Endless Simmer - A Food Blog

I’m a little late getting to this story, but it has absolutely floored me, so I just had to share.

I’m sure everyone here has had the privilege of eating a Pringle or two in their lifetime. Or, more likely, seven or seventy or seven thousand. Once you pop, you can’t stop. It really is true. More than a few times in my life, I have sat down and eaten an entire tin of these things in one sitting. There’s just something about them–you could eat Pringles all day long and still be hungry. Now, after all this time, I’ve finally found out why that is–THEY AREN’T FOOD.

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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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This past weekend was the first in a LONG time that I’ve been home.  And it feels good, especially to have time to cook.  And as breakfast food is my favorite, I have fun simply scrambling eggs or straight making shit up.  This weekend fell in the latter category.  Going by this general idea of a frittata, I threw in tons of half-empty, soon to be spoiled, contents of my fridge.

Continue reading for the next chapter in gansie vs. ricotta

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We must be nearing the end of summer, because the food co-op just got in their first batch of beautiful golden heirloom tomatoes. I won’t insert myself into the whole debate about what makes something an heirloom or not, but I clearly had to grab one of these lovely yellow guys, even though it wasn’t quite ripe yet.

I got home and sliced it open, and as I expected, it was nice and sweet but still a little too tart. So I decided to take a stab at breading and frying it up, a la fried green tomatoes, which brought out even more sweetness and made it, well, deliciously breaded and fried, of course.

Egged on by gansie’s constant stream of runny yolk porn, I put together this simple summer dinner. Details after the jump.

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As you probably know if you aren’t living under an extraordinarily large rock, it’s Olympics time! Around here, that means one thing: Carb-loading. No, we’re not running the Olympic marathon, we’re merely preparing to stuff our faces while watching the Dream Team play inexplicably mediocre basketball, witness 15-year-old Russian girls twist themselves into unnatural positions, and see athletes from around the globe keel over from pollution inhalation. Now that’s gonna take some serious energy. On our part. Can we say take-out? Here’e a look at our Top Ten Olympic Carb-Loading Foods:

10. Toasted Ravioli

Photo: Dyobmit

The Italians may think they have a leg up on the competition with their gigantic pasta dishes, but we Americans took their pasta and made it our own. How? By breading it and deep-frying it, of course! The St. Louis chefs who invented this tastiness get bonus points for the creatively misleading naming. No one would be crazy enough to order something called fried, breaded ravioli. But toasted ravioli? Sign us up.

Estimated Carbs: 85 grams

9. Fried Chicken and Waffles

Photo: LWY

Who says carb-loading means you gotta give up meat? This Harlem classic gives you all the protein you need, and doesn’t skimp on the sugar. A giant waffle topped with fried chicken, gobs of syrup and butter. Can I get some toast with that?

Estimated Carbs: 100 grams

8. Cinnabon

Photo: Cinnabon

What exactly is in a Cinnabon cinnamon roll, anyway? The official story is “warm dough filled with our legendary Makara cinnamon and topped with freshly made cream cheese frosting.” Now, I think we’ve all tasted cinnamon, dough and cream cheese before, and we know that Cinnabon tastes like none of these things. Every bite is so full of powerful, artificial sugar-y stuff that it’s hard to imagine how they get so much sickly-sweetness into such a small space. However they do it, they deserve an award.

Estimated Carbs: 115 g

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So, my hubbie brought home a recipe from a coworker one day that was a take off on the Olive Garden’s “Tuscan Soup”. I am not a frequenter of the Olive Garden, but had already had a recreation of this soup at a friend’s house and enjoyed it thoroughly. We started making it more or less from the recipe and have loved it for over a year now. Sometime in the last couple of months we lost the recipe. So now that I am making it from out of my head, and have tweaked a little here and there, and this last time we made it, the soup came out the best ever, I’m pretending it’s my recipe version.

I will share the deliciousness with you post jump, and you can help me come up with my own name for it and answer the question, “Is it a chowder?”

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One thing that I will never be accused of is being motivated. I don’t mean that I don’t want to succeed, or put the work in to do it. I mean that in the social sense. I’m not a social planner. If there is a party or a event, I’ll go, but only when pushed to do it. It’s not that I don’t like the people I hang out with, I’m just lazy. Put a TV, the Internet and a bowl of chips and salsa in front of me, and I’ll show you want it means to be sedentary.

But this Monday, I was forced out of my element. Gansie had Monday off as a prize for working overtime to plan a conference. For days, we discussed possibilities and settled upon, what else, food. Not just any food, either, destination eating.

Our destination? Jimmy Cantler’s just outside of Annapolis, MD. Anyone reading in DC, it’s only about a 45 minute drive, depending how long it takes you to get to highway 50 East. But eating fresh seafood on a picnic bench by the water truly made it feel like we were on vacation.

This is the point in the blog post where you may feel the urge to write scathing comments…

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Alright, it’s 11:00, I usually go to bed around 9:30, and I didn’t even have a nap today, but live blogging made me realize how much I miss ES, so here comes my first post in quite some time. Also, I have to get back into it so I can start bragging about my fabulous garden to more than just my neighbors. Continue reading for this flippin’ delicious, easy and great for warm weather dinner.

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