Texas RED Chili in a Crock Pot

Texas red. Real Texas red chili does not have beans in it. None. You can put beans on the side. You can add some beans later and call it a topping.  You can't cook it with the beans. You'll get the Dreaded Texas Ticket. I hear they issue them to any person that beaks a major Texas rule and it does not matter where you live. It is even enforced outside the United States. You might not get the ticket today. You might not get it tomorrow. But you will. And no one will be there to console you when you cry.

In order to make this dish you need a few things - in no particular order.

Dried chilies - multiple kinds. Be festive. Make sure they are flexible (mostly) and are not moldy.
masa harina
oregano
cumin
a cinnamon stick
tomato paste
chile in adobo sauce
bouillon paste
cojita cheese
red wine (or beer if you are more authentic)
lemon juice
lime juice
brown sugar
some random condensed syrup made from balsamic you got from Grocery Outlet
butter
beef chunks
garlic
onion
bay leaves
green bell pepper
fresh black pepper
a corner of an old chocolate bar that may or may not have rice bits in it



But really, Texas red starts out in the grocery store. Some grocery stores will carry all the ingredients. But others will carry only a few leaving you to scratch your head wondering if you should substitute crumbled tortilla chips in for the Masa Harina or will just plain corn meal work? Should I use wheat flour?

The Masa Harina is for the thickener. Not every store will have it. Some videos on youtube swear by corn chips as an adequate substitute. Others listed tapioca balls (?). A few listed flour if you can't find anything else. One listed arrow root.

SMDH

I'm going to go with a hard no on the tapioca and the arrow root. With my personal hard no, I include corn starch and gumbo filé powder. Just .... no. I don't put Masa in my gumbo. Likewise I won't put filé in my chile.  I know they rhyme. That's not an excuse to mix them up.

It is important to check out the chiles. If you don't know which chiles to buy then buy all the chiles. I bought all the chilis. One time when I bought all the chilis there was just one available which was an amazing huge flat black flexible chili that smelled like a sultry raisin. I highly recommend that one. But the others are all good, too. You can mix them together.

The other place that Texas red starts is in the kitchen. I'm using a slow cooker because I am lazy.

You have to take all the dried chili peppers and then roast them gently until there is a smooth toasty smell of awesome. You don't want anything to burn.

But who am I kidding? Of course chili cooking starts when you open the wine!
You need enough wine set aside to put some in the chili recipe unless you plan to add beer. Which, technically, is more Texas. But actually I think red wine cooks down with the raisiny flavors of the dried chili peppers better (shit, you are all going to think I am potentially sophisticated here).

Really, it all leads down to why you need to throw in the corner of an old chocolate bar at the end.

But, you have to cut those chilis open and scrape out the seeds inside. You can wear gloves for that intimate doctor experience and then you can make your own ASMR videos by tapping the chili peppers with the gloves while rattling the seeds next to powerful microphones and then making wiggly patterns with your fingers into the camera. If making an ASMR video while putting together this chili, definitely wear those periwinkle non latex gloves for the best sounds of finger wiggling. Otherwise any latex glove will do. But these chilis are not that potent. It is not necessary to wear gloves unless you plan to put your fingers anywhere near your eye ducts at all for the rest of the evening.





For those of you who *don't* know what ASMR videos are, they are a kind of creepy game adults have discovered is a substitute for that magical play time ritual little girls (and some boys or non gender binary kids) do when they sneak away to a quiet corner to draw pictures on each other's backs  with their fingers and the one being drawn on guesses what it is. But the real reason for the game, which is never discussed,  is so they can get that tingly feeling in their head when the picture is being drawn. This is why everyone fights for more time being the person that is being drawn on and serious fights break out about the fairness of who gets how much time being drawn upon and labor unions formed to protect the working rights of those doing the drawing. But the darker side of the childhood girl games is the Rose Garden, where the ASMR tingly feeling morphs into mini top and bottom games of who can tolerate something that starts out gentle and then becomes this horrific torture chain indoor to make neat rows of blood red blotches up and down the receiver's arm. I just tried to show this to my husband who had never heard of it and he couldn't handle it. I suspect most secret girl games are too much for the likes of those who lean towards softer arts, like football.

Anyway ASMR has devolved these little childhood games into remote videos you can watch on youtube of young women wearing a lot of make-up playing doctor (and common, let's face it...mother) on youtube, which is both fascinating and also a little bit sad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeG5iTFw_1U

https://youtu.be/3s0I9eClG7Y

https://youtu.be/tmhmKEhnIpA

So,  now that your chili peppers have been unstemmed and deseeded, take all those soft and leathery skins and throw them in a bowl of water which will randomly be sitting next to you. We will assume it is clean water set aside for that purpose. You are going to soak those babies until the fruit side is all soft and squishy again and the skin side is flexible with just a little give. Like the way you hope your vagina will be when you are 80.











Okay, I actually forgot to roast them. This is a super important step. I admit that I failed here.

Roasting the chilis is a super satisfying experience and one that I put on my list of self soothing tools  that I have in my personal self care toolkit along with stepping on a photo of Trump's face out in the yard with muddy horse poop boots on. It just makes one feel so refreshed! I live in the city which makes it just a little challenging to get the horse poop.


Throw out the stems and the seeds. Do not give them to your dog no matter how much he thinks he wants to eat them.

It's like when the dog thought he wanted to see your Grindr Profile and he was really enthusiastic, but later you could feel him being disappointed in you in ways you could not imagine thereafter.



Take the stew meat and then decide if you want to roll it in wheat flour or not. In this case I forgot to. But I can't be sure why it is part of the point. I mean,  we are adding masa later, so......

But I did cook the meat in a big chunk of butter on all sides until brown. Then I poured the meat and the juice from the pan into the crock pot.

I took one small onion, a small bell pepper,  and all the leftover garlic clove bits which included 7.  I had to pick a few from the floor  (still in the casings) because my partner made marinara yesterday and thought he used all the garlic.

Haha! No! I am victorious.

I briefly did think about roasting all of them first, but then poured another glass of wine and didn't.

 I  put the one onion which I had cut into quarters and all the peeled garlic in to the processor. I food processed the hell out of them and added them to the mix.

This is the second best way to cut an onion besides making your partner go out on the deck and do it for you.

I then took the soaked chili skins and ground them up in the food processor with the wine, brown sugar, cumin, oregano, lemon juice, lime juice, soup bouillon, and some cojita cheese (just because, why not?). Then I blended the hell out of them until they were a seriously thick, blood red paste.

This was added to the crock pot along with some water, more cheese, a bit of balsamic paste, some tomato paste, and a small corner of slightly old chocolate.










Oh yes, I also added a well stirred smattering of masa into the mix.

And a cinnamon stick which kept emulating a bone bit.



The entire thing was set to hot to make the stew meat tender and left for the entire night.

You can add a ham hock, which .... let's be honest, will make the whole thing 20 percent more AMAZING!!!! But do you really have time to pick all those bones out?

Ground pepper can just be in there or not. Some say you should add hot sauce at this point. I say that is an end of dish addition. And then you silently judge the person who added hot sauce to your chili before they ate it.


I set it to low and cooked it the entire night. If it isn't thick enough by the end, add more masa. I also added a wee bit more brown sugar, a splash more of wine, and some added thickened balsamic at the end to give it heft.



Take out the cinnamon stick and the bay leaves.

Let it cool. Serve with sour cream and chives. Possibly some chopped fresh onion and definitely more cojita cheese.



And definitely don't give any to the dog.

West Oakland Irish Corned Beef

 I just thew together the best corned beef I have ever made. Ever!!!!  And that's saying a lot if you had previously eaten my Guiness based corned beef stew. Mmm. Mmm. mmm.

This one, I didn't think was going to be that good because I went more culinary rogue than ever before with corned beef.

 That's pork on the upper left and cow on the lower right. 

The pork loin from Grocery Outlet (Bargain Market) we meant to cook smelled like farts. And not the good kind. So, that put us in a dilemma having prepped all the ingredients for the roast. But Gross Out sells corned beef all year long! And we had it solidly frozen in our freezer from last year. 

Which.... is both good and bad. 

But I figured in a slow cooker it doesn't matter. As we look to our current political landscape, clearly nothing matters anymore. So why should a silly rule about cooking a solidly frozen piece of meat from last year?

I threw that in with a frozen ham hock. Because, if you don't know by now, the secret to great corned beef is the flavor of smoked pig. 

There. It's out. Corned beef is weird and rubbery until it is flavored with the magic of the back end of a thick fat hog that's marinated in back ally poker deals and a tiny bit of hickory thrown in for good luck. 

But that's not all! 

We stole... I mean, we got some fresh rosemary from our neighbor's yard and it is sprinkled with that hint of West Oakland magic which really draws out the nuances of the dish.

 I'm not sure if it's the glint of sparkly goodness of left over burnt aluminum dust from the now defunct recycle plant or that thin dusky smoke of industrial diesel which adds a bit of unique bounce to West O herbs. Either way, it's a winner!

By now you also know that the secret to bringing out the flavor ( besides salt) to mamma's home cooking is to always add one healthy fuck-ton of mashed garlic. It tastes good and it's good for you! 

Because it can't always be meat... I added carrots, potatoes, celery.  Since I didn't have cabbage I added nature's mini cabbage! Brussel sprouts. So cute! Like the kawaii of the cabbage kingdom! 

I was out of soup base. I know I know.  shameful. I did not even have any of those left over flavor crystals from the chicken ramen.

But a sprinkle of soy sauce is, like, basically the same thing. That and a small can of tomato paste. 

Again, so cute! So kawaii!

I didn't think to buy beer since this was an off the cuff and spontaneous meal. I don't normally keep beer around. But I did just come from Grocery Outlet (Bargain Market). And they have insane mystery wine grab bags. Like.... it's normally an $80.00 bottle of wine. But it's here for 11 bucks! And it could be okay. But it could also be that crazy batch the radium fell into which gives it that extra bite. You won't know until you try. And it's all non-refundable! 

I once had an amazing score of something called "potable alcohol" I bought there. Boy it smelled bad. But it made the prettiest colors in our fire pit. 

Btw..... I don't remember how much wine I put in there. More than a glass? I pour larger than a 4 oz. pour. Who doesn't? Except those new trendy wine bars in the Mission,  I guess.

Also, I threw in that tiny odd packet of picking spice they stick on top of the meat. Does anyone else think of those free safer sex kits given out at pride when they open them? I mean you have to wash the outside goo off before you use them. 

No? Just me? Ok. 

I also, of course, added powdered mustard and fresh sage and two water glasses of water. I put it on low for the night after I passed out, I meant...  I fell gently asleep. I let it cook until falling lightly apart. Any sooner than that is too soon.

And remember, the Irish were not subjected to the horror of slavery that so many individuals kidnapped from Africa were. Just because they were subjected to awful treatment, low opportunity, and discrimination doesn't make it the same thing. Here is a really good article from The Root on the subject. 

https://www.theroot.com/when-the-irish-weren-t-white-1793358754

Any questions?

How to Make Tom Kha Soup When your Mother has Inoperable Stage IV Cancer

This is a recap of an earlier soup recipe for Tom Kha Ghai. But honestly, each time a recipe is created it has a unique situation which calls for individual tweeks. I thought that it might be both educational and useful to document one of these particular situations. 

In this case, I will be making this particular soup while changing the prep and the ingredients to align with a diet recommended by certain holistic practitioners for those battling cancer. That is, I will be creating the recipe without adding any alcohol, sugar,  meat, salt, or chilies. 

Hopefully it does not completely suck. 

This recipe is particularly good when you’ve just prevented your mother from possibly going ballistic on helpful nutrition shop owners who are trying to sell her other options not on her list while she was already sliding past her level of comfortable overwhelm and you are trying to calm yourself down from a future ensuing anxiety attack. 

This recipe will call for drinking more wine, overall, than one would normally. If it isn’t going in the soup, that doesn’t mean it‘s not going to be used. Basically you’re drinking a recipe’s worth. If you don’t drink, be prepared to pour out at least one full bottle of wine onto the ground. Tell yourself that it's for the homies. And by homies I mean that it's to honor people in various homes who also have cancer and can't drink this wine.

This time it's okay for you throw the remaining wine bottle against something hard in order to hear the crash. 

Everything has to be organic and there will be no oil to sauté anything. Also, there will be no chicken. This might be closer to the Martha Stewart recipe I ripped into a few posts back when I initially wrote a blog about this particular soup and highlighted how boring and super New-England-white-person her specific recipe was. But maybe she was writing for her family member who not only had cancer, but also an unusually high ability to process sodium while having said cancer. If so, my apologies Martha. I honestly did not know your sodium deficient mom had cancer when you put that one up. 

Chop the fresh turmeric, onions, ginger, celery, lemon grass, and broccoli into smaller pieces than normal.  I mean seriously small bits. Try to breathe a little more consciously as you do this. Normally I’m all about "health at any size", which includes raggedly mean chunky bits along with some scattered smaller bits and then the occasional small slivers that just happen when I chop. But, since there is no soup base, I’m chopping everything teensy in the hopes that my hand will stop shaking and that it might add more flavor. 

I’m adding one metric fuckton of ginger to see if this will fix the lack of soup base and salt.  Also, because Whole Foods in LA apparently has received a written cease and desist letter from Martha around carrying galangal. It seems that her vicious galangal interaction has caused her to banish all galangal from the area. The woman does need therapy. It's not the galangal's fault. It's the behaviors and habits of those who raise and use galangal who end up causing it to go bad.

After chopping the items, take a slice of frozen pizza recently heated and eat it slowly over a period of 20 minutes while staring out the kitchen window into the yard of your mom’s small condo all while thinking about your sister’s earlier conversation with you where in she tried to talk to you about dividing up your  mom’s stuff and then you hung up on her.

 Continue to chew slowly until you feel sad and vacant

Chop up a larger than normal amount of parsley. It's parsley because partially you're not sure cilantro is on the cancer list of okay to eat items and partially because some people think cilantro tastes like soap. Contemplate if they are just faking this to be assholes and wonder why they have been eating so much soap. Fail to chop it too finely, but throw it in the large bowl of chopped things anyway and then proceed to sit with your head resting in your hands while your elbows rest on the cutting board. Hold this position until you can breathe again or until a relative walks in the room and you have to fake it.

Realize that writing this blog while you are cooking is amplifying your feelings. Try not to cry while chopping the fresh basil. If you fail to prevent this, cry over the sink away from any crucial ingredients. Remember, any added salt is not allowed in this specific diet.

Unlike other times when you put together a recipe for the family and everyone tried to crowd in to either insult you while standing around or pretend to help while not actually helping, no one will actually be in the kitchen. Everyone will just be too overwhelmed with their own shit and will have retreated.

Chop the bok choy and the majority of one of those large containers of basil. 

Nothing can be sautéed because you can't use oil, so nothing needs to be cooked separately. Everything gets thrown into the large bowl once chopped. 

Pour one can of coconut milk and an extra tiny can of coconut cream into a large pot, because you aren't sure how to compensate for the lack of oil and because... Fuck it.

Add more than a reasonably normal amount of garlic cloves which have been finely chopped to the mix. 

 Add the juice of two lemons partially squeezed. Some seeds may have fallen in. Don't worry. When these cook for an hour everyone will think they are some kind of unusual legume.

Heat the coconut milk and add four cups of water in a large pot. When it has reached a rolling boil, turn the heat down to simmer and throw everything you’ve chopped into the water. 

Cover it over and wait since there is really nothing else you can do.

Walk away from it and hope for the best.

The Pickle Blog of Many Much Greatness.

So there I was, sitting on top of a six gallon bucket just whacking the hell out of a plastic lid with a hammer. And what goes better with hammers than a screw driver? It was merely by chance that I had been drinking them all morning. Okay, not all morning. Actually, it was noon and I had slept in.  

Recently I've been doing smaller batches of cucumber pickles with some success on a semi-regular basis since I got this "pickle-it" pickle making system. I say, some success, because I did make an error when buying organic cucumbers at the Safeway and I found out that organic does not mean unwaxed. And this was how I learned that vegetables with wax on them make mushy pickles.

I also found out that taking three weeks to make about two dozen cucumber pickles is bullshit. This is America. 

Sure, I may have swiped my blog title from an Italian man who was learning English at the time and now calls me up every few weeks to complain that since he has been living in Ireland now for the past 15 years he probably speaks better English than I do and couldn't I PLEASE stop embarrassing him by making him remember the times when he did not know how to conjugate correctly?

 And it's true. I still sound far worse stumbling through my Italian than most people do speaking any language that they were not born to. But I am an American. And in America we don't care. And in America we make fun of those people that do care. And in America we make things in large large batches because if we can't have it now, we certainly don't want to wait for it later.

So, I bought a 6 gallon beer making bucket.

You may wonder why I didn't try to make beer in that bucket. There is a very good reason for that. 

It will take too long or be too irrelevant to explain. Just accept that I will not make beer with this bucket.

In my discoveries about making cucumber pickles I have learned a great many things aside from that fact that one should not use a pre-waxed cucumber to make a pickle. One of these things is that if you buy a really expensive pickling kit from Pickle-it and you use boiling water to sterilize the glass containers before you put items into it, it may first spider crack along and through the glass  before imploding in on itself and this will cause you to cry. Because of this issue, I now use a diluted bleach solution to sterilize my items.

Also, you should wash your cucumbers. But not, like, WASH wash your cucumbers. It is of no use to you if they are so sterile that they are like the virginal kindergarten teacher who told my entire class that Santa Claus was not real so that we would not be falsely wowed by that tainted temptress wrapped in a crimson mink. 

You want a little disease on them so that they will be zesty like a slightly practiced sex worker. A little history gives a lot of spice. Too green is too green.

Another thing I have learned is that it is actually important to place the pickling ingredients, in whatever container you are going to use, in layers. This is so the smaller bits do not float to the top where they could possibly mold and then spoil the entire batch.

I like to use the mixed pickling spices that you get in jars from the super market. I don't know why. They don't add all that much flavor in the end but they are kind of like those lucky socks that baseball people wear or lucky underwear wrestlers wear so they don't get a slick finger in their bum to get them off balance or so that they can get that extra slick finger in their bum to give them some balance. 

All of the spices you want to use should really go in first because they are, in fact, the most floaty. And by that, I mean that they are the most likely to float.

On top of the spices should go more spices.

If you are pickling you really need things that have a magical additive in them called "tannins" and they will make your cucumber retain that valued crunch when you are ready to pull the cucumbers out. 

Think of them like that sparkly marital aid to keep the juices flowing after 25 years.  It could be porno. It could be role play. It could be extra marital affairs which are hopefully consensual since  Cookings of Many Much Greatness was not a cooking blog built on a bed of marital lies. Or it could be large swaths of bay leaves mixed with oak leaves and a few grape leaves. You have to do what you have to do here  because, despite all the platitudes one might give you, if your pickle is flaccid no one is really going to want to eat it. 

Next, the herbs. Yes, I am aware that herbs are actually spices. Typically spice in a non dried format. In this case we have fresh dill and fresh thai basil and some other sexy spices which I forgot the names of but they just smelled *divine* when Sister Mary TimothySimplicity gave them to me and I am not going to be all discriminatory about which plants are worthy and which plants should be segregated out. 


NO! This is an all inclusive pickle. Any form of spice is welcome. Whether dried or fresh. Whether Western or Asian. Whether flowered or not. IT is a pickle of the people. IT is a pickle for everyone.  A pickle for the people is a part of all people and all people's contributions are what make the people's pickle beautiful! 


Except, you know, those crackly dried broken bits of herb. If your herbs are dried out and crumbly like a cracker, you best get those motherfuckers out of there. You *cannot* trust them. No matter how clean they are, no matter who they claim to have not been with, a crumbly cracker of an herb can ruin the whole batch with it's funky stank. Keep it out.  

Next goes in a fuckload of garlic. I know that many of you have been unhappy with my imprecise measuring terms. That is why, in this blog, I have made sure to capture a visual representation of what it means to add one fuckload. I hope this is helpful:

On top of that goes precisely a shit ton of onions. Again, my people's have a measuring dialect which is not easily translatable. And because of that, I have taken pictures to give you the information that you need to make an accurate measuring assessment.:

Now the cucumbers. The cucumbers must have their tips cut off to assist in the pickling process. The ends, apparently, can inhibit the pickling and so it is really best to neatly trim each end off. Actually it is only the flowering end which inhibits pickling. However I can't tell one end from another and certainly don't know which is the end of a phallic shaped melon and which tip a flower comes out of. In order to be safe,  I cut both ends. This is probably why it is a really good thing I never became an Orthodox Rabbi. That and because, since I have mouth herpes, I would probably just drink all the wine instead of using it to assist orthodox circumcision. 

Just kidding, I don't have mouth herpes. I'm just going to drink all the wine.

After all the ends and tips are cut, you should shove them all into the container vertically. It is a good idea to shove them so tight that none of them will float up on their own. Sometimes I imagine each container like a phone booth in a 1976 gay bathhouse where they have that contest to see how many cocks can fit into a limited space. 


Since Gun Oil hasn't been invented yet, you only have the natural condensation to work with. Now, you don't want to cause a urethral fracture, but if you know that possibly one more can wiggle into one of those dark cracks or crevices, the smaller yet slimmer cukes are really your best bet for the win. And this is why size really *is* important.

And of course size IS important. If I didn't have this large a bucket I wouldn't be able to create this effort to at least try to ferment enough pickles to last the next two months.

I know what you are thinking: Ha ha ha! She thinks these pickles might even last the next two months!

At this point you should be boiling some water. About 30 cups worth to be exact.  I know, you all are all fancy and think in quarts and gallons. But I only have a god damn cup measurer, okay? And it only goes up to four cups at a time. So fuck you with your fancy one gallon measuring devices.

As I said, you will need 30 cups and then you need this wacky thing here which will help you measure all the salt you need. http://www.pickl-it.com/blog/737/brine-calculator/

I made a 3% brine because it is saltier than a sailor's mouth. Any higher, and my delicate sensibilities may be compromised. Despite what some of you may think, *I* am a lady.

Apparently one regular sized metal camping plate is exactly the right size to hold all the cumbers under the brine. Mine is Blue with some white speckles. I don't think they really make any other kind of coated metal camping dishes. I've never actually never seen any other patterns or colors. Not even cute little bird designs or those heinous flowers that are supposed to look whimsical and friendly but really look almost exactly like a butterfly was smashed into the surface.

With your plate,  you will need a heavy thing to hold the plate down. I used a sterilized jar filled with filtered water and sealed with the same lid that came with the jar. But you might use stones or kitty litter sealed in durable ziplock baggies or even your neighbor's mini hookah, provided that it is totally clean and sterile since it is going to be touching the pickling water.

This still won't be enough to keep everything submerged. You will want to add some old pickle juice on top. Not gross/old. Just recently left behind from previously fermented and then eaten pickles. You need to get this, like a sourdough starter, from a batch of pickles you made earlier. If you do not have any, make a few more cups of the 3% brine and pour it on top.

You will need a hammer at this point. How else are you going to get the lid on? It's important you sit on top of the bucket with your entire weight while hammering the lid onto your large bucket.

 

Don't forget that damn airlock! What else are you going to stick in an unyielding rubbery hole to safely contain that growing funk? 

When you are done hammering, you will need something suitable to swaddle your beer bucket in order to protect it further from light exposure. I chose a 1960's teal house robe made of some kind of early substitute for fake fur. Fake fur was so expensive then, what with the war going on and all.

Now, since you cannot see your pickles through the opaque beer making container, you must trust in JEeZus and the smells emanating from the air lock at the top of your bucket to guide you in believing that everything is going okay in there. It's like, when you don't know the STD status of that grrl and she tells you it is okay but you just don't know but you  are still going to dive in there anyway so you split her legs and take a nice big long whiff and it smells just like fresh cut cactus and citrus peel, and that is how you decide you don't need a blood test? Well, this is how it going to be with the pickles. Except, you know, with a whole other set of fragrances.

As the days and weeks go by, you can trust that there are gasses being produced by gently pressing upon the lid of your tub and watching the little tubular  thing in the middle of your three piece air lock go up and then down. And of course there will be more smells.

Every once in a while you are going to have to pull the lid off. If you are feeling really lazy, you can take out the three piece airlock and do your best to try to look through that hole in the top of the lid which is about a centimeter in diameter. It will help if you are assisted with a really high powered flash light. This will kind of tell you that everything is still submerged and that it generally looks all right. However, everyonce in a while, this won't suffice. You are going to really need to get that goddamn lid off and take a good farty smelling look at your pickles. I say farty, because your entire house is going to smell like a pickle the size of a great dane farted all throughout your house. And this is why you should have kept the damn thing in a basement and now you feel cursed because it is too late and you just have to let it live its farty existence outside your bedroom door, even though you really could take it down at any time but you keep telling yourself that it's too late so you won't have to admit to yourself that you are actually just lazy.  

But anyways, back to the looking. It is really really hard to take that damn lid off. The parts you pop off will pop back down as soon as you can pull an adjacent corner up. You might lose fingernails and teeth which may or may not fall into the pickle vat and you shouldn't really tell your friends about that. Still, you must persist. 

There might be things like mold and actual bad smells which are much worse than pickle farts. Some people say to remove the mold and go on as usual. Others say that if you remove the mold and then pretend the mold never happened the mold will lay secret mold spores in the body of the pickles which will infect you when you eat them, eventually turning you into a hollow pickle making automaton shell of a person you used to be who can only live to continually make more and more pickles contaminated with mind control mold spore infections which you then disseminate to all of your friends who then become infected themselves and carry on a new life of simply making pickles. Forever.  

However, with my handy dandy new mold guide, you can now identify those who are infected from regular enthusiastic pickle making enthusiasts. One tail tell sign is that the zombie pickle men don't cut the mold off the cheese when it sprouts. They just eat it with a blank and tired look in their eyes. 

Occasionally the tired blank looks of mold infectees and non discriminating eating habits get confused with your average garden variety exhausted parent of a toddler child. So, whatever you do, hold off from stabbing them in the chest until you are really sure!

Once you have the lid off, you are supposed to taste the brine with a clean spoon to make sure it is going well and also that you won't poison your friends. The brine will be cloudy and possibly beige in color. This is normal. The beige color tells you that the pickling is working and that the water is developing all of the special pickle nutrients and magical enzyme type things and possibly the health components that we have all heard about so much recently from various health magazines. 

 Once the brine flavor is where you want it, or you are just so creeped out you cannot fucking stand it anymore (normally around two weeks, though some wait as long as a month)  you can release the pickles. Make sure you wash your hands really well. You should try to ascertain whether the pickles are slimy or if they make any sort of dull snap sound when broken. If they don't snap, they feel squishy, or they smell at all like Lake Merritt in Oakland, you should probably throw them away. If some are hollow inside, that's okay. Sometimes they do that if your market let them sit too long before you bought them, or if you let them sit too long because you had a feeling you shouldn't be doing this in the first place but then told yourself that you spent 30 bucks on cucumbers so you might as well go through with it.

 You will most certainly need to have a fuck-ton of clean quart jars at your disposal. This is where you finally realize that this was not a fun hobby at all and you have gone absolutely too fucking far and just what in fucking hell are you doing with your life anyway? This is the time that if parents of toddlers were around they would stand and point and laugh at you for your poor life choices, no matter how tired they might be.  You will be up to your elbow in pickle brine. If you wore gloves to protect your hands from the stink that takes days to go away, the gloves will act as a holding container to keep the brine right on the flesh of your fingers as the salty water seeps over the top lip of your latex encased wrists. No matter what you may try to  tell yourself, you must admit that all of those gloves will never be recyclable for sex. Just forget it. No matter how careful you are,  the brine will get all over the floor.  And.... did you really have to ferment them all so close to your entire wardrobe? Your favorite pants are now ruined. At this point you have no choice but to trudge on spending several hours sterilizing and then filling the various jars that surround you on the floor which will probably never all fit in your refrigerator anyway. 

Congratulations. You are now the Howard Hughes of picklers.  

Tilapia with Lemon and Some Pickled Crap Thrown on Top

In order to make this promising tilapia you first have to have put in the time to pickle some crap. I’ve been into pickling lately. However, since I do most of my pickling sober I haven’t blogged about it. Pickling is a long drawn out process and my parole officer explicitly stated that I am not allowed to be drunk for the appropriate amount of time it would take to make that blog.

 I have been putting all kinds of shit in water salty enough to make even a veteran gourmand of the captain’s pudding blush. Currently I’m trying a daring process of fermenting salty plums I picked from my yard with rosemary and lemons in a brine of red wine. It might need to be thrown away in a few weeks. After all,  I'm not afraid to admit that I am scared of death which is a thing that can happen when eating the fruits of experimental pickling. 

With that said, In honor of the amazing Martha Stewart, I am going to leave any and all pickling instructions entirely out of today’s recipe. 

First, I was going to make this fish with a peach. But after some basic research I said all fucks to that.  

Instead I took the tilapia and put it on a big tin foil  sheet which my geriatric cat had already started to lick just a tiny bit because he has a plastic fetish and he felt tin foil was close enough substitute. Also, he hoped I would plop raw fish in front of him while he just happened to be practicing eating it. 

I did not change out the tinfoil because I love our Mother Earth. Also I figured that the heat will naturally bake off any cat anus germs.

 I covered those fishy bitches in salt and pepper and a healthy splash of that provincial herbs mix before slicing one lemon in a fan of thin slices over the top.  Then I realized my coconut oil was starting to get old and it heats better than olive oil and it also fights some kinds of brain diseases though when I was  younger I was told that it would just make us fat.  Ah, the miracle of transformation! Of course globs of coconut oil were strategically placed around the fish like tiny mounds of iced cream!

 I was rudely startled to discover that  I had no fresh garlic in the house. No one really has any good excuse to ever be out of garlic even if you engaged in a month long garlic festival ...  especially if you have engaged in a month long garlic festival. I don't understand those poor  bastards who try to tell me not to put garlic in my food because they claim in does something funny to them.  Be a man, poop it out. Don't you know that some people actually pay extra to have their colon washed with water nearly as fresh at your toilet bowl's before having them stuffed back inside?

Since I did have pickled garlic and pickled onions by the handful I was saved. It’s best if you have a tiny food processor in which you can throw in the garlic cloves and those thar Herbs du Provence and pickled onions in order to make a jaunty puree which you can spread across your fish before you roast it . However, if you live in a residential group home then there is a good chance  that someone threw the entire apparatus (cord and all) into the dishwasher on the second day it arrived from Costco. At this point you have only been able to use it  for a shallow yet  Dadaist invoking vase.  In this case mash the pickled garlic  and sprinkle across the body of these four brave yet bold fish that gave their lives to eventually travel though your lower intestines before going back out to sea in a slightly altered form.

 Also, don't forget to spread the finely chopped pickled onions!

I put a splash of lemon juice for good measure, because can one really trust  a lemon slice to deliver lemony goodness? No. Like a Republican senator’s wife, It’s just kinda there to look pretty while he finds the real business in a gutted bathroom stall in Downtown Detroit. Okay, maybe more gay downlows happen in D.C., but isn’t Detroit just perfectly picturesque?

By now you have everything in place. All you have to do is seal that fish into a tinfoil rosey vaginal pouch like a newly reconstructed hymen. Be sure to shush it and tell it God knows it’s still virginal and that her fish is all blessed and fresh inside.

Put on the grill for 10 to 15 minutes, or until that flakey fish just quivers and falls apart at the slightest touch from an assertive man’s hand, like God intended.

Cooking for a Rock Star

It’s very important no one know I have gotten a cold, which is why I am blogging about it.  And my guts are churning because I have ten tons of Dayquil in my system in order to prop myself up.

You see, I have to cook dinner for Amanda Palmer and 50 other house guests who will all be occupying my living room in three days. There is no wussing out. There is no backing down. There is only go.

I’m trying to pre-prep and freeze most of the food ahead of time because there is no way I am going to be able to make everything that same day and live. I have, as per usual, made everything way too complicated.

Pretty much this entire recipe I am doing today is ripped from the Vegan Soul Kitchen, except that I forgot to buy thyme. But, you know, basil is green, too so it should be all good.

https://www.facebook.com/vegan.soul.kitchen

Cooking on cough medication is not unlike cooking while drinking alcohol. Though there is a more floaty feeling and everything seems to remind me of square balloons particularly when I have my eyes closed. Go ahead. Try it! And this works even better with Nyquil while you are trying to masturbate.  You end up fantasizing all your lovers are square and balloon shaped which may either be a good thing or a bad thing depending on who you are and what you are into.

I don’t even know who I am or what I am doing. Should I be cooking? Should I ever be cooking is really the question most of you are probably asking.

Today we are making a rockin’ BBQ sauce. It will be boiled and frozen to kill any viral or bacterial contents which may currently be spewing from my being while I pray to the gods of all that is sickness that I will be healthy tomorrow.

You do know that many of the people that prepare your foods in restaurants are sick, right? There is no paid sick time for line cooks. And I hate to break it to you, but most of your waiters are either drunk or on acid.

Maybe acid is passé these days. I had a friend who was a server and he told me that he always took a little bit of mushrooms before going on shift each night to make the evening “sparkle” a little.

Normally this worked well, until one time he munched on too many while harvesting them from his basement. You know, pick a few, eat one - pick a few, eat one.  After so many, he became paranoid that every car that went by his house was a cop car and he went for his gun.

Anyways, when making bbq sauce for 50 people and a Rock Star, it is important to make a lot. Like – a lot a lot. Like enough to fill up a large rice cooker. And this is really quite a lot when you see it in front of you.

And do you have any idea how slow tamari sauce is when it pours out of the bottle and you are praying that it will make up four cups to throw into the giant pot you have in front of you?

Oh fuck this. I’m going to bed.

How to Cook Marinara Sauce Like an Asshole.

My husband had stolen the other wooden spoon, most of the pre-chopped onions, and the tomato paste for his meaty meat sauce. I was forced to deal with the dregs to help the vegetarians have a consummate meal. No pre-chopped onions and only jars of Safeway sauce. By god, it was like cooking in the paleo age.

But I did have wine. Thank goodness that I had wine. I decided to make a reduction of one cup red wine and one-cup balsamic vinegar. I wasn’t sure what this would actually do for the sauce but I had seen a fair amount of assholes brag about the quantity of wine and vinegars they had reduced. So, in order to compete, I had decided it would be best if I tried to be like one of these assholes.

I reduced the mess to a syrupy blackness that resembled Hershey’s chocolate sauce. 

I remember reading that some people had difficulty reducing balsamic and wine, which I think is confusing. I’m not a physicist, but I think if you boil pretty much any liquid long enough it will reduce, simply because at least part of it will be converted into a gas. My only guess is that, after 10 minutes, it didn’t seem that much smaller to them than when they started and then they got frustrated. In order to be a real gourmet asshole, you cannot get frustrated with your reduction. It’s the patience that gets you the asshole points.

And so that is why instead of dicing the garlic and putting in directly into the oil to sauté, this time I decided to roast the garlic first. Of yes! I was going to be that kind of asshole.

Garlic roasting, wine thingy reduced… what else can I do?

Well since I had to chop the onions myself,  I decided the best option would be to roast fennel seeds in olive oil until they popped and then add the diced onions to the oil.  You heard me right. I took the opportunity to roast those mutherfuckin’ seeds until  they were a light toasty brown and the whole kitchen smelled like Italian sausage but without the penis substitute.

I hit a snafu in my assholeishness. I was dealing with amateur kitchen ingredients. Very little Parmesan, (which was only bought to top some of the meat pasta) and no fresh  herbs.

GASP! you say?

 You heard me right. I was forced to use the goddamned dried Italian mix! And you know there ain’t no Italian alive in all of Italy who cooks with that.  It just doesn’t happen.

Shhhh!

They don’t.

Shhhhhh!

I don’t care what your mother does,.

Shh!

Dd.

Sssss!

SHHhhhhhh!

No.

So, I sent my husband out for more supplies. In specific, fresh rosemary. And yes, this is the stuff that you can pick out of your neighbor's yard most anywhere on the planet, except for the neighborhood that I live in. 

In the meantime, I had a quarter cup left of nutritional yeast flakes that were soon to go bad on me. At least I think they were. Do those damn things ever really go bad? And when they go bad, do they take a baseball bat to all that is dairy? Best not to leave it to chance. I threw that in the pasta for vegan cheesy goodness.

And since there was a little tiny plastic cup of chili flakes, which came from something, but I have no idea what, I threw that in too.

Garlic was roasted now, but too hot to peel. And I have the patience of a cooking asshole, but not  the patience of a GREAT cooking asshole. I know my limits.

 I put the roasted garlic in the freezer.

Magic! Ten minutes later I could actually squeeze the contents out and mash them up so I it would blend into the sauce for that taste of  smoky garlicky goodness.  And then  I notice the whole pot is getting a paste-like consistency, which means…..

Hurrah!

It is time for another wine bottle to be opened! And since the sauce became super thick in the short hour or so it has been bubbling, I really had to throw a third if it in the sauce along with the rest of the chili flakes and a reasonable bunch of salt. I think the reduced balsamic actually acted like sugar and sweetened the sauce a little too much.

Note to all asshole gourmands. Instead of saying you added sugar to your marinara, tell them you reduced an entire vat  of balsamic – some size that you think might  be worthy of Liberace’s kitchen. Remember, size does matter. Like most men, you don’t have to tell the truth.