Wasted Away Again in Margaritaville.

Everyone has a favorite version of this classic Mexican-restaurant/tailgate party/barbecue elixir.

Cheryl likes them simple. No salt, and on the rocks, made from a mix of:

2 shots good gold tequila (she likes Sauza Hornitos)
1 shot orange liqueur (triple sec, Grand Mariner, etc.)
in a shaker with a couple of cubes of ice.
Shaken and poured in a 12 oz tumbler full of ice, topped off with Mr & Mrs T's sweet & sour, and the juice of a lime.

Easy and good.

I'd love to see yours. Post in the "comments".

Soup For You!

I love soup. One of my favorite things about the weather getting cooler is that I get to make soup.

In this edition, I will post two of my favorites -- French Onion and Tomato.

I made French Onion Soup last night. I used a beef stock I made the other night while making another soup -- vegetable beef.

Here's your "bonus" soup: I chunked up a chuck roast, with the bone, and boiled it for an hour - skimming the scum, and then added cabbage, carrots, potatoes and onion, and a bouquet garni of garlic, sage, rosemary, tarragon and thyme. But I used about 4 cups more water than I needed. I took out the extra liquid, and the bone, then added salt and pepper to taste and cooked another 30 minutes.

What liquid I took off, along with the bone and bouquet garni, went back into a pot, and cooked, covered, another 45 minutes to render the stock.

French Onion Soup

In a large enameled iron pot,
Sautee 4 large vidalia onions, sliced thin, pole-to-pole, in 3 Tbsp unsalted butter until cooked down and caramelized to a mahogany brown (about 45 minutes).
Add two cloves of minced garlic
Add 1 Tbspn salt and a dusting of flour to onions, stirring to make a roux
Pour in enough dry white wine on to cover the onions, and cook down to a thin syrup consistency (another 30 minutes).
Add three cups of beef stock
Add 1/2 tsp black pepper
Add 1 sprig of fresh tarragon,
Add 2 Tbsp cider vinegar
Add 2 Tbsp worcestershire sauce
Bring it to a boil, reduced it to a simmer, coverand cook for 15 more minutes
While soup is finishing, slice a baguette on the diagonal and toast, and shred 1 cup of aged gruyere cheese.
Splash the soup with a jigger of cognac
Pour into large soup mugs, place a toasted baguette on each and cover with the cheese and broil on high for another four minutes, until the cheese was melted and starting to brown.
 
"Thomas" Tomato Soup
There is a nice little restaurant by the hospital that I go to all the time. It's called "Thomas". The guys who own it are really cool. They play great music overhead -- in fact that's where I heard "Pickin' on Zeppelin". The waitress is a Celtic music groupie, and cute as a bug.

They have a house tomato-basil soup that rocks. They have menu item that is a grilled cheese (ciabatta, grilled in a panini press with olive oil, filled with four cheeses - havarti, brie, cheddar and gouda), served with a bowl of this soup. It is one of my favorite meals anywhere. I asked Brian - one of the owners - for the recipe, figuring he'd laugh and tell me it was a big secret or something. Instead, he wrote it on a napkin and gave it to me, and told me to share it.

Here it is:
Thomas Restaurant Tomato Soup Recipe

1 can of #10 tomatoes (San Marzano tomatoes with basil)
½ pint of heavy cream
1 cup (handful) of fresh basil leaves (coarse chopped)
1 yellow onion diced very fine
1 pint chicken stock (boxed or fresh)
1 teaspoon garlic (powder, or 2 cloves finely minced)
2 oz olive oil
1 tablespoon of freshly grated Parmesan cheese (add more to taste if you like)
1/8 teaspoon chili power

Sautee onions and garlic in olive oil until translucent/soft, but not brown
Add 1 can of tomatoes, chicken stock, fresh basil and bring to a hard boil.
Reduce to simmer and add chili power and Parmesan cheese. Simmer 20 minutes. Adjust salt to taste.
(At this point, you can can it, freeze it, or whatever, and reheat later, if you want)

Add heavy cream. Puree with immersion blender, garnish with grated Parmesan cheese and serve.

What are your favorite soups? Post in comments.

I'm FRIED.

My stomach may bark, but sometimes nothing beats fried food. A light breading and a hot oil bath brings out a character in food that no other preparation can match. And if you want to meet the king of the deep fryer, you must take a convoluted route, 2 hours and 20 minutes south of I-70, close to the geographic center of the State of Missouri -- to a quiet no-wake cove, at Shawnee Bend 2, off the 11-1/2 mile marker of the main channel of the Lake of the Ozarks -- to Castaways Resort.  There you will find the humble home of a boisterous and most entertaining giant of a man, Bill Bowen. A big man, in every sense of the word. His balding head is leathered by life at the lake, and his sun-darkened complexion almost makes his closely-cropped white beard glow.

Bill is a salesman's salesman. He represents a company that provides paper and plastic disposable products to the food industry. Whether you need to buy paper napkins and sacks for a fast food joint or the foam trays and shrink wrap used by the grocery butcher, Bill is your man. For many years, Bill was in sales management for the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company. The proverbial "beer that made Milwaukee famous". And, to this day Bill Bowen has a copious gut made of boiler plate, which contains voracious appetite for food, for beer and for life. Especially beer. Or food. Or life. I can't decide.

Bill is well traveled. His jobs have taken him all over the country. Bill has lived a full and interesting life.  And Bill is a guy who can weave a great story that makes you walk away shaking your head, just knowing as fun as that tall tale was, there is no way it really happened. Until you talk to someone else who was there, who corroborates the whole thing. At which point you realize that Bill is just one of those guys who seems to have a knack for always being around when amazing things happen, and he has a gift for retelling them that makes you sure you were there too.

Friday was Bill's birthday. Saturday afternoon was his party. People came from hundreds of miles to celebrate with Bill and his amazing frying rig. Set up outside his free-standing garage, a tier off the lakefront, Bill - son Mark at his side - behind a barrier of benches erected to keep the kids and the dogs out of the danger zone, donned gloves and carefully inserted a long instant-read thermometer to verify the oil was exactly 375 degrees.  The radio blared out the Missouri Tigers football game. The sky threatened, but the rain held off until later. Bill was his jovial self. Brimming with a sense of confidence, bordering on, but just short of cocky.

On the tables behind and to the side were an uncanny array of delectables awaiting their turn in the pool of smoking fat. There were secret-Cajun-spiced cornbread-coated crappie and catfish bits, that he and his neighbor, Paulie pulled from the lake just a 100 feet away. Other options included slices of chicken breast, with a light breading, pie-dough pockets, stuffed with cheese and sage sausage (thanks to Curtis & Marg), spears of Idaho potatoes, battered Vidalia onion rings, dill pickles and even what he calls "dough balls". The latter being an interesting hush-puppy substitute that involved simply snipping canned, "butter flavored" biscuit rounds in to six pieces and dropping them in the oil. As pedestrian as that sounds, they are quite addictive.

Bill boasts that he has deep fried steaks to medium-rare perfection, hamburger patties, hot dogs and even prime rib! 

I ate. A lot. No, I mean a really lot.

I have eaten fried candy bars in London, fried cod in Galway, Ireland, and myriad other deep fried delicacies in my life, but I'd be hard pressed to beat the feast at Bill Bowen's birthday bash. And never accompanied by the great tales of adventure, and genuine family hospitality, I experienced on Saturday. 

Bill Bowen's secret to perfect deep frying almost anything that will hold still long enough:

1) Never fill the fryer beyond 1/2 full of oil

2) Always use good quality, clean oil - like canola or peanut


3) Make sure the oil has reached 375 degrees before anything goes in. He used a splash of beer, to double-check.


4) Keep breading light. Let the food shine on it's own. 


5) Mind the store! Do not walk away from food in the fryer. 


6) Remove it with a wire "spider" to a rack or paper towel, when it's golden, but maybe looks a bit lighter than you prefer, otherwise the carry-over heat will over-cook it. 


7) Season it the moment it comes out of the fryer. Whether salt, Cajun spice, barbeque rub, anything dry you can shake on -- always do it while the oil is still hot. 

Share your favorite fried recipes in the comments!

Tailgate time

This has always been my favorite time of the year. The days grow shorter, the air cools, the mornings are crisp and foggy. The sweaters smell like cedar from their long summer in storage.  It reminds me of college. Of walking the quad, with the changing leaves crackling beneath your feet. The most pressing things on your mind are a chem exam and that cute girl at the party last night who talked about art and music and philosphy with you until 2 am. And, of course, FOOTBALL!

My love of football started at the age of 4, when the Kansas City Chiefs moved to my home town from their orgins in Dallas. I still have vivid memories of the first Super Bowl, played when I was 6 years old. The fourth one when former USC Heisman wnner (and current USC AD) Mike Garrett scored a TD on the immortal "65 toss-power-trap". When Lenny Dawson threw a little hitch on the sideline to Otis Taylor (it's a crime he's not in Canton), which he broke and took to the house. The heartbreak of Christmas Day, at age 12, when I sat in front of my Grandma's blond-wood, Danish-modern Grundig stereo, to listen to Bill Grigsby and Dick Carlson call the longest game in the history of the NFL.

Football may not have invented tailgating, but it is a marriage made in heaven. In Kansas City, it is a religion. Even when the Chiefs are down, as they are now, Arrowhead is still the best smelling stadium in the NFL. But that is not to say they don't do an amazing job, elsewhere, too. Really, any blue-collar town, like Pittsburgh, Green Bay or Indianapolis is going to have good tailgate grub. And the South is famous for college tailgating -- the big dog daddy being in Jacksonville, Florida, with outstanding parties at places like South Carolina and LSU. We can't leave out the Big 10, either. Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State are all known for their parties in the parking lot. In fact PSU tailgating was so notorious, the school had to draft new rules to calm them down.

I have hundreds of tailgate recipes, but this one is the one most often requested for me to bring. My bloody mary that has been nicknamed "DAD's BM". There's a story. I was invited to one of those hauty corporate, multi-RV and tent tailgate parties at Arrowhead. My price of admission was a jug of my famous bloody marys. I labeled the bottom of my Coleman jug, so I wouldn't loose it. I put my initials "D.A.D." and for bloody mary, "B.M." The jug was nearly empty when someone wanted to know who made it, they turned over the jug to find "DAD BM". And the unfortunate name stuck.


Here's how you replicate "DAD's BM":

1 - 46oz jar of tomato juice
1 - 750 ml bottle of good vodka (pepper or citrus vodka are an interesting change up)
1/2 cup - Worchestershire sauce
2 Tbsp - grated horseradish (not sauce - just plain horseradish)
1 Tbsp - celery seeds
1 Tbsp - Tabasco sauce (I sometimes use a mix of regular and chipotle Tabasco)
1 tsp - fine salt
1 tsp - fine black pepper
The juice of one whole lemon

Mix all ingredients well, pour over ice and garnish with celery or green onion and a jalapeno-stuffed olive.

I'd love to see your favorite tailgate recipes! Post them to "comments".  GO TEAM!