How to Make Hooch January 12, 2008

So Google decided to put an end to my dream of saving for a down payment on a house. My pagerank is now ZERO. But, I still have my thousand dollars! I can still get a house, it will just be a much more modest one. Sorta like this:

Photo by Cindy47452

Now, you know the importance of fitting into one’s neighborhood, keeping up with the McCoy’s and all that, right? I figure if I buy into that hood, I need to know how to make some hooch. I mean, there’s probably not a Wine and Spirits store right down the street, right? So I looked into it, and I think I know the minimum to meet my entertaining needs for my housewarming party.

Here’s what I’ll need:

A trash bag

warm water

fruit or fruit juice

raisins or tomatoes

yeast

sugar or powdered milk

Now all I have to do is mix the stuff together, put a tube of some sort in the top of the bag before I tie it off, and wait 3-7 days. Yummy! My new neighbors will be delighted and I’ll fit right in, at least after I steal a few pit bulls. Actually, this particular recipe came from the book, You Are Going to Prison, by Jim Hogshire, but it’s okay that it’s prison hooch, cuz that’ll give me street cred in my new hood. That is, if there are any streets.

For those of you who were hoping to avoid the prison stuff, you can find a good (?) hooch recipe over at How To Do Stuff. He uses grape juice. Thinks he’s better than the rest of us, I guess…

There’s Nothin’ Like Good Homemade Chicken Pot Pie January 11, 2008

Photo by DawnsRecipes

Sometimes I get a craving for chicken pot pie. As a kid, I loved those frozen ones that you can still buy two for a dollar at the grocery store. Now that I can read ingredient labels, I don’t go there. I’ve tried KFC’s Chicken Pot Pie, but it just doesn’t cut it. It shouldn’t even be called chicken pot pie as it denigrates the very name of this delish Southern dish.

If you want something gooood, try making your own. Here’s a recipe I’ve modified:

1 pound deboned chicken
5 carrots, sliced
1 cup frozen green peas, the baby kind
3 stalks celery, sliced
3 Tbsp butter
1 small chopped onion
1/3 cup unbleached flour
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper
1 3/4 cups chicken broth (use the broth from the chicken you boiled)
2/3 cup whole milk
2 (9 inch) homemade pie crusts (It’s just not homemade if you use the storebought kind!)

How Ya Do It

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C.)
2. In the saucepan over medium heat, cook onions and celery in butter until soft and translucent. Stir in peas, carrots, flour, salt, pepper, and ceyanne. Slowly stir in chicken broth and milk. Simmer over medium-low heat until thick. Remove from heat and set aside.
3. Place the chicken mixture in bottom pie crust. Pour hot liquid mixture over. Cover with top crust, seal edges, and cut away excess dough. Make several small slits in the top to allow steam to escape.
4. Bake in the preheated oven for 30 to 35 minutes, or until pastry is golden brown and filling is bubbly. Cool for 10 minutes before serving.

Diversify: Having Recipes on Your Blog is a Good Idea December 21, 2007

One reason that recipes are a good idea is that everyone eats. At some point, almost every is interested in cooking something. Going with this theory, I’ve been posting the occasional recipe over here. I like to cook, so it made sense. Within a day of posting my best fudge ever recipe, I got more than fifty visitors looking for fudge recipes. Specifically, they were looking for “best fudge ever” recipes, for the most part. This drove home the point that the headline you choose for each post is important. Of course, what this means is that I should have named this post “Brittney’s Sister is Pregnant”. Oh well.

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