Catastro-ipes: Committing Abominations Unto Food

Stranger's Cookbook: African Beef Turnovers

2011-05-02T22:31:00.018-05:00

Time to get back to the project. Posts are rare here for several reasons. First, being poor, the first series of posts is out. I don't eat out much anymore, and you can't get a good rip-roaring catastroipe going without takeout food. Second, I still have the occasional sweaty toothed nightmare from the Can Game. Lastly, I'm both busy and lazy in equal measure.

Like this, but with more sweatpance and less cravats.

Let me tell you about my day. I had a weekend that started crap, and then Got Awesome. My standard bout of Sunday Night Insomnia hit, and it was suddenly 4:30 in the morning. I decided that that was the best time to consider serious life decisions that aren't really relevant, and ended up feeling amazing. Lo and behold, I woke up a mere 3.65 hours later and continued to feel amazing. Today, I feel like a Big Damn Hero. Today, I roll twenties. Today, I learned that the combination of fatigue, Teenage Bottlerocket played at deafening levels, and near-lethal levels of caffeine are the perfect combination to make me experience honest-to-crazy levels of mania.

So, what to do? Can I possibly handle such relentless positivity? I know! I'll cook something that is capable of crushing the spirits of many, many men! See, I've had this idea for a new blog-project for awhile. I call it The Stranger's Cookbook. Basically, it works like this: I collect a bunch of old recipe cards from people I know. These cards have old recipes on them written by, and this is important, people that I don't know and will never meet. I'll cook them as written, with as much specificity as possible, and then write it up. Will this be interesting or funny? No fucking clue. Battle on, Heroes!

Note: My camera is sort of jacked right now, so all the pics for this week will be taken via my phone, and thus be shit.

African Beef Turnovers

This is a recipe cut from a newspaper, and pasted onto a card. No clue as to its origins. The paper is yellowed with age, mysteriously. It's signed at the end with a sort of bold definitive 'S'. In retrospect, I wouldn't put my actual human name on this either.

Blurgrediants!

So, my 'rules' for this noble enterprise say that I can't change what's on the card. So when it calls for bloody sirloin, it gets sirloin. I dunno that I've ever even bought ground sirloin. Also, I have no clue what makes this 'African'. But then again, I know nothing about Africa, so we're good. I did an image search for 'African food' and got this:

Is that beans or something? No fucking beans here, guys.

First, the mise en place (it's French, fucking look it up). Pretty simple this time, chop the onion, chop the tomato, soften the butter and cream cheese. Oh, wait. I'm supposed to peel the tomato. How the hell do you peel a tomato? I would have much rather used canned&crushed here, but it's Not in the Recipe. I love self-imposed asinine arbitrary rules!

I'm not a fucking tomatologist, but the tomatoes I found at the shop look like trash. Also, I don't have a peeler anymore (it is on the list of things what walked out of my apartment under mysterious circumstances). Guess it's the old standby:

Hack at it with the knife.

My phone makes these look sort of 'red-ish', but they aren't. Inside, their color is best described as Ashes of Roses. Which I'm sure is lovely for drapes and your ugly sister's prom dress...but not what I'm looking for in my vegfruit. Maybe, I'm being too unkind to what is essentially a skin around a bag of acidic juice-filled crap with seeds. After all, sometimes awful things can contain a wonderful surprise!

Not this time. Also, they smelled a little like the compost from the garden in hell.

Next, I am to make the pastry. According to Sssss, this is done by combining a little flour and salt with All The Fat in the World (8 oz. of cream cheese, and 2 whole sticks of butter). Ok, I've made dough before. Chuck it all in a bowl and mix it up. I'll get out my pastry splicer and evenly distribute the fat throughout the flour!

Like some kind of Weapon X / Betty Crocker fusion. Weapon Crocker.

No wait. Actually, it says to mix it by hand. S, I'm sorry that you're from the past and didn't have access to science, but this isn't a great start to our working relationship.

You know that feeling you get when you squeeze something with the exact consistency of poop? It was like that.

Whatever. Done. Next, I'm to refrigerate it for 'a few hours'. Shit. It's already like 7pm. Protip: Read the damn recipe before you start trying to cook.

A Few Hours Later:

Picture a cool 'wipe' effect here. Also, it was totally like 20 minutes.

Really though, why the wait? I get it, S-hole, you're some kind of fucking society food writer and all....it's a good idea when making Human Food to cool pastry dough. It allows the fats to re-harden, so that they stay sort of localized in the finished product. The whole Tender-Flaky Duality thing. That's totally fine, I respect that. Except you just had me handmush roughly 30 parts of fat with about 2 parts of flour. You can tart around as much as you want here, Essie, it's still a fucking fat-slam. Calling it 'pastry' is putting the proverbial lipstick on a pig.

Moving on. Next step is to make the wholesome African filling....which consists of onion (kind of green), beef (sirloin, for fucks sake), tomatoes (Fruit of the Devil's Asshole), and peanut butter (yum!). Brown the meat. Protip: When it says to brown meat in a recipe, it doesn't mean 'cook that meat all the way hard'....it means get some color on it. I had a great picture for this, but it turns out that it was actually an awful picture. Looked like a jogger blew in and snapped the photo while running in place (with palsy). Stupid phone. Anyway, the point is that most of the time when you're browning something, the next step is going to be 'add more stuff and actually cook it'. So when you cook the meet, and then cook it more, and then bake it....you've done fucked up your meat.

Added the onion and tomaccos and cooked it down. Swirled in the peanut butter. Filling complete:

I get it now: Somewhere in Africa circa 1989:
You got your dog food in my peanut butter sandwich!
You got your peanut butter in my dog food!

The next step is to take out the dough, roll it out, and portion into forty-eight 3-inch discs. 4-8. Really S(hitty fucking cook)? This pile of crap is such a crowd pleaser that you need to have enough to serve your entire readership down at Learn to Hate Food Monthly? Forget that. I made 12 3-inch discs and put the rest of that crap down the in-sink-er-ator. Maybe it was the Fumes of Fugue that were pouring out of that pan, but I had a hunch that 12 would be about 12 more than I really wanted to eat. The recipe next asked me to place one teaspoon of tasty filling slightly off-center, fold dough over, and crimp edges closed with a fork dipped in flour. Maybe S is the kind of person that loves to spend Inordinate Amounts of Time Screwing Around with Food. Maybe S breaks out the compass and fucking radiophone to calculate filling trajectories. Maybe S has one of those Adhesive Forks that I've heard so much about....I don't know, and I couldn't care less. I can't be having with this.

I sot of gommed some in and mashed it closed.

I baked it for 3 times as long as was suggested, and it never got anywhere near Golden, Brown, or Delicious. It was sort of close to being Flacid, Pale, and Malodorous. I was going to broil it or something, but then I forgot that pans are hot and burned the shit out of my fingers. So my 'finishing touch' was to snake them off the heating element with a tongs so as to avoid fire. Bon Appetit.

I ate one-third pieces.

Verdict: S isn't just some jackass food writer. S is someone that was born only to hate me. S is reaching across time and space to wrack terrible vengeance upon my inner portions. You know though? That's ok. I completely understand. I now feel filled with the unholy desire to put my fist through physics right in your direction too, Sbag.

Day 6: Know When to Walk Away

2010-07-27T23:12:00.011-05:00

Tonight, we took a horrible gamble. I'll take full responsibility for it. In retrospect, it was clearly an error of truly epic proportions. The Man said it best, when he said "If you're gonna play the game, boy, you gotta learn to play it right."

Wise words, Kenny. Wise words.

First off, the set up. I'll admit that today was kind of a cheat. See, one of the rules of the game was that you weren't allowed to plan meals around cans. However, we skirted through a sort of loophole (that I just made up completely)...we hadn't planned any meal for tonight. Since it has been brought to my attention that skipping days all willy nilly is costing us the trust of our readership (which we all value incredibly highly), we needed to crack open a can anyway. Little did we realize that this would send us into a greater cooking process than anything we had done thus far.

The can we chose bore some cryptic and helpful warnings:

How kind! Instructions on how best to enjoy the Righteous Happy Beaks within!

Oh. Nevermind.

Since we had no meal planned, there was nothing for it but to crack it open. The internal compromise that I worked out with myself for bending (totally breaking, but whatever, they couldn't eat fucking gravy) the rules was that we would not taste the substance within. We would smell it, look at it, and plan the meal from those impressions alone. Thus, this meal represented A Great Gamble.

Crystal Gravy?

On first glance, it looked like most of the cans we had opened. Some kind of translucent liquid with who knows what (OH MY GOD KILL IT KILL IT) within. Because it almost said to 'serve hot', we decided to dump it into a pan.

If you've been reading this blog, this is a very ominous picture.

As I poured, we kept waiting for the other "shoe" (or tentacled spiny horror) to drop. Nothing. The whole can was this translucent goo with some kind of little meaty chunks in. Well. As we put our noses over it to savor the bouquet, the only thing we got was that it smelled 'spicy' (like poison) or 'fruity' (like hot trash).

I suppose the only explanation is that the very innocuousness of the substance put us off our guard. Remember what we've been eating all week. Something that was just clear goo couldn't possibly be that bad right? This is what caused us to Make A Huge Fucking Mistake.

Meg said that maybe it was just gravy. Which sounds crazy, but it actually sort of fits. See, I'm kind of known for eating gravy. On top of that, Mike went to extreme lengths to apologize loudly and vehemently about the cans we had left. As I was staring at the pot, in my mind I was thinking: Ah ha! Perhaps he doth protest too much! Those of you who are acquainted with Mike know that he has no scrap of duplicity. He lies about as well as the Lamb of Hosts. This somehow led me to believe that it was likely that the reason that he warned us so thoroughly was that he was trying to set up an elaborate trick (like the time he managed to convince Kurt and I that magic was real, and then destroyed our burgeoning sense of childlike wonder in a dickmove worse than 10,000 Grinches, all within 20 minutes--nevermind, another story).

Now, all of that being said, Sara was still involved. So a simple poultry gravy was Right Out. Still, maybe it wasn't 'normal' gravy. Maybe it was made out of some kind of inapproprate meat animal.

Or perhaps it was made out of chickenoids what had all their blood removed and then replaced with gravy. Meta-gravy.

Whatever. How bad could it be? So we planned a meal to utilize gravy. Easy. Chicken Fried Chicken with Homemade Mashed Potatoes. We had everything we'd need to put it together. So I tossed the 'gravy' (as an aside, you've all probably figured out that by this point in the game that there is no earthly fucking way that they would have chosen anything so edible as gravy...I can only say that perhaps the smell of it burned out crucial logic paths in our brains) onto the back burner and prepped everything I'd need.

Behold!

I really got in to this. I think that I was perhaps giddy with excitement to be preparing something that was going to be so edible. For the first time since the competition began, I was really cooking! I seasoned the pans of flour with two different layered blends designed to be distinct and yet still be complementary. I pounded out the chicken to ensure even cooking. I washed, peeled, and cut all the potatoes that we had left.

I meticulously and perfectly executed the 3-stage 2-hand breading method for the first time ever.

Through the entire process, I kept slowly stirring the pot on the back of the stove. I nobly resisted the urge to taste it. I was just completely convinced that this was gravy.

They sizzle, awaiting what can only be incredibly delicious gravy!

After the tempest in the kitchen was over, everything was ready to rock. I got it all dressed up on plates. I was so hopeful that I may have skipped my way to the table.

I completely doused my portion.

Meg, in her wisdom, was more cautious. Gravy on the side, and a big ol' bottle of Hydrocodone ready to go.

First taste. Not gravy. Not even close to gravy. Gravy is not in its ancestry in any way. The people who regularly eat this have never even heard of gravy. The people who 'cooked' and canned this substance actually despise gravy. Gravy killed their parents. There was a gravy flood that drowned their entire village. They were kidnapped as children, and force-fed gravy for twenty years, only to escape and swear terrible vengeance.

Now, we tried. The first taste was bad, but it wasn't repulsive. It mostly tasted like fish. Probably some kind of fish soup. Eating chicken and potatoes covered in hot fish soup was no fun at all. Meg gave up. She couldn't do it. I wanted to persevere though. I didn't want to just give up. We'd come so far through the week! We were so close to the end! I ate a whole chicken and at least 25% of my potate.

Then I found this.

Aaaaaand this:

It's true. Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me.

NOT FUCKING GRAVY.

Day 6: Apparently it's OK to skip days.

2010-07-27T22:28:00.014-05:00

So I finally got those jellied farts I was looking forward to. I'm glad about that, I guess. Although, Jamie cryptically told me earlier that I have one "really awful" can and one "kinda awful" can left and I can't tell you which one I picked tonight. It was the second can to actually make me gag while eating it, but the other to illicit that response was the seemingly innocent gravy, so do what you want with that. Anyway, both of his are fucking terrible, so that's gonna be fun for everyone (me).

Seriously, though, this is the first time since we started this game that I couldn't even accurately describe to you what I just ate. Clear, slightly sweet with a bitter aftertaste and cubed. Oh, and it was probably a (fart) plant.

Can you see the packing date on that can? 2008. Nearly TWO YEARS AGO.

Oh, that's right. Not only did these guys find all this stuff out behind the Meijer, they picked up the stuff that sat on the shelf for two years. This can probably rolled back in between the shelves and some stock boy found it, took it into the break room so everyone could joke about how the store hadn't stocked this product since 2008 where it sat for a few months. After the shift manager (Karen) threw it out, Jamie and Meg find it on one of their opossum-adventures and decide to feed it to me since "technically, it's still not expired". I did the only thing I could in this situation.

I fed it to Mike.

Five minutes later he wasn't dead, so...

I fed some to the dog.

Let me explain something about Sandy (the dog). She'll eat damned near anything. I know what you're thinking...most dogs will eat anything, but Sandy will eat shit like radishes and watermelon rind. Not dog things like 'LoL my dog eats peanut butter, isn't that crazy (LOL)?!'. Sandy will eat a fucking turnip. She eats topsoil in great clumps because it smells loamy. I've also seen her swallow a goose whole.

Sandy balked at this stuff. The dog that will knock you down to lick soapy dishwater off the kitchen tile had to think about putting this in her mouth. When I finally convinced her it was 'Food, Sandy! Cookie! Yum Yum!', she chewed it thoughtfully for about 20 seconds, then sneezed. She didn't really want anymore after that.

She didn't die or puke, though, and Mike didn't mind it and thought it was kind of like a pear, so I threw it in a strainer to get a better look at what I was dealing with and how it would go with our Campbell's Soup recipe (baked chicken and Cream of Celery soup) and egg noodles.

Can't wait to shove double-fistfuls of that into my yammer.

I still have no idea what this jellied-hell is, but aside from the texture (which is really damned awful, like a combination of a grainy pear and those strings from celery but also Jell-o), it doesn't have an extremely offensive taste.

Fuck it. WhipCrem.

Even after huffing half the propellant out of that whipped cream can, I could barely handle the texture of this stuff. I gagged trying to make myself finish my allotment, but I did it. I look over at Mike and see this:

Those are the eyes of a man whose soul is long departed.

I can only hope Jamz and Meg enjoyed their can tonight as much as we did.

Bonus Cool Pic! Mike got his infrared camera today and took this while we were getting dinner...the cool part? This is the heat from our bodies reflecting off the fridge doors!

Awesome.

Day 5: Doubling down for real...Part 2

2010-07-25T00:59:00.006-05:00

After my bout with the gravy this morning, I wasn't completely thrilled with eating another can of something for supper this evening. It was leftover night since the Breinings have had visitors this week and there's been quite a bit of cooking going on. Grilled chicken, teriyaki beef, pizza, Mexican ten-layer dip...just a real fancy international spread. Oh, and a dented to fuck can of "food".

What the hell did you do to it, Jamie?

Seriously...all the cans I sent were untampered with when I put them in that box. Did you guys just find this one out behind the Sav-A-Lot? Was it something they were trying to throw away, but you two were out there pushing around a jankety, rusted out old shopping cart (wheel missing) full of discarded food until the Night Manager shined a flashlight on you and you both run away, but Meg can't push the cart straight because of the wheel, so she crashes it and you only manage to grab this one can? I don't even feel safe opening this thing after all that. It was also rusted in one spot.

Now, I admit that I had it easy tonight and kind of cheated after I opened the can. Which looked something like this:

Is that paper in there? Yes. Rusty can? yes.

I've had canned tamales before. They're not completely horrible taste-wise, but there is one incredibly dangerous thing about a canned tamale which, like some crafty-but-lazy prey animal, doesn't reveal itself until it's too late.

Not terrible...or is it?

Look at the right side of that picture. That translucent orange liquid? It's grease. About 75% of the orange "sauce" in that pictures is just waiting to slide down into some unsuspecting schmuck's guts and wreak havoc in a most horrible fashion. Otherwise, this isn't too bad a meal to have to deal with. The worst part is actually the peanut gallery of family members who crowd around every night while I open the can and proceed to tell me how disgusting I am for five minutes. I KNOW, ALRIGHT GUYS!? STOP JUDGING ME! FUH!

The trap-door spider of meals

They're pretty bland. Even with Cholula (the best hot sauce, shut up) and sour cream, they're still bland. Maybe the included sauce makes them "flavorful"? I'll never be able to tell you, because I won't eat that part. Since we cheated a little and pretty much just made this a meal, it wasn't hard to eat the required 50% and in fact, between the two of us, we ate all but one tamale. However, had I not known about the sauce thing and just drank that down all unsuspecting-like, it probably would have killed us. Creativity: 0. Lethality: 10. I'm onto you guys and this thing isn't over yet.

Day 4 & 5: In Which Much is Revealed

2010-07-25T00:42:00.013-05:00

I'd like to pretend that doing two cans in one meal was some kind of super awesome idea to make an interesting post. No, mostly what it was was laziness. The other part was fear. I spoke a bit about this yesterday, but this Can Game shit is taxing. Every day you're staring down the barrel of a gun. In the early days, we could hope that we might get something delicious. Something from a named animal, perhaps. Maybe a fruit? But no more. After the first 3 days, that hope is dead. Killed off by snouts and lips and things harvested from caves by grave men.

Yet we're only halfway through. We're not going to be the ones to puss out on the Can Game midfield. So we continue. Therefore, after our day of pizza delivery respite, we have to knock out two cans. The plan? Open 'em, throw 'em together, and (if necessary) eat the result weeping over the sink.

The Can Game has taught us many lessons, the first of which is that Mike and Sara do not have kindness in their hearts (or hearts at all, really). Instead they have small withered organs in their chests that pump noxious ichor. Armed with this knowledge, we hit up the store trying to get some post-traumatic-cangame supplies.

Cheese, Candy, and Yogurt.

I picked eggs and cheese, hoping that I could drown out whatever fermented meef we were going to have to eat. Meg? She chose pickles...

She has chosen poorly.

Because nothing takes the taste of despair out like more yuck, amirite? Anyway, it was go time. We picked our two cans for the night, put clothespins on our noses, and said a prayer.

Dear infant Jesus: Protect us from these ratspines and fishfeet we are about to recieve.

Time for the big reveal. Can #1:

Well, clearly some kind of ankle.

Well, it's not the best looking perfectly normal beast I've ever seen, I'll grant you. But all in all, it could be worse.

Meg: "It smells like catfood." Me: "That's not so bad!"

As an aside, can I just mention what a sad state of affairs it is that the above picture fills me with a feeling of relief? I look at that, contemplate putting it in my mouth, and think: "You know, this isn't the worst thing I've eaten in the last 24 hours." Ponder that for a bit, friends.

See those taste-test faces? It's like when you punch your siblings so much that they flinch every time you move your hand.

Relatively bland miscellaneousmeat? At this point in the week, that is comforting. I'm actually a little excited now about this meal. I can find it in my heart to believe that if I had actually seen the label for this can, it would have contained less than four chemicals known to cause cancer in laboratory animals.

It would have been better if they had removed the hair and skin first, but whatev.

Easy enough. We'll make omelets (I knew egg and cheese would be the hero). We had some month-old smoked sausage which we probably wouldn't eat under normal circumstances...but we're midway through the cangame here. Any Normal White American Food is going to be superedible, regardless of age.

Left: Sausage. Right: Probably seahorse.

All fried up, it looked pretty tasty.

Well, provided your taste buds have been so de-sensitized that even a completely unknown meaty substance looks wonderful.

Can #2, though. Can #2 was a different story. A story you wouldn't read to your kids. The kind of story you remember years after and think "Wow, that was a creepy story."

You have the balls to bitch about gravy when you send us concentrated darkness?

What is that? Is it motor oil? Motor oil may not be so bad, I guess. I mean, it's poisonous, but maybe it will numb the mouth as you eat it. Maybe it's the Black Blood of Kali. I could certainly use a good Black Sleep right about now.

Om-nom She-bai, Om-nom She-bai

Time for a closer look. I start to drain what I think is black liquid out of the can over the strainer to catch whatever terror lies beneath. Instead, this happens:

Nothing.

That's right, nothing comes out. About a teaspoon of black goo comes out, and that's it. Maybe it's scared? Is there something in there holding on to the sides of the can? I apply some wiggle, and then it happens.

No one should have to hear the sound this made coming out of the can.

It's a mass of black slime, perfectly retaining the shape of the can. I flip it into a bowl, where it (no joke) continues to flop around for several seconds. I take a couple of minutes to scratch my head. Then I poke it. Nothing happens. Hum. So I bravely pick it up and take a huge bit----no, I'm totally kidding. I cut off a piece and fed it to the dog.

Who promptly sniffed it, sneezed, and then shook his head. That's right. Sara and Mike finally found a substance that the dog wouldn't even consume. We actually shot a video of this, where he literally smells it and shakes his head "no fucking way guys, I don't care how many times you tell me to 'get' it." Unfortunately, Blogger and Blackberry phones do not play well together. I cut it in half and flipped the reject into the disposal.

Where it refused to die. I cut it with a knife like twelve times to get it to go down the drain.

No help for it, but to man up and smell. Not to bad, really. It mostly smelled like old tires and tea. Some kind of galvanized teaslime. It also had no taste. You put a slice in your mouth and chew and get nothing. Then after you swallow, you just smell it again. A re-smell.

Heating had no effect.

It sort of sat there in the pan and whistled for about 10 minutes. Then, to my total shock, it did not explode. It didn't do much of anything. I was hoping that it would dissolve. My plan was to maybe put a fuckton of sugar in it and put it on ice cream. Meg wasn't too thrilled about sacrificing some of her precious ice cream supply, but it turned out to be moot. The substance was inert. I was completely stumped at this point. Then a bolt of brilliant inspiration hit me.

That bolt was Meg telling me we should make bubble tea out of it.

Bubble tea, if you're never had it, is basically iced tea mixed with milk that has random goo balls in it. They call these 'bubbles', perhaps because 'gooball' isn't really a marketable word. Normally, those 'bubbles' are made of tapioca pearls. In our case, we had a gooey tea-tasting mass that would have to do.

It seemed that no matter how much we chopped, there was still more.

Put slime in jars. Pour half tea and half milk into a shaker. Shake well.

Mug for the camera.

Add the stuff to the jars, and enjoy! The final meal wasn't bad. Decent omelets, decent approximation of Bubble tea. All in all, I'll consider it a victory.

Two cans left. If I know Sara and Mike, they'll be the worst of the lot. I know the cans that they have left are certainly no prize. Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion!

Day 5: Doubling down for real...Part 1

2010-07-24T23:53:00.009-05:00

I'm a dirty liar. We didn't eat two mystery cans to catch up yesterday. However, we did make it up today. I'm also pretty sure it's killing us.

The day started pretty well, really. We've been looking for a Dogloo for our tortoise for a few weeks and finally managed to find one on Craigslist for an insane $25. Of course, people on Craigslist are always fucking insane (sometimes, also painfully stupid) and we had to pick it up before 10 a.m. On a Saturday. Whatever, Crazyface, you're selling us something we need for like a quarter of what you paid for it.

What's all that have to do with mystery can? Well, it meant when Mike got home, we ate a late breakfast and since I'm a cheating sneakthief what shirks her can-consuming responsibilities at every turn, I had to make up some lost ground.

What luck! There are fresh bagels in the kitchen and that seems pretty perfect considering bagels are amazing vessels to cart cream cheese into my face.

I chose "everything" flavor, but I'm pretty sure I didn't taste any snout.

Mike chose yumberry.

Those look decent, right? I didn't want to mess it up too bad, so I chose the next smallest can in the mystery can box. It looked like a legit can of food, like it might have come from a real factory that produces something made from the good parts of plants and animals (not stems, teeth and eyelashes).

Thanks for blacking out the text saying "DO NOT EAT", Jerkasses.

See, I thought I might get away with a soup...not something real tame, of course, but perhaps a specialty soup made for people who developed their tastes during the Great Depression when people would boil down shoes and call it supper.

Great. Onion Gravy.

Yeah, fucking brown onion gravy. It smells horrible. Just truly horrible. Unluckily for me, I chose to eat a savory bagel for my breakfast, which pretty much means that I get to try and eat this crap. After all, it's be a real shame to ruin a yumberry bagel with something that smells, looks and tastes like liquid trash.

Oh Boy! There's my Breakfast!!

Yum Yum...Here we go...

... and I claim complete failure on this one. I could not eat half a can of Onion Gravy. For the record, I like gravy. Even with a bagel that would lend itself well to this sort of thing, I couldn't do it. After the third bite, I was gagging at the thought of taking another. The flavor crept into my sinus passages and even though it's nearly 12 hours after the fact, I CAN STILL SMELL AND TASTE IT. I've brushed my teeth, chewed gum, eaten mints, consumed another (mystery can) meal, and nothing I've done has lessened its presence at all. Give me 100 cans of whatever the hell meat that was I ate yesterday morning. I do not want more Onion Gravy.

Day 4: Doubling Down...

2010-07-23T16:57:00.008-05:00

I explained in my last update that I had to eat a mystery breakfast this morning instead of ruining a family dinner last night, which leaves me in an interesting position as far as consuming two cans of crap in one day. This morning, Jamz and Meg got us.

It was pancake day in this house today, complete with fresh fruit, bacon and sausage and your choice of delicious pancake mix-ins cooked to order. Have you ever had a chocolate-cherry pancake? You've not lived then. All of that was available to us, but we also got to crack open a mystery can.

I choose "square can with a key" and chose poorly

First off, this thing came with a separate key mechanism that I have to use to even get at the Glorious Delights inside. Oh that's right...the people who make whatever's in this can FUCKING LOCK IT AWAY. You have to insert this key into a little slot and twist, basically unraveling a razor sharp coil of metal while simultaneously revealing a foreboding fleshy pink line of horror.

How cute...wait, what's...Oh God.

O YAY IT'S MEAT!

Meat that blossoms forth from the can when the lid's removed.

Tools of the trade: Hunk of meat. Dangerous WWII key-can. Key.

I can smell this picture.

If that white stuff is supposed to lubricate that meat so it doesn't stick to the can, it didn't work. However, if that white stuff is supposed to activate in my intestines and lubricate there, it sooo fucking worked.

So Jamz and Meg apparently condone animal abuse on this blog, so I figured "what the hell...it looked fun, let's also turn our dog into a vomiting shit-fountain with this meat! :D" I also love free .gif-makers.

Vomiting Shit-Fountain.

So yeah, pancake day. Pretty much one of the most awesome breakfasts ever and I have to crap it up with a can of chopped up 'meat'. Instead of bacon, I decided to cut this into slices and fry it, thinking it might work similar to SPAM...get brown, be edible. This was not like SPAM. The warmer it got, the less integrity the product actually had and the more translucent pink it became. It didn't smell or taste horrible at this point...very salty, but a bit like brisket.

I don't do shit half-assed and since it was pancake day, I was making a damned pancake (or two). The first one was M&M, because that's very delicious and awesome, the second? O YAH IT'S MEAT!

*SPRINKLES*

Part of a complete Shitfast!

Mike just had good pancakes, but he was a trooper and ate his side-meat like a champion-hero. A sad champion-hero.

I've never seen a sadder or more frightened face :(

Except maybe this one, when she thought we were going to feed her more of it...

o fuk, there's more!?

Biting into it released a gush of fluid, yet it remained grainy and felt like it squeaked in your teeth. The end result...I'm not sure we managed to down the required 50% or not. It looked like we might have, but I'm also pretty sure that crap was sentient and expanding with every minute. I did eat the pan(meat)cake with sprinkles. We ate around 9:30 am, and I swear I can still feel it down there, waiting. When I think about it, I get a little nauseous and I had a salad for lunch because I think I'm scared of eating now.

Day 3: You're gonna have to wait...

2010-07-23T03:20:00.002-05:00

So, I actually had to attend a family "sit down" dinner (that's where you sit at a table with other people and silverware and drink from glasses while eating a meal instead of sweeping shit off your computer desk and eating with your fingers while you Google your own name) this evening and was unable to consume my can for the night due to it potentially being "inappropriate" (sickening to others). That means Mystery Breakfast. It also means I get (have) to eat two cans of ??? tomorrow. I'm so fucking pumped.

Day 3: The Eye of the Storm

2010-07-22T23:17:00.014-05:00

Two days down. Two explosions. Wait, did I say two? See, actually it's three. The contents of the second half of day two's can got put down the disposal, and managed to clog the drain. This caused the sink itself to explode from both sides with some kind of noxious browngrey slime. So there's that.

Next, the camera gave up hope. It's been used to photograph some truly horrible things in it's time, but The Can Game was too much for it. It finished eating the last set of batteries in the house and refused to take any of the spares I could scrounge up out of other lektriks. Way to go, Can Game. You managed to not only destroy my ability to eat things without gagging, you've also robbed my camera of the will to live.

Curse you Camera. You have chosen the easy way out.

What with all the 'excitement', it was quite late when we started cooking. So something tame was in order. Something simple. We chose the smallest can we had:

A can with a message of peace and harmony.

That message? All lies.

So.

That appears to be some kind of veg. Pickled, of course. There were at least 3 distinct components in the can. Green ovoids, tan lumps, and some kind of translucent disks. I'm going to call them Pukeumbers, Hatepears, and Translucent Disks. Time for the initial taste test!

Oh god, not again.

Be at ease, dog. Your services will not be required tonight. I have a better subject.

Happy Anniversay babe. Any regrets?

I choose to take that as a positive sign.

In the interest of fairness, I tried one of the Beige Bananaohgodnoes and made Meg eat one of the Putrescent Possibly Pickles. To our surprise, after the initial gagging, they pretty much tasted like they smelled. Slightly sweet, slightly pickled, and only slightly unpleasant. Given our track record thus far, I'm going to consider that one a win.

The face of victory.

So, what does one do when presented with some Only Mildly Objectionable Vegefruit?

Choosy moms choose Jif.

We decided on nutbutter sandwiches. As an aside, it has been brought to my attention that we have now eaten some variation on the sandwich 3 days in a row. I promise that whatever malignant surprise tomorrow's can has in store for us will not be eaten betwixt two pieces of bread.

Ok, whip out the last of our bread, apply peanut butter vigourously, and liberally add diced dickfruit.

Trust me, I know how good this looks. If you need the recipe, just ask in the comments.

Meg felt that the finished product looked entirely too edible, and attempted to create some parity between the innocuous outside and the horrors within:

The sandwich? She cries because she is so sad.

I admit, before I ate mine, I had to shake off a little nervousness. After all, what if it ruined me on peanut butter forever? Was I really going to take that chance? Sure, the lump I ate wasn't so bad, but what about the clear things? Meg didn't mind the green bit, but have you seen some of the things she eats? Peanut butter sandwiches are so comforting, could I really dare to tarnish that feeling?

Dear readers, the can game is not for the faint of heart (or stomach, or nose, or gagreflex). We're not just eating things and having a laugh...there are real risks involved. Still, it was too late for fear. We had entered into the Can Game in good faith, and I'd be damned if I was going to back out now for fear of a little funk. Also: this one didn't explode at all. You don't have to Ask the Scientists to know that that is some kind of good omen. We took the plunge.

Tomorrow on Catastropies: Watch Jamie and Megan cram more crap into their mouths.

I can promise you that these will be the blandest looks you will ever find during the CanGame.

The verdict? It's actually quite lovely. You have a basic peanut butter sandwich, but with a hint of crunchy sweetness. Like a cross between chunky nutbutter and some kind of crystallized jelly. For all I know, it was Pickled Jelly Stems or something. I'm not saying that I'm going to go on down to the Asian Mystery Market and get a pallet of pickled peace pigeon cans or anything, but it was definately the best eating thus far into the proceedings.

Of course, that means that tomorrow's cans will have some kind of Exploding Eyestalks in them.

Day 2: You've Got to be Kidding Me

2010-07-21T22:58:00.010-05:00

So, yesterday was rough. No one is going to take spider-eggs calmly. We were hoping that we had maybe picked the worst possible can right out of the gate, and we were in for some kind of smooth sailing for the rest of the week. Really really hoping that. You don't even know.

The meal plan for the night was Drip Beef Sandwiches. Last night, I put a whole mess of stuff into the slow-cooker and let it roll. When I got home from work, I had this:

I suppose it looks a bit like cat-sick. But it smells incredible.

It was my turn for can-picking, so I chose a normal looking can. It had a funky shake to it, like there were some kind of chunks in it. I thought to myself: "Maybe it's frute!" I'm sure, because it's Sara and Mike, that it would be some kind of dickfruit. But at least it wouldn't be spider eggs!

Definately not fucking fruit.

So, at first look, not real promising. It looked like this: Suppose that I ate some kind of spider eggs last night. Suppose further that I didn't have a cast-iron stomach and he-man constitution. Suppose further that I made sick-up. Finally, suppose that I worked in a canning factory, and that sick-up went bang into an unsealed can which I was too afraid of losing my sweet canning job to report. Mystery Can #7 looked just like that Shameful Sick-Up Can.

Meg gave me one of those looks that said "boyfriends what love their incredible girlfriends don't make them eat canned sick." I reassured her as much as possible (not fucking much). Hang on, though. Maybe it's just soup! Sure, it doesn't look good, but it could be soup! I smelled it to check it's souposity.

SMELL!

Not good. Not good at all. But maybe it's some kind of dick soup. I mean, it's possible. And soup is so safe and friendly! Then I remembered the clumps. I bravely stuck a fork in there and rooted around. This is what I found:

That's no soup.

What. The. Fuck.

This was a joke, damnit!

Being who I am, I immediately thought of Snouts. Some kind of horrorsnout, snipped live and brined in the tears of the innocent. Meg, on the other hand, thought it looked much more like a tongue. The tongue of a festering bloatape (that eats human flesh) that told only lies and cursed out God.

Artists rendition.

So...there we were. Beef is sitting there, ready to apply sandwich making upon. What the hell are we going to do with these?

Did I mention that they contain skeletons?

Well, Meg has a thing for salmon patties. And I have some skills in creating patties out of what-have-you...Let's do this!

Step 1: Kill it!

Step 2: Bury it in things that don't smell like the inside of nightmares.

Step 3: Beat it into submission

Step 4: Burn!!!!!

Just a note here....Seconds after adding them to the oil, they exploded. Again. Two days, two cans, two freaking nights in a row covered in burning oil and mysterious product. Why are you doing this to us? We're so good to you. We give you sweet mummies and faemylke. You give us things that should be buried at a crossroads after dark, and then explode when purifying heat is applied. We're going to cook tomorrow's can in a church.

Step 5: Silly Megan, that's not enough mustard!

Step 6: ...still not enough mustard.

Step 7: Time to eat!

I tried. I really did. I put spices in there. I put a ton of mustard on there. You can make anything edible with mustard, for god's sake.

Well...almost anything.

To be fair, it wasn't the worst thing I've ever eaten. Mostly, it tasted like mustard and crunch and bread. I manfully ate my way through. But sometimes I would plow right into a nugget of tongue that would just make me want to slip into a comforting coma. Meg tried several times to slip portions of the snoutburger to the dog or cat, only to have to eat them anyway as the fucking animals refused to eat it.

Five days to go. Maybe tomorrow I'll open up a nice can of live fireants!

Day 2: The tiniest can of all

2010-07-21T21:58:00.014-05:00

Now I know for a fact that Jamie's going to hate me after this. I've opened two of the cans he sent me and they've both contained something, if not delicious, at least palatable. I certainly didn't extend that courtesy to him. I'm actually hoping he just threw a couple real mild ones in there to lull me into a false sense of security (smugness) and tomorrow I'll open a can of jellied farts or something.

I chose the smallest can today. We had chili for supper and it looked like a can of tomato paste. "Cool," I said. "We can just mix this tomato paste in this chili and it'll be like we're eating chili."

I called it "Lil Sidewaiz F"

We had some trouble opening the can due to its size...no, that's not true, we had trouble opening the can because our can opener is a huge, child-safe, ergonomic piece of crap. I don't care if my can opener leaves sharp edges, just open my can without making it look like I beat it with a rock. If I cut myself on a sharp can edge, that's my fault and a lesson in consequence that hopefully betters me in the long run. Like when people hit their kids.

Imagine the sound of a car being crushed.

Oh, and it mangled the can so hard white started dripping from it. Well, that's Not Tomato Paste.

Shit, get it over the sink *scree scree scree*

It's white, waxy and leaves a film on my skin...seems like it might be cream of coconut, but it doesn't have a strong coconut smell or flavor. Maybe just a hint of it, but I'm going to treat it like it is anyway.

It's like the can is all :D about this...

So I have this bowl of white liquid what might be coconut...I thought about drizzling it on my cornbread or mixing some into my chili, but those were both stupid fucking ideas, but then Mike says "Pina Coladas?". Way better idea. Pina somethings anyway. With Sprite (the worst of all soda flavors).

Pineapple cups + fucking Sprite + white "maybe coconut milk"= drink.

Mixed them up. The bubbles from the sprite come out all foggy. Like witches brew. That's promising. Maybe this is Pure Wytch's Milke and I just made a fucking cocktail out of it. We can't wait to get it into our mouths.

Looks scummy, like a townie dirtbag of a drink

Mike's shirt tried to fite it...

it weakly hissed back

The first drink was a little thick and coated my teeth, but tasted pretty decent really, for something that might have come from a coconut (alternately, from a Wytch's Teate)

the white stuff is congealed flavor...I'm not even kidding, the consistency of butter and I had to kind of "pudding chew" it

Oh, right...the pineapple I put in there...that means...

...that there's a glob of pineapple chunks loosely glued together at the bottom of this glass with some kind of coconut (Wytch's) butter (Butere) that forms when you mix cream of coconut(Wytch) with Sprite (the worst soda ever).

This fucker hit me in the face.

I guess I'm not great at physics...why would I assume that pieces of pineapple in the bottom of a glass would just slowly slime into my mouth and not rocket into my nose and glasses?

Overall, pretty tame so far, Jamz. I thought you were a man, not a mouse.

Day 1: These guys missed the point

2010-07-20T23:46:00.014-05:00

Jamie exaggerates. When he asked me what I would rate the cans I sent to Indiana, I said 8. I could have found 10s, you assholes. He was right about the hobos though. Like I told him, though...I didn't send them anything I wouldn't be able to handle. I might have to do it in the crapper with Mike holding my hair, but I could do it.

So, I chose my can my shaking them all and deciding to eat the most interesting sounding can. "G" made a moist squelch-thump, so obviously that was for me! I laid it out on the kitchen counter so I wouldn't forget (like I would, this is so exciting).

Not that I couldn't tear it open with my very teeth.

I had some time to kill before dinner, so I did what I always do. Incessantly play WoW, do drugs and catch birds in nets. You might think I'm joking, but two of the three I actually did today. Mike probably did something physical and handy like weld old metal into a bench or something.

Eventually, we decided it was time to eat. The night's menu? Chicken topped with spinach souffle and bowtie pasta. And the wetly-smacking tinned delight that awaited us. What's this? Seems to me that someone doesn't think whatever lives in this can is fit for human consumption.

Joke's on you. Having a face makes me want to eat it harder.

So, time to crack that can and see what treasures await me. What will be inside? I'm half-hoping for a cheeseburger or a log of meat. I don't want chicken! Help me, can, whose top tells me to follow the cooking directions on the missing label! This is what whumped out at me.

Oh.

Smells spicy, kind of sweet. Moist and heavy. Brown with darker brown inclusions.

You think I didn't scoop that out and taste that?

Imagine a fig newton. Or like 30 fig newtons wetted down with warm tap water, beaten to a paste, slimed into a can, then steamed in that can. I might also be way off base and this is actually ground up mummies. You know what, G? I don't care if you're ground up mummies, you taste like soggy newton and you're great. You'll be dessert!

Mike went about heating his dinner while I decided I was going to be a little bitch and not eat any chicken, meaning I needed to cut up two slices of American cheese and eat my bowties with that and delicious Ragu.

Bowties make everything classy. Even that PBR sports bottle I drink sweet tea from.

OMG that dinner was bangin'! I can't wait for my delicious desert! We're fancy around here, so I decided to serve my spicy mummy-loaf warm. Warm from the microwave, that is. Onto a paper plate it went.

1:15

I stood with my nose pressed up against the microwave window in anticipation. After what might be considered the most excruciating one minute and fifteen seconds of my life, it was finally done. A cloud of cloying steam issued forth from the mouth of the microwave, and when it cleared it seemed that the loaf had shrunk a bit. Deflated? Gave up? I needed to embarrass it further by dividing it in two. It didn't cut so much as it smashed down to the point where there was no loaf left between the halves. Some pieces did crumble off. I'm not sure how it did that, because it sure as hell isn't dry.

No scarabs came pouring out. Advantage: Sarz and Miek

It left quite the greasy stain on that paper plate. The kind where it becomes translucent. Which lead me to decide that a dessert this high-class needs to look the part. Whipped cream and "dandy daisy" sprinkles.

Aww!! :D

Then immediately:

:D...wait...:(

It's sweet and sticks to your teeth to the point where I'm not swallowing anything, but it doesn't taste bad really. Fig newton, but cake-y and dense...like a fruit cake. I soldiered on, even though by about the third bite I really didn't want any more of it.

Not Pictured: Me passed out next to that.

I stopped when I got a sharp pain in my shoulder.

Day 1: Dear God, Let me Die!

2010-07-20T21:42:00.011-05:00

I admit, for all of my fearful posturing in the introduction, I was pretty excited about The Can Game. After all, it gives me a chance to do what I love to do, which is cook bizarre crap and then force it down my gullet. I also get to make other people both eat bizarre things, and eat my "cooking". What could go wrong? It turns out....lots.

See, when Meg and I picked our cans, we aimed for things that would be interesting, hard to guess, or fun to write about. Sara and Mike apparently chose things starving wolves and hobos had picked over and rejected. On a scale of one (food) to ten (canned assholes), I rated our selections at about a 4. Sara and Mike rated theirs at The Innsmouth Horror.

Press on, heroes. I made Meg pick our first stop on the journey to Candemonium. She chose #3.

I choose to believe that they duct taped the outside because the 'food' within had burned through the can, Raiders of the Lost Ark style.

Our menu for the night consisted of a sausage and artichoke pasta with red peppers and fresh mozzarella cheese. In a perfect world, this can would have contained some delicious sun dried tomatoes. Or perhaps a tapenade for our loaf of french bread. What did we get?

1: Anticipation. 2: WTF? 3: Goddamn spider eggs.

Eggs. Canned eggs. What could produce those eggs? I have no idea, but assume spider. That's right. We get to cook with spider eggs. The can smells like high school chemistry. The outside of the glistening white orbs is tacky and beslimed.

The inside? Delicious cream! Just kidding, it's bird vomit.

Ok, we have to eat 50%. That's 9 eggs. First step? Basic edibility check. For you non-pet owners, that means feed it to the dog and see if he pukes.

What's this? Treats?

I'm on fire on the inside! Please kill me now!!!

...Ok. That's not promising. That beast eats coffee grounds. He would probably eat scorpions with every sign of enjoyment. Still, he's just a dog. What does he know? Maybe it's really quite tasty, and his palate just can't appreciate the nuance.

Me: Perhaps it just needs salt. Dog: You were a good man. You'll be missed.

Well, I only gagged like four times.

Whatever, so they're not a snack food. I turned a hamburger into soup damnit. I'm not going to just give up because it tastes like the garbage disposal. I just need an idea. After some thought, I came up with Son in Law eggs. Thai dish that consists of a hard boiled egg that has been deep fried and served with sauce. I have some hard eggs...just need to whip up a sauce. Seems simple enough.

Stupid photobomb cat.

I set Meg to making sauce. After all, it involved everything that she loves. She got to meticulously measure ingredients, whisk things with vigor, and beat the damn cat away with a crutch.

She's a natural.

I heated some oil and put the eggs in to fry. My plan was to let them crisp, turn them on all sides, and produce something that was crisp and covered in sauce (and therefore hopefully untasteable).

What could go wrong? I'm a genius.

It's a trap!

See what's missing? That's right, there's an egg gone. You want to know why? Because it fucking exploded. As I was staring over the pan in confusion, another exploded right in my fucking face and hands. Really guys? Not only did you send me Spider Eggs...you also had to rig them to blow the fuck up? I get that I'm not going to get a flavor explosion from these hellcans, but I didn't expect an actual explosion. Jesus.

This is the first day. It's going to be a long week.

Plan B. Chop up what's left, and cover it in cheese.

Boring? Perhaps. But it has 100% less chance of exploding.

The final product:

Yeah, the 'spidereggandcheesewich' is the most appetizing part...

That pasta, huh? Grim. That's foul stuff. Over cooked, globby cheese, no 'sauce' to speak of. Yuck. To be fair, I had some other concerns (like being covered in mother-fucking spider-napalm). Time to put it to the test.

Me: It's like somebody pooped in melty cheese! Meg: If you close your eyes, you can pretend you're just eating toasted garbage!

Me: The first degree burns really added to the flavor! Meg: I'm eating cat food for the rest of the week!

Truthfully, the grilled spider sandwich actually was the best part of the meal. After eating it, we decided that the pasta was a total wash, and started from scratch. We went back into the kitchen, started with all new ingrediants, and prepared something truly divine.

"I have an idea..."

2010-07-20T21:23:00.004-05:00

I really should have known better. There I was, minding my own business, when Sara sends me that message. There was this tiny voice that said: "Nuuuuuuu!", but no matter. The idea? Cans. Mysterious cans. It works like this. Meg and I pick out 7 cans, tear the labels off, and mail them to Sara and Mike. They do the same. Then, every day for a week, you cook dinner and open a mystery can. You can put it in your food, cook it in some other dish, or just eat it crying over the sink. You just have to eat 50% of whatever horror lies within.

This is a good idea!

The problem? Anything can be in them cans. You may be thinking that it isn't that scary...But have you ever really looked at what can go into cans? Have you ever been to the Asian market?

This would have actually been pretty rad.

Picture the worst nightmare you've ever had. You woke up, sweating and ill, and tried to forget it ever happened. Well, if you were Asian, you would have put that shit into a can and shipped to good old America.

In Asia, Cans eat you!

So join us, dear readers, as we post stories of our incredible journey through the world of canning. Over the next week, you'll get two posts a day of the terror and wonder of four people eating things that probably should have remained safely sealed away...

Compare and Contrast

2009-05-15T00:52:00.017-05:00

And now for something completely different. My usual process involves taking some left-overs and doing bad bad things to them in the name of snacks. Not this time. Instead, I thought that I would play it straight. I'll take a regular old recipe and prepare it in the way it was intended. No tricks, no gimmicks. Just plain old cooking.

Well, not exactly. See, I still have to work within my own constraints here. It's still 2 in the morning, and I didn't exactly go shopping first. No matter. Maximizing the effects of the ingredients you have via substitution and adaption is the mark of a good chef, right? We'll call this crime recipe abuse.

Case the Seventh: The Unwellington

I have always wanted to make/eat a Beef Wellington. You may be familiar with it from Hell's Kitchen. If not, the basic idea is to take a delicious steak (good start), season it (awesome), apply some kind of paste to it (I like where this is going), and finally wrap the whole damn thing up in pastry and bake it (what could go wrong?). Looking around for a recipie, I stumbled upon something even better! I found an illustrated guide to making a beef wellington. Step by step instructions with pictures included. This is going to be cake.

Step 1:

Man, that looks good. Why it was necessary to give it the ol' stab-n-tie, I'm not sure.

Ok, our first problem. The instructions call for "Filets 1 inch thick". I don't have those. I don't even have filets at all. Or steak of any kind. Or chicken or turkey or any kind of beef. I don't even have some kind of meaty-fish. Never fear though, adapt!

Caution: Items may be more inedible and mealy than they appear.

Ok, there we go. Got my meat all squared away. Awesome, 1/7 done. This is so easy!

Step 2:

This appears to be browning on the top of a pot lid filled with Kool-Aid. Oh Yeah?

So, step two is to brown them filets. This process is shown above entirely more complicated than necessary. Basically, it goes like this: Turn on pan, toss raw meat in pan. Is it brown? Yes? Ok, flip it. Is it brown? Yes? Congratulations. You don't need to take it's temperature, for god's sake. Brown = Done, Not Brown = ...Not Done. It's pretty irrelevant either way, since my meat is a frozen blockasteak. So, I 'browned' it in the microwave, as the box suggested.

The meat is on the left...er, right. Look how brown it is. I'm so good at this.

We are moving at some kind of hyper speed through this. I'm agog.

Step 3:

1: Get sand 2: Wrap white rag around sand 3: See how brown the sand made that rag? 4: That's good sand!

Step 3 is grandiosely entitled 'Prepare the Duxelles". Now, I don't know why the word 'duxelle' is plural there. Technically, nor do I in fact know what the word 'duxelle' means. The description calls for mushrooms, which I detest (and also do not have). So, time to adapt again! My paste is made of chopped chili peppers and sun dried tomatoes. The peppers are to add a flavor to the dish (the first thus far). The tomatoes are there because I like them.

Shown: peppers and tomatoes. Not Shown: The peppers that ended up right in my eyes (burning)

Consider my duxelle prepared.

Step 4:

1: What is it with this sand? 2: Meat on Sand on Cross on Wood

This step invloves laying out the pastry, and then assembling the Wellington. I don't have puff pastry (not that I have any kind of ideological objection, it just doesn't store well). I do have however, packaged three cheese biscuit mix. I'll just add a little flour to stiffen it up, and we're good to go.

This is what pizza looks like in Hell

Step 5:

Is that Beef Moon Waxing or Waning? Whichever is more delicious.

Some nonsense about trimming the pastry. I skipped it. Advantage: me.

Step 6:

1: Fold it over. 2: Fold it over (more) 3: Continuing Folding 4: Add triangles

This is a crucial step. The pastry must be carefully folded over your beef-paste mixture. You don't want to handle the puff pastry too much, or you will inhibit its...puffiness? This could take several minutes to do right apparently. In my version, I just glom-ed the edges together. I tore a hole clear through it, but just kind of mushed it closed. Advantage: me.

There could be anything in there. I'm going to pretend it's treasure.

Step 7:

This step should be called: Eat it up, Yum Yum

I'll reproduce the final instructions exactly:

Bake for 30 minutes and serve. Beef Wellington deserves it's reputation. It's both elegant, delicious, and can be completely prepped short of the final baking a day in advance; perfect for any special occasion.

Here is what I actually did:

Bake for like 107 minutes and serve. If this kidney looking gross had a reputation, I'm quite sure it would totally deserve it. It was both sickeningly brownish, raw on the bottom, and should never be prepped by anyone on any day; perfect only for dogs and your enemies.

Shown with Macaroni Majesty

Our guide finished his with some svelte asparagus. I used mashed potatoes (made from real potatoes, yo). Then I took the included macaroni and cheese and deep fried it into little taste-wads.

Score:
Ease: D- (Seven steps? Are you kidding me? That's about five too many steps)
Flavor: Double Eff (Wow, this tasted bad. Like, the kind of bad that's hard to imagine. As if each part of it had its own terrible taste, that when combined created some kind of meta-yurk. The little macaroni things were very very good though.)
Criminality: A+ (This was so wrong that I almost felt bad about it. Then again, I actually ate it, so that might be the source of the bad feeling.)

PS- Thanks to Kevin D. Weeks, who's creation I abused herein.

SMP (The 'M' is for Link)

2009-05-02T01:02:00.007-05:00

Being the Student of Value that I am, I have learned to take a Borg attitude to cookery. In most cases, I assimilate the idea of the cooking and adapt it to my own situation. Rarely, however, I will lift a recipe in it's entirety for the greater good of the Catastropie Collective (can you tell I've been watching entirely too much Star Trek lately?).

Thus, the SMP. The origins of the SMP lie in a different time in a different land. Mystical, right? Anyway, the story is that my friend Sara's mother spent some time growing up in Alaska. As a kid, her favorite delicacy was the Moose Pizza. That's not some kind of clever word trickery, eihter. They took a pizza, tossed a big hunk of moose on it, and then? Consume. Well, when they moved back to the County (that's Southern Indiana, for all you city-folk), momma decided that it would be cruel in the extreme to deny her own children this pleasure. Now if you don't know a lot about Indiana you may not know this, but the Great Moose is not in fact native to our fine state. What's a caring mother to do?

The answer, my frineds, is inside a pig. Its called the Smok-Y-Link, and its zip code if F-L-A-V-O-R. Now, you can't get it in Tennessee, so for this SMP, it was necessary to use the cocktail weiner:

And sad defrosted weiners they are. The liquid they are suspended in is in fact tears.

But no matter, shikata ga nai.

Case the Sixth: The SMP (or Smoky Link Pizza)

Source Food:

He's wearing his lying face.

The Chef Boyardee Pizza Kit. It's actually 100% impossible to create that pizza with the included ingrediants. This box essentially says: Look at this! You don't want to eat this delicious looking pizza! Instead, you should buy this kit! The back of the box seems to be attempting to make up for this fact however:

I have never had that much fun doing anything, ever. Also: Is dad some kind of farmer?

After looking at the back panel, you all must be curious about the amazing wonders that lie inside. And you'd be right to be curious. I mean when you really get right down to it, what do you need to make a delicious pizza? Persumably some kind of tender yet crisp crust. Well seasoned sauce. A huge amount of cheese (perferably with several varieties). And toppings...well, the sky is clearly the limit.

The packed helpfully labelled 'CHEESE' contains horror.

Instead, you get that. A can of tinny tasting sauce (older versions of the kit didn't even have a label on the can), a plastic baggy of flour that clearly leaks all over everything, and a small packet of CHEESE. Inside this packet (which is too small to contain any actual cheese), there is a small amount of powdery substance that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike cheese.

Pantry Items:

Why does everything I cook end up looking just exactly like dog food? Are these Kibbles? Or Bits?

Other than the Weiners, the only thing I used from the pantry was the last bit of homemade cheese (and this created some controversy, as I'll describe later).

Process:
Step one is to ignore all the instructions for the pizza kit. In addition to giving you a bizarre mash of ingrediants that cannot possibly be combined into the picutred 'za, they provide a set of instructions that are at best misguided (and at worst, the recipie for another type of food entirely). Next (well, turn the oven on), mix the bag of flour with a bit of oil and a bit of water to make a goey sticky substance we'll call 'dough'.

Looks and smells like the inside of a sheep

Then cover it up with a towel and put it beside the oven. Leave it alone for 20 minutes. Don't peek at it, don't move it, try not to even think about it. Go away. After you wait it out, you can sort of slime it out onto your cooking vessel (a pizza stone is awesome for this). The kit suggests that you divide your dough into halves. Don't do that. Just slime it all out there and try to spread it out so it's even. If you are feeling awesome, you can try to form a sort of crust on it.

Pictured: Me petting the crust-to-be softly, while gently crooning

Next, the kit suggests using the entire can of sauce. God in heaven, don't do that (unless you want pizza-soup...hmmmmmmm--maybe another day). You need maybe 3 tablespoons of sauce. An SMP is not a saucy creature.

Some kind of projective sauce Rorshach? Looks like a sideways pig to me.

Next, apply your smok-y-links liberally to across the surface. Don't be shy, you want a lot of them. They are the crucial ingrediant to turn this blandza kit into a delicious SMP. Once you have a good greasymeat coat going, it's time to shake your 'CHEESE' over the lot of it.

This is infinitely harder than it looks

I added some bonus cheese to the ensemble. This was the cause of intense debate, as I was breaking canon. Aparrently, the CHEESE is supposed to be necessary and sufficient for the needs of the SMP. However, that end of mozzerella needed eating up, so I was victorious.

Naturally, my Victory Mozz turned grey-brown as soon as it cooked. DELICIOUS!

Score:
Ease: A+ (it's practically a one-box meal)
Flavor: A (it's a pretty unique taste, all told...none of the individual components of it are actually very good, but when combined they form this kind of superfood. Who knows...)
Criminality: D (doesn't even have a food crime associated with it, but it's definately worth trying)

Super Fish Time GO!

2009-04-09T01:37:00.008-05:00

I'm a born'n'raised good old country boy. Fishin' is one of the primary forms of entertainment in the sticks, and occasionally you actually manage to land a mess of fish. At this point you're left with an important decision...what the hell do you do with it? If you answered anything but "Fry it!" you're completely wrong. People grill fish, people poach fish...I've even heard of people steaming it. What the hell? Have you ever heard of a great big family gathering where everybody comes up from the hollar and has a grand old time called a Fish Poach? Can you even put malt vinegar on a piece flacid grilled fish? Toss a bunch of broccoli and cauliflower and fish into a steamer and then smell it. You want to eat that? Well, I'm sorry...even the re-cook has his limits.

At any rate, this has lead to my enduring love affair with fried fish. There is a problem however. See, fish live in water. Unless you live right next to some water, said fish has to be caught, processed, and transported before it can be eaten. This means that the farther you live away from where your fish live, the greater difficulty you have in obtaining that fish 'fresh'. You know how when you do laundry, your socks smell awesome? And then after you wear them for a couple of weeks they get all stiff and weird and smell? Fish works exactly the same. Ordering fish is therefore always a gamble. Sometimes you get fish that is delicious. Other times, you get fish that is like this:

You can't see them, but there may as well be stink lines...

All is not lost, however. Through the magic of re-cooking, even stale fish can harbor flavor (Did you catch that? If not, it a-piers that you do not afishiate ichtich puns--enough). This calls for a metafood!

Case the Fifth: Fishy Cakes

Source Food: A 'rustic' sea food trio from The Half Shell. All my complaining aside, they actually have a pretty good record of doing good seafood. The King Crab Bisque is almost always delicious. I'm not quite sure what made this 'rustic' (could it mean old?), but it consisted of fried tilapia, shrimp, and scallops servered over a 'pepper cream sauce' (which...I believe consisted of diced peppers in some cream). Scallops were tiny but good. Shrimp was actually pretty wonderful. The tilapia was....not great.

Pantry Items:

That potato and egg configuration seems suggestive...

Peas and Moirpoix (which we've seen before, and will see again), Potatoes, an Egg (singular), a bit of dry mustard powder (awesome to keep around, and it doesn't go bad), and a healthy dash of Old Bay (seasoning for anything seafood and other stuff....please remember that it's salty!).

Process:
I knew I wanted to do fish-cakes from the beginning on this one. I'd been itching to do a metafood since the last post, and this oppurtunity couldn't be missed.

Oven on to 350. I cut up that bit of roll into cubes, put some OldBay on it, and tossed it in the oven to dry out a bit. Water in pot, cut up potatoes, left alone to cook. Next, in classic metafood style, I seperated everything into bits:

The bits of seafood almost seem to be swimming don't they? It's an Illusion, they're not that fresh...

Moir Poix in a pan with some butter to saute a bit. Cut up the fish roughly with a knife, and then ran through the mini-food processor. Normally, I'd leave the fish roughly chopped to provide texture, but the thought of plowing into a stalefish chunk really turned me off. Once the Veg was good and heated up, I put it in with the breading bits and processed that a bit as well. Once the taters were ready, I mashed them with a fork a bit, and then stirred in the 'cream sauce'.

Combination time. Seasoned the breading/veg mix with mustard powder and old bay, then mixed it with the fish crumbs. Put in enough of the potato mix to get a kind of mush (play it by ear here, it's hard to screw up). Lastly, put in frozen peas, bread from the oven (left corase, to provide the texture I lost by crumbing the fish), and cracked an egg on it:

Seeing this, I ate it all up. I actually had to go back to the resturant and re-order the meal to finish this post.

Time to get the ol' mitts dirty. Don't be squeamish, dive in there! The goal is to distribute the bread and peas all through the mix, and get it all coated in egg. Anytime you're making a patty, cake, or loaf you will need to use an egg in the mix. Eggs are the magic that holds the bits all together and keeps them from disintegrating in the frying pan. Next, I fashioned some cake/patty things:

See how thick these are? Don't do that. Also: why is the knife in every picture?

Time for the fryer. Used the tongs (tenderly, so tenderly) to transfer and flip. While they were cooking on the first side, I mixed up some Peanut Satay sauce and mayo to create Spicy Thai Mayonnaise (which sounds nasty, but tasted awesome). Did the flip, and then got out my bread and applied my Condiment liberally. Removed from heat, they looked exactly the same as they did before I fried them:

Grey-brown, lumpy, thick, and proxiknifal

The final step was to let them sog a bit, and then apply them to bread, thusly:

On the good china, with a little swirl of Condiment, what like in a Fancy Eatery

Score:
Ease: A (only took about 25minutes from start to stop. Metafoods are generally pretty easy)
Flavor: B- (given what I had to work with, it was ok. Biggest problem is that OldBay is saltier than drunken sailor and the patties are about 8 times thicker than they should have been for the onna-wheat-slice serving style)
Criminality: B+ (ordering fish, not enjoying it, leaving it in a car for 4 hours, refridgerating it for a day, and finally deciding that what it really needed was more cooking...that's pretty much Food Apostasy defined)

Dairy-lchemy

2009-04-06T01:47:00.017-05:00

As human beings, we're creatures of hopes and dreams. Some people want to find riches, while others merely wish to be enriched. Me? I have legions of dreams (running the gamut from going to a class to take a final only to realize that I've missed every previous class all the way to starring in my own apocalyptic zombie adventure). Those are small dreams, and not really a great fit for this space.

Instead, lets talk about a greater dream of mine. That dream is cheese. Not tawdry dreams involving cheese, don't look at me like that. Rather, the dream of creating such wonders for myself. For too long cheese making has been the province of the industrial cheese monger, a cold anonymous face grimly doling out his cheddars and neufchatels. No more, I say. Furthermore, you too can share this dream with me. Read on, and imagine a kinder gentler world.

Firstly, while the world of consuming prodigious provolone and pounds of parm (also: crates of chevre, a gross of gouda...I'll stop) is a familiar one to me, I know very little about actual cheese production. On the theoretical level, I understand that cheese is simply milk. Technically, if you leave your milk out for a week or two, you will get a "cheese". Experiments in this area have yielded only stinks and icks...a far cry from the fetas of my fantasy. Clearly, more know-how is required. To that end, I purchased the D-Lux Cheese Making Super Kit from Leener's (a fine purveyor of all manner of DIY cookery kits). They advertise it as a kit, but in reality, it is a kind of Cheese Mongering Course. You start at the basic level (where we are now) and work your way all up the spectrum to the Aged-3 Month-Minimum-Traditional-English-Cheddar. Despite the gratitutious praise and prompting of my friends, I knew that I was not ready for such an event, and began at the begininng: The One-Hour-Mozzerella.

All cheese making starts with two things: Milk and a BDP.

Big Damn Pot (center)

The manual suggested that I sterilize all the equippage before beginning. Normally, re-cook policy is to sneer casually at such blandishments, but since cheesemaking is about controlled bacterial action, it seemed like a good idea.

The tools of a cheese-makers Art

Want to have a nice relaxing time? Slowly pour an entire gallon of whole milk into a pot. Don't dump it in like you're ashamed of it. No, let it trickle in, unaware of everything that is about to happen to it. Like the walk of a friend who foolishly went to the bathroom on his birthday at the ChiChi's, and is sauntering back unaware of the cacaphony that awaits.

Sorry that we sing so bad. DO DAH DO DAH.

Now, let your friend milk slowly begin to heat up. While that happens, let me take a moment to create an understanding. Most of the stuff in this compendium can be easily (if not wisely) replicated by aspiring re-cooks the world around, and to that end I provide detailed instructions about what ingredients I use (often inappropriately) and how I use them (frequently ineptly). Turning cow juice into cojack is not quite re-cooking however. It is instead, I submit, total magimythical alchemy. As ordered by the dusty vellum included with the kit, I spent a good fifteen minutes before beginning preparing my potions. Mixing this with that. Spooning that into the other. Stirring thrice widdershins with one eye closed. Quite literally taking spoonfuls of mysterious powders from small stoppered jars. Squeezing several drops of clear and bizarrly named liquid into water (all while my helpers did the Dragnet Goat Dance and chanted).

From left to right: Benzine, Powdered Ear, Liquid Snake, Salt (in spoon), and the liquid from a box of Wet Ones

I'm not exaggerating. Cheese is freakin' magic. For example...2 minutes after adding several of the above solutions to my pot, my innocent warm milk turned into this:

If you could smell this, you'd be dead.

I bolted the lid on and let it set for twenty minutes (after which it both looked and smelled much worse). Next, I drained the "greenish liquid" (their words, I'd have used far worse). The next recipie in the book involved using that lethewater, but as I didn't have a biohazard container and I still valued my relationship with the person in who's kitchen I was squatting, I put it down the drain. Wisely (in my opinion) the next process was to get as much of that stink out of my transforming cheese. This was done by smushing:

Under the master's hands, the cheese dances

As well as such other dignified techniques as straining, more smushing, heating, yet more smushing, a bit of squeezing, and finally kneading (which works out essentially to smushing). Finally, you end up with a nice shiny mass of proto cheese that is hotter than you can belive:

Shown here: smushing

Now the fun begins. I got to take this pile of searing white goo and stretch it. And then stretch it. And then pass it around the apartment, letting everyone stretch it. Nominally, this is to incorporate some air into it, and to help it to become more "stringy". In actuality, I believe it is to instill in the brand new cheesemonger a sense of wonder and awe.

Look at what I have created!

Normal men are content to drink their milk peacefully (or perhaps in a cereal). Not I. I have taken that innocent milk through dark places; and at the end, I have produced something beautiful that is far more than the sum of it's parts.

I'm still holding it. It feels so good. Milk No More.

I wrapped it in plastic wrap and let it firm up a touch in the fridge. Nothing for it but to slice and serve.

Top: Slice. Bottom: Serve (super haute cusine)

PS - If there are any special requests, post 'em in the comments! I'll work with anything, and while I cannot promise it will end up tasting or looking good, it will be one hell of a trip.

PPS - A shout out to all the folks from the Fugly Forums!

Footware to Fantasy

2009-04-02T13:55:00.011-05:00

I have this love-hate relationship with steak. For the longest time, I thought that I just didn't like it. After all, it was tough, chewy, and bland. It took an A1 bath to get me to eat it at all. It turns out that I was missing something pretty vital: My da' has the uncanny ability to turn any piece of meat into a piece of shoes. All the time I thought I was eating strips and sirloins, I was actually eating the equivalent of tongues and heels. Can you blame me for not liking it?

This has led to me being picky about steak. When it's cooked right, it's delicious. If it's not cooked right, it brings me right back to the days of pulling laces out of my teeth and choking on aglets. A note on 'cooked right'...I'm an open-minded and non-judgmental individual. That means I will tolerate up to 'medium'. Everybody who is anybody knows that the proper way to order your steak is medium rare. Getting a steak 'medium well' or bygods 'well done' is saying: "Please burn the crap out of my delicious and often pricy meat! I'd much rather chew for 20 minutes than enjoy a savory meal!" I don't care if you tell me that it's "just the way I like it"....You're wrong, and you disgust me.

Now, most people seem to order steaks the wrong way, leading to many restuarant cooks being unable cook a steak the right way to save their lives. For example, exhibit A:

A well done(burnt) steak and an ocean of MashPotate

I don't mean to imply that I'm a food snob what gets pissy about every over-cooked piece of meat. In this case, it wasn't bad. I had just wolfed a huge amount of cheese fries (the remains of which will be the next post) and some soup (which tasted and looked exactly like white gravy with potatoes added). I picked at it, but seeing that it was burnt, I decided it was better served as blog-fodder than anything else.

The thing about leftovers...It is never the same meal as it was the first time. Even if you ignore a re-cook's advice and just eat them straight up, it is fundementally different. The first time, your food was served fresh off the heat (and likely still cooking). In much the same way that heating changes the texture and falvor of food (we call this 'cooking' in the biz), cooling back down has the same effect. In a way, cooling your food down in the fridge overnight is merely another type of cooking method. Trippy thought.

The long winded and belabored point here is this: Just because your food wasn't very good the first time does not mean that the leftovers won't be any good. Today is a prime example of this practice, which I'll term Reincarnation. What started as an overcooked steak and some seriously bland potatoes turned into one of the best tasting things I've cooked in a long time.

Case the Fourth: Let There Be Shepherd's Pie

Source Food: Most of a 'Cowboy Sirloin' with Garlic Mash from Rafferty's.

Pantry Items:

Cheesy Biscuit mix (easier to deal with then the canned pre-made variety, since it doesn't expire), red pepper flake, fennel seed, Woozy (Re-Cook gold here. Woozy is one of those things that will turn something from being bland to being awesome. When you're buying it, check the label...if it doesn't have anchovies in it, put it back), Frozen Moir Poix mix (fancy cook word for Carrots, Onion, and Celery), Frozen Peas (frozen veggies are awesome, and I always try to keep at least several varieties on hand)

Lastly, the biscuit mix calls for water. But water is pretty 'meh', so I wanted to use milk. Except that my milk is Gone Round The Bend. Cue a re-cook staple: Powdered Milk. Still your knee-jerk reaction here, and think about how many times you've gone to the fridge wanting to cook something only to find out that you don't have any good milk. How many times have you had to pass on mac-n-cheese and choke down yet another pizza or bowl of ramen becausey milk is stupid and only lasts a week? The twin gods of Value and Sloth demand a better answer, and that answer is powdered milk. Buy a box and stick it in the back of the pantry, behind everything else, a secret kept from all your friends and family (hide your shame!). When you use it, mix it double strength and pretend. Does it taste like milk? Not a chance in hell. But it does taste 'milk-y' and when your actual milk becomes 'cheese-y', you'll be glad you listened to your friendly re-cook.

Process:

My original idea for steak was a Wellington (which is still in the cards, so stay tuned!), but I had that whole mess of mashed to deal with. Instead, I took another great tip from Sara and went with Shepherd's Pie.

Note: My friend Mandy suggested that I do a Vegetarian Option. Well, to all the vegetarian types reading, you do have an option. It's called 'meat' and it's absolutely delicious! Offensiveness aside, I work with what I've got skulking in my fridge, and so far it's been meaty. Vegemeals will happen eventually, have no fear.

Ok, it's time to rock. Oven on 350. Tossed some of the moir poix mix into the pan with some butter on medium high heat. Chopped up the steak into bits, and ground up some of the fennel seed in my spice grinder (they're marketed at 'coffee' or as 'spice' grinders, and you can get 'em cheap). Once the Veg was good and soft, I added the meat in a big pile. Then I splashed a whole lot of Woozy over it.

We're in flavor country, here.

I put the biscuit mix in a bowl, used the rest of my 'milk' (probably close to a cup of the powder), and added 1 cup of water. Whisked all that up and let it set. Mix was coming along nicely, so I added even more Woozy and a couple of teaspoons of flour to gravy it up a bit. Look at this:

It all turned into the best food color ever: Brown

Added the frozen peas (don't ever put peas in until last, else they explode into mushnasty). Spoon it all into your vessel of choice (a classy glass pie pan for me). Flatten it out and pat it down with your implement.

Could the peas be more unevenly distributed?

I nuked the potatoes for the lesser amount. Microwaves have all these fancy settings, but it's not really necessary. All you need is a popcorn setting, a 1-lb defrost, 45 seconds, and 1:15. If it's not done in 45, give it another 45. If it's not done in 1:15, give it another 1:15. You're going to want to stir whatever it is up anyway, so why muck around with all the timing guess work?

I didn't need them hot, I just needed to soften them up so I could spread them on top of the meatpile (used a fork, worked fine). Next, pour your biscuit mix over the potatoes. That's pretty much all there is to it. I have a shitty oven, so I covered it with aluminium foil for 20min, and then cooked it uncovered for another 15. If you try to bake things and the top burns before it's done all the way through, use foil. End result:

*tears up* It's so beautiful

Seriously, why aren't you eating this right now?

Pie with huge monster bite out. Yeah, I did that with my mouth, dripping hot beef and gravy all down my chin.

Score:
Ease: A+ (this is so easy to do its ridiculous. I took like 10 minutes of prep and 35 to cook.)
Flavor: S+ (I ate a bowlful. Then, ate another bowlful. Then, started on the post. Then had to stop because I was looking at all the pictures, and had to eat more of it. It's that good.)
Criminality: F (This dish is not criminal, it's miraculous. Jesus turned water into wine. I turned crappy old burnt steak into this. I'm not going to post the score here, but you can guess.)

Irish Onion Soup?

2009-03-30T12:02:00.010-05:00

The Half Cheeseburger. It's almost a universal leftover. There's probably one in your fridge right now somewhere. These days, with portion size increasing beyond all sense of good taste, it's hard to complete an app, salad, soup, and your entire meal. Generally, by the time the server comes around sweetly asking about dessert, I just want to grunt at her and slip into a food-coma.

So, more often than not, I end up with this:

Reclining on a bed of OldFries

Now, the textbook solution is just to nuke-it-and-eat-it. However, old burgers are dry and usually taste of warm and not of flavor. Added to that, Value compels me to save the fries, but there is no cooking preparation on earth that can make leftover chips edible.

OR IS THERE?!? This is mostly a Transformation, but it also gives me a chance to demo a new Abomination: The Unholy Fusion. Fusion in cooking means to mix two different cusines into a harmionous supermeal. My vareity is much the same only without the 'harmonious' bit.

Case the Third: Ye Olde Irish Onion Soupe

Source Food: Half of an Irish Burger from Celtic Crossing and some chips.

Pantry Items:

Delicious Tab in background. Would love to ronch, but all gone. Hurm.

1 box of beef stock (re-cook pantry gold, here...I try to keep a box of beef, chicken, and vege stock in there), freezer butter, red onion (I like red because I like them in everything...onions also keep a long time, but don't refrigerate them until you've cut into them), and the 'bouquet garni' (a fancy cook word for bunch of herbs) made up of whatever bunch of herbs i had in the pantry.

The Celtic is my new favorite haunt. Wonderful pub food, and 2.50 pint night Mondays....What more could you want? Yesterday, I got the Irish Burger, which is a burger with muenster cheese and a rasher (kind of like bacon, but not really) on top. Ordered it medium rare, and got it well done, but we were there right before the kitchen closed, so I can't complain.

Today, true desperation struck. No food in the house, and a reheat on that burger didn't seem to cut it. A catastropie at lunchtime? So be it.

Process:

I wasn't 100% sure where to start with this one. I was discussing it with Sara and Mike over dinner (now knowing the fate of all leftovers In The House of the Re-Cook...). Mike suggested that I make a burrito out of it, and that is because he is an ass. I mused that I could do some kind of soup with it, and Sara suggested French Onion. Brilliant! Fits perfectly. Burger has cheese on it, and the bun can turn into the croutony-thing. Sure, French Onion soup doesn't have beef or potatoes in it....But no matter. Onward!

Firstly, oven turned on to 300 to dry out the bun. Pan on the heat with some butter melting to begin sweating the onions. Seperate burger into it's component bits. Chop up fries and beef (seperately). Stick the bun in a pan and put it in the oven to crouton-ify. I didn't have enough cheese by half, so I turned to the fridge for some old pepperjack. It certainly wasn't fresh, and a couple of pieces were starting to show a little mold. The cool thing about cheese is that you can just cut the mold off and the rest of it is fine.

Find that a repugnant thought? You should perhaps take a closer look at how cheese is made.

Next, I cut up the onions into slices. Don't bother breaking them up yet, as that will happen naturally as they cook. Protip: got onion juice on your hands? Don't want the stink of it to linger for days? While washing your hands, rub them on the stainless steel of the faucet. This will take care of the smell. Onions go into pan, with some salt on top. Diced up the rasher into little bits to put some extra fat and taste into the pan.

Arranging them like this took me 4 hours

And now you should go start writing that novel you've always wanted. Put the heat on medium-low and just let them sit. Don't even stir them for 20 minutes. Don't do it. They're not going to burn, so leave them the hell alone. After 20, you can start to stir them, but not all that often. I've seen onion soup recipies saying you need to stir it once a minute, which is complete crap. I stirred mine every 5 or so, and it got the job done. Because my stovetop is roughly 40 years old, I had to consistently alternate my heat setting between '3' (sitting in the sun on a cloudy day) and '2' (sitting on the surface of the sun). Your mileage may vary, but remember that this is a 'sweat' and not a 'saute'. If you hear that exciting sizzling sound, your heat is too high (sweating is the boring ugly cousin of saute). It takes forever, but this is the way you want to do it, trust me (or at least, it's the way I did it...)

There's nothing really productive to be done while the onions go. I posted auctions on Warcraft, checked my email, listened to music...Checked the onions:

They're still onions. Glistening limply in the pan.

I wrote a song, published a book, made a house of cards, whittled out the last supper....You get the idea. All in all, it took about an hour for them to get all brown and good (imagine if onions were made of milk chocolate...this is about the color we're looking for here). Don't be paranoid about it, you're not going to burn them on this heat setting. The pan turns brown on the bottom, but we want that. Added the beef in at this point.

--Crap, forgot the effin bun! It's been in there I don't know how long. Pull it out. Looks burnt. Too bad, it'll have to do, I'm out of bread...--

All that brown turns into superflavor if you can get it off the bottom of the pan. How? Well, they call it 'de-glazing' in the business. That sounds all hoo-doo, and basically it is. You know how you put hot water on a pan to clean it? Well it's the same thing. You use a hot liquid to clean off all that yum and get it back into your soup. French Onion soup generally uses wine to deglaze (you can use any liquid, but liquids that taste good are preferred). I refuse to keep some kind of liquor around just for cooking, so if I don't drink it, I don't have it. Therefore, since I detest wine, I never deglaze with wine. Water is too boring, and i'll be adding plenty of beef stock in a minute. Instead, I opened the stash and got out my medicine:

Rum is God's Drink

Dash a little of that in the pan, ensuring to hover over the ensuing steam to smell one of the best smells on earth. Cranked the heat up to high, and begin scraping the bottom of the pan with my implement (this bit is why I didn't use a non-stick). Once all the stuff on the bottom was loose, added all the beef stock and my herbs. Let it boil, then put the heat on low for another 20 minute simmer.

Wow, that's some brown there. Big Ol' Pan O' Brown

Finally, it was go time. Flipped the oven up to broil. Tossed the chopped chips into the mix, and seasoned it with salt and pepper (and fished out the bay leaf). Took my ramekin (fancy word for bowl, essentially--the difference is that it's cermaic and can stand heats up to 500 indefinately) and ladled some of the soup into the bottom of it, filling it up to about an inch below top. Then I put the bun pieces in with the smooth side up (if that makes any sense...you want the absorbant side down). I layered the cheese on top with a bit sticking over the side for that oh-so-enticing cheese rim. Stuck the result on a pie pan (don't just put it in the oven, how the hell do you propose to get that nuclear ramekin back out?) and put it in. I hunched in front of the window like some kind of pathetic hungry kobold and watched it do it's thing.

End Result:

Don't worry, all that brown is still in there, it's just hiding!

Score:
Ease: F- (good god, french onion soup is a pain in the ass. Don't start this if you have somewhere to be in the next few days)
Flavor: A (I was worried about this one, but it actually tasted awesome. That burnt bun? Turns out it was actually perfectly cooked for this....those soggy chips? Turns out that they morhped into some kind of yumnuggets and were the best part of the soup)
Criminality: B (Hamburger into Soup isn't something that just springs to mind, i think. It works well as an Unholy Fusion, as it is essentially a French Onion soup + an Irish Cheeseburger = Something that it not quite either, but tastes a bit of both.)

Pizza Magic

2009-03-28T01:32:00.014-05:00

Does anything look less appealing than old pizza? Sure, I'm a firm believer that day-old pizza makes the best breakfast on earth....But it doesn't look good.

In fact...it looks pretty much like crap

So, for the first live-with-pictures update to this endeavor, I decided to tackle the old pizza. That, and I just happened to have a pizza lying around. Therefore, may I introduce you to the second of the Great Abominations: the Transformation.

A transformation is talking one food and turning it into something completely different. This one sounds simple, but can actually be pretty complicated (witness tonight). Ready to bored the YumTrain to Flavortowne? All aboard for snax!

Case the Second: Chicken Penne with Stale Topping Sauce alongside Crustini (Oh yes, I went there)

Source Food: A modified Cali Chicken Bacon Ranch delivered from Dominos. I put it on thin crust and get roasted red peppers instead of diced tomatoes.

Pantry Items:

Milk (expires tomorrow, so just under the gun), Half Box of Penne (opened who knows when, but it's drygoods), Packet of Creamy Pesto sauce (A Re-Cook staple, along with many other instasauce powders), Frozen Butter (freeze it and it's good forever), Blockacheese (Parmesan this time, but any hard cheese will work. I know these are expensive, but often a few shavings will turn an 'I can't eat this' into a 'Well, I guess I can eat this afterall' meal. And...it keeps forever). Lastly, I had some Fig Balsamic Vinegar that was given to me as a gift (not pictured).

Delivery pizza is by definition taking your chances, but I've generally had decent luck with this pizza from Dominos. This time was not one of those times. The pizza came tepid, chockablock full of floppy undercooked bacon, and buried under enough parsley to re-forest a strip mine. I choked down a couple of the edge pieces when it was still 'fresh' and let it loom on my desk for the remainder of the day.

Inevitably, the witching hour came again. That hour after I'm playing Warcraft for the evening, but not ready to sleep. When I'm awake but listless, I get bored. When I get bored, I HUNGER! Since I am commited to Value, and this baby didn't seem like breakfast material, I decided to See What Could Be Done.

Process:

My initial thought was some kind of bake. The idea was to cook up some pasta, strip off the toppings and make them into a sauce, then make the crust into breadcrumbs for a topping on the bake. Thus, step one (actually, step one was to start boiling pasta and turn the oven on to 350) was seperation. I decided that I wanted to pull the red peppers aside since I didn't want to just lose them into the sauce and I was afraid that they would gum it up. Thus:

How I manage to not just eat that all up right off, I'm not sure.

Next step was to place the crust pieces on the top part of my broiler pan and chuck 'em in the oven. As inundated with grease and sauce as they were, they weren't going to burn, but I wanted them warm and hopefully to firm up a bit. After that, I just tossed the chicken-cheese-sauce-bacon bowl into my small Calphalon nonstick. These pans are King and Lord of Cookery. I couldn't cook without it.

If you're poor (and lets face it, no one else would be reading this), you may have trouble justifying the purchase. Firstly, you can get Bed Bath and Beyond 20% off cupons easier than anything, and they frequently have after-holiday sales. I picked up my two pack (tiny pictured below, and a real whopper) for 40$. This pan means that I can be the laziest bugger ever and still cook a couple of times a week, easy. Nothing sticks to them. You can cook dinner, leave the soiled pan on the stovetop, let it set for a week, run some hot water, and then wash it completely clean with a sponge. Cheaper pans need the dishwasher which means I have to do the freaking dishes entirely too often. Consult the Vimes 'Boots' Theory if you still have problems with this concept.

But I digress. I put a bit of butter into the pan (I have no idea why I always do this...most of the things I'm re-cooking have plenty of fat in them to keep them from burning, and I often utilize this fat later in the process....but I feel better about putting the butter or olive oil in first). Once that is nicely melty, crank the heat up to high to get the mix going. I wanted the cheese to soften up and release and the bacon to actually cook all the way through. The thought was to use this bacon grease to serve in place of the 1/4c of olive oil called for on the sauce packet (since I was out of olive oil). This worked a little too well, and I had to put the whole mess into the strainer to drain off some of the excess fat.

While that was happening, I put the hot pan back on the stove and made up the sauce mix with the milk and powder and a little butter (to replace some of the fat I was draining away? No idea. Seemed like a good idea at the time). Sometime in this process, the pasta was done. Protip: never drain pasta until you're ready to eat it. Take it off the heat and let it sit in the water. It will eventually get mushy like this so don't leave it all day, but you can buy a bit of time this way if you misjudged how long the pasta would take (like I did here).

While the sauce was thickening, I pulled the crust pieces out of the oven for a check. They were still pretty floppy, but nice and warm and smelling ok. I grated some of the cheese over them and stuck them back in on Broil for a few minutes to shock them back into stiffness. A word of warning: Broil will ruin your life. It turns things from nasty to perfect to burnt to black to actually-on-fire-omg in roughly 8 seconds. The trick is to catch them at burnt (because you'll miss perfect every time). The trouble is that there is no way of telling how long they will remain floppy and gross before hitting the magic period. I have no advice for you here, as it seems to be different for me every time. Leave the oven door cracked so you can keep an eye on it (and who doesn't like blasts of searing hot all up and down their chest and eyes?). Next, I incorporated the maxmeatymix into the sauce.

This looks like dog-food and chewed up grass. No one is sorrier than I.

After a few good stirs, I put the heat on low-medium and tried to decide what to do with the peppers. I knew they would make some kind of sauce, but...the pasta already had a sauce. I decided to forgo the 'bake' part (I didn't want to wait on it anyway), and leave the crust as-is for a kind of side-dish to the pasta dish. I quick-ran (well, a kind of shuffle really, but it was like lightning) to the pantry and grabbed the Fig Vinegar. I cut into the wax seal to open it, and manage to cut the entire ruddy top off of the bottle. Cue another suffle into the other room for my Swiss Army Knife with Corkscrew, which not only got the cork-stub out, but also managed to coax the fig vinegar out and all over my hands and table. I blended the peppers in the food processor, and added enough vinegar to make it into a gooey topping-like consistency.

That's pretty much it. End result:

Lookit that. Right out of the Hobo Olive Garden.

Score:

Ease: C+ (none of the steps was all that complicated, but doing them all at once is a bit of a handful. also, some of the ingrediants were non-standard pantry fair (re: the vinegar))
Flavor: B+ (Crustini was actually pretty tasty, although you could probably say that if you put roasted pepper and balsamic onto sticks and mud. Pasta was pretty good, although too salty. Remember when using OldBacon that it's going to be salty. Sauce thickened into a kind of sludge about 10min later, but I had eaten my capacity by that point anyway)
Criminality: B+ (Pizza and Pasta are pretty harmonious ingrediant wise, but turing one into the other seems dangerous. Furthermore, using the curst in such a way offends reason)

Original Sin

2009-03-27T18:11:00.007-05:00

Future posts will consist of pictorial representations of the before and after, fear not. However, for the first couple, I'll be working off of memory. You can all utilize your vivid imaginations to picture the powerful flavors.

The inspiration for this chronicle comes from a meal I prepared some time ago. Being a penniless graduate student, I at least pay nodding attention to Value when I go out to eat. Being someone who loves to eat and to cook, I go out to eat probably more than I should. The combination means that I eat at places with large portions, and quite often have leftovers. After all, paying 25$ for one meal is entirely beyond my budget. However paying the same 25$ and eating it 3 times equals GREAT SAVINGS.

That being said, the same leftovers only last for so long. How many times can you eat on the same pizza before you'd rather starve? For me, the answer it twice. Thus, the birth of the first abomination on the list: The Metafood.

A metafood is a food that is deconstructed and then reconstructed into a similar food. Sound complicated? Well, maybe a little. Why would you want to do such a thing? Pure Flavor, baby.

Case the First: The Tamale Chimi

Source Food: Delicious Tamales over Chili from Corky's

Pantry Items: Tortillas

Corky's does a BBQ nachos to die for, but I feel ridiculous ordering an appetizer as a meal. Besides, when split 2 or 3 ways, they are not nearly sufficient for a full meal. My meal choices are generally the BBQ Chicken dinner, some kind of Ribs, or the Tamales. They're all good, but that day I chose the Tamales.

Fast forward 8 or 10 hours, and it's time to eat again. No food in the house, and it's the hour of the morning where defrosting something is just not going to happen. The only Recent and Edible thing in the fridge is my leftover Tamales. Since I'd been burping them all afternoon, just scarfing them down wasn't going to happen. Thus, the first catastropie.

Process:

I scraped all the chili out of the box and off the talames, and stuck it in a bowl. I then chopped the cold talames up into small pieces, and blitzed them in the food processor. I now had a thick porky paste. In a pan, I saute'd some Pepper Onion Blend (Re-Cook Essential Ingrediant) with some butter. Into this I added some chopped garlic (Another Essential, keep it in the fridge, it'll stay good forever) and a bit of chipotle pepper from the freezer. Once this was smelling good and turning brown, I mixed it in with the porkpaste.

Next, I began heating some oil in a skillet. I used just enough to start coming up the sides of the pan. While it was heating, I began spooning the think mixture into the tortillas (I probably thinned it with something, sour cream maybe? I can't remember). I folded the tortillas into the standard shape, and put them seam side down into the now-hot oil. Once they were brown on the bottom, I flipped them. On all but one, the seam stayed closed...success!

Once they were all done, I dolloped some sour cream on top. If I had had some salsa, it would have been a nice touch too, or maybe some kind of cheese sauce. However, we must deal with what we have in front of us.

Score:
Ease: B- (food proccessing is always a pain)
Flavor: B- (needed something more to accessorize)
Criminality: A (metafoods are hilarious...try describing to someone the process of essentially making a burrito out of an old burrito without looking like a jackass)

Welcome!

2009-03-27T17:53:00.002-05:00

We've all been there. Staring at the fridge at 1am, starving. You can't remember the last time you went to the grocery store, but judging by the date on the milk, it's been awhile. You glumly survey the pantry, wondering what on earth you were thinking when you bought 3 cans of white beans.

The dilemma? There's nothing to eat. Nothing. All the easily prepared box foods are gone. The snack food is just a memory. The mysterious white packages in the freezer could be anything, and you've already eaten on the leftovers twice.

This is a blog for you. Moreover, it's a chronicle of my own personal journey through the underworld of food. The tagline mentions Abominations, and that's not a joke. I'll be combining things inappropriate ways...turning foods into other foods...sinning against nutrition itself.

Sit back and enjoy the trip. Don't expect to find recipes that you can repeat exactly. The whole point is to make do with what you have, when you have it. If you ever go to the grocery store and purchase ingredients for one of my flavorcrimes, you've missed the point. On the other hand, please tell me all about it!