On Food And Manliness

Just decided to pull myself away from the TV, watching some ridiculous show on the Travel Channel about the "manliest" restaurants in America. Really? To be totally honest, I could give a flying fuck about how "manly" a restaurant is. I have no problem with hitting a steakhouse - if I'm flush with cash or someone else is buying. But I'd much rather cook it myself. Isn't putting a slab of dead animal on the grill and cooking it yourself by its very nature primordial and therefore manly - not to mention a whole fuck of a lot cheaper?

And of course, different people have their own notions of what a 'manly' restaurant ought to be. Here's Denis Leary's take from No Cure For Cancer (fast forward to about 7:15). I have to admit to having something of a soft spot for Denis Leary's comedy. But why not take it a step further? Why not have every seat in the restaurant be a toilet, with a woman under the table giving the patron a blumpkin as he ate his giant hunk o' meat? If the link I just gave you isn't informative enough, I'm sure there's probably some.... how shall we say it.... adult-oriented website out there that has a video of it. Don't say I didn't warn you.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that while I'm as much of a red-blooded man as anyone else, does anyone else find something like that to be a bit much? I'm not even particularly interested in going to a Hooters. Hot chicks in next to nothing doesn't make up for mediocre food if you ask me. And since there are plenty of strip clubs with full dinner menus out there - my wife and I visited on in Bend, OR once - doesn't that make a place like Hooters irrelevant?

I'm just not impressed with guys who feel they need to establish status and credibility through displays of overt masculinity. I could give a fuck less who the 'alpha dog' is, or who has the 'type A' personality. I don't give a shit if you feel you have to make some display of superiority in front of me. I'm not impressed. You ordered the sixty-ounce steak and you're going to try to eat it all in one sitting? Enjoy the vomiting, asshole. And the cholesterol. I'll be just fine with the twelve-ounce portion, or maybe the sixteen if I'm really hungry. You really should only be eating four-ounce portions of proteins, and leavening that with lots of vegetables and grains. You might feel manly, but I'll live longer and better. You feel the need to drive a lifted truck down the highway at 80mph? Hey, gas is only $3.05 a gallon or so here in Port Angeles, who cares if that monster only gets 10 miles to the gallon? I'll drive my POS at 55 - I won't even take it over 65 unless absolutely necessary - and get where I'm going safely, efficiently, and not pay an arm and a leg for gas then sell a kidney to cover the insurance. I don't feel the need to display my masculinity on a minute to minute basis. My wife loves me just the way I am. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get dinner started. It's time for my awesome meat loaf.

Sorry, just had to rant.

Playing With Your Food

One thing that I love about what I do as a musician is the downtime between my runs to Nevada and wherever else the music takes me. I'm at home with my wife and family, and I cook for everybody several times a week, basically alternating days with my mother, while my little brother pitches in once a week or so. And I get to make wonderful meals that everyone enjoys, unbeknownst to one little detail: I'm experimenting on them.

 

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not going all Josef "Angel of Death" Mengele on them. No, my level of experimentation is much more subtle than that. I like playing with recipes, modifying and mutating them, seeing how far I can push the envelope before somebody tells me that the dinner I just prepared was too hot/bland/salty/sweet/what-fucking-ever for them. But I don't really hear that very often - except when I bust out the Thai curry pastes I love. But tonight's meal wasn't Thai, not by any stretch of the imagination. Just a simple meatloaf. But if you know me, you know that I'm just not capable of simple. I've just got to fuck with things a little.

 

My meatloaf recipe is pretty safe and straight-forward: a pound of hamburger, a pound of pork sausage, with some diced onions to add a little crunch, and eggs and panko to act as a binder. sometimes I'll throw something else into the mix, like a package of chorizo. And then there's the Mighty Bacon Bomb, which aside from being king-sized gets its name from the woven mat of bacon that evelops in in wonderful flavor while keeping the loaf moist.

 

This time around, my variation was adding tiny pieces of salt pork to the mix, left over from when my mother made potato balls for our birthday. Yes, I was my mother's 23rd birthday present. Some present, right? I fried up the salt pork to get the pieces nice and crispy, then laid the lardons, (as the French call it) on a plate that went in the fridge to cool them down before throwing them into the loaf mixture. The loaf goes into a loaf pan (natch), then into a 400-degree oven for thirty minutes. The loaf got pulled from the oven at that point, to be basted with a homemade barbecue sauce before going back into the oven for another fifteen minutes. After that, the loaf is pulled from the oven and very carefully turned out on to a cutting board, and the rest of the loaf is basted with the barbecue sauce and allowed to rest for about ten minutes before serving.

 

I've got several layers of experimentation going on here all at once, and the next layer is the sauce. The barbecue sauce is make for meatloaf is based on a recipe from of all people, a Canadian internet porn star named Elli. For the record, I'm not a member of her website (NSFW), and I found her blog quite by accident, but I am kinda partial to her stage name (it's my granddaughter's), not to mention the sheer variety of topics she covers on her blog, and the sometimes brutal honesty she puts into it, which in turn inspred me to start the blogs I write. Elli's barbecue sauce recipe was something I discovered while I was still living in Reno, and I've tweaked it enough times to make it into something truly my own. If you want the recipe, I'm pretty sure it's in the archives here, so start digging if you want it!

 

When I make proper barbecue, like ribs or pulled pork, I make my recipe straight. But when I make meatloaf, I change things up a little bit, primarily by swapping out apple cider vinegar for balsamic vinegar, and reducing the amount of garlic I use, though this time there was no garlic in it at all - kinda odd for me, right? I also tried something else totally new to me, adding a shot of whisky into the mix.

 

I have to digress here for a minute. If you know me, you know that I don't drink. And when I say that I don't drink, it's not that I started then stopped. I never started drinking. Growing up with mean drunks for a father and older sister, I decided that it was simply easier to not go down the path they followed and not drink at all instead of becoming an alcoholic, and then a recovering alcoholic. The downside to not being a drinker is that there's a lot of good recipes that require alcohol, and since I never allowed my palate to be exposed to alcohol, I really don't know that much about what kind goes best with what recipe. I'm willing to give it a taste, to see what's good with what, but I don't trust my palate all that much because I'm bascially fighting my own aversions to alcohol to try to learn about using it as ingredient, instead of as an intoxicant. Here's more or less what tonight's meatloaf sauce was comprised of:

 

One 15oz. can of tomato sauce

One shot (1.5oz.) of whisky

One pony shot (1 oz.) of balsamic vinegar

One pony shot of soy sauce

Three to four tablespoons of brown sugar

A few dashes of the hot sauce of your choice to taste - tonight I used plain old Tabasco

Three drops of liquid hickory smoke

 

In a saucepan over medium heat, add the ingredients in order, then bring to a simmer. Reduce heat and simmer uncovered for about twenty to thirty minutes, stirring occasionally.

 

Along with the loaf was my first attempt at a cold pasta salad from scratch. The same day my mother made potato balls, I was asked to make an appetizer that everyone in the family loves - homemade mozzarella cheese. Really, making your own mozzarella is piss-easy. Go google 'make your own mozzarella' and you should be rewarded with a good recipe right off the bat. After breaking the loaf of mozzarella I made into little balls (a gallon of milk will produce about a pound of mozzarella), I marinated the cheese and some halved kalamata olives in a mixture of store-bought italian dressing and store-bought balsamic vinaigrette, and that was when the idea of using making a pasta salad with the cheese and olives hit me. So I went to Wal-Mart the next day and bought some rotini (corkscrew) pasta, and figured that I'd have to do this in the next few days, so I wouldn't forget.

 

So tonight I boiled the pasta long before I started making the meatloaf, then drained the pasta and put it into a bowl that went into the fridge to cool off for a while. Once the pasta was sufficiently cooled, I grabbed my cheese and oilves from the fridge and diced up the lot of it before throwing it in with the pasta and tossing the salad together to make sure the pasta was coated with the marinade, with the bonus action of tossing the salad being breaking up the cheese into even smaller pieces. The salad still seemed kinda dry to me, so I added some more of the balsamic vinaigrette to the salad, then returned the salad to the fridge to let the ingredients marry. While the verdict from the family was that the salad was very good, they agreed with me that it was still a touch dry, and could've used a touch more dressing.

 

I guess that what I'm trying to say is to never stop experimenting, even if you think your recipe is already perfect. Play with your food - it's always worth the effort. And my family always appreciates my efforts.

Sausage Party

I think I got the ultimate compliment last night when my mother told me that I really needed to write down the recipe for what I made - my riff on Italian Sausage and Peppers. So here's the recipe:

Joe's Kinda Sorta Italian Sausage and Peppers

Ingredients:

1 to 1.5 lbs. Italian sausage, or 6 links - I use a large link sausage I get at Costco, but any good sausage will do.
1 medium onion, halved then sliced thinly, but not too thinly
3 green bell peppers, cut into matchstick-sized slices
12 pitted Kalamata olives, sliced in half lengthwise
4 - 5 cloves garlic, minced
2 15oz. cans of tomato sauce
2 tbsp. dried Italian seasoning
2 tbsp. olive oil
1 tbsp. balsamic vinegar
2 tbsp. grated Romano cheese

Instructions:

(It's optional to break up the sausage if you have links, but not necessary.)

Add one tablespoon olive oil to a large saute pan or skillet over medium heat, then brown the sausage and remove the sausage. Add the second tablespoon of oil to what oil is still in the pan, then add the onions, peppers, and olives, and cook until the onions have become translucent - about 6 to 8 minutes. Add in the garlic and cook for another 3 to 5 minutes, until the garlic has begun to take on a little color. Return the sausage to the pan, then add the tomato sauce and cook for a few minutes. Add in the Italian seasoning and balsamic vinegar, and cook just until the sauce begins to bubble up. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for about 30 minutes, then add the Romano cheese just before serving.

Recipe should make six servings.

Serving:

If you broke up the sausage, I'd serve it on top of a noodle pasta like fettucine, or perhaps a tubular pasta like penne. If you kept the sausage whole, a good idea would be to warm up some good rolls in the oven, then split them and brush the inside of the roll with some melted garlic butter (quick recipe: melt a stick of butter in the microwave, then add a teaspoon of garlic powder, and give the mixture a few minutes to let the garlic permeate). Drop a sausage in the bun, top it with the sauce and a little more romano cheese, then enjoy with a nice salad or coleslaw on the side.

Cheers!

How To Make A Bomb In Your Kitchen

A Mighty Bacon Bomb, that is.

There are really three ways of making a Bacon Bomb, otherwise known as a bacon-wrapped meat loaf. The simplest method is to just take your own meat loaf recipe, and before you put the loaf in its pan, layer the bottom of the pan with slices of bacon (otherwise known as rashers), and lay a few more on top of the loaf should the rashers on the bottom of the pan not be able to reach all the way around. Other than maybe adding a few more minutes' cooking time, you can follow your own recipe pretty much to the letter.

But here's how I make the Mighty Bacon Bomb.

Ingredients:

Loaf
2 - 2.5 lbs. lean ground beef
1 lb. pork sausage - for even more bacony goodness, try Farmland's Pork & Bacon Sausage
1 twelve-ounce package of bacon - preferably not thick-sliced
1 medium onion, finely diced (optional: 1 green bell pepper, finely diced, or a can of diced green chilis)
1 tsp. garlic powder
1 - 1.5 cups Panko (Japanese-style bread crumbs) or regular unseasoned bread crumbs
2 eggs

Barbecue Sauce/Glaze
1 can (15 oz.) tomato sauce
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
1 tbsp. soy sauce
1 tbsp. yellow mustard
1 - 2 dashes of the hot sauce of your choice (Tabasco or Sriracha work best)
A few drops of liquid smoke

Instructions

Set aside the bacon. Combine all the other loaf ingredients in a large bowl and knead together until the mixture is relatively homogenous, but don't over-mix.

Here's where things get interesting. Since this is such a large recipe, a regular loaf pan may not work all that well. Usually, I put the loaf into a large rectangular (8" x 11" or so) casserole dish. Then I lay down rashers of bacon on top of the loaf, lengthwise. Then I weave the remaining rashers into the lengthwise strips - basically making a mat of bacon. I snip off the excess of the second set of rashers, and use them to fill in any gaps in the mat and make it look relatively even.

But tonight, at Joy's behest, I tried using a regular loaf pan. What I did was line the bottom of the pan with bacon like I mentioned at the top of this article, put the mixture inthe pan, then covered the top with more bacon. The loaf went into a preheated 400-degree oven. Because of the thickness of the loaf, I wound up taking nearly 90 minutes to cook it through to an internal temperature of about 160 degrees, and dropping the oven down to 350 degrees to keep the outside of the loaf from burning.

From here on out, we'll go back to using the casserole dish for our example. After putting the loaf mixture in the casserole dish and assembling the mat, cover the loaf in a layer of tinfoil and place in a 400-degree oven for 45 minutes. In a medium saucepan, combine the barbecue sauce ingredients in order over medium heat and cook until the sauce just starts to bubble up, about eight to ten minutes or so. Drop the heat to low and let the sauce simmer.

When the timer on the oven goes off, take about half a cup of your sauce and put it in a ramekin. Pull the loaf from the oven, and drain off as much of the fat as possible to a suitable container. (NOTE: You may have to do this more than once during the cooking process. A good safety measure would be to have a cookie sheet under the cooking vessel to catch any fat that drips from the cooking vessel.) Bring the loaf up to the stove top, remove the foil, and brush the loaf with the sauce in the ramekin. Return the loaf to the oven without the foil for another fifteen minutes, or until the loaf hits an internal temperature of 160 degrees. Pull the loaf out of the oven, and let it stand for a few minutes before slicing it thin for serving. This recipe should serve five or six adults, with leftovers for sandwiches the next morning.

Here's what my loaf looked like tonight in a regular loaf pan:

Just a big ol' nasty mess, ain't it? But damn it, it tastes good! This is family cooking for the family that just loves food, and is willing to work that Mighty Bacon Bomb off later that night, or the next day. In fact, I think I'll take a nice walk...... once the Mighty Bacon Bomb coma wears off. Cheers!

Enough Whining - Let's Cook, Dammit!

A few months ago, I came across a recipe for pan-fried chicken breasts covered with hummus and coated with panko bread crumbs while I was waiting for Joy in yet another doctor's office. Recently, I tried playing with it a little, and I came up with something pretty damn good. I'll call it......

Miso Horny Chicken.

Here's how it came to be. Have you ever bought instant miso soup at an Asian grocery store? You know, comes in a bag very little English on it because it's fucking Japanese? Well, making the soup is pretty simple - take the small, soft, squishy packet (which is basically condensed miso soup, comprised of miso paste and dashi no moto - broth made from the dried and flaked loin of a fish called bonito) and dump it into two-thirds of a cup of water and stir, then add the larger packet of dried seaweed (likely nori) and veggies and wait for them to hydrate before eating. Well, my mom loves the soup, but hates the nori. So one day while Joy and I had the house to ourselves, I came up with another use for those miso-soup packets. Here's the recipe:

(Serves two)

Ingredients:

Two chicken breasts, roughly 6 - 8oz. each
Two packets instant miso soup base
1/2 cup panko bread crumbs
Salt and pepper
2 Tbsp. olive oil

Preparation:

Season each chicken breast lightly with salt and pepper. Open the miso soup base packets and empty the contents into a small bowl. Brush each breast liberally with the soup base, then dredge the breasts in the panko to completely cover. Heat oil in a skillet over medium heat, and panfry breasts for 8 to 10 minutes a side depending on size of the breasts. Serve with rice and steamed vegetables.

Personally, I like to serve this with bok choy (Chinese cabbage), split lengthwise and steamed with chicken broth spiked with garlic, ginger, and a dash of sriracha hot sauce, then take a little of that broth and condense/thicken it into a sauce.

Enjoy, and bon appetit!