Big Fat Ostrich

Are you depressed? Well have a look at my frying pan and you’ll feel a little better. This is the last time I use this cheap frying pan, but I will say that it’s served me well over the years.

So what are we cooking today?

Well I had four small merguez sausages that had to be eaten today and I just didn’t want to just sit there slicing these wieners and dipping them in some nondescript sauce. I decided to experiment a bit and cook them in ouzo and try to wing out a homemade dijonnaise sauce on the fly. Why ouzo? Because we ran out of beer.

So here we go.

The Sausages: Use olive oil, slightly heated, then fry up the sausages until they’re golden.

The Ouzo: Once your sausages are golden, lower the heat to medium-low and pour in 2 cap fulls of ouzo. It’ll boil off pretty quick, and you’re going to be loving the sweet steam that rises up from the frying pan. Let it boil off while rotating your sausages. You can bounce them around the frying pan with the handle too, if you’d like.

The Homemade Dijonnaise: This was a total experiment, and wasn’t close at all to actual dijonnaise. Still, I got the consistency down, and it mostly worked:

2 tablespoons mayonnaise.
1 teaspoon of yellow mustard
1 teaspoon of olive oil
Season with ground pepper and oregano.

Go on. Laugh it up. Is it an insult to Dijonnaise? We don’t care, because it did the job. On its own, it might be better suited as a chip dip. But, when we put it all together, something magical happened!

Putting it all Together:  Warm up some pitas in the oven or the microwave. I went microwave this time so that the pitas would stay soft. Warming them up in the oven tends to make them crispy which kind of foils you when you try to wrap them.

Spread some of that chip-dip dijonnaise on your pitas, throw on some lettuce, dice a tomato, lay down your sausage, and wrap it up. Now shove it in your mouth and savor.

The Verdict: VERY flavourful. Remember when I said that something magical happened? Well, the creamy tang of the dijonnaise and the sweet aftertaste of the ouzo-merguez somehow came together to feel both heavy and light all at once. The dijonnaise became actual dijonnaise in the experience, making me forget what the actual ingredients were. I could not taste a hint of yellow mustard, which was how we want it.

Total prep and cooking time was about 20 minutes, which is pretty good on a tight schedule. I’ll be perfecting this one in the future.

Giving guitar lessons requires a lot of energy, so what better meal to prepare than our never before attempted BFO Taouks? Yeah, Dan wants me to give him some hot slide guitar tips and I cannot do that on an empty stomach. So let’s get started.

The Chicken
Look, if we could use ostrich, we would, but no one sells it around here. So chicken it was.

2 boneless chicken breasts (diced)
2 lemons

We used a wok, so pour in a few teaspoons of olive oil and heat it up on medium until the oil begins to smoke, just a bit. Toss in the chicken and stir fry until the chicken is sealed. Squeeze the lemons in and continue to cook until them chicken is golden. Cook ‘em how you like them, cause this part is a matter of taste.

Meanwhile at the tzatziki station…

Homemade Chunky Style Tzatziki
1 large cucumber
1.5 cups of Greek style yogurt
1 tablespoon of dill
1 clove of garlic

Slice your cucumber (not a euphemism) in half, and remove the seeds. Dice it fine and then squeeze out the excess water. I’ll be honest with you, we intended to cut the cucumber into finer pieces but I didn’t have the patience. Hence, the larger chunks of cuke. Hence “Chunky style”.

Throw the cucumber in a bowl, dump in the Greek style Yogurt, crush that clove of garlic in there, and mix in the dill. Mix it all up nice and good and what do you got? Chunky Style BFO Tzatziki.

Now warm up the oven, and throw your pitas in there. No one like cold pitas to wrap their food in, so do that now. You might also want to slice up some tomato and lettuce. We didn’t have onion, so we used some endives (not pictured because they fucking sucked)

There. The tzatziki was awesome, although the picture could be better. What do you expect from an iPhone 4…

Here’s a better pic:

Now let’s bring in the chicken

Now wrap it all together. Some people like to stuff their pita. I like to roll mine. Spread a healthy layer of tzatziki on your pita, then add the ingredients. Wrap it. Look at it. Take a picture of it. eat it.

Kitchen Pro Tip: Do not squeeze lemon over your pita. It fucks it up. Sure, I ate it, but it didn’t need more lemon.

Seriously, Dole. Baby Garden? BABY GARDEN??  You couldn’t come up with a better name?!

Are you guys for real?

Well, apparently BFO is a little offensive to some, so here’s a cheerful how-to video to take the edge off. Yeah, it’s about time we here at BFO put up some real good instructional videos, so why not start with one about Iced Tea.

I bought some Baby Spinach with mixed greens the other day, and no matter how hard I tried, I kept reading Baby Jesus Spinach on the container!

Oh, I just realized why. The package is bilingual and the word Jeune (Baby) is placed in such a way that it looks like it says Baby Jesus, if you squint your eyes just right.

Anyway, I was going to draw Baby Jesus Spinach for you, but it didn’t work out.

However, Adult Jesus Spinach came out pretty good, I think:

Look at all that pasta! Look how it tilts crazily towards you! It’s mesmerizing and that’s what happens when Dan, Mike, and a bunch of food ingredients hang out.

The plan was like last time: cook dinner, and come up with a new Bobbipins storyline. And you know what? I’ll save you the goddamn suspense and just say that the plan worked, ok? Three times in a row we get together with the idea of eating and brainstorming, and all three times we came away with gold.

So yeah, if you want your dinner to look just like that delicious, succulent bowl of pasta over there, this is what you gotta put into a saucepan on medium high:

a few teaspoons of olive oil
1 diced small onion and 2 cloves of crushed garlic (when these guys are golden brown, add the following)
1 red bell pepper
some mushrooms (sliced)
half a fresh tomato
pepper (use your intuition)
salt to taste

Now about the salt…well, I don’t have any! But under the pressure, Dan grabbed a handful of salted cashews and crushed them into the mix. It was a close call, but supper was saved!

So while all this was going on, there was a big pot of fusili pasta on the boil. It’s really boring to talk about, but it happened, ok?

Now that your mix of vegetables and onions and shit are nice and cooked, here’s the best part: stir a few heaping tablespoons of quality sundried tomato pesto. The one we used was called “pesto rosso“. Yeah really. If you can’t find that specifically, just use a quality pesto and you can’t go wrong.

And you know what? You just made a sundried tomato veggie sauce that’s ready to be mixed into your fusili, which is ready now if you timed it right! Did you time it right? DID YOU?

Now eat it. It’s delicious.

It’s summertime and time for salad!

But you know what? Your salad is nothing without a good dressing. Nothing! Which is why we’re here to tell you how to spruce up your bowl of greens and stuff with a kick-ass dressing that will make you wish you had never bought that crate of Renees Sweet and Sour Hog Sauce.

So let’s get started!

You’ll need:

Mayonnaise
Half a lemon (squeezed)
2 Garlic Cloves (finely chopped)
A handful of red seedless grapes (quartered)
3 pickled banana peppers (diced)
Ground Black Pepper (the more the better)
A touch of lemon zest (use the same lemon!)

Preparation:

Chop up the garlic cloves real fine like, and do the same thing to the pickled banana peppers. Diced, chopped, whatever. We’re not really sure what the difference is, so just make sure they’re fine and mushy. Then get a bowl and slog in a few healthy dollops of mayo and squeeze in the half lemon. mixing it all together with your favorite fork. You can mix in the peppers and the garlic too, and while you’re at it, chop up those grapes in quarters, or halves. Now mix it all together some more. Don’t stop! Keep mixing!

Now for the pepper.

You can use your own judgment and add a sprinkle, or a teaspoon. Or, you can be like us and open the pepper without looking and start shaking it generously into the bowl, only to realize after 2 seconds that the ‘big hole’ side of the pepper thing was open, effectively dousing the mix with ALOT of pepper. Too much pepper you say? You might say, but you’d also be wrong. The amount of pepper that poured out was actually ideal. Tangy, peppery, and just right once mixed into the salad. In fact, it was a perfect compliment to the arugula.

So yeah, this dressing was a total success. The grapes were like little forgotten pleasures of grapeness that popped up when we least expected it. The peppers added some zest and were not overpowering in the least. Overall, a good creamy tangy dressing to get you ready for summer!

Ok, I finished digesting that whole thing of blackberry yogurt that I ate. Seriously, man. When you set out to eat a whole 750 grams of yogurt in one sitting, be prepared for the consequences. It’s not like you can just go, “yeah, let’s eat the whole thing”, and then just walk away from the table without consequence.

It’s like playing poker. When you win a huge pot and take everyone’s money, do you just get up and say, “great game, guys! Same time next week?”, and then just stroll out to your Harley? Do you? Well, you could do that, but you better have a backup plan in case things turn ugly.

Well I played my cards right. This time. I went for a solid bike ride AND I went jogging beforehand. Yeah, that’s right. When you do that, your body will be hungry and will absorb all of that yogurty goodness.

But you can’t just go for a 10 minute run. Make it a good honest 20 minutes. And for the bike ride, do at least 30 minutes, with no less than 15 minutes riding uphill. Yeah, that yogurt will go right to your quads. Do those things and you too will be able to eat 750 grams of yogurt in one sitting.

However, if you do not exercise beforehand, you’re going to ruin that new pair of boxers with a lot of blackberry yogurt juice. And it’ll be more than 750 grams, if you know what I mean *wink*

So yeah! Join me next week when I try to eat 12 apricots in one sitting!