Mostly Semantics

Oh blog, how I abuse you. Not that, y’know, any of my cobloggers (save you, CV!) have been treating you any better, but really, has February been so cruel as to leave you postless this long? Well, no more. When at a loss, I, Colbertianly, look to my gut. Now, I may not have lovely pictures of the food from my house over the last few weeks, like Jessica or Capitulate and other, more professional bloggers still. No foodporn for you here. No good excuse - we have a couple of digital cameras around and the people who own them (*AHEM*) are coincidentally the roommates least likely to be cooking. Of course, I have at least two or three photosets lying around somewhere of past foodgasms gone undocumented, so I’m complicit in the problem too. Nonetheless, I do think we’ve made a number of pretty exciting meals over the last month, and, well, for the sake of putting up a fucking post, here are the recipes and my reviews.

Spectacular meal #1: Superbowl.

For this one Tweaks demanded bar-food (not barf-ood) and I was all too happy to step up. It did engender a good week of debate about whether or not the castle could sustain the purchase of a deep-fryer without lapsing into utter cardiac breakdown, before we remembered our friends talking up their fryer and borrowed theirs. I’d just seen the Bobby Flay hot-wing “Throwdown” the week before (not as funny as the “hot-brown” Throwdown, but more useful) and adopted the “wing king’s” bourbon street wings for my ‘traditional’ approach (though appropriating Flay’s blue cheese dressing - better, as it happens, than smittenkitchen’s version). Additionally I found these Chinese five-spice wings which were considerably better than they look/sound - remarkably moist, flavorful meat, along with crispy, well-seasoned exteriors. I ate them cold the next day and still found them delightful. The Maestro reprised his weird-but-masterful guac (seriously, the best guac I’ve ever tasted, way better than even the best ’simple’ preparations - god this shit is good). Vermonstrous made some very excellent pigs in blankets (with chicken sausages, though, so they were rechristened ‘cocks in condoms’ - yes we’re 11 years old) and Tweaks put together some enormous, killer nachos and, yum, deviled eggs. Oh, and Ags brought us a 5 lb freaking bag of frozen tater tots (still living in our freezer) and the most delicious ice cream cake ever (it was football-shaped, covered in the chocolate crumble stuff, with an extra layer of that in the middle. Fuck!) Altogether, we had at least twice as much food as we could eat, but man… it was some pretty solid bar food.

Spectacular meal #2: Birthday dinner.

Vermonstrous had a friend in town and, truth be told, she’s responsible for the vast bulk of the cooking for this meal. That said, I kind of helped select the menu and with some of the prep work, and… we both concluded that, of all the meals we’ve cooked together over the last two years (that’s a lot), this was our favorite. Step one: purchase 16 prime strip steaks at costco. Cook on a rack in your oven at 250 for ~20 minutes, then brown in a skillet (as hot as you can get it) for 1 minute per side. I should note that this is the bananaflux method of steak preparation, but I stand behind it - you get very little gradient in your steak, it’s just a huge reservoir of that sweet wet pink (*snicker*) in the middle, surrounded by glorious crusty exterior. Use the leftovers in the pan to make a pan sauce with, in our case, port and dried cherries (you can use a cornstarch slurry to thicken it up quicker if you’re impatient - we were.) Serve with gorgonzola. This alone would be really, really fucking good, but of course we never stop there. V had spotted this braised leeks dish that she wanted to try, and sweet god, is it worth whatever trouble it is - what a delightful conveyance for butter and salt it makes. I ate these cold the next day too - delicious, still. Those two things would have been plenty, really, but we had to add a delightful butternut squash and mushroom risotto to the plate as well - again, we can just never resist. There was, again, way ridiculously too much food, but, again, so fucking good.

Spectacular meal #3: Indian game-night.

So, I’d made Indian before. So had b-flux, so we felt like we had it covered. I spent the evening beforehand putting together a cucumber raita, a cilantro chutney, and beginning the marination of some tandoori chicken (this one is kind of cobbled together from a bunch of internet recipes. It’s hard to fuck up - yogurt and garlic and onion and spices aplenty). One sticking point though- as I learned the week before with mexican, bananaflux is resolutely opposed to making any and all bread (in that case, tortillas) - he refuses. I have made homemade garlic naan before and love it, cannot make indian without it, but due to the vagaries of scheduling and bread-rising, there was no way I could complete naan before, like, 10pm. The other roommies were equally stymied - all but one, the new one (any lylemen reading will remember him as the apocalyptically skinny, philosophically-bent one from Tongy) we’re calling ‘Sherpa Herpes’ (this is HIS naming of himself, for the record - and you should take it from him, a guy who’s had mouth sores. A mouth full of sores ain’t no fun.) He was still in his first week here at this point (last week) and had the time to make the dough. It was only right that I then left him (with substantial help from Terri on the dough-rolling) to fry them shits up, too. Liberally butter/oiled pan, fry ’til GBD. Keep warm in oven, served with my aforementioned dishes, basmati rice, and b-flux’s Chicken ‘a la shah’ (you’d have to write him for that recipe, it’s some kind of crazy delicious tomato-based curry he and his roommate developed in grad school) and gobi (cauliflower) - what you have there is what was consistently acclaimed as the greatest game night spread yet (which, not to brag, but is no small accomplishment.)

Sorry for not posting more often (and less lengthy, I think, would be advisable?), and for having such a long post with no foodporn. I thought about posting some real porn down here at the bottom, to try and convey the sense of having eaten this stuff, but, eh, you might be at work and I’m not that cruel. But suffice it to say that this shit was like some titties. Some delicious fucking titties.

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