Color me intrigued.  I love natural foods and foods with few ingredients.  I’m amazed that so many potato chips can list ingredients as: “potatoes, salt, safflower oil.”  I love when foods don’t include preservatives.  I think natural foods are better for you and your environment.  And I love simple flavors in quality foods.  So I was definitely going to track down a pint of this goodness.  

So I ventured to my local Publix to check this ice cream out, only to be disappointed by the fact that they don’t have it. Marketing fail.  

Why? First, they enticed me with this: Kevin Rose tweeted about Häagen-Dazs Five a few weeks ago. So Häagen-Dazs sent him an entire case of ice cream! Then, Slashfood got their case of Häagen-Dazs Five .  So after this brilliant ploy to get me interested by invading all of my social media outlets, the ice cream isn’t even available mainstream yet? 

Poo!

• Smoked turkey
• Fresh mozzarella cheese (must be fresh, not slices)
• Crispy bacon
• Mixed green lettuce
• Bartlett pear slices
• Croissant

Now, this sandwich might sound a little weird, but let me explain. 

There are several varieties of pears, but Bartletts work best for a sandwich

First of the all, the trick ingredient is the pears.  I’ve had turkey sandwiches with apple slices before – usually with some sort of cranberry chutney or something – but in this case, the pears provide a lovely crunch, a sweet but crisp texture that gives the whole sandwich I fresh taste you can’t emulate with lettuce or tomato.  

It also serves as a beautiful complement to the salty bacon.  Bacon makes everything taste better, and when you use real thick cut bacon, it’s just that much better.

The fresh mozzarella is also briney, but soft and rich as well.   I don’t know if there’s a better cheese than fresh mozzarella balls.  Although pretty mild in flavor, the texture is killer.  

The mixed green lettuce is perfect with it.  Rather than standard iceberg lettuce, which is good, but mostly bland and tasteless, this is like a small but elegant salad atop your sandwich.  The grassy green flavor adds a subtle complexity.    

Lastly, the sandwich is served upon a croissant, the second most regal of the breads (behind brioche, natch), which is buttery enough to sustain the sandwich without something as offensive as mayonaisse, something as greasy as oil and vinegar, or something as strong as mustard.  

Yes, the Mushmerry is my new favorite sandwich, and I’d highly recommend you try it too.

Update: Behold, the Mushmerry!

The Mushmerry sandwich

Here’s what I want you to do:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile (or alligator, in my case)
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle (it almost killed me, I’m really allergic)
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Not too bad. 46/100. I’d love to see some readers’ or OSNewser’s results.

Halfway Homemade Chicken Soup and Grilled Cheese, originally uploaded by firsttubedotcom.

“Halfway Homemade chicken soup” starts with a mirepois. Then you add pre-made chicken broth and two leg quarters of a chicken and egg noodles. The grilled cheese is hand wrapped fresh mozzarella and peasant bread lightly brushed with grapeseed oil griddled until golden brown. A perfect rainy evening combo.

The perfect afternoon snack: perfectly ripe sideless yellow watermelon slices with huge fresh organic blueberries.

Dinner was a very successful experiment. This is one of my favorites:

Veal Osso Bucco on saffron risotto. This is one of my favorite dishes I’ve ever made.

Not bad for a lazy Sunday.

So I started really looking into different dishes than I normally would make and I focused on using non-traditional exotic spices like Garam Masala. This week we started playing with cooking with cocoa and chilis. It’s farily common knowledge in the culinary world that cocoa powder and chilis complement each other. Even the Mayans used chilis in their hot chocolate. And now Lindt makes a chocolate bar with chilis. So we tried two dishes.

First was cocoa chili steak. It was a choice ribeye crusted with cocoa powder and crushed smoked chipotle dust had a sweet and hot aftertaste. The butter dripped tri-color rotini was a nice complement.

A much better example of the combination was the cocoa chili chicken mole pronounced (MOH-lay). The mole was entirely unique, the taste was both sweet and chocolatey, the cocoa was unmistakable. That said, every bite had a very slight aftertaste of chipotle. I’m not much for spicy hot food, but the post-bite burn was just enough to make it interesting. I was really happy with the tender sweet potato and the vidalia onions, which had absorbed so much of the sauce that they had a very sweet flavor. Overall, I was impressed with this recipe.

First Course: American Kobe Beef

American Kobe beef is an off-shoot of Japanese Wagyu beef. It is super tender, exceedingly well marbled, and delicately flavorful. This steak was a top sirloin, not typically one of my favorite cuts. However, it came out beautifully, and tasted fantastic both raw and cooked.

American Kobe top sirloin

Second Course: Elk Tenderloin
Elk is a delicate meat that can be gamey if not properly prepared, but I have found, in my limited elk experience, that it can be an amazing dish if done right. We made ours in a beef and cream sauce, heavy on the tarragon, with carrots. The tenderness, no doubt, can be attributed to the cut more than anything, but the fantastic texture can only be described as buttery soft, and the flavor, while suggesting a hint of game, was uniquely tasty. A lamb lover, I think, will appreciate elk’s flavor.

Elk Tenderloin

Third Course: Buffalo Steak
Buffalo and bison meats are not quite as exotic as some of the forthcoming meats, but they both have a slightly sweet taste to them that makes them very similar to beef. We coated our steaks in chimichuri and grilled them to medium rare. I found this particular steak “good,” but not great. I don’t think it was just the cooking style – I love chimichuri and the steak was perfectly cooked.

Buffalo Steak

Fourth Course: Roasted Llama Steak
The Llama steak was one of the scarier meats for me in this process, because I have a problem picturing it as not gamey. I wasn’t able to find any grilled llama recipes, but I wish we had braved it anyway, because I think it would have been better than the “sweet onion roast” we chose to use. The llama was prepared like a roast, seared stovetop then cooked with onions, carrots, garlic, salt, and a slew of other goodies for about 12 minutes. The resulting steaks were fairly neutral tasting. They were distinctly not familiar meat, but not especially odd tasting. The llama steaks might be fantastic if cooked better, but in our preparation, it was just a little too much like a poor quality steak from the round or the chuck that just didn’t cut it. I didn’t need a third bite to know that if I ever eat llama again, it won’t be via that recipe. I think next time through, I might season the steaks and grill them.

Roasted Llama

Fifth Course: Yak
Having never had yak before, I envisioned it as a gamey and tough meat. I used a modified tenderloin recipe and adapted it for what were essentially trimmed strip steaks. The yak bits were seared in a saute pan, then crusted with dijon mustard and a custom breadcrumb mix, then seared again to brown up the coating. The yak was served medium rare.

Surprisingly, everyone liked the yak and three of us finished our entire portion. The yak was neither gamey nor tough, and was actually quite enjoyable. The meat has a uniquely stringy texture, rich yet unassuming, beefy but still humble. It was both flavorful and tender, certainly not something you’d mistake for beef, but not altogether crazy tasting at all. If you’re interested in exotic meats, but tentative about some animals, yak is a pretty exotic one with an incredible accessible flavor.

Yak Medallions

Sixth Course: Frog’s Legs
Frog’s legs are not very exotic – they are available in many places – and they are pretty tasty in general. This was, however, my first time frying them at home. Previously, I’d baked them in a slight olive oil drizzle much less successfully. This time through, we battered them and fried them, as they are usually found. The frog legs were tasty – I had one fishy bite that I wasn’t too happy with, but other than that, they were very good. Frog legs have the texture of a whitefish, but really do taste like much more like chicken provided they are well washed and properly cooked.

Fried Frog’s Legs

Seventh Course: Rabbit Loin
Rabbit is, again, not terribly hard to find at a decent supermarket. Many butcher shops either carry it or can order it at a reasonable price – maybe $10-$15/lb. We marinated our rabbit loin in oil, red wine vinegar, paprika, and other spices. The directions called for grilling over indirect heat for 35 minutes(!). Knowing it seemed long, we let it cook for most of that chunk and were a little upset by how dry the meat was upon serving. The rabbit was mostly a miss because of the prep.

There is both dark meat and white meat in a rabbit, and although I generally prefer white meat, the dark meat is very tasty.

Rabbit Loin

Eighth Course: Snapping Turtle
We all confessed to being terrified of the turtle meat. First off, the turle looked disgusting in its frozen, freeze dried form. Secondly, it’s not easily accessible; the pieces are all random chunks in odd sizes and often you can see where it comes from. It’s easy to spot a leg or foot, the backbone, the neck, etc. And it’s scary.

The turtle had a slight lakewater smell to it on defrosting, and we were instructed to marinate it in lime juice before cooking. Marinating is a common was to remove gaminess, people often soak fish in milk, for example. After grilling the turtle, I can assure you that milk would have been a better choice, because the turtle tasted like lime meat. It seemed to have so little flavor of its own, but when you did taste turtle, it was just dull, gray meat. I do not have to have turtle again, but if I do, it will certainly be in a stew, which is a much more traditional preparation.

Grilled Minnesota Snapping Turtle

Overall, it was a great experience and it was a lot of fun. Our next order will likely be more common fare. We’ve discussed alligator tail steaks, rattlesnake, and python, but we’re also tossing around the idea of order real kobe beef rib meat, the kind that costs well over $100 a pound. Nonetheless, having had so many meats for the first time was a great man-style adventure, one I recommend to the culinarily adventurous.

Although I rarely cook the cut, I coated a Flintstones-sized porterhouse with chimichurri and grilled it. As always, it re-affirmed my belief that the porterhouse is far from “king of the steaks,” largely because as good as the filet can be – as tender and juicy as possible – the strip is never as good as I imagine it could be under other circumstances.

I consider myself pretty particular when it comes to beef, and I believe that short of preparing it over wood smoke on some 1100 degree grill, I don’t think the strip can be prepared to taste as good as several other steaks. Like many cuts of sirloin, it really requires marinade or a rub of some sort to bring out any powerful flavor, and with some sort of aid, it’s usually not natural steak flavor. In general, if a steak can’t be seasoned with just extra virgin olive oil, kosher salt, and pepper, it’s a second class steak in our house. That doesn’t mean we won’t eat it, it’s just second tier. Nonetheless, it was plenty tasty enough to accompany the meal.

Lightly sauteed asparagus, tri-color cous cous, and fresh pretzel bread accompanied the steaks and rounded out a great meal.

Image hosted by Flickr

A few tips I can share: get the cube steak patty slightly wet, salt and pepper, flour, egg wash, and put it back into the flour. But here’s the kicker: use your hands. Be gentle, but pat the mix in. Make sure it’s evenly coated. This stuff isn’t glue, it will unevenly coat unless you do it properly.

My only objection, I’m afraid, is that my sawmill gravy was a little thin. I made it with leftover oil, flour, chicken broth, and whole milk, but I suspect I used a little too much broth or a little too little flour. Either way, it tasted great, it just was too thin. Nonetheless, the dish was an overwhelming success.

Image hosted by Flickr

Click the image for a full size version

Here is the text of the auction:

AMERICA ROCKS!

This delicious and amazing strawberry is shaped like the USA! How totally cool is that? Show your love for our country and bid on this one of a kind berry! A must for any serious collector of fruits and veggies in a unique shape. A perfect gift for that special someone who has everything already!

I pledge to donate 25% of the proceeds of this sale to chairity (sic) – most likely I will donate to the one laptop per child foundation. even if you dont bid, google this charity and help them out… pretty cool idea for a charity. (I am not affiliated with them at all)

This is the most amazing strawberry ever to be found.

The strawberry has been immediately wrapped up and frozen in a freezer inside a deep freeze bowl at an undisclosed location.

I will ship this to the buyer in dry ice to ensure quality.

it is red & white and has a tiny green leaf

no returns … all sales final

Turns out I was wrong. I modded a few recipes out there and ended up with a damned tasty dish. Jenn and I tore through 4 servings in 2 days, and last night I made another massive batch. 6 dudes ate 10 servings and 2 asked me for the recipe. Creamy mac and cheese, I now know, is overrated. Real baked and mac and cheese is light and cheesy and doesn’t leave you feeling like you just ate a brick. I’m still perfecting it, but when I think I have, I will post the recipe.

Mac n Cheese, originally uploaded by firsttubedotcom.

1. Use Cube Steak. If you decide to go with round, use meat tenderizer and give it plenty of time to sit. I used round and tenderized it with a mallet and it was still really tough. It needs to be very soft to almost crumble apart.

2. You will need to coat it in either buttermilk or an egg wash, but if you do use buttermilk, let it sit in the buttermilk for some time. The crust was too weak and broke apart, sadly, while still in the oil.

3. Think about gravy BEFORE making the steak. It’s not too hard to put together either a white or brown gravy, but it’s very hard to it after the steak is ready… at least, if you want to serve it while the food is still warm.

Overall, I’d rate this a 6/10. It was good enough overall, but it was bad chicken fried steak. Next time, perhaps.

Country Fried Steak… sorta, originally uploaded by firsttubedotcom.