First off, I know you want lots of photos. Here you go.

Ingredients

• Slice of pig-head roll
• Sliced carrot
• bean sprouts
• Datu Puti vinegar
• Egg roll wrappers

Directions

• Thinly slice a bit of carrot.
• Get you a nice slice of pig-head roll. Trim off the fattiest outer section and cut this fairly thin.
• Place the sliced fatty bits into a wok and heat up so as to render the fat out. This is what you'll be frying in. If it looks like you need more, get more pig head roll.
• Dice up the remaining pig head roll and fry up in the oil. Splash (carefully, that is) in some Datu Puti cane vinegar to taste. Let that stuff fry up for a bit, but don't overdo it. Use a wire strainer to remove the cooked pig bits from the wok, and for now, remove the wok from heat.
• Assemble egg rolls using the fried pig, along with carrot and bean sprouts.
• Return the wok to the heat, and using the fat remaining in the wok, fry up some nice egg rolls. Should there not be sufficient fat in there for frying, supplement with sesame oil if necessary.
• Serve over rice, and provide a large bottle of that egg roll sauce, the "honey and hot chili pepper" stuff you get at restaurants.

The above is what I ate for dinner tonight. The texture of that pig head meat? Well, it's a mix of globby collagen fat, cracklin' fried fat, nice meaty pork, and more fat. Fat! If you've heard of a Chinese dish called Kau Yuk, you'll know what I'm talking about. It sounds disgusting, but eating a bunch of pig fat in various states of fattiness is an occasional treat, trust me. There is plenty of good pork meat in there, mind you, but yeah, it's fatty. Sort of a bacon egg roll.

I cooked up six of those egg rolls, and they were a feast. I'm trying to cut back after all the Christmas overindulgence, but this sure wasn't in the plan. This meal, basically consisting of fatty pig fried in pig fat, probably has enough calories to, well, you cram in an analogy. I'm tired at the moment. But oh it was good. So good. My wife picked up a bottle of that great "egg roll" dipping sauce at Red Apple, and the stuff is like this huge bottle for only $2.50. Well, I tanked probably a fourth of that bottle with the egg rolls. Had those egg rolls over hot jasmine rice, and man oh man, I pigged out. Pigged on pig head egg rolls. Afterwards, I was so carbo-overloaded, I crashed out on the couch for I think an hour. So good.

Ingredients

• One sous-vide pig snout
• One onion chopped
• Hoisin sauce

Directions

• Chop up that sous-vide pig snout into bite-sized pieces.
• Do the same with the onion.
• Get a wok nice and hot. Drop in the pig snout pieces. As they cook, they will release sufficient fat for frying.
• Add onions and continue cooking until onions are the way you like them.
• Hose the whole mess down with a generous amount of hoisin sauce and continue cooking until things look they way you like.
• Serve over rice.

Disclaimer: Do not try this on your own. If you want to cook sous-vide, you should get proper sous-vide equipment. Information here is purely for entertainment purposes only.

Here is porky, after spending 16 long hours in the oven. I used the sous-vide technique, but lacking the fancy French water circulator bath, I had to use the low-tech solution. Foodsaver bag. "Sous-vide" roughly translates to "Boil in the bag", just like the old Banquet TV Dinner Chicken-Ala-King (my favorite back in the day, by the way). I googled around looking for time and temp recommendations and decided 12 hours at at least 160° f. would do the trick.

I decided the best way to maintain this temp would be to fill my stainless steel stock pot full of hot water, and place the whole thing into the oven. I dropped an electric temperature probe into the water so I could get a precise reading. With our new oven, setting the temp was easy. The lowest the oven would go was 175° f., so at midnight I started it out there. Unfortunately, by 2:00 a.m., the water temp in the pot was a measly 122° f. I cranked the stove up to 350° f. until the water temp rose up to 170° f. At that point, I backed off the temp on the oven down to 175° f. and went to bed. The next morning all was well, with the water temp in the pot reading 179° f.

Since it took a while to get up to temp, I decided to let Porky have it all day, finally stopping the cooking at 4:00 p.m. the next day. Porky had undergone a 16-hour sous-vide. He's really taking it like a man, er, pig.

When I got the pot of the water, I drained it out and removed my tightly bundled roll o' pig. I undid the butcher's twine, and cut the bag open.

I guess I was expecting fanfare or something. Instead I got a whiff of some frankly unpleasant odor. I washed ol' Porky off really good, but a pig is a pig is a pig. Sous-vide pig doesn't translate into a wonderful aroma. You must admit, it looks a bit odd, too. The sous-vide process is sort of like poaching. No fried or baked look at all. You remember the first Star Trek movie? The scene where they show the guy who had the transporter accident? He looks a bit like that. Really strange. Had some of that nasty grey congealed blood & crud on parts, too, which I removed. The hot mass was placed into a glass bread pan and sealed up for some fridge time. First, though, I sliced off a section, which will take me to the next story. In a bit. I'm tired, so I'll talk more later.

And of course, you want pictures. Here are plenty of pictures.

This Thanksgiving, I figured on cooking up something besides a turkey. We'll be going over to our in-laws, so they will be doing the heavy lifting. I figured a pie was in order. What is more classic than pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving?

So, to Google I went, and to www.foodnetwork.com I did end; settling on something labeled The Ultimate Pumpkin Pie with Crunchy Cranberry Topping. This recipe is attributed to Tyler Lawrence. I should note, I'm not a big Tyler Lawrence fan. No particular reason, he's just not in my list of Food Network folks I like viewing.

Thanksgiving is less than a week away, so tonight I bake a test pie. Now, here is the funny thing. I started reading the directions listed there on the website, and notice it says add the pumpkin filling into the shell, then, well, you read this snip...

...Pour the mixture into the pie shell, and place on the bottom rack of the oven. Brush the pastry with the beaten egg white...

Huh? If I fill the shell with filling, where does that egg white go? I decide to read the "Comments & Reviews", and I see I'm not alone in questioning the directions. Other folks are not as kind. Some say the recipe is too bland, others decided to tweak it to suit their tastes. The best comment I read was to watch the video. I did, and that was good advice indeed. I think maybe the person who typed up the recipe never actually talked to Tyler Florence or any of his people. Well, enough grousing.

The pie, I did crank it out, following the video more than the recipe. It's the first time I've made a pie where it wasn't "Dump something into the pre-made shell and cook it." The crust came out pretty well, I thought. The pie filling tastes great; my change to the printed instructions was to use 1/2 cup of heavy cream instead of 1 cup. Tyler said 1/2 cup in the video, so that's what I went with. Anybody commenting on time of cooking said the listed time was too short, so I go with an hour. When I pulled that pie out at the end of an hour, the outer crust was too dark. I know next time to shield the outer crust in foil. The pie looked good, so while it cooled down, it was time to prepare the topping.

Ah, the topping. Did I say I went to two different grocery stores looking for amaretto cookies? I did. Got skunked. I ended up buying some Lorna Doone shortbread cookies as a substitute. I could not find frozen cranberries. No doubt folks bought 'em all up. I got canned cranberry sauce, the kind with whole cranberries in them. I rinsed them in a colander to get the jelly off of them. We don't have a real food processor, ours is this add-on one that goes on a mixer body. It's small and a bit hokey. I didn't know how to work it properly, and should have pulsed the cookies, berries, and pecans. Instead, I let it go full bore and it was this sort of gummy stuff with large cookies parts. I found the "pulse" feature, and finally got it more consistent. It would have been better if I redid it, but ahh, whatever. I tell you what, regardless of what the texture should be, I think you would agree that the topping is not particularly attractive. It does taste good, in fact, the pie really does taste great. I think the idea of a crumbly topping on pumpkin pie is a good one, but I don't think cranberry is the right thing. Perhaps a more traditional crumble topping would be best. Maybe next time I'll try that, and if it's good, I'll call it "Better than Tyler Lawrence's Ultimate Pumpkin Pie Pie".

I'm not sure there is a more bizarre looking soup. True, it looks like eating little hands. They got a lot of little bones, and you pretty much need to accept you'll be spitting out more bones than you get meat. But, I must say, this is pretty tasty. I don't have a particular recipe, but I'll write down how I made this particular batch.

Ingredients

• 1 pkg chicken feet, defrosted
• 1 red be1l pepper, diced
• 1 big ancho chili, diced. Keep some seeds, too
• 1 can diced tomatoes
• 1 parsnip, diced
• 1 bundle of radishes
• 1 bundle cilantro
• 8 cups water
• 3 cubes chicken stock
• 1 cube vegetable stock
• 1/2 cup red wine
• kosher salt
• black pepper
• hot sauce

Directions

Get out your package of chicken feet, and wash them thoroughly. I use a colander. Get the feet fairly dry and spray them in the colander with olive oil or well, just get some oil on them. Dust them with kosher salt and pepper. Fire up the broiler and lay the chicken feet out on a cookie sheet. Place them in the broiler and prepare to be shocked. In a few minutes, the feet will start to open up as if they were zombies. It's truly creepy. Anyhow, you want to get the feet browned. Oh, I should mention, chicken feet don't brown so much as they grey-black. The color is odd. Anyhow, you want to get a nice roast chicken smell going. You aren't trying to fully cook the feet, just get some color on the outside. Pull out the cookie sheet and set aside.

Fill up your Fagor Splendid 6-quart pressure cooker with 8 cups of water, and put it on burner on high. While the water is coming up to temperature, I'm guessing you have cubes of chicken stock and vegetable stock, the kind where you add 1 cube to 2 cups of water. So toss in 3 chicken cubes and 1 vegetable cube. Add in the chicken feet. Wash off the radishes, and cut them in half, Toss 'em in the pot. I bought this huge chili, it looked to be almost about 10 inches long. I think it's an ancho chili. Dice that guy up and toss it in. Put in some seeds too, to get some hot in the pot. In with the diced red pepper, too. Dice up a parsnip, but not too small. In the pot! Pour in the red wine. Open up a can of diced tomatoes and pour it in, juice and all. Did I say put in the parsnip yet? Anyhow, dice it up but not too much, and pitch it on in there. Pour on about oh, a couple tablespoons of hot sauce; I used Tapatio. Get a big bundle of cilantro, roughly chop it and toss it on the top. If I forgot any other ingredients, well, toss them all in.

Okay, by now, I'm sure the pot is boiling. Put on the lid of the pressure cooker (I use the term "pressure cooker" and "pot" for the same thing), and, well, I use the "2 burner" technique where the burner under the pot at the start is on all the way, and the other on about 1/3. Once the pressure cooker comes up to pressure, slide it over to the other burner, and let it roll for 17 minutes. At the end, use the cold water release method to release the pressure. Oh yeah, the cold water release method? That's where you move the pot to the sink, and pour cold water on the top until the pressure indicator drops down and it's safe to open.

So now you pretty much eat it up and gross out anybody who can't handle it. I suggest having a plate nearby for spitting out the 1,000 or so little bones that are in those feet. Enjoy.

Well, the vacation is over and now we're paying for it. Particularly when it comes to weight gain. To that end I decided to go along with my loving wife's Weight Watcher's plan. I dig out a WW cookbook, and go through it, tagging interesting recipes. I do not like fish, barely tolerate shrimp. But, my wife and daughter both like shrimp. I come across "Shrimp and Sausage Paella", and decide to give it a go.

Paella is basically a typical ethnic "rice cooked with whatever we got lying around the house today" dish. In this case, unlike say, jambalaya or arroz con pollo, the "What's available" adds up to "Bleh".

I wish I had a photo for you, the dish looked magazine cover beautiful when done. Ah, but how did it taste?

The recipe called for, amongst other things, a pound of shrimp, some saffron, and clam juice. The shrimp makes sense. The saffron? Price for a little sugar packet quantity (3/64 oz.) is $22! Fortunately I got it on sale, 40% off. Still, who would mess with that? The recipe uses a bit of it, but not too much. The taste of saffron is apparently extremely delicate and worth the expense. That delicate taste is utterly destroyed by the introduction of an 8 oz. bottle of clam juice into the mix. Clam juice. There is no more foul substance I've smelled short of some of the Asian fish brews. Clam juice should be used for practical jokes, not for eating. What is clam juice? It tastes like drinking a bucket of dingy sea water bilged up from the dockside where somebody was cleaning off a table after gutting some old fish. Ugh. Disgusting.

So, I inflicted this misery upon the family, with predictable results. When the torment was over, my loving wife read the recipe and noted the part I somehow missed, where it said that the clam juice could be replaced with chicken stock. Argh! I'd have used goat stock instead of clam juice! Yak stock, kangaroo stock, bat stock, cat stock. Nothing walking or flying on this earth could possibly boil down to taste worse than clam juice. I'll never be cooking "Shrimp and Sausage Paella" again, and if I do, it'll be renmaed "Jambalaya" or something.

Our trip to Hawaii in the summer has left me with a few pounds I have not been able to shake off. So to that end, I have agreed to follow Deanna's Weight Watchers plan. Before saying a tearful goodbye to my old ways, I had to go out with a bang. I decided it was going to be dim sum, a festival of fried goodness like no other.

Earlier in the week I did up some char siu pork steaks, and saved one for this purpose. I picked up some leup cheung (pronounced "lop chong"), green onion, and shrimp. Out came the big cleaver, and I minced all the stuff up into a nice filling, liberally adding in hoisin sauce, Chinese 5 spice, and a bit of sesame oil.. Some nice round gyoza wrappers and square wonton wrappers completed the ingredients list.

The square wrappers were used to make some nice fried wontons, generously stuffed, unlike the skimpy wontons which are often found in Anchorage. The round wrappers I used to make potstickers, which are certainly available locally in good quantity and quality, but I just like making them myself.

The potstickers, I cooked in a large pan by putting in a dab of sesame oil, frying 'em on both sides, then adding in chicken broth and putting on the lid for 10 minutes. The potstickers got that classic "crunchy but wet" texture, quite nice, if not a bit soggy. Next time I need to watch the pan closer.

The wontons came out fine, receiving a 5-minute bath in the deep fryer with the oil at 340 f.

Although I don't have a photo for 'em, I also fried up some banana, which I did by cutting up two not-quite-ripe bananas, and tossing them in a mix of instant pancake flour, Splenda, and cinnamon. Those also got the 5-minute deep fry.

I lost track of how many plates I had of this dim sum feast. I ate and ate, and ate. Oh, it was so good. So good. Now I have until Sunday before I resign myself to carefully measured portions of pseudo-food. I feel good going out with a bang, though. For sure.

Photos of malasadas

I don't care about Labor Day as a holiday, but today would prove to be a memorable one. Earlier in the week I received my order of two bags of malasada mix from Tex Drive In, located in sleepy little Honoka'a, Hawaii.

I decided to cook up one bag of malasada mix, which proved to be just right for a family breakfast. The instructions were easy enough, and we had a dough hook for our Kitchen-Aid mixer, so things turned out well. I was a bit concerned because the dough never did rise up much like one would expect, but upon cooking, the malasadas blossomed beautifully.

I was a bit concerned about the recommended frying temperature of 300°ree; f., thinking it too low. Turns out the temperature recommendation is right on. Too hot and it won't cook all the way through. I cleaned out the ol' deep fryer and put in fresh corn oil. The malasadas came out just perfect, I'd say.

We ended up with nine malasadas, cooking just 2 or 3 at a time, as this is all that would fit, and when frying one doesn't want to add in too much food at once.

Our daughter Rachel did like the malasadas very much, finding them to be quite like the ones at Tex Drive In, but of course the ones at Tex are impossible to beat. Justin never had a malasada before, but he's definately liking them now. My wife had one and liked it a lot. Me, well, I certainly had a great time making and eating them. I had mine with a cup of French Market coffee with some half-and-half in it, ooh, very tasty. I've seen that in New Orleans, one would get something just like this, coffee and beignets, at the actual French Market. Well, I'm not going there anytime soon, so coffee and Malasadas in Anchorage Alaska will have to do.

Someday I'll get back to see family in Hawaii and make another stop at Tex Drive In at Honoka'a. Until then, though, I can always make some more at home.

From a previous evening: "This is not low-carb. This is not low-sugar. This is the result of a food fantasy. I watched our son eat a chocolate Pop-Tart, a flavor I do not care for. What came in my head, however, is something I must try, I must. An unfulfilled dream if you will."

Well, a day later I decided to act on that fantasy. Behold, I give to you what is probably one of the most profound dessert treats you'll ever make. Very easy to make, and with an addictively indulgent goodness that will have you wanting to eat far more than you should. You could make this for guests, you could sell this out of an ice cream shop and charge big bucks. Have fun with it.

Pop-Tart Ice Cream Sandwich

Start with some Pop-Tarts and some vanilla ice cream. Note that Im using low-carb ice cream, which should neutralize those carbs in the Pop-Tarts. Either that or it won't. Also worth noting, I favor the Brown Sugar & Cinnamon flavor of Pop-Tart.

I start with a square of plastic cling wrap laid out on the counter. On this I place a Pop-Tart. Using a spatula, spread on a nice layer of ice cream. It helps if the ice cream is slightly soft, but not too soft. Note that you do not need to perfectly apply the ice cream, just get it down in a generally even layer. In this picture, the Pop-Tart is face-down. I have tested this both ways, and suggest instead you go with the Pop-Tart face-up. My loving wife was sure it would be best face-up, but it was my duty to try it both ways, you know. In the name of science. It was a sacrifice, especially having to eat both the face-down and face-up versions. We managed to get through it okay, though.

Place the remaining Pop-Tart on top, and wrap the plastic wrap tightly around to seal everything in. You can now gently press down on the top of the Pop-Tart with the palm of your hand to ever so slightly squish it down into the ice cream. It is now a simple task to smooth out the edges through the plastic wrap, giving you an attractive ice cream sandwich.

Place the sandwich in the freezer overnight. It is important that the sandwich refreeze. If the ice cream doesn't fully harden up, it squishes out while eating it or trying to cut it down into pieces.

Here is how the finished treat looks, very tasty, very good. Note that in this shot, you can see how it looks when cut. Cutting the sandwich into nice snack size pieces is easy when the treat is still cold from the freezer. Use caution when using knives, sharp objects, or eating vast quantities of Pop-Tart ice cream sandwiches.

The possibilities are endless! Take a look at how many flavors of Pop-Tarts there are, and how many flavors of ice cream there are. You get chocolate Pop-Tarts and you got a classic ice cream sandwich. Imagine using cherry Pop-Tarts with a nice French Vanilla. Mmmm. Oh, and using a nice nutty premium ice cream? Oh yeah, oh yeah. Blueberry Pop-Tarts with a cheesecake ice cream? Oooh. I'm gaining 10 pounds just imagining different combinations.

Enjoy, and if you come up with some good combinations, please do post them here, okay?