Meatloaf

A plate of meatloaf and exotic white vegetable arrived hot via Intergalactic Express. 

These plates are prepared for individuals of the highest caliber, achievement, recognition, and refinement, now piss off.

Bonjour. I am, eh, Marcel. 

I am with la  la Résistance Culinaire and our agents have cricked this code. We have hacked this site and provided les éléments de preuve, the evidence, we believe will make this all clear. 

It is a trick.

A trick of the most imaginative sort. We detect a lot of vegetable matter in here, shredded carrot, at least two bell peppers, one red and one green, and also an onion, it's just so bizarre, the whole thing is, additionally there is also a touch of garlic. 

There are spices in there too. We don't know what, we suppose they come from another galaxy, a galaxy for important people. 

We also see eggs, milk, and bread. Everything, it seems, all at once. And now we understand why these things are so expensive and rare. 

They're baked! Who would have thought of that? It takes a truly perverse mind to think of something like that. 

Yet another vegetable smashed to smithereens just to put on top of it. Look at it. Look at all the gelled blood piled up like that. We were all horrified. 

We have no idea what that white stuff is with the black dots. It doesn't match anything in our encyclopedias. We can only imagine it something truly exotic.  

Mushroom soup

Onion and garlic otherwise leek. 

  

The whole package of sage for two servings. Outrageous, yes, but it's how we do around here when no one is looking. 

Mushroom, the amazing shrinking vegetable. I told myself to show how much this shrinks and darkens

and then I told myself to quit bossing myself around, so too bad, didn't show it.

The entire mass of vegetables is processed to sludge and then thinned with stock. This took the whole carton of chicken broth and the soup is still very thick. 

I forgot to get cream and

I forgot to get leeks and

I forgot to get beef broth but

I made a delicious irresistible mushroom soup anyway. 

Potato, bacon

As you can plainly see, this potato is seven feet long.

When the potato shell is damaged this way, that means the potato chick inside is dead and you're supposed to throw them away but I never do.

The hot cheese sauce changes everything, perhaps too much.

I was going to fry an egg but I was to lazy and thus an egg was spared.

The bacon didn't render enough fat so butter was added to supplement and for deep rich satisfying buttery flavor.

Fried in a wonderful cast-iron pan, totally overkill in size and heaviness, but Man, does that thing sail.

Thai noodles

Two strange and alien ingredients, tamarind paste and Sriacha sauce, that you cannot get on this planet and so a plate of thin wheat noodles exotic and delicious and enchanting as this is not available to you. Sorry to tease you this way, that was unkind of me. I shouldn't have done that. Now I feel bad.

Shrimp is coated with chile sauce and cornstarch and fairly burned in a very hot cast iron pan. That takes a minute.

Thin wheat noodles are cooked in salted water. That takes a minute.

A combination of prepared products is stirred together in a bowl sufficient to amount to about 2 tablespoons to no more than 1/4 cup which is 4 tablespoons. A light coating of this sauce for the noodles is the goal not a sopping wet bowl of it. 

Unless you're an insatiable pig, then by all means do, go ahead a make as much as you want. It's hard to go wrong unless you flip overboard with something ridiculous. 

* peanut butter

* Sriracha sauce

* tamarind paste

* fish sauce 

* brown sugar, any kind of basic sugar, palm sugar, etc.

* mustard powder

* crushed garlic

* minced ginger

* water, if you want it thinner, oil if you want it to have that palate covering thing, or if the noodles get too sticky, whatever.

An entire bunch of cilantro, about a cup picked

An entire plant of mint, or a whole package, a lot of mint.

That takes a minute. So we're at what, three minutes? 

Well, it took longer than that. I must have added wrong or lied, sorry about that too.

But I cannot be troubled by these minor character flaws of teasing and lying, for right now I have the fire-breathing cilantro and mint breath of a superhero. I can start fires with my Thai chile breath and put them out with my  aromatic icy herbal cilantro/mint breath. Fierce. Cats follow me around. And cilantrophobes turn away in fear and flee. The scent of cilantro and mint seeps out of my pores. 

I didn't have peanut butter so I used almond butter instead. Tahini works too. Anything like that. 

Tonkatsu, corn

East meets West and slam! and meets East again and slam! again. 

No. No slamming. It's not like that anymore. That ancient attitude doesn't even make sense anymore. It's more like twirl around and swirl and mix and back and forth and there is no clearly East nor absolute West there is only round. 

Psych. There are clearly different approaches and when they meet, POW! right in the kisser. Corn is a quintessentially American thing. Those miniature corns you get in LaChoy chow mein are alien to Asia, I don't even know where they get those tiny atavistic teosinte throwbacks, nowhere in Asia. American corn spiced up with Indian flavors.

Man, this is good. The corn was sliced off the cob. The ears sat in the refrigerator for days. Not the way to treat corn which I keep hearing begins to deteriorate immediately upon being cut off the stalk, right there in the field the deterioration starts, which makes sense, but still. This corn is delicious. 

Corn

* butter

* cinnamon

* nutmeg

* turmeric

* chile flakes

* sake 

Pork cutlet coated with Panko, deep fried. The cutlets were sliced from a very moist pork roast cooked earlier. It had only to warm up and the bread coating brown. 

The tonkatsu sauce is surprisingly easy with surprisingly western ingredients, mostly catsup.

Tonkatsu sauce

* mostly catsup

* mustard powder I love this stuff. One of my favorite ingredients.

* Worcestershire sauce

* soy sauce

Those are the main ingredients. My catsup has a lot of chile powder in it, and I must say it is very good here. 

I added but most do not not call for

* honey

* nutmeg

Those are extra because I wanted them. See how we do? 

Shrimp and grits

This isn't very colorful, is it? 

If you're one of those cooks that likes to plump up shrimp before cooking them by brining, which happens quickly with things like seafood, then you might want to soak them awhile in clear water to have the salt migrate back out. The salt level between inside the shrimp and the water in the bowl will equalize by itself and that happens quickly too. If you held back on the salt and used flavor things instead then you would want to keep all that inside the shrimp. 

Beans, rice, tomato sauce, potato, corn tortillas

Leftovers. I've been having a lot of this here and there on spaghetti and with polenta. 

After feasting on these things originally they sit in there so forlornly and I pass on them because I'm in the mood for something else and because these are so ugly and I forget how delicious I made them originally and how tremendous they are together. 

A bag of masa harina marketed for tamales, the same thing as this, contained disconcerting black dots. It reminded me of tiny insects. I think maybe they were. I threw out the bag. 

Any ol' kind of cheese, not particularly great. 

Eggs with spiral-cut potato and ham

The Benriner spiral vegetable cutter has two blades. One is a regular blade, like a razor blade, that cuts a continuous spiral like a spiral ham. Here, the central plug is wasted. 

The second blade is like a very sharp comb that shreds the slices as they're cut. Without the comb then the potato would be like a spring or a Slinky toy, which is basically a very long and floppy spring. 

Novelty cut potatoes, kids would like these. They could be crispier.

I put regular dish soap in the dishwasher, just a little, to try to get some labels off the necks of bottles, and the machine flooded soap and water all over the kitchen right at the critical moment when the potatoes were to be plated. That forced me to mop up the floor instead of eat my potatoes. And the soap kept coming out. Stupid innit.