Well, after being locked out for five hours, I'm in!

Today I was telling a coworker that I cook really, really ugly food, but it tastes great. I told him I used to have a blog about it. 

What I didn't realize is that the blog is still live.

So yay?

Links are borked. Jokes are corny. Prison Break hasn't been on in over a decade. But that's okay! I'm back with more ugly food.

Right now I'm not feeling particularly well, and it's probably related to something I ate. Okay. It's definitely a direct result of something I ate. And cooked...

I'll tell you about it later when I'm feeling better.

Pro Tip: Try not to poison yourself.

Everyone Likes a Good Stuffed Pepper! or Women of Exceptional Health and Beauty

[Edit below]

[Yet ANOTHER edit below -- I was remiss]

Well, I think my obsession lust respect for the skills of Wentworth Miller has been addressed ad nauseum. It's time for a little sumptin' sumptin' for the lovers of lady bits! (H/T, SFL!)

Many appreciate Women of Exceptional Health and Beauty (heya, Chainsaw!), so we're not going to go all ani here. Let's get to the pictures, shall we?

First we have The True Queen of England. (Most links NSFW.) Dame Mirren (thanks, Bloggie) is a Woman of Exceptional Health and Beauty with incredible poise and self-assurance. I mean, damn! The woman is what, sixty something, and she proves that age is just a fucking number. That makes me have hope for my future.

Another kickass Woman of Exceptional Health and Beauty is Kathy Bates. I'm sorry, but if you went "ewww" when you saw her nude scene in About Schmidt, there is no hope for you. None. If Jack Nicholson can gallivant around showing his attributes while continuing to cover for fucking Roman Polanski, then Kathy not only has a right but a duty to show what a Woman of Exceptional Health and Beauty has to offer. Kathy, you are my idol! And thanks for writing, directing and appearing in Six Feet Under with other Women of Exceptional Health and Beauty.

Which leads us to pre-Hollywood-pressure-to-stop-eating Lauren Ambrose (heya, Chainsaw! Ginger!). Sure, she played a teen in The Best Series Ever, but she was legal at the time, so, don't feel pervy. We all wanted to be Claire: to have the freedom to rant at strangers and to drive a neon-green hearse to school. We wanted to throw brilliant tantrums about pantyhose and temping, and we all wanted to follow our dreams. Claire lives in all of us, and only Lauren Ambrose could have brought that character to scintillating life. I'm just so sad I can't find her green-sequined dress dance routine! Ugh.

The Supreme Goddess of Exceptional Health and Beauty is Chaka Khan. Chakra Khan™ will open your third eye and tell you something good. She'll set your stuff on fire, but no worries! She feels for you, and yes she loves you. We all want to rock her hard or yearn to be rocked Chaka-Style. Life is too short to live any other way. She makes you want to celebrate Rare Earth like, so let's put on our faux fur bras, tube tops and kneel at The Altar of Chaka. She is a sweet thing.

So, yeah. We're all beautiful!






Important Edit: Try substituting Garam Masala for basil and fresh mozzarella for smoked moz. It's a party in your mouth!

Everything Goes Better with Bacon (even pork chops!)

Please, please believe me: Bacon is not a staple of our diet. Truly. When I went food shopping last week, I chose recipes that consisted of similar ingredients just to save money. Period. While bacon on pork chops might seem like oink overload, fat is fat, and a garnish is a garnish, even if it's bacon.

Here's an almost step-by-step pictorial of the thing I made last night (at like 10 PM)

First you make the roux/sauce.

I fried 1/4" pieces of bacon in this here pot until the bacon was crisp. I removed the bacon and then used the fat as the base for this here apple cider sauce. I mean, is there really a difference between using butter or bacon in a roux? No. It's all animal fat, and we all know that pork is The Other White Meat, so, yeah. I'm thinking the bacon fat is healthier than butter. At least that's what I tell myself. Oh, and those little floaties in the picture? They're some pieces of bacon I was too lazy to couldn't scoop out with the bamboo strainer doo dad.

Hokay, I finished with that floaty stuff and moved to the other pork. Here are bone-in pork chops frying in waaaaaaay too much oil. Problem is, my apt floor isn't nearly level and a tablespoon of oil hangs out in the corner of the pan. I can't shim the back of the stove to make it level, so I compensate by drowning food in oil...



Yay! Pork chops are browned, moved to a warm plate, and it's time to cook the onions, apples, garlic, thyme, and whatever else in the oil + pork chop fat...


Onions soften and brown some (really -- shitty camera and shitty lighting), and it's time to put the chops back in the greasy greasy pan, cover them with the onions, etc. and get ready to add the sauce...


Okay -- it's smelling great, but it's looking like the Gulf of Mexico in that pan...


After cooking the chops (covered) for 30 minutes or so, I took them out and reduced the sauce which also meant using a shitton of paper towels to try to soak up some of that oil slick...


And here it is garnished with the bacon that started it all. It really, really pisses my kid off when I take pictures of his food before or while he's trying to eat it, hence the presence of the fork and the Prison Break Buttermilk Cornbread (I think the cornbread is eight or nine days old now). Anything I can do to piss Steve off pleases me, so it was a good night. Oh, and this stuff actually tasted pretty good according to The One Who Hates Onions.


Vegetable of the Day: Onions (do they count?), dried thyme and dried parsley, because I was not in the mood to be chopping herbs or whatever. And, look, we had apples in there. Fruit is a move in the right direction...

Whatever Gets You Through the Night...

It's alright, it's alright. Picture's blurry from The Coffee Shakes or Xanax withdrawal or poor photography. Apologies. I just finished cooking dinner an hour ago, so we'll have more ugly food tomorrow. Steve liked it, so I guess it turned out okay.

Have some music until we meet again:

A Penne for Your Thoughts on What the Hell This Might Be

Good Chakra Khan™! What the hell is that? Well, that's cold penne, sweet Italian sausage, baby spinach, sun-dried tomatoes and some old other shit in a plastic container. Let's see if it looks better plated...



Nope. Not really. How did it taste? Wellllll, it was pretty good but a little on the salty side. I'm thinking I should have rinsed off the sun-dried tomatoes and shelled out the extra cash for some fresh Parmesan instead of this crap from BJ's. (Get your mind outta the gutter - BJ's is our Costco or Sam's club here in Bum Fuck, PA.) Problem is BJ's sells megasizes of this, er, cheese thing, so we'll use the "cheese" as a fail safe for The Prison Break Buttermilk Cornbread in case of zombie attack. Speaking of zombies, log onto the Stinque Zombie Bible, pick a passage and start translating. If you need a good jumping off point, read Job. The Job chapter is a winner. Speaking of fail safes, how's that BP oil spill going? Still killing us harshly? Yes indeedy.

We ate it all; we wanted more, so I guess this was a success.

Prison Break Buttermilk Cornbread

Imagine you're Michael Scofield. Imagine your significant other is Michael Scofield. Imagine Michael Scofield loves you and loves you right...

Sorry. Distracted. So, you're Michael Scofield, and you're a wealthy structural engineer, architect, something like that, and your estranged older brother, Whatshisname, is slated for execution for a crime he didn't commit. What do you do? You grab the plans to the prison, have yourself completely tatted up, full sleeves, the whole nine, with blueprints and information on how to break your brother out of prison hidden in plain view on your rockin' body. You pretend to rob a bank, shoot a couple of bullets in the air, plead guilty and get sent to the same prison where your bro is awaiting the needle so you can bust him out. You meet D.B. Cooper, you schmooze a prison doctor, you enlist the help of one of the planet's best actors, you implicate your sweet but maybe not so bright short-timer celly, and you get the hell outta Dodge. Too bad you don't leave the series at that point...

Anyway, life could have been a lot easier if you'd just made this buttermilk cornbread and thrown it against the wall, thrown it at any guards. Pfft. It's likely bulletproof. Yeah, it's not the same as a file baked in a cake, but they've got metal detectors and shit now. This cornbread is a lethal weapon on its own.

Golden? Uh, sort of. Apparently my oven has hot spots, so the cornbread got a little, um, brick like and too brown on one side. (Note to self: buy oven thermometer and turn food halfway through.)

Day 1: Cornbread a little dry but no too dry to choke down with tons of butter.

Day 2: It's what's for breakfast with a little maple syrup artificially-brown HFCS.

Day 3: Whoa. Is this just stone-ground cornmeal dumped in a Pyrex dish?

Day 4: Munchies! Shit. All I've got is that damned cornbread.

Day 5: Son resorts to eating it because, well, that's all we've got.

Day 6: Hard enough to sharpen knives

Day 7: Yes, we still have some in case of nuclear winter or zombie attack...

Meatwad

What the hell is THIS, you ask? It's Meatwad! Okay, it's really not out to fight crime; it's not hassled by Master Shake. It's not cute, but it is unintelligible. It's also not pink. I blame the twirly energy saving light bulbs, a cheap-ass digital camera and my inability to correct said camera settings for the weird yellow glow those twirly bulbs cast on us. We look jaundiced, so it makes sense that this meatwad should look undercooked. But it's not! It's truly a sickly pale corpse-like color. Yummy!

This is bacon-wrapped, free-form art smothered in with a dollop of dipping sauce over glaze. I know you're thinking that's ketchup, but it's not. It's glaaaaze reduced to a dipping sauce made from ketchup, some brown sugar and vinegar. And dipping sauce? Pfft. We're lazy and we just pour that stuff on top. It's fucking MEATLOAF! Meatloaf should not be accompanied by dipping sauce. That would just set the wrong tone for dinner as we dine on the sofa and play Ninja Gaiden 2 while trying to keep the sauce off of our controllers.

That green stuff is the vegetable we serve with meatwad. It's poorly chopped flat-leaf parsley. And if you're a fan of The Gipper, you know that ketchup is a vegetable, too. If it's good enough for subsidized school lunch programs, it's good enough for us!