Category Archives: Food

Its so safe floating in the glass

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While above all your troubles pass.

Worked from home today on some programming issues for some clients, so I figured what better then to make a cake. Well sort of. Let me explain.

In my family anything and everything dessert pretty much revolves around the Italian pastry Baba rum cakes. Over the years “Baba” has pretty much become an adjective for any dessert of any kind. Often my father would reply in regards to someone asking about what was for dinner,  “To hell with dinner do we even have any Baba?” Roughly translated to who cares about dinner do we have dessert?

What does this have to do with what I am about to show and tell today? Nothing, other then I found myself in the kitchen this morning wondering about what I was going to eat for dinner. I caught myself thinking to hell with dinner, what do I have for dessert or more accurately “shit I have no Baba!”

I have become my father.

Now some people may not want to admit to becoming one of their parents. I think we all start out this way. Maybe some people have bad parents and truly never want to become what they are or were, but I think some genetic material is going to flow through and good or bad you’re going to display some of the same traits as your parents.

I am not too worried about it. My father was tough on me and my brothers growing up, and certainly not perfect. He showed us it was ok to make mistakes or wrong decisions, but you stand up and take it like a man and move on. So becoming like my father isn’t so bad, I could do a hell of a lot worse.

Folks, I made some “Baba” as it were. Oreo Cake.

I found this recipe on Serious Eats by a rather neat woman named Yvonne Ruperti. I had everything on hand and it was easy. You need a couple hours start to finish between cooking, cooling, and then chilling it down but I am convinced if you can follow the simplest instructions or say crop dust the sales department in the cube farm without ruining your shorts you can make this cake.

I stayed true to the recipe (provided in the recipe section) as published and what you see here is the end result. This is nothing more then a simple chocolate cake, crushed up Oreo cookies, and whipped cream.

Now I have some Baba for tonight. What I am eating for dinner is still a damn mystery. As I think about it, screw it. This is dinner. Diabetic shock and comma here I come.

 

What we have here, little yellow sister, is a magnificent specimen of…

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..pure Alabama Blacksnake? Ah…No, but what I do have isn’t too goddamned beaucoup either. What I have here is some mondo, bad assed, kiss your mother with that mouth, sit down, slam the table, I shit you not, homemade pork fried rice.


You may recall that this past weekend for dinner club meet up numero deuce, I made a BBQ pork roast for my guests. Well after eating pork left overs the rest of the week it was time for a reboot. I chopped up the remaining pork, and then diced up some onion, bell pepper, lettuce, celery, a habanero, a couple beaten eggs and broke out the wok. Some soy sauce, a load or two of Sriracha chili sauce, garlic power, salt, pepper and you pretty much have the ingredients for greatness.

Onions, bell pepper, habanero, celery, meat into a hot wok with some oil. Stir, shake, stir, shake repeat until translucent and soft.

Add in your seasoning, chili sauce, soy sauce, and continue to cook and let liquid evaporate off.

Another good shot of oil then stir, shake, stir, shake repeat.

Spoon/shovel all the vegetables and meat up the sides of the wok leaving the hot center bare. Should have enough oil here if not hit it with a teaspoon or two more. Pour in beaten eggs and scramble eggs in center of wok.

Eggs scrambled, meat heated, vegetables nice and sautéed, dump in four cups of cooked rice.

Stir, shake, stir, shake, repeat. Add a couple tablespoons of soy sauce. Stir, shake, stir, shake, repeat.

Dump in lettuce. Stir, shake, stir, shake, repeat until lettuce just begins to wilt. Remove wok from heat, bowl up some of that greatness and enjoy. Pork fried rice, kicked up a notch with the chili sauce and you didn’t have to hit the greasy chinese motor kitchen behind the McDonalds in the strip mall. Yes President Obama I MADE THIS!

Brock you are truly a renaissance man. Your greatness knows no bounds. You are the Pater Familia of awesome, but what in the hell does your blog title have to do with pork fried rice? Well you see pork fried rice is a common food in more then one far east culture and when I think of far east culture the first thing that popped into my mind was the scene in Full Metal Jacket where Private Eightball was negotiating with the Vietnamese hooker for some boom boom in the middle of the battle of Hue City.

A little strange and twisted look into your favorite bloggers head? Sure you might say that. Look at it this way though, my pork fried rice didn’t remind me of Private Handjob jerking off ten times a day and getting greased before his section 8 papers cleared division from the same movie. That would be just silly and disgusting.

Rated G version of recipe can be found over in the recipe section of the blog for you rather weak of heart and mind.

For the rest of you…

…..son, all I’ve ever asked of my Marines is that they obey my orders as they would the word of God. We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out. It’s a hardball world, son. We’ve gotta keep our heads until this peace craze blows over. 

Tuesday, I hate you like Monday

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After a long weekend Tuesday gets to feel the hate of a typical Monday. Back to work, but at least it should feel like a fast week.

Well this Labor day the dinner club met again. Hosted by yours truly, its nothing special, a couple friends get together once a month and actually cook a meal rather then going out to eat. We do that to, not that theres anything a matter with it. Anyway this month I threw together an apple smoked pork roast, sweet potatoes, and stuffed jalpenos. Closed it up with my version of ice cream pie. May have read in a previous post about how I was going to recreate a local resturants desert here:

http://www.whatsupbrock.com/goodbye-weekend-hello-monday/

Anyway this was version 1.0 I have a few tweaks to make with crust and a layer of cake or Oreo cookie type stuff to breakup the ice cream a little. Not bad for a first attempt off the cuff. I had a recipe I found but lost it when I didn’t bookmark the site. Duh. At least this way I don’t have to give credit or cite the originator. It’s essentially ice cream, Reese’s peanut butter cups, peanut butter, pretzels, chocolate sauce. I’ll drop the recipe in appropriate section later.

I hope everyone had a good and safe weekend. Well better then Michael Clark Duncan as he is assuming room temperature right about now. Neil Armstrong, Duncan, who’s next? It’s always a trifecta of death. How’s Yoko Ono’s health? If we have learned anything, when you get sick, stay home and put some ‘tussin on it. Go to a hospital and surely you’ll wind up dead.

And sometimes is seen a strange spot in the sky

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…a human being that was given to fly.

We lost a good one today. Neil Armstrong decided to check out for the last time this afternoon.

Sadly his death isn’t completely  shocking to me. At the age of 81 earlier this month Dr. Armstrong underwent heart surgery. His family has indicated he succumbed to complications from the cardiovascular procedures.

Living in Florida most of my life and living in the vicinity of the Kennedy Space Center during the closing years of the Apollo and later Space Lab missions, I can tell you the significance of NASA and space exploration had on me as a young boy. Every kid wanted to be an astronaut. Mr. Rogers had Apollo astronauts on his program. Sesame Street had astronauts on the program next to Ernie and Bert. However for me it was The Six Million Dollar Man. Col. Steve Austin the NASA pilot who crashes the x-plane and gets bionics. I ate that shit up.

As a small kid I got to go to Kennedy space center in its heyday. However the biggest impact was when NASA launched Sky Lab. We live about fifteen miles south of Kennedy/Patrick AFB in those days. Shy lab was launched on one of the remaining Saturn V boosters that was intended to take an Apollo crew to the moon before the program was shut down. I may have been all of five or six years old. We were on the beach living in Satellite Beach at the time. If you never saw an actual Saturn V launch in person I doubt I can put into  words the description of the events. I can however tell you from a five or six year olds perspective that it must be something incredible because we were at the beach fifteen miles or so away and I can clearly remember the surf was very calm that day. When the rocket took off, there was literally ripples in the Atlantic ocean as far as a six year old could see from the vibration of the launch. That day has stuck with me all my life. Neil Armstrong rode in one of those machines. What a lucky SOB. What balls that man must have had.

In honor of Neil’s death and the passing of a truly great American, I made my special Stuffed Bread for dinner. Check it below.

 

This is a recipe that I have been working on for about a year. Think a loaf of bread with the  ham and swiss cheese built in. Astronauts in the early days had to eat a lot of compact and freeze dried food. This is essentially a ham and swiss cheese sandwich loaf of bread right down to the mustard. Its all baked together. The bread is a simple cross between a stromboli and italian bread dough. I may have boosted the base recipe for the dough from King Arthurs cook book a couple years ago. You can pretty much do anything with it. I figured what the hell, why make a loaf of bread to make a sandwich when I can make it all at the same time. Im hardly the inventor of this as I have noted some similar recipes for this around the internet.

Simple really. Make the dough, let rise. Roll it out and spread on mustard, ham, and swiss cheese. Roll up, form into a loaf like shape, pinch edges of dough closed and let rise again. Bake 375 degrees for 35 minutes. Cool, slice then stuff face.

This is not on par with strapping ones ass to 7.5 million pounds of thrust heading to the moon, but I am proud of this none the less. Without Neil Armstrong and the early NASA astronauts fueling an entire generation of kids like myself to build and explore who knows, tonight I could have been blogging about opening up a can of beans and discussing the fart capacity between Campbell’s and Bush’s.

If theres interest in the recipe, make a note in the comments and I’ll post a print friendly version for you.

So long and happy journey Neil Armstrong. Buzz wont be bitching about you going first on this one.

 

“Edwina’s insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase”

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Probably one of the greatest lines in a movie since Coppola’s “I love the smell of napalm in the  morning.”

So what exactly does this entry have to do with the movie Raising Arizona? Good question reader. Nothing really. Well that’s not entirely true. I did watch the movie last week, and thought about how much I enjoy pretty much all of the Coen brothers movies.

In fact while watching Raising Arizona last week, for dinner I made Nathan’s hotdogs. See the connection? Nathan’s hotdogs, and Nathan Arizona! If there are two things I enjoy in life its great cinema and a punch your mother in the throat its so good, hotdog.

You see I know a good movie when I see one. I know a damn good hotdog when I eat one. The only difference being I probably couldn’t go out tomorrow and make a great movie unless of course I pull a Howard Hughes and throw the family tool making fortune into it.

In the case of hotdogs though, I am like a damned Leonardo da Vinci to the world of encased meats. I have made them all and ate them all. I have traveled the world and at all costs have ate a hotdog everywhere I have been. The best in the world hands down are Nathan’s famous hotdogs. You know the company by the hotdog eating championships held each July 4th broadcast on ESPN.

 

Now Nathan’s while technically a New York dog, they differ slightly from the typical “dirty water” hotdogs sold from the carts in the city. Nathan’s is over in Brooklyn. Coney Island to be geographically correct.

Don’t confuse any respectable NY hotdog whether sold from a dirty water mobile cart on a street corner to a Papaya King, or the Mecca that is Nathan’s Famous as a “coney dog”. That coney dog shit started with the midwesterners in Michigan and they dictate chili, while onions, and mustard. In NY from my experience they love the cooked/stewed  red onion sauce.  Its all a matter of personal taste. Me, I’ll mix it up from time to time with kraut, relish, chili, all the way to the Chicago or Sonoran dogs.

This night was a simple chili, red onion, and a line or two of yellow mustard.

I will make this statement, and I hope and pray for your souls if you think otherwise. Ketchup NEVER goes on a hotdog. I don’t even give a pass to toddlers or pre-schoolers and the only way to get them to eat or face death by starvation is to put ketchup on a hotdog. “Little Johnny is going to die if I don’t put ketchup on his hotdog.” Then guess what? Get Karl Childers to whack that turd in the head with a lawnmower blade, call the hearse and go eat biscuits and mustard. NO ketchup on hotdogs! EVER!

So I hope you enjoyed this primer on hotdogs. Nathan’s hotdogs are sold in most popular grocery stores and if not available in your specific locations you can always order them directly from Nathan’s online. I’ve provide the link for you below so you don’t break your precious Google click finger.

Nathan’s Famous

 

Bringing you the funny or the disgusting since..

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…well since forever. I ran across this little nugget on youtube today. Shoenice22 as he is called on Youtube eats and or drinks pretty much anything in record time.

“Big deal a couple of hot dogs” you say? Well lets see him get down with the Kielbasa and remember ladies don’t use the teeth.

The best part about this fella is his Chris Farley-esq demeanor and his commentary. By the way, he is also a sponsored Youtube member. ie. He’s getting paid nicely for his gimmick based on viewership. Check some of his videos. Shoenice22 is pulling down 30,000-80,000 views on some of his videos. Just goes to show there is something for everyone on the net and people are finding more ways to get paid for taking part.

Anyway if you want to see some funny videos check Shoenice22 on Youtube. He eats pretty much anything. While some is kinda gross if you listen to his commentary he’s hilarious.

Extreme eating for the week….CHECK!

Goodbye weekend, hello Monday.

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So the weekend is gone and another week has started. Saturday night was dinner with friends at a local joint getting known for a particular dessert named the “Captain Jack’s Buried Treasure”. It’s essentially some kind of ice cream, chocolate cake/pie extravaganza. No I didn’t take a picture of it, it wasn’t around long enough. I should mention I had a dozen raw oysters for dinner which were great but my mind been on the “buried treasure” ice cream cake thing since Saturday. I am making my own and I am close to re-creating a version except I am going to include peanut butter and some other stuff.

Dinner tonight in order to feel better about making and eating my own peanut butter cake/pie latter in the week was some basic grilled vegetable and chicken breast. Its raining here tonight so I busted out the old grill pan. Pretty simple really. A chicken breast, some celery, a green pepper and one yellow squash. Olive oil and some Tony Chacheres Creole seasoning. Boom Healthy eating!

I didn’t stop there however, I also had some zucchini and decided to make some bread. The zucchini bread was from a basic recipe I had picked up a few years ago from the internet. I can’t attribute who actually came up with the recipe since I don’t recall where online I got it. It’s pretty basic though so if there in any interest I’ll post the details.

So between tonights grilled vegetable medley and lean chicken, with a slice of zucchini bread, my guts will be sufficiently  douched out and healthy to take on my own version of that bastard Captain Jack’s chocolate ice cream cake. Except mine will be better, and it wont have some piratey silly name like “Buried Treasure”. Oh no mine will be named something way more cool. Like “Brock’s Big Old Nuts and Chocolate Balls Ice Cream Cake Pie” or “Commandant Kingston’s Massive Ice Cream Peanut Butter Chocolate Mother of all Cake Bombs”.

You just wait. Now if I can only convince Debbie to get her ass in gear as she is supposed to be hosting the dinner club for the month of August. I just may debut my creation there.

 

Friday’s Lunch and some new changes

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Went out to lunch today with a friend to a local joint called Hurricane wings. It a small chain wing bar food type place. Nothing to write home about. I had the boneless Jamaican jerk wing nugget things.  Not bad, not near as hot as they should have been.

I shared an order of Parmasan and garlic fries with my lunch date while I got a chance to discuss this blog and some of the changes I wanted to make. The fries were actually better then the wing nuggets things or whatever the hell they may be. I have included a picture of the fries too.

Oh thats right. You may have noticed some changes around here. Guess I better explain.

The original system I was using to create the whatsupbrock.com blog was a little outdated and some of the features were broken since Apple stopped supporting the application. Comments especially were broken and the only way I could get them working was to code the ability myself which would take more time and effort then I cared to spend. Furthermore, why invent the wheel all over again. So I stepped up to big boy content management which you see here.

It will allow you and I a better chance to interact together here which was what I wanted from the beginning of this project.

Small disclaimer: In order to comment on posts the system may ask you for some information such as your name and a valid email address. It does this for a couple reasons, but mostly to try and deny spam bots from placing garbage comments. The system will ask for this information only on your first comment. Then as the admin of the site, I get to approve your first comment. From this point forward you wont have to submit the info and your comments will automatically appear since the system “thinks your a trusted source”. I promise you, not today, next week, next month or ever in the future will I sell or share your contact information. Enter something legit if you can so I know your not some Nigerian scumbag trying to scam some seed money for a large stockpile of gold I may have inherited from a dead relative. I just wanted you to hear this little bit from me and my mouth. Your info is safe if you choose to participate. I hope you do.

So I have some work to do. I do not want to abandon the first ten or so entries from the old site so I need to bring them over here with the pictures. I have a few things to clean up here as well. If you find something broken or stupid with the way this new system works please comment me, email, let me know. I’ll kick the Lama’s ass!

Thanks for your patience.

Brock

PS. My friend Amy who was my lunch date today is watching a couple of dogs for a friend of hers. This is Paddy. He’s Irish. He’s a Golden Retriever. He’s f’ing cute.

 

Queer chicken sandwiches for the straight guy.

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Let me put my love into you babe,

Let me put my love on the line,

Let me put my love into you babe,

Let me cut your cake with my knife.



So by now we all know the brouhaha lately thats been going on with Chick-Fil-A’s CEO and the gay and lesbian community and the same sex marriage advocates.

Personally I think its ridiculous to deny any two people the right to marry based on sexual orientation. That being said I also think anyone should have the right to believe and act in any way their personal moral compass dictates so long as it does not infringe on some others right to do exactly the same thing. In my humble opinion straights and gays are full of shit to think one group holds the moral high ground over the other group simply based on individual beliefs. There is plenty of room on the planet for both groups to coexist and neither group deserves special treatment or rights over the other. This includes letting two men or women legally marry. Besides why should straight people corner the market that is generally the misery of marriage and subsequent divorce. I say let the gays have the same taste of that fun.

In that spirit, I decided to mock up a few of my own Chick-Fil-A sandwiches this weekend at home.

Its pretty simple to make an accurate representation of the famous sandwich at home for a fraction of the cost. The trick is the chicken needs to be brined for six hours or overnight is even better.

1.Dissolve 1/2 cup salt and 1/4 cup of sugar in a quart of cold water. Place skinless, boneless chicken breasts in brine. Cover and refrigerate for at least six hours or like I mentioned above over night.

2.Remove chicken from brine and rinse with cold water. Dry breasts with paper towel.

3.Mix two eggs with a cup of milk in container.

4.Make spice mixture of 2 tablespoon pepper, 1 tablespoon paprika, 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper, 1 teaspoon MSG

5.Mix 1 1/2 cups flour, with 2 tablespoons dry milk, 1 tablespoon of baking powder,1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon sugar and half the spice mixture in step 4. listed above.

6.Season chicken breast with spice mixture, then dredge in milk/egg solution then place in flour mixture and cover with and pat down with the seasoned flour. Shake off excess flour.

7.Fry the chicken breasts in 350 degree peanut oil for about 4-6 minutes based on breast size.

8.Toast hamburger buns in melted butter in a non-stick frying pan.

 

You assemble the sandwiches by placing a few dill pickles slices on the bottom of butter toasted buns. Then simply place the fried chicken on the bun with the pickles and top with the other bun half.

So if you’re inclined give them a try. I think you’ll be surprised just how close to the real thing they are. Lastly the good part about making these in the comfort and privacy of your own home, you don’t have to suffer the public shame and humiliation of eating two or a dozen of these bastards.

Hamburgers in paradise or food of the infidels.

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I like mine with lettuce and tomato

Heinz 57 and french fried potatoes

Big Kosher pickle and a cold draft beer

Well good god almighty which way do I steer

The first in a series of foodie type blog posts on Whats Up Brock its with happiness that I introduce to the readers…(insert Keith Moon drum roll here)

Middle Eastern Lamb Burgers. I ran across this gem of a recipe over on Chow.

http://www.chow.com/recipes/11019-middle-eastern-lamb-burgers

While technically not mine this is my interpretation of the above mentioned recipe. Think of it if you will of Jimi Hendrix playing All Along the Watchtower or Sgt. Peppers.

I don’t normally eat a lot of lamb. My father hates it so I rarely ate it growing up. I have experimented with a leg of lamb on the grill from time to time, but I never knew if the lamb I was buying just sucked or the meat itself sucked. As I understand it, good decent lamb comes from Australia. There is lamb raised and sold in the US buts its not as good.

Secondly, over in the middle east lamb is to a whack job terrorist as is a good hog roast is to a North Georgia abortion clinic bomber. Ironically both groups of individuals seem to get the impression from the same holy prophets and scriptures that one animal is unclean and unfit for human consumption while the other is ok to eat. Imagine that.

While I don’t belong to either group mentioned above, I could potentially have some terroristic tendencies if and when the end times are upon us. In that spirit I’ll embrace the food of my fellow man of ridiculous bullshit ideology and whip up then wolf down some Middle Eastern Lamb Burgers. I doubled the published recipe for guests and leftovers throughout the week. Makes about six 1/3 pound burgers or eight 1/4 pounders.

•2 pound ground lamb

•1/2 cup minced red onion

•2 medium garlic clove, minced

•4 tablespoons finely chopped fresh Italian parsley leaves

•4 teaspoons finely chopped fresh mint leaves

•2 teaspoon kosher salt

•1 teaspoon cayenne pepper

•1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

•8 burger buns

Gently mix the meat with all the other ingredients, form into patties and grill over direct medium fire about ten (10) minutes per side.

Top the burgers with the following cucumber and cumin yogurt relish. Also found on www.chow.com

•6 medium Kirby cucumbers, peeled, halved lengthwise, and seeded

•1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt

•1/4 cup Greek-style yogurt or sour cream

•2 tablespoons white wine or red wine vinegar

•2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh Italian parsley leaves

•2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh mint leaves

•2 teaspoons granulated sugar

•1 teaspoon whole coriander seed, crushed to a powder

•1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

•1/4 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper

The relish I stayed true to the published recipe.

Results.

These weren’t half bad. If you’re getting tired of the same old burgers, try these beauties. I give these a respectable 7.5 our of a 10. Good enough to break the slump of eating the same old go to grilled burgers, but probably not special enough to add into any normal rotation. If I’m trying to get into the panties of say some beautiful Israeli chick sure I’ll break this recipe out.

Try em and report back.