Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Happy Fourth of July!!

It's a Wednesday. I have the day off. I got a bottle of some Barefoot sparkling thingy or other for my birthday and I am making mimosas.

That means only one thing!

Cookings of ManyMuch Greatness is about to begin.

I've been wanting to stuff yellow wax peppers with a bunch of shit and wrap bacon around it ever since my vegan sister flipped her lid over the fact that I still eat meat. Okay, I actually wanted to do stuff with it before, but the sister-flipping-lid thing has just made it necessary to follow through. You see, I used to be a vegetarian. I started at 14 and stayed that way until I turned 20 and I went to study medieval and renaissance art in Italy for six months. There people made many "My Mother's Recipe's" for me, and who the hell was I to turn down good hospitality just because it contained pork?  That would be rude.

I did teach a bunch of Italian men how to make vegan sushi in a tiny kitchenette. But that is a story for another blog.

Today I had a mess of yellow wax peppers, a bunch of premium bacon I needed to use, and a dream to follow.

I was sad that I had used up all the rubber gloves for sex. There were no rubber gloves in the house to protect my hands from the spicy chili oils. I would have to be brave and dive in.

(side tip: if your hands are burning from chili juices you should rub them with dry salt. I know it sounds weird but it really really works. All the other shit is just lies they print so they can laugh at you while you futile-y soak your hand in a bowl of pepto-bismal and vaseline)

(Bonus tip: if you *do* soak your hands in a bowl of pepto-bismal and vaseline you will be ready to fist at an all male sex party as long as it is held in 1972! You might even earn the nick-name "Hot Hands." because, you know, you still have chili juice on them.)

So, there was all this bacon and left over corn and wax chili peppers and other things kitchens often have in them. So what I did was this. I drank a Mimosa for my pre-warmup.

Then, I hollowed out all the peppers and rinsed their peppery guts out in the sink.
I stuffed some left over baked chicken that we have on hand to feed to our geriatric cat so he will actually eat his thyroid medication twice a day into the bottom of the peppers. It just seemed like a good idea. I mean, there is chicken there and chicken and bacon seem like a good mix, right? I had to feed some chicken to the cat because he has become spoiled since we started giving him thyroid meds via chicken delivery and feels that all r chicken are belong to him, now. And I'm totally putting my foot down and stopping the spoiling by giving him more chicken when he does his loud meow/scream thing.

This is why I don't have kids.

I cut up the left over corn from my birthday BBQ last Sunday and stuff it in after the chicken. I need something to hold the corn down and also retain spices I throw at it, so I stuff a chunk of butter in after the corn. Butter is a healthy fat. *And* it's yummy. Bacon and butter are probably a really really good food combo idea. I think it is time to find out.

I throw salt, pepper, lemon zest, and garlic on the butter. IT STICKS! Well, that was the point, anyway.

I cap the peppers off with White Welsh Chedder. I'm black Welsh (somewhere back in the family tree), but I don't hold that against the cheese.

So, then the bacon. I wrap all the chili peppers in bacon. I've never done this before, so I wrap them all and try to squish them together to make sure the bacon will not unravel during cooking. It still might unravel anyway, so for a few of them I break the tips off wooden skewers and use them like toothpicks because, despite owning a really cool toothpick holder that looks like a voodoo doll, I don't have any toothpicks.

I set the oven at 350 degrees since that seems like the normal temperature things cook at and I slide them in a glass cook pan along with more bacon and the leftover corn. The result looked something like this:





Mmmm.

And.. all of the cheese in the front melted off onto the center bacon. Some of you may have predicted this. In my prototypes I had wrapped the chili in foil so the cheese stayed. I had forgotten about that whole "gravity" thing. So the only thing to do was to put more cheese on the top and put them back in while the bacon still needed more cooking. There would be a, sort of, cheese/bacon/corn casserole to enjoy in the middle is all.

My ancestors were always in the middle of something. During the revolution they had split and the family fought on both sides! Though mostly they fought for the South because they liked supporting the  Free Labor Party in Maryland.

Oh wait. Sorry. Wrong war.

 But still.....

Anyways, the end result looked something like this:






Happy Fourth of July!