Cooking Archive

An oldie-but-goody:

Bill Clinton goes into a local diner for lunch. As he reads the menu the waitress comes over and asks, "Are you ready to order?"

Bill pipes up, "Yes, I'd like a quickie."

"A quickie?!?" the waitress replies, shocked, and slaps him across the face before storming away.

Bill is puzzled, until the patron in the next booth turns to him and says, "Sir, it's pronounced quiche."

With that out of the way, I'd like to make an observation: contrary to the thesis and title of the book Real Men Don't Eat Quiche, real men can eat whatever the heck they want.

So today I did a bit of cooking.

• 6 eggs
• 1 cup half-and-half
• 1 cup shredded cheese (I used Sargento cheddar)
• 1/2 pound breakfast sausage, browned, drained and crumbled
• 1/2 pound bacon (pre-cooked weight), cooked and crumbled
• 1/2 shallot, minced
• 1/2 cup chopped onion
• 12 to 20 small or medium black olives

Set your oven to 350° with the rack in the center of the oven.

Spray a 9" round pie pan with cooking spray. Sprinkle half the shredded cheese into the pan; make sure that cheese covers the sides as well as the bottom of the pan.

Now, you can add the sausage, bacon, onion, shallot and olives to the pan as separate layers, or you can jumble them together in a mixing bowl and add them all at once. Spread the ingredients evenly, and do not compact them in the pan.

Beat together the eggs and half-and-half, add seasoning (I used a pinch of salt and a few grinds of black pepper — not too much, since the bacon and sausage are already salty and spicy) and slowly pour the mix into the pie pan. It should fill in between the non-compacted ingredients and come close to covering the contents of the pan.

Sprinkle the remaining cheese over the top of the concoction.

Bake uncovered (I put the pan on a cookie sheet, just in case of spillage, which didn't end up happening) for 40-45 minutes or until knife or toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let stand five minutes before serving.

Serves six... if those six are women or children. Three or four is more likely if you're like me. Or serves one, three or four times. I made two of these today (yes, this is what I had in mind here), and they'll go into the fridge to be used as microwaveable quick meals — very handy on work nights when time is at a premium.

You can, of course, use whatever ingredients you like. Scallions and spinach are good. Mushrooms are OK, I guess, if you're into fungi. I'm not. Sliced up sun-dried tomatoes (if you can get the kind that aren't packed in oil) are awesome.

It's pretty much the same as quiche... but (per Alton Brown) I usually refer to it as "refrigerator pie." Note, however, the lack of a crust. If carb avoidance is your thing, this has a lot of potential.

So, would it qualify as manly grub? Given the sausage, bacon and cheese quotient, I think Steve might approve. (And if you haven't already bought Steve's book, Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man, go do so now.)

Update: now with photo goodness!

That's a blob of sour cream on top. It goes rather well.

On Monday I received a package from Amazon which contained pure gold... smothered in beef fat:

Eat What You Want And Die Like A Man

Written by Steve Graham of Hog on Ice (one of my all-time and ongoing favorite blogs) this hilarious paean to food that's bad for you but so very, very good deserves a place in any man's library.

Any man who's not a wuss, that is. If tofu is your favorite protein and if the price of arugula concerns you, you should probably put the book down and see your doctor about getting testosterone shots before reading, lest your head explode.

This is a hugely expanded, revised and refined version of Steve's same-titled self-published book from a few years ago. If you happen to have that older version, get this one; you won't regret it.

I had palpitations just reading it, before I even set foot in the kitchen.

I had a bit of a dilemma. After screaming through the first 100 pages in a day and a half — it's hard to put down — I was inspired to spend some time in the kitchen. So yesterday I cooked up four pounds of breakfast sausage to use in recipes. When it was all cooked, even after the cup-and-a-half of delicious, wonderful, marvelous sausage grease was rendered out, I still had about half a pound more sausage than could fit into the storage container for refrigeration.

Which raised the question, should I have kept the grease mixed with the remaining sausage, or should I just have had a mug of it on the side as a chaser?

As a followup, I later cooked up three pounds of bacon, also to use in other recipes. Mmmm... bacon grease. I'm sure I'll find a use for it all.

It's a very good thing that the nurse I'm dating has Emergency Room experience.

Buy the book. You'll laugh at the terrific writing, and you might learn a thing or two about real food.

Go to any restaurant called Luigi's and you can get a plate of pasta.

Go to Chez Pierre and it's an even bet that escargot will be on the menu.

Go to Hernando's and it's a given that you can get something in the tortilla family.

But, I swear, you just try ordering a haggis at McDonalds, and they look at you like you have two heads.

Mom has been on my case lately to make sure I get plenty of vegetables in my daily diet.

Do Fritos corn chips count?

It was slow at the office, so I'm home from work a bit early tonight.

Tonight's dinner menu: microwave burritos, enhanced with cheese and black olives, with salsa fresca (none too fresca) and sour cream.

Hey, not every night can be pan-seared ribeye with snap peas and a fresh green salad night.

But I wish it could be.

Do gnocchi provide any culinary benefit other than being a substrate for whatever sauce you use?

I thought not.

Chap chae, kept overnight in the fridge and rewarmed in the microwave, is amazingly good.

Especially with a little kimchi on the side.

Eat your heart out, Steve.

잡채!

One of the things I took from my years in the Army was an abiding love of Korean cuisine.

It actually began while I was at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA — as part of the curriculum in the Korean language course, we were occasionally taken on a field trip to one of the local Korean restaurants and encouraged to experiment with all the different dishes. In no time at all, I was hooked.

My subsequent assignment to Korea was culinary bliss. I had something of the local cuisine every other day on average.

Since my return to the States in '90, I've been mostly deprived of my favorite foreign food. In my hometown, Santa Barbara — the city with the most restaurants per capita in the world, it is often claimed — there is every kind of restaurant you can imagine, except for Korean.

In the Bay Area there are plenty of Korean restaurants to be found, but life in San Jose at the height of the tech boom being what it was, I rarely had the time or inclination to do anything after work but go home.

North Carolina? Surprisingly, there's a pretty good Korean restaurant less than 10 miles from my home... but there are few things that seem to me to be quite so pathetic as a man going to a restaurant for dinner alone.

So, having mastered barbecue, I've determined to learn how to cook Korean food.

Tonight was my first foray into that realm. For my first effort, I decided on 잡채 (chap chae) — a noodle/vegetable dish (sometimes with meat) that was one of my favorites.

If I do say so myself, it was a success... even if it looked like a mess.

아주 촣아요 — very good!

^{[I hope I remembered the spelling correctly.]}

Addendum: afterwards, the kitchen looked like a tornado had passed through.

Some (or most, maybe) of you know that Steve H. of Hog on Ice (formerly Little Tiny Lies) has written a cookbook.

To health nuts and food nazis everywhere, it's the Satanic Bible of cookbooks.

OK, maybe that's a bit harsh.

OK, that's definitely too harsh. But accurate. And it got your attention, didn't it?

The book, of course, is Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man: The World's Unhealthiest Cookbook.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wet your pants – this is one excellent read. Steve has been, from the very beginning of my blog awareness, one of the consistenly great daily reads on the 'net. I don't link to him nearly enough.

The book really will make you laugh, too - a lot, and out loud. The recipes are amazing, but the real point of the book is the humor, of which there is plenty. Not that the recipes are to be ignored. No, never that.

The book actually is evil, to a degree. Not once in my life had I ever bought lard – until today, that is. [When one has spent most of one's life overweight to one extent or another, one tends to avoid anything with the word "lard" printed on it in big red block letters.]