Hey Good Lookin’, What Ya Got Cookin’?

A little while back, I read the book “Hannibal Rising”; which is all about the formative years of Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lector.  At one point a teenage Hannibal is getting some culinary lessons from a French Chef.  The Chef says that the cheeks of an animal are a delicacy.  When you are carving one is supposed to be presented to the lady of the house and the other to the guest of honour.

Now for a while I wondered if this idea was, perhaps, made up by Thomas Harris.  After all we butchered our own animals when I was growing up on the farm and I had never heard of such a thing.  However, just the other day I attended a wine and food festival.  At one of the booths they had beef cheeks.  I tried one and found it to be very tasty and surprisingly tender.

Thus, I have been inspired to create a new dish for The Redneck Bar & Grill.  A 48-hr. sous-vide beaver cheek with garlic infused puree of root vegetables and a pink-peppercorn demi-glace.  Watch for it on the new menu.

October 20, 2009 | | Tags: , , , , , | 44 Comments »

Could Someone Please Invent Negative Calorie Beer?

I know I speak for a lot of beer lovers when I say that beer shouldn’t make you fat. It is downright unfair.

What we need is beer that actually uses up calories while you drink it. I would love to drink beer like I used to, but I just don’t want to pack around all that extra weight on my middle. It took months to get rid of that extra 40 lbs the first time and I’m not gonna just put it back on by drinking high calorie beer and eating hot wings! Anyone that could give us alternatives that taste great and don’t make us fat would be just rolling in the dough.

There are more than one negative calorie foods diets out there. We need to get scientists working harder on this and inventing some new versions of foods that suck up calories instead of putting on pounds. How about these new snack favourites that they are working on right now?

Workout Hot Wings- eat a 1 lb plate of these babies and the burning combined with the extra bathroom trips means you end up 3 pounds lighter! A special combination of extra hot, ultra aged peppers soaked in Castor Oil will have you begging for more – or maybe just begging for mercy. Serve with a side of Pepto Bismol.

Chunky Chocolate Browser Cookies- made with real internet cookies, all you do is eat these full flavoured delicious browser data chocolate chunks until you are stuffed to the gills. Then simply Clear Private Data and it will be just as if those internet cookies never existed. Who knew it could be so easy?

Styrofoam Peanut Crunch - now, another use for those stupid styrofoam packing peanuts. No longer will these environmental hazards be blowing around landfills. From now on they will be safely trapped in this new dessert fave. Utilizing the ever handy Styrofoam glue, and imported peanut flavouring created in industrial China using leftover toy parts, Styrofoam Peanut Crunch will have your tastebuds crying – hopefully for more! An excellent Christmas Gift for relatives that have already lived too long, I mean, that already have everything.

And last but not least, Reverse Osmosis Blue Beaver Beer. This full flavoured brew tastes just like the world famous Blue Beaver Beer you all know and love. Utilizing the quantum data gathered at the Condor Research Facility and Atom Smasher, scientists have entangled beer molecules with molecules of commonly held stocks and bonds. That means that as the stocks and bonds devalue and shrink, the beer molecules will lose their calories to the economic downturn. Drink up! Finally, physics and the stock market are on your side about something. Now who’s the biggest loser?

I guess these would make a good addition to our highly sought after redneck beer gift baskets. I will be looking into it for future shipments. So remember, when you’re feeling blue, grab a Beaver!

March 27, 2009 | | Tags: , , | 70 Comments »

Deskercise To Burn Off Those Greasy Pepperoni Snacks

You may (or may not) recall a little while back we had a listeriosis outbreak at one of our major meat packing plants.  A wide number of different products were recalled at that time.  Among them was a particular brand of pepperoni sticks that I was very fond of (fortunately it did not affect their line of Italian meatballs).

These pepperoni sticks were very, very tasty.  Although they were labeled “hot”, I always found them to be more like medium.  When I chewed them, I could feel and taste the grease oozing out of them in a most delightful way.  Then that accursed listeriosis came along and my favourite comfort food disappeared.  Shortly thereafter, I found a new type of pepperoni called “landjagger sausages” and I decided to give them a go.  There were not quite as good as the other ones, but they were still enjoyably greasy and so made an adequate substitute.

So, you can imagine my joy when I was in the grocery store a couple of weeks back and I found that my favored brand of pepperoni was back on the shelf.  I bought some immediately.  When I got home I noticed that they looked a little bit different now.  Before the ends were cleanly cut off, whereas now they were pinched off.  It didn’t put me off at all because I was certain that it could not possibly affect the flavour.  Boy, was I ever wrong.  Just one bite was enough to tell that something was different.  For one thing they were definitely not as greasy; there was no oozing when I chewed them.  Beyond that I can’t put my finger on exactly what had changed, there was some alteration to the flavour that was just enough to be noticeable.  After eating the whole package (well I couldn’t just waste it, and pepperoni is still pepperoni) I think I figured out what had gone awry.  It’s kind of like when you order Chinese food, you have to ask for extra MSG because that’s where all the flavour is.  Apparently you have to add extra listeriosis to pepperoni sticks in order to make them really good.

Of course, if I’m in the office at The Redneck catching up on my paperwork sometimes I feel a need to burn off a few of the calories that I’ve been eating.  One way to do this is with deskercise. I’ll do curls with my coffee cup (usually three sets of fifteen reps with each arm), then I’ll press my laptop multiple times and naturally I’ll start and end with stretches.  When I’m at home, though, I usually stick to couchercise, it has a much lower impact.

March 10, 2009 | | Tags: , , , , | 37 Comments »

How Can Low-Carb Pasta Lead To Drug Rehab?

A little while back (when it was all the rage) I decided to jump on the Atkins band-wagon.  I have to say it was a pretty fun ride.  Eating all that special food that everyone was making especially for us.  The protein bars and shakes, the sucralose enriched chocolate cake, peanut-flavoured-soy-butter-spread.  Best of all was low-carb beer that all of the breweries were making in order to take advantage of all of us suckers health-conscious consumers.  I drank a heck of a lot of the Pale-Tail Ale from the Blue Beaver Brewing Company.  One of my favourite meals to make was cooked low-carb ground beef, low-carb roasted red pepper soup and low carb pasta all mixed together with a little low-carb salt and pepper.  Them’s good, low-carb, vittles.

Now of course the new band-wagon is to bash the whole Atkins thing.  Everyone says, “After I stopped doing Atkins and went back to eating what I was before I gained back all the weight that I lost.  So basically going that whole week without bread was pretty pointless.”  Now all the idiots health conscious consumers out there just take some “all natural” pills that will make your body burn fat.  So now you can eat all the crap you could possibly crave without any repercussions or exercise whatsoever.  Of course there are a few slight side effects; nausea, heartburn, indigestion, vomiting, diarrhea, convulsions, permanent out-of-body experience, but that’s okay ’cause I can eat potato chips and pizza for every single meal and still lose 90% of my overall body weight with these pills.

Just the other day I was on the subway and I got to talking with a guy named Jarod about diets.  Jarod from the subway was telling me he invented a diet where the only foods you consume are beer and celery.  I told him that I heard about that diet a long time ago from a regular patron at The Redneck by the name of Jordan.  Jarod claimed that his diet was completely different from Jordan’s because he was drinking Spoors Lite and taking a multi-vitamin every day.  We argued semantics for a while, but I could barely look him in the eye, I was so disgusted by his choice in beer.  After I turned my back we were able to have a more rational conversation about diet and overall health.  I told him that I had found a sure fire cure all.  It works on any virus, disease or parasite and even hypochondria and impotence.  Placebos are the new wonder drug for the 2000′s.  Side effects are pretty minimal as well.  They may or may not cause any or all of the following conditions; telepathy, telempathy, telephone calls, telemarketing tendencies, teleprompting, telemetry or they may have no effect at all.  Consult someone who plays a doctor on t.v. before taking placebos.  Women who do or do not want to get pregnant should not take placebos at any time before, during or after sexual relations.

Jarod from the subway said that he ended up in drug rehab when he was 21 because he had become addicted to placebos.  Then he enrolled in a one-step program; Step 1) Don’t ever take placebos again as long as you live.

January 24, 2009 | | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 22 Comments »