Ever had ORIGINAL, AUTHENTIC, GENUINE Homemade Aioli?

Perhaps you’d be surprised at the MANY “knock-off,” el-cheapo, wanna-be, so-called “recipes” for AIOLI.

For some, it’s a Johnny-come-lately to the faux phood scene, a veritable “flash-in-the pan” — here today, gone tomorrow — and something, some trick of “the new and kewl” to attract, and FOOL, or DECEIVE, folks into believing that a great amount of effort, or love, went into making a food item.

Pretty pictures adorn all kinds of websites, magazines, and newspapers — online, and in print — that depict food as an artistic creation… and to be certain, there’s little doubt that some of it is. Certain cakes come to mind, for example.

The finished product… GENUINE, AUTHENTIC aioli.

But most food is not “art,” though it can, and should be, presented attractively. And the reason for that, the reason why food should be presented attractively, is that we FIRST ‘eat’ with our eyes. That is to say, that, what we see whets our appetite. However, for food made in a restaurant, the olfactory sensation is largely missing, because almost no one goes into any restaurant and smells the food cooking. It’s not like your grandma’s, or mama’s kitchen, wherein the savory aromas of food waft throughout the house, eagerly increasing your expectations as mealtime approaches.

But, back to the aioli.

At its essence, aioli is almost pure garlic in a spreadable form. I write ‘almost’ because it has olive oil in it, and cannot be made without it. And, there’s some salt, as well. But the amount, volume, quantity, etc., of salt is up to the maker. And though salt may not be 100% absolutely required, or a mandatory item like garlic or olive oil, it is HIGHLY recommended to be a constituent part of aioli. In other words, just put some in. Don’t neglect it.

Now, invariably, someone, some wisenheimer, will ask something like

An Easy-Peasy, Quick-n-Easy Meal in Under 30 minutes!

Jasmine rice w celery, onions, carrots, bell peppers, cooked in leftover beef broth, with… yup — it’s SHRIMP!

Altogether, including prep time, a meal in under 30 minutes.

Like I’ve said previously… Rachel Ray ain’t got NOTHIN’ on me!

A tasty, nutritious, easy-peasy, quick-n-easy meal in <30 minutes!

Okay… so, What DO you do to make this?

1.) Get your ingredients, i.e., go grocery shopping.

2.) Select the groceries.

3.) Purchase the groceries.

4.) Go home.

5.) Unload the groceries.

6.) Fix the meal.

7.) Eat the meal.

8.) Wash the dishes.

9.) Dry the dishes.

10.) Put away the dishes.

Seriously…

Volumes/quantity are up to you. If you wanna’ fix enough to feed a small army, go for it.

If it’s just you, that’s cool, too.

Perhaps some may ask something like, “How much shrimp should I use?”

The EASY answer is… how much do you want?

The rice? What about it? How much should I use? What kind?

For Pete’s sake, PLEASE DON’T buy rice in a cooking pouch. Seriously. Just don’t. It’s just not that difficult to cook rice. I mean, if illiterate folks in jungles and their kids can cook it perfectly, you can too.

Just remember: Rice requires

Better-than-Boston Baked Beans Recipe

Summer’ll be winding down soon enough, and you should have enjoyed at least ONE backyard barbecue in that time.

And just in the case you haven’t… here’s a recipe that’ll get you going!

The recipe is Complete!

With FREE “Easy-Peasy Instructions”!!

Better-than-Boston
Baked Beans

1 – 2 pounds navy beans (dry)
1 – 2 onions (red/yellow/white)
½ pound bacon
½ pound ground pork sausage
2 Tablespoons crushed garlic

A Truly DELICIOUS Pot Pie! Beef Bourguignonne style!

“Nothing says loving like something from the oven.”
– anonymous

To the idea of pot pies, some folks say things like, “You know, I’ve never liked pot pies, but probably because it was always store bought.”

-or-

“He HATES pot pies. I LOVE them.”

And then, after looking at the ingredients I used, they say this…

“That recipe looks scrumptious.”

-and-

“I’ll have to try this recipe. He might eat it if I make it.”

Understand this: Most all recipes – and that means 99.99% – have their origin in someone’s kitchen – not in a giant factory vat or laboratory test tube.

Also understand this: Recipes are

Deep Dish Pizza: A How-To Guide

Who doesn‘t like pizza?

Why, it’s practically unAmerican to not like pizza! Have you ever made your own pizza at home? Ever wanted to make a Deep Dish Pizza at home? Good news – you can! And I’ll share images and a recipe which will help get you started.

This may come as a complete surprise to some, but pizza is BIG BUSINESS in the United States.

Top 50 Pizza Chains’ Annual Sales by State (Click to enlarge)

And as Marketplace Host and Senior Editor Kai Ryssdal says, “but first, let’s do the numbers…”

According to CHD Expert, a foodservice industry marketing trends & data organization, at the end of September 2016, there were 76,723 pizza restaurants in operation in the United States.

In their 2016 Pizza Consumer Trend Report, foodservice industry researcher Technomic found that 41% of consumers polled say they eat pizza once a week, a 55% increase from the 26% reported only 2 years ago.

And a 2016 Morgan Stanley report found that pizza delivery is a $30 billion industry, but could be be worth over $210 billion — which is the total amount Americans currently spent on off-premise dining. And of that $30 billion figure, over 1/3 – $11 billion – are delivery orders which are placed online, and nearly 2/3 of those online orders are… pizza.

So with impressive data like that, it should come as no surprise that a Harris Poll found that Americans’ No. 1 favorite comfort food is pizza, which also had twice as many votes as any other dish… including chocolate.

Now, for a recipe, and the how-to.

There are many seemingly innumerable styles of pizza, which vary with stuffed crusts, in shape, size, ingredients, and any other number of variations in pizza, and fortunately, this one will be simple enough to make at home.

We’re going to make the entire thing, including the crust.

What you’ll need is

Butter really IS better!

How Food Marketers Made Butter the Enemy

By Tom Philpott

Wednesday, April 9, 2014 3:00 AM PDT

Louise Cukrov/Shutterstock

James McWilliams—a historian who has made a name for himself in prestigious publications like the New York Times and The Atlantic for his contrarian defenses of the food industry—is back at it. In an item published last week in the excellent Pacific Standard, McWilliams uses the controversy over a recent study of saturated fat as a club with which to pummel food industry critics like the Times‘ Mark Bittman.

Here’s what happened: A group including Harvard and Cambridge researchers analyzed 72 studies and concluded that there’s no clear evidence that ditching saturated fat (the kind found mainly in butter, eggs, and meat) for the monounsaturated and polyunsaturated kind (found in fish and a variety of vegetable oils) delivers health benefits.

Bittman responded to the study’s release with

A Recipe for Disaster… naw, not really. A Recipe for Apple Cobbler/Pie! Yummy!

Okay, for those of you reading this whom don’t already know, I post  photographs on Flickr. As I’ve said, there are only two photographic subjects: 1.) people; and, 2.) things. Food is included in the latter category.

If your tastebuds are brain is working, you’ll need to make this recipe.

Here, from my Flickr page – in all it’s glory – is my recipe.

Okay, folks! Do you know what time it is?

Nope, it’s not”Howdy Doody time,” it’s RECIPE time! Yaaaay!

Yup, I made another’n!

I like cooking (I wrote that again, just for you folks that’re seeing my photostream – and foodshots – for the first time.) So, I take pictures of the food I cook… and eat. Yup. Wowser, eh?

Anyway… this is a total delight – to prepare and consume! (At least that’s what the consumers said, ’cause I didn’t get to eat much of it! The leftovers were eaten by my neighbors. *LOL*)

I prepared it as part of a “beerbecue” with some friends I’d made through Flickr! Yaay, Flickr! House of Sims – Great folks, great family, great photographer!

Anyway… back to the recipe thingy.

When I’d gone up to Sewanee, TN a few days back, I’d bought some fresh fruit & veggies from a roadside vendor while on the way back home. (I’d purposed to do that, having seen him on the way up there.) Among those items was a huge basket of Rome apples, from (of all places, and appropriately enough) Rome, Georgia. They were tasty!

Again, purposing to do something different with a recipe, I securely applied my “Fly-By-The-Seat-Of-Your-Pants” device and proceeded to adventure in the kitchen.

Having absolutely no recipe from which to work, I set out and made my own! (The Army has patches for “Big Red 1,” the Special Forces vertical sword with lightning bolts across, “Pathfinder,” “Air Assault” and the “Expert/Combat Infantryman Badge.” (Maybe they should make one with a fork, French chef’s knife and spoon/ladle criss-crossed over a skillet and stock pot with a flame at the bottom. I’d wear it!)

Here’s what I did:

Peel & core apples. Reserve peel (this is an important step – do NOT omit it!). Chop apples coarsely. Make a strong NaClH2O mixture (Use little H2O & boil it, folks! It’ll hold more NaCl. Then dilute w H2O.). Add honey – lots of it – to NaClH2O. Rationale: Honey is hygroscopic, so is NaCl. NaCl will not affect apples, but allow the marinade/bath to absorb the flavors. Add: cinnamon, mace, allspice, ginger, nutmeg, ground clove, vanilla, in copious quantity. Big healthy squirt of lemon juice – don’t be stingy! – (sing the opening stanza of the Oscar Mayer song, “My baloney has a first name…” while squirting) Brown Sugar – lots and lots of it. Cranberries – about two handfuls. Marinate apples overnight (minimum 12 hours) in refrigerator – the longer, the better. (Oh yeah… make sure the cranberries are in there, too!) And the peel? You should’ve chopped it up finely and added it to the boiling mixture.

Dough:

Flour, whole wheat/white mixture – just dump it in. Lots’a extra risin’ (that’s “Baking Powder” for the uninitiated). One egg – don’t use those panty-waste, freakin’ micro-eggs – use the honkin’ JUMBO mamas! The bigger, the better. (If anyone asks, act like you know what you’re doing.) Lard (that would be PIG FAT – avoid the hydrogenated stuff – you can make your own by melting it – about two ladles/scoops). Butter – that would be COW MILK FAT (Teats are good – Mooof!) one stick – that’s 1/4 pound. Vanilla – you should have some from when you made the other stuff – and for goodness sake, DON’T be stingy! Cream – aka “Heavy Whipping Cream” (avoiding freaky innuendo here… but, she’s a very kinky girl, the kind you don’t take home to mother – unless you’re bold as love {Have you heard Ricky Skaggs bluegrass version of Rick James’ trademark song? No kidding!}). Vodka (cheap stuff is okay), brandy (your preference), Brown Sugar (how come you taste so good? Did you know that Rolling Stones tune was recorded in Muscle Shoals, AL?), white sugar (yep, but not as much as the good, brown stuff), Almonds – blenderize ’em to a powdery consistency – about 2-3 cups finished product. The astute cook will recognize… it’s a cookie dough! Yaay!

How to:

Combine dry ingredients. Melt fat/butter together, add vanilla & liquor (that’d be the vodka & brandy),  cream – again, don’t be stingy! – in separate container. Get your hands in it and mix it all up – but first you gotta’ add the liquid to it! Grease interior of deep-dish baking pan (keeps it from sticking during cooking – and don’t avoid this step by justifying that you use some #$^&! “non-stik” pan – DO IT ANYWAY!) Tear off chunks of the dough and mash it out evenly throughout the pan, lining the bottom and walls. Use a slotted spoon to place marinated apple mixture into pan. Add some liquid, but not all – it should be just below the ingredients’ surface. Roll out remaining dough and apply to surface. Bake @ 350°F for about 30-45 minutes. If you’re a halfway decent cook, you’ll know when it’s done… by smell. Oh yeah… you should’ve put some coarsely chopped pecans under the crust before you cooked it. And just so you’ll know, put a shallow cookie sheet under the pan – it may (translate: most likely will) spill over during cooking.

Now, while that’s cooking you gotta’ do something with that remaining liquid.

Here’s a big giant hint: BOIL IT DOWN! Yep, make a syrup to pour over the top of the cobbler/pie! Hello!? Cooking is all about creativity, ingenuity and efficient use of resources. You know the adage: Waste not, want not.

When it’s done liberally apply butter to the top (while it’s hot, you silly thing, you!), and then pour the syrup all over the top.

Then, take some kind of serving device – preferably a big spoon – and insert it into the pan, gently moving up and under, with a slight twist of the wrist, remove a portion or section of the cooked contents. Place them in a bowl. Apply a heaping portion of vanilla ice cream (chocolate or neapolitan just won’t do in this example) to the top. Using a separate spoon, eat it all up.

Bone-head appetite, y’all!