Heisenburgers

DSC00751, a photo by roken is dodelik on Flickr.

Okay, so they're basically bacon avocado cheeseburgers with bleu cheese and caramelized onions. I mixed the bleu cheese with a little mayo to make it spreading consistency.

And really, the bleu cheese is the only thematic part.

But they're still pretty amazing. I might make them again for the season finale, if a better Breaking Bad-themed food doesn't emerge before then.

In the meantime, I have to prevent myself from buying an ice cream maker so that I don't try to make that Ron Swanson ice cream that was going around the internet a few weeks ago.

Seriously, is fan-fooding a thing? If not, can we make it one? Someone should ask Henry.

What would you serve?

Despite the dreadful pun that is this blog's title (for those not in the know, the main professional organization in our discipline is the Society for Cinema and Media Studies), we actually do very little combining of food and media studies around here.

So I want to pose a question that sort of combines those two things.

Breaking Bad returns next Sunday, July 17th. I am thinking of being dorky and making a themed dinner, or at least planning one and then not carrying the idea through. The question, then, is what should I make?

Some thoughts:

1. Alburquerque local cuisine? Googling "cuisine of New Mexico" gives me the idea that I would need four truckloads of green chiles. I don't like green chiles or anything spicy, really (except wasabi, and sometimes Panang curry).

2. Fried chicken, to commemorate Los Pollos Hermanos. However, the last time we had fried chicken, the boyfriend unit woke up at 3:00 a.m. with the worst migraine I've ever vicariously experienced. I think we both would prefer to avoid that happening again.

3. Nothing Skyler cooks looks very good, ever.

4. I don't want to have a dinner of peanut butter sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

5. I could probably make blue hard candy, but that isn't exactly dinner.

6. Hamburgers with ricin? Probably not a good idea, since I intend to live.


My desire to do something so incredibly dorky is not without precedent. I did a themed menu for the Parks and Recreation finale--but that show is oddly obsessed with food. I could probably do two weeks' worth of Parks and Rec menus. Hell, all you'd have to do is serve bacon on everything. (For the record, I made waffles. And bacon.)

Please adopt Axl Affect before reading

When you were young
And your life
Was an open book,
You used to say,
"Live and let live."
But if it's getting tough to stay a vegetarian,
There's something you can try:
FAKE CHICKEN POT PIE!!!

HOW YOU DO

Go right ahead and drop a stick of butter into your large cast iron pan or other sautee pan. And bust out with the mirepoix:

3 Carrots in bite-size pieces, washed but unpeeled
5 or so ribs of Celery with their greens, chopped.
Pearl Onions to taste -- you can peel them yourself or use frozen. The frozen ones will be softer and sweeter.

Add two tablespoons of Poultry Seasoning (Schilling or whatever, but not stale, ok?), a teaspoon of Nutritional Yeast if you've got it, half a teaspoon Turmeric, one and a half teaspoons of salt, lots of finely ground black pepper and a teaspoon or so of Vegetable Boullion.

Sautee this mixture until the veggies begin to soften, so that the seasonings meld together and blossom in the butter and add your fake meat. I suggest one of three options:

- Quorn nuggets are bestest, but somewhat hard to find. But check that calorie to protein ratio. It's awesome. It totally justifies eating a ton of butterfat in pie crust, butter and cream forms.
- Trader Joe's Chickenless Strips, torn into smaller pieces
- Homemade gluten Mock Chicken

Then add a cup of water and turn the heat up so that the broth/gravy marinates into the "meat" and boils down again drier. This is an Indian "technique" called Bhuna. I wish I were lying. Everything simple and intuitive has a name. That thing you do when you hold your nose shut and blow to pop your ears? The Valsalva Maneuver. You can put that on a business card: "Expert in maneuvers Valasalvic and Heimlichean." Anyway, talking of bhuna reminds me that this recipe become my equally sinful SAMOSA PIE if you leave out the chicken, add cauliflower, potato, and lots of garam masala, aniseed and curry.

Next, add a cup and a half of cream! Like a boss! Or half and half, like an underboss. Stir the cream in. Slowly sift in, with a sifter like a good girl, a tablespoon and a half of corn starch and mix it carefully so it doesn't form clumps. Now is the time to drop in 2 cups Frozen Peas! When the gravy comes to a bubbling boil, the starch will thicken. Now you can turn the heat off and fill your pie shell!

I don't tell you how to make your pie crust. I don't know your life. Figure out some way to get two crusts. Lie, cheat, I don't care. I'm not even gonna tell you which one goes on top. That's homework. Alls I knows is: I don't make pie crust because I'm too fancy so I ride down to Trader Joe's in my gold limousine and have my man go in and get their frozen ones because they're vegetarian (other brands not so much FYI). Meanwhile, back at the manse...

Into the oven at 350 for about 30 minutes!

Out of the oven and into your body for ever and ever. Go in peace.

Media Pairing: Live and Let Die!!

Strawberry Shortcake (like Granny used to make it)

Strange kitchen.


Having blogged several of my mom's mother's baked goods, I will now impart the sole dish that I learned from my dad's mother. Technically, I learned it from my mother, who learned it from Dad's mother. And technically, I don't have her exact shortcake biscuit recipe. Mom might still have it somewhere, but it never got passed on to me. (Aunt Nancy? Help?) Granny generally disliked cooking but, having married into a family with notoriously sweet teeth, became fairly proficient at dessert out of necessity. This version of strawberry shortcake is from Dad's side of the family. My mother's family makes strawberry shortcake with those horrible yellow spongy cakes from the grocery store, to which I say, ew. A homemade biscuity thing is much, much better.

So I found myself at my dad's new house for spring break, along with some rapidly wilting strawberries that had been deemed not quite awesome enough to eat as-is.



I always have to bake something for my father, so why not strawberry shortcake?

Step zero: Preheat oven to 425. Place the beaters of your electric mixer into a very clean metal bowl, then put the bowl in the freezer.

Step one: Wash, hull, and slice about 1 quart strawberries. Taste a couple of representitive slices for sweetness. Sprinkle sugar over berries - anywhere from 1/8 to 1/3 cup, depending on how many berries you have and how sweet you want them to be. Stir a bit. Leave on the countertop while you do everything else.



Personal tip: Do not refrigerate the berries before you slice them. They don't spoil any less quickly in the fridge, really. More importantly, trying to hull and slice cold berries is really unpleasant. Obviously, if you have syrupy leftovers, they need to go in the fridge.

In the absence of Granny's authentic biscuit recipe, I use this one from About.com, which I typically modify slightly. I do not turn the dough out and knead it properly. For two to three kneads, why bother? I just sort of mash it around in the bowl a little. I also make these as drop biscuits rather than rolled biscuits. This is mainly because I hate cleaning up after kneading and rolling sticky biscuit dough. It works fine. Nor do I brush the tops with milk or sprinkle them with sugar. Not necessary. Incidentally, you also don't need to use a buttered foil-lined baking sheet. I use an ungreased sheet. There's enough butter. It's fine.

Cooking in someone else's kitchen is always a challenge. In Grandma's kitchen, the challenge is that I don't know where anything is (and, since the kitchen was remodeled recently, neither does Grandma half the time). In Dad's kitchen, the challenge is that neither he nor his wife bake. So it's not that I can't find things, it's that they don't exist. There is a food processor, but it's a mini prep. I asked for a pastry cutter and was told "There's a pizza cutter..." So I used two steak knives to cut in the butter.



You may also have noticed that this is a Pyrex casserole dish, not a mixing bowl. There are no proper large mixing bowls here. It's about improvising.

What you can't tell from that picture is that the flour is a little far gone. Still edible, but not so fresh. "How old is it?" I asked, because flour has, you know, a good long shelf life. I was informed that the flour was originally from St. Louis, which means a) it is at least two years old and b) they moved half a Tupperware tub of flour from St. Louis to Virginia. I...would have thrown it out in St. Louis and bought a new tub once I got to Virginia. But to each their own.



I did encounter some objects from my childhood. This tiny mixing bowl and this 1/2 cup! I learned to measure with this very 1/2 cup (and its brothers, which have probably all melted in dishwashers now). It must be at least 25 years old. Good cup.

Gone, sadly, is the other set of mixing bowls in which I learned to mix. It was a set of three Pyrex-ish bowls. The baby bowl was yellow and the daddy bowl was red. I don't know what happened to them--maybe Mom has them? The mommy bowl was white with a pattern of abstract geometric roosters across the top rim. That bowl got broken during a particularly experimental moment in which I attempted to make homemade peanut butter cups while on Rollerblades. Yes, I was old enough to know that cooking and Rollerblades don't mix. And yes, I was allowed to Rollerblade in the house.

But I digress.



This is how I form my biscuits. I like to get eight out of the recipe, but you could make them smaller or larger.




This is me doing obnoxious hipster photography.




This is what you should do while the biscuits are baking: create homemade whipped cream. You did buy heavy whipping cream, right? Whipped cream from a can is wrong. It's just wrong, folks. Maybe it's acceptable for Jell-O, but that's about it. The real stuff is so much better. (Don't even get me started on Cool Whip.) Pour about 8 oz. into your nice cold bowl, add a tablespoon or two of granulated sugar and a teaspoon or two of vanilla, and whip it.




This is what the biscuits look like. Let 'em cool for just a few minutes. You want to eat them warm, though.

*Yes, I did deliberately line up my biscuits with the teapot. I have to have some continuity in my food photography.

After tasting these particular biscuits, which had a slight plastic Tupperware container aftertaste, it was decided to throw out the St. Louis flour and purchase Virginia flour.




And this is what the whole thing looks like assembled. The cereal bowl and literal sundae spoon are also childhood relics. We used to have a whole set of sundae spoons. Each one was a different color. This is the last one left, though. Sigh.

Thus ends the tour of a few transplanted childhood kitchen objects.

Media pairing:



You thought I was going to post Strawberry Shortcake, didn't you? Didn't you?! WELL, I SHOWED YOU! Rainbow Brite was, and remains, superior.

I had sushi for dinner tonight and ordered a rainbow roll, too. So there.

Sugar Cookies a la Grandma

Another goodie from the treasure trove that is my grandma's recipe box. This is from the back of a product box (Crisco and Arm & Hammer are my educated guesses) from, I believe, the late 1940s. The last step before baking involves putting sugar on the top, so the traditional thing to do in my family is to make these for Christmas with red and/or green sugar, but obviously they can be made with white sugar for color-neutral occasions. Like last night's occasion, which was me wanting cookies.

Sugar Cookies
Sift together 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour (presifted), 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, and 3/4 teaspoon salt. Set aside.

Cream 1/2 cup softened unsalted butter and 1/2 cup shortening, then add 1 cup granulated sugar, and 1 teaspoon vanilla and cream again. Add 1 egg and cream until fluffy.



Do not announce "I'm making this recipe because it's the only one that only needs one egg," in case this happens to your only egg before the preceding sentence has even finished leaving your mouth.

Wait for boyfriend unit to go to grocery store for more eggs.

Stir in dry ingredients until mixture is smooth. This will be difficult. Then blend in 2 tablespoons milk.

Drop by teaspoons onto an ungreased cookie sheet...




Then flatten the tops with the bottom of a water glass dipped in sugar.



I would recommend--if you didn't already figure this out for yourself--removing any stray sugar from the cookie sheet before baking. The dough is pretty adhesive, so I usually just tip the sheet over the sugar bowl and brush it back in with the end of a paper towel or something.

Bake in a 400-degree oven until the edges are very lightly browned. The recipe says this will take 10-12 minutes, but I was taking cookies out after 8.5 and my oven is not particularly fast. The cookies are no good if you let them get too brown, so keep a close eye on them. Makes between 3-5 dozen, depending on how big your teaspoonfuls are.



While I'm typically a purist with these cookies, last night I went experimental. Here they are with cinnamon sugar on the top.




They were good that way.

And here they are with homemade butterscotch sauce drizzled on the top.



The homemade butterscotch sauce is pretty freaking amazing. There's a lot of it left over, in a bowl in my fridge, and I am exercising a lot of self-control right now. It's really hard not to just grab a spoon and eat the damn stuff on its own. I didn't have kosher salt, so I used sea salt, which created a delightfully salty/sweet combination if you're one of those salted caramel folks. I think I might be.


FYI, today I made an awesome breakfast of poached eggs over cornbread with a sun-dried tomato spread. Then I made a batch of super-healthy vegan chili, which even has organic green chard in it (on sale at Whole Foods), and will hopefully combat the effects of the butterscotch-drizzled sugar cookies...

Media Pairing: This came up when I searched YouTube for "butterscotch," and combines my loves of butterscotch, late-night television, and ponies. Well, sort of.

I found a cookbook.

It's a cookbook I purchased myself, in 2003, in Greece. It's called The Traditional Greek Cookery Book. Did I buy it for someone as a gift, and forget to give it to them, and by "them" I probably mean Leslie? We'll never know, because I've completely forgotten. The book was still in its shrink wrap. I unwrapped it. I'm stuck in Grandma's house with what appears (mercifully) to be a 24-hour bug, the Television of Endless Bowl Games, and the World's Loudest Little Brother (tm). What else was I going to do, read one of those quals books I dragged across the country with me?

Sweet zombie Jesus, this is an awesome cookbook. No, I haven't made any recipes from it yet, but there are many reasons that I already believe in its awesomeness.

1. It has no credited author, but was either written by a Greek who speaks British English in a charming second language sort of way, or was written in Greek and translated oddly.

2. The measurements are given mainly in kilos and soupspoons.

3. The recipes all have calorie counts, because "there are few things worse than cookery books which do not help one stick to one's daily programme of nutrition." One recipe calls for 2.5 cups of oil. It is not anomalous.

4. There are some accompanying illustrations, without indication as to which dish is being illustrated. This is particularly problematic in all the dishes incorporating offal and mince. It's less problematic for recipes such as Roast Suckling Pig. I can tell that that's what that is. I can't tell why it's posed on a bed of twigs and a tree stump, or why someone has made it a Dr. Seussean hat of a carved tomato stuffed with kale and perched atop a carved grapefruit rind. But then again, I've never been very good at presentation.

5. Many recipes call for the use of an oven. Nary a one specifies what temperature said oven should be. Similarly, many simply call for one or two kilos of lamb or beef, without specifying which cut is preferable. It's like when I make an apple pie--I don't need a recipe to do pie crust or filling, really; I just need a vague reminder of how much flour goes in the dough. One fish recipe begins: "Fry the fish in the usual manner." Oh. Okay then. I'll just consult the Greek grandma I don't have.

6. It does go into great detail on how to prepare your lamb for roasting on a spit. Also on how to remove a lobster brain and then incorporate the brain into a sauce.


I showed my grandfather a picture of the most colorfully illustrated recipe, Octopus with Macaroni. If you saw that episode of Top Chef All-Stars a couple of weeks ago, where they ate at top NYC restaurants and the chefs were served a crown roast of octopus, it looked like that combined with macaroni and cheese. Before I could even offer to prepare Octopus with Macaroni for Grandpa, he said, "I will decline your invitation." Should I instead offer to cook one of the many dishes calling for lamb intestines?

One thing I remember about Greek cuisine, from my brief time there, was being absolutely bombarded by kumquats. Fresh kumquats, pickled kumquats, candied kumquats, kumquat jelly, kumquat liquor. There is no mention of kumquat in this book. I call foul.

Media pairings: Well, you know. I offer a selection. (The first film relates more to the cookbook topic. The second film is better.)