FoodTrek: Rib-PAX-alypse Now

Wanna know what the worst thing is about a pork rib cook-off? Absolutely nothing. Especially when you're not cooking, you're just eating, and enjoying a Saturday afternoon. The Mister and I were fresh from this year's Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), with the distinct scent of  video game Nerdery and Geekery (aka, human body odor) lingering upon us, so we cleansed ourselves in the smoky fires of Ribpocalypse!

Riders of the Ribpocalypse, reign your meaty terror upon us! - Photo by Wasabi Prime

UnRecipe: My Dinner With Cthulhu

It starts out simple enough, a basic craving for a basic dish... sear up some steak, fry a few eggs, an ad hoc hash of whatever vegetables are around... and then it gets weird. Downright Lovecraftian. And before you know it, a humble breakfast-for-dinner meal has a science fiction Chimera of your worst nightmares showing up on your plate, a culmination of humanity's anxious energy, a fear of the unknown... Hold fast, kids, you're Cookin' with Cthulhu.

Baked eggs with hash, before a mythological beast crashes the meal - Photo by Wasabi Prime

The desire to make steak, eggs and hash wasn't some culinary ritual to call up H.P. Lovecraft's creature of the eponymous story, Call of Cthulhu. It just sort of  happened on a quick plating of leftovers, and I'm saving that photo for last because it's freaky-deaky, and I don't want it to ruin the telling of a genuinely tasty breakfast hash. Honestly, who wants some skeevy tentacle-faced winged leviathan muscling-in on your quiet meal at home? I'm pretty sure he wouldn't say "please" when asking for seconds. He'd just pulverize your sanity and leave you an empty husk of a human being while he threw on extra dashes of Sriracha on your serving of Brinner. He'd probably watch all your DVR-ed episodes of Glee and just delete everything before you saw them. He'd even drink all the OJ and just leave one swallow in the carton before slinking off back to R'lyeh like a total d-bag. Thanks for nothing, Cthulhu.

Brinner done right - with steak and bad-ass hash - Photos by Wasabi Prime

I just wanted to make a Bad-Ass Breakfast Hash. Yes, that's a thing. It's a delicious thing. The CSA had a lot to do with it, providing a bevvy of veggies to play with, but I found a nice combination of produce that makes for a delicious and colorful hash. I like to start building the perfect Bad-Ass Breakfast Hash with the perfect bad-ass base, which is of course: Bacon. A couple of slices rendered in a large pan on a burner set to medium-low. Get all that delicious swiny fat pulled out, it's liquid cooking gold. Remove the crispy slices and set aside, they'll get thrown back in later if you don't just eat them as you cook, which is totally understandable if you do. Toss in some diced red potatoes with the skin still on, let them get a nice browning with the bacon fat. Start building flavor with diced onions and let them sweat and slowly caramelize. The next vegetables are as much for color as they are for flavor -- bell peppers (red and yellow are best, as they're sweeter) and the chopped stalks of rainbow chard. You'll throw in the green leaves of the chard later, but the stalks are edible, they need extra cook time to get tender, and their color stays for the most part. It kind of reminds me of cooking rhubarb; you don't keep the intense color, but it won't brown, instead mellowing to a pastel color. I get a lot of crap for cooking Brown Food, and while there's some brown/neutral tones in this hash, the peppers and chard keep it pretty. Adding the chopped greens of the chard towards the end, just to wilt, keeps the hash  looking fresh. A nice addition for keeping the flavor bright is finely-chopped preserved lemon rind -- I know, not a super common ingredient, but if you feel the hankering to jar up some excess lemon with a ton of salt, just check out the We Can Portlandia That post about pickling everything. I have to say, I'm addicted to the use of preserved lemon rind. I don't always have fresh citrus to zest, but a jar of salted lemons is mightily convenient for these UnRecipe MacGyver meals that  often come together with little planning or grocery shopping.

The hash that makes you hollaback fo' more - Photos by Wasabi Prime

You can't have steak and eggs without steak, of course. I used a flank steak. It's one of my favorite cuts, just because it's got a nice flavor and there's never a doubt over which direction the grain of the meat goes. As long as you're slicing across the lines of the grain, you will not get a tough bite. Getting a nice sear in a pan, ideally in the rendered bacon fat, is a good start. You just want to cook it rare and it will continue to steam a little, wrapped in foil, resting while the hash is getting cooked. You could skip the steak altogether, just going with eggs and bad-ass breakfast hash, but I had a hankering for red meat. When the hash was done, I sliced up the end cuts of the flank and tossed that into the hash, just because I could.The center rare part of the steak was saved for thin slices to go with the finished eggs and hash. I cracked eggs into ramekins of hash, baked in the oven. It's kind of like a mix between poached and fried eggs; still runny but sunny-side up with the yolk staring at you. If there's any crisps of bacon left, sprinkle as a garnish.

Sunny, runny egg yolk, is there nothing better in the world? - Photos by Wasabi Prime

Despite all the Lovecraft pre-func on this post, it really wasn't until we had Brinner leftovers of steak, eggs and bad-ass breakfast hash that Cthulhu made an appearance. A lame attempt at being artsy, fanning out the reheated steak slices before topping everything with a couple of fried eggs had us staring right into the Face of Madness, before it was devoured by the Mouth of Madness. Such is the pitfall of our love of putting eggs on... well, everything. Call it Cthulhu, call it Dr. Zoidberg from Futurama, call it whatever you like. We just started into its terrifyingly mad sunny-side-up face and devoured the devourer of souls because dang, we were hungry.

Let's be honest, if this were the first photo, you'd have stopped reading the post - Food photo by Wasabi Prime





UnRecipe: The Lost Weekend

This is what should have happened -- an action-packed weekend of attending this year's Emerald City ComicCon and then an evening of liver-pummelling at the annual Cask Festival. But, no. Thwarted. Defeated. Left a smouldering husk of a superhero that once was... burning through one tissue box a day and a really chapped nose from the Evil Sinus Infection from the Phantom Zone. It was a rare day when the Powers of Evil and Mucus reigned supreme. Bummer.

So... yeah. The last few weeks have been a rip-roaring good time of battling a chest-rattling cough and other sickly sundries -- and I know I'm  not the only one. It seems like everyone is suffering from the same bug. I feel your pain. Literally. Let's share sick stories -- add your horrific tales of pestilence below in the comments section, it'll be theraputic. Maybe it's the change of seasons, perhaps the sudden spike in pollen causing massive irritants leading to a mass outbreak of sinus-related problems. Whatever. It sucked. What sucks even more is how dull and bland food becomes. Granted, you're so zapped for energy, you don't want to do much, but on the early end of being sick, I immediately craved one thing: spice, and lots of it. So I cooked what I considered to be My Last Supper, knowing things would get worse before it was going to get better.

The spice must flow... into my belly - Photos by Wasabi Prime

We had some fresh green beans in our CSA delivery and all I could think of was dousing them in spicy chili sauce and giving them a quick pan-fry. I marinated sliced pork in chili paste, some sugar and soy sauce, and cooked that into a kind of curry-type dish with carrots, chickpeas and onions. I don't even know what it was. I just threw in every strong-flavored spice I had, like cumin, coriander, the works. Not quite as sweet as Japanese-style curry, not quite as heavily-spiced as Indian curry -- at least, not that my fading tastebuds could tell. But it was delicious and this combination literally blew my socks off, they were so spicy and satisfying. I finished off the last of some pickled cucumbers, to add some chilled spice to the mix. Oh, my poor insides, trying to digest this onslaught of heat, but I don't care, when you're feeling sick, you're like a tragic comic book hero, deadened by the prospect of a doomed future -- you do anything just to feel aliiiiiiiiiive.

Food packed with flavor... keep it coming, I'm only getting sicker - Photos by Wasabi Prime

One bright note, I was glad to sprinkle in some fresh garlic greens. I saw we had a fresh batch of green shoots from some garlic cloves that thankfully overwintered and returned this spring. Yet another nice way to use oddball kitchen scraps. I used to plant green onions, but shoving the too-small garlic cloves from the center of a bulb right into the dirt has been an even better, lazier way to get something similar to green onions. They taste similar to scallions, with a mild garlic flavor. Bugs tend to avoid them, so yet another bonus for lazy gardeners like myself.

More flavor, less effort, the I'm So Freakin' Sick Diet continues... - Photos by Wasabi Prime

Like some Outbreak-style Patient Zero study, my progression into Congestion City only worsened, so I cooked up a beef broth. Getting caught up on the latest episodes of The Walking Dead felt like a promise of things to come. Zombie-fication -- engaged. I had some beef bones in the freezer and pulled some goodies from the frozen scrap bag like leek trimmings, ginger, plenty of onion tops and bottoms. I added whole dry spices like star anise and peppercorns, as well as a little packet of dried kombu, or seaweed. It's typically in sheet forms, and you add it when you're making a traditional Japanese dashi or broth, for that uniquely savory umami. Which of course is a fancy way of saying, "MSG High." I had little dried seasoning packets from Uwajimaya, so I threw some of that in towards the end of the simmer. I strained all the solid chunks, added a spoonful of chili sauce to sweat my sinuses open, and drank it up with somen noodles. Very simple dinners for the next several days of feeling too tired to do anything.

Soup is good food - Photos by Wasabi Prime

Highlight: I had some awesome fever dreams of solid food. A very clear vision of soft bread filled with creamy, gooey Brie cheese. And possibly honey or pear slices. I followed my Food Vision Quest, and while waiting for my prescription of Action-Packed Antibiotics, I found some soft bread rolls and a big ol' wheel of Brie. Let's make this dream a reality, people. I hadn't used the grill pan in a while, and it was good practice getting the heat just-right. Medium-low is just enough to melt the cheese, but not enough to char the bread into a lump of coal, as cast iron can have that effect on things.

Do you dream in cheese? Apparently, I do - Photos by Wasabi Prime

Somewhere between all this, I toasted some almonds with more spicy seasonings because I needed something to snack on that wasn't an orange. At this point, things were looking up. I appreciate all the very kind well-wishes over email, Twitter, Facebook, and even a nice e-card, to boot. You are all awesome people and deserve SuperLotto-like fortunes, but all I can offer is Super-Lotto-sized Thanks. Indy was a good nursemaid, staying on the bed, not judging the fact that I was an absolute wreck. I was popping pills like Valley of the Dolls, eating ibuprofen like candy to stay propped up for work (probably didn't help things, but there's no such thing as sick days when you're self-employed), and taking fever-dream-fantastic decongestants that left me in Bat Country most nights.


All remedies aside... drugs are best - Photos by Wasabi Prime

At least the Mister was able to enjoy Cask Festival this year. He sent me a nice photo of a friend face-down from drunken fury and everyone returned in one piece, so that's a successful beer festival if I've ever heard one. While I'm still disappointed at missing all the fun at Emerald City ComicCon, thank heavens for Local Independent Superhero Web Series! Is that a thing? I think that's a thing. Friend and Brock's fellow workmate at Runictown, Wonder Russell, is blessed with superhuman abilities and Top Pot doughnuts in this funny web series that kicked off at ECCC - meet The Collectibles!  Think Superfriends Meets The Office, which I think we can all dig, because even with special powers, you're still fighting The Man. It got a great live kickoff at the Con, and since it's a web series, you can be anywhere on the planet with the interwebs and watch it (except maybe China and likely North Korea). It's been a nice diversion, along with big breakfasts and Star Wars marathons as I continue to get better and pop more pills. So please check out The Collectibles!

All the things that will truly cure what ails you - bottom pics by Wasabi, top from The Collectibles