Greetings from the Old West
Happy Holidays.
Paul De Lancey, raconteur, doctor, and gunslinger
– 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.
Greetings from the Cows.
Happy Everything to you.
– 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.
Malian Appetizer
HIBISCUS TEA
(Jus de Bissap)
INGREDIENTS
1 cup dried hibiscus flowers
6 cups water
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon fresh mint leaves
SPECIAL UTENSIL
colander
Makes 4½ cups. Takes 30 minutes
PREPARATION
Add water to lst large pot. Bring water to boil using high heat. Add hibiscus flowers Reduce heat to medium-high. Boil for 20 minutes or until water becomes aromatic and turns dark red. Strain red liquid through colander into 2nd large pot. Add sugar to red liquid. Stir with whisk or fork until sugar dissolves. Add vanilla extract. Stir with whisk or fork. Pour into tea cups. Garnish with mint leaves just before serving. Put tea in refrigerator, if you wish to serve it cold.
TIDBITS
1) Being buried by an avalanche is not fun, whether it happens in Switzerland or in the Saharan country of Mali.
2) Burial by avalanche is really, really dangerous. How dangerous? Really, really, really dangerous.
3) The downside of being buried in avalanche is death. See? Dangerous.
4) Legend has St. Bernard dogs seeeking–spelled with two “e”s outside of Switzerland–out avalanche victims and giving them brandy from a keg. What really happens is that rescue camels patrol the Saharan Dessert looking for victims of sand-dune avalanches. It can get cold under a mound of sand. The Sun’s heat can’t penetrate it. Neither can oxygen.
5) This why Malian rescues camels are proficient in CPR. After restoring the human’s breathing and heart beat, the camels serve the unlucky one a nice, hot cup of hibiscus tea. This wonderful restorative never fails, even with snow victims. The ever efficient Swiss have already tested this.
6) Indeed rescue camels are scheduled to start patrolling the Swiss Alps in late December. This will make cross-country skiing much safer. The Swiss Tourist Board expects a 37% increase in tourism.
– 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 Entree
INGREDIENTS
1 cup chicken broth
¾ cup milk
2½ cups water
1 cup grits
¼ teaspoon pepper
½ teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons butter
1¾ cups grated Cheddar cheese
1 garlic clove
4 stalks green onions
5 bacon strips
1½ pounds shrimp, peeled and deveined
1½ tablespoons lemon juice
Makes 4 bowls. Takes 45 minutes.
PREPARATION
Add chicken broth, milk, and water to large pot. Bring to boil using high heat. Stir frequently. Add grits gradually, stirring with whisk until no lumps exist. Add pepper and salt. Reduce heat to warm. Simmer to 10-to-20 minutes or until grits become tender and all the water has been absorbed. Stir occasionally. Remove from heat and add butter and Cheddar cheese. Blend in cheese and butter with fork. Cover.
While liquid boils and grits become tender, mince garlic and dice green onions. Chop bacon into ½” squares. Add bacon squares to pan. Cook at medium-high heat for 3-to-5 minutes or until bacon becomes crispy, turning them over at least 1 time. Remove bacon and place on paper towel. Keep bacon grease in pan.
Add shrimp to pan. Sauté shrimp for 3 minutes at medium heat or until they start to turn pink or orange. (Don’t overcook shrimp. It will get mushy.) Add lemon juice. garlic, and green onion. Stir quickly until shrimp is well coated with garlic and green onion. Remove from heat.
Ladle grits into bowls. Top with shrimp and garlic/green onion/lemon juice. Sprinkle with bacon squares.
TIDBITS
1) It seems hard to believe now, but shrimp portraits were once quite popular in America during the late nineteenth century.
2) Darned difficult. I mean, why?
3) Okay, to understand phenomenon, one simply must read, Dr. Amos Keeto’s enthralling work, “Amazing Fads of the Gilded Age,” Garlic Press, Paducah, Kentucky, 1933.
4) According to Dr. Keeto, horse racing was incredibly popular in the 1890s. People with too much money, having bought up anything of any value in America, turned to gambling. They wouldn’t bet on baseball. Ordinary folk did that.
5) So the filthy rich, so called because oil from their wells constantly spurted onto their clothes, would clean up and go the race tracks to wager on horses, the sport of kings.
6) Everything went well. The had fun playing the horses. They lost vast sums, of course, but they had vast sum to lose. The race course owners became quite wealthy as well. They purchased gigantic mansions and went on railroad buying sprees. The Race Track magnate, Silas Brunswick, even bought BrusselsSproutsTM for $250,000 after it came out with the BS PadTM.
7) The BS Pad, a precursor to iPhonesTM, tablets, and the such, consisted of two tin cans tied together with a string, an abacus, and a sketch pad. Improvements have been made since then. Nevertheless, it was all new back then and the sexy BS was all the rage
8) But the craze stopped a scant year later when all of a sudden shouting became socially acceptable once more.
9) Then horse racing died out. On May 5, 1897, the swiftest horses gathered for the prestigious Mississippi Derby in Biloxi. Society’s elite bet over a million on the horses. The favorites were Southern Boil and Sandstorm.
10) People still debate what happened. As the horses turned the corner to enter the final stretch, an enormous fog rolled into. When the fog had lifted, all of the horses were gone. Everyone.
11) Where had they gone? Some speculated that the horses had gone to the same parallel universe that orphan socks go to when placed in a dryer. Some folks dispute this, noting electric dryers weren’t invented back then. The proponents counter, “Where you there, na, na, na, na, poo, poo?”
12) Some folks say that a mare in heat passed by the track and that time and the stallions merely left the race to chase after her. Still others maintain mass spontaneous combustion claimed all the horses, ignoring the fact that no explosions were ever heard. I mean, really.
13) We’ll never know what happened to the race horses. The race-track owner claiming that since no horse crossed the finished line, paid off none of the bets. This defiant act angered the wealthy bettors. Horse racing rapidly fell out of favor.
14) Fortunately, the crowd spied a cocktail of shrimp–you know, like a pod of whales–swimming off shore, and fast! An energetic entrepreneur, his name is lost to history, improvised a shrimp race course. By heavens, the event was fun. Shrimp racing became the most popular social event of the 1890s.
15) Breeding shrimp for speed became a lucrative business. Wealthy owners hired artists to paint their prize shrimps. These artists loved to eat grits. Hence, shrimp and grits. There you go.
– 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.
Beninese Appetizer
INGREDIENTS
1 small tomato
1 small onion
2 tablespoons peanut oil
1½ tablespoons chili powder
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cube MaggiTM beef bouillon*
1 cup water
10 tablespoons smooth peanut butter
* = While other boullion cubes work fine, Maggi’s are incredibly popular in Africa.
SPECIAL UTENSIL
blender
Makes 1½ cups. Takes 35 minutes.
PREPARATION
Puree tomato in blender. Mince onion. Add onion and peanut oil to pot. Sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until onion softens. Stir frequently. Add tomato puree, chili powder, and salt. Reduce heat to low and sauté for 3 minutes. Stir frequently.
Crush boullion cube. (This makes it dissolve quicker.) Add bouillon and water. Bring to boil using high heat. Stir frequently. Add peanut butter. Reduce heat to low. Simmer for 15 minutes or until sauces thickens to your liking. Stir frequently. This is served in Benin with boiled yam. It also goes well with rice.
TIDBITS
1) Peanut Sauce is, of course, an anagram for Tuna Ape Cues. Queen Mary I hated the theater, thinking it immoral. She tried fervently to ban it altogether, but succeeded only in driving theater going underground. People attended ribald plays in people’s attics where such animalistic passions such as hand holding and improv comedy took place. Mary I could not abide this licentiousness, so she imposed hateful regulations, such as having all roles played by gorillas holding tuna.
2) It’s important to realize that Joe Ape’s vocabulary was, and still is, quite limited, making line memorization challenging. And as with humans, line retention goes down while holding tuna. So, stage hands constantly cued the tuna holding apes. Hence, “Tuna Ape Cues.” The next queen, Elizabeth permitted human actors. To honor his new patron, Shakespeare, playwright, chef, and anagrammatist, turned Tuna Apes Cues into Peanut Sauce. His peanut sauce was tasty. What luck!
– 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.
Polish Entree
STUFFED CABBAGE ROLLS
(Golumkies)
INGREDIENTS
1 medium cabbage head
½ cup rice
3 garlic cloves
1 small onion
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 egg
1 pound ground beef
½ pound ground pork
¼ teaspoon sweet basil or basil
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon parsley
¼ teaspoon pepper
1 tablespoon sugar
1½ cups tomato sauce
½ cup diced tomatoes
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar or vinegar
SPECIAL UTENSILS
9″ x 13″ casserole dish
8-quart pot
x-ray vision
kitchen scissors
Makes 12 cabbage rolls. Takes 2 hours.
PREPARATION
Add cabbage head to 8-quart pot. Add enough water to cover cabbage. Bring to boil using high heat. Boil for 15 minutes or until leaves are soft and pliable enough to be removed easily. Remove cabbage from pot. Let sit until leaves are cool enough to be removed by hand. Drain cabbage. Remove and reserve damaged outer leaves. Carefully remove 12 leaves. Snip off the top part of the large spines on the cabbage leaves. This will make folding the cabbage rolls easier.
While cabbage boils, cook rice according to instructions on package. Dice garlic and onion. Add garlic, onion, and olive oil to pan. Sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until garlic and onion soften. Beat egg in small bowl with whisk.
Add garlic, onion, rice, egg, ground beef, ground pork, sweet basil, paprika, parsley, and pepper to large mixing bowl. Mix ingredients with hands until well blended. Place 1/12 of the rice/meat mixture in the lower, middle part of a boiled cabbage leaf. Fold the sides of the leaf over the rice/meat mixture. Roll up the leaf from the bottom to make a cabbage roll. Repeat for the other 11 leaves.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Add sugar, tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, and white wine vinegar to mixing bowl. Mix with whisk. Place damaged outer cabbage leaves on the bottom and on the sides of casserole dish. (This helps prevent the cabbage rolls from burning.) Place cabbage rolls seam side down in casserole dish. Pour tomato sauce/crushed tomatoes over cabbage rolls. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes to 1 hour or until meat is done.
(The doneness of the meat is difficult to assess without x-ray vision. If for some reason you don’t possess that capability, may I suggest discretely sampling one? Okay, okay that cabbage roll is yours.)
Place cabbage rolls on plates. Ladle tomato sauce from casserole dish onto cabbage rolls.
TIDBITS
1) There is only one way to spell “taco.” That way is “taco.” However, this are multiple ways to spell this entree, “golumkies.” They are: golumpkies, golabkis, and galumkies. There are probably many other spellings used by underground culinary cultures.
2) There are many, many taco trucks in America. But there aren’t many golumki trucks. This goes back to tidbit 1. All hungry eaters know what they’ll be enjoying when they go up to a taco truck.
3) What if you grew up thinking the correct spelling was golabki?. What if you saw a golumki truck on your street corner? What if you also suffered from dyslexia? You might think the vendor was selling “K gum oil.” You wouldn’t buy that, certainly not the “K” variety. You’d scurry down to the other corner where a truck owner sold tacos. The word tacos is so well known that even dyslexics won’t confuse it with any other word.
4) Lefthanders are much more likely to suffer from dyslexia than are northpaws.
5) There was a time way back when people walked hunched over. Half of them were cro magnon and the others were neanderthals.
6) We know now a right-handed cro magnon named Bartolomeo Diaz killed the first elk. It was delicious, especially cooked that new-fangled way with fire. In fact Bartolomeo routinely won all the caveman chef contests. Bartolomeo, being a kind hearted soul, rushed to all the neighboring caves and wrote, “I so gum elk.” Cavemen, notorious for bad dental hygiene, usually lost all their teeth by adulthood. So their word for “eat” was “gum.”
7) The right-handed cro magnons read Bartolomeo’s words and hunted elk. Elk meat is high in protein. The cro magnons grew in strength and stature. They would conquer the animal kingdom and rule the world.
8) Neanderthals were all lefthanded dyslexics. They interpreted the cave-wall writing as “golumkies.” They stopped all hunter-gatherings and searched for golumki trucks. There were no prehistoric golumki trucks. There are none now. The neanderthals died out. Bummer.
– 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.
Yes dear voter, the future is now. Support our republic. Support democracy with your vote. Vote in Bacon & Chocolate Party’s online primary. It’s open to everyone regardless of residence or citizenship. We are the world. We are democracy. We are change. We like Bacon. We like Chocolate. We like bees. We like naps. What more do you need? Vote!
Candidates are: Paul R. De Lancey for president, Candace C. Bowen for vice president.
Elmer Fudd for president, Bugs Bunny for vice president.
Click on the following link to vote.
Bacon & Chocolate Party’s Facebook primary. Now you can look totalitarianism in the eye and say, “I did my part to stop you.
Information on Bacon & Chocolate Party thoughts and goals.
– 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.
Jordanian Appetizer
INGREDIENTS
2 cans chick peas (keep liquid)
2 garlic cloves
3 tablespoons lemon juice
¼ cup olive oil
¾ cup tahini
¼ teaspoon cumin
¼ teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon salt
SPECIAL UTENSIL
blender
Makes 5 cups. Takes 10 minutes.
PREPARATION
Add all ingredients to blender. Blend on medium setting until smooth. If your hummus is watery, add tahini. If it is too thick, add water and olive oil. This is a forgiving recipe. You can add more of each ingredient until the hummus is the way you like it. Hummus goes well with pita bread.
TIDBITS
1) It’s more authentic to smash up the chick peas with a mortar and pestle. If guests complain about you using a blender, point to the title of this dish, “Simple Hummus.” Suppose your guests also say, “You shouldn’t use canned chick peas. You need to boil dried chick peas.” Warn them. Right away. “I am the cook. You are in my kitchen.” This proclamation invokes culinary law which is superior to civil law. (See Courgette v Rhode Island.) This decision empowers you to mete out any punishment necessary to restore order in all rooms in the house dealing with food.)
2) Your death defying quests might continue with, “Why didn’t you make your own tahini?” You know have three choices.
3) One. Back down. Please don’t this. The prestige of the entire culinary community world will suffer irreparable damage. Customers will charge into a restaurant’s kitchen armed with the steak knives found on their table every time their rib eyes aren’t done to their liking.
4) Two. Force them out of your house with an electric cattle prod. This is a safe, respectable, middle-ground response.
5) Three. Zap the clods into oblivion with your sonic obliterator, an essential item in any serious kitchen. A strong response to be sure, but these unruly guests will never again bother any chef. Yay.
– 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.
Dear Dr. Economics,
Why is there so much poverty?
– Ms. Anne Thracks, Paducah, KY
Dear Ms. Thracks,
Too many people don’t have enough money.
– 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.
This blog is directly inspired by the talented and hilarious Kathy Minicozzi who was in turn inspired by the renowned humorist David Sedaris.
Here are the things I resolve not to do today. Takes a deep breath. Lets it out. Okay Paul, you cannot do this.
1) I will not cook or eat lutefisk.
2) I will not foment revolution anywhere.
3) I will not lose a sock in the dryer.
4) Because I will not do clothes today.
5) I will not engage in the illicit fruitcake market.
6) I will not voluntarily upgrade any of my electronic devices.
7) I will not race to the be the first to reach the South Pole. I’ve already lost. It happened about a century ago. Why try?
8) I will not attack the weeds in my backyard with my weed whacker for another day. The tenuous truce still holds.
9) I will not sing at any karaoke bar. The whole world rejoices.
10) I will not befriend North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un on Facebook.
11) I will not say, “I love you,” to my printer.
– Paul R. De Lancey, great no-doer
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 