Stuff My Kids Tell Me: McGangbang

When I work at McDonald's as a teenager there was a trick you could do on you grill orders.  A grill order is a special order on a hamburger or cheeseburger: Hold the Mustard, No Onions, Extra Pickles, etc.  The trick was to order a Big Mac with quarter pound patties instead of the normal 10 to 1 (10 patties to a pound of ground beef) hamburger patties.  There were two ways you could do it:  Order a double quarter pounder and have the "cooks" dress it like a Big Mac, or order the Big mac with the quarter pound meat.  Sometime the people at the cash register refused because they could not figure out how to punch the order in, and you would have a lot of explaining to do.  The old veterans at MickeyDs usually got what you meant.

Now with the dollar menu and the rising cost of the pre made combos, the creative cheap college student or hungry high schooler does something different: McGangBang (Sometimes called: the Bird Bomb, Mc Churger, or Mc Tasty)

A Mc GangBang is a McChicken inside a McDouble.  The purist will just order the two sandwiches and pull the McDouble apart at the patties.  Then place the McChicken in between the two halves. It's now a three decker sandwich.  I don't think you can order this put together, but you can order the two sandwich yourself.  Technowiz just pulls the chicken patty out and places it somewhere in the McDouble.  He says it's tasty.

If you want to have the triple bypass surgery you can go for the Land, Sea and Air sandwich.  Once again you need to ask a veteran at McDonald's.  As the name implies: A hamburger patty, A fillet-o-fish patty, and a chicken patty.  You can get this as an order without having to order three separate sandwiches and putting them together.

This is what passing for cooking and fine cuisine for my kids.  I think my heart is going to explode.

Cooking with Bananas

I have one of those cravings that I have once every five years or so: Banana Fritter   My mom made these all the time.  I decided to give it a try.  The first recipe required mashed bananas.  The fritters came out awful.  They were like fried donut holes without even a hint of banana flavor.  They just had those strange brown and black line you have with anything that has bananas: Pancakes, muffins, bread, etc..

So I call my Mom and ask her for the recipes she used for banana fritters.  This is what she sent me:

Banana Fritters:

1 Cup Flour 

1 Teaspoon Baking Powder

1/2 Teaspoon salt

1 Whole Egg

1 Cup Milk

1/2 Cup Oil

1. Mix flour, salt, egg, milk and oil into large mixing bowl.  Whisk into a light batter.

2. Cut and quarter 3 - 5 bananas lengthwise to form pieces that are 2 to 3 inches (5 - 8 cm)  in length.

3. Coat the prepared bananas with flour before dipping into batter.

4. With tongs or fork, dip the banana pieces into batter and allow excess batter to drip off into bowl

5. Fry in oil (Canola)  at 375°F (185-190 C°) degrees until a golden brown. Drain on a paper towel.

6.  Sprinkle with powered sugar and serve warm.

Notes: This batter makes enough to coat a bunch of bananas (6 to 10).  Watch the oil carefully.  It's really easy to burn the fritters.  You can serve brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, or maple syrup with your fritters as well.

Zucchini: The Demon Plant 

So the garden is growing like gang busters. The four zucchini plants are produce more than I could have imagined. Then looked so small when i planted them, I was worried i might not have enough. Someone should have smacked me upside the head. Next year I will stick with just 2 or three plants. I have more than enough. So what does one do when one has enough Zucchini to make 27 loaves of zucchini bread. Good Question.

Spaghetti Sauce Of Course!  If You shred the Zucchini using a fine grate the Zucchini just disappears into a nice set of tomatoes to make a great spaghetti sauce.  The shredded zucchini adds a lot of volume and moisture to the sauce so you my have to cook the sauce down a bit if you thick sauce.

Here is the most common recipes I use.  I just add the Zucchini right at the beginning.  I can usually hide 2-3 12 inch zucchini this way and no one is the wiser.   I like having this sauce with some Italian  or French bread and a couple of Italian Sausages.  I suppose this same recipes could be turned into a great vegetable soup as well (This is a repost of a recipe I posted a couple of summers ago.)

Homemade Tomato Sauce I

Ready In: 4 Hours 30 Minutes

Servings: 6

Ingredients:
10 ripe tomatoes
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
1 onion, chopped
1 green bell pepper, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 cup chopped fresh basil
1/4 teaspoon Italian seasoning
1/4 cup Burgundy wine
1 bay leaf
2 stalks celery
2 tablespoons tomato paste

Directions:

1. Bring a pot of water to a boil. Have ready a large bowl of iced water. Plunge whole tomatoes in boiling water until skin starts to peel, 1 minute. Remove with slotted spoon and place in ice bath. Let rest until cool enough to handle, then remove peel and squeeze out seeds. Chop 8 tomatoes and puree in blender or food processor. Chop remaining two tomatoes and set aside.

2. In a large pot or Dutch oven over medium heat, cook onion, bell pepper, carrot and garlic in oil and butter until onion starts to soften, 5 minutes. Pour in pureed tomatoes. Stir in chopped tomato, basil, Italian seasoning and wine. Place bay leaf and whole celery stalks in pot. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low, cover and simmer 2 hours. Stir in tomato paste and simmer an additional 2 hours. Discard bay leaf and celery and serve.

DIYS Gardening: Tomato Pie
Once again if you don't eat the tomatoes you'll wake up with them under your bed. There the tomatoes will try to turn you into pod people and make you worship the Green Man.

So it's tomato pie to save your life.

This recipes come from Simplyrecipes.com:

Tomato Pie

Ingredients

* 1 9-inch pie shell (or you could make a pie crust, but that adds on more time)
* 1/2 yellow or red onion, chopped
* 3-4 tomatoes, cut in half horizontally, squeezed to remove excess juice, roughly chopped, to yield approximately 3 cups chopped tomatoes
* 1/4 cup sliced basil (about 8 leaves)*
* 2 cups grated cheese (combination of sharp cheddar and Monterey Jack, or Gruyere or Mozarella)
* 3/4 cup mayonnaise
* 1 teaspoon (or more to taste) of Frank's Hot Sauce (or Tabasco)
* Salt and freshly ground black pepper

*To slice basil, chiffonade them by stacking the leaves on top of each other, roll them up like a cigar, starting at one end slice the "cigar" crosswise in thin slices.
Method

1 Preheat oven to 350°F. Place pie shell in oven and cook for 8-10 minutes or longer until lightly golden. If you are starting with a frozen crust, you'll need to cook it a little longer. If you are using a homemade crust, freeze the crust first, then line the crust with aluminum foil and pre-bake it for 20 minutes, then remove the foil and bake an additional 10 minutes.

2 Squeeze as much moisture as you can out of the chopped tomatoes, using either paper towels, a clean dish towel, or a potato ricer.

3 Sprinkle the bottom of the pre-cooked pie shell with chopped onion. Spread the chopped tomatoes over the onions. Sprinkle the sliced basil over the tomatoes.

4 In a medium bowl, mix together the grated cheese, mayonnaise, Tabasco, a sprinkling of salt and freshly ground black pepper. The mixture should be the consistency of a gooey snow ball. Spread the cheese mixture over the tomatoes.

5 Place in oven and bake until browned and bubbly, anywhere from 25 to 45 minutes.

Serves 6.

Some Suggestions

1. Cut the amount of cheese in half.

2. You can caramelize the onions before placing them into the pie shell.

If you want to make the Technomage heart attack version of this pie try this:

1. Add 1 pound of cooked bacon, crumbled to form a layer between the tomatoes and cheese.

2. Instead of mayonnaise add some more milk and an egg to the cheese mixture. This will make the pie more quiche like. I haven't try this yet, but it is next on the list of the things to try.

DIYS Gardening: Tomato Sauce
Last year I had more tomatoes than I knew what to do with. One of the reasons? I was unwilling to peel my tomato. It seems a little to much work. Then I found this wonderful YouTube video on blanching and peeling tomatoes. This video change my cooking life and let me try a different tomato sauce from the one I posted last year.




This sauce is pretty good. It just takes hours to cook. Start this one after lunch. The sauce is a little sweet, but that could be due to the Big Girl tomatoes from my garden. Try cutting the sweetness with more wine, wine vinegar, or salt. Try adding small amounts while cooking and tasting the results.

Homemade Tomato Sauce I

Ready In: 4 Hours 30 Minutes

Servings: 6

Ingredients:
10 ripe tomatoes
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
1 onion, chopped
1 green bell pepper, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 cup chopped fresh basil
1/4 teaspoon Italian seasoning
1/4 cup Burgundy wine
1 bay leaf
2 stalks celery
2 tablespoons tomato paste

Directions:

1. Bring a pot of water to a boil. Have ready a large bowl of iced water. Plunge whole tomatoes in boiling water until skin starts to peel, 1 minute. Remove with slotted spoon and place in ice bath. Let rest until cool enough to handle, then remove peel and squeeze out seeds. Chop 8 tomatoes and puree in blender or food processor. Chop remaining two tomatoes and set aside.

2. In a large pot or Dutch oven over medium heat, cook onion, bell pepper, carrot and garlic in oil and butter until onion starts to soften, 5 minutes. Pour in pureed tomatoes. Stir in chopped tomato, basil, Italian seasoning and wine. Place bay leaf and whole celery stalks in pot. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low, cover and simmer 2 hours. Stir in tomato paste and simmer an additional 2 hours. Discard bay leaf and celery and serve.

Recipes Courtesy allrecipes.com

DIYS Gardening: Eggplant
I'm growing two type of eggplants: Purple Blaze (Shown here) and Little Fingers. I avoided eggplant in the grocery store, but I don't know why. Maybe it's because the only purple foods I've eaten are grapes and blueberries, so a purple vegetable puts me out of sorts. However my eggplants have been growing like gangbuster! So what to do? Eat them! I heard of Eggplant Parmesan in every cookbook I've ever had, so why not give it a whirl.

Eggplant is a bit of an annoy vegetable, which is probably why people avoid it. The eggplant taste great, but you must prepare it properly. Eggplant needs to be drain of excess water before you can cook it. Usually this mean slicing the eggplant and putting it into a colander in between layers of kosher salt for 2 hours. That what makes most recipes for eggplant stretch past the three hour mark. After drain my eggplant, I found it helpful to give the eggplant a good rinse to get rid of the extra salt. Then press the eggplant dry between paper towels. When your eggplant is dry and rubbery (Not the word I want but it fits, and the eggplant taste so much better than rubber), you are ready to cook.

I find that eggplant chips battered and fried like onion rings can be quite yummy.

Eggplant Parmesan
Ingredients

* 2 lbs (about 2 large) eggplants
* Kosher salt
* 1 28-oz can whole peeled tomatoes
* 1 clove garlic, peeled and minced
* Olive oil
* Freshly ground black pepper
* 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
* 1/2 cup fine dry breadcrumbs
* 4 large eggs, beaten
* 1 1/2 lbs of fresh mozzarella cheese, sliced into 1/4 inch rounds
* 1 cup grated high quality Parmesan cheese
* 1 packed cup fresh basil leaves

Method

1 Cut eggplants lengthwise into 1/4 inch slices. Arrange one layer in the bottom of a large colander and sprinkle evenly with salt. Repeat with remaining eggplant, salting, until all eggplant is in the colander. Weigh down the slices with a couple of plates and let drain for 2 hours. The purpose of this step is to have the eggplant release some of its moisture before cooking.

2 While the eggplant is draining, prepare tomato sauce. Combine tomatoes, garlic and 1/3 cup olive oil in a food processor. Season with salt and pepper to tasted and set aside.

3 When eggplant has drained, press down on it to remove excess water, wipe off the excess salt, and lay the slices out on paper towels to remove all the moisture. In a wide, shallow bowl, combine flour and breadcrumbs. Mix well. Pour beaten eggs into another wide shallow bowl. Place a large, deep skillet over medium heat, and pour in a a half inch of olive oil. When oil is shimmering, dredge the eggplant slices first in the flour mixture, then in the beaten egg. Working in batches, slide coated eggplant into hot oil and fry until golden brown on both sides, turning once. Drain on paper towels.

4 Preheat the oven to 350°F. In the bottom of a 10x15 inch glass baking dish, spread 1 cup of tomato sauce. Top with one third of the eggplant slices. Top eggplant with half of the mozzarella slices. Sprinkle with one third of the Parmesan and half of the basil leaves.

5 Make a second layer of eggplant slices, topped by 1 cup of sauce, remaining mozzarella, half the remaining Parmesan, and all of the remaining basil. Add remaining eggplant, and top with the remaining tomato sauce and Parmesan.

6 Bake until cheese has melted and the top is slightly brown, about 30 minutes. Allow to rest at room temperature for about 10 minutes before serving.

Serves 8.


Recipe courtesy of Simply Recipes

DIYS:  Gardening - MORE Tomatoes!

I've got more tomatoes and I don't quite know what to do with them.  I leaning toward a food dehydrator so I can make "sun" dried tomatoes, but Technowitch has been dying to do some cooking with them.  She came up with a salsa recipe from Great-Salsa.com

It's pretty good, but it help to know what Tomatilloes look like before driving all over the city to find them. 


Mild Homemade Salsa

8 Fresh vine ripe right from the garden Tomatoes, chopped 4 small Tomatillo, remove the papery skin and chop ½ cup of fresh cilantro, chopped 2-4 whole green onions, including the green part; chopped Jalapeno peppers to taste. ½ bell pepper, seeds removed and finely chopped 1 lime, juiced ½ teaspoon Kosher Salt

Combine all the chopped ingredients into a bowl stir lightly. Squeeze the lime juice over the homemade salsa.

This flavorfuly mild homemade salsa can be served immediately, but its flavor will be enhance after allow the salsa to season for about an hour or over night in the refrigerator.

DIYS Gardening:  I've got Tomatoes, now what?!?

My tomatoes are growing like gangbuster, along with the rest of my garden.  I think a good garden should provided at least one dish you can eat regularly.  This year doesn't quite do the job, because I need to grow some spices.  Maybe that what i should do for next year.

This year, it's what to day with 3 dozen tomatoes.   Actually, I all ready had a plan.  The High Priestess like to make pasta dishes, so tomato sauce seems to be a good choice.  I've asked friends and combed the internet looking for a simple recipe that had fresh tomatoes and could be prepared with little effort.  This is what I came up with, courtesy of allrecipes.com.

Fresh Tomato Sauce
Prep time 2 hours ( the website say 30 minutes, but they lie).  It took me ahile to chop everything and I just threw them in the pot as I went.  I forgot to add the oil first then toss in the veggies.  I am willing to bet that the hot oil would have brought on more of the flavors in the tamotoes and peppers.  It's a ver sweet sauce and kind of soupy.  I added 2 (6oz) cans of tomato paste to thicken the sauce up a bit.  It's pretty good, but lack the Itallian spices.  Next time, I'll add more garlic, basil and oregano.

Ingredients:

1/4 cup olive oil 6 tomatoes, chopped 3 onions, minced 2 green bell peppers, minced

4 cloves garlic, minced 3 tablespoons white wine salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

1.	In a large saucepan, heat oil over medium heat; add tomatoes, onions, green bell peppers, garlic, white wine and salt and pepper to taste.
2.	Mix ingredients well; cover and simmer for 30 minutes. Serve.