– 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.
– 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.
Swedish Dessert
INGREDIENTS
2¼ teaspoons yeast
⅓ cup warm water
1 cup milk
½ cup butter
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar (½ cup more later)
½ teaspoon (1 gram) saffron threads
⅓ cup raisins
½ cup sugar
2 eggs (1 more egg later)
4 cups flour (2 more tablespoons later)
2 tablespoons flour
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
no-stick spray
SPECIAL UTENSILS
tin foil
cookie sheet
Makes 4 6″ buns. Takes 2 hours 40 minutes.
PREPARATION
Preheat oven to 250 degrees. Add yeast and water to large mixing bowl. While yeast dissolves, add milk to small pot. Heat milk at high heat until scalding hot (almost boiling). Stir constantly. Reduce heat to medium. Add butter, salt, and 1 teaspoon sugar to pot. Stir constantly until butter melts. Remove from heat.
Add saffron to tin foil. Bake at 250 for 5 minutes or until saffron is toasted. Add toasted saffron to cup. Crush saffron with fingers. Add 1 teaspoon sugar to cup. Mix with fork. Add crushed saffron/sugar to mixing bowl with dissolved yeast. Add 2 eggs, raisins, ½ cup sugar, and buttery milk to mixing bowl. Stir in 4 cups flour, one cup a time. Mix with whisk or fork.
Dust cutting board with 2 tablespoons flour. Add dough to cutting board. Let dough stand for 10 minutes. Knead with hands until dough stiffens. Add oil and dough to large bowl. Turn dough until it is coated with oil. Cover and let rise for 1 hour or until dough doubles in size.
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Divide dough into 12 pieces. Use hands to turn each piece into a 12″ rope. Put 3 ropes side by side. Braid the 3 ropes together by crossing the left rope and then the right rope over the center rope until there is one long braid. Join ends of long braid to make a circle or crown. Repeat to make three more crowns. Beat one egg. Brush egg over crowns.
Spray cookie sheet with no-stick spray. Place crowns on parchment-covered cookie sheet. Let crowns rise for 15 minutes or until they puff up into a bun. Bake for 15-to-25 minutes or until golden brown and when a toothpick inserted into buns comes out clean. Let cool on rack.
TIDBITS
1) Böard is Swedish for surfboard. Yes, surfboards were invented by the Swedish baker, Franf. For in 1618, Franf found a large tree trunk washed up on shore. The tree was of a sort unknown to Europe. Franf reasoned it must have come from a large continent to the west.
2) He announced his discovery to the Swedish court and asked royal packing for a proposed voyage of discovery. The Swedish king said Franf was an idiot, noting Christopher Columbus had discovered the New World in 1492, in addition to Basque fishermen, Viking explorers, the third-grade class of Stockholm’s very own Lutefisk academy, Chinese traders, and the people of the great migration across the land bridge from Siberia to Alaska.
3) Franf wondered why entire tribes would assemble in frozen Siberia and then trek eastward into howling blizzards to an unknown land. Perhaps they really had a hankering for a White CastleTM burger. Those tiny delights with their minced onions are really tasty. Perhaps the ancient trekkers honestly thought there be a White Castle in the new land, just like the Spanish conquistadors and their Seven Cities of Gold. We’ll never know. Researchers are still waiting for the Cliff NotesTM to come out.
4) Franf waited patiently for the above long tidbit to end, before he could go home.
5) He moped for countless seconds–there were no stopwatches in 1618–before rebounding with the boundless optimism of all Post-Renaissance Swedish bakers.
6) Fraf went to a dock, sat down, pulled out his pipe, lit a match, and commenced to day dreaming. His long reddish beard burst into a fireball of flame; not applying the burning match to the pipe was a mistake. Howling with pain, Franf dove into the bay to put out the fire.
7) Flame extinguished, Franf immediately inventoried certain gaps in his education and there were many. However, the one that consistently came to the forefront was not learning to swim. Thank goodness, the tree trunk from the first tidbit, by now worn down to a thin board, was right next to him. (Notice the neat foreshadowing?)
8) Franf climbed onto the board and sat down to think. Here he was sitting in Sweden, the top of world, when suddenly, in geological terms, he caught a wave. “Häftig,” he shouted, “this is totally awesome!” People gathered on the shore as Franf rode one rörformig wave after another. They joined in. Surfing totally rocked Sweden. It was totally tubular, man.
11) Then the Thirty Years war broke out. Thousands and thousands of surfing Swedes lost their lives in the battlefields of Germany, never again to catch that perfect Baltic Sea wave. Surfing died out in that no longer care free Nordic land.
12) But Franf is still remembered in the vibrant culinary, surfing world. This recipe is called Saffransbröd, in anagrammic remembrance, of Franf’s böard.
– 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.
Fusion Entree
POWEGIAN BREAKFAST BURRITO
INGREDIENTS
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.
French Soup
INGREDIENTS
1/3 cup rice
2/3 cup water
2 russet potatoes
1 red potato
2 garlic cloves
1/3 large yellow onion
1 2/3 cups chicken broth
1/3 cup water
1/3 tablespoon Poultry MagicTM Spice
1/6 teaspoon lemon pepper spice
UTENSIL
potato masher
PREPARATION
Cook rice separately according to instructions on package. While rice is cooking, peel russet and red potatoes. Cut both types of potatoes into eighths. Peel and mince garlic cloves and onion.
Put potato eighths, garlic, onion, chicken broth, water, Poultry Spice, and lemon pepper into large soup pan. Cook at low-medium heat for about 50 minutes or until all the potato eighths are completely soft. Stir occasionally. Mash the potatoes constantly until you feel no resistance. (No, there is no masher for human relationships. No. No! I said no.) Stir frequently. Add cooked rice to potato soup.
Supermarket potatoes cost almost the same whether you buy five pounds, two pounds, or just one microwavable tater. So, we all purchase the economical five-pound bag, leaving us with a lot of potatoes. This tasty recipe reduces your spud surplus wonderfully.
TIDBITS
1) The nutritious potato almost single-handedly kept European peasantry alive during the Thirty Years War in the 17th century.
2) Deadly nightshade is related to the potato. Unlike, its cousin, the tater, this plant is a deadly poison.
3) Which is why my recipes never include deadly nightshade.
4) Nor any other poison for that matter.
5) I do, however, use tomatoes frequently. Tomatoes are related to both the potato and deadly nightshade and were considered poisonous by American settlers in the late 17th century.
6) This fear by early colonials of the mighty tomato completely explains the lack of pizza parlors in early America.
7) Salem, Massachusetts became notorious for its Witch Trials of 1692.
8) In 1905, Lombardi’s in New York became the first restaurant licensed to sell pizza.
9) So, the Witch Trials delayed the licensing of American pizza by 213 years.
10) This explains resistance to capital punishment among many chefs.
– 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.
Sad Sack comic book from about 1967.
French Soup
GARLIC POTATO RICE SOUP
INGREDIENTS
1/3 cup rice
2/3 cup water
2 russet potatoes
1 red potatoes
2 garlic cloves
1/3 large yellow onion
1 2/3 cups chicken broth
1/3 cup water
1/3 tablespoon Poultry MagicTM Spice
1/6 teaspoon lemon pepper spice
UTENSIL
potato masher
PREPARATION
Cook rice separately according to instructions on package. While rice is cooking, peel russet and red potatoes. Cut both types of potatoes into eighths. Peel and mince garlic cloves and onions.
Put potato eighths, garlic, onion, chicken broth, water, Poultry Spice, and lemon pepper into large soup pan. Cook at medium-high for about 50 minutes or until all the potato eighths are completely soft. Mash the potatoes constantly until you feel no resistance. (No, there is no masher for human relationships. No. No! I said no.) Stir frequently. Add cooked rice to potato soup.
Supermarket potatoes cost almost the same whether you buy five pounds, two pounds, or just one microwavable tater. So, we all purchase the economical five-pound bag, leaving us with a lot of potatoes. This tasty recipe reduces your spud surplus wonderfully.
TIDBITS
1) The nutritious potato almost single-handedly kept European peasantry alive during the Thirty Years War in the 17th century.
2) Deadly nightshade is related to the potato. Unlike, its cousin, the tater, this plant is a deadly poison.
3) Which is why my recipes never include deadly nightshade.
4) Nor any other poison for that matter.
5) I do, however, use tomatoes frequently. Tomatoes are related to both the potato and deadly nightshade and were considered poisonous by American settlers in the late 17th century.
6) This fear by early colonials of the mighty tomato completely explains the lack of pizza parlors in early America.
7) Salem, Massachusetts became notorious for its Witch Trials of 1692.
8) In 1905, Lombardi’s in New York became the first restaurant licensed to sell pizza.
9) So, the Witch Trials delayed the licensing of American pizza by 213 years.
10) This explains resistance to capital punishment among many chefs.
– 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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