Catfish's Dishes

Guayaki Organic Yerba Mate

2012-02-01T08:26:00.001-07:00

This italic text is fancy blogger speak for "This is important. My crediblity is on the line here." The following blog is a product review, and I want you as readers to know that I was not paid or coerced to say things about said product. I've considered paid product reviews as a way to supplement the tiny advertising income this blog generates, but would rather have the people who come here be able to take me seriously.

So now that we're past the long winded disclaimer, why am I reviewing Guayaki's line of yerba mate based products? Simple answer. My co-worker Palm Springs was on campus for his calculus class, where he was accosted by one of Guayaki's marketing reps. (Edit: Guayaki contacted me after I initially posted this to let me know that they don't actually have reps. The person Palm Springs met on campus was one of the founders, and they still travel around the country promoting their product themselves.) They gave him a variety of products to try, all for free, with one caveat: "If you like it," the spokesman said, "give us a shout out on Facebook." Palm Springs brought the products home, and promptly gave them to me. Over the last month, I have entered into a contract with Boy in which I have given up the use of energy drinks and he in turn has given up candy, so PS knew that I would appreciate an alternative. When he gave me the drinks, he also gave me the demo guy's caveat, but I knew if I liked it I could go one better than Facebook.

If you are unfamiliar with yerba mate, it is a relative of the holly plant and grows freely in South America. Its biggest exporter is Brazil, but its widest use is in Argentina, where the herb is found in roughly 95% of homes (Wikipedia.) It is traditionally brewed like tea, and then drank from hollowed out gourds with special straws that filter out the loose mate leaves. In the countries where it is most prominent, yerba mate outsells both coffee and tea, and is thought to be a perfect mixture of the two, combining the relaxing herbal presence of tea with the energy benefits of coffee. Guayaki, the company that makes the products that ended up in my hands, was founded by an Argentine transplant named Alex and his university classmate David, who began to grow mate in San Luis Obispo, California, between attending classes and surfing. Soon, they had gathered a small group of partners and began spreading their love of yerba mate across America in vans. In the sixteen years since Guayaki was founded, they have become a Fair Trade, USDA Organic, and Kosher certified non-profit who uses the money it makes to restore the rain forests of South America. It's a good cause, but it wouldn't matter if the product wasn't good.

Traditional Mate

The first of their products that I got to try was Traditional Mate, which comes in a glass bottle familiar to most tea drinkers. They actually have a decent variety of bottled mates, including flavors like pomegranate and peach, but this was just lightly sweetened mate. I enjoyed it, but the light touch on the sweetener meant that it has some of mate's natural bitterness; while I was OK with that, I could see it being just a touch sharp on some people's palates. Apart from that it was cool, refreshing, and surprisingly stimulating for something that looks and mostly tastes like a tea. I would definitely love to try flavors beyond Traditional Mate.

Enlighten Mint

While I liked the bottled mate, I was really curious about their canned drinks, since that's why Palm Springs introduced me to Guayaki's products in the first place. The three canned yerba mate beverages-Enlighten Mint, Revel Berry, and Lemon Elation-are not energy drinks, but they are clearly marketed at the same consumer. The sample I ended up with was Enlighten Mint, and it was fantastic. It had a very subtle spearmint flavor and a gentle touch of honey, just enough so that while you could clearly taste the mate underneath the natural bitterness I talked about in Traditional Mate was gone. Really, mate seemed to be the perfect base for a drink this willing to have a slight hand with its flavoring, and it was a nice change of pace from other bottled teas like Arizona brand, which can just kill you with sweetness before you can even finish one. Also, I was impressed with the energy boost it gave me. It didn't have quite the same kick as an energy drink; it was more akin to having a couple of cups of coffee. However, it was clearly noticeable, and more importantly it left my system gradually; there was no harsh comedown as you can often get when drinking caffeinated drinks.

Energy Shots

The last product I got to try was one of their energy shots. Although this may have been cheating in regards to my contract with Boy, the fact that these don't contain any of the harsh chemicals contained in normal energy drinks made me decide that I could at least try one. These little guys pack a punch, and they taste way better than normal energy shots, which are often flavored like the psychic hologram of future heartburn. Unlike the bottled and canned drinks, which are slightly below coffee and energy drinks (respectively) in power, the Guayaki energy shot is just as, if not more, powerful than its chemical laden kin. I got four solid hours of energy out of one of these, and again-no steep drop off.

All in all, I was quite pleased with the taste and quality of Guayaki's products, which is why I decided to write this post instead of merely making an aside on Facebook. I'm gradually making my way to a state of drinking almost entirely water, but when I do need a canned or bottled pick me up that doesn't make me feel guilty, I'll hunt out Guayaki. If you are interested, you can find their store locator here.

An Accidental Discovery: Tangerine Dream Rolls

2012-01-26T04:04:00.002-07:00

I had never imagined, when first I set out to write about food, that I would ever say the words "it all started with a box of prepackaged Pillsbury mix," but here we are.

Who knew?

To be honest, I don't even know where the stuff came from. I was cleaning out the cramped cupboard that houses my "baking only" ingredients and found this guy crammed in the back with some boxed cake mixes, from some long ago time when I must have not really given a damn. The first impulse was to chuck it. I've been enjoying baking more and more, and cooking alongside Poppin' Fresh seemed like a setback. However, I'm cheap and it's wasteful. I knew from the start that I didn't want to make the hot rolls that were the main focus of the product. The "great pizza crust" touted in the lower left corner was tempting, but once again I'd already locked in my menu for the week, and I wanted the dough boy gone. (I needed room for cake flour, so that I could eventually make these.) As anyone who even periodically reads this blogs knows, one area where I do have room to tamper is with dessert. The two years I spent working at a cinnamon roll factory had ruined me off of the sticky treats for most of my adult life, but with one caveat. Orange rolls. Perhaps it was because they only made them sporadically, perhaps they were just better, but while the cinnamon rolls I bagged each day grew to disgust me, orange rolls were a highlight of my day whenever the test pan ended up in the break room.

Now, I have no idea what goes into a traditional orange roll. But I do know how to make chocolate-mandarin won tons (a personal invention that I'm sure we'll get around to eventually,) and at the center of that dish is a mandarin orange reduction. Using similar principals, I set out to make a filling with the ingredients on hand.

Those ingredients were:

7 "cutie" tangerines
1/4 cup + 2 T softened butter, divided
1/2 cup cranberries
1/2 cup brown sugar

Before I began the filling, I made the dough following the instructions on the package. It runs a bit contrary to my nature, but I didn't tamper with it a bit. If you are ambitious (or just don't have the product on hand) you can make your own dough-this package makes sixteen rolls, and my half of the recipe makes enough filling to cover that amount plus a little bit extra.

Once the dough was on its final rise, I heated a small saucepan on medium heat and melted the two tablespoons of butter. While it was starting to bubble, I peeled and removed the stray pith from six of the tangerines, tore them into segments, and tossed them into the butter along with the cranberries. The cranberries aren't entirely necessary here-I had them leftover from the oatmeal cookies I made a couple of weeks ago, and was just trying to limit food waste-but they worked quite well and made these turn out with a unique taste that was reminiscent of orange rolls past, but still completely new. If you don't want to go to the hassle or it's not the right season, just add a couple more tangerines. Once the fruit was in I added the brown sugar and squeezed the last cutie over the top so that its juice would help the sugar dissolve. This mixture needs to cook down for about ten minutes (stirring occasionally,) or until the chunks of fruit have broken down, released their juices, and had the opportunity to reduce in them.

Once the mixture looked nice and syrupy it got tossed into the food processor. When I would make my mandarin dessert, the canned orange segments dissolved so thoroughly that I never needed to bother, but fresh fruit holds up better, and I didn't want huge bits of tangerine in my rolls. It didn't take more than a few pulses to make it smooth.

An even smear should do it.

With the tangerine mixture at the ready, I returned to the instructions and rolled the dough out flat, covering it with the 1/4 cup of butter, and then topping that with the filling as shown above. Couldn't have been easier. I rolled it into a "snake," sliced it into sixteen about even slices, and put them on a greased pan. Twenty minutes later, they came out of my oven looking fluffy and delicious. All that was left was a glaze. While the orange rolls of my youth had a cream cheese frosting, I just used the powdered sugar based topping from the side of the box, with one slight change. Instead of using milk to turn the sweetener into a syrup, I kept with the theme and juiced one last tangerine. Half an hour after I had contemplated tossing my Pillsbury roll mix into the trash I had a great dessert that had Wife (my greatest critic) insisting that, box or not,I write about these rolls.

Quick and Easy Chicken Salad

2012-01-20T04:28:00.001-07:00

Let's get something straight right up front. When I say chicken salad, I'm not talking about tuna's equally gloppy cousin. I'm talking about a healthy, vibrant green salad topped with juicy slices of chicken breast. If you were expecting the other chicken salad, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Now that we have that out of the way, let's turn our attention to the salad. While the actual assembly of the salad is easy, the quick part is relative. To give our chicken the proper flavor (one that will allow us to eat the salad completely dressing free,) we have to prepare it at least several hours in advance. You'll want a couple of boneless, skinless chicken breasts-one for every two people you plan to serve. Poke them a couple of times on each side with a fork, and place them in a large Ziploc bag with a tablespoon of olive oil, the juice of one lemon, and a teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes, plus a few dashes of salt, then stick them in your refrigerator to marinate.

For some reason black subbed in for red pepper in this picture.

About half an hour before you are hoping to eat it is time to get the vegetables ready. While I'm a fairly open-minded eater, I want my salads to have the taste and texture I grew up with, so I generally stick with iceberg or romaine lettuce, coarsely chopped. It takes about half of a head of fresh iceberg to provide enough roughage for four salads. Since this is a main dish salad, I tend to skip the salad bowl and just divide up the portions as I go. The other pieces you'll need at this point are tomatoes-one per salad for small romas-and olives. It drives Wife crazy, but when I am using them for dishes like this I tend to consider it a waste of time to perfectly slice the olives; this is, after all, a simple dinner salad. Unless you are preparing this for guests and presentation matters, just crumble them on top of the lettuce like they were clumps of feta cheese. How many olives you want to use is really a matter of personal taste, but I've estimated it takes about six olives per salad to make sure you are getting some in each bite. Cut each tomato into sixths, and place them into the bowls as well. Once you've laid down this base, quarter a lemon and squeeze the juice of each slice onto a salad, being careful not to let any seeds fall into your food. Add salt and fresh ground pepper to taste, and then toss.

Red bell peppers and grilled mushrooms could go here as well.

With the bottom half of the salad ready to go, it's time to cook the chicken. You'll want to place, on medium heat, a skillet large enough to hold your chicken without the pieces touching. When I prepared my salads, I started with the heat on high and then reduced it after I had gotten a nice char on each side, but I don't recommend this idea. When I first began making this meal it was summer, and the chicken was always cooked on the grill (the ideal way to do it.) While raising the heat of my pan did partially recreate the effect of grilling, the high heat coupled with the red pepper flakes still clinging to the chicken caused the pan to let off a thick smoke that was not unlike pepper spray. I didn't mind-anything for flavor-but Wife and Boy let me know between jagged coughs that my tactic wasn't appreciated, and I had to open all the windows even though it was freezing outside just to accommodate their breathing.

Not as good as a grill char, but a nice color all the same.

You'll want to cook the chicken for several minutes on each side, until it is cooked through and not at all pink inside. Since it's best not to mess with the meat too much aside from turning it, you can prep the ingredients that will go on top of the chicken while you wait. Thinly slice a handful of green onions, both green and white parts. Most recipes tend to want you to pick the tops (for garnish) or the bottoms (for flavor,) but both work well within the context of the salad and there is no reason to waste half of each shoot. Set them aside, and roughly chop 1/4 cup of smoked almonds. The almonds are really one of this salad's secret weapons. In addition to providing a nice textural contrast to the vegetables, the smoky taste contributes to the flavor that makes this work without having to add any sort of dressing. I just sort of hack at them with my knife and am satisfied with the irregular pieces I get, but if you dislike this you could probably get more even bits with a food processor, though it seems like too much work for a salad. Finally, grate a 1/4 cup of Parmesan cheese.

Once the chicken is cooked, move it to a cutting board. Using a knife and tongs, slice it into bite-sized chunks and divide it equally among the salads, then top with the onions, almonds and cheese. That's it. The resulting salad will be full of flavor, filling, and incredibly healthy, and all in about fifteen minutes.

Chocolate Cranberry Chunk Cookies

2012-01-09T03:40:00.000-07:00

I started this week off with a dilemma. Although I got behind a bit during the holidays, I feel like I need to post at least once a week to remain a viable blog. After all, I'm making money now-my first payment from the mucky-mucks who provide the advertising that frames this page will be here by the end of this month. But there can be no clicks without content. Problem is, I don't just write about food. I read about it as well. I've already gushed about Macheesmo on these pages but there is also Kayln's Kitchen, which has food so delectable I looked at it off and on for a month before I realized it was dedicated to the South Beach Diet, and The Food in My Beard, whose author must really take the whole "a picture is worth a thousand words" thing to heart-his step by step photos make any recipe seem easy. I could easily list a dozen more, but I'm worried if I gave you that many great blogs to read you wouldn't come back. The point of all this is that I ended up with a cooking conundrum. I need content, but on all the days I allot to creative cooking (three days a week are for leftovers or such challenging meals as potatoes topped with chilli,) I filled the menu with other blogger's dishes. Had they been written any length of time in the past I could have filed them under "Other People's Recipes" and hoped any slight modifications I made might make it worth reading about the process, but the things I am cooking are from recent enough posts that even fairly heavy modifications would still feel like theft. Obviously, I could have scrapped one of the meals and replaced it with something of my own, but that isn't what I wanted to do. African peanut stew sounds great. Chicken tortilla soup simmering all day in the crock pot sounds wonderful. I decided I would have to bite the bullet and find the cash to finish my half written review of the Salt Tears Coffeehouse and Noshery some lunch hour, and headed to the store.

I hadn't made it ten steps into the produce section when I saw them piled high with the other seasonal rejects. Fresh cranberries; almost three dollars a bag just before Christmas, they were now a mere seventy-eight cents. I pulled the pen from my pocket and began tweaking the list. I may have locked down my dinners, but there was one area of the week I didn't have the slightest problem modifying.

My work lunches are as follows:

A sandwich. Typically turkey with mustard, mayo, pickles, and any stray bits of vegetable. Occasionally a dinner leftover that is too slight to make another meal out of.

A healthy side. Almost always a Gala apple, but if not something else in the fruit/vegetable realm.

And finally, to round it all off, JUNK. Pop Tarts, pudding cups, Reese's.......I do my best to eat healthy meals, and the "troll toll" (so named because co-workers-the trolls in this equation-will occasionally steal this portion of my meal, tolerated only because it is healthier in the long run) is the one exception I allow. But why clog my arteries with processed crap if I can make cookies instead.

The following cookies are inspired by cookies I made last winter with the leftover berries from scratch cranberry sauce.

Boy is eager to help when it's sweets.

Chocolate Cranberry Chunk Cookies (Makes 24 cookies)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Combine, in a small bowl, the following dry ingredients:

2 cups of all-purpose flour

1 cup of oatmeal

1 teaspoon of baking powder

1/2 teaspoon of ginger

1/2 teaspoon of sea salt (regular salt is fine, but sea salt actually gives a noticeable taste to this cookie that helps add contrast to the sweet and sour elements)

It's nice to finally have a real mixer.

Once your dry ingredients have been combined, you can move on to the wet. Boy decided to help me do this (both to try the Kitchenaid mixer Mother-in-Law got me for Christmas and so that I would reserve a few of the spare cookies for his lunch,) and he was confused as to why sugar would be a "wet" ingredient. Unlike flour or oats, the sugar dissolves when creamed, so it is a part of the wet step. Our very traditional wet ingredients (to be combined in a large mixing bowl) are as follows:

1 cup of brown sugar

1/2 cup of granulated sugar

2 sticks of butter, softened

Cream these until the sugar has dissolved, and then add:

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

Beat until smooth, and then add the dry ingredients gradually, making sure each amount is fully incorporated before adding more. Once the dough is completely mixed and you can't see any dry flour it is time to prepare the chunks that give these cookies such a wonderful texture. It all starts with a block of chocolate from the bulk section of your grocery store. I went with dark chocolate, but just use whatever you prefer. These would even be good with white chocolate if that's your thing. Cut the block into irregular pieces, about double the size of industrially produced chocolate chips until you have around a cup of loosely packed chocolate bits. Dump these into the mixing bowl and add a cup and a half of fresh cranberries. You could probably make a decent cookie even with dried cranberries, but you would lose what makes these so special if you did. If you've been using a wooden spoon or other people powered device up until this point, you can just stir this stuff in, but if you are using an electric mixer you need to switch to something manual at this point. We want to keep our berries intact and our chocolate large, so any mechanical mixing is going to be to rough. Even with a spoon, it is important to avoid crushing the fruit. Stir until both the chocolate and the cranberry are evenly distributed, and then hand form balls of dough roughly the size of a golf ball. There is no way this dough can be tamed into the neat tablespoon droplets you find in most cookie recipes. Once you have a pan ready, throw it in for twelve to fourteen minutes-the chunks cause these to take just a bit longer to bake than most cookies. When they come out they should still seem a little underdone in the center, but they will set if you give them three minutes on a cooling rack. The cranberries that have stayed in one piece for this entire journey are the highlight of this cookie. They just burst in your mouth with each bite, and both the baking process and the surrounding sugars will have transformed them into something juicy and sweet, with none of the bitterness of a raw berry. Make these just once and I promise you'll find yourself keeping an eye out for cranberry sales at the end of each holiday season.

Boise's Best Breakfast: The Egg Factory

2011-12-21T02:35:00.001-07:00

Before I begin to discuss the food served at The Egg Factory (6882 W State St Boise, ID 83714 (208) 853-2037, with two other locations in the Treasure Valley) let me take a minute to address hyperbole. I'm not a fan. Perhaps it's because I have young kids at home, but I don't really care for it when people casually say that things are "the best," "the greatest," and the like. I don't get a sense for how good something is if you run around like Gordon Ramsey, saying that everything that passes your lips that you don't actively hate is "the most amazing" whatever-it-is. I just want this to be clear when I pronounce The Egg Factory Boise's best breakfast. To be fair, I haven't eaten at every single restaurant in Boise, but I have eaten at perennial "Best of Boise" winner Goldy's, hangover staples like Merritt's and The Capri, chic coffeehouse/eateries and truck stops. The Egg Factory tops them all.

The only area in which they are lacking (so far as I can tell, anyway) is in the image department. Its almost too professional. Every time I drove past it over the last year, I saw the large, colorful sign, with a chicken motif on the window and assumed it was a chain restaurant, and a generic one at that. Through the windows I could see bright yellow paint and even more chicken decor. It isn't that there is anything wrong with the sunny look of The Egg Factory, it just didn't sit well with my personal prejudices. I ignored The Egg Factory and continued to stick with the previous "Best Breakfast in Boise," Northern Lights Cafe. It probably would have continued that way if it weren't for this blog. Since Wife doesn't do Facebook herself, it is left to me to friend her rather large family and give her updates on what they are doing. In return, a few of them have been kind enough to become part of my readership, and when I contemplated breakfast places online one of her cousins promptly recommended The Egg Factory. That might not have been enough, except she went beyond simply saying it was good and told me one reason why-the cooks at The Egg Factory make their own chorizo.

It was only a couple of weeks before that information enticed me to making a stop. Mother-in-Law wanted to borrow my daughter for the day, and since she needed me with her to be able to pick up Girl from her mom's house, it was decided we would meet up for breakfast beforehand. Wife and I arrived first, and had some time to take it all in. While the pastel coloration of the interior had turned me off from the outside, it turned out to be a pleasant environment to wake up in, and the early morning dining crowd seemed to be in bright spirits. A fair number of the customers seemed to be regulars, which I took as a positive. I was also impressed when the waitress delivered my menu. It was a good thing that the in-laws had gotten lost, because the laminated sheet I was given may as well have been a novella. There were easily a hundred options, and if you take into account how accommodating the staff is regarding customization that number increases drastically. When the rest of our party arrived (several cups of coffee later) I had merely narrowed down the options-I was far from deciding.

Father-in-Law took no time deciding what he would have. Biscuits and gravy, with an over-medium egg and "factory potatoes," which are just diced and fried potatoes with a custom seasoning blend. The egg was fried perfectly, which many consider to be the defining test of a breakfast restaurant (especially, one would think, if the restaurant had "egg" in it's name) but I was more curious about the biscuit. A good biscuit is hard to find. The one at The Egg Factory was just shy of the pinnacle (those would be the biscuits at the Sunrise Cafe, just across the street) but it was damn good all the same. It had a fluffy interior, well suited to soaking up the lush sausage gravy, but enough crags on the outside to stand up to the sauce and not wilt or become soggy. The gravy itself was everything one could hope for. It had large chunks of actual sausage, was well seasoned, and neither overly oily or lacking in the flavor punch that fat provides. My father-in-law was a trucker for many years, and knows his biscuits and gravy, and we were both more than impressed with what The Egg Factory had to offer.

Mother-in-Law is a daintier eater than any of us, but was intrigued by the egg crepes. The Egg Factory serves traditional crepes, with the expected fruit fillings, but they also had a section of the menu devoted to these savory variations, which are essentially small omelettes rolled in a crepe. She chose the "Garden Delight" variety and replaced her toast with lemon poppy seed pancakes. This was one aspect of The Egg Factory that really impressed me-you can substitute pancakes for toast at some restaurants, but if so they might limit you to a single flapjack, or even if they do give you two you are limited to the basic item. The Egg Factory has a large selection of custom pancakes and they are all available as an alternative side. It's a good thing, too, because pancakes play a large role in my enthusiasm about this restaurant. The lemon poppy seed pancakes taste exactly like the muffin of the same name, and instead of coming with maple (or some synthetic "butter-flavor" syrup) it came with house-made lemon syrup, which both tasted and felt like a classier version of the filling of a Hostess fruit pie, and I mean that in the best possible way. Both Wife and Mother-in-Law felt that the house syrups were a bit too sweet, but I blame that on the fact that they handled them like you would regular syrup; the pancakes themselves have so much flavor that you need to have a light touch with the syrup, but this is not a bad thing. The truth is, the pancake was so vibrant that it completely outshone the main dish. The Garden Delight crepe was adequate, and that was it. Of all the things we ordered, it seemed the most exciting as written on the menu, but large slices of mushrooms that hadn't really been cooked (a choice I'm guessing was intentional, to emphasise freshness) dominated each bite, even over the lovely hollandaise.

Wife's eyes were fixed on omelettes from nearly the moment we sat down, and in the end it was she and not I who went for the homemade chorizo, in the form of the Enchilada Omelette. In addition to the chorizo, it features avocado, onion, tomato, two different cheeses, and a homemade chipotle enchilada sauce. In a word, simply fantastic. I have to admit, in omelette form I couldn't pick out the homemade essence of the chorizo, but that is mostly because the smoky sauce defined the plate. Not only did it make for a great omelette, but I wouldn't mind using their sauce on actual enchiladas. The cooks managed to get all that great chipotle flavor into each bite without it being spicy or overwhelming, and after taking my complimentary "you have to let me, I'm a blogger" bites of her breakfast, I was reluctant to slide the plate back over to my wife. The scariest thing is that the omelette wasn't even the best thing she was having. Like her mom, Wife swapped her toast for a pair of pancakes, but rather than lemon poppy seed, she picked the monthly special-eggnog. Growing up, I always looked forward to the time of year when eggnog would begin to appear, but as I've aged I've grown less tolerant of things that are that rich. I still loved the flavor, but barely more than a shot glass worth was too much. Miraculously, these pancakes held every iota of eggnog's essence without the worry of drinking (essentially) a glass of heavy cream. Treading yet again into hyperbole territory, they out-eggnogged eggnog. This too came with a customized syrup (rum) that the ladies at the table found overly sweet; again I would disagree, but if you happen to arrive at The Egg Factory and find them offering these seasonal treats yet again, I would still recommend skipping any syrup at all-they are too good to put anything other than a small amount of butter on them.

Quite literally the best pancakes I have ever eaten.

Finally, I took advantage of the flexibility of our waitress to change the Rio Grande Scramble (scrambled eggs and potatoes all mixed up with the other ingredients) to a "Spudsation" (said ingredients and fried eggs served over fried potatoes.) The Rio Grande features more of the same great chipotle sauce that graced the Enchilada Omelette, but with green chiles, onions, and carnitas. At first I was disappointed because I was expecting the carnitas I was used to from Los Betos, which were both crisp and juicy chunks of pork, but the meat was flavorful and fork-tender, more like the meat in a pot of ham and beans but with better spices, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Besides, according to the description of carnitas on Wikepedia, it's The Egg Factory and not the Mexican restaurant that got it right. My meal was spicy and savory, and while I was envious of what my wife was eating that was due to the quality of her food and not anything lacking in mine.

Beyond what the four of us ordered, the gigantic menu offers an entire section of Benedicts, a good variety of waffle and French Toast options, half a dozen grain or fruit options for dieters, and a reasonable lunch menu. There is nothing out of the ordinary about the drink menu (though I've been hearing a rumor that they may add shakes soon,) but the fresh squeezed orange juice is sublime, and our waitress did an excellent job of keeping our coffee hot despite the fact that the place busy the entire time we were there. As a bonus to those of you who have kids or whose inner child still lives, even the hot chocolate has a complimentary refill. So if I haven't made it clear enough, The Egg Factory has straight-up great food, an excellent waitstaff that is accommodating to whatever special requests you might throw at them (at least at the State Street location), and a wonderful atmosphere in which to enjoy your breakfast. They manage to deliver the flair and creativity of the pricier downtown restaurants at the cost (and with the portions) of the greatest greasy spoons, which is why The Egg Factory is literally Boise's best breakfast. Go there soon, go there often, and tell them "Catfish's Dishes" sent you.

Fowler's Pie

2011-12-07T02:08:00.001-07:00

I know we're well into December now (a by-product of time spent Christmas shopping and preparing for class in the Spring), but today's recipe involves Thanksgiving leftovers-kind of. For the first time ever, I made stock with the turkey carcass. It was a relatively simple process. I placed the entire carcass in a large pot along with some chopped carrot and onion, a whole head of garlic that I peeled and crushed, a tablespoon or so of sage, half that amount of black pepper, and a carton of vegetable broth. I added enough water to make sure the liquid covered the bird, brought the whole thing to a simmer, and covered. I let the stuff cook for about five hours, then took it off of the stove and strained it. The liquid had changed from murky and brown-the color of vegetable broth-to a bright straw yellow, and it definitely still smelled like Thanksgiving. I disposed of the solids and put the fruit of my labors into the fridge to chill.

Homemade Turkey Stock

The next day my stock had gone from liquid to solid. The gelatin from the turkey bones and fat had congealed, and the whole thing now looked like a gravy flavored Jell-O. So far so good. The only question was what to do with it. Wife already makes the best chicken noodle soup, and as with the initial turkey cookery, I didn't want to trespass on her turf. However, Mother-in-Law had sort of perma-loaned us her ramekins, which gave me the perfect idea-pot pie! I love pot pie, even the seventy cent ones with the weird chicken that doesn't really taste or feel like a food. Something about breaking through that buttery, flaky crust into a hearty stew is really satisfying, even in its lesser forms. I was ready to rock out some dough when Wife pointed out a sobering fact. We were being overrun by potatoes. We'd just bought a hefty bag of them when Father-in-Law donated some to us. Then we got food from the church, and they decided to give us potatoes as well. All told, we had almost twenty-five pounds of tubers. "Make Shepherd's Pie," she suggested.

"It's not a Shepherd's Pie without a sheep!" I retorted.

"Fine, Fowler's Pie. Whatever." Whatever indeed. Still, the potato problem needed to be dealt with. I decided to take this challenge on. The first thing I did was chop up an onion and two carrots, and get them sweating in about a quarter of a stick of butter. While they cooked, I got my cast iron up to medium high, and began to cook four boneless, skinless chicken breasts (rubbed with salt and pepper) in a tablespoon of oil. Although it is always best to work with the freshest ingredients, I knew that the stock I made was carrying a lot of flavor, so I used up some frozen bulk chicken. Cook the bird for several minutes on each side, until it has a nice char, and then dice it into bite sized cubes. You'll want the meat to be mostly cooked through, but since it will continue to cook in the stew a little bit of pink is OK, and perhaps preferable. You certainly don't want it to dry out. Add the chicken, two cups of frozen peas, and whatever other vegetables you want (I used a tablespoon of minced garlic) to the carrots and onions, and four cups of turkey stock. This part of the process was the biggest surprise to me. I had a box of my favorite chicken broth at the ready to thin the mixture out, but as soon as the stock began to heat it returned to liquid form. The smell was wonderful. I added a bit more sage and black pepper, and after bringing it to a boil I put it on simmer while I completed the next step, which was to make mashed potatoes.

I'm not going to go into making mashed potatoes-I feel I can safely assume that everyone who reads this already knows how, and if I am wrong there is always Google-but one thing I will say is that because this is going to be a crust, fancy them up a bit. You'll want to go ahead and add salt and pepper now (white pepper would be great if you have it,) and I also used Parmesan cheese and sour cream. Feel free to use your imagination. Recipes are only mannequins, and it is the cook's job to dress them up as they best see fit.

The Stew....

...and it's Crust.

Once your potatoes are ready, check on the stew. It should be reducing some, but if not you'll need to add some cornstarch to give it a rich thickness and differentiate it from soup. Be sure to temper it-there is nothing worse in this kind of a dish than adding cornstarch to an entire pot and having it clump up. To temper, remove a cup of the liquid to a separate vessel (even just the measuring cup itself,) and add your cornstarch to it. Once it has been fully dissolved, stir that liquid back into the rest of the stew. Once it has cooked to the desired consistency, pour it into medium-sized roasting pan and spoon the mashed potatoes over the top. The hard part is over. Throw it into a 425 degree oven for half an hour or until the top begins to brown and the stew is trying to bubble up over the crust. The end result is simple, hearty, and a good alternative to the traditional Shepherd's Pie.

The Finished Product

Easy Corn Chowder; or "How to Eat Canned Potatoes and Like It."

2011-11-30T02:14:00.001-07:00

Someday, I will be a successful food blogger. Between the combination of ad revenue, promotions at my so called "real" job, and writing articles for print I will buy myself Kitchenaid stand mixers with dough hooks and paddles. I will have a walk-in pantry with multiple types of flour, present recipes for dry-aged beef with truffles, and write reviews of restaurants that actually require reservations and shirts that don't profess allegiance to sports teams or alcoholism.

But right now, "Catfish's Dishes" is exactly what it claims to be in the tag line: something between Iron Chef and a package of ramen. Today we'll be leaning a bit closer to the latter than the former. See, in the non-idealized world where I am a custodian and not a culinary expert, sometimes money simply runs out. Boy breaks his glasses playing soccer, or Girl leaves her coat at school. Wife misses a day at work. Thanksgiving dinner gets out of hand in regards to largess. Any number of things could happen to break the budget. While I can respect the growing sentiment that Occupy should realize how much better they have it than people in third world countries, Wife and I and pretty much everyone I know ARE the 99%. We have school debt and a non-existent savings account and live paycheck to paycheck. That hasn't stopped me from trying to follow my passion, but it does mean that I can't always talk about the roast I made. In fact, as we juggled Wife's shortened hours (from the holiday) and increased visitation from Girl (likewise,) I found myself in a position I used to be in frequently, and hope to avoid whenever possible.

That is to say, in line at a food pantry. It wasn't that long ago (summer session, to be exact,) that I was writing about church food boxes nostalgically in a "Bum Survival Guide" for my English 101 class. A decade ago, before Wife was my wife and I had any concept of children, being penniless was an adventure. Now it's just uncomfortable. Somehow, it was much easier to accept the charity of others when I didn't need it as badly, but I actually felt ill when the volunteer helping me at the Salvation Army turned out to be someone I knew socially. That's part of why I am writing this, so that if any of my readers find themselves in a similar situation maybe they won't feel as bad; as long as you are striving to do better for yourself there is no shame in getting behind on the bills or having a rough month. The other reason (to the joy, I'm sure, of those of you who have saved your money more wisely) is because I actually ended up with a pretty good dinner out of the whole experience, a spicy corn chowder that tastes far better than the ingredients that went into it.

One of the biggest problems of getting food from an organization like Salvation Army or The Vineyard or whatever group serves your community-apart from the aforementioned pride issue-is that the food people are giving aways typically isn't the best food. You could say, quite literally, that beggars can't be choosers. It's vegetables and meat that are about to expire, and often dairy that already has. It's large, corn syrup frosted cakes that I feel obligated to take but don't want to bring anywhere near my family. It's lots of canned food, and most of it is the same-green beans, peas, and corn. It's mystery items. It's not hard to find a place for most of it, but sometimes you have to work a bit harder to find a use for what they give you.

Take, for instance, canned potatoes. It isn't that they are inedible; it's that potatoes aren't hard to come by, especially in Idaho. Green beans in a can pale in flavor to those fresh from a farm, but depending on the season they can be pricey. Fresh corn just disappears. I can get cheap potatoes year round without that canned taste. No matter; the charitable organization helping my family out this holiday season gave me several. While it was tempting to put them into my garage until I could "recycle" them the next time my employer held a canned food drive, I decided that I should will them into a good meal. After all, the last time I had to resort to food boxes, I developed a reputation for being able to get the most out of them. No reason to allow the success's of the last decade to cripple that skill.

The most off-putting part of a canned potato is its texture. They are a little bland, yes, but it's the weird softness that makes them unappealing. But potatoes are often soft in soups and stews. With that as my backdrop, I began to look at what else I had available and went to work.

Bacon makes a great base for chowder, but can be replaced with butter.

In the end, the ingredients in my house indicated a corn chowder of sorts was in order. I took five strips of pepper bacon (one of only three non-spice ingredients not sourced from my church food box or someones garden) and sliced them into matchstick sized pieces, then began to heat them in a large pot over medium heat. While they sizzled away, I grabbed a new knife and my veggie cutting board, and got to work chopping an onion. I used an entire yellow onion-often, when soup recipes call for an onion to be used, I will only use half, but since I was going to be using canned corn as well as the potatoes, I wanted to make sure that a lot of flavor could be transferred over from fresh ingredients. I also minced a fresh jalapeno from Mother-in-Law's garden, although it wasn't needed yet.

When the bacon began to get nice and crisp, I removed it from the pot with a slotted spoon and set it aside, leaving the bacon grease bubbling away in anticipation of my onions. (A vegetarian version of this recipe would probably want to use 1/4 stick of butter.) I dumped them in along with one clove of garlic, which I added via a garlic press to save time. You'll want to stir frequently here, both to get up the little browned bits from the bacon as well as to keep the garlic from burning. When the onions begin to turn translucent and soft, open up two cans of corn, reserving the liquid from one, and dump them into the pot along with the jalapeno, two cans of potatoes (drained and rinsed,) 2 tsp. of salt, 2 tsp. of cumin, and 1 tsp. of black pepper. You'll want to let these cook together for about five minutes. Being canned, the corn and potatoes don't need the time for any other reason than to let the flavors marry, but that is definitely reason enough.

Once everything in the pot has had time to get acquainted, add a carton (thirty-two ounces) of your favorite chicken or vegetable broth, the reserved corn liquid, and a tablespoon of lemon juice. The juice from the can of corn is only there to help emphasize the flavor that is lost by using canned ingredients, so if you are able to make this with fresh corn it won't be missed. Bring everything to a boil, then add 1 cup of heavy cream and three cups of sharp cheddar, grated. When I was making this I was stuck with the ingredients I had on hand, and used milk in place of the cream, but I've made similar soups enough times to know that if you have a choice here you'll want to go with the cream. That being said, it's a textural thing, not a taste thing, and if you only have milk to work with everything will still be fine. Cook until the cheese is completely melted, then reduce to a simmer. Let everything cook together for ten minutes or until it has reduced by about the tip of a finger, then salt and pepper to taste. Serve topped with the reserved bacon and/or a sprinkling of minced fresh cilantro and crusty bread. While this isn't the world's best corn chowder, it is a cheap and tasty way to make the most out of sub-optimal ingredients, and that can often be a far more valuable asset to the home cook.

Welcome Neighbor!

2011-11-29T07:48:00.001-07:00

This post, or at least its title, has been sitting in my "draft" section for a few days now. I was busy trying to find pictures from an earlier era, or get out a new post of my own so it didn't seem like I was just padding content. To hell with it. I have a shout out to make, and it isn't going to wait for the perfect framing device.

Several years ago, though I didn't know it at the time, I was living in paradise. One friend went so far as to name my home "St. John's Wood," in reference to the abundance of trees that stretched out behind my little house. It was a two bedroom, situated on a gigantic lot yet less than two feet away from another little green and white house with similar dimensions. (We got a bigger living room, the other house got a skylight and a rocking back porch. Otherwise it was a push.) Like all things in life, this living arangement wasn't perfect. The homes were poorly insulated, the kitchen was about as big as a walk-in closet, and its proximity to the river caused a strip of our floor from the living room to the bathroom to host a nightly death march of spiders and beetles from 10-2. It was those things that we were focused on (well, that and the less than stellar landlord who liked to park his friends broken cars in our yard along with his construction supplies) when we moved. But-hence the earlier "paradise" remark-there was plenty to recommend this particular property. The backyard had a large firepit, and a ready supply of wood. If you were willing to clamber over an old stone wall you could charge into the woods and find yourself on the Greenbelt, or at least at the off-property neighbor's hammock. A previous resident's freed rabbits gamboled on the lawn, half wild pets that you could enjoy but never had to tend to. During the summer, the yard would get truly overgrown, and for brief moments you could forget you even lived in the city. Hell, even the landlord's negligence was sometimes a positive, as not only was the rule against additional houseguests never enforced, but entire yellow school buses of hippies could come and spend a summer as our guests and it didn't matter. That being said, one of the best parts of living in that house-now burned to the ground so said landlord could make skinny townhomes-I didn't truly appreciate until I didn't have it anymore.

Good neighbors. Now, I don't have issue with my current neighbors; Boy is best friends with the boy next door, and the person directly across the street from me always gives a friendly wave. I'm just not friends with them. The whole class/hobby/age thing has kept me from getting to know any of them, and I'll be the first to admit that it's just as much my fault as it is theirs. But at my last home, things were different. Chelsea and Nate welcomed us from the very start. Of course, it helps that Wife knew Chelsea from before, but she knew her because she had dated one of Wife's best friends. It could have just as easily been akward as it was pleasant. It also helps, I'm sure, that our houses were practically touching-you'd be in for a rough time if you couldn't relate to people in such close proximity. Whatever the factors behind it, we've never had neighbors we got along with in that fashion before or since.

Unsurprisingly, one of the big points of connection between us was food. Nate actually works at a restaurant, and the rest of us-Chelsea, Wife, and myself-are all enthusiastic hobby cooks. They were always offering up leftovers of soups they made or cookies fresh from the kitchen. Not only did I feel comfortable going over to ask for a cup of sugar, but they were the type of people you could actually talk to about what you wanted it for. In addition to movies and the cartoons of the Eighties, food made up the bulk of our conversations.

Then their family began to grow, and the little green and white house didn't quite do it anymore. Several months before we decided that we'd had enough of the marching insects and the ceiling mold the landlord wasn't concerned with they left for a bigger house. We promised to keep in touch, but apart from Facebook it hasn't really happened. It's just the way of life. Boy has chess club and piano practice; I blog and have started going to FNM's. Wife works crazy eleven hour days and then wants nothing more than a glass of Chardonnay and an episode of Bones. The only freinds we really see are those we can get to come to us. But I've missed those conversations. That's why I was so happy when I saw that Chelsea decided to start a blog of her own. I was even more happy to see that she raised the bar by making Turducken for her very first post. So long story short, if you enjoy the food conversation here at "Catfish's Dishes," you might enjoy her conversation as well.

You can go to http://www.tattoosandcookies.blogspot.com/ if you would like to meet the new (virtual) neighbor.

Of Food Gone By

2011-11-21T04:32:00.001-07:00

A few of you readers, the ones who have been here since the beginning (well, the second "beginning," I suppose) I know in real life. We've worked together, gone to school together, hung out at parties or talked on Facebook. Maybe we're even related. Some of you (more and more, thank goodness) don't know me at all, except as the person who typed what you are reading. The feature that counts page views tells me that you are there, although for the most part you are just lurking-I don't have that kind of following yet, that people feel obligated to comment on my every post. But like any good Thanksgiving festivity, today's post is about sharing. Getting to know one another.

I don't have a recipe today. I haven't been to any restaurants, good or bad. I don't even have a grain of culinary wisdom to share. On this, the week of Thanksgiving, I just want to talk to you about something near and dear to all of us: food memories.

With all that is dark and depressing in this world of ours, it seems profound to me that some of humanity's most endearing memories are of music and sex and fragrance and food. I can hear the right Weezer song and suddenly find myself reliving a teenage broken heart. I can smell hay and manure driving past a field and remember carefree summer days growing up on a ranch. Perhaps it is a gift humanity has been given, that memories such as these are more likely indelible than our pains; perhaps it is simply harder to forget the things that affect not only our lives but our very senses. From the traditional Thanksgiving meal to our own family customs, food memories are perhaps the strongest of all of these. Not only can a well made dinner strike the same emotional chord as a song, but food is also at the core of survival; it perfectly encapsulates both want and need. So rather than try to add to the lexicon of turkey and pumpkin pie recipes, I thought Catfish's Dishes would celebrate Thanksgiving by talking about a few of those seminal experiences. It wouldn't be sharing, though, if it's just me doing the telling. Whether you are one of my friends, a casual reader who has stumbled across my site, or even just here because you tell EVERY food blogger that they are great and should join your food blog aggregate site, leave me a food memory in the comments below. I can't wait to see what you have to say.

Boy and his cracker crumbs are here as a pagebreak!

My mom is a great cook, and if you try and tell me that every kid says that about their mom you'll just irritate me. That being said, the most visceral memory I have of food as a child isn't from her kitchen. My dad is a fair cook too, and while he only made a few dishes here and there, everything in his small repertoire was fantastic. I'm not going to talk about him either. Several decades before Jamie Oliver or Mrs. Q started trying to fix school lunches, my mind was blown by cafeteria food. To be fair, Owyhee Combined served its fair share of nutrient deprived crap. They served frozen pizza (apparently a vegetable, if you haven't heard) and the burger/fry duo regularly, and the salad bar was a sad thing, only ever stocked with five or six salads and pushed into a corner where only the weird kids could find it. They even shipped their milk cartons in through a long and winding canyon on an unrefrigerated truck, so that during the hot months that bookend the school year any milk not drank on delivery day was a pulpy, sour mess. It was enough to make a kid want to bring in a sack lunch, even if all they were getting was peanut butter and jelly or (ugh) baloney. But not on Fridays. Friday was Indian Taco day.

Pic taken from Wikipedia. I only wish I had an Indian Taco to photograph right now.

Now, an Indian taco isn't much different than a regular taco. It has meat, cheese, beans, lettuce, tomatoes, salsa and sour cream. But something separates it from its Mexican cousin-frybread. Frybread is a leavened dough that is flattened into discs and deep fried in oil or lard, and is such a quintessential staple of the Native American diet that it was named the state bread of South Dakota (thanks Wikipedia!) I've had frybread since elementary school, in fact the stalwart Boise breakfast location Merritt's serves "scones" that are really nothing but frybread, but it isn't the same. While so much of my elementary cafeteria menu was the standard processed junk polluting schools today, this frybread was clearly an individual person's recipe. The halls would begin to smell with that sweet fried bread smell half an hour before lunch, and class became an afterthought. It has been eighteen years since I have had real frybread, loaded with slow cooked beans and beef and sharp cheddar cheese and a full compliment of condiments, over half of my life. I still think about it a couple of times a year. Ever since I've started writing this blog it's becoming more and more a question of "when," not "if" I tackle the Indian Taco myself.

Of course, not all food memories are good ones. While the main intent of this post is to focus on the magic of food in our lives, I don't think I can talk about food memories without giving a brief mention to the Shamburger.

Gem State Academy: known for its commitment to Christ, not its food. Clearly.

After having gone to elementary school and junior high on an Indian reservation, my parents made the choice to send me to a Seventh Day Adventist boarding school. Now, not every Adventist is a vegetarian. If you meet somebody of this faith on the street, chances are they might wear jewelry, dance, or go out to eat at a restaurant after church on Saturday. But boarding schools are funded by the staunchest members of a faith. Not only did the lunch ladies not serve us meat, but most spices were verboten (even pepper!) Really, none of the food was good. Some people who grew up Adventist are nostalgic about Haystacks, which is basically meatless chili piled onto Fritos, but I was never sold. Now, I don't mind meatless meals. I even spent a couple of years as a vegetarian. Still, with the exception of a few well made veggie burgers and one brand of fake sausage, the good vegetarian food isn't trying to pretend to be meat. As bad as the pretend meat cranked out by companies like Loma Linda was, it couldn't hold a candle to the strange creation of the cafeteria staff, the Shamburger. The patty contained three ingredients: cottage cheese, cream of mushroom soup, and cornflakes. The lasagna they served, which broke plastic forks like they were wishbones, didn't hold a candle to this monstrosity. The "burgers" were warm and slimy, served with American cheese on cheap buns with only ketchup and mayo as options. Each bite was the same texture, like a big pile of mushroom flavored ketchup covered oatmeal.

The final memory that stands out is of a more recent vintage. Just over a year ago, I received a call informing me I had won a trip for two to Reno, Nevada. While the main purpose of the package turned out to be a bit anti-climactic, there was a day and a half of free time to tour the "Biggest Little City" bookending the trip. That's how I found myself wandering around a strange city looking for something good to eat on the day after Thanksgiving. There was plenty of food to be had in the casinos, but apart from the buffets nothing was really worth the price they were charging, and neither Wife or I was ready for the all-you-can-eat segment of our trip, so we braved the cold to try and find something affordable AND appetizing. Across from the valet parking was a McDonalds, but that only met the cheap part of the criteria. Wife was eyeballing a grungy Mexican place akin to Boise's own Los Betos, one of those places with huge portions of cheap food served any time of day or night, but it hadn't been that long since we'd made a Betos' run and I wasn't feeling burritos. It still might have been the best option if I hadn't walked around to the backside of the casinos. Sitting in a weedy parking lot across from a depressingly secure liquor store was The Golden Flower, a Vietnamese and Chinese restaurant. My eyes lit up. I expected Wife to be resistant due not only to her dislike of Asian food but her reluctance to try new things (we'd never had Vietnamese before,) but the fact that I won us a trip to Reno had given me enough brownie points that the choice was mine alone. We entered, and I was struck by a wave of culture shock. In Boise's Asian restaurants the cook might be Vietnamese (or Chinese, or Japanese, depending on the cuisine.) There is a decent chance the servers are as well, but it isn't guaranteed. But all or most of the customers would be Caucasian. Not so at The Golden Flower. Wife and I were the only white people around, and the place was packed. While I knew that the casino industry employed large amounts of Vietnamese it was still surprising that this little restaurant, no more than fifty yards from the door of the El Dorado, had no diners that appeared to be gamblers or tourists. Between the atmosphere and the smells, I already had an inkling I was in for something special. Not really knowing my way around a Vietnamese menu, I decided to order their signature dish, pho (pronounced "fuh,") a beef and noodle soup. Though I couldn't have paid more than five dollars, it was brought to me in a bowl that probably held at least two quarts of soup. Tender strips of beef were floating alongside rice noodles in a rich, long simmered broth, and the whole thing was accompanied by a plate of sliced jalapenos, bean sprouts, basil leaves, and wedges of lime. That one bowl contained everything I love about Asian food and the homemade comfort of chicken noodle soup in each bite. I've since had pho in Boise, at Pho 79, but it didn't compare. It was good, it just didn't have the same *something* in the broth. A new place, Pho Bac, recently opened in a space long held by a sandwich shop and I am trying to convince Wife to go with me this Friday and create a new Thanksgiving tradition, a Black Friday bowl of pho.

So now that I've shared these three dishes and their impact on me, what food stands out to you as clear as the day you ate it? Pies made in a small kitchen with your grandma? A killer Reuben at a border town truck stop? I want to know. Oh yeah, and one more thing-

Happy Thanksgiving!

Gyro Shack (Review)

2011-11-17T07:55:00.001-07:00

Wife was having a bad ~~day~~ week, and to be perfectly honest, so was I. Boy has reached the age where he believes it possible to talk his way out of homework, and despite being a nine year old with a high school reading level, he ended up with a "D" in reading due to lazy and incomplete work. The "stern parent talk" that happened at the end of the semester seemed to do the trick for a week or two, but he was right back at it, hiding away bits of his worm journal so he could claim to be done with his assignments and play the Wii. Sunday started with the revelation that he had several weeks of work due on Monday, and each successive day revealed more hidden homework. Only time will tell if the punishments leveled-from a missed meeting of the chess club to the first spanking handed out in over a year-will make an impact on him, but it was clearly weighing on us.

It was with this crushing wall of negativity as a backdrop that I decided to relinquish my pocket money and take Wife out to eat. I'd won a whopping ten dollars on a bet, and while I had intended to save it to feed my obsession, I felt I had to do something to perk Wife (and myself) up.

Luckily, we are in the same neighborhood as a Gyro Shack (5602 W State St., Boise ID 83703 (208) 853-2684). Another Gyro Shack sits in a shopping center on Cole and Overland, next to the second-run movie theater and a gaming store. It has been there as long as I can remember, but the one down the road from me is of a more recent vintage, taking over the space once owned by failed coffee shop The Human Bean. It is just a little drive-through and there is no dining space available, not even picnic benches outside, although the grassy berms that separate the restaurant from State Street's heavy traffic might be a nice place to picnic with your food during warmer months.

We pulled up to the speaker at around ten-thirty in the morning, the only customers. Wife didn't have much of a break (just long enough to take me home, really, which was another mark on the stress tally) so we were glad not to have to deal with a long wait. In fact, while the place never seems deserted, I have never actually seen it busy. Another factor beneficial to my wife's time crunch, but perhaps disappointing to some diners is that there aren't a lot of options on the menu; I think the coffee place may have had more. I am notoriously slow at deciding when I am given lots of options, and that wasn't a problem at the Gyro Shack-while there are a total of eighteen sandwiches listed on their board, they are really three different types (regular gyro, chicken gyro, something-something bacon ranch) served a variety of ways. While I could see this bothering parents with a car load of picky children, or a large group looking for variety, I figure most people who pull up to something called Gyro Shack are looking for a gyro, so I gave the limited menu a pass.

Wife went for the original gyro, and paid the extra two dollars to make it a combo. For those not familiar with gyro, the traditional Greek sandwich is lamb served on pita bread, with tomato, onion, and tzaziki (cucumber and garlic yogurt) sauce. Gyro Shack offers the option to make the gyro "deluxe" by adding feta cheese, but neither of us felt like paying a dollar more for one ingredient. The combo came with her choice of Greek salad (cucumber, onion, tomato, kalmata olives and feta, drizzled with olive oil, salt and pepper), some boring bagged chips, or hummus and pita and a drink. She took the hummus, and I made her get me a Diet Coke for the drink since she was going to waste the drink option on water. While the original looked tempting, it isn't much of a review if the diners eat the same thing so I decided upon the spicy chicken, which had most of the same toppings as the regular gyro, but in addition to replacing lamb with chicken added sambal oelek chili paste (similar to the Vietnamese chili garlic paste I use on my ramen, other than the emphasis on garlic I don't know if there is any difference but nationality) for kick. Seeing as I only had my ten and the change in Wife's purse, I skipped adding a combo, but I did feel obligated to add a piece of baklava from the tiny desert menu. Total damage: $10.95

We got back to the house and spread our feast out onto the table. Everything looked and smelled wonderful, and after I took a few pictures it was time to dig in. I've had a Gyro Shack gyro before, but I talked Wife into letting me try hers to refresh my memory. The pita was warm and soft, and while I can't imagine they make their own pitas (especially with the appropriately named shack being roughly twice the size of my bedroom closet,) they weren't the cheap pitas from the deli some places use. These were fluffy, but with a nice, crisp bite on the outside. Inside of the pita, the flavors meshed beautifully. The tzaziki was just right, with hints of parsley and lemon, flavorful but not overpowering. The vegetables were fresh and added texture to the otherwise soft food. Finally, the meat was exactly what I hoped for. Gyro Shack adds beef to its lamb (gyro meat is not sliced directly from any particular cut of lamb, as I once imagined, but actually an especially dense meatloaf,) and I don't know if that is typical, but the flavor here was bold, and stood apart from both the sauce and the other condiments. The meat was also moist, which was a plus; since pitas are particularly hearty, dry gyro meat can lead to quite an unappetizing mouthful.

My cellphone camera doesn't do it justice.

Her side-the pita and hummus-was just about what you would expect from pita and hummus. Wife was bummed because sometimes they serve the hummus warm, and other times it is cold, and today was a cold day. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason for the variation-it is my hypothesis that the times she has gotten it warm were merely accidents based on where the Styrofoam shell was sitting in the kitchen while the gyro was assembled-but she has developed a taste for warm hummus, and if we go back we may just have to start requesting it. Minor gripe aside, it was quite flavorful, and the whole thing was dusted with the most wonderful paprika. I am used to the grocery store variant of the spice, and if you've had it you know that it is mostly tasteless, a coloring agent seemingly used in American cuisine only to brighten up the appearance of deviled eggs on a platter. This paprika couldn't be farther from the jarred stuff from the store. It was deep red, more like a chili powder in color, and it's smell was pungent. Even between the hummus itself and the pita bread it stood out, announcing its presence in every bite. The whole thing was topped off with a pair of kalmata olives, and I was sad that I didn't scrounge up enough change to get some of my own.

The spicy chicken gyro delivered more on the spicy than the chicken.

While good, my spicy chicken gyro took a clear backseat to its traditional cousin. Part of that was my fault, for the cardinal sin of assumption. Having been often to the other Mediterranean fast food place in town, Mazzah, when I read the words "chicken gyro," I instantly assumed it was just grilled chicken with spices, thrown on a pita, and that the use of gyro was just to give consistant feel to the menu. Instead, chicken was given the same treatment as a lamb gyro, formed into a loaf and slow roasted on a spit before slicing. This may not have bothered me as much if I hadn't gotten the spicy variant of gyro, but the sambal paste and tzaziki completely overtook the chicken; the sandwich was still quite good, but I could have gotten it without meat entirely and enjoyed it about as much; it's presence added a little something, but not much.

The only thing that was actually disappointing was the dessert. I love baklava. Every year the Greek Orthodox Church in Boise has a Greek food festival, a weekend full of gyros and lamb kabobs and baklava and other delicious food. Gyro Shack's gyro matches those served at the event, and for considerably less money, but the same thing can't be said of the baklava. It contains all the right ingredients: puff pastry, walnuts, a sweet syrup-the only thing it lacks is execution. Rather than the many, many layers the little old Greek ladies (and men) at the festival-or even Mazzah, for that matter-make, the nuts in this dessert seemed concentrated in one spot, allowing the pastry to be dry, and the syrup was missing an element I couldn't place. It was still fine, and if you are headed to the Gyro Shack for its fantastic gyros and really want baklava, I wouldn't blame you for ordering it, but it doesn't have that special something I wanted.

All in all, I was quite satisfied by the Gyro Shack. This small Boise based drive-through is very affordable, has good-almost great, even-food and quick (if nondescript) service, everything I could hope for, and I see myself coming back time and time again, perhaps even soon. The bad taste in my mouth from Bad Boy Burgers has been cleansed, and I am excited to see where my car will take me next.

Other People's Recipes: New Mexico Chocolate Cookie Crinkles

2011-11-10T21:11:00.001-07:00

One of the nicest things about the fall and winter months is all the attention paid to tradition; while my family has rituals for the Fourth of July and the whole month of August is pretty much a party (with both mine and Wife's birthdays bracketing our anniversary over a three week period,) none of these things really stands up to the feelings generated between Halloween and the first week of the new year. Some of these traditions, like the yearly Zombie Walk I posted a picture of on Halloween, involve an activity, but whether it is roasting pumpkin seeds as a family or the deliciously unhealthy "sausage biscuits" Wife makes every Christmas morning, many of them revolve around the kitchen.

That's why when my friend Mouse talked about the cookies her mom used to make for her, I knew I should try and make them myself. I had been looking for something tasty to make for a friend who was in town, but even when that didn't pan out it I decided I would like to try and replicate the cookies Mouse had grown up on for her sake. I had already tried to replicate her nostalgia once, on her birthday, with mixed results. The candied apples I made in lieu of a cake looked beautiful, tasted wonderful, and played hell on your teeth. My inexperience with candy thermometers made what could have been a perfect treat more reminiscent of the glass Christmas ornaments my punk friends used to eat to freak people out. I wasn't going to let one mistake in the kitchen discourage me, however, so I set out to find a recipe.

Fort Knox

Problem was, even Mouse wasn't sure what they were called. After much thought, she came up with "Krinkles?" All I knew is that they were chocolate, they were wonderful, and they got their name from the way the top of the cookie cracked as it baked. With that in mind, I turned to the internet. After a little bit of looking around, I found a recipe on "The Joy of Baking" that looked promising and sent the link to Mouse via Facebook. It was quickly rejected. The idea of coating a perfectly good chocolate cookie in confectioner's sugar? Blasphemy. Luckily, Mouse's very own mother decided to get in on the conversation. They weren't regular Crinkles (with a "C,") but New Mexico Crinkles. While I wasn't so fortunate as to get her recipe (it was tucked away at Mouse's father's house, and my desire to make these cookies had reached critical mass,) that information was enough to lead me to the proper Crinkles; the ones coated with cinnamon sugar. Now that I knew I was working with cinnamon as well as chocolate, I was even more eager to make these and returned to the internet. In the end, I decided upon a recipe by Melissa Snow from the site "Just a Pinch Recipe Club." It seemed to meet all the criteria from the information I was presented, and more importantly it-for the most part-called for ingredients I already had.

I waited until a morning that Boy asked for cereal instead of a cooked breakfast and set to work. These cookies were pretty easy, but I was trying to fit them into a pretty narrow window; I drop Wife off at work by 7, and leave to take Boy to school at 8:25. There could be no lolly-gagging.

For those of you who don't like to click links, this is the recipe I was working with:

1 c plus 6 tbsp all-purpose flour
1 1/4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
5 Tbsp butter or margarine
1 c brown sugar, packed
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
3 squares unsweetened chocolate, melted
1/4 c granulated sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 to 1 tsp instant coffee (optional)

Pretty straight forward, and it began in the usual way: combining the dry ingredients. The flour, baking powder, and teaspoon of cinnamon went together in a bowl and were mixed together. The brown sugar and the butter got mixed in another bowl until creamy, and then the eggs were added.

Dry Mix

At this point I had to deviate a bit from the original recipe, although I am glad I did. Melissa calls for unsweetened chocolate, but I had some semi-sweet chocolate left over from a pie Wife had made the Christmas before, and I was willing to risk the quality of the cookies rather than buy even more chocolate to sit in the baking cabinet. I melted the required three squares, and added them (along with the vanilla) to the egg/sugar/butter goop. Nothing had gone in the oven at this point, but already the kitchen was smelling pretty nice. Once everything is well incorporated, you can begin to slowly add the flour mixture. This would also be a nice time to preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Usually, I'll put the oven temperature up at top of a recipe, but your dough needs to go into the fridge to chill at this point, so you may as well wait and save the electricity.

...and Chocolate.

Speaking of, I would give the dough a good half hour of refrigeration. I didn't have the time, and only gave it ten minutes, but texturally speaking this stuff is a quarter cup of flour away from being batter; it's not easy to roll unless it can properly set.

Tastes like childhood.

While the oven is heating and the dough is cooling is the perfect time to combine the final ingredients. This was the other place (again out of necessity) that I deviated from the "Just a Pinch" recipe. I didn't have any instant coffee, and since it was both listed as optional and didn't figure into Mouse's nostalgic recollections I had no qualms about scrapping it. However, the mix of sugar and cinnamon just seemed off. One of my favorite parts of childhood was my mom making me toast with cinnamon sugar, and the ratio in the recipe seemed like sugar with some cinnamon in it, not cinnamon sugar. I doubled it to a full teaspoon and hoped for the best.

Once the trifecta of heat/cool/mix has been accomplished, it is time to make the cookies. I've never had patience with making each cookie identical, but the original recipe says that if you make one inch balls you can get thirty cookies. I got a reasonable eighteen. After you make them, roll them in the cinnamon sugar mix and put them on a greased cookie sheet. I saved my leftover cinnamon sugar for toast; I haven't a clue what you would do with any remaining sugar if you added the coffee as well. (Except maybe add it to more coffee?)

Ready for the oven

The recommended baking time is twelve minutes. Due to either altitude or how hot my oven runs I knew I should shave off some time and pulled mine at just over ten. Let them finish setting on the hot tray for a minute, then remove them to a rack to cool (or put them in your mouth. They're your cookies.)

I was really impressed with the way these cookies turned out, and I would definitely make them again. I don't know what these would be like with the mocha flavor the coffee would provide, and I certainly wouldn't mind making a batch that way in the future, but I am glad I made the change from unsweetened to semi-sweet chocolate. Neither myself nor any of the people (Boy excluded) who tried these cookies like their desserts overly sweet, and these seemed just right for us-I could imagine them being perhaps a little plain without that extra bit of sugar.

And as for the girl whose traditions inspired me to make these? I have to say Mouse was quite pleased, although in the end she only got to have a few as all of the people who came around between when I finished baking and when I finally brought them to work had to try one (or two.) Even Wife (who usually prefers the savory to the sweet) had a couple.

Slow Cooked Pork Shoulder with Rosemary Potatoes and Butternut Squash

2011-11-09T02:40:00.000-07:00

Fall. It is perhaps my favorite season. The Boise State Broncos are dominating opponents on the blue turf, the unrelenting heat of summer fades, and the calendar is filled with family celebrations. While it is still over half a month until Thanksgiving, the chill in the air was making me pine for the type of food that takes all day to cook, whose aromas fill the house and makes stomachs growl; the type of food that makes dinner an event. I had to ignore that desire the week of Halloween. Our house was filled with guests, and we turned to quick fixes so that we could actually spend time with our company. Pizzas, burritos, and pasta dishes all helped keep us out of the kitchen while satisfying the various dietary restrictions of our temporarily extended household. The food tasted fine, and I had a great time with my friends, but as the last of them left for Oregon on the second I started planning how I was going to cure my craving.

The first part was easy; with Thanksgiving so close I knew I didn't want to cook a bird. Anyway, Wife has pretty much perfected the Alton Brown turkey, and while I don't purport to be a true expert it seems counter intuitive to blog about a meal if I'm not even the best at making it in my own house. That left beef and pork, and while a pot roast would certainly fit the criteria the humble pig had one very big advantage. Towards the end of summer, Mother-in-Law decided to purchase a freezer with which to store all of the homemade pasta sauce she had made; unfortunately for her said freezer didn't actually fit in her house. The unit ended up in my garage, and while I was excited to have it there it was still mainly just holding her sauce. At least it was until I saw the pork shoulder.

It was a ten pound bone-in monstrosity, going for just under a dollar a pound in the Winco deli on its "sell-by" date. Without the freezer I would have had to pass it by; I'm a stickler for order, and I wouldn't have adjusted the menu I make each week before I go shopping just to take advantage of a good deal. Despite throwing off my attempt to come in under budget for the week, I brought it home and stashed it in the garage for a rainy day. So by merit of being already purchased (and therefore assisting this week's budget) pork shoulder nudged its way ahead of roast. Now all that was left was to craft a meal around it.

Slow Cooked Pork Shoulder (Serves 8, liberally)-Adapted from this recipe by Jamie Oliver

Set your pork out on a clean cutting board while you preheat your oven to 425 degrees. For best results, you will want to find a ten pound shoulder yourself, but if your market doesn't have one just check on the cooking a bit more often-nobody likes dry meat. One side of the roast should still be covered with a decent layer of fat. With a paring knife, make small incisions every couple of inches. These shouldn't actually be deep enough to cut the meat, but are otherwise similar to the cuts you would make to stud a roast with garlic. Once you have scored the fat, rub the entire roast with sea salt (I really like this Celtic sea salt I found at the Boise Co-Op) and fresh ground black pepper, making sure to work the seasonings into the cuts you've made in the fat. Place the roast in a roasting pan, preferably one with a v-rack to keep the meat up out of its own juices. This will ensure that the outside of the roast gets a nice crust. Cook for half an hour, then remove, cover with two sheets of foil, and cook for another four hours.

While the roast is cooking, prepare your vegetables. I used a couple of red onions, a dozen baby carrots, a bulb of garlic, and (in the biggest deviation from Oliver's recipe) a whole butternut squash. Since I was using baby carrots, I just kept them whole, but the other bits of produce needed some work. I quartered the onion, peeled the garlic cloves, and chopped the squash into half inch chunks. I kept the skin on, but I would definitely change that the next time I make this and you should too. My rationale at the time was that it would be easier to remove the squash from its outer flesh once it was soft, but it will be time to make gravy when the vegetables come out of the oven and you will be in too much of a hurry to stop and deal with scalding hot squash.

A wonderful fall medley.

When the roast has finished its four hour stint in the oven, lift up the v-rack and set it aside. There should be a goodly amount of fat and drippings in the bottom of the pan. Drain them and set them aside, then place your vegetables in the roasting pan. Toss them in two tablespoons of the reserved pork fat, and add two teaspoons of crushed red pepper. Place the roast (minus the rack) onto the vegetables and return, uncovered, for an additional hour. Set the foil aside.

When half an hour remains on your timer, heat the remaining drippings in a large lidded pot or cast iron over medium heat. Once they start to boil, add six cups of cubed potatoes and two tablespoons of dried rosemary and cover, stirring every five to ten minutes until the potatoes are tender, approximately the length of time remaining on the roast. (Alternatively, you could portion out the fat and cook the potatoes in batches so as to get them crispy, but I liked the way they came out a little creamy and saturated with flavor through to the middle.) Salt and pepper to taste, and set aside-still covered-until you are ready to serve the roast.

These potatoes are incredibly rich.

When the roast is removed from the oven, set it aside and cover with the foil. Set aside the carrots and squash for serving, and throw away the garlic and onion. (Alternatively, the garlic is soft enough you can spread it on baguette, but there are enough carbs in this meal that it seems like too much. I just handed mine out to the family as a teaser for the meal.) Place the roasting pan on your largest burner and heat on high heat, adding 2 1/2 cups of chicken stock gradually as you scrape up the bits of burned fat (fond) on the bottom of the roasting pan. Reduce the heat and simmer the liquid to reduce.

Once the gravy is ready, so are you. The meat should be nice and fork tender. Portion it out along with your vegetables, top it with some gravy (and put a pat of butter on the squash,) and serve.

This turned out to be a truly phenomenal meal. Wife is telling everyone that it is the best meal I've ever made, and it was really easy. There was very little active work, with the quality of the ingredients doing all the heavy lifting. Not only that, but it reheats well, and while the squash and carrots only lasted the first day, Wife, Boy, and I were able to get three meals out of the pork and potatoes with generous portions of meat for the adults. This dish is bound to become a regular staple of my fall and winter cooking, and I expect you'll have a similar reaction.

Bad Boy Burgers (Review)

2011-10-31T16:51:00.000-06:00

When I first got the idea to combine my love of food and my love of writing into this blog, one of the most appealing aspects was the fact that I could finally review restaurants. I've always been slightly jealous of food critics (and critics in general, really.) Getting paid to go out to eat? Sounds too good to be true. Of course, at this point it is too good to be true, because apart from the few cents provided whenever anyone is kind enough to click on the advertisements clogging up the corners of this page I don't make anything; if I made enough money at my real world job to do itemized deductions on my taxes I could probably start claiming going out to eat as a business expense, but at this point restaurant dining is just a loss.
Which isn't to say that it doesn't have its advantages, the biggest being that it helps me in the great going out to eat debate. It's hard to argue with Wife the merits of new and unpredictable versus familiar and safe when money is tight, but if it's for "work," well, we can't just go to Los Betos all the time. Then again, if our experience at Bad Boy Burgers (7000 Fairview Avenue, Boise ID 208-373-0020) is any indication, maybe we should.

Typically, Wife would be at work on a Monday morning, and Boy and I would be making breakfast prior to taking him to school, but Halloween is rarely typical. Since Girl was scheduled to join us this Halloween, I made arrangements with her mother to keep her Sunday night. That meant taking her to school as well, but on the other side of town. Wife had taken the day off, so we fed the kids cereal (skipping the usual cooked meal so as to keep from waking our house guests) and dropped them off. The people on our couch had been consuming wine and horror movies until two in the morning, so it wasn't long before I suggested we go out to eat. Wife lobbied hard for the aforementioned 'Betos, craving the steak and egg burrito, but I played the blog card.

"We should try something new." I'd been eyeballing The Egg Factory for some months, as well as Salt Tears Coffee House and Noshery, a fancy looking place near our house that is attached to an art gallery. Wife wasn't as reluctant to ditch Los Betos as I thought she would have been, but she still wanted to keep it simple. We had errands to run, and that meant drive-through food. We'd technically been to Bad Boy Burgers before but I'd never written about it and more importantly I had no idea they had a breakfast menu.

The first thing I noticed as we pulled up to the menu was that the outer case had been cracked off of the speaker. I noticed this by the fact that the person working the drive-through said "Or_r wh__v_r _r read." I thanked him, wondering if my words were coming out as mangled on the other side, and began to scan the menu. While I did my usual "restaurant menu pressure" thing, Wife quickly found what she was looking for; a steak and egg burrito. None of the breakfast items jumped out at me, so I began looking at burgers (available all day) until a truck pulled up behind us. The speaker repeated that we could order whenever we were ready. I settled on the sourdough bacon cheeseburger and added fries ala' carte. In what I should have recognized as foreshadowing, the crabby man working the speaker didn't know that the steak burrito was a menu item (item #2, actually, listed with a 6 oz rib-eye), but said that he could make us one special with the meat from their steak sandwiches. We pulled up to the pick-up window, and began to wait.

What American cheese lacks in edibility, it makes up for by being photogenically pleasing!

Ten minutes and twelve dollars later, we pulled around the corner and parked with our food. Wife opened her burrito first, and muttered a curse under her breath. American cheese. The menu hadn't specified one way or the other, but we hadn't thought to ask, so this flaw was on us. It still looked good, although the tortilla was just the standard store bought kind, which made the Los Betos comparison unavoidable. Wife tasted it, wrinkled her nose, and asked if I would like to try it. I took a bite; that is to say, I tried to. My teeth sank through tortilla, egg, hash brown, and cheese before stopping cold on a piece of steak. I bit harder and wiggled my head. Finally, I just used my fingers to help tear the meat into two. It tasted good, but I couldn't really chew it without pushing it all the way back to my molars. Had this been some sort of value menu item at McDonalds I probably would have been indifferent to the burrito's quality, but at five bucks it definitely wasn't worth ordering, and I say this having gotten one of the "good" bites. As Wife worked her way deeper into the burrito, she found not only more overcooked steak, but gobs of fatty meat in chunks way to big to be part of a realistic bite.

I'd marry this bread, but the filling only deserves a one-night stand.

My burger was better, but better in this case is relative. Instead of a bun, the meat was served on toasted slices of sourdough, with lettuce, tomato, and Swiss. Unfortunately, the Swiss was also "Americanized," and though it had a more distinctive flavor than its yellow kin, it was still a plasticky mess. The bacon was crisp and flavorful, far better than the kind that comes with burgers in lesser fast food joints, but the patty wasn't even up to Burger King's standards. Since the bread was crisp and buttery and the veggies were fresh I had all the components of a good BLT, but instead I ended up with a mediocre burger. My fries were about the same; they were thick (although not hand cut), and perfectly cooked, but the salt had all fallen to the bottom of the bag and they didn't really taste like anything other than vegetable oil.

Price = perception. Would we have been friends at half price?

In the two years since I last ate at Bad Boy, the food has taken a considerable dive. I could chalk up the overcooked steak to a bad day by the cook, but the hamburger patty itself was sub par-it would have been disappointing even if I had cooked it myself. If this were some chain restaurant, with low prices and an expectation that quality would be sacrificed to provide them, I would modestly recommend Bad Boy due to the variety of toppings available on the menu, but I cannot in good conscience tell you to eat at what basically amounts to a McDonalds at four times the price because they have mushrooms and slightly sturdier fries. Bad Boy Burgers may not have the worst food in the world, but when you spend twelve bucks to feed two people, the primary emotion should not be "sad." On the positive side, even Wife agrees that we need to get the taste-literally and figuratively-out of our mouths, and Salt Tears sounds good to her too. Hopefully we'll have better luck the next time.

Happy Halloween!

2011-10-31T11:52:00.000-06:00

Quick and Easy Chicken Wraps

2011-10-27T03:54:00.000-06:00

It was just last week that I was telling you how much of a struggle it was to get Wife to go to Asian restaurants with me, but it wasn't always that way. When we were still just boyfriend and girlfriend, we had many more opportunities to actually go out to eat. She had a better paying job than she does now; our kids didn't need separate bedrooms, and as such we paid less in rent. When going to a restaurant wasn't a rare treat ethnic cuisine still wasn't at the top of her list, but it wasn't out of the question.

One of our favorites was Mai Thai. It may not be the most authentic Thai restaurant, even in a place like Boise, but at the time it featured lots of flavors that we weren't used to, and its prices were pretty great before they caught on. Also, it's beautiful.

From Mai Thai's Website. I did not take these photos.

It was one of our go-to destinations for a nice date, somewhere we could dress up a little and stare at each other over candlelight and still not spend all of our money. We even used Mai Thai for the rehearsal dinner at our wedding.

Then it just sort of stopped. The babysitter who took care of Boy during the days was just that-a babysitter. We had to switch to daycare which, given the state of our budget, pretty much meant that Wife had to work at a daycare. We were able to avoid a major expense, but it still caused a significant pay cut. It also took her out of downtown; out of sight, out of mind. We didn't eat there for years.

Then along came some holiday or special occasion; I really don't remember which. One of Wife's aunts gave us a gift certificate to eat at the new location they had opened in Eagle (now defunct.) My typical choice would be something both large and spicy, but we had chosen to go on a day when we didn't have any money outside the gift card, and neither wife or I planned on forsaking bubble tea. Wife wanted to take advantage of a rare opportunity to eat shrimp (I'm allergic,) so I played the sweet husband and ordered something inexpensive to make it possible.

That something was their lettuce wraps. They aren't the ones currently on Mai Thai's menu (listed as: sauteed chicken with red bell peppers, water chestnuts & green onion topped with crispy vermicelli noodle and served with butter leaves,) but instead had minced ginger, cashew, coconut, and a sweet soy dipping sauce to accompany the chicken. What had started as settling ended up a memorable meal, and Wife was more enamored with my food than her own. I vowed to make them at home. Then I promptly didn't.

More years passed. I never quite forgot the wraps, but they were never on the front of my mind. Then along came the wave of motivation that inspired me to start blogging again. Along with it came a need for healthier meals, especially lunches. We started making an excellent quinoa salad Mother-In-Law had suggested to us, and serving it alongside chicken for a healthy boost. Then one morning (I work at night) I had a few too many beers and devastated the quinoa. With not much time before Wife's lunch break, I realized that I had better come up with something else. I doubt she wanted to come home to a lonely slice of chicken on a plate. We had some lettuce left over from hamburgers, but while I can occasionally whip up exceptions to the rule, salad is one of Wife's four-letter words. That's when I remembered the wraps. We didnt' have fresh ginger, or coconut for that matter, but I had a few ideas about what I could use.

Preheat a skillet to medium high with:

1 T. vegetable oil

When it's up to temperature, add:

2 large or 3 small chicken breasts, seasoned with salt and pepper.

Brown on both sides, then reduce the heat to medium and cook until the internal temperature is 165 degrees. While the chicken is cooking, remove the peel from a cucumber, then use the peeler to make thin strips of cucumber, being sure not to go into its seed layer. You will need about half of the cucumber for this, and can reserve the other half for a salad or snack. Place the cucumber strips in a bowl and toss with:

2 t. vinegar
2 t. olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

This is the type of slice you are hoping to end up with.

Set them aside and remove the outer leaves of a head of romaine lettuce. You are looking for four to six decent lettuce "cups" for your wraps. If the lettuce is fresh, you should be able to get it all from a single head, but if it's a bit older you might need to salvage from more than one. The white stem section of romaine is bitter and unpalatable, so I usually trim it down before arranging the leaves on a plate, but they can be left on to provide a handle of sorts if you prefer. By the time you have finished prepping all of your wraps, the chicken should be at or near temperature. If it looks like this:

Exactly the color I was looking for.

It's probably ready for you to do this:

I like big chunks of chicken, but it's probably a bit classier to shred it.

Shred the chicken with a fork or, if you are like me, cut it into chunks. It's really a matter of personal preference. Before you place the chicken on your lettuce, top each leaf with:

2 tsp. sweet Thai chili sauce (I prefer Mae Ploy) Be sure to leave the bottle out, because you will want additional sauce for dipping.

Then divide the chicken evenly between each of the wraps. Top each with:

1 T. chopped peanuts or cashews
4 marinated cucumber strips, loosely formed into bows

Not Mai Thai, but a pretty good lunch.

That's all there is to it. Four wraps seem to work pretty well for two people. I like each wrap to be fairly hefty but you could probably divide the chicken more sparingly between six leaves of lettuce and convince yourself you were having a larger meal. These wraps don't have quite the "wow" factor as the ones I discovered at Mai Thai, but what it does have, apart from a bottle of chili sauce that has a pretty decent shelf life, is very basic ingredients that are easy to keep on hand. The next time you are bored of packing a sandwich in your lunch, give these wraps a try.

A Taste for.....Blood?

2011-10-25T08:28:00.001-06:00

Catfish's Dishes is a food blog, as food is the only thing in my life that I have a desire to write about on a continuous basis, but it's far from my only interest. I like craft beer (still technically fair game for food writing, I guess,) nerdy stuff like Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, comic books, camping, live music and horror films.

It is, of course, the latter that I wish to address today. An unhealthy love of top ten lists, combined with my disgust at our local school district's choice to not allow children to come to school in costume has inspired me to take a break from writing about food and instead offer my top ten horror films as an appetizer for your Halloween celebrations. If buckets of gore aren't your thing, or you're simply a stickler for actually finding a recipe when you open up a food blog, head on over to Macheesmo; it's the best food blog online. But if you like a good scare or want to debate my picks in the comments below, please continue reading.

10. The Last Exorcism (2010)

While I spent my childhood reading Stephen King novels and old issues of "Tales from the Crypt," few things were as unsettling as a 20/20 special on exorcism. Ever since I ran screaming from a Safeway grocery store at the age of four because of a life-sized cut-out of the Wicked Witch of the West, my parents put a lot of time and effort into making sure I knew the difference between fantasy and reality. Unfortunately, with exorcism that line wasn't as clear. Priests who-though my home was thoroughly secular-were definitely regarded as authority figures claimed that people were suffering from demonic possession. Scientists claimed that these (usually well meaning) clergymen were abusing the mentally handicapped. I found neither thought particularly comforting, and I always expected to be scared of horror films dealing with the subject.

I was wrong.

I understand how it might have played when it first came out, but I found "The Exorcist" to be overly long and boring. "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" was predictable and poorly acted. Both of these films were still far better than all the straight to video films that aimed to imitate them. Exorcism was doomed to be more creepy in thought then in practice.

Then came "The Last Exorcism." Truth be told, I wasn't even interested in the exorcism angle any more when this came out last year. I doubt I would have bothered watching it if I hadn't noticed Eli Roth was one of the producers. Roth made the critically-reviled film "Hostel," as well as the under-rated "Cabin Fever" (more on that later,) and I was curious why he had attatched his name to this film. Would it replace moodiness for an angrier, bloodier type of exorcism film? After all, he had made his mark with gore.

Truth is, I don't see Roth's hand in this film at all, but that isn't a bad thing. "Last Exorcism" is a traditional take on the exorcism genre, with one important twist; it's filmed as if it were a documentary. Reverend Cotton is cynical, pretending to cure people's demonic ailments for large sums of cash, but the deceit is begining to wear on him. Before he hangs up his robes, however, he decides to take a film crew along and expose the ritual as a fraud. Of course, life has other plans.

What really makes this movie work for me where so many other tales of exorcism have failed is the way it was filmed. I'm not a big fan of first person monster movies, but the documentary style is perfect for this subject matter; it takes what was so sinister about something like the 20/20 special and takes it just a step further. Coupled with the camera technique is the acting and writing. Neither is spectacular; they don't have to be. The important thing is that they manage to create characters that really do seem like people in a documentary. Whereas something like "Blair Witch" tried to use poor acting to simulate real people, "Last Exorcism" has good enough actors to allow you to pretend they are real people, a critical difference. Even though I have some issue with the abrupt way this movie ends, it had me on the edge of my seat until the (anti-climactic) climax. You could definitely do worse this Halloween.

9. Teeth (2007)

To be fair, "Teeth" isn't really a horror film in the traditional sense. It's really more of a dark comedy, with elements of the horrific. "Teeth" is the story of a girl named Dawn, who grows up in the shadow of a nuclear power plant, unaware that she is different. She has a rare mutation, vagina dentai; literally, a vagina with teeth. This is traumatic for her; life-ruining for the procession of men who try and take advantage of her. While this movie probably won't scare you (unless you are a man who likes taking advantage of women), "Teeth" has a wicked sense of humor and enough gore that it makes a perfect Halloween movie for someone who wants more than just a scare.

8. Saw (2004)

With a new "Saw" film coming out each year since the first, it's hard to believe that the first installment of this series was actually a low budget film shot in a warehouse over the course of eighteen days. While each succesive film in the series became a showcase for Jigsaw's traps and all originality left when the creators moved on to other things, the first film in the franchise had interesting characters and the element of surprise. Two men wake up in a strange room, chained to the wall, with no idea how they got there. What will happen to them? Even though some of the acting in the film is downright terrible (I'm looking at you, Mr. Elwes,) the strength of the premise makes this one of the most disturbing films I've ever had the pleasure of seeing. And while I still think that what makes the original (and possibly the second) "Saw" worth seeing is that there is more there than just gore, the gore that it does have is fantastic. Forget "Hostel" or the other films lumped in the so-called "torture porn" genre-Wan and Whannel's film, originally meant for straight-to-video, conveys the horror of torture in a way no other film has before or since.

7. Cabin Fever (2002)

There is something great about "Cabin Fever," and it's not just that the lead (Rider Strong) has the world's best unintentional porn name. Without this movie, I probably wouldn't be sitting here writing about horror films.

See, with the exception of Stephen King novels, I "outgrew" horror. What was terrifying at nine or ten just left me cold when I hit high school. I didn't mind when other people put on scary movies at Halloween, but I wasn't lining up to see them. That's how I found "Cabin Fever," actually, as background noise at a party. Normally I would have been paying more attention to the beer selection, but I was hooked. It was bloody. It was freaky. And it was ridiculously funny.

"Cabin Fever" starts like so many other horror films, with a troop of sexed-up teenagers headed off into the woods. But while I knew the predictable tropes of slasher films, the secrets of the undead, and what to expect from monsters, I had no idea how to react to the evil at the center of this film-a flesh eating virus. As each of the cast succumbed to the inevitable (including the most disturbing shaving scene ever filmed) I grew to appreciate that horror films didn't need to scare, merely entertain, and "Cabin Fever" is still one of the most entertaining "scary movies" I have ever seen.

6. Paranormal Activity (2007)

I never wanted to watch "Paranormal Activity." Too many people had compared it to "The Blair Witch Project," which remains one of the least interesting horror movies I've ever sat through. I didn't really place a lot of faith in the whole "found footage" dynamic, and let the hype monster pass.

Now it's 2011. "Paranormal Activity 3" just recorded the highest October opening in box office history, and I have to imagine sweaty studio executives are already calculating how much money they could make off of a fourth film. It's pretty much the "Saw" franchise all over again, but with ghosts instead of guts. I would have continued to ignore this film, but luckily Wife decided she wanted to watch it. We'd had friends over the night before, and I chose to play the sequel to Rob Zombie's "Halloween" (mind blowingly dull the second time I watched it-was the beer really that good the first time?) without any input from her, so I didn't have a vote this time around.

I couldn't have been more wrong about this movie. It takes a little while to get going, as the actors start in the aforementioned "Blair Witch" mode of non-acting, but eventually they find the same sort of balance that made "The Last Exorcism" work. The writer and director do a good job of building tension gradually, and even when that tension eases up, it never fully dissipates. The ghost is perhaps one of the better realized movie ghosts, in that it's neither so hidden as to render it dull or so in-your-face as to lose track of what makes ghosts so scary in the first place. It's rare that any horror film can make me feel uneasy, but "Paranormal Activity" did just that, and that's why it's my number six horror film you should watch this Halloween.

5. Slither (2006)

When you can't decide between "Shaun of the Dead" or "John Carpenter's The Thing," just watch "Slither."

While an oversimplification, the above sentence does a good job of illustrating why I love this movie. "Slither" is about a small town sherriff who has to go above and beyond when his town is overrun by body stealing aliens from outer space. Starring Nathan Fillion (Captain Mal from Firefly,) "Slither" has both the subtle humorous twists that made "Shaun" so great and the over the top gore and suspenseful sci-fi action featured in "The Thing." And it's a love story. A very disgusting love story.

Also, its bonus features include the blood recipe I use every year at Halloween. It doesn't get much better than that. Oh, wait, it does. "Slither" also has zombie deer, one of the grossest people-explosions to ever be filmed, and "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" star Micheal Rooker as a scenery-chewing villain named Grant Grant. Everything left on this list is there because it is scary; "Slither" ups the ante of films on this list like "Cabin Fever" and "Teeth" and is simply the most fun you can have at Halloween.

4. The Hills Have Eyes (2006)

Hollywood sure loves its remakes. Over the last decade, we've seen new versions of "Friday the 13th," "Nightmare on Elm Street," "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Halloween," and many others. But in my mind, Alexandre Aja's take on Wes Craven's "The Hills Have Eyes" is the best of them. Maybe it's because the Craven film doesn't have the nostalgia factor that comes with any new story about Freddy or Jason, but I'm willing to bet it's more due to the director's ability to evoke fear even when nothing that frightening is happening.

The film begins with a family taking their RV on a shortcut through the desert when they blow their front tires. Even without the psycopathic mutants roaming the hills, we are suddenly filled with a very relatable fear-being stranded in the middle of nowhere. While many horror films focus on forests, and the darkness inherent to a wall of trees, this movie instead finds and draws out what is menacing about an endless skyline of nothing. The same style was used in the Australian horror film "Wolf Creek" to good effect, but in service of a much less interesting story. Combine this isolation and dread with stock footage of nuclear tests and a story of the angry, cannabalistic descendents of fallout victims that seems all-too plausible, and you are in for a very unnerving evening.

3. 28 Days Later (2002)

There is a lot of debate over whether or not to call "28 Days Later" a zombie movie. The tag is irrelevant; all you need to know is that it is a great movie. The infection that decimates the world's population is caused by a man-made "rage" virus when well-meaning environmentalists decide to free the monkeys from an animal testing facility. Those infected have no desire but to kill and eat; the only thing that seperates them from the classic zombie is that they are still alive. They can run. While that may offend purists, it raises the stakes considerably, enough that this film makes my list while no traditional zombie film does. The speed and ferocity with which the infected attack makes it hard to ever relax while watching this movie, and for good measure director Danny Boyle also one-ups the traditional zombie movie trope that the true evil lies in humanity its self with a brilliant and chilling performance from "Ninth Doctor" Christopher Eccelston. Also, the camera work in this film is perhaps the best of any on this list; the scene at the start of the film with our hero wandering the empty streets of London is perhaps one of the most iconic shots of the last decade.

Also of note: This film had a sequel, "28 Weeks Later." With a completely new cast and director, it is a far cry from the greatness of the original. That being said, the opening scene disturbs me more than anything in the first film.

2. 1408 (2007)

If we were just going off of the source material, there is no way that "1408" would represent Stephen King on this list. From "IT" to "Pet Semetary" to "The Mist," King has earned his reputation as the master of modern horror, but not everything to leave his desk is a masterpiece, and "1408" was one of the more forgettable segments in an otherwise solid short-story compilation, "Everything's Eventual."

It seems to be a trend, however, that while Hollywood butchers King's novels trying to shrink them for the screen they can find just the right ways to elaborate on his shorter works. While decent novellas, both "Stand by Me" and "Shawshank Redemption" were better as works of film, and Frank Darabont made "The Mist" even more horrific than the original short. That magic carried over to "1408," a movie I didn't expect to like and certainly not to be scared of. It stars John Cusack, great in all those eighties films that made the girls swoon:

Not exactly who you imagine as the protagonist in a horror film though. It was rated PG-13. I was expecting it to be at best the sort of thing they would show on TV at Halloween that I didn't completely hate, and at worst the same sort of over-rated mind sludge as "The Grudge."

Instead, I left the theater reliving my childhood fear of the dark. Tree branches stretched across the sky menacingly. "1408" has little in the way of gore, relatively minor special effects, a small cast and only a few locations, but the director found a way to completely decieve me as to what was real and what wasn't; even though I went into this film looking for any cracks or cliches it dictated my perception, and since the main character was himself a skeptic looking to disprove the existence of ghosts it was easy for me to suspend my disbelief to the point where his reality and my reality were one and the same.

1. High Tension (2003)

While the way that "1408" uses traditional ghost story techniques to be frightening and yet suitable for most audiences, and even gory fare like "Slither" and "Cabin Fever" are so laughably over the top I could recommend them to most people, "High Tension" doesn't play so nice. Alexandre Aja, the director of "The Hills Have Eyes" remake got his start on this French movie, which is not only my favorite horror film, but perhaps one of my favorite movies of all time. Two girls (college classmates) head to the French countryside home of one of their families to prepare for their exams. An old, beat up work truck rumbles up the driveway after dark. A man of few words steps out and walks to the door, a straight-razor in his fist. The killing begins, as does a game of cat-and-mouse between the nameless killer and the girls. The gore in this film is first rate, excessive and (apart from a scene involving a bannister) frighteningly realistic, but even better is the way the film lives up to its name. Even though I know how the film ends, I've seen it ten times and I still find myself on the edge of my seat as our heroines try and outrun their assailant. There is something wonderful about the pacing here, much slower than the American slasher film and yet never dull; the intensity builds without slacking, and ends before wearing out it's welcome. I will say that some people dislike the questionable logic in this film; it never bothered me-strong acting, a creepy, unrelenting gritty atomosphere, and brutal violence-this is a slasher flick with a great modern style but all the balls of the best horror films of the eighties. I'm not going to let something as inconsequential as "reality" get in the way of a truly scary movie, and you shouldn't either.

Of course, if I've learned everything from listening to Filmspotting, it's that every good movie list needs a few honorable mentions. This list could have easily been twenty films long, and you'd still have a case that I left out something great. Here are a few more I think you should check out this Halloween.

Honorable Mentions:
Creepshow: Written by Stephen King; directed by "Dawn of the Dead"s George Romero, "Creepshow" is a tribute to the old EC horror comics like "Tales from the Crypt," and rather than telling one feature-length story, it's a collection of viginettes including a tale of bloody revenge, an evil old man getting a little karmic retribution, and Stephen King himself playing a country bumpkin who has the bad luck to come across a strange glowing rock. It's funny, it's scary, and the comic book style works perfectly for a Halloween film.

Trick R Treat: This film could be easily described as a descendent of "Creepshow," as it also tells multiple stories rather than just one, although these tales are much more closely linked. Also like "Creepshow," it manages to use both humor and horror in equal measure. While most of the publicity this film got centered around the scarecrow costumed boy on the cover, pay attention for the segment of the story featuring "True Blood"s Anna Paquin.

Tremors: Lots of films get worse with age, but not "Tremors." If anything, I appreciated the tale of a small town attacked by giant carnivorous worms more as an adult. Continuing with a theme among my honorable mentions, "Tremors" is funny, perhaps even more funny than scary. Kevin Bacon, Micheal Gross, and even Reba McEntire ham it up amidst the monster attacks, and while there is plenty of death to be had, you never really fear for the good guys. This is a good starter film if you are ready to start showing horror films to your children; lots of jump scares, some creepy but unrealistic beasts, and a happy ending.

Event Horizon: I had forgotten about this movie until Matt Singer of IFC News described it as one of the worst movies he had ever seen. It has lots of cheesy elements, sure, but what isn't to love about a space station that dissappeared for seven years only to come back.......from Hell.

Well, that's it. I hope you have found something to watch this holiday season, and if not I will be back later in the week with the chicken wraps Wife has been taking to work with her. They pack a lot of flavor for something so healthy.

Stir Fry with Peanut Tofu

2011-10-18T09:54:00.000-06:00

There aren't many aspects of my marriage I have an issue with. I think it's a testament to exactly how good I have it that, when thinking of areas of contention, something this trivial comes to mind. We don't have big blow out fights, don't run around on each other or even (six years in) spend much time apart. But whenever Wife and I go out to eat, there is an elephant in the vehicle.

She doesn't like Asian food.

She doesn't like Chinese. She doesn't care for Thai. She's not terribly fond of Vietnamese.

It's not that she hates these foods. On occasion she'll be in the mood for "the broccoli beef from that one place," and she is satisfied after eating a bowl of pho. If she were to have a say in this blog, if we were to put the food debate on trial, I'm sure Wife would say that it isn't that she doesn't like these foods, it's that I like them entirely too much. Both of us would look at a typical conversation on the trip to the drive-through to state our case.

Wife: Wanna go out to eat?
Me: (Looks at dirty dishes.) Sure, why not.
Wife: What should we get?
Me: In the mood for Chinese?
Wife: Not at all.
Me: Whatever you want, I guess.

My lawyer would make a chart of all the times we go out to eat in a typical year. It would look a bit like this:

He would pull a pile of receipts, and it would show that while Chinese food was often reserved for occasions such as my birthday, all pizza needed was a Friday.

In turn, her lawyer would point to the transcripts of our car conversations. During cross examination he would ask, "Do you ever suggest anything other than Chinese food?" The jury would gasp. As he walked back towards Wife, telling the judge that he had no further questions, I'd yell "It's only because I was still waiting. I never had the chance to suggest a place the time after Chinese, because we never went." A valid point, but stricken from the record because he never actually asked.

In such a situation, I imagine my wife would be the victor. Boy and Girl could provide expert testimony that, while acceptable, the food of Asia was inferior to the cheese coated delicacies of Italy and Mexico. I would be forced to admit that I like pizza just fine; this would prove that Wife had more to lose by going with my suggestion than I did by going with hers. I would be put on probation. No asking for stir-fry or curry or fried rice for a year. I would be forced to resort for more subtle methods to get my fix. Then again, that's what I end up doing anyway.

Over the last year I've made a push to make grocery shopping my chore. Wife doesn't particularly like fighting the Sunday crowds at the store with the kids in tow anyway, so it was an easy battle. What she didn't realize at the time was this-they who control the shopping list control the menu. It's not a power I take advantage of very often. Potato bar, chorizo spaghetti, beef stroganoff-all of these things are in fairly heavy rotation. But last week I could take it no longer. Between the aforementioned potato/chili concoction and bean and cheese burritos, I put "stir-fry."

It was partly out of necessity. A pile of vegetables that Wife had planned to turn into snacks were starting to turn. The morning before I planned to make the stir-fry, I prepped the vegetables. I cut 1 red bell pepper, 1 green bell pepper, 12 baby carrots (about 2 carrots), and a head of broccoli (stem and all) into matchsticks. They went into the fridge, and I went to sleep.

Colorful Veg, Matchstick Style

When I woke up, I started the rice. Wife hates brown rice, so I settled for some long grain white rice, about 1 1/2 cups prior to cooking. Once I had it simmering away and had set the timer, I began work on my peanut sauce.

Everything at the ready.

1 C. Smooth Peanut Butter
1/4 C. Light Soy Sauce
1 T Chili Garlic Sauce (this stuff again)
2 T Brown Sugar
2 Limes, juiced
2/3 C Hot Water
1/4 C Cilantro, finely chopped
1 T. Sesame Seeds

Put everything except the water, cilantro, and seeds into a sauce pan over medium heat and whisk it together until the peanut butter looses up in response to the heat. Once everything has bonded together, add the water slowly until the sauce has the proper consistency, and fold in the cilantro and sesame seeds as you remove it from the heat.

With the sauce made, it was time to start the stir-fry. In a large skillet over medium high, I heated up a tablespoon of oil for my veg, making sure the oil was nice and hot before I added anything. I tossed in my matchsticks, tossed in the oil briefly, and moved on to my tofu while it cooked.

Chop a package of extra firm tofu into little cubes like this:

Once chopped, wrap them top and bottom in paper towels and place on a plate under a weight (I used a spare cast iron) to squeeze out any excess water while you set up your assembly line.

In the first pie plate goes 2 eggs, beaten.

In the second goes a cup of cornstarch, plus a touch of salt and a generous helping of black pepper.

The idea of using cornstarch on tofu is something I got from another cooking blog, and I have been really impressed with the way it works. You can bread tofu in flour, but it's hard to keep the coating from falling off of the cubes while they fry, where the water absorbing properties of corn starch cause it to hold firm to the tofu.

Tofu Assembly Line

With the assembly line ready, dip the squeezed out tofu into the egg first, and then roll in the cornstarch. Once they are all coated, return to the vegetables on the stove. They should be tender but not soggy. Add a clove of garlic, minced, and cook for another two minutes. Once the garlic has had time to mingle with the other vegetables, take them out of the pan and heat 3/4 of a cup of canola oil. Once it's nice and hot add the tofu in batches, frying until lightly brown and crispy, about 3 minutes a side.

While the tofu is doing its thing, divide the rice among four bowls, and top with equal portions of the vegetable mixture.

As soon as the tofu is done frying, toss it in 3/4 of a cup of peanut sauce and divide it among the bowls as well. Garnish with sliced green onion. Serve hot, with remaining peanut sauce on the side.

Yes, even Wife liked it!

I thought this turned out really well. Wife liked it, even though it's not typically her thing. Boy liked it, even though he claims to hate tofu. I loved it. It took a bit longer than I typically look to be cooking for a weekday meal, but I'll be making it again some weekend soon.

On being a lazy parent:

2011-10-13T04:07:00.001-06:00

We've all been there. It's time to feed the children, but there are a thousand other things you would like to be doing than cooking. Maybe the game is about to start, maybe it was a long day at work and you just want to sit down; it could be practically anything. The point is that pretty much anyone-even those of us who enjoy cooking so much they feel like writing about it-don't always want to get stuck in the kitchen.

Take this morning. Boy and I had just returned from dropping off Wife at work. He wanted to hop onto Netflix and finish watching "Garfield's Pet Force." I wanted to do some prep work for the stir fry I was going to make for dinner. Spending half an hour to make something fancy was out of the question. Still, I didn't want to resort to cereal, cold or hot. Our eggs were already claimed for other things. It was a similar situation to the one that caused me to make the breakfast ramen I wrote about earlier. This time, however, I didn't come up with any new ideas. I turned to a cheat.

Cheats are the dishes that I-and many parents just like me-keep in our back pockets for just such an occasion. Easy recipes that don't use more than a handful of ingredients and don't take much time off the clock. Grilled cheese sandwiches are perhaps the quintessential cheat food: three ingredients, a few minutes, and yet everyone is satisfied. It's true that you can add steps to make a grilled cheese sandwich more gourmet, but whether you are going fancy or just plain exotic, it is hard to live up to the simple perfection of white bread, butter, and sharp cheddar. Buttered noodles, peanut butter and jelly-the list of cheats handed down through the ages is a long one. This is one of mine.

Cream Cheese

Peanut Butter

It's a peanut butter and cream cheese quesadilla. If it were a movie its tagline would be: "Five ingredients. Five minutes. Breakfast."

This is how easy it is. Preheat a pan on medium heat, and get out as many tortillas as needed, typically two per person although you can do the folded method for smaller eaters. Smear one tortilla with creamy peanut butter and the other with cream cheese. Neither layer needs to be super thick, but there should be enough topping to completely conceal the tortilla underneath. I just so happened to have strawberry cream cheese, but regular cream cheese works just fine. You could even use regular cream cheese AND actual strawberries, but then the whole tagline goes to hell.

Then sprinkle one of the sides with a tablespoon of brown sugar and a teaspoon of cinnamon. Put them together and cook each side until golden brown and the filling begins to ooze out of the sides.

Just as oozy as a regular quesadilla!

But I didn't write a blog post (just) to tell you that you could make a quesadilla with peanut butter. It's really more the concept of cheats that I am interested in. Sure, if you incorporate canned pasta and frozen pizza and the litany of convenience foods into the mix then it's pretty easy to have an inexhaustable supply of cheats, but I'm talking about being lazy, not giving up entirely. Just because I don't feel like cooking doesn't mean I won't take the time to give my family real food. I know quite a few shortcuts to get out of the kitchen quickly, but it's always good to know more, and what I really want is to hear what you do when the stove has become the enemy, so if you've read this far use the comments section down below and let me know your cheats. Maybe we can all get out of the kitchen a bit earlier this week.

Quick and Easy Faux Asian Breakfast Ramen

2011-10-07T02:28:00.000-06:00

Wife and I have very different strengths in the kitchen. I got my culinary training, such as it was, from Job Corps. Wife learned to cook from me. This leads many people to think that, should they need advice in the kitchen, I am the one to call. I am not.

Perhaps it's a poor idea, when trying to establish a cooking blog, to talk about one's inadequacies in the kitchen. However, it's the truth; I am very bad at the technical aspects of cooking. I double check "The Joy of Cooking" to get the proper cooking time for baked potatoes. I prefer it when Wife makes the rice. Her skills lie in, well, skill. When she found a roasted chicken recipe she liked she memorized it, and apart from minute changes in seasoning, she makes the same bird each time. Mashed potatoes, gravy, and a small rotating selection of veg follow as if created on an assembly line. This analogy may make the food sound uninteresting, but it's not. Everything is tender, flavorful, and perfect.

Throw Wife in a kitchen without the right ingredients, however, and the wheels begin to come off. I'm not saying she couldn't produce an edible meal in an unstocked kitchen; she can. But her strenghts lay in producing a few dishes, fully realized. This is the yin to my yang. While the culinary program in Job Corps did its best to teach me about cooking, I learned more in the two years after deciding that cooking professionally wasn't for me. I spent most of that time either homeless or hovering near it. If I wanted food that tasted good, I had to be creative. I developed a reputation for being able to throw together random assortments of ingredients and come up with something that people were actually happy to eat. Technique may have been difficult to get a handle on, but I've always done alright with flavor.

Transitioning to married life, I began to share cooking duties. Wife is certainly better at weeknight meals; when you only have a few hours together with the ones you love, it's better to leave the cooking to someone capable of producing a meal without the kitchen looking like something out of a horror film. Additionally, health and budget concerns limit my opportunities for innovation; each meal is planned out a week in advance. I don't mind this structure-it is what it is-but I can't say I mind when it breaks down.

Two weeks ago, I was hanging out with Boy before school. We'd dropped Wife off at work, and it was up to me to come up with breakfast while he worked at rescuing Zelda. We'd had oatmeal the day before, and the day before, and even the day before that. A lack of milk prevented me from copping out via dry cereal. All that left were eggs, and those had to last the rest of the week so that Wife could get a good meal before work, which meant that if we were going to eat them, we'd only get one apiece. I was getting prepared for round four of oatmeal when Boy asked if he could just have ramen for breakfast. The "no" was halfway out of my mouth when a wire in my brain began sparking. I recalled seeing one of the many competitive cooking shows-it's hard to recall which, there are so many-where one of the contestants made a traditional Italian dish of spaghetti noodles with parmasean cheese, and in place of a sauce, a lightly fried egg was placed on the top, a take on Spaghetti Carbonara. Could the same thing be done with ramen? Probably-I thought I'd seen raw egg used on a noodle dish on Iron Chef. I began to rumage through the fridge to see if there were any other ingredients that wanted to be invited to the party. Boy was skeptical. He just wanted regular ramen with a full bowl of broth, but it was breakfast. I didn't mind making something odd, but it at least needed to have some kind of nutritional value. He grimaced as I contemplated whether or not to use fish sauce.

Long story short, Boy loved it. I loved it. It's probably not for everyone, but here is what I did in case it sounds good to you:

What you do with the other packet is up to you.

First, make two packages of ramen noodle (this is assuming you are making this for two people) but only use one flavor packet. I use Oriental flavor ramen, but I don't think it would make much of a difference to use any of the standard flavors. When the noodles are done, drain off all the broth and add:

3 tsp. fish sauce
1 tsp. soy sauce

Set aside and heat a pan to medium high heat with about a tablespoon of oil. When it is hot, toss in:

1 lb. fresh green beans, cleaned and chopped into half-inch segments.

The proper amount of char.

With the chilli paste.

Cook until the green beans begin to get charred on the outside, about five minutes. Reduce to medium heat. On another burner, begin heating a pan for eggs. Right before you remove the green beans from heat, add:

1 tsp. brown sugar

1-2 T. chilli garlic paste

Stir until the sugar is melted and the chilli sauce is sticking firmly to the beans, about a minute. Be careful not to overcook, as too much heat really brings out the salt content in the chilli sauce. Remove the beans from heat, and begin to cook 2-4* eggs until they are fried to your liking; either over easy or over medium-there still needs to be some runny yolk to run down into the noodles. While the eggs are cooking, divide the ramen into two bowls, then top each with half of the green beans. When the eggs are ready, transfer directly onto the beans and use a fork to crack the yolks. Garnish with 1/4 cup of sliced green onion and serve immediately.

* There is a lot of debate in my house about whether or not each portion of ramen should have one or two eggs. Wife swears by the second egg, and I think the sauce created by the oozing yolks is what really draws her to this dish. I was just looking for another way to incorporate more chilli sauce in my diet, and find the second egg to be overly filling and unneccesary, especially at breakfast. Let your own tastes guide you.

Fish on Fire

2011-10-03T02:42:00.002-06:00

I love cooking shows. I love the brainy ones that actually teach the in's and out's of cooking like Good Eats, America's Test Kitchen, and Barbecue University. I like contests of skill, like Top Chef, Iron Chef, and Chopped. I even like sensationalized "reality" cooking like Hell's Kitchen. But there is one show I just can't get into.

Man Vs. Food.

The whole "going somewhere in America to eat something" genre of food show is my least favorite in general, but something about extreme eating just bothers me. Maybe it's contrasting images like this:

With this:

Maybe, as I try and make healthier choices in the way that I eat, I just don't like watching people gorge themselves. I don't care for milkshakes that come in gallon sizes, or hamburgers that don't fit on a regular dinner plate. It bothers me that my eight year old son thinks that people who can eat a four pound meal should be idolized. But I have to admit, there is one part of this whole spectacle that doesn't force me to turn away in disgust.

Hot foods.

I've been a pepper belly as long as I can remember, covering my meals with my mom's homemade salsa, Tabasco sauce, and sliced jalapenos while I was still a small child. It took another step when a high school friend tricked me into eating a habanero pepper during church. It wasn't a pleasant experience at the time-not for about twelve hours, in fact-but after the burning finally stopped, I wanted more. Like minded friends and I started spiking our ramen with Dave's Insanity Sauce. The habanero pizza at Flying Pie became a yearly ritual. So when Adam Richman sidestepped the more gluttonous challenges to eat Hellfire hotwings in San Jose, it caught my attention. I could see myself doing that. I planned a road trip to San Jose in my mind until reality caught up to me. I have a "just above minimum" wage job, and there was no way Wife would let me plan our yearly vacation around food-especially food that she would have no interest in eating-when our friends are scattered around the Northwest. I tucked the idea into my bucket list, and moved on to other things.

Morgan Freeman can't believe Jack wants to eat those spicy wings.

A couple years passed. I was sitting at work, reading the Boise Weekly when I saw something that sent a thrill through my whole body. Superb Sushi's Hot Streak Challenge. (You can see the rules of this challenge here.) While I respect Man Vs. Food's decision to go to the legendary Flying Pie Pizzeria when the show visited Boise, the habanero pizza doesn't come with any challenge. It's just hot. This is what I was looking for. I don't usually spend a lot of energy on being an "alpha male," but I felt the need to prove myself against the flames of their fiery fish.

That being said, I didn't have any intention of doing it alone. I placed a call to Newport, Oregon, home of Grasshopper. Grasshopper hadn't really been into spicy foods when we met, but while I was taming the heat of my spices to adjust to cooking for a family, he was eating raw habaneros with Mexican day laborers. It was a case of the student surpassing the master, but this was my chance to retake the banner. I told him what was up, and it was decided that when he came down during the summer, we would take on the Hotstreak. However, this call took place in the fall of last year, and that meant I had plenty of time to practice. Things were going great until a batch of unexpectedly hot jalapeno poppers on Super Bowl Sunday turned me off of spicy things for awhile. By the time I was ready to get back in the saddle, I had forgotten about the challenge, and wasn't going out of my way to eat anything spicier than sriracha. That's why I was surprised when Grasshopper gave me a call a couple of weeks before his visit. He'd just eaten a ghost chile. (Ghost chiles are one of the ingredients in Superb Sushi's death sauce.) He described the sensation as if lightning had removed the top of his head and the rest of his skin was crawling to get away. I was screwed.

Before you could reiterate that I was indeed screwed, two weeks passed and Grasshopper arrived in town. We had a lovely Fourth of July celebration over at his in-laws, drank a bunch of whiskey, and then the moment to test ourselves had arrived. By this point, however, the ante had been raised considerably. Instead of Grasshopper and I going it alone, with maybe our wives on hand to watch us crash and burn, word had gotten out and we found ourselves with a crowd of spectators, as well as two more foolhardy participants. While I had been excited to read about this challenge in the paper, I found myself nervous as I walked into the restaurant, my stomach already tight as I thought about the after effects of such heat.

The nerves would have an extra day to build on themselves, it turned out. Coming off of the holiday weekend, they didn't have enough peppers to hurt all of us. (So if this sounds like something you and your friends would like to do, call ahead.) Grasshopper spent the extra day drinking even more whiskey. I spent it eating instant potatoes, hoping they would build a protective shell inside my stomach.

When it came time for take two, I wasn't any calmer, although I don't know if anyone other than Wife noticed. Boy spent the day bragging on my behalf, talking smack like a pro athlete. Just as with horror movies, I had been waiting for a spice that could best me, but the thought of having that moment in public began to gnaw at me. Still, there was no backing out now, and I was still excited.

Some waivers are mainly for show. This is not one.

The waitress seated us, with the contestants all at one end of the table to give a good view to the audience as well as ensure that we were well out of the reach of anything that could douse the flames. Waivers came. Flying Pie has a waiver for their Triple Habanero pizza too, but it doesn't say anything about fainting or death. Hoping it was more hyperbole than anything, we signed off. While we waited for the food to be made, it was decided to take a look at the "wall of flame" and see what we were in for. There were approximately twenty pictures on the wall, and most of us headed back to the table, relieved. It was short lived, however, as Grasshopper had been looking a bit more closely. The contest is divided into two rounds: "Demon's Delight" and "Hot Streak." Three quarters of the pictures were for round one. Only five or so people had made it to the upper part of the wall. This revelation came just as our drinks were cleared away and the first part of our meal arrived. First to the table was a miso soup made with habanero, wasabi, sriracha, cayenne, and death sauce (ingredients unknown,) followed promptly by the namesake Demon's Delight roll, which was oozing fresh habanero peppers from its sides and came with its own bowl of death sauce. A token slaw of cabbage and pepitas sat in a small blob in the corner of the plate. The timer was set at ten minutes.

This soup is definitely good for clogged sinuses.

The Demon's Delight.

Most of us decided to tackle the soup first. It was the most intimidating looking thing on the table, but it's liquid consistency meant that you could pick it up and drink it. On the plus side I had it halfway gone before my mouth really began to burn, but when I finally caught fire I caught it from my lips all the way to the pit of my stomach. I looked around the table through the tears in my eyes and saw red faces. "Do I look that bad?" I asked Wife, hoarsely. "Worse." She said, and snapped another picture. The last person to join our folly, the engineer, was also the first to throw in the towel. The waitress offered to take his plate, but he declined. "I can eat it," he said, "but not in ten minutes." She returned his beer, and he joined the spectators. It was just three of us now. I worked quickly, still ahead of the clock. I had started with the intent of using chopsticks, but quickly abandoned them in favor of grabbing sections of the roll in my fingers, swabbing it with as much death sauce as possible. Bubbling lava began to roll around my midsection. No wonder "no vomiting" was on the rules list. I contemplated the restroom I saw in the Idaho Building lobby. No way I was going to throw up there-it was barely sanitary enough to stand and pee. I finished the roll and ate the slaw, the crisp vinegar coated cabbage and seeds refreshing me like water after a hard days work, only magnified. Grasshopper was done. Our third finished just before the bell rang.

"Who is moving on to round two?" The waitress wanted to know. We still had to wait five minutes without anything to cool the flames before we officially passed round one, but she wanted to get the info back to the chef. Grasshopper eagerly pressed on. Our other companion quit. I needed to make a decision. I quit as well. She headed to the kitchen. Boy begged me to continue. Wife reassured me we could afford it if I went into round two and failed. The pain in my gut began to subside, leaving me with only mouth burn, which I actually enjoyed. I still had two minutes left before it was too late. "To hell with it." Grasshopper and I were off to round two.

Round two came in the form of two enormous tuna hand rolls, overloaded with sliced habanero, and another side bowl filled with death sauce. This time, however, the death sauce had been stepped up by the addition of Bhut Jolokia (aka Ghost Chile) pepper. "Don't worry Catfish," Grasshopper cheered, "hand rolls are the best kind of roll they could have given us-they're just rice at the bottom of their cones." With this bit of advice, I made a plan-I would eat the tops of each roll, and save the bottoms for the end. There was no soothing slaw this time around. The timer was reset, and I charged into my first roll. For a moment, I thought I was going to make it. The Ghost Chile was giving my body the most electric spice high I had ever experienced. My face and chest felt like they had fallen asleep. I gave a spectator a high five, but I couldn't even really feel anything from my hand other than an intense, rapid tingle. But in spite of this, the fire in my mouth really didn't seem that much worse. It was spicy-damn spicy-but on my palate it didn't seem much hotter than the habanero. I tore through the first roll, leaving the bottom on my plate. Then I started working on the second. My gut began to gurgle once more. But I dug deep, and soon I had my two bottom pieces and nothing else. The death sauce was gone. And I fell down just shy of the finish line. Grasshopper had just completed his final bit of sushi, and was waiting it out. All I had to do was take four or five more bites. I lifted one of my saved bits and saw, not rice, but a few fingers of habanero and a large pink chunk of raw tuna.

So close and yet so far.

It may sound like a cop out (Wife thought it was) but I hate sushi. I was only here for the spice, which I had hoped would mask any inherent fishiness in my meal. That had worked through the the first roll, which was tightly wrapped and kept its meat portion small. It wasn't working any more. The tuna "bite" was the size of two of my thumbs, and it screamed at me with its rawness. Coupled with the tentacles of spicy orange pepper, my gut just refused. I couldn't put that fish in my mouth. Seared Ahi, one of the best things I have ever tasted, still disturbed me with its rawness. This mass of tuna, in inland Idaho, screamed at me. It screamed, "I will make you throw up." I knew I could force it down, but I thought its screams were probably correct, and the thought of all of this heat trapped in my sinuses, it was too much. With three minutes still on the clock, I threw in the towel. Boy cried, losing a little bit of faith in my infallibility. I felt bad myself, inches away but felled by a distaste for fish and knowing no one would buy it. Grasshopper drank beer and was making plans to celebrate his iron stomach with yet more whiskey.

I ordered this:

Ice cream of shame.

I had lost. I still got my picture on the lower rung of the wall, and (while not how it was described in the rules) I still got the t-shirt, but I lost a little bit of pride that day. It's o.k., though. I know what would make me feel better.

Does anyone want to go to San Jose for some wings?

Quick and Easy Banana Ginger Oatmeal

2011-09-16T02:29:00.000-06:00

Last weekend, I made Ginger Spice Brownies. Even though I started from an old Nestle' recipe, I spent a lot of time fine tuning and worrying about the flavors I was creating. I was going out of my way to try and make something that could be appreciated, both by anyone who was reading this blog, and by Mouse, who had asked me to combine brownies and ginger in the first place.

This is not that blog. While I'm sure I will approach the next thing I bring you with the same level of detail as I paid my brownies, this is a story of throwing things together, and being pleasantly surprised with the results.

It all started with this guy:

You know his type. A banana, well past his prime. If he'd brought his buddies you'd be making banana bread. Sometimes you can throw this lone wolf into a smoothie, but when it's the last piece of fruit in the house all you've got is a sad looking piece of produce that the kids won't touch. Sad to say, there have been many times I just passed this unattractive fellow by until he was too far gone, and into the trash he went.

But not this morning. Wife ate the last of the eggs on her way to work, in a cheesy, crunchy English muffin sandwich that made me drool with jealousy. The dry cereal was gone; so too the yogurt. All that was left to satisfy Boy and I before he went off to school and I hit the gym was that healthful bastion of breakfast, oatmeal.

When I was a child I hated oatmeal. Thought it was like eating paste, without the depth of flavor. If you piled enough raisins, butter, and brown sugar on top of the sticky lump of goo I might eat it, but I was never a fan. That's changed as I've grown, but one thing is still the same-oatmeal just doesn't taste right to me unless I have some sort of a fruit. Peaches, preferably, or apples. Strawberries are good too, and I might use a raisin or a blueberry if I'm desperate. After that? Probably going to pass oatmeal by. Unless it's the only option.  But what to do about fruit? To be fair, I did have a box of raisins in my baking cupboard, but at the same time, they've been there longer than I've had most of my pets. I decided to give a banana a try.

I don't have any fancy "steel cut" oats, just the rolled oats in the cardboard cylinder, and I started them the way I always do when it's Boy and I, which is to say I followed the directions for three servings. I would reprint them here, but they tend to vary from box to box, so just follow the instructions on your own brand of oatmeal.

If about now you are shaking your head, wondering why you wasted your time when all I was going to do is tell you about a time I made oatmeal and put some banana in it, I feel your pain. It's not far from the truth. But I did tweek it a little:

1 T. brown sugar
1 t. ground ginger
1 t. vanilla extract
1/2 t. cinnamon

I pulled my oats off of the stove just a little early, making sure that they didn't get mushy, and tossed this combination of seasonings into the pan. Brown sugar is in all my oatmeal, and I used cinammon any time an apple or a peach went in, but this was the first time I'd used ginger or vanilla. Meanwhile, I placed two bowls out and broke up my banana into chunks, each about the size of my thumb above the knuckle, and since I was splitting my three servings of oatmeal 2-1 in favor of the adult, I did about the same with the banana, though I was a little bit closer to an equal split. I spooned the oats across the fruit, and used the wooden spoon I'd cooked with to mash the banana into the oatmeal. The banana itself had been slightly better off than the peel had implied, but I was actually happy to see that the breakfast would have some texture to it, as it only partially gave way.

When the banana was as integrated as I wanted it to be, I grabbed my last ingredient.

2 T. candied ginger, finely diced

This was really the kicker. I still had some candied ginger I'd chopped up from the frosting that went on last weekend's brownies, and while it was the banana that provided the impetus for this meal, it was the decision to build my flavors around the ginger that made it something worth documenting.  Which isn't to say the fruit didn't pull its own weight. Smashing it through the already cooked oats allowed each bite to have just a subtle undertone of banana. If I had cooked it along with my oats, the end result would have just been mush, and if I'd merely sliced it on top the flavors would have never married the way they did. Along with the spices, it created so much flavor that I used at least half as much sugar as I would have normally tossed in, and the creaminess of the banana completely replaced the need for butter.  It was the perfect base for the candied ginger, which I just sprinkled on the top. It gave each bite a hint of heat, lacking in powdered ginger, and made it something special, a bowl of oatmeal I could feel okay blogging about.

Ginger Spice Brownies

2011-09-12T02:05:00.008-06:00

Lately, my mind has been on health. Diabetes has affected both mine and my wife's families, and as we put our twenties behind us, it's clear that we aren't in the best of shape either. In addition, while looking at innovative kid's food on Macheesmo, I followed a link in the comments to another blog about the deplorable conditions of school lunches; more links followed, and soon I was watching the entire first season of "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" on Youtube. I'd missed the show when it came out initially, because it was advertised as a companion to the cloying, in-your-face inspiration porn that is "Extreme Make-Over: Home Additon." While sometimes I find that "Food Revolution" does get a bit heavy handed with the importance of what they are doing, Jamie Oliver has a message I can get behind. It also helps that he's not this guy:

(Ty Pennington wants you to be really, REALLY inspired)

This surge of motivation is causing changes at home. While we already tended to eat healthy dinners, Wife and I have begun planning her lunches so that she doesn't eat the proccessed food readily available at her employer. We have been cutting out the least healthy parts of breakfast. I've been swinging by the farmer's market to get fresher, more inspiring produce. So for my first cooking blog in two years, all this inspiration has led me to make.......Brownies?

Yes and no. I'm serious when I say that I have been fired up about making healthier, more natural foods. I made the brownies less as a piece of that inspiration, and more to get them out of the way.

See, I have these co-workers (whom I'll just call Happy and Mouse) who constitute my nerd posse. We share comic books, play Dungeons and Dragons, and have a litany of inside jokes. Mouse, especially, helps make work feel like recess. During the semester break at the university where we work, our D&D group began meeting in the morning at Mouse's house. Unfortunately, a third nerd who was supposed to be my ride lost her character while moving, and I was in a pickle. I have a deep hatred of the local bus system, which can barely muster up hourly routes and doesn't run past seven at night. I could be stuck in a transit nightmare, or I could convince Mouse that gaming at my house would be better. She would have to bike home, which was just as inconvenient for her as the bus system was to me. Fortunately, one of the things I have learned working with her is that she enjoys her sweets. I used a bribe. I told her I would make her whatever she wanted.

"Ginger Brownies." It threw me for a loop. I had never heard of or considered putting ginger in a brownie before. Still, it didn't sound that bad. I told her I would get right on it. Then a couple of weeks passed. The brownies were still in the conceptual stage heading into this weekend, and I knew that they needed to be dealt with before I could commit myself fully to eating better.

Baking isn't my strong suit in the kitchen, and so I immediately went to Google for a recipe, but apparently the ginger + brownie equation wasn't a popular one. I did find one recipe, from a blog whose writer decided to go all "Julie and Julia" on a Martha Stewart cookie collection, but she described the end result as a "mysteriously bad, possibly unedited or unproofread recipe." Not the sort of thing you want to make a friend as a reward. In the end, I decided to go with a regular brownie recipe, and just adjust the seasoning myself.

GINGER SPICE BROWNIES

adapted from Nestle's "Chewy Cocoa Brownies"

Makes 12 "real-sized" brownies, but the other recipe claims it made 24.

Once I decided to go with a regular recipe, I went from too few options to too many. In the end, though, I chose to eschew the endless bounty of the internet and stick with the recipe written on the side of my cocoa powder.

1 2/3 cups granulated sugar
1 1/2 sticks of butter, melted
2 Tbs. water

I mixed the starting ingredients together in a mixing bowl, and preheated my oven to 350 like the recipe told me to. I also greased up my trusty 13x9. I was tempted to begin my improvising already, and replace the water with rum, but the look Wife gave me made it clear: this was not rum for cooking.

(my tiny workstation)
2 large eggs
2 tsp. vanilla extract

The next two ingredients were supposed to be mixed right in with the butter-sugar combo, and that's what I did, but not without some hesitation. I looked in my fridge, and alas-medium eggs. After fretting a bunch and looking for egg conversion charts on the web, I put them in at the same quantity. What resulted was a shiny yellow mix, ready for some chocolate to join the party.

(the wet ingredients)
1 1/3 cups all purpose flour
3/4 cup baking cocoa

1 tsp. powdered ginger
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. cloves

(the smell of the spices was faint, but noticable)

I mixed the dry ingrediens together with a fork in a tupperware, because Son recently broke our best mixing bowl. This is where I began to put my stamp on the recipe. Ginger, cinnamon, and cloves went in alongside the traditional cocoa powder. I used the "bad Martha" recipe to get an idea of how much ginger and clove one might use, since the review chastised texture more than taste, and adjsted to my own sensibilities. I decided that I wanted cinnamon to be right about in the middle of those two flavors, though it wasn't in any of the recipes I had seen. It just felt right. It was time to combine the dry and wet ingredients.

As soon as I started stirring, I began to doubt my recipe. The mix was as thick as melted taffy, and my arm was getting quite the workout from stirring. I had picked Nestle's recipe because I imagined that most recipes on product labels were the results of dedicated Midwestern housewives, and suddenly I had lost faith in the Midwest. It looked good. It smelled good. But it was just so dense.

(Stuck to the bowl like pudding)

(tamed and in the pan)

For the record, the recipe I cribbed also had the ubiquitous "nuts, optional" on the list, and I had some pretty good looking macadamias in the pantry, but whenever we find cookies at work, Mouse would exclaim dismay at those which had nuts in them, and these were her bribe, not mine. The macadamias will have to find a home in something else.

So that was it, the basic brownie with a bit of ginger Not that I was done. When I first intended to make the "bad Martha" recipe, I misread it and ended up buying candied ginger. When trying to determine how I could best integrate this extra ingredient, one thing stood out in my mind:

Frosting.

I put my brownies in to bake, cleared my small kitchen of all baking apparatus to make chilli for dinner, and busted out my mixer as soon as Wife and I had eaten and the brownies were cooling.

CANDIED GINGER FROSTING
enough to coat all twelve brownies, with a little extra

4 T. butter, softened
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 tsp. lemon juice
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 cup candied ginger, finely diced

I threw everything in a bowl, set the beaters to cream, and watched as the ginger and cinnamon became integrated into a basic sour cream frosting recipe. All that was left was to add:

2 cups confectioner's sugar

3/4 cup brown sugar

Blend until the brown sugar breaks down into the frosting, and the whole thing takes on a nice, rich tan color of sorts.

(you can't really tell, but the frosting is freckled)

So how did it all turn out? I have to say, it's a mixed bag. The brownies themselves were great, just the classic, chocolatey, perfectly textured (neither too dense or too cakey) treat, but with a subtle hint of the spices I had added. It just gave the brownies.................swagger.

At the same time, the frosting was an exciting surprise. If you haven't had it, candied ginger is very sweet, but still has the spice that makes fresh ginger so much more interesting than the powdered stuff. It was a perfect complement to sour cream frosting. As I licked spoons and fingers, I envisioned all the great things I could do with it, from giving carrot cake a little extra pizzazz to making cupcakes with my kids.

The only problem came with the combination. Wife tried to warn me, but I was obsessed with my plan to integrate candied ginger into this recipe. I smeared on the frosting, and while everyone loved the flavor, roughly half of the people (including Mouse) found the dessert too sweet. The data pool is relatively small, but one thing I noticed is that only girls were overwhelmed by the amount of sugar, where as the two boys and one girl had no issue with the combination.

So, in conclusion, I would definitely make these again. While the frosting worked as the perfect showcase for both the flavors I was trying to harness and the edible flowers I needed to use up, however, I would either seperate it from the brownie recipe to be used in other applications or serve it as a side. Everything here was too good to ruin it by overwhelming my audience. I hope you give some or all of this recipe a try and let me know what you think!

Out of the Kitchen

2011-09-07T01:52:00.004-06:00

So, after compiling an "impressive" seven blogs, the combination of spotty internet access, spotty motivation, and the usual blah-blah-blah of school, work, and family meant that I turned around for two minutes and when I looked back I saw that my dear "Catfish's Dishes" had been abandoned for nearly two years!

On the plus side, nobody was really reading it.

However, it is my plan to get back in the proverbial saddle. As is often the case with the fickle nature of life, my decision to rejoin the kitchen blogosphere thing was decided far from the narrow confines of my kitchen.

Mother-in-Law, who you might remember from my review of Bar Gernika , has been making an increased effort on eating for health. My wife and I have been doing the same in our own kitchen, but where as we have been taking baby steps (one toast instead of two with breakfast, and diet soda in our mixed drinks) M-I-L has gone all out, from portion control to fueling her body via a Vitamix juicer. While the thought of pureed vegetable drinks (V-8 aside) never really tripped my trigger, some of them really haven't been that bad. Each time we stop in to visit, we have been greated with glasses of the stuff, primarily out of motherly concern for my wife's hatred of vegetables, and partly because the juicer makes such huge portions. While not every concoction is pleasing (sorry, cucumber-celery!), I have enjoyed quite a few, especially the spicy tomato-based mixtures.

On our most recent visit, we found ourselves in the same postion as the aforementioned Bar Gernika trip: the Father-in-Law was taking the kids again, this time to go fishing. But instead of offering to buy us lunch, the newer, healthier M-I-L asked if we would like to join her on a trip to Boise's fabulous farmer's market. The answer was almost no, as I still had left over beer from the night before and I was anxious to drink it in preperation for the night's festivities, but I hadn't been to the market (or even downtown, really) for years. Wife and I had already been planning a fridge stocked with produce to fight off bad snacking habits, and this seemed like a good chance to put our money where our to-do lists and pocket organizers were.

My, had it grown. What was once two blocks packed with people had stretched yet another, not to mention widening out on side streets. It was so packed, I didn't even have room to find out if they were still handing out samples of my favorite local salsa, Los Pastores.

Instead I just walked around, gaping, as my Mother-in-Law loaded up on tomatoes and green beans, garlic and peppers. I bought an inexpensive bag of bell peppers from Lazy Dog, got fresh leeks for Wife's weekly quiche from The Peaceful Belly, and toted around basil, peaches, and edible flowers M-I-L insisted on buying for us. I got home (hours later, after much imaginary house shopping) with tons of fresh goodies, and an excitement to enter the kitchen. What would I create next? To top it off, the first edible tomatoes had appeared on my plants, and a fresh jalepeno from M-I-L's yard surprised me with its incendiary heat. I don't know what all I'll be making as fall approaches, but I do know this. I'm looking forward to sharing.

Bar Gernika (Review)

2009-07-13T08:52:00.005-06:00

I've been broke enough long enough that I feel self concious when people offer to give me things, but that being said I'm only human, and being able to turn down a free meal is a talent I don't have. Such was the case Saturday morning. Wife and I had been out hitting the yard sales, with Boy reading his comics irritably in the back of the car, but our end destination was my Mother-in-law's house, where Grandpa intended to take Boy to an airshow in Nampa. Wife and I had intended to return to the sales, but soon she was helping her mother assemble a file organizer kind of like this one, and I was drooling over a Pampered Chef catalog, admiring Himilayan salt and knives that presumably don't suck.

By the time we were finished, we didn't really have time to do much but eat lunch before visiting our friend in the hospital. Not wanting to go home, we contemplated having lunch at Mother-in-law's, before realizing that anything worthy of our efforts would take longer than we had. I had the feeling one of us was seconds away from putting up the white flag of surrender to Top Ramen, when MIL said the magic words. "I'll spring for lunch."

Hallelujah. To be honest, I waver between Agnosticism and Atheism, but when someone offers up restaurant food (or non-prepackaged home food, of course) I think in religious terms. And Mother-in-law is a bit of a foodie herself, which meant that we'd be going somewhere with edible food. My wife, she's a hell of a cook. She didn't cook before we were together, but she's been one of those "the student has surpassed the master" kind of cooks at home. But she's not a foodie. When she's not in the mood to cook, anything is game. Well, except McDonalds. Except this time she surprised me. When MIL suggested a little cafe where we'd had a nice breakfast before, Wife kiboshed it on account of it's tiny seating. But then she said something that I found sexier than any pillow talk. "Let's try something new and different."

I honestly can't remember if it was her or her mother who first said "How about Bar Gernika?" because my excitement blotted out the details. This institution of the Boise Basque community was on my to-do list, in general and in specific due to this blog. I'd noticed the place often in my nine years here, but had largely ignored it until this Spring. That's when it was featured on Food Network. There's something wrong when you live in a city as far out of the national spotlight as Boise (sorry Broncos) and a hometown restaurant makes it on cable TV before you can eat there.

We wound up parking on the other end of the Basque block, and found ourselves staring at Leku Ona, the other Basque restaurant, which was considerably less crowded than Bar Gernika appeared. Perhaps it was an omen. But we'd made up our collective minds.

We entered the crowded space, and I was shocked at how small it really was. Thankfully my MIL asked for the patio, and soon we were back outside. Despite being next to a major street, things weren't too noisy and the day was perfect, with the weather in the high seventies and a light breeze moving through the air. Both Wife and MIL knew our waitress...I broke palaver with the menu long enough to catch that she went to school with or otherwise knew Brother-in-Law. One of the most impressive things about Bar Gernika is the menu. It has a small selection of items, but offers them in not only a standard entree portion but in smaller and larger quantities. MIL went with the small (side-free) chorizo and an Arnold Palmer. Wife took the lamb grinder, which was predestined from when we watched the Food Network video. I was curious-also from the video-to try the beef tongue, but chickened out. After a long time contemplating the Solomo (pork with pimento and peppers) I decided to try the chicken and chorizo paella. Wife chose the croquetas, a traditional Basque side, while I took the white bean soup, just to add to the variety. In addition, while MIL was covering the meal, I requested a glass of El Mason, a Basque wine, on a seperate tab. I was taking this new gig of food writer seriously, you see.

I'll say this for Bar Gernika. The service was efficient and fast. First to arrive were the beverages. I felt no need to mooch MIL's tea, but as for my wine....well, first let me digress. I'm not much of a wine drinker. I appreciate good beers, and can debate the minutia of various IPA's or describe the fragrance of a favorite Oatmeal Stout, but when it comes to wine I can only frame things in terms of the few I like and the many I don't. Unfortunately, this was one of the latter. It was listed on the menu as "perfect for the patio on a summer day"....but perhaps they meant I should use it for killing insects? It was a blush wine, which I had supposed would make it lighter and floral, but it was remarkably bitter and while I tried to be every bit the professional, swishing it around and analyzing it all I could really come up with is that it tasted like alcohol. Perhaps someone with a developed palate would appreciate it, but it's no novice's wine, certainly.

The table next to us was already eating, and after smelling their food for several minutes we were giddy like schoolchildren when we saw the tray of food arriving for us.

First on the list was Wife's lamb grinder. It was truly a beautiful sandwich, and on looks alone I have to rate it highly. But the flavor was somewhat lacking. I was surprised, after watching the video that shows everything that goes into it, but it was kind of plain, and while the lamb was generous, it was a bit dry. Don't get me wrong, I didn't hate it, it just didn't wow me. What did wow me, however, were the croquettas. Underneath their crunchy surface was a rich chicken filling, like a gravy but more substantial.

Next was MIL's chorizo. It came unadorned, since there was a wide array of condiments on the table, and was served on a crunchy baguette. I sampled a small bite and was impressed. It's hard to mess up something as simple as chorizo, but I was still pleased to see they'd cooked it perfectly, unburned but charred along the sides, with just a hint of grill persperation to let you know it would be juicy throughout.

Last was my paella. It wasn't what I'd consider a true paella, as it didn't have any shellfish, but since I'm allergic to crustaceans I was willing to ignore what I would once have considered a flaw. Unfortunately, I couldn't forgive the rest of it's issues. The chicken was completely dry, and other than the bits of chorizo scattered throughout it was strangely flavorless. Rather than containing an exotic essence, it tasted like the spanish rice out of a Rice a Roni box. At least there was the soup. While the first bite came off a bit like another poor pantry staple-pork n beans-each subsequent taste revealed layers of subtle flavor and I wished I'd had a large bowl of that instead of the paella.

The food at Bar Gernika was largely decent; then again so is the food at buffets. I don't think I'm in any hurry to return, although I probably will give it another chance some day if only to eat more croquettas. As it was, after our plates had been cleared we had to get one more plate, if only to enjoy the beautiful patio a bit longer. On the way back to the car we stopped off in the little Basque Market that was across the street. After browsing for awhile, I fished some change out of my pocket for a green olive stuffed with anchovy and on a spear with manchego cheese and a smoky strip of grilled pimento. It was the best thing I'd eaten all day.

Carmel Apple Bread Pudding (Recipe)

2009-07-07T02:11:00.006-06:00

Every summer it seems, we wind up having guests who for all intents and purposes live with us. While our refrigerator contains enough food for myself, the wife, and the kids to get by it isn't quite set up to take on additional comers, and given that most of our friends are for lack of a better word "hippies" the budget doesn't expand much with their arrival. Fortunately many local churches offer food boxes for those without an income, and while the merit of giving said food boxes to traveling road kids is probably debatable, my family and I certainly aren't going to turn up our noses at incoming food, no matter its origin.

While it's easy to find a place for cans of tuna or Top Ramen, one of the biggest problems with food boxes is that some things are scarce (meat and produce) while others are abundant (mainly junk foods and canned soups). After all, these are things that other people no longer wanted, for the most part. While there's always a few things collected from food drives that are quality, most things donated by businesses are things that are no longer salable. One of the biggest is bread that's past its prime. Which is fine, except that often these boxes are loaded with it. It would take a ravenous appetite or a large group to make much of a dent in it before it could turn. So it takes creativity to find uses for it without allowing it to go to waste. Having been homeless myself for about a year, and having had that experience not long after leaving culinary school, I spent a lot of time ruminating on how to make these cast-offs into something more interesting.

Sometimes it's hard. But I have to admit, when I first saw the box of stale croissants in this recent pile of baked goods, I knew instantly that I wanted to make bread pudding. It's a forgiving dessert and one that actually looks for the bread that makes it to be past its prime. Besides that, it's delicious. After a few people sampled the croissants and could tell that they were practically inedible for sandwich making purposes, they got set aside and I waited for an opportunity to get to work.

Finally, this last week I got home from my graveyard shift with an abundance of energy. I'd spent the night reading the recipes from the latest round of Foodie Fights and had cooking on my mind. Plus my wife was already at work and my guests would still be off camping until that evening.

Carmel Apple Bread Pudding (Modified from The Joy of Cooking's New Orleans Bread Pudding)
3 Tablespoons softened butter, spread over a 13x9 baking dish.

9-10 croissants, sliced in half inch slices.
The original recipe called for one and a quarter pounds of French bread, but since I had 12 croissants to work with, I merely layered as many half inch slices of croissants into the pan as would fit. I used just over nine, though your results may vary, especially if you get those extra-large croissants made especially for sandwiches.

1 cup dried apples, broken into pieces.
Another food box acquisition, I used dried apples in place of raisins. Once you have stuffed the pan full of rows of croissant, all you have to do is slip in the pieces of dried apples in between the slices, aiming for an even distribution.

3 large eggs
Whisk until frothy in a bowl large enough to accommodate the following ingredients;

4 cups whole milk
2 cups sugar
2 tablespoons maple syrup
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg

Whisk these ingredients into the eggs, then pour it over the croissants, allowing it to soak in for about an hour. Every ten minutes or so during the wait, press down on the croissants to make sure that the top pieces get an even coating of the egg mixture.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees, then bake until the top puffs up and is barely browned, 50 minutes to one hour.

After baking, top with;

Caramel sauce

This was the final "found" ingredient and was used due to convenience, however I'm sure a homemade sauce would make the dish even better. Let the pudding cool for another hour, then slice and serve or refrigerate for use within the next couple of days. Serve with:

Whipped cream

The final product? Every bit as delicious as I'd hoped. I over baked mine, cooking it for the full hour despite the fact my nose had warned me otherwise, and the edges were a bit charred..however, some slight trimming and no one who ate it was the wiser. The choice of croissants for the bread, as well as the use of maple syrup instead of vanilla, created a dessert that was both sweet and refreshingly moist. The dried apples were able to absorb a great deal of the flavor from the liquid ingredients, and came out just as tasty as if I'd topped an ordinary bread pudding with the contents of a hot apple pie, and the choice of caramel as a topping worked out wonderfully. I imagine most recipes I'll be posting on here are things I've made many times, and refined, but this one didn't need it. It was perhaps providence-for instance, the choice of maple syrup was merely due to a lack of vanilla, and I feel the pudding was richer for it-but working without preparation on merely a strong desire to eat bread pudding, I turned out a dessert I know I'll make again and again.