Hurry up with Kanye’s damn croissants
By now everyone’s aware that when Kanye West is in a French restaurant he really wants people to hurry up with his damn croissants.
Inspired by Kanye’s need for flaky morning pastry in the song “I Am A God” Sarah went looking for other baked good-inspired songs.
To read the whole mouth-watering list head over to Huffington Post Music Canada by clicking here.
Filed under Food, Music, Shameless Promotion
Cheesy Blasters
Early last year as the show 30 Rock was nearing its final days the Risky Fuel household began experimenting with trying to recreate one of main character Liz Lemon’s favourite foods — Cheesy Blasters.
The recipe was simple:
You take a hot dog
Stuff it with some jack cheese
Fold it in a pizza
You’ve got Cheesy Blasters
We tried to copy this recipe. It did not turn out very well.
Undaunted, awhile back we tried to make Cheesy Blasters again, this time modifying the recipe with one major change: Instead of buying pre-made frozen pizzas and wrapping them around hot dog wieners, we bought a bag of pre-made pizza dough and used that dough instead.
It was… AMAZING. By using the real pizza dough it not only tasted better, but you could structurally engineer something that had better wraparound/pigs-in-a-blanket qualities.
So, to recap, here’s what you do to make rockin’ Cheesy Blasters:
1) Buy a bag of pre-made pizza dough, some hot dogs, a can of pizza sauce and some shredded cheese.
2) Cook some hot dogs.
3) Open a can of pizza sauce.
4) Make a canoe out of the pizza dough for the hot dog, put the hot dog in there.
5) Throw some pizza sauce and cheese into the canoe.
6) Close that canoe’s edges together so the hot dog is sealed right in there.
7) Sprinkle a bit more cheese and pizza sauce on the top of your Cheesy Blaster.
8) Throw it in the oven and bake for about 10 minutes or until the dough starts turning golden brown.
Voila, Cheesy Blasters.
Thanks Meat Cat.
Filed under Food, The Misadventures Of
Shad
The latest edition of my Polaris People column is online over at the Polaris Music Prize website.
Grimes recently told the world she really loves Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I bring this up mostly because the only other person who I know loves Cinnamon Toast Crunch with heartfelt passion is my brother. And he’s basically an aspiring Tommy Chong. So, using transitive properties, well…. heh-heh, munchies, maaaaaaaaan.
To read this week’s column, go here.
P.S. Shad and The Dears got mentioned this week, too.
Filed under Food, Music, Shameless Promotion
Rob Ford in his natural element – butter. I didn’t eat this.
Each year I go down to the Canadian National Exhibition and try out an assortment of the bizarre and gimmicky foods they have there. In 2010 it was stuff like Deep Fried Butter and Taco In A Bag, and in 2011 it was things like Deep Fried Pickle and a hamburger made using Krispy Kreme doughnuts as buns.
Once again, this year yielded some fascinating and gruesome taste sensations — including the worst thing I’ve encounter in the three years of tracking this stuff.
Scroll down to see what I consumed:
The first stop was to the Coke booth to purchase a refillable cup and then partake of the magic flavour fountain pop selector machine they have. Basically, it’s like when you’re a kid and you try mixing a million flavours of pop together all at once. First you pick your drink base (choices seen below), then you’re sent to another screen where you can add flavour shots like vanilla, cherry and peach, then the machine fills your cup with the chosen concoction.
The magic flavour spooger Coke product machine.
This would be our first concoction, Vanilla & Cherry Coke. I was a big fan of the now-disappeared Vanilla Coke so this was a happy return of sorts. Better than normal Coke, but still fountain pop. 6.6/10.
We were going to hit the crazy train early and start with Kimchi fries from Far East Taco, but because the Food Building was just opening they weren’t exactly on their game yet. The Mandoo Beef Dumplings were ready though, so we had those. Solid, simple dumplings, they didn’t suck — because dumplings rarely do — but they weren’t exactly a mouthsterpiece either. 7/10.
From here it was on to the big trendy food booth for this year — Bacon Nation — where everything they serve was wrapped in bacon. I decided to go big with one of the ridiculous signature sandwiches on the menu, the Nutella BBBLT. This sandwich is comprised of back bacon, the L&T, bacon, more bacon, and Nutella, all spread over toast. Or at least it was supposed to…
The Bacon Nation Nutella BBBLT. As a BLT it solidly does its job. 7.5/10.
Unfortunately, what I got was the Bacon Nation No-tella BBBLT. There was no Nutella. So I basically paid $12 for a novelty sandwich that didn’t have the key component of its novelty. This means this sandwich was actually a complete failure. 0/10.
Sarah then ordered a classic grilled cheese from the Mac ‘N’ Cheesery (sic?) with a fried egg in it. I think she liked it. I had some of her chips — Miss Vickie’s regular (5.5/10) and pickle chunk (5.6/10).
By this time we were had pretty much finished our first wave of the Food Building, which we topped off with another round of pop.
Pop round two was Barq’s Vanilla Root Beer. This was a totally acceptable choice, though the vanilla flavour was a little on the subtle side. 6.4./10.
Rasberry Coke. This was not a good idea. 3/10.
This here is the Greek Cheese Pie from one of those independent booths that only lasts one year. It was basically a baked pita with olive oil on it and wee chunks of cheese. Underwhelming, if that’s a word. 5/10
Sesame Zaatar With Cheese Pie. This was Sarah’s. She liked it, but there appeared to be none of the cheese we asked for. I tried it too. I thought it tasted like birdseed. 4.8/10.
Creature From The Black Lagoon, sculpted out of butter.
Vanilla Fudge. Vanilla totally gets a bad rap just because it’s associated with white people. This shiz is tasty. 8.1/10.
M&M Fudge. This is one of Sarah’s favourites. 7.8/10.
Oh My Gosh Fudge. I’m still trying to figure out what this is made of exactly, but I think it’s got marshmallows and caramel in it. Tasty, though. 8/10.
Red Velvet Fudge. I’m still not entirely sold on this whole red velvet food colouring trend, but this was just under the straight vanilla for tastiness. 7.9/10.
Another round of pop. Peach Sprite. This was like licking the bottom of a fruit stand clean. The worst. 2/10.
Beer break! (And frozen margarita break. That was some strong tequila.)
Frozen Margarita and Creemore beer. They’ve got booze in ’em, right? Right. 10/10.
This was a giant Veggie Loaded Potato from Baked ‘n’ Loaded, or Loaded and Baked, or Loaded Potatoface or whatever it was called. It was huge and featured broccoli, green beans, carrots and cheese jammed in the middle of a sea salt crusted baked potato. This was a welcome change from our non-stop sugar consumption and it was alright as far as vegetable slurry goes, too. 7.5/10.
Chocolate Dipped Ice Cream On A Stick With Sprinkles. In theory, this should have been a tasty treat, but the hot chocolate dip make the ice cream melt too quickly and the result was a drippy, deteriorating mess made worse by the chunks of chocolate sprinkle randomly falling to the ground. And being the cheapskate I am, each chunk that fell I was going “That’s 72 cents… That’s 12 cents… That’s 23 cents…” What should have been gold, wasn’t. 6/10.
The Maple Lodge Chocolate Eclair Hot Dog was one of the worst things I have ever eaten. Things did not get off to a good start when the group of college bros in line before me ordered one, got their order and proceeded to conduct an elaborate photo shoot before attempting to eat it — they were doing it as a dare. It didn’t get any better after I ordered and the first thing the server did was hand me a half-dozen napkins. So I got my Eclair and quickly rushed out of the Food Building to near BMO Field where there’d be less people to see me eat this…
Exactly like the title suggests, this is a chocolate eclair with a hot dog in the middle. On their own they’re both fine foodstuff, but the combination of chicken wiener and whipped cream was not a good one. Worse though, was the mess. Falling, dripping globs of cream landed at your feet, soaked through the napkins onto your hands and generally created the tactile sensation that you were being covered in sticky-sweet hot dog water. With Sarah’s help we wolfed this down (she was actually turning away from people walking in the nearby thoroughfare because she didn’t want anyone seeing her attempting to eat this). It was, truly, a heroically awful food experience. 1.1/10.
Additional reading:
Things I ate at the CNE in 2016. Bug Bistro’s Bug Dog and Fran’s Blueberry Milkshake with a slice of real blueberry pie.
Things I ate at the CNE in 2015. Including Frosted Flakes Chicken On A Stick and The S&M Burger.
Things I ate at the C.N.E. in 2014. Including Cocoa Chicken and the Thanksgiving Turkey Waffle.
Things I ate at the C.N.E. in 2013. Including Nutella Jalapeno Poppers and the S’more Dog.
Things I ate at the C.N.E. in 2011. Including the Krispy Kreme Hamburger and Deep Fried Twix.
Things I ate at the C.N.E. in 2010. Including Deep Fried Butter and Taco In A Bag
Filed under Food, Recollections, The Misadventures Of
Step 1: Separate the Skittles
A while back, the Risky Fuel household hosted a bit of a party for Sarah’s birthday. Two of the centerpieces of said party were an endless supply of 30 Rock Cheesy Blasters (we dramatically improved on the recipe from our first attempt and will write about that at some other time) and the creation of the very exciting liquor combinations Skittles vodka and Skittles rum.
Here’s what went down:
First, we needed the ingredients and the tools, so we got:
* 2 big bags of Skittles
* 3 500ml bottles of water
* 1 bottle of 375ml Bacardi Superior rum
* 2 bottles of 375ml Absolut vodka
* a box of coffee filters
* a funnel
NOTE: You need to start all this a day before the day you intend to drink these fancy boozes.
Step #1: Separate The Skittles
This job was pretty simple. There are five flavours of Skittles — lime, lemon, strawberry, grape and orange — so we just separated the various candies into their appropriate bowls. What was harder, though, was figuring out which flavours of booze we were going to make. We had two vodka bottles and one rum, which meant two Skittle flavours wouldn’t make the cut.
We figured strawberry would got with the rum because, well, strawberry daiquiris. Lime sucks, so that was easy to cut. So it was down to grape, lemon and orange for the two vodka bottles. We decided to go with grape and lemon because orange just doesn’t go well with stuff. Like chocolate. Those chocolate orange thingees are only exciting to lowers on the evolutionary ladder.
Anyway, we now had our flavours:
* Lemon Skittles vodka
* Grape Skittles vodka
* Strawberry Skittles rum
Step #2: Skittle-fying The Alcohol
First, you drink the water from the water bottles. Then you take your Skittles and put all the lemon in one bottle, all the grape in the second, and all the strawberry in the third. Then you go have a pee break because you just drank three bottles of water. When you come back from peeing you grab your funnel (because it mess-proofs things) and funnel the corresponding booze into the appropriate water bottle.
Then you let your water bottles full of booze and Skittles sit for a day to allow the alcohol to dissolve the candies. They should look something like this if you arrange them neatly for photo taking purposes:
Lemon Skittle Vodka Bottled
Grape Skittle Vodka bottled
Strawberry Skittle Rum bottled
Step #3: Filtering The Skittle-fied Booze Back Into Original Bottles
So the next day while you’re casually cleaning the house for your party it’s time to set up the funnel, with a coffee filter in it, to pour the Skittle-infused from the water bottles back into the original bottles.
We were forewarned this was a snag area — the whole reason why you need to coffee filter things is because the candy doesn’t entirely dissolve — and sure enough, it was a problem. And the specific problem in our case was that the coffee filters made the actual filtering process go reaaaaallllly slowly.
Lemon Skittle vodka in the early filtering stages
As in agonizing drip, drip drip-type slow. Poking the funnel or tugging at the edges of the filter would temporarily increase flow, but ultimately continuing to do that would cause structural collapse of the filter and the entire contents just ended up pouring straight into the bottles.
We never figured out a better filtering solution so our Skittle booze was filled with candy floaties.
Step #4: Drink It
We were a little bummed about the filtering, but people eat tequila worms and drink Goldschlager, right? So it was, like, whatever and we had our party.
As it turns out, people were actually a little bit scared of rum and vodka infused with Skittles. We managed to finish off the grape vodka by doing shots, but the strawberry rum and lemon vodka are still kicking around our place. As shots the various flavours came across a little harsh — like an angry variety of cough syrup that won’t make you appreciate Houston hip-hop if you drink it. And we’ve yet to experiment with the remaining boozes in mixed drinks.
Booze-periment end result
Conclusion: Unless we come up with a eureka mixed drink combo for our remaining booze and a brainwave on how to filter out the candy pieces more quickly and easily it’s probably going to be a long time until we combine Skittles with alcohol again.
Filed under Food, Recollections, The Misadventures Of
I Overcame My Autism And All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir
Risky Fuel 