Get me to the doctor

64. David Bowie - "Blackout" (from the "Heroes" album, RCA, 1977)

I have been making beans and rice a bunch recently, as I don't have too much money and it really seems like something that someone who doesn't have that much money should be eating. Obviously beans and rice are also real delicious when prepared with even a tiny modicum of effort. I felt like really going in on some BnR today, so I thought I'd do the one thing that, in the 21st century, we all seem to agree makes any meal better. I threw an egg on it.

Beans and Rice with a Poached Egg (2 servings or so)


Make the rice however you want. There are hundreds of ways to make rice. I used Basmati cuz I had some laying around.

Start the beans by taking three slices of bacon and chop them up. Throw them into a medium-low saucepan that's heavy enough so as not to be useless. Render the bacon fat and then take it out with a slotted spoon, leaving the fat in the pan.

Next, chop half an onion and a stalk of celery and throw it into the bacon fat. Cook that stuff until it's soft and then toss in the bacon, a can of kidney beans, a 1/4 cup of chopped tomatoes, a teaspoon of something spicy (I made some chili powder a while ago, it's delicious, use hot sauce if you want tho), and some salt. Let that cook for like 15-20 minutes until it reaches the consistency you like.

When the beans and rice are done, poach an egg. Don't poach it too long, make it runny. Obviously I was too excited about this meal to transfer the egg properly but it looks even better this way. This should make enough beans for two dinner servings but I'll prolly do it in 1 1/2 cuz it tastes too damn good.

Thank you

81. Daft Punk - "Around the World" (Virgin France S.A., 1996)



As we give thanks for many things, including French robots, here's the stuffing I made for a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner we had at my homie Sam's house on Sunday. Recipe stolen pretty much wholesale from November's Bon Appetit except for a few tweaks.

Ingredients:
- 2 loaves good Italian bread
- 1 pound each Hot Italian Sausage and Sweet Italian Sausage
- 5 tablespoons butter
- 2 large Spanish onions
- 4 celery stalks
- 4 Granny Smith Apples
- around 2 1/2 cups chicken broth
- 3 large eggs

The first part of this is by far the most annoying but at least you'll have it out of the way. Preheat an oven to 350 and take the crust off of the bread, cutting the rest of it into 1/2 inch cubes. When you've completed this surprisingly Herculean task, spread the bread on one or two baking sheets and put it in the oven to toast for like 15 minutes, or some of the pieces begin to get golden brown. When it's done, put the bread into a large bowl.

While the bread is toasting, chop the onions and celery into relatively small and, much more importantly, relatively equal pieces. Also peel and chop the apples. Put your largest skillet over medium-high heat and throw in the sausage (feel free to throw in some extra hot sausage if your grocer sells it in 1.5 pound bundles). Cook the sausage, breaking it up into small pieces with your spatula, until it all looks cooked through, then transfer it to the bowl of bread, making sure to leave the drippings in the pan. It might look like the sausage to bread ration is out of control, but it'll turn out ok, I promise.

Next, sautee the onions and celery in the sausage renderings until the onion is soft and just beginning to turn golden. Then, pour the contents of the skillet into the bread/sausage mixture, put the skillet back on the heat, and add two tablespoons of butter. Now throw in the apples, and sautee them until they're tender. God, cooked apples are delicious. When those are done, pour them into the bowl, and melt two more tablespoons of butter over low heat. The recipe said to sautee some fresh sage in the butter for 30 seconds, but I didn't have any, so I just used the butter. Feel free to add any herbs you feel appropriate, but either way, throw that butter into the bowl as well. Add the chicken stock and three gently beaten eggs as well.

Finally, butter a 15x10x2 glass dish (or, if you're like me and/or are transporting it anyways, a similarly sized, disposable aluminum roasting pan), spread the mixture evenly into it, and throw it into a 350 degree oven for around 50 minutes. It's delicious.

I want to screw you

104. Tall Dwarfs - "All My Hollowness to You" (from the "Three Songs" single, 1981)


Roast Chicken Breast with Pan Sauce and Zucchini

Summer's over, but fuck it, I saw some zucchini at my shitty local supermarket and it looked delicious. So I bought some and made it as a side for some chicken.

Ingredients:

- 1 chicken breast, bone in, skin on
- a bit of olive oil
- salt and pepper
- 3 tablespoons of butter (trust it)
- half of a decent sized zucchini (though I probably could've eaten a whole one)
- the zest of like half a lemon
- 3 cloves of garlic
- a cup of red wine (-ish, I guess)

Preheat your oven to like 440. Get a chicken breast ready and sprinkle it with salt (kosher or sea, obvi) and black pepper. When you're oven's almost ready, pour some olive oil into an oven-safe skillet and heat it over medium-high. When it's hot, put the breast in skin side down and sear it until the skin starts crisping up. Then transfer it to the oven and cook for 12-16 more minutes, depending on the size of the breast.

While yr chicken's roasting, melt 3 tablespoons of butter in another pan over medium-low heat. Slice up half a large zucchini, thin but not flimsy. Also mince three clothes of garlic. When the butter is melted throw in the garlic, zucchini, and lemon zest and saute until the garlic and zucchini both soften, no more than a few minutes. Turn it down if the garlic starts burning.

When the chicken is done take it out of the pan and put the pan on a burner at medium. Deglaze the pan with some wine and reduce it until it's more of a sauce than a wine. Meanwhile, take the zucchini out of its pan, put it in a bowl, and cover it with some of the garlic. Then, when the wine is reduced, finish it with the leftover butter and garlic from the other pan. Drizzle the sauce over the chicken and EAT THAT SHIT. Ahem.

Whores in my head

108. Pixies - "Hey" (from the Doolittle album, 4AD, 1989)

I've been making this a lot recently because the closest supermarket sells a pound of pasta for 89 cents and I'm broke and love canned tuna fish. It's mostly stolen from a recipe in the Letters to the Editor section of last month's Bon Apetit, except I changed spaghetti out for linguine (best pasta evs), lemon peel for fennel seed, and fancy pouch tuna for the regular old Bumblebee can. Here we go:

Set a pot of salted water to boil. While that's happening, mince like 2-4 cloves of garlic (I love lotsa garlic like most right-thinking people). Open the can of tuna, and drain some of its oil into a small skillet. When the water is boiling, throw in one serving of linguine and turn the skillet on low. Throw the garlic into the oil along with some crushed, dried chili peppers and some fennel seeds. Cook until the garlic is soft, which should be about as long as the pasta takes to cook. Right around when yr ready to drain the pasta, throw half a little can of tuna into the skillet and mix it up with the garlic, pepper, and fennel seeds. Use a little of the pasta water to moisten the tuna and then toss the pasta in the mixture. Add some Romano and Parmesan and eat that shit.

This serves one, but it shouldn't be too hard to extrapolate for more, yeah? You really know you're with good folks if you can serve em canned tun linguine.

Gimme one drink

145. the Rolling Stones - "Loving Cup" (from the Exile on Main St. album, Rolling Stones Records/Atlantic, 1972)

Out of my by no means expansive cooking repertoire, I'll def take these chicken tacos to double down on.

Ok, so start off by pre-heating your oven to 450 and getting two bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts onto a roasting pan or a rimmed baking sheet or whatevs. Cover them with olive oil and season with salt and pepper and stick them in that oven. They'll roast for a while, depending on their size, I dunno, I'm not good with looking at the clock and such. They'll be golden on the outside and white all the way through. Now, you never like to cut into meat while it's cooking, but to be honest this thing is gonna have a sauce, so if some of the juices run out it's not the end of the world, cut in if you really need to check.

But yeah, while the breasts are in the oven, you wanna melt a few tbsps of butter in a frying pan over medium-low heat and throw a chopped onion into it. Cook the onions until they're soft and then throw in 2/3 (or, I dunno, 5/7) of a big old can of chopped tomatoes (with the juice) and two chopped chipotle peppers with a bit of the adobo sauce they come oh so conveniently packed in. Stir together, season with salt and pepper and cook on low until the chicken is almost ready.

When the chicken is ready, take it out of the oven and let it rest for a few minutes while you get two forks out. Skin the breasts and get to shredding. Just get your forks in and pull them apart with the grain. This'll take a few minutes.

Just before you're ready to put the chicken in the sauce, throw into the sauce a little heavy cream. Basically you want the sauce to drop a shade, but still be recognizably red. Richness, yo. When that looks good, throw all the shredded chicken into the sauce and mix it together and voila.

Now, for the tortillas (corn fa sho). You can warm them up in the oven, that usually works fine for me. Obvi, you can also fry them as is traditional, but if you choose to do that, be sure to get the oil (a neutral oil is best, corn oil for example) real, real hot, so you can cook the tortillas for just a few seconds on each side and not just have them soaking, absorbing all the oil.

But yeah, put the chicken on the tortillas (kitchen tongs!) and enjoy, shit's real tasty.

EDIT: Ay, double up on the tortillas btw, and depending on breast size (the chicken's, not yrs) and how much you stuff yr tacos this should produce like 8-13 of them)

In Love With Bacon & Egg Risotto

165. The Paradise - "In Love With You" (Vulture Music, 2003)



A rich Bacon & Egg Risotto recipe for this richest of Alan Braxe's French House tracks. Adapted from here.

Take 3 slices of thick cut bacon and put them in a dry frying pan over medium-low heat. Cook them until a good amount of fat renders and they are crispy but not dry. Yr not eating cardboard, yr eating delicious bacon. Remove them and drain them on some paper towels. Put like one tbsp. of butter in the bacon fat and let it melt.

Meanwhile, put about 4 quarts of chicken broth (or whatever broth) (stock works too) (not just water though) in the a sauce pan and bring it up to a simmer. Pretty little bubbles.

While the broth heats up, turn the heat in the pan up a smidgen and throw in one medium-sized, chopped white onion. Let the onions cook until translucent and throw in 1 1/2 cups of Arborio Rice. Stir that up for a bit, add some salt and pepper, and let the rice fry with the onions for a minute. The rice will get translucent on the outside and remain white on the inside.

When this wonderful effect is achieved add a good few sips of white wine. Stir the rice and onions and let them absorb the wine. Then, the fun begins. Add the chicken broth like 3/4 of a cup at a time, and keep stirring or shaking the risotto (whatever dance you wanna do, baby) until the liquid is mostly absorbed. The rice won't get dry, as the starch is released and mixes with the broth, but you'll be able to tell when it's not absorbing more liquid.

Then, add more broth and keep stirring and adding. How long it takes to finish will vary, but expect a minimum of 20 minutes from the first time you add the broth. At that point, start tasting the rice. It should taste cooked but not completely mushy. During yr last stock addition, add another tbsp of butter, 1/3 cup of Parmesan, and the bacon you cooked earlier, which you should chop at some point.

When the risotto is done, you'll wanna top it with a poached egg yolk. No whites for this one, just the really delicious part. Put a few inches of water in a saucepan and bring it up to a calm, not at all violent simmer. Then gently lower an egg yolk into and let it cook. It should lay there for a minute and it'll be ready. Slide it out on a slotted spoon and put it on top of the risotto. Break it whenevs. The choice is yours. This should feed you and a dance partner. Though God knows if you make it yourself you might eat more than your share.

So pick a BC date, cuz you're history

229. Big Daddy Kane - "Ain't No Half Steppin" (Cold Chillin', 1988)
230. Dizzee Rascall - "Fix Up Look Sharp" (XL Recordings, 2003)
231. Jay-Z - "99 Problems" (Roc-a-Fella Records, 2004)

I've Got the White Rice, I Get on Down

My mom used to make something like this, and I thought I'd do it the other day. It's kind of like a rice pudding, except with no pudding to speak of. It's a good snack or dessert though, and a great way to use up some white rice.

Simply grab some cold, cooked white rice and a peeled apple, and mix something like 3 parts rice to 1 part grated apple. Then add a few dashes of cinnamon and a few tablespoons of sour cream and mix it all together. If it looks like it needs more sour cream, add more sour cream. It ain't rocket science, I assure you. Mine looked like this (and tasted delicious):

Fooooood

288. Ennio Morricone - "the Ecstasy of Gold" (from the Good, the Bad And the Ugly - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, United Artists Records, 1967)

So one day a studio decided to let Italians make that most quintessential of American movie genres, the Western, and it turned out they were amazing at it (not to mention at writing super-dramatic Western scores. In that spirit, our scientists took a quintessential Tex-Mex form, the quesadilla, and filled it with Italian goodness.

The Ecstasy of Cheese Quesadilla (alternately the Good, the Bad, and the Cheesy)

Ingredients:
1 tbsp olive oil (or olive oil spray)
1 12" tortilla (flour or corn works)
Some grated mozzarella (enough to mostly cover half a tortilla)
1 or 2 fresh sprigs of basil, chopped
1 or 2 deli slices of pepperoni, chopped (optional)
1 small roasted red pepper, chopped (optional)
1 or 2 marinated artichoke hearts, chopped (optional)

Coat the bottom of a frying pan in olive oil and heat. Next, place tortilla on pan, cover half of it with cheese, and sprinkle with basil and, if ya like the meat, pepperoni. Fold and cook on medium to high heat, and flip when the bottom side is a little crispy and the cheese has melted. Wait til the second side is crispy and then take it off and serve with some Italian-ish topping. I used alternating rays of roasted red peppers and marinated artichoke hearts, but I'd imagine others might prefer Olives or Parmesan Cheese.