pout You just want to make me sad!
I’m going to try a small bit tonight and I’ll let you know how it goes. (it makes me wish it was 6pm already. 
)
Whacky?!?
Crab Nasties
Ingredients:
Fresh cooked Dungeness Crab.
Sliced/peeled Avacados.
Peeled Grapefruit segments.
Catsup/Mayo (mixed).
Using a Parfait glass, layer the ingredients 'til glass is full.
Yes, it looks disgusting.
Yes, it tastes delicious.
I made up a few interesting recipes the past couple weeks:
Best.Salsa.Ever:
Equal parts Paul Newman’s Chunky Garlic Salsa and Paul Newmans Tequila Lime salsa. Add liberal doses of Mexican hot sauce. The hot sauce not only makes it satisfactorily hot but also makes it eminently dippable due to thinning out and homogenizing the salsa.
OJ Tea:
Just like it looks. Add teabag to heated orange juice and steep. No sweetener needed (and cream is definitely contraindicated.) Tea purists, besides the obvious objections, would probably pitch a fit since if I’m not mistaken you have to make sure the OJ isn’t heated too much (or something bad will happen to it? Refresh my memory.)
Remember all those grill gurus who told you to NEVER EVER poke a hole in a steak you’re grilling, because all the mojo will leak out, and nobody will ever come to your parties after that? Ha!
Get a load of this.
A steak, at least 1" thick
Cloves of garlic, cut into spears as big around as a wooden kitchen match.
A very pointy knife
Optional, a few drops of Cholula hot sauce
Cut 12 to 20 deep slits in the steak, then you’ll know how many garlic spears you need. Lay the steak on an upturned bowl to open up the slits. Push a spear into each slit. Sprinkle a little salt on eack side of the meat.
For even more ecstacy, drip a little hot sauce on, then rub it into the slits.
Then grill it the way you usually grill. Did all the mojo leak out?
'Scuse me, while I go howl at the rain.
I saw one on TV just a couple of days ago. It’s the latest winner of the Pillsbury Bake-Off. The recipe concept is simple enough, chicken and stuffing. The wackiness is, the stuffing isn’t plain ol’ bread.
As the recipe’s inventor tells it, one night she had a hankerin’ for chicken and stuffing, but she didn’t have any bread around. What she did have was frozen waffles. Specifically, those “dunkables” type waffle sticks. So, she toasted the waffle sticks, cut 'em into cubes, and used that for the stuffing. And she used the maple syrup packets as part of the glaze for the chicken.
Freakin’ genius.
I came up with something new tonight. Quite a tasty combination… Leftover Spanish Rice, two scrambled eggs, and cheese. Much like a Mexican Fried Rice, or arroz refrito. It would make a great burrito stuffing.
My salsa is always pink and frothy at first*, but after stirring with a spoon and standing in a fridge overnight, it looks much more like it should. It’s always much better tasting the next day, as well.
Also, I don’t know why, but I find canned tomatoes to taste better. I think grocery store “fresh” tomatoes aren’t really that flavorful, for some reason. Canned tomatoes are non-ideal, but for some reason, taste better in many recipes than what you can usually get “fresh.”
-FrL-
*Oh God. Do you know what I’m thinking about? You don’t want to know.
I think I’ve told this one before…
Winter of 2000, I’m new in my first apartment. I’m making chocolate chip cookies, nothing fancy, just the recipe on the back of the bag of chips. For some reason now unfathomable to me, I was only making a half recipe. But then I accidentally add a full recipe worth of baking soda. Well, I can’t take it out, so I figure I’ll bake one tray of them, taste them, and decide what to do from there.
So the first tray comes out, and they’re bitter as all heck, edible only with large quantities of ice cream. Well, I say to myself, that makes sense: Baking soda is a base, and bases are bitter. Obviously, what I need to do is neutralize the base (I’ve since been informed that this is not the way most people think when they’re cooking).
Except, remember how I said that this was my first apartment, and I was new there? I hadn’t yet fully stocked up my kitchen, so I had no vinegar. No lemon juice. No sour cream. I did have spaghetti sauce, but I wasn’t that crazy.
And then, staring into the refridgerator, I saw it. A jar of pickles. A couple of teaspoons later, and a lot of kneeding/stirring, and I’m ready for the next batch. They came out fine.
A long time ago, I found a great chocolate chip cookie recipe. Mom had said something along the lines of ‘if you use Bisquik instead of flour, double the amount of Bisquik’. So I made the cookies with double the dry ingredients. They were impossible to mix except by hand (as in my two hands). However, they were absolutely delicious! I made them a few times after but it was just too labour-intensive and haven’t made them in years. I obviously figured out that mom was wrong about the doubling the Bisquik idea.
I got on a salsa making kick after getting back from New Mexico with 2 bushels of hot green chile’s I had roasted in Bernalillo. I modeled my salsa off of a mom and pop Mexican restaurant salsa I had in Carlsbad New Mexico.
My salsa recipe is:
1 28 ounce can whole stewed tomatoes, drained, crush with hands
1 28 ounce can diced tomatoes, drained (I dunno, they seem to taste different :D)
appx 20 or so peeled green chile’s, cut up into bits
3 habanero peppers with seeds, finely chopped
3 Serrano peppers with seeds, finely chopped
1 large white onion, coarse chopped
fresh parsley, amount desired, medium chop
2 tablespoons white vinegar
1/4 teaspoon cumin
1/2 tablespoon tomato paste
mix up in a large bowl
Run ingredients through food processor in batches, pulse each for a few seconds until fine consistency- should be saucy with smallish chunks.
After each batch in food processor, transfer to a large bowl repeat until done. stir to mix all batches for consistency.
Enjoy right away or store in airtight container in 'fridge. Lasts quite a while. The last batch I made was the first week in November, finished off the last jar in March. I did not “can” the salsa. I just put it in sterilized Ball canning jars.
This makes a hot salsa (by grocery store standards)
You can leave the parsley out or use cilantro instead, It depends on what you like. I hate cilantro, so I never use it in anything
My best anti-salsa recipe includes yellow tomatoes and purple basil. An awesome twist.
A senator from Pennsylvania?
This makes me feel the way I feel when someone says they don’t like garlic. Or Moulin Rouge! Or Kate Bush. Sad. I can’t imagine living my life without any of those things. My husband doesn’t much like cilantro. Luckily, he loves those other things.
I’d put cilantro and garlic on everything non-sweet, if I could. I eat cilantro (but not garlic) right out of the bag.
The "pumpkin crunch " recipe works. You can change the yellow cake mix to any other flavor(I used apple spice), you can change pumpkin to sweet potato.
That is the weirdest cookie story I’ve ever heard.
Smear chicken with peanut butter, roll in bread crumbs, wrap in bacon and stick in the oven. Wacky? Sure. Tasty? You bet!
Escargot in Red Wine sauce. Make it the same way as usual, but sub red wine for butter. Kinda different and tasty as well.
Chronos, there’s a thin line between culinary genius and insanity. And I’m not entirely certain which side of it you’re on.
Mmmmmm…Chocolate Lasagna
That’s because “fresh” store bought tomatoes suck. I can’t wait until my CSA starts up, and the farmer’s market opens. Some brands of canned tomatoes use really good tomats- Muir Glen for example.