King Charles was Prince of Wales and William the current Prince of Wales was Prince William when the letter below was written.
It’s nice to know that they have gone up in the world since reading one of my novels.
– 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 – MARINADE
2 ancho chiles, dried or fresh
1 chipotle chile from can. (Keep 2 tablespoons of the can’s liquid)
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon coriander
2 teaspoons epazote or oregano
4 garlic cloves
1 teaspoon salt (1 teaspoon more later)
1¾ cups water
1 tablespoon vinegar
INGREDIENTS – LAMB
3 pounds boneless lamb parts*
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 large bananas leaf or 3 avocado leaves**
2 cups bone broth, beef broth, or water
INGREDIENTS – GARNISH
1 medium onion
⅓ cup fresh cilantro
2 tablespoons lime juice
12 8″-flour tortillas
* = Beef is the most popular meat for this in Mexico. Goat is also popular. Regions in Mexico usually have a strong preference. But NO ground meat.
** = Bananas leaves and avocado leaves are mighty hard to find outside of Mexican or Asian supermarkets. If you cannot find them, use cornhusks, parchment paper, or tin foil as a substitute. Leaf or leaves should be able to cover the width of the slow cooker.
SPECIAL UTENSILS
food processor or blender
slow cooker
serving platter
Serves 6. Takes 9 hours 40 minutes.
PREPARATION – MARINADE
Remove stem and seeds from ancho and chipotle chile. Add all marinade ingredients to food processor. Puree in food processor.
PREPARATION – LAMB
Rub salt onto lamb. Cut lamb into as many pieces necessary to fit them in a slow cooker. Add oil to pan. Heat oil at high heat until it starts to ripple. Carefully, carefully add lamb pieces. Sauté lamb at high heat until all sides are well seared or you get a dark-brown crust on the lamb. Turn over to sear the other side of the meat.
Wrap lamb with banana leaf. Add wrapped lamb and marinade to slow cooker. Ladle broth over banana-leaf wrapped lamb. Set slow cooker and high and cook for 9 hours or until lamb becomes fall-apart tender. Shred lamb with forks. Keep liquid.
PREPARATION – FINAL
While lamb cooks, dice cilantro. Thinly slice onion. Cover serving platter with banana leaf. Place shredded lamb on banana leaf. Ladle juice from slow cooker over lamb. Sprinkle with lime juice. Warm tortillas by placing on pan with the heat set at medium. Remove as soon as they get warm. Or microwave tortillas for 10 seconds. Fill tortillas with lamb. Garnish with cilantro and onion. Goes well with with green salsa.
TIDBITS
1) The stars in our universe exhibit a red shift. That’s because they’re moving away from us. This observed red shift in our celestial orbs gave rise to the Big Bang Theory. The color red makes objects move things move from other things. For example, forest fires are red. Forest fires move away from their starting points.
2) Red picnic-table cloths, left unchecked, would move themselves away from the picnic table. This is why people have potlucks. The plates laden with potato salads, hot dogs, and corn on the cob provide enough weight to counteract the Moving Away Force (MAF) on the red table cloths.
3) The Germans experimented with red tablecloths in World War II. They hoped their table cloths would move away from the ground and into the path of Allied bombers. The red objects, however, moved away from the bombers as well. These Nazi tablecloths still continue outward trek. Look for them in the Asteroid Belt, if you have a powerful enough telescope.
4) Naturally, other red objects such as plates exhibit MAF. A totally red plate would leap off the kitchen table and crash through a window in a quest to join its brethren in the Asteroid Belt. Plates with only a tiny bit of red in them display a tiny MAF. (See above picture.) Such plates require only a little bit of food to keep them in place.
5) Of course, blue objects show Moving Toward Force (MTF.) This is why so many people end up wearing blue shirts. To be safe, you really should avoid blue and red altogether. If, however, you must use these colors, for Pete’s sake, you them in equal amounts. (See above picture again.)
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.
Burmese Dessert
INGREDIENTS
1 16-ounce can coconut cream
or 2 14-ounces cans coconut milk.
3 eggs
2 tablespoons sesame seeds
1 cup semolina or cream of wheat
1 cup sugar
¼ cup ghee or butter
½ teaspoon cardamom
Note: if you need to make coconut cream from coconut milk, you will need to keep cans of coconut milk in the fridge overnight.
SPECIAL UTENSIL
8″ square cake pan
PREPARATION – COCONUT CREAM (If you can’t find it in stores.)
Chill coconut milk cans in refrigerator for 24 hours. Open cans and scoop out the thick cream on the top. Keep 16 ounces, or 2 cups, of coconut cream. Use the rest of the coconut cream and the liquid in the bottom of the cans to make coconut-based smoothies
PREPARATION – ONCE YOU HAVE COCONUT CREAM.
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Separate egg yolks from egg whites.
Add sesame seeds to pan. Fry sesame seeds for 3 minutes at medium heat or until seeds brown. Stir constantly. Remove seeds from heat.
Add semolina to large pot. Slowly add in the coconut cream, stirring each time to prevent lumps. Add sugar. Stir until sugar dissolves. Bring to boil using medium heat for 3-to-5 minutes or until mixture begins to thicken. Stir constantly. Add ghee. Cook for 2 minutes or until mixture thickens to the point that it leaves the side of the pot. Remove from heat.
Add cardamom and eggs yolks to pot. Mix with whisk until this batter is well blended. Add egg whites to small mixing bowl. Whisk egg whites until they thicken and form peaks. Fold egg whites into batter. Pour batter into cake pan. Top with sesame seeds. Bake at 325 degrees for about 45 minutes or until cake start to brown or a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.
Let cool in cake pan. Cut into squares and serve warm.
TIDBITS
1) The Burma-Vita company first produced Burma ShaveTM in 1925. The product was said to include products from Burma. Antarctic Shave wouldn’t have worked. It 
would have had to included ice and cubes and penguin meat. No one would have wanted to shave with that, particularly during the summer.
2) At first Burma Shave only sold a bit better than Antarctic Shave.
3) Then Burma Shave came out with a brushless shaving cream. To promote this new, improved product they came up with a brilliant advertising campaign. They put a series of six small signs in a row alongside major roads. Early motorists got a chuckle out of reading them.
4) And they bought Burma Shave. The company became the second-largest seller of brushless shaving cream. The number-one company sold more.
5) Sales of Burma Shave after declined after the development of the atomic bomb.
6) This is probably coincidence.
7) But roadside Burma-Shave signs got put up less and less often with new advancement of nuclear weaponry. Indeed, about a year after the world almost went wonky during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the signs all got taken down.
8) Why do advertisers always say, “new and improved?” Shouldn’t “improved” be implied? Is there really a possibility of companies proudly putting out an product that’s “new and worsened?” How can something be improved if it’s new? You can only improve something that’s been around for a while.
9) Indeed, the first ICBM was just plain new. Now, the second generation of ICBMs could have be improved, but the whole ICBM concept was no longer new. Could the company that made the ICBMs have boasted of “new and improved” nuclear warfare. If so, I must have missed the radio jingle.
10) But the fond memories of the Burma-Shave signs never left our hearts. They would show up again and again in literature, including the very best of cat-herding novels, The Fur West.
11) There is no evidence that cats ever read the Burma-Shave signs. Cats do not shave. Coincidence?
Perhaps.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
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.
American Breakfast
CORNED BEEF HASH
INGREDIENTS
3 medium brown potatoes
1 pound corned beef
1 onion
2 tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons parsley
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/4 cup beef broth or broth from cooking corned beef
PREPARATION
Bake potatoes, keep skins on, at 400 degrees for 40 minutes or until potatoes are soft. Remove potatoes. While potatoes cool, dice corned beef and mince onion. Put onion and butter in large skillet. Sauté onion at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until it softens. Stir frequently.
Cut potatoes into 1/2″ cubes. Add potato, corned beef, parsley, Worcestershire sauce, pepper, and broth to skillet. Cook on medium heat for 10 minutes or until potato turns golden brown. Stir occasionally. Add broth and cook for another 3 minutes. Stir occasionally.
TIDBITS
1) Reporters once ridiculed Vice President Dan Quayle for misspelling potato. Thank goodness for him he didn’t need to write the word “heteroskedasticity.” Indeed how many reporters can spell that word? Can you spell “heteroskedasticity?” Okay, without looking at this tidbit? Of course, if you weren’t looking at this, you wouldn’t be challenged to spell “hetero…” Oh never mind.
2) Potatoes are used to make French fries at baseball games. However, corned beef hash is not served at any baseball stadium, not even at the single A level. Caviar-and-filet mignon hash might be served at ball parks located in the ritziest of neighborhoods, but I’ve never heard of it.
3) By the way, the word “hornswoggle,” meaning to “bamboozle,” comes from baseball as this excerpt from the novel The Fur West states,
“I loved baseball, too. Timmy played it and so did many of my other friends, Jeb, Bobby, Pete, and Josh, although I didn’t cotton to a sneaky Irish kid named Sean Hornswoggle. The redhead would hit the ball and run directly to second base if he thought he could get away with it. We soon took to calling any cheating “hornswoggling.”
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
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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