Posts Tagged With: Sumerians

Spam and Egg Musubi

Hawaiian Appetizer

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SPAM AND EGG MUSUBI

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INGREDIENTS
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1 cup sushi rice*
4 Nori (seaweed) sheeta
4 eggs
1½ tablespoons mirin**
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon sugar
no stick spray
1 12-ounce can SPAM(tm)
4 teaspoons furikake seasoning*** (½ teaspoon at a time) (optional)
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* = Substitute rices are: arborio, pudding, short-grain white, risotto, or cauliflower
** = Substitutes are: rice wine vinegar, white wine vinegar, white wine, sake, or dry sherry
*** = May be found online Or 2 teaspoons crumbled Nori and 2 teaspoons sesame seed.
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SPECIAL UTENSILS
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musubi mold (can be found online) or empty SPAM can.
2 12″-or-wider pans
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Serves 8. Takes 1 hour.
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PREPARATION
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Cook rice according to instructions on package. Cut Nori sheets into strips, each one about 2½”-to-3″ wide, Add eggs to mixing bowl. Scramble thoroughly with whisk or fork. Add mirin, soy sauce, and sugar to small mixing bowl. Mix with whisk or fork until sugar dissolves completely.
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Cut SPAM into 8 equal slices along its width, each one about ⅜” wide, Spray large (12″) pan with no-stick spray. Add mixed eggs. Cover and fry  at low-medium heat for 5 minutes or until eggs set and achieve your desired level of doneness.  Remove eggs and set aside.
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Add SPAM slices to second 12″ pan. Fry at medium-heat for 3 minutes or until bottom of SPAM slices become crisp and start to brown. Flip SPAM slices. Fry at medium-heat for 1 minute 30 seconds or until new bottom of SPAM slices become crisp and start to brown. Reduce heat to low. Let pan cool for 1 minute. Ladle mirin/soy/sugar sauce over SPAM. Cook SPAM for 30 seconds on each side or until sauce thickens.
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Put scrambled eggs on flat surface. Use knife and musubi mold to make 8 egg cutouts that have the same shape as the SPAM slices
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Put Nori strip shiny side down on flat surface. Put mold on the middle of the Nori strip. (The length of the mold should stick out just a bit from the sides of the strip.) Place SPAM in mold. Put an egg cutout on SPAM in mold. Sprinkle egg with ½ teaspoon furikake. Put ¼ cup cooked rice into the mold. Level rice with spoon. Press down evenly with musubi mold until rice becomes molded and compact.
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Wrap Nori strip around stack. Put some grain of rice on the Nori strip where it comes together. Gently press the ends of the Nori strip together to make a seal. This is the musubi. Gently flip the musubi so that the Nori seal is on the bottom.
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TIDBITS
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1) SPAM and Egg Musubi looks like a bar of soap. This is no accident!
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2) The ancient Sumerians, way back before your parents we born, loved to be clean. But how could they? Dust storms stormed through the land depositing layers of dust deep enough on the inhabitants to impress even the most ardent archeologist.
3) Then on July 3, 2473 BC, a textile worker cried out to the earth goddess Ki, “My life sucks.” “Yes, child,” said Ki, “what troubles you so?”
“ I hate my name. It’s Ninsun. It means ‘wild lady cow.’”
“Oh my gosh,” said Ki, “from now on you shall be known as ‘Betty.’ It means ‘God is my oath.”
“Cool.” But Betty still fretted.
“What else disturbs you, child?”
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4) “I want to be beautiful. I wish to attract, Anzu the hunter. How can I do that when I’m perpetually caked in dirt?”
“Ah,” said the goddess, you are a textile worker, are you not?”
5) Synapses fired lickety split in Betty’s brain, for she was smarter than the average Sumerian textile worker. “Aha! “The fatty lanolin from the wool vats would work wicked wonders  as a cleaning agent and when added to lanoliney  water would create liquid soap. I can wash myself clean. I can get Anzu to be my husband. Cowabunga!”
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6) Betty and Anzu gave birth to a baby girl, Nanshe.  Nanshe next noticed nicely that when the liquid in the soapy dried out it became soap bars. The Soap-Nori Road would be born the next morning. This is why we know of Nanshe.
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7) Nanshe also sagely saw something soap shaped, but with egg and SPAM wrapped in Nori would be quite exciting and tasty. Especially so, when you considered that the average Sumerian meal consisted of bread, porridge, bread, and porridge.
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8) But it took years to trade for nori on the Soap-Nori Road. And there was no such thing as SPAM. However, the SPAM-and-Egg Musubi dream never died out.
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9) SPAM would be invented in 1937, and SPAM and Egg Musubi came about in the early 1980s.
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10) We are living in a golden age.
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– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
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­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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Powegian Breakfast Burrito

Fusion Entree

POWEGIAN BREAKFAST BURRITO

INGREDIENTSPowayBreakfastBurrito-

½ white onion
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
6 eggs (1 more egg later)
1 4-ounce can diced green chiles

½ pound sliced ham
1 tomato
1 pound Italian pork sausage
1 cup chipotle salsa
1 cup grated four Mexican cheeses
18 8″ flour tortillas
1 egg

SPECIAL UTENSIL

9″ x 12″ casserole dish

Makes 18 burritos or a saner 9 burritos with the amount of ingredients halved. Takes 40 minutes.

PREPARATION

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Mince onion. Dice tomato. Cut ham slices into ½” squares. Add onion and vegetable oil to pan. Sauté onion on medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until onion softens. Stir frequently. Add eggs and diced green chiles. Sauté on medium heat for about 5 minutes or until eggs reach your desired level of doneness. Stir constantly. Remove from heat.

Cut ham into 1″ squares. Dice tomato. Add ham squares, pork sausage, and chipotle salsa to large pot. Cook on medium heat for about 5 minutes or until thoroughly warm. Stir occasionally. Add tomatoes and cook for another 2 minutes. Stir occasionally. Add cheese. Stir until well blended.

Combine egg/chiles with sausage/cheese/tomatoes mix. Place ⅓ cup of combined mixture on middle, bottom third of tortillas. Fold bottom of tortilla over mixture. Fold in sides until they touch. Roll up tortillas from the bottom to make burrito.

Put egg in small dish. Whisk egg. Brush all burritos with whisked egg. Bake at 400 degrees for 12 minutes or until egg on top of burritos is golden brown and burritos begin to brown.

TIDBITS

1) Eating sausages 5,000 years ago enabled the ancient Sumerians to establish the world’s first advanced civilization.

2) The mighty sausage was first mentioned in the play “The Sausage” written by Epimarchus a really, really long time ago. The play got lost, however, and culinary drama disappeared for a really long time. (Note: really, really long time is longer than a really long time.)

3) Aristophanes, the dude from 5th-century B.C., mentioned sausages in one of his plays. Of course, mentioning sausages is not as good or powerful as writing an entire play about this amazing, meaty delicacy.

4) Culinary tragedy struck in the fourth century A.D., when the Catholic Church banned the eating of sausages as being sinful.

5) Church leaders had noticed the barbarians hordes that were carving up the Roman Empire ate sausages at their festivals. Therefore, sausages were ungodlyl.

6) Historians, often wonder why such spirited warfare existed between the barbarians and the Roman Empire as both peoples possessed sausages. Why fight someone else for something you already have?

7) The Catholic Church, over the years, relaxed its stance on sausage eating, banning it only on Fridays.

8) Arabs burst out of the Arabian peninsula in 632 A.D.. Fired by strong religious belief and fortified with beef sausages, they conquered North Africa, Spain, Sicily, and the Middle East.

9) Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg. Normal historians take this to be the start of the Reformation which split Christian church into Catholic and Protestant ones. Culinary historians speculate that if Martin Luther had only been able to eat sausages without guilt, he would have been devouring this wonderful entree to his heart’s content. Full of sausage-induced good will, he couldn’t have possibly mustered up the rage to write even two theses, let alone ninety five. The Christian church would still be one and horrors of the Thirty Years War, 1618-1648, fought between Protestant and Catholic Europe would never have happened.

10) Sausage-eating Protestants and six-out-of-seven-days-a-week Catholics built vast colonial empires starting from the 1500s. These empires fell apart during the mid-twentieth century when the European nations switched from consuming vast amounts of sausages to more trendy things such as sushi, salmon quesadillas, and specialty coffees.

12) Vatican II led many Catholics to believe that eating meat on Fridays is okay. The world has not had a major war since then.

13) “To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.”
– German chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898).

14) “War without fire is like sausages without mustard.”
– King Henry V.

15) “The dog’s kennel is no place to keep a sausage.”
-Danish proverb

16) “Yum.”
-me

– 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.

Categories: cuisine, history | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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