“I'm not drunk, I'm pleasurably inebriated so I don't say anything stupid.”

Seriously, I'm not that big of a lush. And I'm drinking my daily dose of coffee intravenously. Oh, glorious coffee. Hmmm....

Well past that moment which my doctor/mother/healthcare provider would question my addiction level (I'm not addicted, I don't go to meetings) today was the first day since the accident which I rode my bike. I'm a bit tender, but I took it easy and made sure I didn't do anything incredibly stupid (no more than usual) (and my doctor was kinda pissed at my definition of short compared to his definition of short). Of course this means my short bike ride to the coffee-shop was a bit slower than usual, but still a fantastic day for such an excursion.

Several weeks ago while I was still gimping around the house with a cane I had an overwhelming urge for kosheri, but I wanted to determine if I could make the sauce in a slow cooker. By the drool currently running down my chin thinking about the sauce, I know I was more than successful, I think I actually improved upon the recipe. If you don't know what kosheri is from one of my earliest blog entries, it Egyptian soul food: a starch fest including rice, pasta, chickpeas, lentils, vermicelli, fried onions, and chili oil all covered in a slow cooked tomato sauce. This stick to your ribs dish is perfect to make when you have to feed a lot of people on the cheap, guaranteed to fill any teenager in two bowls.

Slow Cooker Kosheri Sauce


Tools:
Small slow cooker
Cutting Board
Knife
Potato Masher
Slotted Spoon that won't ruin your slow cooker.

Ingredients:
1 large onion and 1 small onion, diced.
1 head of garlic, roughly chopped.
1/2 cup of good olive oil (I'm a fan of Spanish Olive Oil)
4 8 ounce cans of cheap tomato sauce (By cheap, I mean the supermarket plain label brand that has no extra flavors added in, like spices or other veggies. You want this sauce as plain as possible to absorb the awesome flavors you are creating. I use the Kroger white label brand of tomato sauce.)
2 8 ounce cans of water (I fill all four cans to the halfway point and slosh it around to get all the tomato sauce out)
4 heaping tablespoons of cumin (If you have a fantastic Middle Eastern grocery nearby, get your cumin from them! Seriously, It'll be about the same price but a million times better flavor!)
1 tablespoon of parsley.

Before you even get started, I need to point out this is a 48 hour recipe in the slow cooker, you can't rush this for it to be perfect. And the best part of this recipe is that your house will smell FANTASTIC the entire time you cook it.

Get the slow cooker out, plug it in, and set it to "low." Chop the onion and garlic up and add it to the slow cooker. Pour the olive oil over the veggies, then close the lid. Now walk away for 24 hours. And I'm not insane, this is how long you will want to do this! Right now what you're doing is caramelizing the onions and garlic in the slow cooker, releasing all the natural juices. In about an hour you will start to drool as your home fills with one of the most holy smells in all of creation. The urge to toast some bread and smother the garlic/onions on it will be tempting, but resist! RESIST!!!!!

Alright, every 6-10 hours go visit your slow cooker with that spoon and mix everything. What you are aiming for is a brown coloring in the onions and garlic as they slowly dissolve into tastiness. If your slow cooker is cooking it too fast, feel free to turn it off every so often, you do NOT want to burn the onions and garlic, it will leave a horrible bitter flavor in your sauce that no one will enjoy.

After it has cooked for 24 hours, get out your potato masher and genitally smash the onion and garlic into a mash. You don't have to press hard, and you'll barely have to press at all to turn the garlic/onion into a liquid.

Pour in all the tomato sauce, cumin, and parsley into the slow cooker. Add water to each can to help you get the last of the tomato sauce out of them, and then rinse the potato masher off with the water, into the crock pot. Stir until everything is mixed, and then seal the slow cooker for another 24 hours. This will let all of those flavors meld into bliss. Every so often (every 6-8 hours or so) open the slow cooker and mix it with your spoon.

And this, my friends, is my kosheri sauce, version 2.0. I will still make my original sauce, but this sauce is FAR superior in every way to the first. There's something about slow cooking that makes all the difference.

Well until next time, eat well!

Bien Camino!

PS: the title of this post is a quote from my upcoming book, The Zombie's Diary, which should be out soon.

Pickles and the Undead

Sorry I've been gone so long, but one of the side effects of trying to remove the ligament from my left ankle is an inordinate amount of time to write. This would be fantastic in most cases, but it has meant I've not been keeping up with this blog like I should. I shouldn't complain too much, I have gotten that pesky third book of mine written and edited in the last few weeks, The Zombie's Diary should be on sale here soon in the Amazon Kindle store along with my other books.

But in other news, I've healed to the point that I need to be careful about re-injuring myself with short walks between 10-15 km with a light 15 kg pack (Oh, get over the metric, my favorite places to walk are on the Camino de Santiago in Spain where you measure things in those distances). Yeah, I hurt last week, but that's one of those things that I'll have to learn the hard way through pain and suffering. 

Although I have been buried in my own literature for the last couple of weeks, I have been practicing a few new recipes, one of which includes one of my favorite foods: the pickle. Oh, I love a good pickle: the traditional cucumber, the spicy and sweet onion, the very interesting potato, or the hot pepper. But for this recipe I was experimenting with an Asian influenced cucumber pickle that you can make very easily at home. This is a "quick pickle," which means that no cooking is required. They'll stay good for about a week or two in the fridge after you make them, but I wouldn't keep them much longer than that. 

Asian Spicy Pickles (aka, Crack in a Jar)

Tools:

Cutting Board

Knife

Mason Jar (or any other easy to close container, but there's something about pickles out of a mason jar that reminds me of Granny's homemade pickles)

Strainer

Spoon

Towel

Ingredients:

2 Large Cucumbers (about a foot long total)

2 tbsp salt

4 tbsp sugar (don't try to use a fake sugar, it doesn't end well)

3 tbsp seasoned rice vinegar (you don't need an expensive bottle, I found one in my local Asian market for $2.50 that tastes fantastic)

1 tbsp chili oil (my local Wally-world sells a very affordable chili oil for just over a dollar, use that if you don't want to invest in a lot of oil)

1 tbsp sesame oil

The name of the game in this recipe is cleanliness, you want to make sure since nothing is being cooked that all containers are very clean. You don't have to go out of your way to sterilize everything in boiling water, but if you are worried about food born illness, then run all of your tools through the dishwasher right before you use it. 

Most cucumbers are shipped with a thin layer of wax on the outside. Wash the cucumbers in very hot water to remove that layer of wax (which doesn't hurt you, but slows down the absorption of the brine). Dry the cucumbers off and place on the cutting board. Slice off the ends of the cucumber and then slice the cucumber in half. This will leave you two cucumbers that you can now stand on their ends. Bisect the cucumber down the middle so you see the seeds. Take your spoon and scrape out the seeds into the trashcan. 

Tip o' the day: If you don't scrape the seeds out, the pickles will get VERY soggy and won't be very good.

Place the seeded cucumbers down on the cutting board and slice the cucumber to about the size of your pinky-finger, this will leave you with cucumbers that look like the smile on a smiley face. :) Repeat with the second cucumber.

Dice and place all the ) into the strainer. Place the strainer into the sink and sprinkle the salt over the cucumbers. Mix well. Place the clean towel over the strainer and let the cucumbers drain any excess liquid for the next hour, this will allow the cucumbers to dry out slightly and suck in brine later. 

In the mason jar put all the rest of the ingredients, seal, and shake well. After the cucumbers are done draining, put them into the mason jar, seal, and shake well to cover all the pickles with the spicy brine. If you want a "hotter" pickle, just add more chili oil. Place the jar in the fridge for at least an hour, if you have a tight lid you can turn the mason jar on its side every so often to mix the ingredients. You'll notice the jar's liquid level will rise and the pickles will get smaller as they brine, this is perfectly normal and mean's you'll have a fantastic pickle.

These things are highly addictive and very cheap, so don't be surprised if you make a batch at least once a week, or eat an entire jar while watching a movie. As far as snacks go this is a very healthy alternative to a lot of the junk out there, and the tingling feeling on your lips is a happy sign that you're eating healthy. 

Bien Camino! 

For my friend.

Well about a week and a half ago I received a request from one of my friends, a certain Mr. Torok of Egyptian goon squad fame, for a steak marinade. Although I am loath to marinate good meat-I feel that a good cut of meat is flavorful and delicious if cooked properly on its own-I also realize that the bigger/faster/leaner craze in the United States have left us with some very sad cuts of meat compared to the rest of the world (there are exceptions, I like to hit the meat locker in Royal Center, IN for some FANTASTIC local beef and pork, but places like that are the exception and not the rule).

With that said, I had an excuse to create a simple steak/beef marinade that I'd love to use for pan cooking or grilling, on many different cuts of beef. I like to think that when you do marinate something, it is to help intensify the flavors of the meal you are serving and now drown it out. With that said, I made a very simple Asian-inspired marinade to soak my beef in overnight before cooking.

D's Asian-Inspired Marinade

Tools:

Cutting Board

Food Processor

Knife

Plastic Bag you will marinate the meat in

Ingredients:

A thumb sized piece of ginger with the skin peeled off.

1 cup of Blue Moon Beer (You can imagine how I instruct you to dispose of the rest of the Blue Moon)

2-3 large pieces of garlic

1/2th cup of orange juice (Whatever kind of OJ that you like, I am a pulp man personally)

If you have never worked with ginger before, peel off the outer brown skin of the ginger. Place the ginger and the garlic into the food processor and turn it into a liquid paste. After it is ground up, add the beer and orange juice into the food processor an mix it for a few seconds to clean the blades off. Add all the ingredients into the plastic bag and add your choice of beef. (Note: I used chicken as well and was VERY happy with the result). Refrigerate overnight for the best results, but give at least an hour for the flavors to mingle and for the beer to break down the meat and make a more tender cut of beef.

When I grill this, I use a medium hot heat (I can hold my hand near the grill for 3-5 seconds before I have to pull away) rubbed down with a paper towel with oil on it (you have to oil the grill or the meat can stick). Before I put the meat on, I cover both sides with salt (I love sea salt) and pepper (white pepper is nice on steaks) to taste, and then grill it until it is a happy medium/medium-rare.

I hope this is what you are looking for Mr. Torok, it was fun developing a new marinade.

Bien Camino

Note: if you don't have a food processor, it isn't the end of the world. Just chop the crap out of the garlic and ginger and then place it into the plastic bag. Then get out a very heavy rolling pin and mash the crap out of the bag as well, further releasing flavors.

Asparagus

Finally! It's that time of the year again when one of my favorite veggies is in season and I can start to gorge on it until it costs me four dollars a pound again. Yes, I am talking about that same veggie which too often has been destroyed by boiling for years, that strange green stalk with the consistency of mush when it is served out of a can.

I swear, asparagus gets a horrible reputation that it doesn't deserve, so what people have been abusing it for years and mutilating the poor veggie into baby food paste for years. We shouldn't abuse such a fantastic veggie that is very easy to prepare, but of course there are those out there that will continue to damage and abuse the reputation of this misunderstood plant based on flashbacks of your mom forcing you to eat that crappy canned variety.

To you, I say, "have heart, be brave, and get out the fire: we be grillin'."

Grilled Asparagus

Tools:

Charcoal or Gas Grill, turned on and hot (about 400 degrees-ish).

1 gallon plastic bag

grilling tongs

Ingredients

1 lb of fresh asparagus

3 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons fresh minced garlic (I used jarred minced garlic to save time)

Pepper and salt to taste

This recipe is a two-day recipe, I like my asparagus to have the time to absorb some of those wonderful garlic flavors before grilling. But if you don't have time, prepare the asparagus as the grill gets warm. It'll still be delicious, just not as garlic-y.

First thing you need to do is wash the asparagus and dry it off. Then you will want to remove the bottom of the stalk of each plant, asparagus is very "tough" by the base of the plant where it comes out of the ground. There is a REALLY easy way to figure out when the asparagus is tender and to remove the bottom: grip the stalk at the end and at the middle and bend it until it breaks. As you remove the bottoms, toss the tender tops into the gallon plastic bag to get it ready.

Once all the asparagus is done, pour the olive oil, garlic, and seasoning into the bag, seal the bag, and toss it around until the stalks are covered in the oil/spice mix. You can then just plop the bag into the refrigerator overnight.

Get the grill hot the next day and cook all of your meats. Once all of your other dishes are done, place the asparagus on the grill in a single layer. Don't stack it! The olive oil will cook the asparagus quickly on the grill, so you want to keep rotating it. The asparagus is done when you get those fantastic grill lines on the top and bottom of the asparagus, this will take at most 4-6 minutes on a hot grill, a little longer on a slightly cooler grill.

The asparagus can be eaten as is, although I know some people like to abuse the poor stalks in butter once they are done. To each their own, but I think the butter really cheapens the fantastic flavors that fresh asparagus gets when grilled.

Bien Camino!