Bullshit Mac 'n' Cheese

Are you a lazy fuck that can't always be buggered to go all out when you cook? Sometimes I am too. Here I present a really easy and super lazy way to make some pretty alright macaroni (or whatever pasta you want) and cheese. Check it.

Ingredients:

• Pasta - whatever kind you want and however much you need to serve people
• Butter
• Cheese - any kind really, even that canned parmesan stuff works in a pinch
  
• Salt & Pepper
• Optional: Any extra seasonings, meats, veggies or whatever that you want to chuck into this
  

Directions:

1. Boil salty water in a pot
2. Add the pasta
3. Remove butter from the fridge and slice about a tablespoon (or more if serving more than 2 people) into thin slices
4. Once the pasta is just past al dente, strain it but reserve some of the water
5. Put the pasta into a bowl and add the butter and 2TB of the reserved water
6. Mix until the butter is melted
7. Add the cheese and mix until it melts
8. Adjust by adding more pasta water/cheese (or even butter you fatty) until you get the consistency you want
9. Add in any other crap you want (baked chicken, old bay and garlic powder is a fav of mine)
10. Eat this slop.
11. Don't forget to clean up
12. Later on, hate yourself for being a lazy shit
    

Spicy Pork Tenderloin

I made this yesterday for lunch, and had plenty left over for lunch today as well. It's a pretty simple dish, but there's a good amount of flavors packed into it. I pretty much eyeballed everything, so any measurements are guesstimates.

The Rub

• 1/2-3/4 cups brown sugar
  
• 2 heaping TB paprika
  
• 1 TB cayenne pepper
  
• 3 TB sea or kosher salt
  
• As much ground pepper as you want
  
• 1-2 tsp of garlic powder
  
• A dash of oregano

The Sauce

• 1 can chopped tomatoes
  
• 2 TB whole seed mustard (better if it's extra vinegary)
  
• 1 TB horseradish
  
• 3-5 hearty splashes of Worcestershire sauce
  
• A half yellow squash, cubed (optional)
  

• 2 longish pork tenderloins (or whatever Fresh 'n' Green sold me as pork tenderloin)
  
• Butter and/or oil for frying

Filler:

• Pasta
• or
• Rice

Directions

1. Mix the rub together and apply to the top and bottom of each tenderloin. You can let it sit and marinade, but I didn't feel like waiting this time.
   
2. Heat the pan on med-low and add butter/oil.
   
3. Once it's hot, cook each side for ~5 minutes.
   
4. Remove pork and let sit under tin foil
   
5. Dump the tomatoes in (including the liquid) and stir up all the nice tasty bits of frond.
   
6. Add the rest of the sauce ingredients, stir, and let reduce until it's thick. Then remove from heat.
   
7. Options
• Dice up the pork and return to pan to sit in the sauce
• Slice the pork and serve with the sauce drizzled/dropped over it
8. Filler: Cook some up and add to the dish
   

So yeah, pretty simple and very delicious. The sugar combined with the spices, mustard and horseradish make for a lot of good things happening in your mouth. Enjoy!

Recipe: Black Bean Burgers

I've made more or less these burgers before. This specific recipe was written from memory for a recipe exchange thing a friend sent my way. They should be pretty good and delicious!

Ingredients:
2 cans of black beans, washed and drained
1 TB oil (olive, veggie, rapeseed, baby)
1 onion, diced
3-6 cloves garlic, diced
1-2 jalapenos (if you're into the spice), sliced AND diced
2 or so ears of corn, cut the pieces off the cob
1 egg, scrambled (vegan? use 1/4 c hummus)
1/2 cup bread crumbs or panko or glitter or whatever
1 TB cumin
1 tsp coriander powder
1-2 tsp chili powder (more if you're awesome)
S&P to taste
fresh parsley, diced

Directions:
1. Sautee the onions and jalapenos in the oil on med-low heat for 5-7 minutes
2. Add garlic and cook for 2 more minutes (onion should be translucenty)
3. Mash beans, but not all the way. You want some chunks but not too many.
4. Combine all veggies in a bowl and mix together.
5. Add the spice, continue to mix.
6. Add the egg, mix and then add the bread crumbs
7. Form patties and let them sit in the fridge (or a relatively cool place) for 10-15 minutes to form up and let the spices meld or whatever
8. Put them on a grill or pan (with some oil) and cook on mediumish heat
9. Flip when the cooking side is crusted a little, but not burned (DON'T FUCK THIS UP)
10. When the newly cooking side is exactly like the old one they are done unless the inside is still cold
11. Put on bun with lettuce, tomato, sriracha and a dab of mayo
12. Put into mouth

Recipe: Chicken That Is Delicious

So yesterday my dad took two boneless chicken breasts out of the freezer and defrosted them in the microwave. Later, before he left to go to my Grandma's, he asked me to cook them. I was busy reading but told him I'd take care of it. When I eventually got around to it I turned out some really delicious, really tender chicken that surprised even me. I think this recipe might be sort of French based but I know fuck all about French cooking so I'm probably wrong.

Ingredients

• 2 chicken breasts
• Butter and olive oil
• S&P
• 1 medium yellow/white onion, sliced
• 3 fresh cloves garlic, diced
• 1 big handful of button mushrooms, quartered
• 2 fresh sprigs rosemary
• A big pinch of fennel seed
• A good amount of decent white wine (I used a pinot grigio because I don't know wine)
• Another good amount of chicken and/or veggie broth

Directions

1. Salt and pepper one one side of each breast.
2. Melt the butter and olive oil on medium heat in a dutch oven and preheat oven to 350F.
3. When fat is hot, place the breasts in, seasoned side down and salt and pepper the other side
4. Let them cook until the one side is browned a bit (um, probably 4-5 minutes?)
5. Take them out and add a little bit more butter and oil to the pan.
6. When that fat has melted place the breasts back in, uncooked side down.
7. After that side has browned take them out.
8. Add the onion for a few minutes. When it is translucent add the mushrooms. Make sure to stir a good deal.
9. After a few minutes clear a spot in the middle and add the garlic. Stir until it starts to turn golden, a minute or so.
10. Add the rosemary, fennel seed, wine and broth and stir it all up. It might be a good idea to use a little cheesecloth bag or something for the herbs so you don't have to pick around them when eating later on.
11. Put the chicken back in, making sure it is as submerged as possible (It's OK if the liquid doesn't go all the way up the breast)
    
12. Put the lid onto the dutch oven and place it in the real oven for about 40 minutes or so
13. It will be done, so take out the chicken and let it rest while you reduce the liquid (keep the veggies in there) for 15 minutes over low-med heat. Oh and make sure you get the rosemary out.
14. Serve over some pasta, maybe fusilli. Or just serve each breast with the sauce poured over it. Either way this will be delicious
    

This chicken is delicious, no doubt about it. One of the main reasons is all the fat from the butter and oil mixes really well with the fennel and rosemary. Also everything in this dish is awesome. So enjoy this shit, I think once winter rolls around this will be even better, especially after a long ass day shoveling snow off your large and inclined drive way.

Recipe: Pasta Salad - Easy, Delicious and OH So Summery!

Hey guys! I know its been a long time since I posted anything here, but my last semester at College got WAY hectic and then I forgot about this until now! Today I made a boatload of super easy pasta salad to eat with the lunch I'll be bringing to my internship! Here's what to do!

Ingredients:

• 1 pound of pasta! This can be macaroni, shells or whatever. If it is long pasta, I recommend busting it down in size a bit.
• Vegetables (any, all of or more of these!)!
• 2 stalks Celery
• 1/3 medium Vidalia Onion
• 1 carrot
• 1/2 cucumber
• 1/2 bell pepper
• Also mushrooms, red onion, broccoli, spring onions, pickled garlic, etc...
• Dressing 1
• Mayonnaise
• Mustard
• Relish
• Lemon Juice (just a splash!)
• Good amount of dill
• A few shakes of celery salt (or normal salt!)
• ONE good shake of mint
or
• Dressing 2
• 1 part Red Wine Vinegar
• 2 parts Olive Oil
• Fresh Basil and Parsley (more basil, like 3:1 ratio here
• 1-2 crushed garlic cloves
• Some Dijon Mustard
• Tiny bit of sugar
• Add all but oil to blender, blend and then add oil while blending
• Optional: 1-2 diced, hard boiled eggs

Directions!:

1. Cook the pasta! Obviously you need to break it before it goes in the water if you're using spaghetti or linguine something similar.
2. While the salted water is boiling for the pasta, cut up your veggies! I like to get them all into sticks, and then dice them up into pieces no bigger than 1/2 inch at the MOST!
3. You can use whatever veggies you want, but I've provided the approximate measurements of what I used tonight in the ingredients section
4. When the pasta is done, dump it in a colander and shock it with cold tap water. Then, shake and try to get as much water off as possible while also trying to minimize the amount of pasta that comes through the colander holes.
5. Add the pasta to a bowl, then dump the veggies on that.
6. Dump the dressing on top of all that and then mix it up!
7. Eat some now and then refrigerate the rest because it will taste better once the flavors have mixed!

I'm really happy with how this all came out! If you only use enough dressing to just cover everything then it really brings out the flavors of the raw vegetables, but still giving you the creaminess of the first dressing or the tang of the second. Hopefully you'll like this as much as I do!

Enjoy!

Lox and Fried Egg Breakfast

I just thought of something delicious and amazing that I am going to try for a pre-physical therapy egg date on Wednesday morning.

I went to Barnes & Noble on Sunday to use my $20 gift card that I won in the ACM Current Technology Contest last week. My submission was a great site called Wordle. Use it, love it. I used the card to pick up Douglas Hofstadter's I Am A Strange Loop and then, since I had $3 left, I decided to pick up Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Since it was so close, and Jesse needed grapefruit soda, we went to Trader Joe's afterwards! While there I picked up some lox because A. I'm Jewish and cannot resist and B. I fucking love lox.

I've had some just as a snack so far, and was thinking of what else I could do with it! Since I now have the physical therapy, Jess and I can do egg dates on some mornings again! I got to thinking and remembered a time when I fried a piece of lox with an egg over it. It was pretty good, but the lox really was not well incorporated with the egg at all. Then I remembered that a cool thing about eggs is that you can separate the yolk from the whites! BANG! It was like a shot of inspiration flew into my brain, seeping into my neural tissue like a really fine sauce being ladled onto spaghetti. First it drips down through the layers and then, as it thins out a little, it begins to stick to the pasta.

Now I have a plan, and here it is! To make it easier to follow, it will be in list form:

1. Get out an egg and a little piece of lox, somewhere between 1x1" and 2x2". You certainly don't need to measure, but that seems like a good size for something like this.
   
2. Separate the one egg into 2 small bowls/containers. You can use a fancy egg separating device, or use the one mother nature gave us a.k.a. its shell. I'm not going to attempt to describe this so I'll assume that if you can get to my blog you can google for "separating eggs"
   
3. Heat up some butter on medium in your really awesome cast iron skillet (either of them really, you pick!) or a non-stick pan. Or any frying pan.
   
4. When the butter has melted and is on the way to becoming brown put the egg white down in the pan.
5. Immediately place the piece of lox on top of this, followed by the yolk. Try not to break it!
6. Hopefully it will not slip off and you will have a tasty little tower cooking in your skillet.
7. Cover it if you want. I do this so that things cook faster and, seemingly, more evenly. This will trap the heat inside so it is more efficient!
8. After a smidgen less than a minute flip it so that the yolk side can cook on the pan.
9. After less time than before, it is done!
10. Put it on a plate and eat it!

This is really just an idea right now, and I'll try to remember to take pictures when I do this tomorrow morning. If not that just means I'll have to purchase more eggs and lox and do it again, oh no!

Recipe: Jicama and Apple Salad

I've never used jicama in anything before. In fact, before Saturday I don't think I've ever even held one. However, I decided to take the plunge and purchase one for $1.50 at the Phoenixville Farmer's Market. I actually didn't have any solid plan for it at that point. The woman I bought it from mentioned using it like other root vegetables in soups or roasting. She also talked about using it in a salad, which I have seen online before, so that sort of stuck with me in the back of my mind.

This didn't really come together until I went with my parents (who came up to visit!) to this market in Phoenixville that has really great prices for produce. While walking around I thought about the jicama and remembered that those salads made from it almost always had apple in them, thus I should definitely pick some up! The market had some Eastern Delicious red apples just kind of hanging out in front of the counter, so I grabbed a bag of those. Just across the way from them was a big box of mangoes, which I absolutely love, so two of these were also purchased for the salad. To round everything out, I saw that blood oranges were 4/$1. I had to get them!

When I was putting this together on Sunday, I initially was just going to use jicama, apple and mango. I was sort of following this recipe for a (soy) creamy vinaigrette I'd found after about a few seconds of googling. However, I didn't have soy milk or cream, so I sort of went off on my own direction. In the end this dressing consisted of olive oil, apple cider vinegar, dijon mustard, blood orange juice, carrot juice, salt and pepper. Ugh, it was so gross. There was too much mustard and vinegar, I think. Honestly, I'm not sure what really threw it all off, so I ended up just scrapping it. I think if I tried to make it again without the mustard and only a tiny bit of vinegar it might be good? Dunno, doubt I'll try it though.

Anyway, since the dressing idea was scratched, I started looking around the kitchen for something to spice up the salad which, at this point really only consisted of jicama, apple and mango. Laying on the table behind all my stuff for the dinner was a little knob of ginger and, right next to it, the bag of blood oranges I'd bought the day before.

Aha! This is great!

Ingredients:

• 1 jicama
• 3 small, great, red apples
• 2 mangoes
• Ginger
• 1 blood orange
  (Ignore all that crap for the dressing on the left. Also the cabbage.)
  
  

Directions:

1. Skin the jicama and then shave it using the big holes on a cheese grater into a big bowl, a.k.a. the serving bowl
2. Quarter the apples, keeping the skin on, and then slice the cores off. Dice them up however you want and add then to the bowl, mixing them in well.
3. Mango. I am not 100% sure what the best way to cut up mangoes is so either google it or figure it out. Anyway, cut the mangoes into thin strips, sort of like matchsticks but as close as you can get with mango. Add this to the bowl and mix around!
   
   
4. Grate (using your microplane if you have it!) about one thumb knuckle's worth of ginger into the bowl and mix it around as best you can.
5. Then, grate about half of one blood orange's zest into the bowl too. If you don't have a grater you can just cut it off with a knife, but be very careful. You want to avoid getting any of the pith, the white stuff under the zest, into the salad because it is bitter and doesn't taste good.
   Here's a picture of a blood orange and my microplane because I thought it would be a good one:
   
6. Mix it all up and eat it!

This came together SOOOO much better than I thought it would! I absolutely love it and plan on making it again as soon as I can. This salad does not need a dressing at all. The flavors of the ingredients, especially the subtle ones from the ginger and zest, combine together so well on their own that adding a sauce just wouldn't do it all justice.



I think if I make this again I might try adding raisins, or maybe another fruit. Don't really know, but I guess I'll figure it out next time I get some jicama!

Enjoy!