I just finished one, courtesy of Alton Brown: Fried Mac & Cheese!! Yep, you heard me right!
First, begin with the World’s Most Amazing Mac & Cheese (that would be my recipe, and no, you can’t have it. But it involves lots and lots of cheese.) or make your own recipe. But it has to be the baked style, so it will set up to a nice firm, slicing consistency when it’s cold.
Eat some, then chill the rest.
Slice into chunks of any size you like.
Dip in egg, then roll in PANKO crumbs (god, I love panko crumbs!) and drop into nice hot oil.
OH MAN!!! It’s SOOOOOOOOOOOO good!!! And surprisingly, it’s not horribly greasy. It’s like a croquette.
Important, as with all fried foods, to ahve the right temperature of fat so that it doesn’t soak in. (remember those Crisco or Wesson commercials wherein they would fry bread, and the “crappy-not-Wesson” brand would soak into the bread, while the brand name wouldn’t? What a crock…)
HAOAP dessert: warm chocolate cake with butter. Best was Sara Lee chocolate pound cake, but they stopped making that 30 years ago.
Well, it’s definitely heart attack stuff, but she lost me with the Velveeta, and given the insane amount of fat in the cheese and the half and half, I don’t even understand the point of the butter…and I’m a woman who believes that most carbohydrates exist as butter-delivery vehicles.
Here at the Minnesota State Fair, you can get hotdish (casserole), battered & fried, and served on a stick. Except that it’s the ground beef-potatoes-mushroom soup hotdish, rather than the mac & cheese type.
A recipe from the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook for “Fried Cream”–basically you take two eggs, three egg yolks, flour and milk, cook it down to a thick paste, add cheese, then cool it, slice it. dip the slices in bread crumbs and deep-fat fry them! And people think my (Veggie) Sammich O’Death–(soy) bacon on a toasted buttered salt bagel–is bad.
There’s the Horseshoe from Springfield, St. Louis also has a “Slinger.”
A Slinger is a hamburger patty, covered with hash browns, covered with a couple eggs (any style), covered with chili, covered with onions and cheese. There’s a breakfast version (that I’ve seen served in other places as a “Haystack”) that replaces the hamburger with sausage and the chili with gravy and omits the onions.
Ross’ Diner in Bettendorf, IA (one of the Quad Cities), has a “Magic Mountain”, which is grilled texas toast covered in their “loose meat” hamburger, covered in hash browns or french fries, covered in cheese. They also have a “Volcano” which is the same thing with their (very spicy, for a restaurant) chili on top.
The Midwest is the master of heart attack on a plate food.
My favorite is three sunny side up eggs, a pile of greasy (they must be greasy) hashbrowns, and four sausage links. Cut everything up and mix them together. Salt heavily. Eat. Enjoy this with a side of biscuits and sausage gravy (with extra gravy).
Yum. If Denny’s hadn’t gotten so expensive, I’d eat this all the time!
I’m from Bettendorf, and ate at Ross’s occasionally back in the 70s. I don’t remember the dishes you mention, but I do remember their loose meat hamburgers. They also had something that loosely resembled a taco – a soft tortilla lightly fried in lard & filled with loose meat. Topped with their hot sauce (sort of a watery salsa with a surprising amount of heat), it was a pretty good, albeit unhealthy, meal.
Growing up on food like that, it’s no wonder I’m going in for a cardiac cath (and probable angioplasty) next week… :eek:
I had a slinger for the very first time two Sundays ago at 5:51am after closing the Oakwood at 5am with some friends after a show.
Hash browns, 2 cheeseburger patties, eggs and chili with two pieces of toast and butter on the side. You get a certificate if you finish it. Mine’s still in the car somewhere, kind of embarassed to bring it in the house.
I still haven’t made my Ultimate heart killer; a country fried bacon, avocado, and bean chimichanga suiza with sausage gravy.
In Chicago you can get deep fried bacon at the Wiener and Still Champion on Dempster in Evanston.
Marlboro Man’s Favorite Sandwich, courtesy of Pioneer Woman, a clever and talented blog writer who lives and cooks somewhere in the great American west and is married to a hunky rancher (the aforementioned Marlboro Man).
In this sandwich, quite a lot of butter is involved. Actually, most of her recipes involve way, way WAY too much butter. I also recommend her Apple Dumplings, if you’re interested in browsing around her site. Much sugar and a can of Mountain Dew is involved.
Bagna Cauda, a hot oil dip from the Piedmont region of Italy.
In a small double boiler place 1 cup olive oil. Add 8 ounces butter. Warm this gently until the butter is melted. Add four to eight finely minced cloves of garlic(I use the maximum!!!) and allow it to steep in the warming oil mix. Just before you are ready to eat stir in two ounces(more or less) of anchovy filets and blend until they break up.
This is used as a dip for chunks of bread and crisp veggies, like bell peppers, cauliflower, broccoli and so on. It can be kept warm in a fondue pot.
I first heard about this dish on Babylon 5. Mr. Garibaldi told Dr. Franklin how his father had always made it for him on his birthday. Dr. Franklin eyed it with suspicion and said “I can feel my arteries hardening just being in the same room with it.” But he ate it anyway.