Roasted Elotes

We use corn for so many crazy things in America that it's
even starting to weird out the other vegetables

Corn is everywhere, especially in the midwest. Some of you sticklers for language might be thinking "there's no such thing as gradient levels of 'everywhere,'"and you'd think that would be the case. But you're wrong. Go to any grocery store. Look at ingredients. Corn is everywhere. Then go to the midwest and drive for 30 miles in literally any direction. I rest my case. Fortunately, corn is also absurdly delicious, and is kind of synonymous with Summer, which it technically is in case the absurd heat and gaggles of unruly children roaming the streets wasn't enough of a clue for you. The point is, we're being invaded by delicious corn, and it's our duty as patriotic Americans to eat the heck out of it to thin out its numbers so that we don't get completely overrun and end up slaves to our corn overlords, working in a butter mine in Montana.

Ingredients:

4 Ears Corn
4 oz. Cotija Cheese (If you can't find Cotija, you can replace it with Feta, but it won't be quite the same)
1/4 cup Mayo
1/4 cup Sour Cream
2 Limes
2 cloves Garlic
1 tsp Chile Powder
1/2 tsp Smoked Paprika
1/4 tsp Cayenne Pepper
1/4 tsp Kosher Salt

I've managed to make some pretty easy food here once or twice. Once I just mashed up a couple of fruits and froze their goop. This isn't the easiest recipe I've ever made, but it may be the easiest recipe I've ever made that actually requires any cooking. So first thing's first, heat your oven to 400 degrees and toss your corn in, husks and all. You don't even need any bourgeoise luxuries like a pan. Just throw them straight on your oven racks and leave them there for 45 minutes. Which is awesome because, firstly, there's no dishes to clean up, and secondly you now have 45 minutes to prep everything else. 40 minutes later, after you suddenly realize that you completely forgot about your corn because you got sucked in to whatever reality TV show you're addicted to this week, run to your kitchen with a nervous energy that really has no place near sharp knives. Take a sharp knife and chop the bejeezus out of your garlic. You really want to get it fine. Otherwise you're going to end up biting into a giant chunk of uncooked garlic later, which will end up being bad for you and everyone who has to talk to you for the rest of the day.

I wouldn't recommend letting these sit around for too long if
you're not eating 'em right away. This has yet to be a problem.

Combine your mayo, garlic, sour cream, cheese, and the juice from your limes together (oh yeah, you've got to juice your limes. So go retroactively have done that). In a separate container combine your chile powder, paprika cayenne, and salt. You're pretty much good to go. Like I said, easy. Once your corn is cooked all the way through take it out of the oven and pull the husks off of it. If you have delicate, sensitive, effeminate hands that can't handle second degree burns, use a towel for this. Either way, leave the husk at the bottom of the corn so that you can use it as a handle, and take your delicious snack on the go. This allows you the fun of eating your hot food outside in the Summer heat. You know, where the sun is blazing down on you in its endless struggle to murder you. Anyhow, immediately slather your cream mixture on to the hot corn, and then sprinkle it with your spice mixture. I'm a fan of citrus, so I squirt on a little extra lime juice at the end, but that part's optional. And that's it! You've got a snack that's delicious, filling, and a service to your country. You're technically a veteran now.

Eggnog Milkshake

Desolate winter snowscapes: the cause of adding booze to
things for roughly 1000 years.

Eggnog, it's commonly believed, was derived from a British drink popular in the middle ages called Posset. It is a classic British recipe consisting of taking stuff that doesn't have alcohol in it, and throwing some alcohol in it because it was Britain and the middle ages, and life wasn't especially worth living unless you were drunk enough to forget those things. Some people have theorized that alcohol was added in to preserve the drink and prevent people from getting sick. This is technically possible, but seems to be crediting a fair amount of scientific and medical knowledge to a group of people who literally used to bore holes in to each other's skulls to try and cure migraines. A more likely scenario is that alcohol was added to proto-eggnog in order to give people something to look forward to during the year so that they could better cope with the constant ridiculous insanity of their daily lives. It's used for pretty much the same purpose today. Adding ice cream and making it into a milkshake helps too.

Ingredients:

1 Cup Eggnog

1 Cup Vanilla Ice Cream (You want to get a decent vanilla ice cream here. The sort of vanilla that makes you think "delicious" instead of "boring.")

1/2 Cup Heavy Cream

1.5 TBSP Sugar

1/4 tsp Allspice

Cinnamon

Nutmeg

Whiskey!

So the first thing you're gonna need to do is find some eggnog. You can make it yourself, steal it, or buy it from a store. Homemade stuff will probably have a somewhat richer flavor and consistency, but we're mixing this with spices and ice cream, so it doesn't make that much of a difference. Though I've heard that eggnog won is twice as sweet as eggnog earned, so if you see any contests with an eggnog prize they might be worth entering. In any case, take your eggnog and toss in your allspice and cinnamon. If you want the best cinnamon flavor you can get, take some cinnamon sticks and throw them in a saucepan with your nog while heating it (Gently heating it. It's got dairy and eggs in it, neither of which you want curdling) for 20-30 minutes, and then let the mixture cool completely. If you have better things to do than spend upwards of an hour teasing out the the best flavor from your cinnamon, just add in half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon and call it a day. Sure, it won't taste quite as deliciously cinnamon-y, but again: we're mixing this with ice cream and whiskey. Take your spiced nog and throw it in your fridge while you whip up your cream. 

Alcohol, ice cream, and eggnog. That'll hold you over until
it's warm outside again.

Take your cream, sugar, and a small sprinkling of nutmeg, and whip that nonsense together until it forms a thick and delicious cream. This should take about 5 minutes, or roughly until your arm has wanted to fall of for a minute and a half. Now it's time to talk about whiskey. Traditionally (at least in the USA), bourbon is added to eggnog. Personally, I think that Irish Whiskey has a much better flavor for a drink like this, but feel free to experiment. There are no wrong answers with whiskey (there are so many wrong answers with whiskey. Evan Williams happens to be one.) As for how much of it to use, you can really add in as much or as little as you'd like. It's just about personal taste and your specific level of alcoholism and depression. Personally, I like it when the whiskey is one flavor that melds with the other flavors in the eggnog to make something new and awesome. That's about 2 TBSP of whiskey in this recipe. But if you drink eggnog more to forget the pains of all the times that Santa wronged you than to drink delicious drinks, feel free to up that to 2 liters, or whatever amount of whiskey soothes the violent raging storm in your soul. Then add your whipped cream on top and maybe some sprinkles because sprinkles are fun, especially when alcohol is involved, and maybe I've already had a few. Enjoy! 

Rosemary Roasted Potatoes

Rosemary, taking a selfie with some potatoes

So it's official. It's getting dark early, the air is getting colder, and people have begun to talk about "the holiday season." It's truly the end of times. All that we can do now is wait it out until the sun stops ignoring us and starts being cool again. You know, for about a week until the unbearable heat and humidity of summer. But that's a problem for future us, and those jerks probably have it coming, so let's focus on what's important: making a good all-purpose side dish that's tasty and hearty enough to satisfy us while we're huddling for protection from the cold and darkness outside. Which means delicious potatoes, at least to me. A lot of historians believe that if this technology had fallen into the hands of Ivan The Terrible, we'd all be speaking Russian right now. Or whatever proto-Russian they spoke back in the 16th century. So use with caution.

Ingredients:

2 lb. Potatoes (I don't know if you've noticed, but there are a lot of different kinds of potatoes, with more mutant varieties popping up in stores every week. Potato farmers need to just stop and get a life. Anyhow, any potato with a thin skin like red or white potatoes should be fine)
4 Cloves Garlic
3 TBSP Olive Oil
1.5 TBSP Chopped Rosemary (Don't buy chopped Rosemary. That's not even a thing. Buy Rosemary, chop it, and once it's chopped measure out one and a half tablespoons)
1/4 tsp Black Pepper
Salt

So full disclosure: this recipe is going to take almost an hour and a half to make from start to finish. If you don't have that kind of time, just get a store-bought can of potatoes and eat them cold while thinking about how incredibly important the things you've chosen to spend your time on are. Everybody else is gonna start by choppity-chop-chopping their garlic and rosemary down to size, which seriously represents like 50% of the work involved in this recipe. Throw your tiny bits of garlic and rosemary into a ziploc bag (Sorry, I forgot to act like Chopped and pretend that brand-names don't exist. Put them into a resealable zip-top storage bag) along with your oil, pepper, and salt. How much salt? Well, potatoes tend to need a lot of salt to taste like anything at all, so don't be stingy. I'd say throw in two large person's pinches of salt. For the frantic measurers out there, about 1.5 teaspoons. Chop your potatoes into wedges (Pro-tip: if they're all about the same size, they'll all cook in the same amount of time. If they're not, your life will be full of regret and sadness), and throw them in there as well.

If you're snowed in, just make these potatoes. Neighbors will
smell them, and dig through the snow to get to deliciousness.

Tradition says that you mix all these things together in a bowl, not a bag. But one of the oldest traditions is to not eat if your food can outrun you, so maybe let's use our brains instead of blindly following what people tell us to do. Seal up your bag and shake around the contents until everything's mixed together and the potatoes are thoroughly coated. Then spread them out onto a sheet pan in as close to a single layer as you can manage, and throw that sucker in a 400 degree oven for about an hour. Check on your potatoes every 20 minutes or so to stir, mix, and otherwise wangjangle them, which will help them brown evenly. Once they start looking crisp and golden and just kind of awesome, take them out. Serve them immediately, by which I mean eat them in your home while taunting the wild bears that are now roaming through your snow-encrusted neighborhood. Good luck out there, and remember that in no way by suggesting that you taunt bears am I trying to ensure that there are more scarce resources left for me. See you next week, possibly!

Artist's Rendition: January

Apple Parsnip Soup

The apples clutch their purses a little tighter when walking
through parsnip-town. Racist apples. 

If the rain, wind, and gloom outside for the past couple days are any indication, it might not be summer any more. Then again, I live in Chicago, so this is about the third time that I've thought that since August. But this time is different. This time there's also "pumpkin spiced" garbage all throughout every store, and the spiderwebs that I carelessly walk into outside are starting to feel store-bought. So I'm fairly certain that Winter is coming to kill us all, but first we get to ease into it by always being slightly too hot or too cold, and being forced to clean up after dying trees. So it's time to grab all of the root vegetables we can, make some delicious soup, and start waiting for May.

Ingredients:

6 Parsnips
4 Granny Smith Apples
2 Onions
5 Cups Vegetable Stock
1/2 tsp Black Pepper
1/2 tsp Coriander
Salt
Oil

So there are a lot of different kinds of apples out there, and they all have misleading names. Red delicious apples, for instance, while very red on the outside, are actually garbage on the inside. Granny Smith apples are kind of weird and tart. I didn't know the Smith matriarch myself, but if I had to guess I'd say she probably was super sweet and straight laced, in the sort of apologetically racist way that movies depict protagonists in the 40s and 50s. But I digress. The first thing you're gonna need to do is chop up your onions and sauté them in some oil (In a pot of some kind, for preference) with a standard-issue-human's pinch of salt. Let them cook down for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally as an excuse to go smell delicious cooking onions. Then add in your parsnips, which you've prudently taken this time to peel and chop. Once you realize you forgot to do this and you haphazardly do it as fast as possible, add in another pinch of salt and let that whole mess cook down for another 5 minutes.

Apple slices added in futile attempt to distract from the
beige-ness of delicious soup.

Now it's time to peel your apples. Why not earlier? Because apples hate the air, and while I'm not usually one to kowtow to whining vegetation, hate-filled apples turn brown and gross. And sure, you could just squeeze lemon juice in their whiny faces and they'd get over it, but then this soup would taste like lemons which wasn't the idea. So we coddle the apples until the last moment, when we strike. Kind of like an evil witch. Once your apples have seen your true nature we don't have a lot of time, so quickly chop the flesh off their cores, and then toss them in the pot along with the rest of your ingredients. Bring that sucker to a boil and then simmer it for 45 minutes. Blend it until it's smooth, and enjoy. It tastes savory, peppery, mildly sweet, and a little tart, which is perfect for pretending the world isn't dying outside. Some of you may be thinking about the colors of parsnips and peeled apples and wondering "is this another aggressively beige soup that you're making?" And to them I say: see you next week!