Super late Easter post

The best traditions in my family all revolve around food, and Easter a day reserved for stuffing our faces with delicious lamb. My feelings about lamb are this: If you don't like it there is something wrong with your brain/taste buds. This was the first year that I decided to help with the food, and I made two sauces to go with the lamb: mint pesto, a family favorite, and tzatziki, a condiment that I'd never made before. Unsurprisingly I went to serious eats for the tzatziki recipe, and it was delicious. Unfortunately yours truly was a little... overzealous... with the mandolin and ended up slicing off the tip of my right ring finger. I am happy to report that, despite said trauma, yours truly managed to finish the recipe and we had both sauces that I intended to serve. I am not particularly proud to admit that I had to wait to finish said recipe until we returned from the hospital and that I nearly passed out not once, not twice, but three times. Luckily my uncle is a surgeon who works at said hospital (which is five minutes away from my grandparents house) so as soon as I mutilated myself he took me to his office and patched me right up. I debated posting a picture of the wound, but it's pretty gross so I'll spare you. Enough gross stuff, here's a picture of the mint pesto in process:

For those of you who don't know what Lent is, the crash course version is that it's a period of time during which many observers of various Christian faiths give up something meaningful to them. It ends the Saturday before Easter. Common things to give up for lent include booze, chocolate, meat, swearing, and sweets. My girlfriend, who was coming with to my family's Easter celebration, had given up sweets. In the middle of the Lent period she informed me that she was really craving coconut cream pie, so I decided to surprise her with one. My buddy Josh helped me make it, and it was delicious. I will say that the custard didn't set perfectly, so I made it again a week later and it was perfect.

Game of Thrones Dinner

When thinking about what to make for a Game of Thrones themed dinner I was cooking with my sister roast fowl kept coming to mind... I mean, what's more medieval than roasting an animal carcass nearly whole (aside from this)? Surprise surprise, I turned to Serious Eats that had a lovely tutorial on how to oven roast chicken. If you cut out the spine of a whole bird, effectively butterflying the chicken, and roast it on a wire rack at 400 degrees the thigh meat will hit 170 right when the breast meat hits 150, meaning that the chicken is cooked perfectly the entire way through and both thigh and breast meat are tender and juicy. I also smeared the skin with olive oil, salt, & pepper. It worked like a charm!

Apple, Cinnamon, & Nutmeg Spiced Pancakes

Continuing on the pancake route I decided to alter the Krusteaz mix yet again, this time by adding cinnamon, nutmeg, & apple pie spice to the mix. Results were ... well I'll definitely be doing this again.. Repeatedly. Although I'll probably use more cinnamon next time!

Apple Pancakes

For the first 2-3 years after my return to Boston I was pretty obsessed with pancakes. During those years I probably made somewhere around 500 pancakes (measured by the number of 10 lbs pancake bags we went through). I made a myriad of varieties, such as chocolate chip, banana, strawberry, and blueberry. I even got a bit fancy, making peanut butter & Nutella stuffed pancakes and a PB&J pancake sandwich (both of which were crazy delicious). I never, however, altered the mix. I always used simple, basic Krusteaz.

Let me be the first to say that there is NOTHING wrong with Krusteaz; in fact it's amazing. With the right amount of water (I have no idea how much water they recommend, I just go by feel at this point) it makes a light, fluffy, delicious canvas for maple syrup. I was about to make pancakes for myself one morning and I had the insane/brilliant idea to replace the water with blended apple (used 1/4 apple for 2 small pancakes). Now, some people will ask me why not just cut up the apple and put it into the pancake like I would with a banana. No. That would be all messed up texture wise. Gross. No thank you. I used my Vitamix to be certain there were no surprise chunks waiting mid pancake.

What I ended up with was a light, fluffy, delicious pancake with the exact same texture as a normal pancake that had a fantastic apple flavor to it. Yum!

Eggs Benedict continued

I'm still obsessed with my discovery of Sri Racha hollandaise and look for pretty much any excuse I can to make it. Dad has never had eggs Benedict before? Eggs Benny w/ Sri Racha hollandaise. Girlfriend leaving for London? Eggs Benny w/ Sri Racha hollandaise.

There are two differences for this rendition of Eggs Benedict... the hollandaise also had sea salt and paprika in it and the English muffins were fried in bacon fat (omgbaconfat 10/10 would do again).

Cinnamon french toast with a cream cheese glaze

List articles, generally speaking, are annoying; they're a cheap way to draw you in by making their pointless, mundane content seem more exciting. A very quick search on Buzzfeed's front page yielded several such articles, chief among with was "9 videos you can't miss this week". I can miss them, and I will, thank you.

Rant over, there are some list articles that are super awesome. The same quick search on Buzzfeed took me to "17 Ways To Eat More Nutella" and "27 Ways To Experience The Holy Matrimony Of Peanut Butter And Chocolate". These are obviously good things and make their list article nature tolerable. A couple weeks back my sister sent me the article "31 Life-Changing Ways To Eat French Toast". Now, when I see an article title like this I'm imagining people eating french toast while doing a split between two trucks moving backwards at ~30mph. Stupid title aside, the article had some awesome ideas for french toast variations such as Nutella and bacon stuffed french toast, caramel apple french toast, cannoli stuffed french toast, and cinnamon french toast with cream cheese glaze. Last weekend I recreated the latter and dayumn it was good. Quick question, is it playing with your food if you do it before you eat? SMILEY FACE!

Because the article has a link to the recipe I won't bore you with it here, but damn it was tasty. The cream cheese glaze had cinnamon and nutmeg and was bonkers. Yep, bonkers.

To go with the french toast I did scrambled eggs with aged cheddar and pan fried maple breakfast sausages from Walden Local Meat Co. If you're actually reading this terrible blog and haven't seen my post about them, I'd suggest you check it out. They're awesome and you should support them.

Grilled Cheese continued!

A few posts ago I wrote about making a apple-cheddar-bacon-egg-caramelized shallot gourmet grilled cheese. Aside from blowing my mind, it taught me that a grilled cheese is an awesome format for creative deliciousness that has to be explored further. Since then I've made two more... aside from the innards, the biggest difference is that I've fried these in the bacon fat from  said bacon. The first picture is cheddar, guacamole and bacon grilled cheese while the second is cheddar, avocado, heirloom tomato and bacon.

Also, it should be noted that I kind of cheat when it comes to grilled cheese making. This is how I guarantee that the cheese is nice and melted: