Endless Simmer - A Food Blog

- Leah weighed in on our White House Chef guessing game:  Um, so last night, I was at a restaurant in Chicago and overheard the convo next to me…and I’m betting the chef is coming from Chicago… (or at least that’s what the convo next to me lead me to believe)

Spill it, Leah! Tell us more!

- If any of you Top Chef fans missed our Top Chef season five premiere live blogging, you can check out the whole thing on replay. Don’t miss JoeHoya calling Andrew from season four at Spike’s request. Although Flamingo has no love lost for the bromancers: Wow, that transcript just reinforced what a complete douchenozzle Spike is.

- mariah carey has some interesting soup advice to share:  OH MY GOD this reminds me. Last Thanksgiving my brother made an amazing soup - so amazing I cant remember if it was squash or pumpkin or tomato, but it was to diiiie. Anyway, the consistency was so incredibly thick and creamy my entire family was raving and scared for our arteries - surely it must have been made up of pure lard and cream.

SECRET OF THE DAY: the consistency was made of RICE! He said his trick is to always grind down the rice for any of his thicker soups. You obviously can’t tell it’s rice bc it’s been made into such a fine consistency and takes on whatever flavors you’ve incorporated into the soup.

You’re welcome.

- And ya’ll were all up on it with suggestions for what I should do with my leftover fat and bones:

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I’m sure a lot of you are wondering how I know frequent ES commenter, Mariah Carey.  Well, believe it or not, before she became a famous singer married to a little boy, we used to work together in Houston.  Yes, this foul-mouthed Jerzy Girl spent almost 6 months working in God’s Country—with Mariah Carey.  I almost got into a wreck the first time I saw a gun-rack on the back of a truck.  Christ.  Texas.

Anyway, so I know this might sound super obvious, but people eat Tex-Mex all the time in Houston.  I just never really thought about it before I lived there.  But for like every meal, people would want to eat Mexican.  It shocked me.  I mean, going out for Mexican was like a once a week, at most twice a week, thing, not numerous times a day.  Somehow, I got accustomed to it.  And I now no longer can stomach a margarita and chili con queso dip.  I did, however, find a completely adequate substitution for my fav hang-over food, fried egg and cheese on a begal.  It’s absolutely perfect and I can’t believe I never thought to do it before.

Right near our campaign HQ there was this dive of a Mex joint. I mean, terrible.  But, they served the most amazing egg dish (and they even served it for lunch!)  It was 2 small tortillas filled with scrambled eggs and

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Like I said before, I went to visit my little sister this past weekend.  Before I went up there she kept bracing me for this small, mountain town that I was sure to find terribly boring.  I could go to the bar in sweatpants, I would meet *townies* wearing flannel, I could see the whole town in 2 minutes…  She was nervous that me, the big city, snobby food girl couldn’t survive in the middle of crazed college kids and gun-totting Repubs.

I assured her that beyond my love for salt-crusted whole red snapper, eggplant and mizuna salad and mini frittatas, that I was really a fried-food-eating scum-bag at heart.  And, um, yes - sign me up for more opportunities to wear sweatpants in public.  I, of course, had a kickass weekend.  I learned what a beer ball was, played more drinking games than I have in YEARS and watched a public access hunting show while eating one of the best mozzarella and spinach Strombolis of my life.  (And the seasoned waffle fries were pretty great too.)  Fuck all that fancy shit.

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Editor’s Note: As promised, here’s the baking post from Alex, which we solicited in exchange from promoting this great event. If you’re interested in trading recipes for exposure, always feel free to holler at ES!

If you’re like me and get sad every time you have to throw away a bag of wilted spinach or a moldy piece of bread (”Oh spinach, you taste so good and I could have eaten you, but I didn’t get to you fast enough…”), you understand my perspective on pumpkins. Fun to carve, but then they get all droopy and then they start to smell bad, and you MAYBE roasted the seeds, but probably just carved the pumpkin and left it to die, and now, sadly, you have to throw it away. This always gets me thinking about how to salvage the wreckage, aka what pumpkin-flavored things to cook with the remains…

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80P and I make this so much for dinner that I actually had to search through the ES files to make sure I hadn’t blogged about it before.  It’s like not even funny anymore to mention how much I love eggs, but I just can’t get over how often they assist me in meals.  While taking a break from practicing chicken pot pies (I film this Sunday - eek!) I wanted to throw together something I didn’t have to really think about, and would use up that half onion, half can of beans, leftover rice…

Breakfast—Dinner Burrito 

Now this is just what I happened to use on this particular night.  I’ve changed this a billion times, adding in greens, hot sauce, spices, prepared salsa, garlic, sour cream…I mean, really, this will work with almost anything.  Although my goal is to figure out if egg and winter squash mix.  Wait for it.

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I usually frequent the farmers’ market by myself, but this weekend I got 80P out of his hangover-I-want-bed mode and took him with me.  And this resulted in the purchase of radishes.  They had samples out and it’s kinda weird because they’re spicy.  Anyway, we now have like 5 fucking radishes and I have no idea what to do with them.  80 says he used to eat them as a kid with salt, but um, there must be something else out there.  I’m thinking I could use them as a alternative to a chip for a dip.  But any suggestions would be appreciated.

Anyway, this post has nothing to do with radishes.  And don’t you think radish should have two “d”s in it?

Even though a lot of the workforce likes to go out for lunch during the week, I love bringing my food.  No shock there.  For today’s lunch I took full advantage of my market purchase, including these funky greens that 80 also added to my cart: mizuna.  We were just going to buy a bunch of mustard greens but then the upseller said there’s a special: 2 bunches for $5, so 80 grabbed mizuna.  Um, yea, I know, what the eff is mizuna.

Eggplant and Mizuna Salad

I risked the safety of not only the baking sheet, but of my entire apartment building,

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I was on the bus home from a miserable Monday and in between pages of “The Perfect Meal” chapter of Omnivore’s Dilemma, I thought about my dinner.  80P would be at class, so I was on my own — to put a fried egg on anything I’d want.  And then as I was cooking up my meal, and styling it, and playing the part of the photog, I thought about ES readers.  And just how you all might be sick of seeing me cook something and then put a sunny side up egg over top.  But, I’ll let you decide…

Decide post jump

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I’ve been thinking about Baked Stuffed Zucchini ever since Rooms brought them up last month. My vegetarian GF has already made this a couple of times, mostly because when she asks me what she should cook for dinner, it’s the only thing I can think of that doesn’t have bacon. So I decided to give it a go myself last week.

I followed Rooms’ basic instructions, mixing it up with what I had in my fridge, and ending up with a spicy, Asian take on the stuffed zukes. The outside part is the same at Rooms:

- Cut your zucchinis in half. Rub them with extra virgin and salt and pepper, then bake at 400 for about 10 minutes.

Then I got a little crazy…

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We’ve talked a lot about crazy sandwiches here at ES,and one of my favorites I’ve ever heard of is the Southside Slope sandwich available at Pittsburgh’s legendary Fatheads sandwich shop: fried pierogies and kielbasa sausage topped with onions, American cheese and “horsey sauce.”

One of these days I’ll make it to Pitt to try this beautiful blue collar creation, but in the meantime I’ll have to content myself with my own knockoff version.

I had a couple of leftover frozen Mrs. T’s potato pierogies the other day when inspiration hit and I started emptying my fridge. Of course, when I empty my fridge, I don’t find things like American cheese and horsey sauce, but some odd slices of prosciutto and a little bit of herbed cheese. OK, I admit, as much as I talk about American food, I’m a pretty bougie motherfucker. But I also have to say, my classed-up Southside Slope–we’ll call it the Southside Park Slope–was pretty freakin delicious…

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