We all love going here.
Especially, waffle-loving oenologists.
Expert sommeliers are on hand to pair wines with your waffles’ toppings.
“You’ll never forget your first wine and waffle.” – Gourmet Diners
Gourmet Diners, November Issue
– 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.
Gourmet bunny
There’s a bunny outside my outside window! I have to watch it.
It likes to eat weeds. I like that it likes weeds.
Specifically, it prefers stray bits of weed that have been cut off by my weed whacker and have started to turn brown.
I have gourmet bunnies living out front in the hedge.
– 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.
I had to use this. My photo of Biden didn’t look like Biden
I have invited every president to a debate or a dinner. I see no reason to stop this fine tradition. So,
Dear President Biden,
I am officially inviting you and whomever you wish to come with you to have a gourmet five-course meal at my humble abode in Poway, California. My wonderful wife, many friends, and I eagerly await your appearance. As you know, Mr. President, Poway is the hot point of all political campaigns and legislation. The saying runs, “As goes Poway, so does the Presidency.”
You’ll have have a great time in Poway with its many streets, walking trails, theaters, library, and the site of the proposed Candyland(tm) Museum. So, please come. It will help your approval rating. And heck, you’ll have fun chowing down on home-style gourmet cooking.
Sincerely,
Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
P.S. I even have the complete collection of The Adventures of Robin Hood with Richard Greene. We could watch that after dinner.
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.
Dance as a Greek goddess at the DMV
Everybody knows that waiting in line at the DMV is the most soul-sucking experience imaginable.
But we are all wrong.
Just because the slow lines inside the DMV resemble plate tectonics, it doesn’t mean our imagination and hopes have to slow that much as well. No! Well then, what do we do in those funereal confines?
I’m glad you asked. Here are some fun things you can do while waiting to turn in your paperwork for a smart license.
1) Start a flash-mob Greek dancing extravaganza. Put on your togas, crank up the Hellenic flute music and rock the joint as your favorite Greek goddess or muse.
2) Start a chess tournament. Don’t worry, there will be enough time. You’ll need to bring your own tables and chess sets.
Such fun
3) Give archery lessons. Isn’t there a risk of hitting someone? Won’t someone move into the path of the arrow? No, people don’t move inside the DMV. Well, hardly ever. And even then, your impeded shot will just make the line shorter. It’s a win-win scenario for all but the victim.
4) Organize a reading contest. The first person to read Moby Dick from cover to cover wins.
5) Set up a film festival. Screen the car classics, Thunder Road, Smokey and the Bandit, Death Race 2000, and if time permits, Mad Max – Fury Road.
6) Do DMV dating. It’s just like speed dating where you get five minutes with a potential date, but much, much longer.
7) Keep track of your time and apply it to any future jail sentences.
Dine Well While Waiting Out the Line
8) Bring a crossword puzzle book. Finish it.
9) Have a candlelit gourmet lunch with the person next in line. Dinner on lobster thermidor, steak au poivre vert, chicken Florentine, and baked Alaska. Meet the love of your life, make a business contact, or just past the time with delicious food and pleasing conversation.
10) Learn Portuguese. You never know when you’ll go to Brazil.
11) Get paid by the hour while you keep a billionaire’s place in line. The billionaire can use this time to rocket into space. It’s a win-win situation.
As you can see, there are many exhilarating things you can do while in line in the DMV. I hope to see you there. Son of a bee, we’ll have great glee at the ‘MV
– 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 onion
2½ tablespoons butter
15 saffron threads
¼ pound blanched or slivered almonds
2 eggs yolks
3 cups chicken stock
3 tablespoons sherry
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
⅛ teaspoon pepper
¼ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon Spanish paprika or paprika
½ cup cream
2 teaspoons slivered almonds
2 tablespoons fresh parsley
SPECIAL UTENSIL
spice grinder or food processor
Serves 5. Takes 1 hour.
PREPARATION
Mince onion. Melt butter in pan using low-medium heat. Add onion. Simmer at low-medium heat for 8 minutes or until onion softens and turns yellow. Stir frequently. Add saffron. Simmer at low-medium heat for 3 minutes. Stir occasionally.
Add blanched almonds to pan. Toast by using medium-high heat until almonds start to brown. Grind toasted almonds until they become a paste. Add almond paste, egg yolks, and minced onion to mixing bowl. Mix with fork until you a well blended almond/egg/onion paste.
Add chicken stock, sherry, nutmeg, pepper, salt, and Spanish paprika to pot. Bring to boil using high heat. Stir occasionally. Reduce heat to low-medium and add cream. Gradually add almond/egg/onion paste. Stir until well blended. Simmer at low-medium heat for 10 minutes. Stir occasionally. While soup simmers, mince parsley. Garnish soup with slivered almonds and parsley.
TIDBITS
1) There have been documented instances of the heavens raining fish. This sounds pretty exciting, especially if I needed an expensive fish for a gourmet meal and the nearest supermarket that carries it is an hour away. I would like it even better if the clouds rained Almond Sherry Soup. Well, why not? I’d be out their with buckets, I can tell you. Wear a raincoat.
– 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.
Dear Mr. President,
I am officially inviting you and whomever you wish to bring with you to have a gourmet five-course meal at my humble abode in Poway, California. My wonderful wife and many friends eagerly await your appearance. As you know, Mr. President, Poway is the hot spot of all political campaigns. The saying runs, “As goes Poway, so does the Presidency. ”
You will have have a great time in Poway with its many streets, walking trails, proposed Candyland(tm) Museum, and library.* So, please come. The prestige you’ll reap from visiting Poway and me will let you overawe your opponents in Congress. Lord knows you need help with that. And heck, you’ll have fun chowing down on home-style gourmet cooking.
Sincerely,
Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
P.S. May I suggest you invite your wife to come along with you. You don’t want to get in trouble. And I could talk to her Ph.D. to Ph.D. It would be such fun.
* = Our library even has a little aquarium. You can look at it for hours without even noticing the time. All the while, you’ll feel your many troubles melting away. Now, what is there in Washington that can do that for you?
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.
We won the war. We brought the Nazis to their knees, not some namby-pamby foot soldier who probably counted dodging Spam thrown in the mess halls as combat experience. Yes sir, it was me and the airmen of Okeechobee. Young man, I’m gonna tell you our story.
Okeechobee, Florida then was only known for its millions of bugs; huge bugs the size of baseballs. But it was there, in 1944, that the Army set up the 800th Bomber Group, captained by Henry Pizarro.
Well, we were out in the middle of nowhere in a state often forgotten by the rest of the Union. Supplies never did get to us in a regular manner. Sometimes we’d go weeks without any supplies. Sometimes, we got a lot of stuff we didn’t really need. One week they sent us one million scarves, and 22,187 bird feeders stamped “U.S. Army bird feeder, Red-Headed Woodpecker Only.” Antonio Cedeno, Army Head Scratcher First Class, scratched his head and said, “That’s army for you.” Oh, we also received eight hundred tons of papayas. It seemed that although our nation’s scientists were still failing with the general concept of refrigeration, they had miraculously found a way to refrigerate papayas several months ago.
Well, around August, we had run out of all food but papayas for two months, and no one wanted to eat bugs. Hell, the bugs had been biting us so much that some of us figured we’d be cannibals if we’d eat them. So, we approached Lieutenant Kelso, who was in charge of food supplies. Kelso said that he was mighty sick of papaya soup and papaya burgers. He said he’d raise heaven and earth to find some new food.
The next day we heard a terrible ruckus all around us. Every flea-bitten mutt in the flea-bitten state of Florida was barking, yelping, yipping, and scratching his balls. Sergeant Niekro went out to investigate. Apparently, Kelso planned to use these dogs to sniff up some food for us.
Well, I decided to follow the dogs. They headed away from the mess hall as even dogs get tired of papaya biscuits. Those mutts made a bee line toward the swamp where bugs felt particularly secure and ornery. Way in the distance I could make out that huge ominous, gray, metallic building so forbidding that even the chaplain called it “the Hut of Hell.” The Hut of Hell housed our chemical supplies, used oil drums, and various pleasant poisons.
Those dogs just ran to the Hut and barked something fierce. Kelso, opened the door and immediately the dogs keeled over in agony. Kelso doubled over and proceeded to vomit big yellow chunks of papaya loaf. Sure, it was up to me, Robert Carbo, the man with the big sniffer. I dodged a stream of papaya spew from Kelso and went inside.
As God is my witness, I have never seen so many hot dogs in my life. These hot dogs were arranged in huge columns. Each column was twelve feet long by ten feet wide and stretched at least fifty feet up to the ceiling. There were thousands of these majestic columns.
Well, perhaps not majestic, more like tons of decaying, larva infested, grayish-green beef shapes. How long had they been sitting in that metal building in Florida’s fine, humid, 120-degree weather? However, stench worse than Private Aparicio’s pits after a twenty-mile hike, prompted to me continue this thought outside. I wrenched my boots free from some hot-dog ooze and bolted outside.
I carried Kelso all the way back to the infirmary. Unfortunately, our doctor was away in Miami picking up popsicle sticks off the sidewalks as we had run through our last shipments of tongue depressors. Corporal Johnny Conigliaro, a quack in civilian life, prescribed a dose of deadly nightshade, a rather poisonous, purplish flower. Kelso nearly died from this treatment but did not complain, saying, “It’s worth risking death to eat something that’s not yellowish orange.”
A week later Captain Pizarro, arose from his desk and put on his papaya-woven flak jacket and walked to the mess tent. The cook had outdone himself with a gourmet feast. We started off with a snappy papaya fondue and a Waldorf salad where the apples, celery, walnuts, and mayonnaise were substituted with papaya, papaya, papaya, and papaya sauce. For the main course he regaled us with a choice of: barbecued papaya sandwiches on papaya bread with a papaya sauce or chicken cordon bleu, where instead of chicken, ham, gruyere cheese, breading, and butter, he substituted papaya, papaya, curdled papaya juice, papaya crumbs, and melted papaya. For dessert we could choose either the papaya balls or the papaya flavored ice cream made with creamed papaya instead of cream. We washed down this feast with good ol’ papaya juice.
– 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.
South African Entree
INGREDIENTS
2 slices bread
⅔ cup milk (½ cup more later)
1 Granny Smith or other sour apple
1 large onion
3 tablespoons butter
2 pounds ground beef
2¼ tablespoons lemon juice
1½ tablespoons curry powder
½ teaspoon pepper
¾ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
¾ teaspoon turmeric
2 cups almonds, quartered or slivered
½ cup raisins
5 bay leaves
1 egg
½ cup milk
SPECIAL UTENSIL
8″ x 8″ casserole dish
Makes 8 plates. Takes 1 hour 20 minutes.
PREPARATION
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Add bread and ½ cup milk to small bowl. Let bread soak. Peel, core, and dice apple. Mince onion. Add butter, onion, and beef to pan. Sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until onion softens and beef browns. (The universe is continually expending, things are getting farther apart from each other, hence the extra two blank lines after this paragraph.)
Add beef, onion, diced apple, soaked bread, lemon juice, curry powder, pepper, salt, turmeric, almonds, and raisins to casserole dish. Evenly insert bay leaves, tips standing up, throughout casserole dish. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.
Remove casserole dish. Add egg and ½ cup milk to mixing bowl. Beat with whisk. Ladle egg/milk mix over casserole. Bake for another 15 minutes or until golden brown. Bobotie goes well with rice. However, it goes really, really well with chutney. Omit the chutney and you’ll risk a visit from the culinary police.
TIDBITS
1) There are no gourmet restaurants in space. There once was that orbiting fast-food restaurant called The Outer Limits. It relied heavily on drive-through traffic. It failed. You probably never heard of it.
2) New owners reopened the eatery. This time they added space ports, hoping to get dock-in business from space-shuttle pilots and passengers to and from the International Space Station.
3) It failed as well. Indeed, it never opened. Costs did in this project. The parts necessary to building an up-to-date space docks surprised the eager entrepreneurs. And my gosh, the transportation costs for the materials. Out of this world! Who knew that NASA charged so much to blast off with even the most modest kitchen appliances?
4) Oh, and here is a tip for would be extraterrestrial restarauteurs. When hiring a private company to carry your culinary supplies to your orbiting eatery, don’t hire the shuttle on a mileage basis. The cost will eat you alive. Overtime wages for the shuttle operator are pretty horrific as well.
5) Anyway, there’s a hamburger joint, up there that is fully equipped and ready for business. Make an offer to the bank holding the mortgage. you’ll find it quite easy to work with.
6) I fear I’ve dwelt too long on the costs of operating an off-Earth restaurant.. There are benefits as well. You really don’t need a refrigerator. Simply place your meat, ice cream, etc. outside. The food won’t go bad; the temperature is nearly absolute zero out there. Your restaurant being the only thing of any size in the neighborhood will generate enough gravitational field to carry the food all with it.
7) I do recommend putting all your food in a giant mesh. Picture this. You’re trying to bring inside a rack of ribs. Instead of hooking the ribs you poke them away. The ribs fall out of orbit and hurtle to Earth. Except the ribs don’t make it to Earth. They crash into a satellite on the way down.
8) Only it’s not just any satellite. It’s the one people use to transmit photos of babies, kittens, and puppies to each other. Deprived of their cute pictures, billions of distraught people get into their cars to get the one thing that can ease their pain, a really good burger. And if billions of people turn on their cars at once, the resulting exhaust will cover the world asphyxiating everyone.
9) Social media companies have a reserve satellite permanently on call on a launching pad for this very occasion. They can get a new satellite functioning in space in fifteen minutes.
10) People will probably realize this. Enough of them to avoid suffocating the world. Probably, but do you want to take that chance? So for the future of all of us, please place your out-of-shuttle food in a secure mesh net. Thank you.
11) In the meantime, those wishing to enjoy a fine meal far from the madding crowd, might want to consider heading north, way north. The culinary scene in Svalbard, Norway is vibrant despite being in the land of four-month-long nights and having only 2,642 people. Indeed, the town of Longyearbyen has thirteen fine restaurants. According to TripAdvisorTM, the highest rated restaurant is Huset. It’s also the northernmost gourmet restaurant.
– 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.
Saudi Entree
AL KABSA
(Chicken and rice)
INGREDIENTS
3 pounds chicken breasts (or other parts)
2 carrots
5 garlic cloves
2 medium onions
3 Roma tomatoes
4 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup tomato puree
2 ½ cups water
1 ½ cups chicken stock
2 whole cloves
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons kabsa spice mix (See Kabsa Spice Mix recipe if you can’t find the mix.)
2 cups basmati rice (Do not precook.)
1/4 cup raisins
1/4 cup slivered almonds
Serves 6
SPECIAL UTENSIL
Dutch oven
PREPARATION
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Chop chicken into 12 pieces. Grate or dice carrots. Mince garlic cloves and onions. Dice Roma tomatoes. Add garlic, onion, and butter to Dutch oven. Sauté garlic and onion on medium-high heat or until onion softens. Stir frequently. Add chicken, tomato puree, and chopped tomatoes, Reduce heat to low and simmer for 5 minutes. Stir occasionally.
Add water, chicken stock, carrot, cloves, nutmeg, salt and kabsa spice mix. Bring to boil using high heat. Cover, reduce heat to low and simmer for 30 minutes or until chicken is no longer pink inside. Remove chicken and bake for 25-to-30 minutes at 350 degrees or until it starts to brown.
Bring to boil. Stir in rice. Simmer for 30 minutes or until rice is tender and liquid is absorbed. Stir occasionally. Add raisins. Simmer for 5 minutes. Stir occasionally. Place rice on plate and top with 2 chicken pieces. Garnish with an equal amount of almonds.
TIDBITS
1) The Temple of Eve is supposedly located in the Saudi city of Jeddah. Cool.
2) Saudi Arabia is one of the driest countries in the world.
3) British humor is one of the driest in the world.
4) These tidbits are getting shorter, aren’t they?
5) Yes, they are. You can measure them.
6) Soon nothingness.
7)
8) And rebirth.
9) And so new, longer, vibrant tidbits come into being.
10) I feel like writing a haiku to tidbits.
11) Tidbits, o, tidbits.
Life was so sad when you were gone.
I’m glad you are back
12) Haikus are composed of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables respectively. They can evoke complex imagery within this restrictive space or they can display the elegant simplicity of the following effort:
Word, word, word, word, word
Word, word, word, word, word, word, word
Word, word, word, word, word
13) Speaking of using words to communicate information; all shops in Saudi Arabia are forbidden on Valentine’s day from selling anything red or with hearts on it. You may not wear anything red.
14) Movie theaters and beer are banned in Saudi Arabia. You must drive to Bahrain for these things, which depending on where you live could be anywhere from twenty minutes to twenty hours away. That movie had better be good.
15) And what if the beer you had made you sleepy and you fell asleep during the movie? That movie that took you twenty hours to get to? And twenty hours to get back?
16) If had to drive forty total hours for a beer, I would get the best, most expensive beer I could buy and really, really, really savor it.
17) And I would get gourmet popcorn for the movie. A giant tub of it.
– 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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