime, peanut oil. That's it! Totally something you'd expect to have seen in some small ethnic supermarket in a big city - and it makes bangin' curry. I need more coconut milk.

Hell, I could put green curry paste in macaroni and cheese. New flavors are wonderful!

This is chili posting bitches!

2006-07-17T09:28:00.000-07:00

Grab a drink grab a glass/after that I grab yo' ass - Kanye West

My original chili recipe is the one I made four or five times (I think) two or three summers ago.

That's quite the endeavor, since it takes a day and change...especially because I couldn't prep like a chef back then.

The original recipe is on my personal blog. This one is a freestyle, based on what I remember. Seriously though - fuck recipes. I write them because I don't have the words to tell you what my food tastes like...not yet, anyway.

Skillet Chili
Cook all ingredients in the cast-iron skillet before cooking them in the Dutch oven or slow-cooker. Except for the ones specified, of course.

You'll need
1 yellow pepper
1 red pepper
1 orange pepper
(green peppers suck - i taste bitter more than most people, so green peppers ruin everything. Triple this amount and double the rest of the veggies if you want to make the vegetarian version of this. I think it might even be vegan)
1 can Ro-Tel tomatoes and jalapenos (and seriously. if you email me asking if you can use real tomatoes and jalepenos, the answer is yes. use three large tomatoes and dice them, and chop six jalepenos fine. Leave the seeds if you want heat. Scrape them out along with the ribs if you don't.
1 large onion (whatever's best looking - red and white are my main ones, though a bunch of yellow onions worked too)
1 head (yes, head) of garlic. (Chop it yourself, dammit. You can avoid peeling it by buying peeled cloves, and you'll need 15 to 20. Chop them with some salt and mash under a knife)
2 pounds 80/20 ground (name your meat here. I use ground chuck or if it's on sale, ground sirloin, but you can do turkey, pork, chicken...)
1 Hillshire Farms kielbasa. (Your call on whether it's turkey, lite, beef, lite beef, etc. You could use their smoked sausage. You could use someone else's smoked sausage. The whole point is making it taste the way you want. I've used andouille - that was fantastic)
1 large can kidney beans
1 small can great white northern beans (large can is about 2.5x the sixe of the small can - it's the brand in the supermarket...I can't recall)

Instructions

Put the peppers on your gas burner. Turn it on. Leave the peppers there until they turn black.

Put the peppers into a paper bag and close it up. Let 'em sit, you'll come back.

Saute the kielbasa (sliced lengthwise twice and then chopped, resulting in small quarter-chunks) and ground beef in the cast-iron. Brown it nicely. Transfer to a paper towel to drain.

Saute the ground beef in the skillet until it browns nicely. While it's on medium heat, shake the paper bag with the peppers a few times, then unfold it, and tear it open. You need to peel the burnt skin off (don't have to get ALL of it, but you have to get most) and it's quicker to clean up if you do it on the paper bag.

Transfer browned ground beef to paper towel.

Open cans. Put in large pot set on medium. Stir to combine, then add the peppers after chopping them to the consistency you desire. (want thin chili? puree all the veggies. want thick, chunky? you know the drill.)

After patting the meat down with more paper towels, transfer the now-degreased protein into the big pot. Again, stir to combine.

Your pan should still have some grease in it from the sausage, so use that to cook your garlic and onion, chopped fine.

Once the onions are translucent and your kitchen reeks even more of onions and garlic than it already did, add them to the chili pot. Stir, motherfucker...stir. Then cover the pot and leave it alone. Leave it on medium. Ideally, have a glass lid and stare through it.

Your goal here is to get it to bubble, stir it, then turn the heat down to just under what'll make it bubble, and leave it alone and let it cook. You don't need tons of heat - everything here is already cooked. This will work in a crock-pot, too, though you might need to add some water.

Taste frequently. Sometimes I add hot sauce early and let it stew, or add it late and heat things up.

I write recipes like this because they're supposed to be a starting point. Really - don't make this like I said. Don't trust me. You know what tastes good. Try things. Experiment. Add peas.

Actually, don't add peas. Not to chili. It's just wrong. But that's me. You should eat what you want.

I like chili because you can use lean beef and lite sausage and cook it well and drain all the grease and put in more vegetables and it's even more filling and better for you.

If I had a bottle of red wine, I'd pat the grease out of the skillet with a paper towel and then deglaze the skillet with wine, then add that to the chili pot with a little stir.

If the flavor is too heavy/dense/salty, I use orange soda or not-from-concentrate orange juice to counterbalance. Guess that's why brown sugar gets added to curry - I thought mine tasted a little strong.

Green curry - the result

2006-07-16T19:37:00.000-07:00

First, the recipe.

1.5 lbs of boneless skinless chicken thighs
four links of Aidell's andouille - about 13 ounces
green beans
a third of a pound package of rice stick noodles
24 ounces Goya coconut milk (would doulbe next time)
2 spoonfuls green curry paste (would not double until tasting and letting it simmer nest time)
rice wine

Brown the chicken on both sides.
Do the same to the sausage.
Deglaze with rice wine, then coconut milk.
Add curry paste, stir to combne, and simmer until you've got the flavor you want.
Add back the noodles, green beans, chicken, and sausage, and cover and simmer to bring it all together.

The curry paste jar said to add fish sauce and brown sugar after simmering, but I skipped that.

I used too many noodles - the result is more like Thai spaghetti that had a one night stand with jambalaya, but I can live with that. Make sure to cut the chicken into chunks.

Roboppy, this one was for you.

Is it wrong that I get thirsty when I see this?

2006-07-16T09:31:00.000-07:00

mmm, grain alcohol

Reflections on why I failed tonight.

2006-07-14T01:11:00.000-07:00

First, there's the obvious - I didn't take my ADD meds, so that hurt. I didn't get enough sleep. I didn't come in sharp.

More useful to those who have never done the whole "cooking for a paycheck" thing - I failed because I got too far behind and couldn't plan my moves far enough ahead.

I had two samplers and an order of fried calamari on the same ticket. I had most of it, but then a second sample and a spinach dip came up. Did I mention I had 20 wings frying at the same time? Yeah. I was frazzled.

Anyway, I put a ticket up top on the app rail but forgot to call the burger on it for the grill man, so everything got backed up. Then the shit hit the fan and I got chewed out in front of waitresses.

Sucks. I think I'll be washing dishes for a while.

Anyway, here's something I learned at the restaraunt that we don't do at the restaurant...for customers...unless I drop supposed-to-have-been-dry wings into the sauce. But let me start over.

First, marinate your wings. Hell, let 'em soak for a week. Then fry them until they're both golden and brown and they float

(about ten minutes was what I was told when I first started working, but I have no idea - I can make a lot of food while wings cook)

Then drop the wings into a flavorful liquidy concoction. Puree some ginger, soy sauce, sesame oil, pureed scallions if oyu're feeling it (I so fucking wanted Chinese food after work. Fuck)

The trick is dropping them in a liquid that is either the marinade (no, not the exact same marinade. ew.) or something designed to complement the marinade's flavor as it's been modified by chicken absorption and frying...I can't do that, so I just use the same stuff.

Yes, sriracha woujld be lovely as the flavorful liquidy thing. Dammit, now I'm really hungry.

And since it's late and I'm lonely, we've got a blogger shoutout - Roboppy, yuu are awesome. Girl, may you continue to eat everything for a long time to come...and despite what I said on your Frappr map, I'm not weird, but I do plan on a NY Chinatown noodle-and-dumpling-geekout at some point via the NY-DC bus.

Green curry to come tomorrow if I can get a ride to the store after cashing my FAT ASS PAYCHECK. Five days a week sucks your soul out your ass...but it pays. Then again, they don't call it "giving away your soul."

Time for a throwdown!

2006-07-13T22:21:00.000-07:00

While I'm loathe to admit liking anything that involves Bobby Flay besides Iron Chef America, his new show "Throwdown" is very good.

Here's the thesis - superstar chef takes on masters of certain kinds of cooking. So far, he's lost at pizza and barbecue, and I'm watching Battle Chowder (to use the Iron Chefenclature) right now.

Challenger has razor clams, steamers, and geoduck clams. Yum. Bonus: Geoduck is pronounced gooey-duck. He's also making a Bahamian monkfish chowder.

Flay's doing something with corn and lobster. And...um..something else.
A sweet potato clam chowder - right. Yum. Not.

I like Flay's idea of using pureed corn to thicken the chowdah.

I'm more about chili, myself.

The post no one aspiring to chefdom wants to make

2006-07-13T22:04:00.000-07:00

I was on apps today and just couldn't handle it. Three samplers were all day (still to be cooked by me) and it was too much. I got put on dishes, where I promptly cut my finger by reaching into the silverware tub.

I washed dishes with great energy. I grokked right action SOMEWHERE at least.

Fun with Goya beans

2006-07-12T16:49:00.001-07:00

I ate a bowl of Goya kidney beans in sauce with a little Ken's Italian dressing. Good combo - I'd do it again.