Crazy Fries Revealed! (PHOTO)

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

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

20 oz. fresh watermelon juice
one shot of Gentleman Jack

yum. Now that's a sippin' drink.

My ideal cheesesteak

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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Lettuce Lunchmeat Maki

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

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

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

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!

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!

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?

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

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!

Need I say more?

"Veloute is made with stock...."

Plans for this weekend

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.

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