koopa beach

Betty gave birth to 3 healthy puppies 3 days ago. It's hard to tell by the pictures, but each pup is about the size of 1 and a half wine corks. Food related posts to come soon; I promise.

I haven't posted in a while because I've been real busy working at the moving job. I was gonna make an article for this fig dish that I learned from Annika's cousins, but I accidentally deleted the photos on my camera. So instead, here's another narrative of hijinks.

    So me and my brother Josh are really bored and my parent’s had just left the house to go to the grocery store or something. As usual, when we have the house to ourselves, we opted to blow something up. I had a bunch of pulverized “D-engine,” powder hiding on of the back shelves of my basement, so once my parents left, I stuffed it into a toy car. It was a little aluminum die-cast model of a British taxi-cab, and we rigged it with a sparkler firework as a fuse.
    It wasn’t really a fuse though. The basic plan was to light the sparkler and then just shove it into the payload of explosive powder inside the little toy car. So naturally we elected my youngest brother Zach to perform this task.
    So Zach is standing in the driveway with a lit sparkler in his hand looking at me and Josh, who are safely ensconced behind a wood pile 15 yards away. Sitting at his feet is an explosively-rigged toy car, when he looks at us and says, “wait, where do I put it?”
    At that point, a single spark drops off the end of the lit sparkler and ignites the toy car which in turn produces a massive fireball that completely engulfs Zach’s hand with the sparkler.
    He starts screaming bloody murder and running around the driveway waving his hand around because it is on fire. I don’t remember it clearly, but I’m sure our neighbor saw the whole thing- cause I know he said, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!” And I yelled back, “NOTHING!”
    So we tackle Zach onto the pavement and swat out the fire on his hand. It’s all fucked up. Basically, the skin is now grey and there are yellow blisters on the surface. The rest of the arm is flushed red with blood and so we are basically fucked because my parents will be home at any moment and the first thing they’re gonna ask is, “what happened to Zach’s arm?”
    So it’s me and Josh standing around in the driveway with a hysterical Zach, and we need to make an executive decision. We decide to lie to our parents. We need an innocuous reason for Zach to have burned his arm that doesn’t involve explosives, and then we realize, “wait a minute, Zach really likes Ramen Noodle Soup! What if he burned his arm with soup?!!!!”
    So we clean up the driveway and we start boiling a ton of water on the stove in our kitchen. We wait untill my parents pull their car into the driveway and start walking into the house. Then, on cue, we pour the boiling water onto the floor and take a glass bowl and smash it on the floor of the kitchen. Zach starts screaming again because we told him to, and then he runs up to my mom yelling, “the soup burned my arm!!!”
    They buy it hook line and sinker, but the worst part was that after they brought him to the hospital, the doctor gave them instructions on how to treat a water burn. At first me and Josh were relieved that a medical authority would buy our lie, but then later we were like, “what the fuck kind of ignorant doctor did you bring our brother to?”

muzak

I bought these two little chickens that came in one package at the local Korean market. I guess they're comparable to Cornish game hens. Basically, you want to cook these on a metal baking sheet at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes; or until the skin is a golden brown or the internal temperature reads above 160. They're a little bit tricky to roast because of their size. They came out just slightly overdone, but still delicious. The skin was the best as I had basted them repeatedly with Chili-Honey-Butter.

After removing the guts and adding a generous amount of salt and pepper to each chicken cavity, I stuffed them with:
Half a medium yellow onion, quartered
1/4 of a honey tangerine
5 cloves of garlic
sprigs of thyme
sprigs of pineapple sage (or just regular sage)

Truss up the chickens and rub a little salt into the outside skin. Pop them in the oven and start basting after 15 minutes. Rotate the pan each time you open the oven.

This was served with some mashed butternut squash and some leftover salad and rice with balsamic dressing.

Last weekend I cooked barbecue ribs for a pool party at the Lindgren School. I've cooked ribs about 5 times now, each time I try to improve, I become more greatly aware of how little I know about slow cooked barbecue. It's an incredibly finicky science. But here's this method. It made ribs that were just on the edge of medium-rare with a great flavor. My frustration was with the texture of the end product. When ribs are really good, they should be falling off the bone, or at least, the rib bone should be able to freely rotate in the sockets. The ones I made here came out a little on the stiff side.

The Rub (from "The Southwestern Grill":
2 tbs. chile powder
2 tsp. ground cumin
1 tsp. black pepper
1 tsp. GRANULATED brown sugar
1/4 tsp. garlic powder
1/4 tsp. salt

I've also heard that you should never use salt or sugar in your rub, but I haven't been able to find any recipes that follow that rule. I don't know if I trust it either, cause I like my ribs sweet and wet.

The night before you barbecue, prepare however many sides of baby-back ribs you want to cook (I made 3). Remove the membrane and trim excess fat. Apply the rub moderately over both sides of each rack. Rub it in. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Now the hard part. To cook these I used a standard Weber charcoal grill. I made a small pile of hot coals arranged on one side, with steel baking pans of water located directly above and to the side of the coals. These are supposed to work as heat baffles, so that your ribs don't scorch and so that they stay moist.

To prep the ribs, I curled each rack into a spiral and secured it with a chop-stick. This is maximizes the use of space within the grill, and I didn't have a lot of room with the heat baffles in place.

So the grill should operate between 220 and 250 degrees fahrenheit for 5 to 6 hours. Low and slow is the key. Add coals as needed and check the temperature often with a digital thermometer, so you don't have to open the lid and waste the cooking heat. I also added wet hickory chips every now and then. When the ribs are almost done, baste them with barbecue sauce and let them cook for another 5 minutes.

So I thought this method would render me some fall-off-the-bone ribs, but I didn't get that. If anybody has a tip as to what I did wrong or any guidance, it will be welcome.

So, at a party 2 weeks ago; I was talking to my friend Nick on the topic of hot dogs, and he mentioned his favorite way to cook hot dogs is "hot dog bacon." The instructions are basically "microwave the shit out of it." When I want a hot dog, I usually wrap one in a paper towel and microwave it for 1 minute. Nick was like, "not one minute, 5 minutes. It turns into bacon."
Well, it didn't turn quite into bacon, but it was not unpleasant I must say. Imagine a kind of hot dog flavored pretzel stick covered in scalding grease.

So, this past Saturday night Olivia had her 21st birthday party and we had 2 kegs and we had a ton of liquor and a whole bunch of hot dogs and hamburgers and there were like seven dogs and some of the dogs ate the hamburgers out of people's hands and we yelled at them and we drank beer in the horse stables and the horses loved it and I fed the horses like 5 apples each and then Mac head-butted me cause he wanted more apples but we were out of apples  and there was loud music and my puma trainers got all wet from the grass dew and we had a potato cannon that me and josh built and it was really loud and dangerous and we had fireworks and it rained a lot and then the sun came up and I was hung over and the dogs were sleepy because of eating the hamburgers and then I picked up some trash from the party and then I drank some more wine and then we talked about how one of the dogs should be excommunicated to a japan-bound garbage barge and everything was aaalllllllllll-riiiiiiiighhhhht.

This the dish we cooked on the last night of the North Carolina trip. If you don't know what Prosecco is, it's like champagne, but much better. The worst bottle of Prosecco is better than the best bottle of champagne.

5 or 6 cloves of garlic, minced
1 large onion
1/3 cup of minced tarragon
2 sticks unsalted butter
1 cup Prosecco
juice of 2 lemons
Salt
Pepper

These are just approximate amounts of ingredients, since we kept adding more of everything to adjust the taste. But essentially you just need to lightly saute the garlic and onions, then melt everything else in it together over low heat.
You use this to brush all over the lobster once on each side while it is grilling.

You prepare the lobster my making sure the claws have all been shut and secured with rubber bands. Grab the middle of the lobster with one hand. Then carefully take a long chef's knife and stab it in the center of the head, between the eyes. Continue the cut down to its conclusion, bisecting the face. Then flip the knife around and cut the rest of it in half. Remove the intestinal track, which will be a dark green. This supposedly is the most humane way to kill it, since the brain is instantly destroyed. But hey, I'm no lobster doctor.

This is a small tree frog that was rescued from the inside of the grill before I turned it on. I actually thought it was a rubber toy until I touched it then screamed like a girl.

This is another thing I cooked in North Carolina. I don't have exact measurements because I just eyeballed, or rather, wineballed, everything. There's a step that you usually wanted to do with clams before cooking them, but I forgot this time. Put them in a water filled container so that they are submerged and stir in a small handful of flour, then leave it for a half hour or more. The clams will consume the flour-water and work it through their system, expunging any stray sand or seawater. I forgot to do that with this, but they weren't gritty, just a tad bit sea-water-ish.

You'll need a stockpot with lid, or similar container.

Melt a lot of butter in the pot and add some diced shallots.
Add all of the clams, shake them around a little.
Add the juice from a few lemons and some wine.
Cover and let the clams steam until they all open up. Discard those that don't open up.
Add some salt, pepper, parsley.
You could also add some milk or cream if you wanted to.

Me and my girlfriend traveled down to outer banks, North Carolina, over Memorial Day weekend, where my parents had rented a house. It was a fine trip, however the beach was too cold and windy to get any enjoyment out of it, due to it being so early in the season; so we mostly regulated ourselves to the pool (and me to my brother's new copy of Grand Theft Auto 4) On one of the nights we went to this amazing restaurant called The Blue Point, in the town of Duck. I'd been there before the previous year and it was still just as good.

Chipoltle bourbon barbecue baby-back ribs.

seared jumbo scallops
french green lentils & chorizo sausage —whole grain mustard butter sauce—fennel salad