How Not to Flirt #1

Failing to wear pants will likely result in an eyeful of mace or a police report.

Weeknight Recipes For the Inept, Exhausted, and/or Lazy

Candid Engineer and Science Mama are posting up easy recipes for busy scientists. Because I'll forget to do this later, I offer you 3 now.

1) Idiot's Jambalaya

2-4 chorizo sausages, depending on how chorizo-ey you want it
8 rashers bacon
1 can diced tomatoes
1 can kidney beans
1 bag frozen chopped bell peppers (0.5kg worth), or 3 chopped fresh
2 medium taters
2 stalks celery
1/2 white onion or 1 cup spring onions
1.5 cups rice
1.5 cups chicken stock, or whatever else stock you want
some shrimp (optional)
chicken (optional)
other veggies (optional)
ham (optional)

1. Get a big pot. Get a bowl and a knife and a cutting board, too.
2. Dice onion, place in pot and coat with oil (canola works well).
3. Squeeze the chorizo out of its casing into little wads and on into the pot.
4. Dice the bacon evenly (1cm square) and add to the pot.
5. Mix the oil over everything and fire the pot! Cook on medium-high until the chorizo is browned through. This will smell absolutely delicious.
6. Remove everything from the pot with a slotted spoon and place into the bowl.
7. Saute any other meat you're adding in the leftover chorizo-bacon-onion oil. Remove that, too, when it's done.
8. Now is a good time to wash off your cutting board.
9. Dice potatoes (also 1cm square) and celery (~3-5mm across longitudinally split stalk). Put them in the pot and stir them into the chorizo-bacon-onion oil.
10. When the celery is semi-translucent, dump in the bell peppers and can of diced tomatoes (don't drain). Stir.
11. Add the beans (drained and washed with cold water and drained again). Stir.
12. Add your spices. I use about 4 tablespoons Tabasco, 1 tablespoon red pepper, 1 tablespoon salt, 1 tablespoon black pepper, 1 tablespoons paprika, and 1 tablespoon garlic salt. Stir.
13. Re-add your set aside meat and onions. Stir (now is a good time to start the corn bread if you're also making that).
14. Add the rice and the chicken stock, stir, and let boil for 2min.
15. Cover and reduce heat to a giggling simmer.
16. When the rice is done and has absorbed the stock, it's done.
17. Serve with cornbread and nosh happily.

Yields 4 Toaster Servings, which probably means 8-10 Normal People Servings.

Why is this an easy recipe? It only uses 1 pot and requires practically no skill. It does, however, take about an hour, but you can walk away and let it saute or simmer rather frequently.

2) Fried Chicken and Greens

For the chicken:
lots of skinless chicken
eggs
flour or cornmeal
some oil (canola recommended as vegetable oil is too heavy)
crushed Doritos (optional, hat tip for this idea)

1. Beat the eggs in a bowl.
2. Put flour or cornmeal in a bowl.
3. Add 2 cups oil to large pot with lid, heat on high until oil begins smoking.
4. Dredge chicken in flour or cornmeal.
5. Dredge dredged chicken in eggs.
6. Re-dredge double dredged chicken in flour or cornmeal (or in the chip crumbs, if you're using Doritos [which can seriously be done, even with Nacho Cheese])
7. Place gently in hot oil.
8. Fry until light brown on all sides.
9. Remove to plate lined with paper towels to drain away excess oil.
10. Sprinkle desired seasoning on top (Lawry's works very well).
11. Note, if you want really fizzy fried chicken, you can mix eggs with a non-sugary carbonated beverage, such as soda water or beer.

For the greens:

1.5kg greens (equal parts collard greens, mustard greens, and chard)
1 tablespoon spicy brown mustard
1 cup stock
black pepper, red pepper, and hot sauce
barbecue sauce (optional)
bacon fat (optional)
ham bone (optional)

1. Put everything in a big pot.
2. Simmer over medium heat for 1h, stirring occasionally.
3. Serve.

Yields 1.5 Toaster Servings, which probably means ~4 Normal People Servings. Best served with home-made macaroni and cheese or roasted taters.

3) Sausage Ragu

4-5 spicy Italian sausages
2-3 zucchini, halved coronally and/or sagittally and sectioned transversely at about 0.5cm
0.5kg washed and cut mushrooms
~500ml marinara sauce
1 can sliced black olives
3 cloves diced garlic
0.5kg dried pasta
shredded mozzarella (optional)
grated parmesan (optional)

1. Add diced garlic and liberal olive oil to a large and deep saute pan (skillety thingy, but not a wok).
2. Squeeze sausage out of casings into little wads (this can also be done by slitting the casings longitudinally or by just squeezing it all out in 1 big wad and making little wads with your spatula during Step #3).
3. Turn on high heat and saute until sausage is evenly browned and done in the middle.
4. Add zucchini.
5. Add mushrooms and black olives as soon as the zucchini gets shiny and sweaty.
6. Saute until zucchini is lightly browned.
7. Turn heat down to simmer and add marinara sauce. Stir.
8. Add basil, oregano, black pepper, red pepper flakes, and a very tiny amount of thyme. Stir.
9. Bring pot of water to a boil and make the pasta while the ragu/sauce simmers.
10. Serve ragu over pasta, top with cheeses if desired.

Yields 3 Toaster Servings, which probably means about 6 Normal People Servings.



So yeah, that's just about my entire culinary repertoire. I can also make a decent chili and homemade soup, and hashbrowns, but that's about it. Enjoy (or else)!

It should be noted, however, that I always use chicken sausage and turkey bacon for these recipes. I suppose if you really wanted to you could use soy substitutes for any of the meat ingredients above, although it would probably have a very different mouthfeel.

How Do Mad Scientists Grill?

Figure A: Like this.

I am Toaster, and I enjoy barbecue immensely. If it's been fried and then barbecued, it's even better (can Toaster has OKRA and CORNBREADS?). However, I am also a Mad Scientist, and connoisseurs of barbecue are generally known as rednecks. These labels are not exactly compatible. While it is true that I will quickly and invariably develop a red neck if left out in the sun for too long, I do not drive a pick-up truck or think that country music is palatable. I have never gone turtle stomping, square dancing (although my high school required us to learn how to do so in gym class), slough hollerin', swamp boating, or had a moustache. However, in the interests of disclosure, I must admit that I have occasionally been known to let slip a "ya'll" or an "ain't", sometimes even a "y'all'rnt".

Ahem. Don't judge.

Anyway, given the above conflict of labels, I of course started to ponder how I might prepare barbecue and retain my Mad Scientist Street Cred. The answer, of course, is to build an overly complicated device to barbecue for me. Naturally, the answer is a Tesla coil:

However, this Tesla coil is cooking hot dogs in a row. That's the voltage arcing between the hot dogs that you can see flashing in the lower right quadrant of that video. I also remember that in the hometown of Dumpling Toaster (i.e., Young Toaster) there was a hot dog stand guy who electro-cooked the hot dogs he sold. He had a little breadboard set up with exposed metal pegs spaced a little less than the length of a hot dog. He'd impale each end of a hot dog on those pegs and run current through it until it was cooked and somewhat singed. It worked well and the end result was somewhat tasty, I mean, about as tasty as a hot dog can be.

But I don't want to Teslacue hot dogs. I want to barbecue whole motherfucking chickens and turkey breasts at once! So this brings up some practical considerations:

1) In order to cook the flesh, I'll need a complete circuit. Most of the time with Tesla coils one can come into contact with 1000s of volts because the amps are low and the circuit isn't complete. This means I'll need not just one, but two Tesla coils! However, this means that I can't just stand between them and hold the meat, because then I'd either a) get cooked as well, which I do not wish to do or b) have tachycardia and possibly cardiac arrest, neither of which seem particularly pleasant. This is somewhat disappointing, but understandable.

2) Hot dogs are made from chopped up processed meat, usually beef, pork, or turkey (fish dogs?), that has been pressed into a mold. What muscle fibers remain in hot dogs has been completely chaos-ified and as such no contractions will occur. But in a whole chicken, muscle fibers remain in their original orientation. As such, is it possible that, when zapped with thousands of volts, they'll twitch and spasm horribly and cause everyone buy me to lose their appetite, and maybe even spatter delicious barbecue sauce everywhere?

Figure B: Luigi Galvani beat me to it. But he was Italian and this was 1771, so I don't think he had barbecue in mind when he conducted these experiments. His frog legs twitched and he figured out that nerves are electrical.

I searched the Internets for information on this in barbecue, but to no avail. Based on the experiments of Luigi Galvani (above), it looks likely that they will. Gross as it may be to think of, this isn't much of a disincentive for me.

3) What is the probability that the flesh I intend to be barbecue will instead be reanimated into horrific, yet tasty, zombie barbecue chickens? I think that, so long as the flesh has been deceased for a sufficiently long time, say, a week refrigerated, that no reanimation would occur because the cells of the flesh would be far too degraded to jump up and wreak evil. However, it is also possible that this effect could be desirable, especially should I wish to ever conquer Kentucky (which is unlikely in any event).

4) Cornflower + cayenne = purple barbecue!

5) Who wants to come to a barbecue? I'll even make some without heat (= only 1% cayenne powder) for the wusses out there.