Yo bros and dogs. I am TOTES over recipes right now. So today I made this thing up. I’m calling it BLT orzo salad. Read on to learn more about how I’m unemployed and putting random foods together.

Guess what? Turns out you can make a pretty awesome pesto out of whatever green crap you have sitting around in your fridge. I happened to have some garlic scapes, fresh green garlic, and parsley sitting in our fridge from our farm box that arrives at our door every Wednesday. We have these items and subscribe this service because we walk a fine line between hipster and nouveau yuppie.

So I put all these green things in my Cuisinart (which I just finally cleaned for the first time in maybe a year, and I had to use a toothbrush which was really gross because I found the toothbrush under the sink next to some gross rags and cat food), with a handful of slivered almonds, some salt, and some olive oil, and KABLAM I have a nice pesto. I am kind of not into putting cheese into my pesto anymore. I think it’s too heavy and plus Dan hates cheese so whatever.

Then I boiled a package of orzo.

Then I thought. OMG. I could make this into a sort of BLT type thing with the bacon and random collection of tiny tomatoes we have. And then all that green stuff counts as the lettuce, and pasta is sort of like bread.

Then I chopped some tomatoes and so then I chopped up some bacon and then fried it and put it in the bowl blah blah this just got boring meow meow.

TIP: basically if you can’t figure out how to throw tomatoes and bacon into the other two things I mentioned, you should really just get out of the kitchen.

Check out my guide to getting a job blog though, because that’s not boring:

www.swimmingsheepdog.com

BYE!

Did you figure out that I’m on a little break-a-roo here? You did? Of course you did. I’m basically just posting here because I was invited to a Chicago food-blogger meet up this week and feel like I need to justify myself if I want to go. For the record: that’s me making fried gator nuggets.

I’m finishing up my Master’s Degree in word-assemblage right now, slapping a thesis together, looking for a real job. So, I’m mostly eating things I can shove into pitas, anything I can slather Nutella on (spoons work), a lot of Mandarin oranges, and this. The Dill Pickle Coop is my main source of sustenance right now. Go there. Yeah, it’s expensive, but shut up. Don’t go there to fill your whole pantry. Go there to get a lychee/wasabi elixir, some mandarins, and a dark chocolate quinoa candy bar.

In other news, I’ll be performing like a monkey in some readings this month, so if you’re sad that you can’t  see my words about food on the internet, you can see me talk them at:

Ray’s Tap on April 30th with awesome peeps like Jill Summers, Chris Bower, Tim Racine, Brian Nemtusak (who has a really scary facebook picture), and Mark Chrisler, who is a serious mega playwright in town that I have never met but expect to be BEST FRIENDS with by the end of the evening.

I’ll be reading at Quimby’s (1854 W. North Ave) on May 4th with local insane genius Zach Dodson (featherproof books) and music journalist/former Guided By Voices bassist James Greer, who is out promoting his book and OH MY GOD also currently working on a rock musical about Cleopatra starring Catherine Zeta-Jones. I’m almost guaranteed to throw up on the microphone.

AND finally,I’ll be reading at Quickie’s (Innertown Pub, 1935 W Thomas ) on May 11th at 8 pm with bad asses like Sara Levine, Matt Trupia, and Jonathan Messinger, all of which overshadow me with their greatness. This is the funnest monthly reading event of all time.

Hope to see you there!

Also, here is how you make gator nuggets:

Stop by the side of the road on State Road 54 in Pasco County Florida, and pick up a couple pounds of tail.

Cut it into nugget-ish pieces.

Let it soak in buttermilk for a bunch of hours. I did it for 5. But 2 minimum.

Boil some oil

Cover your gator nuggets in salt, pepper, cayenne, and then dredge those puppies through some flour, throw them in the oil, and let them crisp and firm.

Serve with Frank’s Red Hot, or comparable hot sauce. Ranch would be good too, but I was too lazy to make that from scratch.

Now you can gross out your friends and impress a bunch of rednecks!

Here’s the recipe , if you want to see how to assemble a soggy, unbready train wreck.

The best feature of this alleged flatbread was the crunchy, oily crust. Beyond that: barf. The center was a bland, wet, uncooked mess. So if you like to eat water mixed with salt and chickpea flour, do I have the food item for you!

My taste testing of three different pickled apples is over, and there is a winner. Hey, isn’t that jar of pickled apples up there beautiful? It really is. Guess what. It tasted like a douche. Not that I’ve ever had a douche, in my mouth or otherwise. I promise. Though douches do sorta look like juice boxes.

BIGGEST LOSER: That beautiful jar of cranberry colored apples was Martha’s recipe. The first time she’s ever let me down. Let me tell you what I’ve learned: never use any vinegar other than apple cider vinegar to pickle your apples, probably any fruit you want to pickle should use ACV, though I can’t say for sure. Maybe I’ll pickle pears next. Another thing I’ve learned: I’m really tired of star anise. It kind of tastes like this hippy soap I use, not that I’ve ever put it in my mouth, even when I’m self-punishing from cursing all the time, which I do, but am trying not to.

When I opened the jar, the smell made my nose burn. I didn’t try the cranberries in the pickle because I could already imagine how terrible they tasted. This recipe also called for the apple peel to stay on, which I think I remember they did at The Publican, but I don’t really remember. Regardless, gross.

THE PREVIOUS WINNER: This was the first batch I made, still a little vinegary, knowing what I know now about apple cider vinegar. They’re the ones with the star anise in them, a taste that is totally 2009. This is 2010. The year of HONEY.

THE TOTAL WINNERINGEST WINNER OF ALL TIME: Evoo chef and owner Peter McCarthy’s honey ginger pickled apples. They were sweet and tangy and, even though I used half the amount of honey that the recipe called for, tasted of honey. The ginger flavor was not overwhelming. Delicious. I served them with ice cream the other night and a oven-baked walnut crumble topping and, though my guests seemed a little ambivalent about it, I enjoyed it. I think maybe my friends are tired of me pickling things.

The other thing I learned from the EVOO recipe is that you should let your pickled apples sit for at least 2 weeks. Nobody else mentioned that. Not even Martha.

They aren’t the most appealing looking apples, but I think I used some lame-o apples that were on their proverbial “way out.”

P.S. Martha, it’s ok. Pickled apples are weird and I forgive your website for not steering me in the right direction. You have been so good to me in the past, that I will gladly erase the idea of those pickled apples from my brain. But not from the internet.

This recipe turns your butternut squash into a sort of pesto, sort of, sort of. At first I thought it was weird, but mostly it was weird because it was my first attempt at making pasta with my NEW PASTA MAKER. That’s right. I got one for Christmas, and my first attempt was NOT stellar. I made the pasta too thin, cooked it a little too long, forgetting that pasta continues to cook after you strain it duh.

I’m going to attempt to make another batch of pasta tonight. I’m sure it will fare much better.

I got the recipe for this pasta from Epicurious. It was a little labor intensive, but I had a pal helping me to put it all together, so, even though it took about an hour to throw together, it could have taken longer. And really, it was fun to cook with a friend. People should do that more often. Especially when you have to peel a butternut squash, which nobody wants to do. That is something you can pass on to a friend.

Here’s the recipe. The only departure from the recipe that I made was to fry some sage leaves in a little olive oil before I made the butternut sauce, just for color and so the pasta didn’t look like a little pile of bland barf. Also I had a ton of sage left over.

I ate a lot of things since I last posted, including, but not limited to:

waffle house cheese eggs and raisin toast
a chikfila standard sammich with waffle fries and Peloponnesian sauce (not really, it’s Polynesian sauce, but funnier to ask for the war sauce)
my mom’s collard green soup
my mom’s spanish bean soup
Publix fried chicken
my uncle’s pork tenderloin with a peach-horseradish glaze
and
pickled black eyed peas.

To catch up on these things might be impossible.

So for now, I’m going to tell you about a collard green and black eyed pea soup I made. It was amazing. It is currently amazing, because I am eating the leftovers RIGHT NOW OMG LIVE BLOG.

Now, I love my dutch oven. On Martha not that long ago, some hollywood person was all, “I don’t know what a dutch oven is,” and I turned to the hubs and said, “What a loser.” And then he said, “There was a point in time when you didn’t know about dutch ovens.” And then I felt like a judgemental A-hole.

So into the dutch oven I put some bacon fat from morning’s breakfast- you could of course use butter and a little olive oil. I tossed in a diced small onion, diced carrot, diced celery and then sauteed for a while, until they were softish.

After a while, I added the bayleaf and tossed that around in there like a small kid vs. a big kid in one of those inflatable fun jumpers. Ah, sweet fragrance.

Then I added four cups of chicken stock.

I forgot to tell you about the black eyed peas. They were dry, so I quickly softened them by bringing them to a boil and then letting them sit for an hour on the counter. You can use canned ones. So after the chicken stock, I added those puppies to the soup, let that cook for about 20 minutes, until they were soft, took out about two cups of the goods, blended them with my immersion blender, threw that back in, and then threw in a sprig of thyme, and the greens and let them cook until the stalk parts of the greens were tender.

This is the best soup I have cooked all winter. I will make this again and again. It’s based on a bland epicurious recipe that did not call for any herbs or carrots or celery. You could throw some ham in if you wanted to or a smoked ham hock, but I didn’t have any around, hence the bacon fat. Mmmm… bacon.

Keep an eye out for more of my catching up posts. I promise I’m back in the swing again.

Did you know you can pickle apples? Well, I went to The Publican a couple weeks ago and had pickled apples with MUSTARD ice cream and it blew my mind, so I tried to replicate at least the apple part over here in Santa’s workshop. The texture is crazy: soft like an apple in an apple pie on the outside, but crispy like a fresh apple on the inside. It’s sweet and sour and it makes my face all twisty.

It’s so easy to pickle things. I want to pickle everything now: cukes, beets, rainbows, kittens, you know the drill. I got the recipe from the Boston Globe and mixed it up with a recipe I saw somewhere else that called for apple cider vinegar instead, so I used that. Next time I might not put the star anise in the pickling jar because the taste is pretty assertive. Kind of like the Jehovah’s witnesses in our neighborhood, but man, someone showed them when they spray painted CULT on the front of their building, am I right?

I think next time I will make spicy pickled apples. Whatever it is, I will definitely be making pickled apples again.

Serve them on a little puff pastry square with some vanilla ice cream and BAM you have a great little dessert, don’t you? Impress your friends. I plan to on Christmas.

And now, an interview with my husband, who is totally obsessed with pork, but also obsessed with finding ways to bring all forms of pork together in one fatty dish. I bring you: the hard-hitting rillettes interview. Brace yourself.

Me: How did you first come to know rillettes?

Hubs: The Anthony Bourdain cookbook.

Me: That’s it?

Hub: I guess. You can embelish.

Me: What made you want to make them?

Hubs: Well I love pork and I love fat. I figured it would be like pate but better.

Me: Do you like pate?

Hubs: It’s ok. I’m not a huge liver fan.

Me: You’re not very interesting to interview.

Hubs: Well I told you you can embelish.

Me: Tell me about the process. What do you look for in a meat?

Hubs: A fatty piece of shoulder. The first time I used pork belly. The first two times. This time just pork shoulder and smoked slab bacon.

Me: Where did this recipe come from?

Hubs: The Pork and Sons cookbook.

Me: Do you think it’s better than the Bourdain one?

Hubs: I think so. You liked the Anthony Bourdain better. Last time I made it I think it had sherry in it. This time I used a white wine, but I didn’t like the batch I made with the sherry very much. Sherry or port.

Me: Tell me how you made it.

Hubs: I diced 2.5 lbs of fatty pork shoulder and half a pound of smoked slab bacon and seasoned them with salt and then put them into the crockpot and simultaneously melted down 12 oz of pork fat. Then poured that into the pork in the crock pot threw in a branch from a rosemary bush and 2.5 cups of white wine and then set it for 8 hours. When it was done, I took a fork and a potato masher and shredded everything, put the meat into the containers and ladeled the fat over the meat so it created a hard protective layer when it cooled.

Me: Why did you make so much of it?

Hubs: To give away for Christmas. Everyone likes pork spread. I’m going to have some now, in fact.

Me: What would you recommend drinking with your rillettes?

Hubs: A good IPA.

Me: What should you listen to while eating rillettes?

Hubs: Beirut seems like a nice soundtrack. Animal collective.

Me: What do you put your rillettes on?

Hubs: crusty french bread. A good baguette. I wouldn’t put it on anything else. The Publican serves a rillettes sandwich. I imagine it would be good with arugala. I’ve seen it with a cornichon on it. Supposedly the salty briny taste of the cornichon cuts the fat well.

Me: We have 6.5 containers left.

Hubs: I”ll give away 3 or 4 of them.

Me: Good. What’s your favorite part of making rillettes?

Hubs: Taking rillettes that are slightly warmer than room temp and spreading it over warm bread and watching the fat melt just a little bit. That’s my favorite part.

Next up: Duck rillettes.

Note: Rillettes keep for up to 5 months in an airtight container in your fridge. That way you can spread out the tastiness over a series of months.

Everyone else is doing their gift guides, so I might as well put my two cents in. And by “two cents” I mean that I am cheap frugal so I made all my gifts this year. Many bloggers suggest you buy interesting presents from interesting websites. Martha endorses homemade presents, and hell, so do I. Martha also says that industry is the enemy of melancholy, well, actually William F. Buckley said that, but I’m not going to go that far. Because I’m still melancholy on account of the weather, even though Santa’s workshop is in full sweatshop mode.

So here we go. If you are making presents, refer to my pumpkin bread recipe. Those make good presents.

Also, I made body scrubs. You have to be an idiot to screw them up, so don’t attempt to make this present unless you are ready to take the idiot test. I made one scrub that is rosemary oil, olive oil, and epsom salt. Then I made another out of this gross tasting  but good smelling trader joe’s coffee, sugar, cocoa butter, and olive oil. It’s good for when your hands smell like a dirty sponge and you want them to smell like cupcakes instead. Or you can use it all over your body if you don’t mind smelling like a giant cupcake or barrista. There really aren’t  any recipes here, just add stuff until you’re happy with the consistency. I have a lot of used glass jars, so I put the mix in there.

I also made marshmallows, which made me feel like a scientist AND alchemist at the same time. They were so fun and stressful to make, when they turned out the next day I was so excited that I wound up playing a one man game of chubby bunny (which kills exactly one christian youth group member every four years). Guess what? I won! I got the recipe from Martha (over here). My suggestions: use a bigger pan so you can get smaller marshmallows, glaze your knife with vegetable spray, and don’t use food coloring. Or at least use high quality fancy food coloring, because the target brand prevents the top layer of the marshmallows from setting. There you go.

I also made my go-to cookies and gave those to people in used glass jars too.

If you want to BUY things for people who like kitchen things, lots of bloggers suggest you spend like 80 dollars on a pair of salt and pepper shakers. Some people tell you to get weird food items like bacon flavored potato chips or bacon chocolate or bacon slippers or bacon face cream. I’m going to tell you something else: go to the thrift store, sift through the hilarious collection of old cookbooks, choose some for a friend, and give the gift.