And so do I. Don’t you want to pet it? And with a photo, there’s no fiercely protective, real life mama tiger around. So it’s all good.
You need to see #27
– 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.
American Entree
INGREDIENTS
1½ pounds ground beef
½ teaspoon herbes de Provence
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
3 tablespoons white wine
½ cup heavy whipping cream or crême fraiche
1 tablespoon fresh* herbs (thyme, marjoram, or sage)
4 ounces Camembert cheese, no rind
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
4 French rolls
* = Try to use fresh ingredients for this dish. However, if that is not possible, use 1 teaspoon dried herbs instead. A still-life painting by Vincent van Gogh.
Serves 4. Takes 30 minutes.
PREPARATION
Add ground beef and herbes de Provence to mixing bowl. Mix with hands. Shape beef into 4 oblong patties that match the shape of the French rolls. Add butter and olive oil to pan. Warm butter using medium heat until butter melts and browns. Tilt pan occasionally to ensure even melting. Add beef patties. Sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minutes per side or until meat is done to your liking. Remove beef patties to dish and cover to keep warm. Keep liquid in pan.
Toast French rolls. Add wine to pan. Bring to boil using high heat. Stir frequently. Add whipping cream and herbs. Stir. Bring to boil again using high heat. Stir frequently. Reduce heat to medium high. Add Camembert cheese and Dijon mustard. Stir constantly until cheese dissolves and blends into the rest of the sauce. Add beef patty to each French roll bottom. Pour sauce over beef patties. Place French roll tops on sauce-covered patties.
TIDBITS
1) Vincent van Gogh painted food for cookbooks. It kept him going during his lean years which were many as he sold only one non-food pictures in his lifetime. Van Gogh also had to work at carnivals as an egg catcher. He and his pals wowed crowds by tossing raw eggs for longer and longer distances without dropping them or letting them break. Van Gogh’s supple hands that helped him catch eggs also allowed him to wield his paint brush with a deft touch. Today, we honor his memory with Poway’s annual Impressionist Egg Toss Festival.
2) All his food paintings but for the incredibly valuable one here perished in s freak fire. Odd.
Leave a message. I’d like to hear from you.
Chef Paul
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with 180 wonderful recipes is available on amazon.com. My newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, is also available on amazon.com
America’s last bit of expansion, from the 1840s to the 1890s was a great period for dime-novelists and newspaper reporters. Yep, those people went to work with a smile knowing their country was strong and their jobs secure.
Then we gave up the Philippines and various bitty islands in the Pacific. As a result, Americans stopped reading and turned to cat videos on the internet. What should we do? I’m glad you asked. We need to expand.
How? By force? Oh heavens, no. The world these days frowns on aggression and what with all those nuclear weapons stashed all over the world, conquest is a might dangerous.
Expansion by war – bad!
Then how do we expand? By purchasing Leichtenstein, that tiny country in the middle of Europe. It would be a bargain. If we paid each of Liechtenstein’s 35,000 citizens a million dollars, it would cost only $35 billion, lock, stock, and barrel.
But we don’t have that money what with continued fighting in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. However, these conflicts are really an opportunity in disguise. Simply stop the fighting in these hot spots until we’ve saved $35 billion. How did we get the enemy insurgents to lay down their arms?
By giving them soft ice cream cones. Admittedly your average Joe Desert Fanatic will not stop shooting, bombing, and carrying on forever for soft ice cream. But he will for a few months, especially in those hot summer months, when the sun bakes the sand, bakes you and all you can think of is a nice, cool, creamy chocolate/vanilla swirl served up in a sugar cone.
Voila, the conflict stops for a spell. We spend the savings on Leichtenstein. What are the benefits? First, it helps our national pride. Second, we could use the vast forests of that tiny land to print billions and billions of novels, providing steady employment to thousands of needy writers. Third, we could join the European Union. Our farmers would become eligible for those legendary EU subsidies handed out to thistelwort farmers. But most importantly, our tourists could visit Europe and never leave America. Life doesn’t get any better than that.
– Paul De Lancey, Dr. Economics
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.
Very Simple Chiseling Haiku
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, oops.
– Paul the Bad Artist
– 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.
The welfare system continues to spiral out of control. Millions and millions dollars of our tax dollars flow into the lazy mouths of these lazy bums who do little but sleep, eat, and make more lazy bums. A great many of these welfare kings and queens hail from other countries without even the most basic of IDs such as drivers’ licenses. Indeed they thumb their noses, metaphorically at least, at us, the taxpaying citizens of this great land. Who are these burdens to the American economy?
The creatures in our nation’s zoo. As the great philosopher Hobbes, or someone else, could have said, “There is an implicit social contract between our zoos and its critters. The zoo provides food and shelters. The animals therein provide entertainment by jumping up and down, running, chattering, and at the very least moving.”
But do our zoo’s animal do much moving? Heck no. They sleep, sleep, and sleep. Big whoop. The worst offenders are the koalas, turtles and lions who sleep twenty hours a day and for whom the act of munching on their grub makes their little black hearts beat like jackrabbits. What will gets these sleeping bum off the their butts?
Speed? Well, no. It’s illegal, isn’t it? At least for people it is. And I, for one, don’t want any of the zoo’s purchasers going to jail.
But what about high-energy drinks? One of those little bottles gets a person whizzing about for about five hours. Imagine how long it would get a tiny koala going? Heck we might even get to see those koalas pole vaulting and boxing each other.
Or since the lions and turtles sleep so much because they need all their energy to digest their stupid gazelle butts and turtle pellets, why not feed them something all our red-blooded American kids love, breakfast cereal packed with hig- energy sugar? I tell ya, fifty bowls of little sugar bombs in the lions’ breakfast bowls would get those lions roaring. Or how about hearing turtles roar? They’re usually ever so quiet. I tell you one could visit a zoo fifty times and never hear a turtle roar. Well, I want to hear a turtle roar. Don’t you?
Or even better have the roaring turtles do honest-to-goodness 100-yard dashes, one’s where they sprint as quickly as Usain Bolt. Wouldn’t that draw those paying crowds into our nation’s zoos?
– Paul De Lancey, concerned citizen
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.
Modern Art Haiku
I don’t understand you
And you do not understand me
Let’s have a root beer.
– Paul the Bad Artist
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.
Well now you know.
– Paul the Writer
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.
Everyone should have a dream
– Philosopher Paul
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.
But you can get them to arrive by going to the bathroom.
– Humorist Paul
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.
Fusion Entree
GRILLED HAM AND DILL HAVARTI CHEESE SANDWICH
INGREDIENTS
6 tablespoons butter
8 slices of your favorite bread
1 pound slice deli ham
6 ounces dill Havarti cheese
PREPARATION
Cut butter into 4 equal pieces or pats. Cut havarti cheese into 8 equal slices. Add 1 pat of butter to skillet. Melt butter using medium heat. Add 2 bread slices to skillet. Quickly Add 1/4 of the ham slices and 2 havarti slices to one the bread slices. Put the other slice butter-side up on top of the ham and cheese.
Grill for 2 minutes on medium heat or until bottom slice is browned on bottom. (Unless you have a skillet made of transparent aluminum, you will have to use your spatula to take a peek.) Carefully flip sandwich over and grill other side for 2 minutes or until the new bread on the bottom is golden brown and cheese has melted. (Note: cooking times for this sandwich will tend to become shorter with each new sandwich as the skillet absorbs more and more heat.)
TIDBITS
1) On April 1, 1491, Chef Bjorn Havarti sailed west from Copenhagen, Denmark, to discover a shorter route to the empire of the Great Khan. His voyage lasted just two minutes Remarkably, Mr. Havarti had not succeeded in hiring and keeping a crew. To this day, in Denmark, attempting a great task with woefully insufficient resources is called, “pulling a Chef Bjorn.”
3) Apparently, the Danish chef had prepared a bon voyage dinner of lutefisk. Four of their senses damaged beyond repair by contact with lutefisk, the entire crew elected to stay ashore. Before Bjorn could raise funds for another voyage, Christopher Columbus would discover America*. Bjorn was destined to be forgotten for two tidbits.
4) * = Columbus was not the first to discover America. Arriving before him were the First Americans who crossed over the land bridge from Asia, possible voyagers from China, and Vikings. Apparently, America can be discovered many times. You just need a new starting point.
5) Okay, I look out my window and see America. I hereby state that I am the first one to discover America from my home in Poway, California. April 24th will now be known as Chef Paul Day.
5) Chef Bjorn learned his lesson and devoted his life to discovering a truly tasty food. On April 1, 1920, just 429 years later, he succeeded with his pièce de resistance, Havarti cheese. He died just one day later, exhausted but triumphant.
– 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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