Superbowl Sunday Food: Jalapeno Popper Mac and Cheese

Once you start showing off what you’ve managed to learn to make in the kitchen (say, on a blog for example), you have to take a certain level of responsiblity when friends and family start making certain food assumptions about what you’ll prepare for them when you invite them over. I became accutely aware of that fact earlier this week when my friend Travis asked what I was going to be serving at my weekly LOST viewing party and dinner:

Travis: “What are you making tonight, Gary?”
Me: “I’m making this amazing jalapeno popper mac and cheese.”
Travis:  “Cool… what else?”
Me:  “What do you mean what else?”
Travis:  “I mean… what else are you making to go with it?  And what, no dessert?”

I guess my days of gliding by with spaghetti and meatballs served on plastic plates I stole from my college dining commons are over, but I’ll happily leave that era in my past. MG often reminds me of my typical day’s food rundown from our first year or so of dating. I don’t recall, but apparently I lived exclusively on Hot Pockets, McDonalds and Tombstone frozen pizzas. I’m guessing MG is happy I’ve left those days behind as well.

On to the mad mac and cheese recipe I found over at Let’s Cook.

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Superbowl Sunday Food: Three (or Four) Cheese Mac and Cheese with Herbs

There’s some serious cheese going on here, folks.  You need to be warned… I mean truly warned.  Take a good look at the photo below and ask yourself, “Do I have the fortitude to take on this recipe?”  All of the cheese in the photo below was grated  and melted into a mere 12 ounces of penne rigate to create the finished product.  You’ve been told.

And it doesn’t stop there.  There’s also butter!  There’s also bacon!  There’s also the fat from the bacon! There’s also white flour.  There’s also fresh sage, parsley, oregano and rosemary.  Some of that counts as vegetables, right?

Am I leaving anything out.  Oh yeah!  I accidentally doubled the amount of butter required by the recipe.  Oops!  I swear, it was unintentional.  And guess what, it totally didn’t ruin the meal!  Who’d have thought it?

I started preparing this at about 8:00 in the evening.  I started eating it at about 9.  By about 10, I was speaking in tongues and levitating three feet off the floor

The recipe can be found at StephenCooks.com, so send your thank you cards and/or the pants you are about to no longer be able to fit into his direction, not mine.  I didn’t come up with this.  I merely used it on a lonely Wednesday night to fill a hole in my heart.  Cheese is really the best way to overcome such things, don’t you think?

So take a read below for how to get ‘er done, and then head to the store for the ingredients you’re missing, because if you have this much cheese just sitting around your house already, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be spending your time reading blog posts.

Recipe for Super Bowl Style Mac and Cheese

Superbowl Sunday Food: Zesty Italian BBQ Meatballs

Sticking around all afternoon while the aroma of phenomenally good Italian Barbeque Meatballs slowly creeps its way through your apartment in an invisible flavor fog is utter self-torture.

Damn good meatballs though.

The potatoes were a last-minute addition.  I discovered I had one russet in my cabinet, so I diced it up, coated it with olive oil and a little dry onion soup mix and baked covered at 350 for about 45 minutes.  The tanginess provided a nice contrast to the hickory sweetness of the meatballs, and it wasn’t long before MG and I had everything on our plates mixed together in two giantic savory smokey food mountains.

And of course, you can’t serve a meal like this without a healthy slice of fresh French bread to cover the soppin’ duties at the end.  Barbecue-flavored butter!  There’s nothing better.

Recipe for Italian BBQ Meatballs

Superbowl Sunday Food: Baked Potato Skins

The King of Comfort Foods! Here’s how to make potato skins that put last year’s Super Bowl snacks to shame.

There’s a secret about how to make potato wedges no one ever tells you. Yes, cheese, sour cream, bacon and green onions don’t hurt, but the real secret to wham-bam, kick you in the face potato skins isn’t what you put in them… it’s what you put on them

Recipe for Super Bowl Potato Skins

Five Things I Learned From the Hollywood Arsonist OR “Cornmeal Thyme Cookies”

Don’t be fooled by the two ingredients in the name, these babies cook up with a sweet, buttery flavor and just a hint of cornbread goodness. This is the perfect cookie to ween you off the daily sugar showers you took through the month of December.

Last weekend, a crazed arsonist terrorized the streets of Hollywood, igniting over 50 fires all over town in the span of three nights, and causing over 2 million dollars in damage.

Here are five things I learned from the experience, followed by a recipe for cookies.

1.) I probably am not the person to contact in case of emergency, especially if I don’t know you.

MG called me at 4 in the morning last Saturday to tell me he’d woken to the sounds of his neighbors screaming “Fire!” He looked out his bedroom window and saw the carport of the apartment building next to him engulfed in flames.

“Okay, what do you want me to do?” I asked — not in a snotty way, but because I actually did not know what I was supposed to do!  Thankfully, he didn’t know what I was supposed to do either.  Then there was about five seconds of awkward silence, like when you run out of pieces for your new IKEA credenza but there’s still a page and a half of assembly instructions left to go.  Finally, I managed to come up with, “You need to get out of there!”  Boy, the Red Cross really needs to put me on the payroll, don’t they?  My split-second thinking would be an asset to any life-threatening crisis.  Did MG actually need to hear this from me?  Was he sitting there thinking, “Aw really?  I was planning to just go back to bed.  The fire is like twenty feet away, and if I can’t jump twenty feet, will a fire really be able to?”

Despite what the stickers on the elevator wall ask of me, I do not stay calm in a crisis.  When I first heard the phone ring, I immediately panicked, the way one does when they hear the words, “I think we should run additional tests,” or “Now we’re going to go around and all say something interesting about ourselves.”    Before I even picked up the phone I had the thought, “Please please please don’t be a number I recognize,” because at least then I’d be off the hook.  If someone I actually know is calling me in the middle of the night, it’s probably going to require a level of cool-headedness I’ve never had to muster before.  No one ever calls you in the middle of the night with good news.  Even if your sister went into the delivery room and instead of giving birth to one baby, as the doctor had predicted, she gave birth to nine babies and a Cuisinart hand blender, everyone knows you wait until sunrise to spread the good word and invite people to omelettes.

If someone I don’t know is calling me at 4 am, while it’s true they may be in the process of getting mugged, going down in a plane, or choking on a chicken bone, what’s also true is that thankfully, it’s not my problem.  That’s why you should always make sure you’re dialing a phone correctly, especially if it’s the middle of the night and your life is in jeopardy. Grandma may hop into her Yugo and speed over to your house with a pamphlet on the Heimlich Maneuver, but once I get my six pillows into their proper sleepy-time configuration, if you call me by mistake, you’re pretty much fucked.

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Chipotle Chicken and Apple Pizza

Pizza with apples is both surprisingly tasty and also a daring “rule breaker,” like when you were a kid and made a sandwich out of wheat bread and Fritos and it brought you closer to God.

I’m a crazy Christmas whore.  At least that’s what you might label me if you were a mean person.  And even if you did, I’d be okay with that.  I’m no stranger to being called names, you know.  In fact, regularly in elementary school, mean kids would scratch out the R’s in both my first and last name on my lunch bag, then turn the “N” into a “K,” transforming me from Gary Green into “Gay Geek.”  Once this happened the first time and scored riotous laughs all across the dodgeball circle, they continued with a frequency rivaled only by the amount of times they’d wipe their noses on their sleeves.   And they didn’t stop there.  They also called me “Gary Green Bean” “Gary Green Eggs and Ham,” “Gary Gary the Human Fairy,” and my personal favorite, “Faggot!”

Kids really can be cruel, but if I was pressed to admit it, I really don’t see much of a difference between “Faggot” and “Crazy Christmas Whore,” so in this particular case the kids I went to school with were less cruel than they were right on the money.  Even as a full grown man it would be hard for me to argue it, as just today I was sharing with friends at Pinkberry how I had been dieting for a week so I’d look good for the premiere of The Bachelor. Meanwhile in my head, I was silently booking thirty minutes later in the day to stand in front of the mirror and see what I’d look like with my hair parted on the left instead of the right.  Let’s be honest… a Crazy Christmas Whore is just a Faggot who’s out of season.

I’m almost positive I’m a giant grump outside the month of December. For the rest of the year if you took a shot at reading the sentiment I was presenting on my face, you’d come up with only three options: “I’m not interested in hearing more from you,” “Why the hell would we do that?” or, “Well well well, look who thinks she’s God’s gift to Starbucks.”

Of course, I’ve never gone so far as to ask anyone if I’m coming off as tyrannical and disagreeable as I think, though sometimes MG calls me out for being unpleasant when we’re somewhere in public.  If I’m pretty sure he’s going to pick up the check, I agree with him.  We Gay Geeks are always thinking ahead like that.

But I’m most definitely someone you want to know in December.  I might even say hello to you before you can do it to me.  And if I’ve managed to get in at least a good eight hours of sleep the night before, it’s possible I’ll allow you to tell me what you think is currently interesting about your life and the lives of those with whom you interact.  And If I managed to squeeze in a few episodes of Dallas on DVD on top of getting those eight hours of sleep, I could go so far as to advise you to have a “nice rest of your day” while I give you a bold “I’m not afraid to physically connect” graze across your shoulder.  Yep, in December I’m a real cuddle bug.
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Season of the Cookie: Chocolate Raspberry Oatmeal Cookies

These rich, decadent cookies filled with chocolate chips, oatmeal and hints of raspberry are sure to be the first to disappear at that Christmas party you don’t really want to attend, except for the fact that it’s a way to score some kissy points with your boss and you’ll get to show off that new cashmere sweater.  If you see me there, come say hello.  I’ll be the one furthest away from the bar.

Ninety-five days ago, I stopped drinking booze.  For those of you like me, who share the unfortunate deformity of a hand shaped exactly like the perfect martini holder, that translates into 2,280 achy, grumpy hours without alcohol.  I just figured that math out myself and it terrifies me almost to the point of spontaneous flop sweat.  I haven’t done anything consistently for 2,280 hours except perhaps blink, denigrate commercial pitch people and hum the theme to TV’s Dallas in my head.

I boxed up my entire bar library, descended four floors to my building’s management office and gave it all to my landlady, Bonnie: Gin, Rum, Kahlua, Fernet, Saki, Homemade Blueberry Vodka, Vermouth, Galliano, Creme de Mur, Irish Cream, Goldschläger, cocktail shakers, olive spears and tiki time toothpicks. After picking her downhome Southern jaw up off the ground, Bonnie managed to alert me to the following: ”Shoot, I’m gonna be humping with my carpet come tomorrow morning!”

My nightly cocktails have been replaced with a combination of club soda and Torani flavored syrup.  I had been drinking it for close to a week before MG informed me that there was an actual name for it:  The Italian soda.  I often serve them up in martini glasses, as a de-fanged nod to my riskier past, much in the same way those Revolutionary war re-enactors fire blanks at each other and go to the bathroom in Andy Gump toilet rentals instead of buckets and pig troughs.

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Peach and Basil Pizza

This morning on my way to getting coffee, I passed a giant display for Marlboro’s “Dream Big” contest.  I immediately thought to myself, “They’ve discovered a way for me to achieve my biggest dreams WHILE nursing an unhealthy addiction?  F**K yeah!  Where’s the saw for my right arm?”

I would have pursued it further, but the Marlboro website requires you to sign up for entry. And ever since I’ve given up cigarettes, I find I don’t really have the energy to finish things I start.  But that didn’t stop me from looking back over my life and recalling the larger-than-life dreams I once held as a young person… back when anything was still possible, we learned all we needed about safety from a police parrot, and AYDS was just a diet candy!

Come on… let’s hold hands and take a walk down Memory Lane.  A rich, creamy, juicy peach and basil pizza awaits us, along with all kinds of “Gary Green’s dreams” that evaporated amidst more unpleasantness than NBC’s ill-conceived Emeril Lagasse sitcom.

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