Honestly, it’s almost enough to make one start eating lutefisk.
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
½ tablespoon yeast
½ cup warm water
1¾ cups flour
¼ teaspoon salt (1 teaspoon more later)
1 pound beef chuck, round roast, or rump roast
2 garlic cloves
2 medium onions
9 dates. (If fresh, remove pits)
4 tomatoes
2 tablespoons vegetable oil (2 tablespoons more later)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 cup tomato sauce
¼ teaspoon aniseed
1 bay leaf
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon cumin
¼ teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon salt
1⅔ cups water
Serves 5. Takes 2 hours 20 minutes.
PREPARATION
Add yeast and ½ cup water to small mixing bowl. Mix with fork until yeast dissolves. Let sit for 15 minutes. Add flour and ¼ teaspoon salt to medium mixing bowl. Mix with fork. Make a small depression in the middle of the flour. Pour yeasty water into depression. Knead flour/yeasty water until you get a big, non-sticky dough ball. Cover medium mixing bowl and let dough sit for 1 hour.
While dough sits, cut beef into 1″ cubes. Mince garlic cloves and onions. Dice dates and tomatoes. Add beef and 2 tablespoons oil to pan. Sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until beef is completely browned. Stir enough to ensure even browning. Remove beef from heat.
Add 2 tablespoons oil, garlic, and onion to pot. Sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until onion softens. Stir frequently. Add tomato paste and return beef. Reduce heat to medium and cook for 2 minutes. Stir frequently. Add tomato sauce, aniseed, bay leaf, cinnamon, cumin, pepper, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1⅔ cups water to pot. Stir. Add diced dates and tomatoes. Cover stew and simmer on low heat for 25 minutes.
While stew simmers, divide the dough into 8 small dough balls. Cover with damp cloth and let sit for 30 minutes. Gently add small dough balls to pot. Simmer at low heat for another 40 minutes. Stir occasionally and gently. Remove bay leaf and serve.
TIDBITS
1) Tukasu is a stew.
2) “Stew” is an anagram for “wets.”
3) It is also as anagram for “west.”
4) Culinary anagramists will note that stew can be rearranged to form the word “stwe.”
5) Stwe is rarely used in normal conversation.
6) Oh my gosh, there’s a bunny outside my office window.
7) Bunny wants me to tell you there’s no such word in the English. Not even in medical terminology. Which is why none of the medical TV shows even say, “stwe.”
8) Bunny also says it not a French word, a Dutch word, nor even one in Latin.
9) Why did Bunny help me with this information? Because I feed him carrots and raisins.
10) My fair city, Poway, is justly proud of its multilingual rabbits.
11) Another arrangement of stwe is “twes.”
12) Twes is the plural form of twe.
13) As in, “Shall I take two twes or just one twe to the party?
14) My word! I forget the anagram “stew.”
15) Every word is its own anagram.
16) Like “onion” is an anagram for “onion.”
17) Oh sure it’s blindingly obvious now, but did you know that before you got to tidbit 16?
18) If you know of any real anagrams for “stwe” existing in other languages, please inform me.
21) And I’ll pass on your discovery to Bunny. Bunnies devote nearly all of theirs life searching for rabbit and watching out for hawks. The only real pleasure rabbits indulge in their rare leisure moments is creating new anagrams or finding out about new ones. Bunny and I thank you in advance for your help and consideration.
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.
Be flexible.
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 writer hard at work.
Thinking Up a Plot Twist
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 – DOUGH
2¼ cups flour (3 more tablespoons later)
1 tablespoon olive oil (1 tablespoon and 3 more cups later)
½ cup water
INGREDIENTS – FILLING
1 bunch chard leaves (maybe ¾ pound)
enough water to cover chard leaves
1 small white onion
1 tablespoon olive oil (3 more cups later)
⅔ cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 eggs (1 more egg later)
INGREDIENTS – ASSEMBLY
1 egg
3 tablespoons flour
3 cups olive oil
Serves 4. Takes 1 hour 30 minutes.
PREPARATION – DOUGH
Add 2¼ cups flour to large mixing bowl. Gradually add oil and water. Knead by hand with each addition. Stop adding water when you form a dough ball that isn’t sticky. Put in refrigerator for 30 minutes.
PREPARATION – FILLING
Remove chard leaves from stems. Slice chard leaves into ½” squares. Add enough water to cover chard to large pot. Bring to boil using high heat. Add chard to pot. Blanch chard for 5 minutes. Drain. Mince onion. Add onion and 1 tablespoon olive oil to pan. Sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minute or until onion softens. Add chard leaves, onion, Parmesan, and 2 eggs to 2nd large mixing bowl. Mix with fork, or by hand until thoroughly mixed.
PREPARATION – ASSEMBLY
Add 1 egg to cup. Beat egg with whisk. Dust flat surface with 3 tablespoons flour. Roll dough out on flat surface to 0.1″ thickness. Make 3″-wide circles from dough. (A glass cup works well for this.) Add 1 teaspoon filling to the middle of each circle. Fold dough circles in half to make half moons. Brush edges with egg. Press down on edges to seal half moons. Add 3 cups olive oil to deep, large pot. Heat oil using medium-high heat. Oil is hot enough when a bit of dough dances in the oil. Carefully add half moons to pot. Fry half moons until they turn brown and blister. Flip half moons enough to prevent burning. Drain on paper towels.
TIDBITS
1) The little known opera, The Barber Juan, also known as Barbajuan, opened and closed on May 5, 1795,
2) The great opera, The Barber of Seville, by Rossini, premiered in 1815.
3) Europe’s decades long, Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815.
4) Coincidence?
5) Perhaps.
6) Look! Look! Two one-word tidbits in a row.
7) Alas, the single-word tidbit streak was broken by the tidbit immediately above.
8) Let this be a lesson to us all. Think before you type.
9) Think before you drink and drive.
10) If you really must do something after getting pickled to the gills, may I suggest drinking and typing?
11) The great American novelist, Ernest Hemingway was supposed to have said, “Write drunk. Edit Sober.”
12) But, in fact, he never said that. Indeed, he always wrote while he was sober.
13) Why?
14) He probably knew that if he wrote while drunk, the quality of his writing would plummet.
15) How far would his prose fall?
16) Probably to the point where he’d be writing such memorable lines as, “Iggy piggy poo. Q1c3 4fvt, 7jmk, UIo97*.”
17) It is worth nothing that any human could type the bon mots, “Iggy piggy poo, and the illustrious Hemingway certainly thought he could write better than any human.”
18) But even more damning to Hemingway’s literary soul was the undeniable fact that all the words after “Iggy piggy poo” could have been made by one of his cats walking from left to right across his typewriter. And Papa Hemingway was certainly vain enough to want to out write his cats. So, he always wrote sober. Now you know.
The struggle is real. We must not let them win.
Angry Man #9
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 15-ounce can baked beans*
1 large tomato
4 pork sausages, breakfast sausages, or bangers
4 slices bacon**
6 mushroom caps
2 slices black pudding (optional)***
1½ tablespoons olive oil
2 slices bread
2 eggs
* = Try to use Heinz beans. Heinz is really popular in England
** = back bacon, pork belly, or regular bacon
*** = can be found online
SPECIAL UTENSILS
3 pans and 1 pot (Not really special, but you’ll need 4 of them.)
sonic obliterator (Now this is a truly special kitchen utensil. Once you get one, you’ll wonder how your ever managed to do without one.)
Serves 2. Takes 40 minutes.
PREPARATION
Cut tomato into 4 slices. Add beans to small pot. Simmer at low heat until the sauce that comes with the beans thicken. Cover and reduce heat to warm or lowest setting. Stir enough to prevent burning.
Poke sausages with fork or toothpick. (This keeps the sausage juices from building up and coming out in a hot jet.) Add sausages to 1st pan. Fry sausages at medium heat for 15 minutes or until completely browned. Turn enough to ensure even browning. Turn enough to prevent burning Cover and reduce heat to warm..
While sausage fry or warm, add bacon to 2nd pan. Fry bacon for 3 minutes or until it reaches your desired level of doneness. Turn occasionally to ensure even browning. Cover and reduce heat to warm. Remove from heat and set aside Turn enough to prevent burning.
While sausages simmer, add mushrooms to 2rd pan. (The one that had the bacon.) Sauté at medium-high heat for 2 minutes or until they turn brown. Turn enough to keep from burning. Remove mushrooms from heat. Add black pudding to 3rd pan. Sauté at medium heat for 3 minutes or until it both sides turn crispy. Flip once. Remove and set aside.
Add 1½ tablespoons olive oil to 3th pan. Heat at medium heat until tiny piece of bread in the oil starts to dance. Add bread slices. Sauté for 2 minutes or until both sides are crispy and golden brown. Flip once. Remove and set aside Add eggs to this, the 3rd pan. Fry eggs until they are done to your liking. Remove from heat and set aside. Add tomato slices. Reduce heat to low-medium. Sauté for 2 minutes. Flip once.
Add equal amounts of everything to 2 serving plates. Use sonic obliterator on anyone gives you any guff at all during the cooking or the presentation. You don’t need that kind of negativity in your kitchen.
TIDBITS
1) People ask me, “How does one start writing again while suffering from writers’ block?”
2) Go find your muse. Of course, you might just discover that your muse has gone on a drunken bender.
3) So you go on a pub crawl to find her. At each stop, you ask the bartender if he’s seen your muse.
4)“I’m not telling you a thing,” says the bartender, “until you’ve ordered a drink.”
5) So, you order and down a whiskey.
6) “Your muse was here ten minutes ago,” says the man serving drinks, “but she went to the next bar up the street.”
7) So you enter the next bar. That bartender also refuses to talk unless you’ve bought a drink. You order another whiskey. The barkeep informs you that she moved onto a bar two blocks west. “She was a with a gal called Betty.”
8) And so it goes. You drink a whiskey at every bar you go into. The bartender states that you just missed her, but you can find at a bar that’s really not very far away. And so you stagger doggedly on after her.
9) Hours later, your muse parts company with Betty. But the muse conquers bar after bar.
10) Eventually, you give up. You decide to head home. In your car.
11) A vigilant traffic cop notices you weaving from lane to lane. He pulls you over.
12) “But officer,” you hear yourself saying, “I’m a writer. I was looking for my muse, but she was on a pub crawl.”
13) The officer sneers. “Like, I haven’t heard that one before.”
14) This is why writing is not as easy as some people think.
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, 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 cup strawberries
1 cup butter, softened
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups confectioners’ sugar
SPECIAL UTENSILS
food processor
electric beater
no-stick pan
Frosts 1 double-layer cake or 24 cupcakes. Takes 1 hour.
PREPARATION
Remove green leaves and stems from strawberries. Puree strawberries in food processor. Add butter and vanilla extract to mixing bowl. Mix with electric beater set on medium until fluffy. Set electric beater to medium while gradually add in confectioners’ sugar. Mix until fluffy and completely blended.
Add pureed strawberry to no-stick pan. Cook at medium high until puree starts to boil. Stir constantly. Remove heat to low-medium. Simmer until strawberry puree reduces to ⅓ cup. Stir constantly. Remove thickened puree and put in refrigerator until puree cools to room temperature.
Use spatula to gradually fold strawberry puree into bowl with butter/confectioners’ sugar mix. If frosting turns out a bit thin, thicken it by putting it in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
TIDBITS
1) Strawberries are great. They are ever so tasty. One of baseball’s greatest star was Darryl Strawberry. He played for the 1986 world champion New York Mets. One of music’s greatest bands was The Strawberry Alarm Clock.
2) Strawberries are part of the rose family. Who knew
3) Ancient Romans believed strawberries cured depression, kidney stones, and a sore throat. The Roman Empire was one of the world’s mightiest and longest living empires, so they might be right.
4) See the Strawberry Museum in Wépion, Belgium to learn everything about this wondrous fruit.
5) All hail, the strawberry.
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 the leaf blower a crime against humanity?
Angry Man #8
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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