The Pies That Bind Us

Growing up in the Green household, Friday night was pizza night.  Case closed.  Friday is that superb night of the week when you've just finished five hellish days and nights of school and/or work, but you don't yet feel the pressure to go out and have "fun" like on dumb ol' Saturdays.  You can feel justified in ordering a greasy pizza, downing some soda, and sitting on the couch with your loved ones (or your cat).  Friday is the best night of the week, always has been, always will be.  From the childhood days, I mostly remember ordering thin crust half cheese/half pepperoni pizzas from Pizza Hut (I'm not sure if this was what we ordered most frequently, but it was my favorite, so it's stuck in my brain vault) and drinking a whole lot of Pepsi (I don't drink soda anymore, but Pepsi will always hold a special place in my heart).  I also remember a few nights, in my teenage years when my mom, Tony, and I decided to make our own pizzas.  We would pop some ingredients in the bread machine and an hour or so later, crank the oven up to its hottest and each add our own favorite ingredients.  At the time, I'm sure I stuck mainly to cheese, red sauce, and pepperoni while my mom tried more adventurous fare, and Tony, I'm guessing, put cut up hot dogs and ketchup on his.  But whatever we chose, it was amazingly delicious at the time and so satisfying to have created our own pies.  So this Sunday (it's the new Friday), Tony and I attempted to recreate that magical pizza-rific time from days gone by.  Here's how the phone conversation went:


Karen:  Hey, dude.  So how about we just make a pizza tonight?
Tony:  Ooooh, dude.  I'm kinda hung over and that sounds awesome.
Karen:  Dude!  Me too!  That's totally why I suggested it.
Tony:  Awesome.


Yup, just like when we were kids.


Ah yes, I remember waiting for the doorbell that would signal the arrival of our pizza.  I would rush downstairs (or upstairs if I was working in the subterranean cryogenics lab that evening), making sure I was the first to intercept the pie, because who knows what might happen if I let Karen or Dad handle it.  Idiots.  I would grab the cash placed on a nearby table, throw it in the face of the delivery dude and grab the warm pizza box and metal platter of freshly baked cookies.  That taste is still fresh in my mind: dunking a gooey chocolate chip cookie into warm marinara sauce.  I’m so glad DiGiorno has recently released it’s ode to the grand American tradition of delivering pizza and cookies to your doorstep.

It's not delivery, it's DiGorno trying to convince you that pizza and cookies are a natural combination. 

Karen and I did happen to make pizza and cookies, though.  If you're an avid follower (read: real friend), you may recall that we had planned to make cookies on empanada night, a recipe for South American style alfajores, a sandwich cookie with dulce de leche in the middle.  This plan was dashed by the realization that making dulce de leche is similar to making diamonds, in that it requires three hours and constant stirring.  While these cookies would have worked better thematically with empanada night, screw it.  Pizza and cookies sounds great.


All right, Tony's been throwing around the phrase dulce de leche as if everyone just automatically knows what that is.  Well, we don't, Tony!  We don't know what it is.  We don't all speak Spanish!  Is it caramel?  It looks like caramel.  Why don't you just call it caramel?!?  As it turns out, dulce de leche is what happens when you take a can of sweetened condensed milk (not to be confused with evaporated milk) and heat it up for a while, allowing the sugars to caramelize (although it's still not caramel).  What you get is a thick sauce that is basically sugar.  It's thick sugar sauce.  That's it.  Many of the recipes out there on the interweb will tell you to stick the still-sealed can into some water and heat it for about 8 hours with the disclaimer that you may or may not explode your kitchen that way.  I chose the non-explosion route of pouring the contents of the can into a double boiler and stirring it ever so often for 2 1/2 to 3 hours.  Works like a charm.  The condensed milk will go from a snot-like consistency of this color:

To a slightly more viscous substance that looks like this:

Now just set that guy aside and let it cool a bit before the cookie spreadin' begins.  And stop dipping your finger in it!  I saw that!


Oh come on, Karen, have some faith in our readers.  Even someone that doesn't speak Spanish can figure out that dulce de leche means "sweet of milk," and from there, the rest is obvious.  


All right, so pizza dough.  I have tried many a dough recipe in an attempt to get something akin to what they serve at them fancy wood-fired pizza establishments we all love so much.  So far I have come up with . . . flattened bread.  I mean, the pizza crusts have not been bad, it's just that there's a difference between light, fluffy, crumbly bread and the chewy, crispy, slightly denser baked good that we know as pizza crust.  So I decided to try yet another recipe and in my search for "thin crust pizza dough" I came across this gem on several different cooking blogs: White Wine Pizza Dough.  A pizza dough with wine already in it!?  Sold.  I mean, a couple food bloggers can't be wrong.


I'm glad I tried it because this recipe is definitely as close as I've come to matching professional pizza dough.  It has a whole lotta flavor and that nice crispness on the outside, but not so much as to be crunchy.  And the best part is that a crust this thin means that your pizza will only take like 8 minutes to cook.  Eight minutes!  Pretty great.  Plus I got to use my rolling pin, the love of my life.  Don't ever leave me, rolling pin.

I always like to brush the outside of my dough with olive oil.  I'm not really sure what this adds.  Maybe it makes the cheese stick better whilst sprinkling?  I dunno, but I like it.
  
While Karen wrestled with the dough and pondered the finer points of a flaky crust, I pursued a task more within the limits of my hung-over capacity: I threw a bunch of onions in a hot pan and lied down on the floor.  Actually, I first browned the onions, then added a hearty fourth cup of balsamic vinegar, turned the heat down and let them cook nice and slow.  Don't be overprotective and stir these too often, just let them live their lives; they'll make the right choices.  And if they don't, if maybe they sometimes drink too much and turn out kinda crusty and dried out and dim witted the next day, you'll still love them.  Right, mom?  

Here's me forgetting whether I measure out a fourth cup before or after pouring it into the onions.

In lieu of a sauce, these onions, which turned out delicious, acted as the moist base for our pizza.  And acting as the salty meat layer of our pizza was some delicious prosciutto, courtesy of Trader Joe's:

We set out with pancetta in mind, fixin' to saute it up and then toss it on the pizza, but couldn't find any.  Prosciutto turned out even better though because it required only chopping and was just as salty, which is what my body was craving.  This might also explain why I went from lightly salting the alfajores (to bring out the caramel taste, don'tcha know) to rolling them in salt and finally to chasing each cookie with a mouthful of salt.

While Tony was shriveling up like an earthworm in Arizona, the pizza assembly had begun.  

Layer of gooey onion first,  followed by the prosciutto.  We figured we didn't want that to be on top or it might get too crispy on the edges, so this way it would be all covered in protective cheese.  But not just any cheese, my friends, oh no.  It was Trader Joe's crumbled blue cheese.  Of all the blue cheeses I have had in my life, TJ's patented fromage stands out as the creamiest, tastiest, and fairly priced-iest blue cheese yet.  If you haven't tried it, it's a must.

Come on, would this face lie to you?  Or seduce your aged, wealthy grandmother with a flamenco dance, and then abscond with your sizable inheritance?  Surely not.

And NO, we are not soulless corporate blogging pawns paid by Trader Joe's to peddle their products.  And YES, we would love to be!  So if you're reading, Joe, hit us up. 

So Trader Joe's blue cheese it is, followed by some parmesan I had lying around that needed usin', then sprinkle on a bit of fresh thyme and you get this:

Arguably my artsiest food photo to date.  Thank you, I'm very proud of it, but not as proud as I am of how awesome this pizza was.  It's basically just the saltiest ingredients we could find all piled onto that delicious crust and damn if it wasn't a good combo.  From here we cranked up the oven to 500 degrees and, like I said, the pizza will only take about 8 minutes.  Just keep an eye on it and when the crust is golden brown it's time to take it out.  The finishing touch would of course be a massive pile of arugula just like they do it in Italy where people are better than us.

As if that wasn't enough greens for ya, I actually came up with my own kale salad concoction for the meal.  Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the first ever original recipe here on Family Füd:

Karen's Tony-Approved "Holy Crap That's Good" Kale Salad (aka Karen's Kale Salad)

1 bunch kale

Juice of 1 large lemon

1/4 olive oil, plus extra for drizzling

1 tablespoon chopped rosemary

2 cloves garlic, minced

parmesan cheese

croutons

salt and pepper

Rinse and chop your kale, removing stems, place in a large bowl.  Drizzle kale with olive oil and half of your lemon juice (about 3 tablespoons) and massage until it begins to wilt, about 2 minutes.  Set aside.  In small bowl add the rest of the lemon juice, garlic, and rosemary and muddle.  (It helps if you have an actual muddler, which is a good investment because it's also useful for making mojitos.  Hey, Tony, why haven't we made mojitos yet?) ANSWER: we prefer alcohol that comes pre-muddled and ready to ingest, such as wine, beer and moonshine. Add salt and pepper, a few shakes, or pinches or whatever, and drizzle in olive oil while whisking.  I sort of estimated the amount of olive oil, it may not take a whole fourth cup.  I would err on the side of less because you can always add more afterward.  Pour dressing over the kale and toss to coat.  Next grate your parmesan cheese over the salad.  I just kept grating and tossing until my kale was sufficiently coated, then add croutons.  You'll get something that looks like this:

Wow!  A Family Füd milestone, indeed!  And can you believe it was Karen?  Making a kale salad?  Instead of me?  Even though I'm the one that introduced her to kale and I'm the one that really loves it and I'm the one that should have a recipe DAMN IT!

Bitterness and plans for revenge aside, this salad is great.  It's got strong but balanced flavors and great textural components.  I tried to make it myself the next day and mine didn't turn out as well.  Not that I cared.  I didn't want it to taste good.  I'm so beyond taste.  Karen doesn't get that.  

After the pizza came out and was smothered in arugula, I decided to further confuse its identity by putting toasted pecans on it, just like it was a salad.  "Now toss yourself!"  I yelled as it wept and wished it was more like the other pizzas.  I'm glad it wasn't though because it was amazing.  Saltiness and creaminess and tartness and bitterness and it all works wonderfully.  My only qualm is that the pecans didn't add much.  I've since become intrigued by the notion of candying the pecans, as the sugar glaze bolsters their crunch-factor and the sweetness would compliment the multitude of other flavors on the pizza.  Then again, it might just taste like crap and this pizza tastes wicked good already.

 

Oh yeah, I completely forgot about the pecans.  I guess because they added nothing memorable to the meal . . . kind of like Tony.  Ooohhh, snap!  Actually I'm gonna eat those rotten words because Tony came up with the entire concept of this pizza, not to mention he introduced me to alfajores.  Remember those cookies we'd been planning on making for over a week?  Yeah, it took me that long to get their name right.  "Hey, are we still gonna make them alfa-jury cookies this weekend?  Alfa-whore-hays?  Them Alfonso Ribeiro cookies?"  Haha, that's the actor who played Carlton on Fresh Prince, for those of you who missed all the funny in that last sentence. 

Again, can you believe the above doofus fell ass-backwards into a pile of ingredients and clambered out with a semi-palatable salad stuck to her?  

Back to the cookies.  Karen and I make no attempt to hide the vastness of our ignorance, so I wasn't shocked to find that the alfajor originated not in South America, as I had assumed, but in the Arab world.  The following is a very ignorant retelling of the cookie's history which I culled from a too-long Wikipedia article: 

The Arabs brought this sweet with them when they conquered Spain, presumably offering the treat as a "Hey, sorry we burned down all your stuff" peace offering.  The Spaniards fiddled with the recipe, adding their own touch, no doubt trying to add some canned fish to the recipe as they are wont to do.  Early versions of the pastry were cylindrical cookies rolled in fruit preserves and various nuts and spices.  Then the Spaniards decided they'd like to conquer some people themselves and since Americans were probably already busy cleaning their triple barrel muskets and inventing the horse-drawn Hummer carriage, Spain played it easy and conquered South America.  So, the Spaniards offered the South Americans a plate full of totally not disease-infected cookies (got 'em again!)  Everyone loved them and the countries throughout the region did some more fiddling until they finally got it right and sandwiched dulce de leche between two shortbread-type cookies.  Fast forward forty years or so, and I find what is undoubtedly a highly authentic South American version on the Martha Stewart website.  The only change we made was to substitute heavy whipping cream for the milk, because it's all Karen had (because only a p**** would use milk in their cereal).  I theorize that this change made the cookies extra moist.  Karen amended this hypothesis with a very smug "DUH."  Also, as mentioned earlier, we sprinkled some sea salt on the filling of each cookie. 

Yeah, I don't want to sound too smug here, but I think we totally improved this Martha Stewart recipe.  She may have anal retentive disorder and knowledge of the dark arts, but we've got Tony yelling, "Put salt on that!"  So, yeah, delicious cookies.  So good, in fact, I almost forgot that there is still no chocolate in our desserts!  I know, I know, I promised you (and myself) a ridiculous, chocolate, heart-stopping dessert.  Well, just you wait until next week, folks.  You will not be disappointed . . . 

In summation:  

Pizza is the perfect, hard-to-mess-up, brings-people-together food to make at home.  

Alfajores: Not just for Arabs, Spaniards, and South Americans anymore!  

And Tony's sodium levels are such that his body literally acts as a sponge now.  He's more like a "Grow a Tony" than he is human.  I'd like to put him in a kiddie pool and see if he expands to four times his original size.

Good ol' Pissporter!  I can't believe we forgot about you!  A humble German white wine, I recall it being sweet and . . . that's it.  It couldn't compete with the other taste bud pleasers here, but Karen and I had a ton of fun yelling 'PISSPORTER!' every time we drank it.  Go on, pronounce the name with a Minnesotan accent.  You won't regret it!  I wish more Americans in the medical profession would take after Doctor Beckermann and make alcohol with funny names.  

Don't get me wrong, the alfajores were delicious, but in my passionate pursuit of perfection (hey, I like the way that sounds), I couldn't help but consider how to improve them.  Too much cookie, not enough filling.  If only the components could be reversed, a cookie sandwiched between two sheets of dulce de leche!  No, no.  It can't be done.  I would like to try a more crisp and flat cookie next time, for the added textural aspect as well as the filling ratio improvement.  At FüdCorp, I'm always seeking to improve filling ratio while maximizing textural contrast.  

That's it for this week folks.  I hope you enjoyed our trip down memory lane, through both the annals of childhood pizza ordering and alfajor history.  The pizza has changed, from hot dogs and ketchup to blue cheese and prosciutto, and the cookies from not really existing to shortbread and dulce de leche, but the joy of sharing great food with friends and family remains the same.  If it gets people enjoying food together who normally wouldn't, then maybe DiGiorno and Tollhouse should be commended for their Pizza and Cookies Memory Surrogacy Campaign.   

P.S. Look for FüdCorp's new Taquitos and Snow Cone meal pack in the frozen food section of your local grocer.  Beat the heat and eat some meat with Taquitos and Snow Cone!  Just like when you were kids!

Guest Blogger: Ma Green

Hello, all.  Karen here.  It's been an eventful week in the world of the Green family.  Over the weekend, Brother Tony graduated from Chapman University with a B.A. in screen writing!  Watch for his name  in the future as that brief flicker before one of your favorite, critically acclaimed, and cancelled-too-soon comedy shows (or so I'm predicting).  We're just so proud of him.  The whole family came down to Orange to celebrate the day.  And by "celebrate" of course I mean "eat copious amounts of food."  The entire weekend was one giant meal after the next . . . followed by snacks.  Unfortunately though, between the fine Mexican meal at Cha Cha's and the adventurous fare at Honda Ya, not much cooking got done.  So in lieu of our weekly cooking adventure, we offer you a guest blog written by the one and only Ma Green outlining her food philosophy.  Enjoy!

Ma Green's Food Philosophy. . .


My favorite meal, as a kid, would have to be hamburger patties.  These were generally skillet-cooked and mine would be covered with, no, not ketchup, not A-1, or my mom’s favorite, Worcestershire, but . . . barbecue sauce.  Chris and Pitts barbecue sauce to be exact (or Piss and Critts if you’re amused by that sort of thing).  I don’t think KC Masterpiece had been invented then.  Said burger patty was generally accompanied by canned pork-and-beans (the white glob of “pork” to be avoided at all costs), and a canned vegetable (corn, green beans or peas).  Frozen vegetables must not have been invented yet either.  Of that “vegetable” selection, canned corn (sometimes of the far-less-preferable creamed style) would have been my first choice, followed by green beans (often pleasantly enhanced with bacon grease), and lastly, those icky grey-green mushy peas.  Let’s face it, peas lose a LOT in translation when canned.  Peas are still not a favorite, except when left in the pod, and of the “snap” variety, which are delish.  Yes, times have truly changed (to a certain extent)!   


Surprisingly-or not-ground beef patties (with KC Masterpiece) is still a favorite meal for me (see “comfort food”).  That patty though, is always grilled (with charcoal) and accompanied by a wedge of fresh onion, cottage cheese (with more onion as in “chopped green”) and steamed-or better-yet, blanched-broccoli. 


In the “good-ole-days”, we ate margarine and drank far too much Shasta soda; Shasta being cheaper than Coke and Pepsi.  Their cherry cola was my favorite followed by cream soda.  We never went “out” for dinner (it was too expensive), except for the occasional treat of Jack-in-the-Box burgers, which we never referred to as “fast food”, that term having not been coined yet (I don’t think).  Jack-in-the-Box must have pre-dated McDonalds, in Chula Vista anyway.  


OK, I just looked it up and Jack-in-the Box opened in “San Diego” in 1951.  McDonalds opened in San Bernardino in 1940, closed in 1948 and reopened three months later with a menu reduced to nine items, including a 15-cent burger.


I do like to cook, especially when I have more time (weekends), but I admit that cooking for a family of four could be a real chore when you work full-time.  Bill was pretty easy, but would have loved for me to bake fresh bread every week, like his mom did (yeah, right!).  Karen was not a picky eater and pretty brave, even loving tomatoes.  Tony, by his own admission (and I remember it even better), seemed to think I was trying to poison him.  He didn’t even like spaghetti sauce for cryin-out-loud!  It was chicken fingers or nuthin when he went out.  They all liked “Near East” rice pilaf; it was a staple, as were frozen potatoes in just about any form.  Even Tony, thank heaven, liked broccoli, and we ate lots of marinated/grilled chicken.  In fact, I grilled most all meat unless it was raining.  Speaking of which, salmon too, was pretty much fool-proof.  Tacos are a no-brainer . . . always good (especially if it’s raining).  Cooking on Fridays is against my religion-so to speak-and we always did pizza (not too much sauce, Tony).


So let’s jump forward and I will say that food has undergone an absolute RENAISSANCE, which I will sum up in the following (but not-limited-to) list:
Olive oil . . .YES!
Balsamic vinegar . . .YES, again!
So many new cheeses
Farmer’s Markets
Oh, yeah . . .cilantro!


My philosophy, in a nut-shell (see pine nuts, pistachios, walnuts, pecans and peanuts), is that food is fun and cooking with my kids (who can now enjoy wine with the meal) is one of life’s greatest pleasures!
Karen and Tony:  I love you more than pork and beans . . . I mean hamburger patties (or even olive oil), I love your blog, and I thank you for allowing me to contribute to this admirable endeavor.


ALL my love, mum 

Bolsillo Caliente

Hello again.  We're so glad you're back!  Honestly, the tone of last week's blog was so quarrelsome and despondent that I thought we may have lost some people.  On that note, I am happy to report that this week's cookery was the most joyous of adventures.  It was merry, wacky, jubilant, and whimsical.  In a word, it was empanadas.  For those of you who have never heard of or had the immense joy of tasting an empanada, it's a stuffed pastry that can be sweet or savory.  It's of Spanish origin and is widely eaten in Latin America.  Tony's mentioned to me several times that he follows a food blog with some impressive and authentic looking Mexican food.  So I finally popped on over to Pati's Mexican Table to take a look.  Everything appeared delicious as promised, but I took one look at this photo and it was decided.  We are gonna make the crap out of those empanadas.


Nothing excites me like not having to make decisions, so I was ecstatic to find Karen had already chosen a couple recipes.  She had used our leftover plantain from last week and cooked a test batch of "tostones" (which I had suggested last week in place of the chips that ended up sort of sucking) so we decided to do a rebooted attempt at plantains, frying them not once, but twice.  Delicious, no doubt about it, but something about deep fried plantains and dough filled with pork butt sounded a bit filling.  Probably the pork butt part.  So I added my own two cents and suggested we pair this meal with a salad.  Karen grunted a hardly audible sound of consent, and we had ourselves a full fledged meal.   


For the record, I am not opposed to salads.  I just think that they're kind of stupid to eat in a world where sandwiches exist.  Anyway, the empanada recipe was our most extravagant so far.  It has a rather lengthy and varied list of ingredients.  I mean, green olives and raisins together in one flaky buttery pocket!  It's madness!  But Tony and I were really on top of things this week so we popped on over to our local Sprouts and picked up every thing we needed for Empanadas of the Immaculate Conception, an avocado and lime Mexican-y salad, and plantains "Take 2" and made it back to the kitchen by 3:00pm to start the cooking.


The one problem we encountered was that it was not avocado season, meaning that all the avocados being sold in the greater Los Angeles area were plucked not from a tree, but from the nest of an overprotective Dragon holding a machine gun and the prices reflected this.  I was disgusted at having to drop two dollars on a single avocado, but once I have my heart set on this, my favorite of all fruits, I can't be swayed.  And let me tell you, boys, this was an avocado to get your heart set on.  It was perfect.  

No, you hang up first!  That was stupid.  I'm sorry.  I'm just nervous.      

Back in the kitchen, we busted out the aprons, put on some tunes (tUnE-YarDs to be exact), and burst into joyous dance.  No seriously, Tony did the weirdest lankiest lookin' thing with his arms that I've ever seen and I went full on "robot penguin" which consists of sticking your arms straight down at your sides and moving them in tight circles while waddling back and forth.  Yes, we were that excited.  And yes, we are that white.  Here, look:

Glorious.  

The jovial mood only grew from there as I began to make the empanada dough and had the immeasurable pleasure of dumping two whole sticks of butter and an entire packet of cream cheese into my mixing bowl.

If only every meal could begin this way.

There was something fiendish, even terrifying, about the way Karen was gazing into that bowl of butter and cream cheese, as though she saw in it the promise of a new world order, a horrible dystopian future in which every meal begins and ends with butter and cream cheese.  She was in her element, so I let her do her thang and got to work on the meat.  Unable to find pork butt, we settled on some much less hilarious pork shoulder.  I chopped the meat and set it simmering with garlic, onion, carrot, bay leaf, peppercorns, thyme and salt.  I was essentially boiling a bunch of meat, which is not a preparation I'm used to and which produces some very unappetizing grayish brain meat.

I quickly sauteed some onions and garlic and got that brain simmering in tomato sauce.  

Meanwhile, I mixed up the pastry dough faster than you can say "brain meat" and, as Tony mentioned, moved on to the tostones part of the meal.  I couldn't let my tasteless cardboard plantain nuggets be the final word on plantains for this blog, so during the week I'd whipped up some fried plantains courtesy of Alton Brown, damn know-it-all is always right about how to make things delicious.  Anyway, these double fried, garlic-y, savory plantains went over muuuuuch better than the previous week's so I made them again to go along with our latin theme.  Unlike my neurotic brother, I have absolutely no trouble frying any and everything  that I can get my hands on.  I love to hear the sound of sizzling and feel the hot oil splash against my skin.  Actually, no, that part kind of sucks and so I have a habit of throwing things into the oil and then running away squealing and ducking for cover like a hysterical piglet.

But just look at those babies frying up to a nice golden brown.  This recipe is fun because you get to smush the plantains and then fry them again, soaking them in a little garlic salt water in between.  After all that they sort of just taste like really good french fries.  No problem there.

**SPOILER ALERT: Do not look at the platter next to Karen's head!  Those aren't finished empanadas!

Success!  The empanada filling flavors had satisfactorily mingled, or as well as one could hope for at a party with such disparate guests as green olives and raisins.  Fun fact: green olives prefer to be called manzanillas when they are used in a Spanish or Latin American dish.  Don't you forget this, or else you'll have to go to two different stores because the first one didn't even have manzanillas, just these stupid green olives.

A truly inspiring sight, manzanillas, raisins, almonds and pork all hanging out, having a grand old time.  And who's that tree branch looking thing in the back?  Is that cinnamon stick?  Yup, cinnamon stick showed up.  

Done!  Here!  I held up the skillet and demanded Karen turn the meat stew into empanadas while I spent my remaining time hanging out with avocado, maybe making a salad.  Or is it too soon?  Do you think avocado even likes me?  I'm not good enough, AM I?  With a firm backhand, Karen brought me back to my senses, then delivered a proverbial backhand by informing me that we had to actually put the meat stuff into the dough stuff ourselves.  Moi?  I don't bake and this process really towed the line.  However, it can't be that hard, right?  I summoned every bit of knowledge I had on matter and spatial relations, and I managed to do this:

"KILL IT!  KILL IT!"  Karen yelped, as she cowered in the corner clutching her rolling pin, crying what I'm pretty sure were joke tears.  Har har, very funny.  You try it.  You shmuck. 

Yes, fine, ok; Karen's didn't have a gaping hole in it.  And yes, mine looked like a pumpkin spliced with road kill begging to be killed and put out of its misery, but in my defense . . . whatever, I don't even care.  I'm calling avocado, it accepts me for who I am!  

Since this post has been totally and completely out of order from the get-go I'll stick with the theme and talk about rolling out the empanada dough.  Now, you might ask, "Hey, didn't you just stuff the empanadas?  How could you stuff the empanadas and then roll out the dough?"  To which I reply, "How do you know that we don't have a time traveling kitchen?  Huh?  You don't.  And I'll never tell.  So shut it."  The dough had been chilling in the fridge for about an hour while Tony fussed over the stuffing and fretted over how the world would judge him and his unnatural avocado love (harshly, by the way) and I couldn't wait to get it out and start the rolling.  On my list of favorite things to do in the kitchen, using my rolling pin is right up there with apple peeling, bread kneading, and sliding across the floor in my socks.  So I was excited to roll out the empanadas and find a suitable sized circle to use as a cookie cutter.

Rolling pin excitement verging on madness!  Anyway, I grabbed a random piece of tupperware and started makin' some circles, not really knowing how big we wanted our empanadas.  On a side note, this is where I wish there was a synonym for "empanada" because the writer in me feels that I have repeated that word one too many times.  So from now on, I will alternate the use of "empanada" with "Spanish Hot Pocket."

Is this the right size?  I uhknow.  As Tony's mutated drooling first attempt would show us, no, it was not big enough.  But since I couldn't find a better cookie cutter, I cut them and rolled them out a little bigger, so that explains the lopsidedness of the first batch of Spanish Hot Pockets.  Luckily though, and I'm not sure if you knew this, but being slightly lopsided in no way affects the deliciousness of this item.  They did get a little prettier as we got more practice.  Here you can see the progression of prettiness from left to right smothered with egg wash and sesame seeds.

Anyway, they all look good to me once they're baked.  I just wanna pinch their little cheeks.

It was almost time to dish up when I realized I had to make the salad, meaning it was time for avocado and I to . . . errr, ok any attempt to keep up this "being in love with the avocado" metaphor is going to result in explicit descriptions, so consider it abandoned.  I sliced it up and tossed it with romaine lettuce, cilantro, a cumin-lime vinaigrette and feta cheese.  Cotija cheese works even better if you've got it.  This combo is fresh, the flavors complement each other and you can throw a bunch of other stuff in there too like corn, bell pepper, black beans, a taco, whatever.  Ah yes, I also added in some pepitas which, if you read last week's entry, you know is a food that Karen does not respect.  (That is correct.)  I don't know that I changed her mind, but the salad was good.  The Spanish Hot Pockets, on the other hand, were amazing.  Utterly fantastic.  The dough was sweet and buttery, the meat was salty and tender, the olives chipped in a great tang and these things are so portable that you can tuck one into your cargo shorts, overalls or other large-pocketed clothing and hit the town.  

What better way to wrap this meal up than some delicious alfajores, shortbread cookie sandwiches with Dulce De Leche in the middle?  How about not having those because someone (me) didn't realize that it takes a minimum of two and a half hours to make Dulce de Leche?  You'll have to tune in next week to see the alfajores in action.

Let me just reiterate before wrapping this up that these empanadas were friggin' fantastic.  They are hands down the best thing that we've made so far.  While they do take a bit more work and patience and it helps to have a fun cooking partner, they're totally worth it.  And since this blog cares not for linear order or the nature of time, I will let you in on another secret.  We actually cook our meals while writing about the previous week's adventure, meaning that we made these Spanish Hot Pockets last week and this week made a different delicious meal which we'll tell you about next week.  Confused yet?  I only tell you this because I ate one empanada each day for dinner after cooking these and by Thursday when I finished my last one I felt such an extreme feeling of loss and sadness that I knew this recipe was something special, something worth holding on to, worth fighting for.  Worth dying for?  No, that's ridiculous, but worth adding to my "make these as often as humanly possible" list of recipes.  I highly recommend that you try them.  And then freeze one and mail it to me.  I'll wait.

What the Kale?!

Hello friend.  Are you like me?  Do you sometimes stand around in the produce section of the grocery store thinking, “I should really be eating some of this healthy green sh*t,” before walking over to the cracker section and getting a box of Cheez-Its instead?  Have you tried a bite of chard, black kale, collard greens, or other strange leafy plant and spat it out immediately because it tasted like God was trying to poison you?  If you hate to eat green things but you also feel guilty about it, then have I got the recipe for you!  This week's meal was inspired by the fact that I woke up on Sunday with extreme "I'm not eating healthy enough" guilt.  I then wandered around my local farmer's market with that mindset and an hour later emerged triumphantly from the crowd holding aloft a large bunch of kale and four sweet potatoes.  Smug and satisfied with myself, I was then faced with the question of what the hell to make with a big bunch of kale and four sweet potatoes.

No.  No, I am not like you, pal.  I guilt-tripped myself into eating kale a long time ago.  It’s a superfood!  It’s got vitamins and minerals through the roof, a ton of fiber, even calcium (I’m looking at you, vegans).  Plus it has them little cancer fighting glucosinolates all in there.  In the leaves.  Y’know, glucosinolates?  Point is, it’s amazingly good for you, but it ain’t no ordinary green.  Unlike ice berg lettuce, kale won’t shamelessly whore itself out to any burger, taco or Chuck E. Cheese “side salad.”  When raw, kale is tough and bitter and spiteful.  It needs to know you respect it, you love it, you’ll even . . . massage it.  A little salt, acidity and, yes a deep tissue massage, and you’ve got kale showing you its soft delicious side.  Karen doesn't strike me as the type of person that is cool with pampering her food prior to eating it, so when she called me and insisted we make a kale and mango salad with dinner I was blown away.  I figured she’d gotten all body-snatched by an alien that did really poor research.  Turns out, Karen was ready to turn over a new LEAF.  LEAF.  Eh?

All right, so I didn't have much kale experience, but luckily for me the television in my household is almost exclusively tuned to The Food Network at all times, allowing me to be well acquainted with Guy Fieri shoveling food into his mouth in coronary proportions, Alton Brown being a total dick know-it-all and then cooking such amazing things that you forgive him almost immediately, and a little Indian food nymph know as Aarti Sequeira cooking up what I can only imagine are the most flavorful and delicious Indian dishes anyone has ever tasted.  I don't know this for sure, but the judges sure seemed impressed on season 6 of The Next Food Network Star.  Although the technology does not yet exist for me to confirm this assumption (Hello, Taste-O-Vision!  Where are you?  I'd like to eat some TV cheese now.) the judges' reactions were enough to make me jump at the idea of making Aarti's Massaged Kale Salad with mango and pepitas.  Except that I had never really heard of pepitas but I did have a bag of frozen slivered almonds and as I'm sure Tony will rant about shortly, I am all about taking cooking shortcuts that will lead to food reaching my mouth sooner, even if it's only by a few seconds.  So I went with almonds.  So sue me.

OBJECTION!  I'm now including a charge of libel in my lawsuit.  Karen did not JUST go with almonds!  She poured in a sorry heap of waxy still-frozen corpse nuts!  I'm all for almonds in a salad, they've recently become one of my favorite additions, but they must always be toasted.  It was one thing to shun pepitas, which are delicious and one of the funnest words ever, but raw almonds haven't nearly the machismo to compete with the flavors of any salad.  Toasting them brings out a huge amount of rich nuttiness which is then a perfect compliment to many salads.  Karen has become inured to my more fervent food convictions, so she ignored my roasting rant.  I wouldn't be denied so easily.  Shortly after sitting down to dinner I excused myself under the guise of getting something from the fridge.  A few seconds later a "ding" alerted Karen to my devious plan.

"Dude, are you toasting almonds?"  

"JUST TRY THEM!"  And she did.  Oh, if you could have seen the look on her face!  I could actually see every stubborn muscle in her body beaten into submission by pure roasted truth!  And you can too because I took a picture:

Booyah.  Well then, I think that's enough rant for now.  Since Karen thought up the salad, she made me conjure up a main dish.  A mango salad brought to mind caribbean food.  Then that brought to mind toucans, board shorts, and monkeys playing coconut drums.  I zoned out for awhile bobbing my head to those sweet monkey rhythms and then realized I didn't know diddly about caribbean food, but I knew I'd been wanting to make Caribbean Coconut Rice for a while.  To top that rice I settled on a cuban inspired Shrimp Creole from the impressively titled "Best Cuban Recipes" blog.


I suppose I should note that during this particular cooking adventure I was not in the best of health which may partly explain my laziness.  I'd been fighting a fever, wicked cough, and sore throat for about a week and so my contribution to this meal consisted of me throwing together my kale salad, falling asleep on the couch, popping up and shouting, "DON'T TOAST THE ALMONDS!", falling asleep again, waking up and wandering into the kitchen, stirring whatever dish Tony was making (even though I later ate this dish, I still have little knowledge of what it actually was), and hanging around long enough to nitpick everything Tony did.  I was sick and grumpy but wanted to get food made so I also contributed a half-assed plantain dish.  My roommate had made some pretty great plantain chips earlier in the week (which I ate when I saw them sitting on the stove, because if you leave food sitting in plain site, I'ma eat it) and so I thought that I would try to duplicate her efforts.  Tony suggested that we make something called "tostones" with the plantains which involved mashing and baking and garlic, to which I replied, "Ugh, let's just put oil on them and throw them in the ovenzzzzZZZZZ . . . . DON'T TOAST THE ALMONDS!"  

Anyway, I succeeded in making some flavorless plantain nuggets with the consistency of cardboard.  They can't all be winners.


It's true, Karen phoned it in this week, but I was happy to pick up the slack.  Sending me out shopping alone, however, was not a good idea.  I suffer from chronic indecisiveness, poor navigational skills and I can't go more than two hours without eating.  Basically, I'm hard-wired to suck at shopping.  Sending me to the store alone was tantamount to a parent pushing their blindfolded child into a knife warehouse with the directive to "Pick a sharp one.  Oh, and have fun!"  By the time I had been to three stores in search of shrimp, gotten lost and ended up starving to death in a cram packed Trader Joe's, I was stifling the severe urge to head butt everyone in line and trade the whole elaborate meal for In-N-Out and a beer.  Luckily, I made it back to my car, ravenously devoured some broccoli and hummus and I was back on track.  Glad I made it out alive because my Shrimp Creole turned out to be delicious!  Although, due to an unfortunate shrimp shortage at Sprouts, the recipe became a "seafood medley creole."  I used the Trader Joe's frozen shrimp, scallop and calamari combo, which is good, but some plump shrimp would have been better.  They would have mamboed around the edge of the skillet playing steel drums before diving in synchronicity into the delicious stew and bidding me farewell with a hearty "Thanks for deh steam bath, mon!"  Yikes.  I apologize.  

Looks ok, right?  I was skeptical because it seemed too simple: onion, garlic, bell pepper, white wine, tomatoes, and cumin.  Then you toss in your shrimp or perhaps aquatic medley or, hell, a thinly sliced dish towel.  It doesn't matter, the flavor is that good!  Not only that, but the rich semi sweetness of the coconut rice proved the perfect accompaniment to the smokey creole spice of the seafood.

Yeah, Tony done real good this week.  Which is why I feel a little bit bad for sending him shopping alone, denying him his precious pepitas, and then belittling his vegetable chopping skills.  The only other thing I contributed to this portion of the meal was to point out that, "Oh my god, this piece of onion is larger than the majority of the other onions!  It's what statisticians would refer to as an 'outlier' and will therefore ruin the entire meal!!"

Did I mention that I was sick and grumpy?  Soon after the offending onion I found an inordinately large tomato and the sh*t really hit the fan.

Luckily I followed this outburst by immediately passing out on the couch, allowing Tony to finish the meal unharangued.  Whatever he did with the rice and seafood concoction turned out really well and even through my clogged nasal passages I could tell that it was delicious.

The kale salad was also tasty.  Little Aarti did not disappoint, and at least my plantains looked pretty on the plate.  


At this point I was nearly delirious with exhaustion and cantankerous as Grandpa Simpson, but we had to press on and do dessert.  Remember those sweet potatoes I bought earlier?  Well, I hadn't been able to squeeze them into the meal and so was determined to make them dessert.  Sweet potato pie came to mind because it's a thing that most people have heard of, but making a pie seemed like a monumental task in my weakened state.  So I did a quick search for pumpkin recipes (because pumpkin can be replaced with mashed sweet potatoes and be just as good . . . better even!  Just you wait and see-uh who even cares.  I just want to sleep.)  My search revealed this recipe for Pumpkin Mousse Parfait that looked so pretty!  It was settled, ingredients were assembled, dessert was gonna get made.

Pumpkin pie-spiced sweet potatoes, whipped cream and gingersnap cookies; it's like sweet potato pie in a cup!  Well, sort of.  I admit, I ate nearly my entire parfait because I had a raging sweet tooth and it was brimming with nutrient rich sweet potatoes (another superfood!),  but it wasn't my cup of tea.  I concealed my true thoughts from Karen because I suspected that, due to her sickness and the lackluster plantains, she might use a ginger snap shard to stab me.  Don't get me wrong, it wasn't terrible, just a little too sweet for me and the inclusion of orange zest, the measurement of which Karen admittedly guessed at, was off-putting.  I would try these again with pumpkin and less orange zest . . . and in a pie shell.  Wow, they do look good, huh?  

What these mediocre desserts made me realize is that we on this blog may be denying our true selves for the sake of interesting and aesthetically appealing desserts or "pansy ass desserts."  I promise soon to make a real dessert consisting of no less than 3 pounds of chocolate and 12 sticks of butter because who are we kidding?  Decadence is the best way to do dessert and I am clearly over my "not eating healthy enough" guilt trip.  Sooooo over it.