Episode 1: Cooking a godamn chicken.

In case you couldn't decipher my pathetic drunken slur of a cooking show (Watch it!), here are some CRUCIAL elements to remember as far as ingredients and cooking times:

Oven Temperature: 425 Degrees

-Put potatoes in the oven while preheating, don't take them out until ready to serve. Don't forget the fucking holes or they will explode into a million pieces just like all of your hopes and dreams.

-Remove chicken from its illustrious blood bag. 

-Remove and discard organ packet at your liesure

-Separate garlic cloves and place around chickenbeast in some sort of appropriate cooking dish.

-Season the chicken liberally with garlic salt, tarragon, and fresh ground pepper. Don't forget that fresh rosemary butt plug if one is handy. If you cannot find a fresh rosemary butt plug....Whatever. 

You want your chicken to look like this:

-Put the chicken in the oven once it's preheated. Set a timer for one hour. Don't open the fucking oven until that timer goes off, or unless your oven catches on fire because it's incompetent.  

-Make your salad dressing. Remember! One part vinegar to three parts olive oil (changed my mind about that)....and get something nice. Add a heaping spoonful of whole grain mustard and stir it very half-assedly. Who cares. It's all gonna get to know each other in the bowl. 

-Fart out a salad. It's not rocket science...it's....salad.

-When the timer goes off, take your chicken out of the oven and hack that shit up with all the finesse of a blind baby eskimo. Put it on a plate with your potatoes and salad.  Take that plate out to your nearest dinner guest and be like "shit yeah mo'nucka."

- Eat your delicious dinner, chill the fuck out and coerce your manfriend into making you a martini while you put your feet up and come down from your labor intensive evening.

The End.

Eat Ducks.

So a girl walks into a really fancy restaurant. Orders the seared duck. Duck arrives well done. Girl flips the fuck out and kills everyone within a 50 mile radius. Girl squashes entire villages in her scramble to obtain all the ingredients necessary to make a redeeming duck dish. Girl also kills the last animal of a dying species because she just didn't give a fuck. There is no greater quest, no feat more noble, than the quest of forever washing the taste of failure off your tongue...with something much more delicious.

 BEHOLD!

The dish consists of:

A chipolini onion puree, cut with just a lil' bit of po-tater for texture. This puree is easy to make. Offensively easy. You just boil your peeled little onions, however much potato you want (the more potato you add, the thicker the puree...This one in particular has one peeled (and diced) russet tater to about 2 pounds chipolini onions), when they're tender drain them and toss into a food processor. Process till smooth (like 15 seconds) add butter, salt and pepper to taste.

 

Play tic-tac-toe on the skin side of your duck breast with a paring knife (i.e. score the fat for optimal rendering, season with salt, pepper, paprika, honestly I forget what I did. Season it with good stuff.

In a cast iron pan sear the duck breasts presentation side down .

Flip those duck titties over and pop the whole godamned pan in a 500 degree oven for 5 minutes precisely for a perfectly rare duck breast. Let rest at least 5 minutes on a cutting board.

To plate, spoon the onion puree onto your dish, top with steamed veggies of your choice (asparagus and red russian kale pictured) and top with the duck breast.

 Anyone can prepare this meal with about a half hour of effort. Suck it Rachel Ray (the 50's called, it wants to tell you that nobody gives a fuck about fritattas), and all those other people who "just don't have the time to cook."

I win.

A special thanks to Derek Melton of Mimosa Restaurant, who can cook one MEAN duck breast! 
(unaffiliated with the fancy joint that tried to serve me well done duck)

Schweet toof.

Hey! Remember that time when the economy totally sucked and it was impossible to find a job?!?! Oh wait, that's right now. 

 The moral of today's story: When everything blows, make candy.

BEHOLD!! A sheet of delectable caramel (Recipe here) is lovingly transformed into....

...Dark chocolate caramel squares!!! 

Today's flavors:

-Bacon & sea salt
-Walnut & sea salt
-Coconut, Chili & sea salt

And also dark chocolate toffees!!! FUCK YES!

Today's flavors:

-Rosemary Walnut
-Black pepper & Chili
-Cacao nib & date
-S'more style 
-Cocoa dusted


A day of failure?

I think not. More like a day for deliciousness.

The Art of Grilled Artichokes.

This is quite possibly one of the most delicious appetizers on the planet. Everyone should know how to make it because its fucking simple.

Step One: Acquire artichokes using any means necessary (i.e. robbery, prostitution).


Step Two: Toss your artichokes (one choke for two people if you're doing appetizers, or one choke per person if it's the main) into a pot filled half-way with water, the juice of one lemon (you can put the juiced lemon halves in the water), and healthy dose of dried oregano. Bring to a rolling boil for about 45 minutes.


Step Three: While you're waiting for your delicious chokes you can make a godamned sauce for their leaves to dip their toes in.(While you're at it you can start preheating your grilling apparatus because that thing should be smokin' hot by the time yer chokes are done boiling.) Combine the following ingredients in a bowl to make a delicious sauce. If you can't figure out how to make it taste good, you're stupid. Go out to eat. One tip: think thick, not runny.


-2 heaping spoonfuls mayonaise
-Juice of 1/2 lemon
-1 tbs dried tarragon
-1 tbs fresh chopped basil
-At least 6 cloves of finely minced garlic....YEAH
-Fresh ground pepper
-Sea salt
-A few shakes of yer favorite hot sauce. Ideally not Tabasco, because it is an overpowering and unnecessarily vinegary hot sauce that makes delicious things cry bitter tears of unfathomable sorrow. Try Widow Maker instead.


Step 4: 45 minutes are up! Drain your chokes, relocate to a cutting board, stem side up, and cut them all the way in half. Using the curve of a spoon to your advantage, gently remove the choke fuzz from each half. Then you place the artichoke halves in a bowl and toss liberally with olive oil, sea salt and FRESH ground pepper. Now run your little buns out to the grill, slap those suckers on, and grill them until they look delicious. 

Cool.

Serve 'em up on a wooden cutting board and enjoy! Also, you know you made your artichoke sauce right if your face looks like this when you're enjoying a bite: