So here is the spot where I’m going to warn you:

If the mere mention of the word “haggis,” grosses you out… stop reading now.

If you’re intrigued by the appearance above, but you’re the type of person who eats hotdogs so long as no one mentions how they’re made… stop reading now.

If your house is covered in cute lambs and Little Bo Peep décor… stop reading now.

And if you don’t know what haggis even is… stop reading now. You may be fine, but I’m not going to have it on my shoulders if you aren’t. Let someone else take you down this path. :P

Are we good now?

The whole 2 people that are left, check out these!!

That’s the picture I wanted to put up top but knew that the one with a bite out of it might get some nasty comments. Those are seriously the cutest presentation one could ever find for stuffing sheep organs inside their own stomach lining. I had no idea that the texture of the stomach lining was so varied either… so the pops all look different!

It’s probably a good thing I don’t come from a country where this is the norm… Or at least not one where it’s easy to find ingredients like this, huh?

Also, don’t these look like mushrooms before they’re finished? A really weird mushroom, of course, but mushroomy nonetheless!

And now for the link and disclaimer to the full tutorial for how to make your own (I’m looking at you, Scots!).

Before clicking this link, even if you were fine with the above pictures, beware. It has lots of pictures of raw organs, both in their full form and sliced… and it goes into great detail of how to deal with tubes, cartilage, and tough pieces of lung. That’s great for a tutorial, but not so great if you’re an American who is just now sitting down to dinner. ;)

Link to the cutest haggis presentation ever: Hagis Pops

The post Haggis Pops–The Cutest Innards You Will Ever See appeared first on Quirky Cookery.

Egg-a-Matic Chick Egg Mold

The post Who cares which came first? – Egg mold to look like a chick (Wordless Wednesday) appeared first on Quirky Cookery.

The first time I had one of these chips, it was after picking up someone off the floor as they fainted when I said “what’s an all-dress chip?”

I hadn’t ever heard of them before, much less had them, and even once I was corrected and told that the term was “all dressed,” it didn’t exactly sound appealing. After all, when I ask for my burger to be fully dressed, it usually means that I want everything on it…and I do NOT want everything on my chip.

I had already experienced the beloved ketchup chip (beloved by the crazy Canadians, that is…not myself) and further explanation that the chip was “kinda like ketchup chips with vinegar, salt, and pepper” really didn’t make the case for me to jump on the bandwagon.

The description, however, was surprisingly accurate AND it turns out the chips are delicious. Weird, I know. They really do kinda taste like a ketchup chip met up with a salt ‘n’ vinegar chip and said “hey, let’s experiment with a whole bunch of spices and seasonings that no one will be able to distinguish” and voila, Canadians favorite chips were born!

I suppose it’s kind of like the “everything bagel” of chips. You think it’s going to taste weird if you heard everything they put on it, but once you have it, you find that it’s actually pretty good (albeit, not for everyone, of course). They’re perfect for people who innocently dip their chips in ketchup or like stacking their chips directly on their sandwiches.

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Top Eight Ways that The Stinking Rose is Guaranteed to Ward Off Vampires:

• Their motto is “we season our garlic with food.”
• They serve 3,000 pounds of garlic every month. Every MONTH. Do you realize how light garlic is and just how much that translates to??
• It’s home to the world’s longest garlic bread, which includes 2,635 individual bulbs of garlic.
• Their 40-Clove Garlic Chicken really does include 40 cloves of garlic in every dish.
• Where else can you get a garlic flavored ice cream?
• Even the drinks are garlicky with their signature garlic martini topping the list.
• Local Virgin Atlantic Cabin Crew members aren’t allowed to eat at the Stinking Rose any more because of passenger complaints about their stinky breath.
• Previous customers claim that it sometimes takes 3 days for the garlic breath to fade.

I can’t imagine this being a great place to have to walk by everyday, but their menu does sound delicious. Fortunately, once cooked, garlic is not nearly as strong as it is raw…as I learned first hand by eating whole cloves at my first shrimp boil party.

So while forty cloves of garlic may be a bit excessive to actually eat, the flavor would be mild and probably quite delicious. Just don’t sit within a 5 foot radius of me for a few days!

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(Part 1 can be found here: Canadians like their…Kraft Dinner)

The whole “American boxed mac ‘n’ cheese vs. Canadian KD (Kraft Dinner) obsession” is one of the silliest, strangest things I have to try to explain when I’m comparing the differences between food in America and Canada.

Considering there’s an entire section in the Canadian Culture portion of Wikipedia about how obsessed they are with KD, it really is something worth talking about. What I hadn’t seen before was a video like the one above about how they actually *taste* different, though.

Having tried both quite extensively, I can say they do have some differences, but when it comes down to it, both are still just cheap boxed pasta that gets covered in an unnatural orangey “cheese” dust that college students live off of and the rest of us still indulge in from time to time as a guilty pleasure.

(If you’re curious about more of the technical differences, check out this post from Garden Gnome’s Canadian Perspective. She does a breakdown that is quite funny at times and even reminds us that only Americans would need two sets of instructions for how to open a simple box of mac and cheese.)

The post Canadians love their…. Mac and Cheese (Part 2!) appeared first on Quirky Cookery.

For about a year, I was pretty hardcore into cooking healthy for the entire family. We tried no dairy to isolate allergies; we tried bento boxes for a healthy twist on brown bagging’; we focused on homegrown produce and local meats; we cut out MSG, certain yellow preservatives, and white sugar; we replaced soy with things like amino acid sauce…

I didn’t go nuts with it all, but if you had my brownies during this time, you better believe they had pumpkin puree in them and you had no idea.

This also means that I made all of the dog’s food from scratch, too. If you aren’t familiar with how spoiled this dog was before we adopted him, it’s worth a few tear-jerking moments here.

I fully recognize that this isn’t really the norm, but it’s what worked for us and I didn’t think much of it. It was simply part of the routine and what needed to be done in order to keep everyone healthy and happy, so it’s what I did.

Well… that is… until one day, the girls came home from school and B saw me mixing the weekly batch of dog food in the kitchen sink.

(Yes, you read that correctly, by the way. Using the sink is a whole lot easier to mix a large batch in than trying to find an appropriate mixing bowl that will happily slop it all over the counter or table while you’re mixing and scooping. Just toss it all in the sink, do your thing, and when you’re done, run some watch to clean up. Voila!)

Anyway, so they come in and B is clearly excited, “Is that supper?!?” To which I could only reply that no, no that is not their supper, and that the food she is so obviously drooling over is indeed the family pet’s dinner instead.

She was noticeably disappointed at that point and announced, “I wish I could eat Buddy’s dinner… ” which is the same point where I realized that I had unknowingly created jealousy over a dog’s food. Oops!

I made up for it immediately by changing our dinner plans to something extra yummy, but it was the first time I had ever seen someone wish s/he were eating an animal’s food instead. I’m not sure if that means the food I was feeding the dog was particularly delicious or if I was failing in the excitement factor for the human food being produced.

Either way, the dog was certainly being fed well, eh?12

The post That time B was jealous of the dog’s dinner… appeared first on Quirky Cookery.

I cannot think of a better bouquet of flowers, so this is definitely not for men only.

If you want to do a little something extra for your guy this V-Day, though, maybe a dozen bacon roses would do the trick.

Just make sure you make an extra dozen for yourself… ;)

The post A Rose for Your Bros–Perfect Bacon Roses for Valentine’s Day appeared first on Quirky Cookery.

Back when I was regularly making quirky food art, people would often ask me “how do you have time for that??”

I would love to say that I spent hours and hours on some of these projects, but realistically,  most of them were thrown together at the last minute. Or… even when I was pre-planning and knew I wanted to do something quirky, the end result was still only going to take a couple extra minutes to make.

For example, the snowman pancake above…. Without the quirky factor, I would’ve still been making bacon and pancakes, so the amount of time it takes to make those remain the same regardless.

The only real difference is that instead of making a single pancake in a pan or on a griddle, I put two small ones right next to each other (one slightly bigger than the other, of course). Instead of putting the bacon on the side of the plate, I laid it carefully on top to create a snowman scarf.

And do you know how long it took me to dig out chocolate chips and M&M’s from the cabinet to create the eyes, noses, and buttons? Probably 30 seconds…maybe a full minute if the box where I keep all those goodies got pushed to the back and required I climb on a cabinet to reach them. Whoop-de-do.

I made several different snowmen that day because there were multiple people needing fed, but even so, that means with an assembly-line production, I maybe added an extra five minutes to how long it took for breakfast. Nobody starved in that amount of time and my daily schedule wasn’t drastically thrown off that day. That amount of time was less than it takes to find the missing shoe for any given morning, so if it means spending those few minutes to make everyone giggle when they get their plates… I’m good with that.

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