I drove my Porsche
full of borsch
to the forest.
Now I can’t see
the trees
for the borsch.
It sorta rhymes.
– 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.
Cuban Entree
CUBAN HAMBURGER
(Frita Cubana)
INGREDIENTS
4 garlic cloves
1 onion
2 tablespoons olive oil
¾ teaspoon cumin
½ tablespoon Spanish paprika or paprika
¼ teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons ketchup
¼ chorizo (no casings)
1 pound ground beef
¾ pound ground pork
½ cup bread crumbs
2 tablespoons olive oil
1½ pounds shoestring potatoes (And cooking oil as well if deep frying or pan frying.)
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
12 hamburger rolls
Serves 8. Takes 50 minutes.
PREPARATION
Mince garlic cloves and onion. Add garlic, onion, and olive to pan. Sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until onion and garlic soften. Add sautéed onions and garlic, cumin, paprika, pepper, salt, ketchup, chorizo, ground beef, ground pork, and bread crumbs. Mix with hands until well blend. Shape meat mix into 12 patties.
Cook shoestring potatoes according to directions on package. Add 2 tablespoons olive oil to pan and as many meat patties that will fit. Cover. Sauté meat patties at medium-high heat for 5 minutes on each side or until meat is cooked to your desired level of doneness. You might need to cook the patties in batches. Top patties with Worcestershire sauce. Warm or lightly toast buns. Add patties to bun bottoms. Top patties with shoestring potatoes. Place bun tops on shoestring potatoes.
TIDBITS
1) The most common geometric shapes drawn by the cavemen was the triangle. So, it’s no surprise cavemen engineers chiseled stone into triangular wheels. This shape proved to be quite useless for transportation. The PorscheTM line of high performance cars would have to wait. But then the Cubanhamburgerpithicus tribe invented the Cuban hamburger. Little prehistoric diners thrilled hunter-gatherers with this avant-garde culinary creation. Soon, an engineer, Ogg Edsel Yugo, had himself a Cuban hamburger. It was tasty. It was round. It inspired him to make a wheel, to make a car. Edsel Yugo’s car flopped. Humanity would wait several millennia for Porsches. 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.
Antarctic Entree
ICE CUBES
INGREDIENT
water
SPECIAL UTENSILS
glacier
pick axe
Siberian husky
panniers
Van Gogh painting
Twinkie
monastery
Porsche
PREPARATION – If you live near a glacier.
Take pick axe to glacier. Shatter a square foot of glacier ice into little ice cubes with your pick axe. Put panniers on Siberian husky. Put ice cubes in panniers. Have husky follow you back to your home. Will the lock on your door freeze up before your get your key in it? I hope not.
PREPARATION – If you have automatic ice maker in your refrigerator.
This method is much easier and safer than the above method. Many people get refrigerators just for this reason. Simply put your cup or bowl in the proper opening (Consult your refrigerator manual for proper placement of said cup or bowl.) Press the ice maker’s lever back. Ice cubes will fall into your cup. You will be happy.
Note, there will be an option with your ice maker for crushed ice. Use this daring option only when your are ready. In the meantime, play it safe and use the factory setting for ice cubes.
PREPARATION – If your refrigerator does not have an automatic ice maker.
You will have to go to an antique store and buy an ice cube tray. Fill tray with water. Open freezer door on refrigerator door. Spill water from tray. Leave door open. Fill tray again with water. Put tray in freezer. Close freezer door. Wait several hours while water in tray freezes and the moisture you let in the freezer when you left the door open too long forms into layers of frost so thick you could hide a wooly mammoth in it.
Open the freezer. Remove wooly mammoth. Remove ice cube tray. Try to remove ice cubes by lifting that lever. Bust lever. Curse. Hit counter top with ice cube tray. Chip counter top. Shatter ice cube tray. Watch ice cubes fly all over. Watch an ice cube hit your Van Gogh painting. (Why didn’t you buy a refrigerator with an automatic ice cube maker if you can afford a Van Gogh?) Watch ice melt on painting. Watch paint run. Assess the value of your new Van Gogh finger painting. It’s not high. Collapse to the floor crying. If you do not have a TwinkieTM nearby to calm you down, you will withdraw from society and join a religious order.
PREPARATION – if you have a car
Drive to the supermarket and buy a bag of ice. If you can afford it, go to a gourmet foods store and buy the brand, “Grandma’s Recipe.”
TIDBITS
1) Ice is frozen water
2) It’s harder than water, but not as hard a diamonds.
3) You can’t cut glass with an ice cube like you can with a diamond.
4) However, you could let your ice cubes partially melt and refreeze them into one big, weirdly shaped ice cube. You could shatter a window by throwing this huge cube at it.
5) You can’t do the same with diamonds. Diamonds don’t melt when taken out of the freezer. Not even if you live in the Saharan Dessert.
6) The French made great efforts to conquer and colonize the Sahara from the late 1800s to early 1900s. With every step taken into the great sandy interior, the French infantry found itself farther and farther away from its sources of ice.
7) Sure, the French possessed lots and lots of ice houses in mainland France. What civilized nation of that time did not? However, these French ice houses were far, so far away from the sand dunes of the Sahara and its relentless Sun.
8) No ice houses in the Sahara, no ice cream. No ice cream, no soldiers willing to enlist in the French army. The French army found itself reduced to enlisting the scum of the Earth in a special unit, the French Foreign legion. These men were so beyond accepted social norms that some of them had never ever put an ice cube in their root boor, let alone dine elegantly on three scoops of vanilla ice topped with chocolate syrup. Oh, oh, I can’t go on…
9) Just let me note that the United States acquired Alaska in 1867 and the Philippines in 1898. For various and manifold reasons which are beyond the scope of this recipe, we were forced to relinquish control of one of these two lands. Alaska has millions of square miles of ice. The Philippines do not. The United States kept Alaska.
10) Indeed, the untapped supply of ice cubes in Antarctica, estimated here at 1,456,000,000,000,000 ice cubes is so tempting, that in 1959 all the great nations of the world signed a treaty pledging themselves never to claim this frozen land.
11) And now the world is happy. Well, mainly.
– 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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