MMMMMMMM…low-carb ice cream…MMMMMMMMM!

Thanks, Easycure!

We seem to have become King Ranch Casserole Central here at the TFG hovel. I have made no less than three gallons of it, two quarts at a time, over the last two weeks. It’s what I was chopping vegetables for last week when I hurt myself. It’s something that everybody will eat, including the kids, and it is a great winter dish. But I am oh-so-very tired of making it in two quart increments, especially cleaning up after. So I went out today to three different stores to find a 4- or 5-quart glass casserole dish so I could make it every three days instead of every day.

Problem is, there is apparently no retailer that carries a 4- or 5-quart glass casserole. Not Bed, Bath & Beyond, not Wal-Mart, and not Target. Maybe nobody makes them, because I can’t find one on Amazon, either. I find that exceedingly odd, for some reason. I thought this was a regular household item. I distinctly remember the big whopping casseroles that my mom and grandmother used to make for church dinners and suchlike, as well as everybody else’s big whopping casseroles.

Literally the closest thing available at each place was some crazy heavy super-anodized triple-strong non-stick metal thing with a glass lid that cost $50, easy. The day was saved, though, by Target, in the camping aisle –

Heche in Mexico, and $9.99. Life is sure sweet sometimes.

One good recipe deserves another. My mom brought over King Ranch Casserole for lunch on Christmas Day. It was awesome, and adding to it’s greatness, it held up real well as a refrigerated leftover. She provided the recipe below, under the MORE button. So I made some last night. I made one change to make it more spicy, but that’s it. Give it a shot — you won’t be disappointed. In fact, I’m having some of it right now…
Read the rest of this entry »

Get a load of these rockin’ crazy things — caja chinas. Cuban pig roasters! With wheels! Me want, me want…

It occurs to me that I have a big enough extended family, I could actually justify one of these. Not to mention enticing some of my friends down to the Brazos. W007!!!

Thanks, HC16″A!

PS I can’t find my Justin Wilson pork roast recipe, but it goes like this:
- your basic pork roast, 2-3 lbs., the flat kind
- some cayenne pepper
- some black pepper
- some salt (not much) - sea salt or kosher salt is nice, but not required
- medium onions, cut into eighths
- some garlic, about a big bulb’s worth of cloves
- one bottle of pickled tabasco peppers, the kind the old guys use at lunch counters - you know what I mean - the little green peppers in vinegar that touch up soup or sammich
- some potatos
- some celery, chopped up
- carrots, if you’re of a mind, I guess, but I don’t bother

1) Rub the cayenne and black pepper and salt into the roast, both sides.
2) Cut little slits into the roast about every half-inch, and make a grid all over the roast.
3) Alternate stuffing garlic and the little tabasco peppers into the grid of slits.
4) Arrange onions in a cooking bag in your roasting dish as a place for the roast to sit on.
5) Slide the roast into the cooking bag on top of the onions, add the potatos and celery, and cook to your basic pork roast cooking times and temps.
You might pour a little bit of water in for the potatos to steam in, but I think the roast releases enough juice to cook them. Why cut the taste with water?

This makes for one spicy bit of pig — tears to your eyes & sweaty scalp spicy, but not burn your tongue into submission spicy (obviously YMMV). It’s easy to move the heat level up and down by making the grid in the roast smaller or larger. Tell the poncier guests that they don’t have to eat the peppers if they’re not inclined, but anyone eating this should not be afraid of a tiny pepper. After roasting for however long, though, they’re nice and softened up, and the garlic cloves are just like butter. Good stuff, Maynard. Highly recommended.

For those the least little bit interested, I picked this up from an old KERA cooking show that I saw about 3 years ago. Justin used this method on his big city-wide pig roasts. They’d cook about 20 whole pigs using the plugging method described above, and they did it in a galvanized tin shed, with one wall taken out, and a ‘floor’ of hardwood coals. The pigs were wired to a big rack they just leaned against the open end of the shed. The video was one of the most wondrous things I’ve ever seen. I adapted his plugging idea to something slightly more suitable for a family of four.

I’ve been wasting time over at Chowhounds.com, a site my buddy, Hawk, told me about.

We are not foodies. They are a separate breed, an avatar of that 1960’s archetype, The Gourmet. Foodies eat where they’re told; they eagerly follow trends and swallow the hype. Most of all, they fuss endlessly about ingredients, a fixation which strikes chowhounds as sheer culinary materialism. A brownie needn’t contain imported French butter and Valhrona chocolate to earn chowhound esteem; it’s gustatory gestalt we crave, and we comb doggedly through far-flung nabes where foodies never tread in quest for a deeper deliciousness. Our star chefs are Peruvian grandmas, renegade sushi guys, and elderly Brooklyn pizza makers who serenely slice mozzarella while the subway screams overhead. It’s not about eating on-the-cheap; chowhounds can be spotted at Lespinasse insouciantly swirling their merlot. But, unlike foodies, we have not the slightest compunction about stopping for a really great slice on the way home.

They appear to be Yankees, but chowhounds know no such boundaries. It’s all about the food, brother…

For those seeking a weekend respite from da boid, here’s a great-sounding recipe for Green Chile Posole from Mrs. Fire Ant Gazette. I hadn’t even heard of posole before Eric waxed ecstatic about it, so I badgered him for the recipe. I’m probably gonna give it a try when I have a free weekend.

Posole, by the way, is Spanish-Indian for hominy, which happens to be another one of the thousands of vegetables my mother forced on me as a small, defenseless child. I never would have thought I would be the least bit attracted to anything containing hominy. But this sounds gooooood - and more proof that you can pretty much spice up anything and make it tasty. Except brussel sprouts — those things are useless and an abomination.

There goes San Antonio’s brown-n-serve rolls. Thus ruining Lord knows how many men’s plans to gorge on a second and third plate of nothing but rolls and giblet gravy.

A truckload of southbound frozen dinner rolls yielded a different kind of bread this week when a record $5.3 million in cash turned up in a search by suspicious Department of Public Safety troopers.

Next up: turkey “insurgents” fight back with hit-and-run RPG attacks. I’m glad my bird is in the freezer already.

Green Onions Linked to Hepatitis Outbreak

Green onions were the likely source of a deadly hepatitis A outbreak at a Mexican restaurant last month, but the origin of the onions and how they were tainted remains unclear, state health officials said Friday.

“All the evidence suggests that people had direct contact with the green onions,” said Joel Hersh, director of epidemiology for the Pennsylvania Department of Health.

The outbreak, which has killed three people and sickened at least 575, is the nation’s largest ever from a single source - a Chi-Chi’s restaurant at the Beaver Valley Mall, about 25 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.

Most of the hepatitis A cases were traced to people who ate mild salsa or one of two particular entrees, which will be identified in an official report expected to be issued later Friday, health officials said. The restaurant’s hot salsa is packaged before it arrives at Chi-Chi’s, but the mild salsa is made partly on site, health officials said.

Two things:

A) There goes my world-famous mashed baked potatoes next Thursday.

B) Mild salsa is an abomination upon this earth, so stick to the habanero / jalapeno stuff. Toughens up the gut, and kills hepatitis.

That last is a joke, except it’s worked for me for years.

I found this in the spice rack today:

Because, you know, it’s so dang time-consuming when you have to use the black pepper bottle AND the red pepper bottle.

KEEPS GETTING BETTER UPDATE: Plundering the refrigerator for some non-crunchy food (got a big nasty sore in my mouth), I found the moldy, half-eaten contents of a Kraft Colby and Monterey Jack package. I was shocked to learn that not only have the good people at Kraft combined the two, but they have performed all the slicing and cutting that a Neanderthal like myself might have been forced to do, should said Neanderthal desire to eat this cheese with a cracker. They call them Cracker Cuts. Now, I know that pre-sliced cheese is nothing new, but I had no idea they had moved their dies down to cracker size. Moore’s Law marches on! I expect next week, should I remember to check, they will have both Square Cracker Cuts, and Round Cracker Cuts. Being a caveman, I trimmed off the mold and dropped the remnants into a bowl of Wolf Brand Chili.

I can’t help but marvel at this kind of concept. Not in a million years would it have occurred to me that you could sell such an undistinguished, pedestrian “blend.” Don’t misunderstand — this is precisely what I use on 90% of my steaks and chops and ribs. Have been for years. So I’ve lost Lord knows how many unretrievable hours of my life using first one and then the other. Now I want to know what they’re getting for it at the grocery store.

My wife’s gonna kill me.

Xenon, the Astrofishy

Never underestimate the powerful, curative, restorative, miraculous, mystical & metaphysical powers of slabs of barnyard animals smoked for hours & hours, with a little side of raw onion.

That’s gonna be my tagline when I get rich and can afford to open my smoke pit / beer joint / honky-tonk.

Yep, that sounds about right.

Weekend Sonic Count:
- 1 Super Sonic Jalapeno Double-Cheeseburger, with Tater Tots
- 1 Smokey Cheddar Double Pattie Melt, with Tater Tots
- 2 Sausage, Egg & Cheese Breakfast Toasters, with Tater Tots
- 1 Route 44 Cherry Limeade

I guess I missed tater tots a lot more than I ever knew. Dr. Atkins is spinning in his grave, just by my typing this. Next up, the Extra-Long Coney Dog (with chili, cheese, onions and jalapenos) and the heretofore unknown Sonic Size Cheese Tots. Thanks for the tip, Phelps!

Hoo, boy. They’ve opened up the Sonic that they’ve been building for the last month. I loves me some Sonic. Their cheeseburgers are neck and neck with Whataburger in the race for best fast-food cheeseburger. Cherry limeaids, foot-long chili dogs, jalapenos on anything. And they’ve got tater tots! With cheese!

I can’t wait to get me one of these Breakfast Toasters, either.

Plus, they’re on my end of town, 5 minutes away. Unlike the DQ, which is 10. I bet that crappy ol’ Burger King is closed in six months. Who would ever eat one of their cow-pies when you can get a dang Sonic?

Let’s recap:
- smoked in a pan, not on a rack
- bottle of Shiner in the pan to start
- jalapenos plugged

This one got 13 hours of smoking, at higher temperatures than the last two. One of my complaints about my last two briskets were that they were too tightly grained, and while initially tender, didn’t stay that way overnight. Well, it’s safe to say that I’ve found the other end of the spectrum. This one is very loosely grained — to the point that it was all but uncuttable after resting for an hour off the grill. The good news is that it’s unbelievably moist and juicy.

So my brother gets two lbs. of chopped brisket, I’ll get about three lbs. of chopped, and about two lbs. of sliced. The dogs got two pounds of fat and scraps.

Oh, and the jalapenos and the Shiner Bock? Can’t taste a damn bit of either one. I’m gonna repeat this experiment with pickled tabasco peppers to see if I can force some zip into the brisket itself.

Some other smoking notes:

• Averaging 240° is better than 220° on my built-in thermometer. I think that, more than anything, is what loosened up the grain.
• I would have speculated that the higher heat would have forced the jalapeno taste into the meat more, since theoretically, more fat was trickling down through the meat. Maybe I just had wussy jalapenos.
• Using a roasting pan did have a side-effect I didn’t like. The smoke ring did not penetrate the liquid-covered areas. That’s what I thought would happen. One of my brisket preferences is a nice pink smoke ring all the way around the slices. This brisket did not have that, so it might as well have been cooked in an oven.
• I might try trimming some of the fat off next time, for two reasons:
  • so that I might have that nice, gorgeous, smoky, fatty crust on the eating part of the brisket
  • so that the rub ingredients and the whatever-I-plug-it-with ingredients don’t get scraped off and into the dog bowl.

  But I am not a butcher — that is to say, I will likely butcher it trying to trim it.

• I’ve got to figure out a way to get this off the grill and ready to cut by no later than 7PM. By 9:30, I just don’t care about being neat, and I pay little attention to the niceties of slicing. I guess that means setting an alarm for 4AM, lighting the fire, slapping Mr. Brisket on, drop in some chunks of mesquite, and then going back to bed. I can’t build a fire that will stay consistent (or even average out correctly) overnight — I don’t have the right smoker for that.

So, a couple or three weeks hence, we’ll give this a run-through again and see how things fare on my search for the perfect TFG brisket.

The Everlasting Phelps has a nice list of superiour Texas food posted, and there’s nothing on there I don’t agree with. Mention is even made of Mrs. Bairds. There is, however, this one disturbing line, discussing enchiladas:

That is the only real way to eat chili.

I can’t endorse that being the only way to eat chili, sadly. There’s the simple bowl of red, there’s the tamale&chili plate, and there’s the TFG winter-time favorite, chili, rice and cheese, topped with chopped onions.

Speaking of food, I got a new method to try out on a brisket this week. I’ll let you know how it works out. And no, it’s not Jahna’s ketchup with Lipton Onion soup in the oven method…a good cow died to give me that brisket, and I’d sooner be hung than dishonor the memory in such a way.

Time to play that popular new interweb game, What’s TFG Having For Dinner?

Your choices:

a) Turkey sandwich on wheat with mustard, and a cup of Lipton Instant Soup?
b) Week-old, but still-tender, mesquite-smoked brisket tacos?
c) Two perfectly-marbled pounds of slow-cooked, hickory-smoked London broil, with onions sauteed in REAL butter?
d) 8 Keystone Lights and a pack of Marlboro Mediums
Read the rest of this entry »