The struggle is real.
Angry Man #19
Let me end this post on a positive note. I love you all.
Thank you for reading my blogs for the last two years. Thank you. Thank you.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
INGREDIENTS
1 small white onion
1 small red onion
3 garlic cloves
1½ tablespoons olive oil
1½ pounds ground beef
3 large eggs
1 tablespoon parsley
1 green bell pepper
1 green chile
1 14.5 can diced tomatoes
½ teaspoon coriander
1 teaspoon cumin
½ teaspoon tarragon
2 teaspoons fresh cilantro
1 cup grated pepper jack cheese
1½ cups bread crumbs
SPECIAL UTENSIL
8″-x-8″ baking dish
Serves 4. Takes 1 hour 20 minutes.
PREPARATION
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mince red onion, white onion, and garlic. Add this to olive oil and sauté on medium heat until soft or about 6 minutes. Dice bell pepper and green chile. Combine red onion, white onion, garlic, ground beef, eggs, bell pepper, green chile, diced tomatoes, coriander, cumin, tarragon, cilantro, pepper jack cheese, and bread crumbs. You really need to use your hands to do a good job here.
(Better yet, get your nine-year old to mix this up. He’ll welcome the opportunity to be helpful while getting his hands messy. Take advantage of this willingness before he becomes a teenager.)
OR…dice and mince all the above ingredients and put them all into the oil to sauté at once. This will save six minutes.
(Saving six minutes is particularly useful if there is an accidental nuclear countdown near your home, you’re the only one with the key to abort the launch with the resulting global nuclear war, and you really don’t have the extra six minutes needed to perform this extra culinary step, eat this meal, and get to the missile silo in time.)
Spray 8″-by-8″ baking dish with no-stick cooking spray. Transfer the meat mix to this dish. Smooth the meat until it is a flat as the Kansan prairie. Bake for 50 minutes at 350 degrees. Let cool for 5 minutes.
TIDBITS
1) According to The Tales of the Arabian Nights, coriander is an aphrodisiac.
2) We should all absorb the lessons of great literature.
3) Coriander is also mentioned in the Bible. The Bible does not mention any non-culinary benefits from Tarragon.
4) Indeed, The Good Book commands, “Do not commit adultery.”
5) Sometime in the 1600s, two English publishers came out with a Bible with the exciting command, “Thou Shall Commit Adultery.”
6) The King of England fearing for the morals of his people, outlawed this version of the Bible, and heavily fined the publishers.
7) Editing and correct spicing are musts.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Can’t hear you. My ears are hairy.
Now that I’m getting older
Hair will grow longer in my ears.
I’d rather not have it happen.
Does it help the cause of evolution?
Bread slices evolved o’er the years
To hold PB&J, roast beef,
And chili cheese dogs, too.
But why hair in men’s ears?
At least we now have an excuse.
Sorry, boss. Sorry, dears.
We can’t hear you ‘cuz
There’s hair in our ears.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
That’s right,
I mean business.
Early this morning, I turned my Miniturizo Ray(tm) on Jupiter. The planet is now only four inches across, easy peasy for my PlanetoPull Ray(tm).
So, the entire planet Jupiter is now sitting comfortably in a little bowl on a table in my office.
And there it’s going to stay until I’m paid one trillion-and-five dollars.*
*The extra five dollars is just a negotiating play. That way the ransom payers can say they bargained me down and feel good about themselves.
Anyway, if you want to ever again see Jupiter in the night sky, you’d better come up with the cash, Nash.
The left-below picture shows Jupiter in my office. The right-below picture shows a NASA photo. Proof you cannot deny.
You don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t get paid. I might draw a big butt on Jupiter. Or maybe I’ll just keep the planet as a paperweight.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
INGREDIENTS
RICE BED
1½ cups rice
3 cups water (1½ cups more later in SAUCE)
1 green pepper
MARINADE
2 ½ tablespoons rice vinegar (⅓ cup later in SAUCE)
1 green pepper
1 cup flour
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon Poultry MagicTM spice
1 tablespoon cornstarch (3 tablespoons more later in SAUCE)
4 chicken breasts
SAUCE
1½ cups water
⅓ cup orange juice
⅓ cup rice vinegar
¼ cup soy sauce
1 cup brown sugar
½ teaspoon ginger
1 clove garlic
¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes
½ teaspoon sesame oil
2 tablespoons water
3 tablespoons cornstarch
SPECIAL EQUIPMENT
hammer (If brown sugar is brick hard.)
PREPARATION OF RICE BED
Cook rice according to instructions on accompanying bag. This should take about 30 minutes. Add diced green bell pepper to top of rice while cooking.
PREPARATION OF MARINADE
Cut chicken breasts into 1-inch cubes. This is best done when the chicken is partially thawed. Mince garlic. Dice green pepper. If the brown sugar in its box is as hard as a brick, pound the box until the sugar fragments into little bits or individual granules, or until it cries, “Uncle.”
For the marinade, combine the rice vinegar, flour, salt, poultry spice, and cornstarch in large bowl. Mix thoroughly with whisk or fork. Add chicken cubes to bowl. Mix the chicken cubes with ingredients already in the bowl with your hands until the cubes are thoroughly coated. (Your hands will be considered icky for handshaking, so wash them before greeting anyone except door-to-door salesmen.)
PREPARATION OF SAUCE
Combine the 1½ cups water, orange juice, rice vinegar, soy sauce, pounded-into-submission brown sugar, ginger, garlic, red pepper flakes, and sesame oil. Cook over medium-high heat. Stir frequently. Bring to boil.
Gently-–to avoid being splattered by heated sauce–add the coated chicken cubes until the saucepan is full. Cook on medium-high heat for about 5 minutes, or until the coated cubes are golden brown and the chicken is no longer pink inside. Remove cubes with a spoon with holes in it so as to keep the sauce in the pan. Add remaining chicken cubes until all are cooked.
Add 3 tablespoons cornstarch and 2 tablespoons water to sauce remaining in pan. Stir thoroughly with fork or whisk.
Put rice in bowl. Put cooked chicken cubes on top. Spoon sauce over everything. This is great.
TIDBITS
1) Chickens are eaten all over the world because they are tasty and can be found on all continents except Antarctica.
2) Penguins are only found on one continent, Antarctica. Nobody on the upper six continents eat penguins. Perhaps penguins are protected because they come from a continent that since 1959 has been claimed by no nation.
3) After the British-Argentine war over the Falklands, British fighter pilots flew patrol after patrol over the retaken islands. To relieve boredom, they would fly back and forth over penguin colonies. Thousands and thousands of eyes followed them. After a few minutes of this, the jets would rocket straight up into the air. Thousands of penguins would tilt their heads farther and farther back to follow the jets until they all fell over like bowling pins.
4) I’d bet chickens would like to move en masse to Antarctica where they too would be protected.
5) Of course, that assumes that chickens have the brains to think up such a scheme, could cooperate enough to pull it off, and have enough money to book passage for all of them to Antarctica.
6) As of publication, chickens have shown no such abilities.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
The struggle is real. I recently had to go back to the store, horrors, for pomegranate syrup.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Is it safe to visit?
Weeds
If you kill a neighbor,
You’ll die for murder.
If you kill a weed,
You’ll never bleed.
I do good deeds
When I’m happy.
I attack my weeds
When life goes crappy.
If the garden looks like sin,
By all means, please come in.
No weeds! Don’t knock on my sill
Without writing your will,
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
INGREDIENTS 
6 medium brown potatoes
14 ounces diced green chiles
2 medium white onions
3 cups grated Four Mexican cheeses
3 tablespoons butter
PREPARATION – POTATOES
Gently scrub the potatoes to remove dirt. Cut out the potatoes’ eyes. This is not an act of barbarity. The eyes are those little rooty things that grow out of the potato when you leave them in the potato bin for too long.
You might want to stab each potato a few times. (Okay, let out your aggression here.) This prevents steam from building up to the point your potato explodes. Boom!
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Put the potatoes in the oven and bake for about 50 minutes. (You do need to plan ahead. Watch two episodes of Man Versus Food while waiting.) Jab a fork into the taters. The fork should slide in easily. This step is essential. Baking with multiple potatoes or multiples of any food can increase the baking time. Also the sizes of the potatoes vary with each baking. And who knows if the temperature of the dial on your oven is accurate? My experience is that most real oven temperatures are less than what the oven’s gauges would have you believe.
Oh, don’t forget to remove those potatoes when done.
PREPARATION -SAUCE
While the potatoes bake, melt the butter. Mince onions in your food processor. Mince onions by hand and you’ll cry. Pour the minced onion and the diced green chiles into the butter. Cook on medium high, stirring constantly. Periodically taste, it’s your kitchen, and stop when you’re satisfied or as soon as the onion changes color. Add in the grated cheese and stir until it melts.
Cut the potatoes open and cover both sides with the sauce. Note, both this sauce and baked potatoes taste much better hot than cold.
Although time consuming, this dish is easy to make and tastes great. When serving this dish to guests, stress the time this dish took and omit the ease of making it.
TIDBITS
1) People from Wisconsin are often called “cheeseheads.”
2) There are about 2,000 varieties of cheese. Cheese will grow moldy. Clean your refrigerator periodically. Cheese can be made from camel’s milk. Never tried it.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Mañana.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Paul De Lancey's Blog 
Another Word Added to Paul’s Awesome Dictionary
Gruntjectives: n: (Pronunciation, just like it looks) Adjectives that get so overused that they lose all meaning. The speaker might as well grunt instead. – Paul’s Awesome Dictionary
Today’s Gruntjective Story:
“I just completed a chat with a tech support person. When they asked for the verification number they’d sent to confirm I’m me, apparently I responded exceptionally well. They responded: ‘Awesome’.”
– the great author Judy Reeves on Facebook(tm)
I commented:
“Maybe the support gets filled with awe whenever she hears an identification number. We should all endeavor to be like her. ‘Look, a glass!’ Be filled with awe. ‘Look, it’s full of water.’ Be filled with more awe. See, how happy you could become.”
My comments made it into this little blog. I’ve learned not to waste moments when my synapses fire.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
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