Maintenance

Hey all.

You may have noted we haven't been around and that our blog template (again) took a plunge into the abyss and the site has been a wreck lately... hence the change in the way things look around here.

We think we've fixed everything, but Blogger has undergone some changes of late that ought to give us more leniency with multiple pages, profiles, and so forth. We're still exploring these changes may continue to be tweaked for a few days yet... we'll see. Thanks for your patience while we've battled through our technical ineptitude.

The good news is that Matty (finally) has something French to share with you! Standby...

~ Luke

What an Incredible Smell You've Discovered!

Never ever EVER volunteer to help clean refrigerators. Especially ones with vacuum condensers.

Fried K-sausage?

This, my friends, is my first post as a legitimate Conquistador but some of you may remember me as the man who brought you the "This Salad Don't Run" Hotdog Salad. Ironically enough, my first real project, a sort of impromptu idea as most all of our ideas are, again dealt with completely processed beef, prepared in a pan with the potentiality for usage on a grill. It was not complicated. It was not very unique. In general, it was not very great. Unless you really like hotdogs and want to try something different from your average cylinder of packed meat. We took a large roll of Hebrew National "Beef Salami", which was much more like Hebrew National "Processed Balogna", and decided that it was pretty bad so why not fry it?

We took an adorable little egg pan, put a slab of regular butter in it on the stove on medium to high temperature, and threw a piece of this salami on top. Within minutes, it began to brown a bit and smell a whole lot like a hotdog. After flipping a few times, it was done and ready to be tried. In my opinion, it was really just a big slice of hotdog with much more of a salty and flavorful nature than your average ball park frank. The salty nature of this food becomes an issue though, as in recent news, sodium has been under attack by health experts as one of the major factors which makes the childhood obesity (and adulthood obesity rate for that matter) constantly on the rise in America. In today's issue of TIME magazine, I came across the statistic that a single Hebrew National Jumbo hotdog will take up over 1/3 of the recommended daily value of sodium of an average person, at just over 2,300mg per dog. Really, the fact that I noticed a definite increase in sodium taste, which makes this slab of meat much more delicious than if it were not packed with salt, just makes this dish one more fatty snack to try. In general, not amazing. Just a fat hotdog. mmm.

Culinary Conquistagloriousalsa!

Since it would have been entirely too convenient for me to share a Cinco-de-Mayo-related recipe with you before the holiday had come and gone, today I'm going to fill you in on how I celebrated on Wednesday and how our most recent culinary endeavor played into the festivities.

As you may or may not know, next Friday is my last day at the P.R. firm at which I have been interning since the beginning of the year. I've learned much more than I've earned, but I've had a great experience and am definitely coming out of the internship with a good bit of personal and professional development to show for it. It'll be a sad change in a lot of ways, but once you know that you are not going to be hired for financial reasons, it is time to move on.

Anyway, Wednesday (Cinco-de-Mayo) was the day of the Third Annual Salsa Challenge at the firm and I got talked into competing. I have never made salsa before, thus it seemed like a perfect challenge for a Culinary Conquistador... I couldn't just be that guy with a food blog who decided he didn't feel like competing.

In true last minute fashion, I went to my golf lesson on Tuesday at 7pm (realizing upon my arrival that they had scheduled me incorrectly and thus I ended up practicing on my own for a while) and then headed on to Heinen's at 8pm. Armed with a recipe which I had apparently cut out of a 2007 Gentleman's Quarterly issue and stuck in a cookbook, I was about to gather up the required fresh ingredients (plus a few additives of my own) and make it out before the store closed at 8:30.

When the GQ recipe page fell out of the cookbook that my mother was reference, I was excited for two reasons. First, I've generally had good luck with GQ-originating recipes in the past. Secondly, I thought to myself, "boy, writing this blog post ought to be easy... I can totally find it online and not have to type it all up!"

Guess I was wrong on the latter part.

For whatever reason, like a ghost-riding phantom drifting across the Mexican border to impart delicious, cryptic, tomato-centric knowledge upon me only to disappear forever into the sunset, I should have known that I'd never see so much as a mention of the recipe after the fact.

Well, alright, maybe that would have been a stretch. Regardless, I  have the original page of the bygone magazine issue and thus with a little extra effort can still relate to you the steps I took to make our salsa.

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"Roasted-Tomato Salsa" modified to become...
THE CULINARY CONQUISTAGLORIOUSALSA!

Serves four to six (if that is all you're eating)

Ingredients

• ~1 pound of on-the-vine tomatoes, cored
• 2 Kumato tomatoes (they are brownish in color)
• 6 Campari tomatoes (smaller, but larger than cherry tomatoes)
• 3/4 lb. of tomatillos
• 8 serrano chillies, stems removed
• 5 cloves garlic, peeled
• 1/2 large red onion, thinly sliced
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil (plus a little extra)
• Salt
• Sugar
• 1/4 white onion, chipped
• Handful of cilantro, stemmed and chopped
• 1 lime

Directions
1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

2. Toss tomatoes (all) tomatillos, chilies, garlic, and sliced (red) onion with a small amount of oil in a roasting pan, season with salt, and then roast until soft and wilted (about 30-45 minutes... check @ 30 min). If you want a bit of char on the vegetables for added flavor (you do), roast the tomatoes, tomatillos, and chilies in sperate pans over high heat before placing them in the oven.

3. Once the ingredients are roasted (again, they should be soft and somewhat wilted), let them cool a bit then puree in a food processor, slowly adding the 1/2 cup of oil. This will help to emulsify the salsa. Season to taste with salt and a pinch or two of sugar (I went heavier on the salt as I like the taste).

4. Mix in the chopped raw (white) onion and cilantro. Cut your lime in half, juicing half and mixing the juice in with the salsa. Cut the other half into 6 wedges (see picture) to be used by individuals who may want to further flavor their salsa... besides, it looks cool as a colorful decoration.

5. Serve with warm tortillas or good-quality tortilla chips. Preferably cold beer or margaritas as well.

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And that's what I did. It took a while... it was a bit more... viscous than anticipated and was also orange vs. the red salsa in the picture for one reason or another. The taste, which was the important part, was great.

The office shut down at 4pm on Wednesday and the "Creative Team" area became a Mexican eatery. We ended up having 13 entries in the competition and Lisa's husband came and tended bar with top shelf tequila-made margaritas and Coronas. It was a blast; all of the salsas were very different (ranging from chunky mango ones to smoky fine chipotle blends) but all very good. Everyone had a chance to submit one vote for their favorite of the thirteen... I'd say 25-30 folks voted.

The Culinary Conquistagloriousalsa did receive a couple votes for best salsa, however the top award went to a woman named Kris who used special smoked peppers from a brother-in-law in Arizona and herbs she'd grown in her own garden. Where my salsa was orange, hers was a deep brown and tasted as smoky as it looked. It deserved the win... and the festive giant chili pepper plate that went with the title.

Looking at my salsa, I have to say I was pretty happy with the results. I'll warn you now that it is pretty spicy... serrano peppers are up there in the heat index. Not TOO spicy; some sauces or chilies that I've had over the years leave a lingering, hurt-your-tongue burn. This chili has a crescendoing heat effect... You eat some and feel nothing at first, slowly gaining a "kick" over the first 15 seconds or so. The spiciness lingers for a minute or two, but recedes as quickly as it came. I nice touch, but nothing to lament afterward.

The taste was interesting. While the texture may have been less "meaty" than I had expected, the salsa was full of flavor and complexity. Everyone was very complimentary of it while sampling all the salsas, and Matty / the rest of our family was quite impressed when they tried it the next day.

In the end, I am glad that I competed. It was a chance to make a vegetable-only dish, use the freshest of ingredients, and come out with a big success on the first try. If you're looking to try your hand at a from-scratch salsa anytime soon, give strong consideration to the Culinary Conquistagloriousalsa.

Captain Candy's Catastrophic Chili: One Big Bowl O' Birthday Fun

 As I mentioned not long ago in my last entry, I've been doing a decent job of keeping our Twitter presence up. If you were monitoring our feed today, you may have noted that it is Matty's 17th birthday today. I, being the thoughtful older brother that I am, neglected to get him anything of significance.

Hey, they don't pay me right now at my job... and I don't think ahead. As you can likely tell by his shirt, he got plenty of awesome presents as it was.

As the day has gone on and I've given the subject more thought, however, I realized that I could give him the greatest present of all: stress-relief.

You see, I have been prodding Matty for close to two months now to post our award-winning chili recipe on the blog. He's been either too busy or too unmotivated thus far to do it... and it's keeping him from contributing. I figure that if I take the burden off his shoulders, guess what on Earth we put in the chili, and get a post up, it'd make his day. A great side-effect? It'll surely make your day too.

That being said, here it is. The big one. That which our blog's measly reputation hinges on: Captain Candy's Catastrophic Chili.

"If the recipe is that good," you might think, "why share it with us lowly peasants lurking in the blogosphere?"

A good question, but one that is easily answered. Since we waited forever and a day to actually post this recipe, measured things... less than accurately, and hardly remember what we put in to begin with (I wish you could see this crumpled, pencil-scrawled sheet of paper in front of me), I don't think we're in any danger of losing a fortune on this one. Besides, we only actually took the 2nd place medal (out of 14 entries), our egos have been kept in check for now.

To be honest, the chili wasn't even our idea. Our church hosts a "Chili Cook-off" every year, and every year you know where to find us when that day comes around...

Not at the cook-off.

We don't have great memories, so we've never quite made it there. This year, however, we didn't have too much of a choice. The pastoral associate at the church, a very bright guy named Bill, knew about the Culinary Conquistadors and knew that we had a bit (keyword being BIT) of cooking experience. He hounded us week after week about when he was gonna see our name on the entries list and how he couldn't wait to try that Conquistador chili. He wasn't being obnoxious, just probably knew that we didn't have the gumption to enter ourselves.

Finally, without Matty's permission, I put our names on a slip and we were in the running.

When that fateful weekend came around, we hit the store, grabbed some ingredients, and went to work. given how long ago it was that we actually made the chili, I'll skip the faulty narrative and stick to the phases of preparation. Here is how it all went down.

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Captain Candy's Catastrophic Chili

Serves: ???? (a crock-pot's worth)
Cook Time: ~6 hours (though you won't be present the whole time)

Phase I: Meat and Flavorings

• What you'll need
• Coarsely ground beef (2.5 lbs+)
• Bulb of garlic (6 cloves)
• Salt & Pepper
• Onions (1.5 cups+)
• Olive oil (a few Tbsp. to cover the electric frying pan

• Preparation
• Thaw the beef, chop it up. Keep it chunky. Microwave, hot water, whatever you need to do to make sure it's not frozen and can be worked with.
• Chop up your onions. We diced them, but not finely. pieces were probably 1/2 in. long.
• Crush your cloves of garlic. We used a garlic press, I recommend one if you can find it
• Add oil to electric frying pan, turn to 300°F. Heat oil.

•  Cooking
• Put beef into the electric frying pan / heated oil. 
• Add prepared garlic and onions
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Allow the mixture to cook for a few minutes until the beef and seasonings are browned

Phase II: Vegetables

• What you'll need
• Variously colored bell peppers, the more colors, the more fun (1.5 cups+)
• Celery, chopped (1.5 cups+)

• Preparation
• Chop that business. Like onions, don't go too fine.

• Cooking
• Drain meat and seasonings
• Add new oil to frying pan
• Add chopped vegetables
• Sauté vegetables for 5 min. or until soft

Phase III: Beans, Spices, Etc.

• What you'll need
• Kidney beans (40.5oz. can)
• Dark red kidney beans (30oz. can)
•  Can of tomatoes with oregano, basil, and garlic (28oz) [You may want to try the kind with diced green chilies in it as well]
• Spices
• Oregano
• Ground black pepper
• Basil
• Chili powder
• Hot paprika
• Cinammon
• Crushed red pepper 

•  Preparation
• Drain beans

• Cooking
• Add drained beans to vegetables in electric frying pan
• Add seasoned tomato mixture
• Stir, add spices to mixture. Now I realize that we haven't given you any measurements, but honestly we didn't measure it either. You've just got to work with what you have and guess a bit along the way. We continually tweaked the spices toward the end to equalize spiciness, saltiness, sweetness, tartness, etc. to meet our qualifications. We'll come back to this... just put in a couple shakes for now and try not to overdo it.

Phase IV: All Together Now!

• Combination
• Add everything, meat, vegetables, etc. to crock pot
• Simmer the mixture for several hours (4-5 hrs.) The flavors need to "become acquainted", as one of our aunts likes to say. Don't bother taste testing for a while.
• We kept a bit of overflow simmering in the electric frying pan for testing purposes... we had very little faith in ourselves and wanted to avoid polluting the whole batch if possible. You may want to try this too

Phase V: Hittin' the Sauce - Finishing Touches

• What you'll need
• Buffalo sauce (We used a brand called "Moore's", 16oz.)
• Frank's Hot Sauce
• Srirachi asian hot sauce
• Limes (two)

• Mixing it up
• Juice both limes, add the juice to the chili
• This is where any semblance of a scientific approach falls apart. We added the entire bottle of buffalo sauce, squirts of Frank's and srirachi, and fiddled with cinammon, hot paprika, and chili powder. Here are some pointers:
• The lime juice and cinammon add a sweetness to the mixture with a bit of tartness from the limes
• Srirachi sauce adds spice, but almost a little sweetness as well
• Frank's has more distinct flavor than the srirachi sauce, thus adding more spice that equalizes the sweetness
• Chili powder, hot paprika, and crushed red pepper all add spice
• Salt and pepper are useful for normalizing any oddities
• Pray that it works out and don't give up until you find a flavor you like

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... Or something like that.

It wasn't exact, it wasn't elegant, but it was pretty dang good. For once, you don't even have to take just our word for it either.

What we learned from all of this is that chili is something that is meant to be toyed with and is hard to mess-up. As long as you have a consistent base with the beef and vegetables, your originality will come from how you season it. In our case, the limes and srirachi are what really made the difference, I believe.

You don't even have to use beef if you want to try something different. The chili that took number one in the cook-off was a green chili-based, shredded chicken chili. It was made by a woman who was a much more accomplished cook than we and was thus a tasty departure from the norm. If you're confident, try something crazy!

Now that it's Spring, chili-season may have passed for the most part... but if you're looking fora different spin on a recognized classic, we suggest giving this one a try. Captain Candy has never let anyone down... at least not yet.

A brief update before something signifcantly more interesting.

Good afternoon, or morning, or whatever... the Indians are playing in Oakland today so I'll be sensitive to you folks from the West Coast.

So, you may have noted that the activity on the blog picked up earlier this month then proceeded to drop off as usual, not surprisingly. I admit that I could have been working a bit harder to conjure some culinary creations during this period. My cohorts (yes, you may not recall them as it has been SO LONG since they posted much) have been of little help. To be fair, they've been busy. Both starring in plays, Deering performed a ridiculous number of shows at Wittenberg U. last week and Matty had three appearances as Cpt. Hook in the high school's Peter Pan presentation. These beleaguered thespians have had their minds on just about anything but cooking, I imagine, though Deering may not have a choice as he works in a fancy restaurant.

Regardless, you, Internet-world, haven't seen nor heard much from any of us. If you follow our tweets, that may be an exception... we've stayed pretty up-to-date on those (see the left hand column if you're too lazy to make your way to Twitter or pick up your snazzy mobile device which probably has a Twitter app as well); follow us if you haven't already.

Martha Stewart, we realized last week, is following @CulinaryFTW on Twitter... she follows 6,000 some folks out of the 2,000,000 or so that follow her, so we felt pretty honored. Twitter is really a great place to meet other folks interested in cooking, foodie matters, dining, etc. I've learned a bit and I know that certain tweeps have benefited from some of our tweets as well. Trendy though it may be, its useful. Get on it if you haven't yet.

Anyhow, between the plays and my work schedule (food around here is generally cooked by the time I get home... not that I'm complaining), we haven't had much of a chance to tackle stuff. Hopefully that'll be changing as school is winding down for the other two Conquistadors, potential guest stars will be coming back into town, and I'll be motivated to do more cooking and less social media work around this endeavor. Who knows? We may even get out the camera and start the long rumored internet show. Only time will tell...

Re-establishment... the Western Way

Greetings followers/ Internet-world! We're still here.

You may have noticed (or not, depending on how often you're around these parts) that things are a bit different on the site right now. We had to do a bit of clean-up given some formatting issues we've run into of late. While Safari, Opera, and Chrome have all seemed content to show the blog the way it ought to look, Firefox and Internet Explorer haven't shared in that view of late. After struggling for some weeks to find out what has been causing the problem, it seems as though we've fixed our issues.

As a result of our tinkering, you'll note the sidebars have been altered slightly and that a new poll has been put in place (you should respond to it). Hopefully the site will stay in one piece henceforth and we can focus a bit more on what we're supposed to be doing - cooking.

On that note, I have a little something-something to share with y'all today - a recipe brought to us by the very same little lady that imparted unto us her buffalo chicken dip knowledge. Yes indeed, Erin has been back in town for a few days and this time she taught us how to make a variation on something that may or may not have originated from a Campbell's soup can: "Cowboy Casserole".

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"Cowboy Casserole"
     
     Serves 6-ish

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Ingredients

What you'll need:

• 1 small onion (diced)
• 2 cloves of garlic (pressed)
• 1 lb. of ground beef or turkey (if you prefer a healthier alternative)
• 2 10.75 oz. cans of tomato soup(we used Campbell's)
• 2 10 oz. cans of diced tomatoes and green chilies (we used Rotel's)
• 1 pack small tortillas (you'll need approx. 6 of the tortillas)
• 1 cup shredded mozarella
• Olive oil
• Optional: a splash of Frank's Hot Sauce

Directions

The greatest thing about this recipe is that it is simple. It can be made quickly, the preparation is not difficult (something that you cannot necessarily count on with our recipes... remember the gumbo?), and it's tough to mess up. Perfect.

To begin, you'll need either a large skillet or an electric frying pan: we used the latter. Once you find that, you're ready to cook.

1. Begin by pouring some olive oil into your skillet/frying pan, just enough to roughly cover the bottom. Turn the heat onto Medium (or equivalent).

2. Dice your onions / press your garlic if you have not done so yet. Once they're in appropriate form, toss them into your skillet to saute. Leave them in there, stirring as necessary until the onions are browned.

3. Add your hamburger, chopping it up with a spoon or spatula as you do. Begin browning the hamburger in the oil with the onion and garlic.

4. Slice your tortillas into bite-sized pieces while the hamburger is cooking. I used a knife to slice the tortillas, though a kitchen scissors would work.

5. Add your cans of tomato soup and tomatoes/chilies to the skillet. Stir together with the ingredients already present and heat the mixture. Think of it as if you were heating a can of soup; it shouldn't take more than a few minutes to reach a good temperature. Erin added a dash of Frank's Hot Sauce here. The chilies add a kick of their own, so this is optional dependent on taste.

6. Pour your mixture into a large serving bowl. Place tortilla strips and cheese in their own bowls and serve. Tortilla strips and cheese are meant to be used as a topping for the soupy casserole, adding consistency. Add these ingredients as you see fit.

7. Enjoy.


Analysis

In the words of a famous warthog, it's "slimy, yet satisfying." Of the six who tried the dish today, five heartily approved and one (nine year-old) complained that it was a bit spicy for her. This is a great lunch dish if you're looking for something quick but a little different.

Experiment with quantities - we had no problem cleaning out this amount of the casserole, including a side of tex-mex vegetable mix (corn, tomatoes, beans, peppers, etc.), hence the "6-ish" serving designation. As long and you make enough, this one is a sure winner.