Lettuce Wraps

Not pictured: the 20+ boxes behind me

Food has a magical quality. A good home-cooked meal can help make you feel at home even when you're on some godforsaken rock somewhere waiting for your connecting flight to some garbage place like New Jersey. That's why it's a little disappointing that my kitchen at my new apartment isn't quite functional. You see, there was a mix up where the gas company actually wanted to read the meters, but the meters were hidden from passing meter bandits behind a locked door to which I don't have a key. Who could have guessed, right? At least those pesky meter marauders won't catch me with my metaphorical pants down. Or eating any food cooked in my kitchen. But times of hardship show us what we're really made of. Innovation, determination, and several other importation "ations" can let you have the comfort of a delicious home-cooked meal despite not having the ability to technically cook. Oh, and for those of you interested, it turns out I'm mostly made of oxygen and reruns of 90s sitcoms.

Ingredients:

1 Rotisserie Chicken (Yes, grocery store chicken is totally a thing. In dire circumstances it can be super useful, and if you take the time to doctor it up a bit it can be tasty and versatile as well. But if you're not careful you'll end up regularly eating grocery store chicken. And that's exactly what my hardy forebears left their turnip infested homeland to avoid)

1/3 cup Coconut Milk

3 TBSP Natural Peanut Butter (In general, you're looking for peanut butter with little-to-no added sugars. If you can't find it or don't want it, just leave out the honey. Oh, retroactive spoiler alert. There'll be honey)

1 tsp grated Ginger

1 tsp grated Garlic

1 tsp Rice Wine Vinegar

1/2 tsp Soy Sauce

1/2 tsp Honey

Lettuce (You're looking for any lettuce with leaves that are big and pliable enough to use as a food receptacle. I like a little bitterness and crunch, so I used radicchio and some bibb lettuce. You use what you like)

Green Onions

Since we're not, technically speaking, cooking anything here, the first step is to get a bowl. We're mixing a bunch of crap together, and you can't mix nonsense without some kind of bowl. Winston Churchill said that. So take your British bowl of freedom and unceremoniously dump in your peanut butter, coconut milk, ginger, garlic, vinegar, soy sauce, and honey. Pretty much everything except for the chicken, green onions, and lettuce. Stir all of that together until it forms a kind of beige homogenous goop. Set your bowl of beige aside for the moment and get cracking on your chicken. You're going to want to take the meat and get to shredding. If it's hot, you can totally do this with two forks, using an awkward jerking motion like you're a T-Rex trying to bust out some sweet dance moves. If your forks are lost somewhere in a sea of boxes that is your life right now, you can totally do this by hand. Maybe make sure to buy some soap and paper towels first, because if you don't know where your forks are, who knows what else is lost in the cardboard abyss?

Adding insult to the injury of my not-quite kitchen is how
much better this kitchen is than my last one. 

Pretty much all that's left is the assembly. Take your vaguely cup-shaped leaf of lettuce and fill it up with your shredded chicken. You want to stuff as much in there as you can without risking it all falling out when you try to pick it up and eat it. Then liberally splorp on your peanut goop. Use a little bit more than you think you should. The top may look like it's got a bunch of sauce, but if you're anything like me then your pile of chicken runs deep. Also it's where most of the flavor is coming from, and why settle for less flavor? Finally, thinly slice some green onions and sprinkle them on top. All that's left is to settle on to your couch in front of your TV and eat while you pretend like you're totally going to unpack something during the commercial break. See you next week! You know, assuming I can find my computer.

Crock Pot Pastrami

You may as well call this pastrami Suleiman the Magnificent.
Because of its distinctive onion hat. Historical puns!

There's something to be said for food so easy to make that a blindfolded dog with some pretty severe physical handicaps stands a chance of getting it right. Aside from the obvious benefit of cheap canine labor, sometimes you just don't have the energy to make anything real. And so you end up eating take out, or ramen, or take out ramen. But not the actual delicious Japanese dish of noodles, meat, broth, and whatnot. Takeout top ramen from a plastic pouch. Because I'm sure hipsters have invented that restaurant by now. The point is, we make bad decisions when we're tired and hungry. Fortunately, with a small bit of planning you can turn reasonably few ingredients into absurdly delicious food. Also, I've been making a bunch of healthy food lately, so it kind of feels good to just make a giant slab of red meat.

Ingredients:

1 Whole Pastrami (Any reasonable deli or butcher counter should be able to get you this. Mine is about 2.5 pounds. It's literally just the entire slab of meat that they'd slice pastrami from if you ordered it like a normal person)

2 Carrots

2 Zucchini 

1 Standard Issue Onion 

2 Cloves Garlic

2 tsp Olive Oil

1 TBSP Water

1 Standard Issue Human's pinch of Black Pepper

Salt

So, the first thing you'll notice about this recipe is that it's barely a recipe at all. Remember, the idea is to make something easy and delicious. So we're taking an already cooked piece of delicious smoked meat, and gently heating it to render out all of the fat and make it absurdly tasty. We're also throwing vegetables on the bottom to soak up all of that smoky, peppery goodness as it cooks out of the pastrami. Kind of like a turducken, if you don't think about the fact that it's in no way like a turducken. Anyway, the first step on your path to glory is to cut your zucchini and carrot into chunks. Personally, I prefer cutting them into rings. They're large enough to not just turn in to mush, but small enough to easily grab with a fork. But ultimately the star here is the meat, so the way you cut the vegetables that are here to play backup to said meat really isn't that important, no matter what their IMDB pages say. Dice up your onion and garlic, and toss all of that veg in the bottom of a crock pot (And no, i don't care what brand of slow cooker you use. But crock pot has become the generic term. If I needed a kleenex, I wouldn't ask you for a generic facial tissue of your choice, so just shut it). Add in your oil, water, and black pepper, and get ready for the existential dread you'll feel about salt.

Breakfast of champions. Maybe not the champions who
win awards, but certainly the ones who win at life.

So here's the deal. Good pastrami is already pretty salty. You're still going to need to add in a little bit to season the vegetables, but how much kind of depends on your starting point. You can estimate based on your previous pastrami experiences, assuming you've had any, you can just slice off a piece of pastrami and taste it to get a feel for its saltiness, or you can wildly speculate based on nothing. No matter which of these methods you choose, you've got about a 50/50 chance of getting it right, but at least you'll feel better knowing that you tried. Kind of. Anyhow, salt your vegetables, and stir that nonsense up. Then toss your pastrami haphazardly on top of that mess, preferably with the fatty side facing down, and let it cook on low for about 6 hours. You'll know it's ready when you literally get woken up by the deliciousness wafting down the hall and realize that you fell asleep while you were supposed to be cooking food for your blog. Then shred that meat up with any forks, bare hands, bear hands, or other implements of culinary destruction you have lying around, and enjoy! Don't let the fact that it's 90 degrees outside stop you.

Blizzard Ramen with Meatballs

This is what it looks like when the plow has been by a couple
times, but it's still gonna keep snowing all night

Sometimes in life you get thrown a curveball. Sometimes that curveball is actually billions of snowflakes (actually more like quintillions, but billions is easier to wrap your head around) falling and covering everything in your immediate geographic area with a cold blanket of beauty and traffic collisions. Sometimes you spend hours cleaning off of your car and driving through treacherous conditions just to get to the store, only to find out that the store wasn't dumb enough to open in this weather. The point is, sometimes you have to make due with whatever disparate ingredients you have lying around, and try to make something tasty and nutritious. Or at least tasty and not poisonous. Or at least tasty and not immediately poisonous. Listen, tasty is the important part. Survive until the end of the snow and then you can go get all of the fancy medical attention you want.

Ingredients:

1 lb. Ground Beef
2 packs Ramen Noodle Soup
3 cups Water
1 cup assorted Frozen Vegetables
1 cup Seasoned Breadrumbs
1 Egg
1/2 an Onion
2 tsp Grated Ginger
2 tsp Soy Sauce
1 tsp Garlic Powder
1/2 tsp Onion Powder
1/2 tsp Toasted Sesame Oil
1/8 tsp Hot Sauce
1/8 tsp Crushed Red Pepper
Salt
Oil

Now, I know that's a daunting list of ingredients. It's in the double digits, and the world is ending outside, and you don't want to deal with this. You'd rather just order a pizza. There is no pizza. The pizza place exists outside of your apartment, a place that may-or-may-not even still exist at this point. And most of these ingredients are just spices anyway, so deal with it. Take a bowl and mix together your ground beef with your breadcrumbs, egg, onion powder, hot sauce, sesame oil, and half of your ginger, soy sauce, and garlic powder. Got all of that? Good. Once your hands are covered in meat goop, wash them off, using some form of witchcraft or yoga to actually turn on the faucet without touching it with your gross meat hands. Then thinly slice your onion half and sauté it in some oil along with a standard human's pinch of salt over medium heat until the onions start to soften and turn a little translucent. Form your meat goop into golf-ball sized balls and then crank the heat on your pan up to medium-high, and toss in your meatballs. Or gently place them in if you're a wuss who doesn't like grease burns. Don't stir them around a whole bunch. Give them time to brown before turning them and repeating on as many sides as time and geometry will allow you.

There's nothing quite like eating way too much food from the
comfort of your couch while watching the olympics

While your meatballs and onions are doing their thing, stir the seasoning packets from your ramen in to your water along with another pinch of salt, your crushed red pepper and the rest of your ginger, soy sauce, and garlic powder. Once your meatballs are sufficiently browned, add in this spiced murky water along with your frozen vegetables and use a wooden spoon to scrape up any browned bits from the bottom of your pan. Bring the whole mess to a boil, then cover it and reduce it to a simmer for 10 minutes. If you live in a standard apartment building, it's about now that your neighbors will start sensing the presence of food, or some reasonable facsimile thereof, and start wandering the halls in a zombielike trance, trying to find its source. Don't be fooled into letting them in to your home. It's totally a trap. You might not all make it through this winter alive, and you want to make sure that you don't get killed and eaten. Anyhow, after your 10 minutes are up, take the solid bricks of noodles from your ramen and break them up into about 4 pieces each. Add them in to your pan and stir until they're tender. And that's it! You have food to make it through the storm possibly. Happy shoveling!

Whiskey Fudge!

If life and the Simpsons have taught me anything, it's that
Yale's motto really should be Semper Fudge

So I'm going to be straight with you all. I've been known to enjoy some whiskey on occasion. And yes, that may have been a contributing factor to my decision that it would be an excellent addition to fudge, but that doesn't change the fact that I was totally right. It gives it a subtle complexity that tastes awesome, and helps keep the fudge from being too sweet. Too sweet sounds like a good thing for fudge, but if you make it a little less sweet then, aside from tasting better, you can totally justify eating significantly more of it at one time, which means you'll feel slightly less bad about yourself when you snork down half of this recipe before lunch. And sure, if you have a super low alcohol tolerance it's entirely possible that this recipe will allow you to literally get drunk on fudge (Drunk On Fudge is definitely going to be the title of my memoir), but that's a risk that I'm willing to take.

Ingredients:

14 oz. can of Sweetened Condensed Milk
12 oz. Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips
5 oz. Bittersweet Chocolate Chips
1.5 tsp Whiskey (I used Irish Whiskey, which worked really well. Technically, you can use whatever whiskey you want, but if you use garbage whiskey you may end up with garbage fudge.)
1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract

You may have noticed that there's not a whole lot going on in terms of ingredients. You're welcome. The entire point of fudge is to be easy and delicious. And sure, you can add fancy things like caramel sauces or toasted nuts on top if you like, but they're like ketchup on a really good hot dog, or like your appendix. If you like it then sure, go and have fun with it, but it's ultimately not really necessary. And before all of you ketchup lovers and appendix lovers start sending me your angrily worded handwritten emails, let me just remind you that - and I mean this sincerely - I don't care. Anyhow, open up your can of sweetened condensed milk, and let it gloop out of the can into a pot. After about 3 minutes of waiting for it to stop taking its sweet time, try futilely to speed up the process using spoons, spatulas, and other various implements of destruction. Once your can is more or less emptied into your pot dislodge any dust and spiders that may have settled colonies on your person, and crank the heat up to medium-low. Stir occasionally for a couple minutes to let your milk heat up before adding in both your semi-sweet and bittersweet chocolate chips. Add them in in about 3 batches. Keep stirring and let the whole thing melt and smooth out before adding more in. Normally you'd melt chocolate in a double boiler, and be hesitant about stirring it because crystals could form and it could seize up, and you could be the butt of many jokes made by me at your expense. This is all technically true, but in my experience the sweetened condensed milk helps to prevent this, kind of in the same way corn syrup would, by acting as a buffer between potential subversive crystal clumps. Follow your heart.

If possible, it's advisable to eat fudge in mountain form

Once your chocolate is melted in turn the heat off and stir in your whiskey and vanilla. Once they're incorporated and everything is smooth, pour the whole mess into a baking pan that you've thoughtfully lined with aluminum foil, and let it cool down to room temperature for about an hour. How big of a pan to use is up to you, but in my mind it's not really fudge unless it's thick. Otherwise it's just a chocolate bar. Toss your fledgling fudge in the fridge (I want to stop writing things like that, but I don't know how) and wait for it to set up completely, which ostensibly takes a couple of hours, but feels like an eternity. Allow extra time for several misguided attempts at eating your fudge early, wherein you get goop on your hands, refrigerator door, and possibly walls. When it's finally ready, turn the foil upside-down over a plate, and then remove it to reveal your fudgy treasure. Slice it into whatever servings you think are appropriate (e.g. in half, or completely unsliced) and consume it as fast as possible to keep intruders from claiming it as your own. You waited hours for this fudge. Your friends and family can pry it from your cold dead hands. Enjoy!

Cinnamon Schnapps

Trained actor depicted. Don't actually buy
store-bought schnapps

Well, it's official. The weather is finally starting to get colder. As of today that is, because it was 60 stupid degrees in Chicago yesterday. In December. And don't get me wrong, 60 degrees feels nice. But one of the main reasons I left LA, aside from getting away from the unnecessary levels of cilantro on everything and the overpowering stench of palm trees, was to maybe see snow again at some point in my life. You know, in person and not just added into a movie with CGI. So far that plan hasn't really worked out. Last year's winter in Chicago was pretty tame, and the only real snowfall came when I was out of town (because apparently I wronged the god of irony), but I've got high hopes for this year. Of course I've also been enduring an endless stream of possibly well-meaning acquaintances and doom-sayers taunting me about how this will be my first real winter in years, and how I'm obviously going to freeze to death because I'm no longer acclimated to the cold. Fortunately some delicious cinnamon schnapps really helps me make it through the long nights of dealing with those idiots.

Ingredients:

1 bottle Vodka

at least 10 Cinnamon Sticks

Water

Sugar

The first thing you're gonna need to do is buy some vodka. Now some of you may have discerned my personal feelings on things like vodka in general, but we're flavoring this sucker. I wasn't about to waste some good whisky on this, and anyway we need alcohol without any strong flavor of its own. So now we need to actually choose which vodka to buy, and there are a dauntingly high number of vodka brands at astonishingly different price points. From what I've been able to gather, Vodka is the main export of pretty much every eastern european nation, which explains a lot really. Again, we're flavoring this, so don't go crazy expensive with it. Just avoid any obvious garbage brands with names like "Alex's Upscale and Legitimate Vodka Product." You should be paying roughly 12-18 dollars for a bottle, so let that be your guide. Once you've picked out your vodka, pour out a shot of it and either consume it or throw it down the drain to try and get your drain-goblins good and drunk. Either way, fill up that empty space in your bottle with about 7 cinnamon sticks. Close the bottle back up and let it sit for a week, shaking it up every day or two. 

Seriously, which of these would you rather drink? I rest my
case. Regular vodka is for suckers. 

Now you've got cinnamon vodka, which is already better than regular vodka in pretty much every perceivable way, but we're not quite done yet. Take equal amounts of sugar and water and bring them to a boil along with some cinnamon sticks. About 3 sticks should do it for every cup of sugar you've got going. Let that sucker boil for about 5 minutes, and then let it cool completely. Now it's time to emulate our favorite mad scientists, and just mix together the various liquids we have lying around the house. Mix together a solution of about 2/3 cinnamon vodka and 1/3 cinnamon sugar syrup. The result is going to be super cinnamon-y, a little sweet, and a whole lot of deliciously awesome. Bring it to parties, drink it with friends on cold nights, or use it as a libation during your saturnalia celebration. Or all of the above. Happy alcoholism!

Tired Returns

Oh, and waterfalls. There were also waterfalls.

So it's 2017! That apparently happened. And with it came the grim realization that I lied to all of you. I said that I was going to keep updating this blog while I was on vacation. I even implied that I might update it more than usual with random trip nonsense. This was not the case. And sure, I didn't intend to lie to you all. I had no way of knowing that the old unsupported blogger app would finally crap out and keep me from updating from my phone. But that doesn't really matter. What actually counts is that I went to Scotland and played around with frickin' Owls. Seriously...even if all the technology worked all of the time, I would not have been focused on updating whilst on this vacation. I was focused on owls. And castles. And whiskey. And....I dunno...natural splendor? But I'm back! And it turns out that when you get back from a day of about 14 hours of plane travel, you're hungry. And because you've been gone for two weeks, you pretty much only what's in your freezer to work with. Fortunately, my freezer was well stocked....with cheese. And not much else. But cheese, plus tomato/herb crusted mini-pitas that I bought from a supermarket, equals delicious mini pita pizzas! Which will totally soothe your soul after a long day of travel, and distract you for about 45 seconds from the fact that owls and castles are behind you, and you have only your whiskey to remember them by. And the pictures. Mostly the whiskey.

Ingredients:

Mini Tomato/Herb Pitas (Yes, this is kind of weirdly specific. But it's what they had at the grocery store. Get regular mini-pita for all I care and smear some tomato sauce on it. Actually, that sounds better. Do that instead.)
Cheese
Vegetable Oil

Nothing like melted cheese to help you forget the horror
 that is WOW airlines. 

That's right. 2 ingredients. Because one thing you don't want to do when you've been on a plane for 16 hours that day is have to mess around prepping different ingredients, hungry and tired and just wishing you were either back in Scotland or dead, whichever you can get to faster. So simplicity is key here. Take your oil and coat the bottom of a cast iron skillet. Throw down your pitas until you get a solid layer (Yes, you've just come off of 20 hours of plane rides, so you're probably not going to have the energy to literally "throw" anything anywhere. Maybe "listlessly prod.") Cover the top with cheese. How much cheese? If you need to ask that question, you may not be deserving of cheese. It's delicious and you're tired. Go nuts. I had about 5.5 ounces on my batch, but that's just because my weary hands gave out from all of the sprinkling. Toss that sucker in a 450 degree oven for about 10 minutes, and then take it out and enjoy! There's nothing like cheesy deliciousness to welcome you back to your dreary life after crazy travel and adventure.

French Fry Hash

Artist's rendition of me eating this food

Sometimes, as you journey down the highway of life, futilely trying to avoid the potholes of decaying hopes and youth, ever watchful for the police officer of injuring yourself on the toilet, you can get a little tired. So maybe you don't have the time or energy to make food from scratch, or eat healthy, or put on pants. So what? You don't need to apologize for it. Right? Right? Well who cares? Yesterday I gathered with friends to celebrate my having desecrated the Earth with my presence for another year, and I decided a number of things. Most of them involved which drink I was going to order next, but somewhere in there was the idea that making delicious and awesome food isn't something to be ashamed of, even if it's not some bespoke, cruelty-free, gluten-free, nut-free, sugar-free, food-free, fun-free hipster nonsense.

Ingredients:

5 oz. Cooked French Fries (That's about one large order of fries. If you don't have this lying around, trying going to literally any fast-food restaurant ever and asking for some)

1/3 lb. Corned Beef

1 Bell Pepper (I used half a red pepper and half a green pepper. Because I'm just that cool, but you don't need to shoot that high if you're not comfortable. You don't want to fly too close to the sun, melt your wings, and end up drowning, like some jerk in a labyrinth. Use whatever kind of Bell Pepper you want.)

1/2 an Onion

5 Button Mushrooms

1/2 tsp Garlic Powder

1/2 tsp Smoked Paprika

1/4 tsp Black Pepper

1/4 tsp Salt

An unspecified amount of Vegetable Oil

There really isn't much in the way of direction for this recipe. It's pretty straightforward, which is on of the reasons why I like it so much. Another is the delicious delicious taste. A close 3rd is the money I've received from the powerful Corned Beef lobby to promote their products and services. In any event, the first thing (Of like 4 things total) that you've got to do is choppity chop chop your Fries, Corned Beef, Bell Pepper, Onions, and Mushrooms into bite-size pieces. There isn't really a too big or too small, just make sure they're all about the same. Like the designers of airplane seat-backs, you're looking for uniformity of size. If you don't start off with it, you'll sure as hell have painfully molded it by the end of your trip. 

Unlike the grammatical composition of this sentence, there
ain't nothin' wrong with that

Anyhow, mix together your Garlic Powder, Paprika, Black Pepper, and Salt in a bowl (That was the second thing you needed to do, if you're counting along at home). Now heat up a pan on medium heat, coat the bottom of it with Vegetable Oil, and add in your uniformly chopped Peppers, Onion, and Mushrooms, along with 1/3 of your Paprika mix. Saute`for about 3 minutes before adding in the Corned Beef. Cook for another 5 minutes, and add in the Fries, and the rest of the Paprika mix. Let it all cook together for about 5 more minutes, then take it off the heat, put it on a plate, and immediately consume it, preferably next to a person who's eating a salad. Bonus points if you make obnoxiously loud grunts of appreciation for the food. 

Top Ramen Soup

All the best foods come in dried prepackaged rectangles.

This week is a little bit different from what I've done before. Normally, I make some awesome nonsense from scratch, and try to teach you all how to make it, all while taking no sass at all from the voices in my head. This week, I'm gonna show you how to take some super cheap, pretty crappy nonsense (dried rectangles of ramen noodle soup), and combine it with some other simple ingredients to make something pretty damn incredible. Because sometimes nothing's open, and you have to make do with what's lying around, or what you can buy at some sort of Kwik E Mart. And sometimes you get home from your trip to Ireland at midnight in the middle of the only legit cold-snap since you've moved to LA, you find out that your heat is broken, and you have to figure out some way to warm up with delicious food even though you're too tired to go to the store, because your flight was delayed 2 hours and then you had to sit on the tarmac for an hour after landing, so you try and find a way to utilize only things that have been sitting in your pantry or freezer for the last month or so. You know, hypothetically.

Ingredients:

2 Rectangles of Ramen Noodle Soup
4 Cups Water
1 Standard Issue Onion
1.5 Cups Frozen Peas and Carrots
2 Cloves of Garlic
2 Average Sized Human Pinches of Salt
2 Average Sized Human Pinches of Ground Ginger
1 Average Sized Human Pinch of Black Pepper
1.5 tsp Olive Oil

The first thing you're gonna need to do is forget 80% of what you know about those packages of Ramen noodles. If you never went to college or lived alone in your early 20s, you'll probably be ahead of the curve on this one. The next thing you're gonna need to do is mildly chop up your onion. You're looking for smallish chunks, but nothing too fine. If you were an onion serial killer, this would be like your sloppy early work. The stuff that the police eventually look back at years later to finally gather substantial evidence and catch you. Heat up your Olive Oil over medium heat, and sauté the crap out of your Onion along with half your Salt, half your Ginger, and all of your Black Pepper. Let it cook down, stirring occasionally, for about 6 minutes, or until the onions start to get slightly brown and smell awesome. Add in your frozen Vegetables, along with the rest of your Salt, and sauté until they're very definitely defrosted, and the whole mess starts to smell...well, even more incredible than before. During this time choppity chop up your Garlic, like a well-oiled garlic-mincing machine. Nobody's solving any garlic murders from these cloves. Add them in, and sauté for another minute.

Noodles, vegetables, flavor, and crunchy bits. You're welcome

Now it's time to deal with your noodles, and how much you're supposed to forget about what you no longer know about them because your forgot it. Got it? Me either. Which is the point, I think. Anyhow, take a knife, and chop each dried noodle-loaf into 5 equal slices. Some crumbly bits are gonna break off from the slices. Don't worry, you haven't ruined everything. This time. Yet. Take your crumbly bits and put them in a bowl for later. Add your Water, along with the slices of Ramen, and all but one pinch of the accompanying Ramen "seasoning packets" in with your Vegetables and bring the heat up to high. Cook it for about 4 minutes, when the noodles soften. Take your crumbly extra bits of noodles and toss them with your reserved pinch of Ramen seasoning and the rest of your Ginger. Serve yourself up a bowlful of soup, top it with your spiced crumblies, and enjoy! I'm sure the memory of it will continue to keep you warm as you sleep in your cold apartment, waiting until it's day out so you can call and get your heat fixed. Hypothetically.