Anger Burger

I’m not sure if it’s a Lilliputian fantasy or a giant fantasy, but I think I’m most pleased when there is a multitude of tiny dishes to eat from.  Of course, whomever is washing dishes that night is shit out of luck, but thems the breaks, MIKE.

1. Leftover fried chicken. I have a confession to make: I don’t really care for leftover fried chicken.  I think the soft breading is vaguely unpleasant, and the flesh too firm.  So: I didn’t eat this.
2. Mike’s rice. Topped with a little shiso, a side of dried seaweed shreds and a single rehydrated seaweed piece that he picked out of his miso soup.
3. Fucked-up tamagoyaki. Tamagoyaki is basically an omelete with some nice flavoring (soy, a pinch of sugar, etc.), which you cook by making sheets of moist egg in a pan and rolling it (and adding more sheets) until you form a sort of evenly-cooked egg cake.  Here’s a lovely one. Mine?  Not so lovely.  But it tasted good.  And I suppose mine is technically “dashimaki” but I like the word “tamagoyaki” better.
4. Saba mackerel! In Japan, mackerel is commonly served two ways: “grilled” or pickled.  The grilled is often very salty, oily and delightful with rice and beer.  The pickled is served as sushi.  Since mackerel must be very fresh in order to safely eat raw, the pickling of it as sushi became common long ago.  It has a light vinegary tang to it, which is actually a nice flavor since mackerel is a very rich, oily fish.  I bought a slab of pre-pickled mackerel at the Asian market and served with pieces of shiso leaf, which is also traditional — the shiso is so fresh and herbal, it makes the whole thing a perfectly balanced bite.  I could eat pounds of this, but I don’t want to ruin how special it is for me.
5. Chinese sausages (lap cheung). Very greasy, salty and sweet, these are bought in packs like hotdogs and are sort of shriveled and dry, but you throw them into the rice as it cooks and they get plump and hot, and you slice them up at eat them along with your rice.  Very good.  Probably terrible for you.
6. Pickled radishes. A simple pickle: 1 cup of vinegar, 1 cup of water and a ½ cup of sugar are heated until the sugar is dissolved and then poured over a few bunches of red radishes cleaned and cut into whatever shape you want.  Let sit for a few days, and they turn from red and white to PINK and PINK.  They are lightly flavored, crunchy and addictive.  And cheap!
7. Juice. I think… something like “Mango Sunset” or something from Trader Joe’s, a mix of mango and orange juice, but diluted with water.  It’s pretty tasty.
8. Squid jerky. The squid is storebought, dried and shredded strips that I then cook with some Thai sweet-chili sauce, a splash of soy sauce and sesame oil until the liquid has all absorbed into the squid.  I fucking love this stuff.
9. Miso soup. From miso paste, with some dried seaweed nicely rehydrated.
10. My rice. With lots and lots of chopped shiso leaf and dried seaweed shreds.  I’m a condiment whore.

HISTORY IS BEING MADE!  We have a new writer on hand here at Anger Burger: Internet, I present to you: AARON,  General Harbinger of Greatness.  Please welcome him as you have so lovingly welcomed me.  I hope — as I am certain you will — that he has many more meals to share with us. Love, Sunday

Remember when you were a kid and before school you would hide the leftover meatloaf so that when you got home you could indulge in that joy of joys the Meatloaf Sandwich? Me too. The cold meatloaf sandwich is just about the best thing ever.

And yet. And yet I don’t think I’ve had homemade meatloaf since I moved out of my parents house. I have this vague memory of maybe making it once several years ago, but I’m not certain. So of course the more I thought about it the more I knew that I had to have it. But here’s the problem: My household is vegetarian. The Wife is and I am… under protest.

Late last year I had a physical and found out that my cholesterol was at a dangerously high level. I was under the impression that I was healthy and virile and hardy and vigorous. So be warned, the cold hand of death is on your shoulder. (I assume.)

Anyhoo, the vegetarian lifestyle for three months dropped my cholesterol by 30 points. So we’re sticking with it. But that means no meatloaf.  I know there are vegetarian ground beef substitutes out there, but lets face it, they don’t taste like ground beef. They don’t even come close. Despair.

Until, that is, the British arrived on the scene with their amazing fungus meat. I speak of a product named Quorn, and I can honestly say without exaggeration that Quorn has changed my life. It’s a meat substitute that actually tastes and feels like meat. It’s fantastic and it has allowed me to make my dreams a reality. I can make meatloaf. And not just a passable meatloaf. Not even a good meatloaf, but a really fucking fantastic delicious meatloaf. We ate this with wilted spinach with garlic and sesame.

So I called my Ma and got her recipie. Which as it turns out was a slightly modified Joy of Cooking recipe. So here it is meatloaf adapted from my Ma, adapted from The Joy of Cooking.

The great thing about this recipe is that you don’t have to go in order. Just add the ingredients into a bowl and mix.

• 1 lb Quorn Grounds (you could sub actual ground beef here if you wanted. Be crazy)
• Fat¹
• Cilantro, chopped
• ½ small onion, finely grated
• 1 small white potato, coarsely grated
• 1 egg
• 2 cloves garlic, pressed
• 1 T bread crumbs
• lemon juice, salt, pepper
• tomato sauce and ketchup

Mix everything except the tomato sauce and ketchup in a large enough bowl.
Grease your loaf pan (or whatever you’re baking in)
Dump the mix into said greased pan, and form into loaf.
Top with a mix of 2 parts tomato sauce and 1 part ketchup, being sure to coat the sides.
Bake at 350 for 45 minutes

EAT!

ENJOY!

SWOON!

¹The only drawback to Quorn is that it cooks up kinda dry. So to use it in recipes you have to add some fat. I usually use olive oil, but in this case I used coconut oil because at room temperature coconut oil is a solid. I was thinking ahead to a cold meatloaf sandwich and I wanted to be sure it would stay together.²

²It did. And it was the best.

Our Sponsor.

Our first sponsor here at Anger Burger sent along a message that my partner Mike and I were to eat anywhere we wanted on his dime, provided that:

A) It is under $50

B) I must write about the experience on Anger Burger

After narrowing a list down to four choices, I realized that only fear of being a tourist held me back from immediately high-tailing it over to Roscoe’s.  Famous most famously for being where Snoop Dog took Larry King¹ who then split after eating precisely one bite of chicken and 1/8th of a waffle.  Whaaat?  I don’t care if King’s cardiologist was sitting right next to him, no human alive can eat only a single bite of fried chicken.  That shit ain’t right.

If you don’t already know, Mike and I recently lived in Cincinnati for about 18 months.  Upon being seated at Roscoe’s we both looked around and in confusion I said, “This is more like Cincinnati than Cincinnati was.”  It’s a moderately run-down but well-used old diner, dark and sticky, but doing cracker-jack business at 2 in the afternoon on a Tuesday.  The menu is short and sweet: chicken, mostly; waffles, secondly; soul food, third.  Most people, by my observation, ordered chicken.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’d read about Roscoe’s drink concoctions, but had forgotten until we arrived and I saw these plastic tumblers of nuclear waste being shuttled to other tables with quartz-regularity.  There is the Sun Rise (OJ and lemonade), the Sunset (fruit punch and lemonade) and the Eclipse (OJ, fruit punch and lemonade).  Oh, and the Lisa’s Delight, which is an Arnold Palmer to everyone else in L.A., but just one further indication that perhaps Roscoe’s isn’t in L.A. at all.

I of course had to have a Sunset: this thing tastes like a liquid Jolly Rancher.  I nursed the cup over the entire meal, eventually feeling quite ill (more on that later) no doubt in large part due to the 16 oz. of pure high-fructose corn syrup I’d downed.  Dang! The worst part is that I couldn’t stop. It was like each drink brought me closer to being actually hydrated, and yet, as the burn of sugar faded from my throat, I’d be that much further away.  I imagine this is what it is like to be dying of dehydration while floating on the open ocean, eventually sneaking mouthfuls of seawater to quench yourself even though you know its going to kill you.

Meanwhile, I ordered a #2 on the menu: ¼ a chicken “smothered in gravy & onions,” and 2 waffles.  Mike had a #1: the same thing, minus the gravy.

I feel the need to address what is certain to be the question arising at this point: why chicken and waffles?  On a practical level, I don’t know what the answer is — the guy that started the whole thing is from Harlem, and perhaps those folks know better than I do.  But on a visceral level, you must understand that these are delicious together.  Bites of peppery, salty, greasy chicken followed by sweet waffle? C’mon!  It’s like bacon and pancakes.

I didn’t get a shot of my gravy-chicken because I thought Mike got it in this shot.  Whoops.

I had also read a review that the Roscoe’s waffles were “as bad” as Waffle House waffles.  Now, Waffle House waffles shouldn’t even qualify as breakfast food — they are nothing  less than vanilla cake batter poured into a waffle iron.  Light and crispy, each waffle is the equivalent of eating a cupcake.  And that’s before you put the syrup on.  And we love them.  Roscoe’s', on the other hand, are a strange beast.  They were a lot denser than they appeared to be, and in fact were borderline doughy. Despite this unexpected heartiness, they were excellent specimens, complexly flavored and able to hold their own even when topped with pieces of fried chicken and gravy.

The aftermath.

And a word on the “gravy & onions” touted in the menu: it should maybe just read “onion gravy.”  I was expecting a heap of individual, soft fried onions along with some gravy.  Nope.  Just a well-flavored, greyish, peppery gravy that they ladle over hot friend chicken.  It was delightful, even if a royal pain in the fucking ass to eat without it all over yourself.

By the time we left we agreed that we’d ordered way, way too much food.  A single piece of chicken and a single waffle would have been sufficient (#18 on the menu), but these things never reveal themselves until too late.  And we paid for it.  Both of us were unable to eat anything else for the rest of the entire day (for reals) and I woke at 4am with the most incredible, epic indigestion I’ve ever had.  It was a rough night.  But?  I’d do it again.  I probably will do it again.  And soon.

¹This is not the Roscoe’s location we went to.  Sorry.  This is actually the exact location we went to — skip ahead to 4:30 on the video.

My mom, Starr¹, gave me a mission: find a commercial brand of madeleine called “Donsuemor” and report back.

I wandered the aisles of Whole Foods for several minutes before a wayward glance toward the cafe landed on the brown plastic wrapper of the Donsuemor madelines, at which point I began laughing.  Turns out I’ve seen them before and remember seeing them before because their motto is “The One You Remember”.

I have to admit I wasn’t expecting much; in the package, the cookies felt hard and dense, quite unlike the madeleines I make at home.  In fact, I rather reluctantly called her back to tell her I found them.  She sounded so excited when she commanded me to search them out!  I put it off by telling her I wanted to eat them with my tea later, and thus procrastination achieved.

I fired up the kettle and set about making a cup of tea in my favorite Fire King teacup in an attempt to influence my tastebuds.  I grimly sat down to my doomed morning cuppa and with great weariness, dipped the madeleine into my tea.

So, of course it was totally tasty.

Donsuemor madeleines are dense, yes, but they have a clean, rich, poundcakey flavor that I gobbled down before realizing I should have taken another photo.  Too late, down the piehole.  And considering how rarely I feel like baking up a batch of 40+ madeleines — half of which go stale before I can eat them all — I’ll gladly accept ‘dense’ as being the worst adjective I can think of.

¹In light of this post being about tea and cookies and my mother, I didn’t drop a single f-bomb!

I think Non-Cookers are so awed by us Cookers in that they truly believe that we memorize and follow some kind of elaborate instructions.   Am I letting the secret out when I say that we aren’t?  Maybe some of you are.  At least, generally the first two or three times I make a recipe I follow it pretty closely, but even then I’ll skip certain ingredients and automatically — mindlessly, really — reach for others.  And then its a damn free-for-all.

A perfect example of this is spaghetti carbonara.  It’s one of those meals any college student worth their loans should learn, being reasonably cheap, easy, and suitably impressive after a long night of early-relationship fucking¹.

The concept of carbonara is very basic: fry some bacon, throw some cooked pasta in it, and off the heat stir in eggs and cheese and let the residual heat of the pasta turn the egg and cheese into a rich, creamy sauce.  Like chocolate chip cookies, the variations thereafter are endless and personal.  My version includes whole eggs, mostly because I don’t see the point of wasting the whites and also?  Even if the pan is too hot and the whites harden?  It’s still awesome.  Sort of like egg-drop soup, but as pasta.  I also don’t like cream sauces a hell of a lot, but for some reason I like carbonara – it might also be because I add lemon zest and juice along with the vermouth.

Its also a meal that feels pretty good to make.  I don’t know what it is about tossing pasta in a frying pan with a pair of tongs, but when I’m sleepy and hungry and sort of worn out with the whole world, as I was tonight, it becomes a focal point for my brain to calm the fuck down.   It is completely different from and yet not totally unlike approaching a campfire with a hotdog.  This is food, and you’re cooking it.  It’s practically a Neanderthal act.

And it shouldn’t take a genius to figure out that this shit tastes good when you’ve been drinking.  I tried to think of a vegetarian alternative, but I’m afraid I can’t offer one: the bacon and the pork fat seem crucial.  Hopefully when science starts offering vat-grown pig, you vegetarians will be able to share in the miracle.

Carbonara, Give or Take
serves two-ish

1/2 lb. thin spaghetti noodles
1/2 package bacon
2 whole eggs
1/4 C. parmesan cheese
1/4 C. half-n-half or milk
1/3 C. dry vermouth (white wine is fine, too)
an obscene amount of pepper
zest of one small lemon
juice of said small lemon
handful of fresh parsley

• Start a pot of water to boil for the pasta.

• Meanwhile, chop the bacon into smaller pieces and fry up until almost crispy.  Pour off most but not all of the fat and return to the heat.  Add the vermouth and allow it to cook down until it’s pretty much gone.  Turn off the heat.

• Since your water is probably boiling now, add the pasta and start cooking it according to the package.

• While the pasta is cooking, in a small bowl mix the eggs, cheese, cream/milk, pepper, lemon zest, and lemon juice.  Stir vigorously with a fork and set aside.

• The pasta is probably not yet cooked, so pluck off a bunch of parsley leaves and chop it up.

• When the pasta is done, turn the heat off  and then return the bacon to the heat.  I know, you’ll never get this right when you’re drunk, so practice now while you’re sober.  Anyway, with tongs or a pasta spoon, transfer all the pasta to the bacony-frying-pan.  It’ll sizzle a little.   Pour a slosh of the pasta water over it to help the sauce form in a minute.

• Remove the pan from the heat again and stir in the egg-and-cheese mix you made, making sure to actively stir it.  Keep it moving, and it will turn creamy and smooth.  Add the chopped parsley and then taste; even though there is salty bacon and cheese in the pasta, it will very likely need more salt.  It can handle a lot.  Taste, add a pinch, then taste again.  Repeat as needed.

¹That just reminded me of a gross article I read where Katie Holmes bragged that Tom Cruise had wooed her in part by whipping up some amazing carbonara without a recipe:  “He knows exactly how to do it. A pinch of this, a pinch of that. He has a recipe, but he also kind of improvises by himself. You have to do the egg at a certain time.” BLERG.  Gag.  Because you know what she’s talking about.  Also — carbonara isn’t hard.  “You have to do the egg at a certain time”?  It’s like bragging that he knows how to press the toaster button on the toaster right before the bread gets toasted.