Apple waffle

You get yourself an apple and peel it round and round in one long peel.

It's a contest that we have with ourselves.

I don't know why I always buy whole pecan halves. I always break them up. 

Same thing with shrimp. I make a point to get big ones then end up chopping them to bits. 

The raw batter tastes better than the cooked waffle.

So how do you think about making a pancake batter?

Well, it will have certain things like like an egg and sugar and butter, and either baking powder or baking soda depending upon how acidic, and flour of course, duh, salt, vanilla. And some kind of liquid to thin it like milk or cream or buttermilk or like in this case apple cider.

And cinnamon.

And apple.

I tested with paper pH test strips. A tablet of paper strips similar to matches. It turned out neutral. There was no change. Surprisingly. So I used baking powder. Which is baking soda with its own combination of acids to activate it.

And that worked. 

Ham spread

Deviled ham spread!

It's the kind of ham that comes in a chunk and wrapped in foil and with its own brown sugar in another package for you to make your own sauce. Spiral cut. It's already cooked. The thing was so big that segments were frozen in packages like this one. 

The pieces are chopped then processed in two batches by the miniature blender that came with one of the immersion blenders. It is a ridiculous little blade. Yet it works in seconds for things like this. It is a handy little device. And it is always right there at hand.

That there is what you call a lagniappe. It's a small present added to the deal that you're making, a free toaster for opening a bank account for example. Michael Moore showed a famous one in his distorted way, a free rifle for opening a bank account. We see him walk in empty handed and we see him walk out of the bank carrying a rifle. The audience applauds. Ack shully that process took more than a week, I think. Moore had to wait for his gun but he shows himself walking out immediately after his first interview at the bank.

But a rifle really is an odd lagniappe. 

Twice as much mayonnaise was added as shown. I had to open a new jar.

Then, after the first little round, I got tired of the bread. It's the end of the loaf and I am totally over this bread. 

So I scraped off the ham filling with a Saltine. 

And that was excellent. 

So the rest was eaten on Saltines and the bread just sat there uneaten on the plate. 

A cold wet piece of bread.

What a way to go. 

What a spectacular loaf of bread to begin with but what a pedestrian dull way to go. 

Both the ends of the loaf were discarded and this last slice is also discarded. That's a lot of bread to waste. 

What do you think this is over here, a bakery? 

I never had Deviled ham. I never had anything in those little cans. 

Oh man.

I forgot pickle relish.

There is still quite a lot left. I'll add pickle relish to that. 

Macaroni and cheese with serrano chiles and applewood bacon

I have two jars of liquid cheese sauce intended for chips. It's very good in things like this. But today I wanted to open a package of Tillamook sharp cheddar cheese. A Béchamel sauce is prepared and then altered into something else, possibly a side-mother sauce, an aunt sauce. The butter and flour roux is arrested and forced to combine with new liquid and it does that fairly instantly. I used vermouth to combine them into sludge then milk was added and blended with a whisk. Then cheese. And that's two things right there, alcohol and cheese, that turn a Béchamel into a sauce that is a lot more complex. 

And a  bit weird.

You've got to be careful. This sharp cheddar and vermouth sauce is not that great. Maybe better luck next time. This is where American cheese works very well. One of the jars of liquid cheese sauce by itself would be better.

Spaghetti and meatball sandwich

* Homemade bread, hard winter red, malted

* Homemade meatloaf

* Psych!  

It's not a sandwich. It's just two pieces of malted whole wheat made into garlic bread and pretending to be a sandwich.

Because that's what food does when you turn your back for three seconds. It plays with itself.

Country style pork ribs

The whole time I thought it was beef. And the whole time I thought they had bones. Imagine my surprise to open the package and see only 4 things in it. 

I am out of BBQ sauce.

Homemade BBQ sauce:

***First bbq sauce photo:
* Catsup
* Mustard powder
* Worcestershire sauce
* Soy sauce
* Brown sugar
* Apple cider vinegar
***Second bbq sauce photo:
* garlic powder
* ginger powder
* 13-spice Chinese

These were placed in an InstantPot that is way too large for it. On a rack, with 2 cups of water below it.

Maybe I fell asleep a little bit while this was cooking. 

And maybe I didn't.

Had I known it was pork then I wouldn't have cooked it for 3 hours. The setting for "beef and roasts" was chosen and that brought it to low pressure. I think. The machine turned off when it was done, it did not hold a warm temperature. The lid opened without having to de-pressurize it. That tells you how long I let it go, that it could cool so much.  Possibly 4 hours. It was warm when I opened it. 

It is very good. 

I want to do a big ol' pile with bones -- a very large package of ribs. Beef ribs. Possibly two packages. I want to fill the 8-qt container. 

cheese sandwich, cheddar on malted whole wheat bread

Cheese toasted on the outside as well. 

French fries with Grueyere cheese and Beef Burgundy.

Psych!

It's really thirteen spices. 

A large and well-shaped russet potato from the exalted land of Idaho, a state in the American empire, is sliced as if turning it into a brick, that is roughly. Four sides, top and bottom. That is all the peeling it gets. It leaves a lot in the trailings that could be formed into potato sticks, but they are not, so a good deal is wasted. 

And that's such a shame.

See, if you were doing this for a family then all the little bits would be gathered too.

The container of five-spice is at least fifteen years old. I'm guessing.

It's been used twice that I know of.

It needs to be thrown out.

The container repurposed.

This Chinese 13-spices (from the back of the box):

* star anise

* fennel

* Sichuan pepper

* galangal ginger

* tangerine peel

* black pepper

* nutmeg

* ginger

* licorice

* amomum

* clove

* angelica dahurica

* ...

Should be 12-spice because this is all that is listed.

* Sichuan pepper is not a variant black pepper. It is not a chile. It has slight lemony overtones and it makes a tingly numbness in the mouth due to hydroxy-a-sanshool. 

* Galangal ginger, also Thai ginger, similar rhizome, while the varieties of galangal all have the same hot spicy flavor as ginger, they are not considered synonymous with regular ginger.

* Amomum is a Chinese plant genus that includes black cardamom. The plant genus is remarkable for its pungency. 

* Angelica dahurica is an Asian plant whose roots are used mostly for medicine in the Far East. The plant blooms look like Queen Anne's lace.

Well, we're left to guess what the 13th spice is. Let's say, cumin. 

No wait, let's say, some stupid crap like burdock.

No, wait, wait, wait. Let's say, fenugreek.

Turmeric. 

Something brown. Asafoetida (hing).

Whatever.

What we have here is a curry. I don't know why they're so resistant to using the term. Five-spice sounds so exotic. It's a curry! Thirteen-spice sounds over twice as exotic. It's a curry!

Star anise and fennel both have a licorice taste, then combined with actual licorice the whole thing will be heavily licorice-ified. 

Just like five-spice does. Due to the star anise alone. 

And it's cheap as H-E-Double cinnamon sticks. 

You can buy half the spice store combined into one thing and it's cheaper than buying them separately. It's so cheap that it makes me not want to buy it. Like what are we getting here, the floor sweepings of the spice shop? 

The original idea was to fry the potatoes three times to overcome the high altitude handicap that is preventing soft fluffy insides with crisp outsides. No matter how crisp, the moisture inside them transfers to the surface and makes them go soft.

That's how it is in a desert. 

The water moves automatically to even itself out. It passes right through the surface crispness leaving it softened. And that happens immediately.

That experiment was a massive pain in the butt and it failed because so much with moisture was added to them after they were cooked. The fries were already soggy before they were brought to the table.

What a bummer. 

I have another potato and the oil is still out, so I might try it again right away.

The Beef Burgundy was frozen leftover. It tastes weird. The big round thing is a potato, odd, because it's added to French fried potatoes. 

Whispers: It wasn't very good.

Pizza with pepperoni, jalapeño and pineapple

Now here is an odd pizza.

It was started the night before but by the time the dough was ready that night I was over it so the dough sat on the counter and over-proofed. For like half a day. I wasn't sure it would start back up. 

See, the yeast goes far as it goes then peters out and stops. It needs to be moved around. The yeast cells did what they could but now they can no longer reach, they need to be redistributed. It collapses dramatically and it kneads fairly instantly. The dough is no problem. It has a very strong aroma of alcohol.

This is the first time in decades that I didn't use parchment paper to transfer the pizza to the oven. I use a cookie tray. I sprinkled it with flour but that was not useful. The pizza stuck to the work surface and it stuck to the tray and it wouldn't release onto the preheated stone. It bunched up. That turned out a major problem. 

No tomato sauce. Olive oil instead.

It tastes very good.