ODG Eats

So it has been brought to my attention that honey is not vegan. I think that is bullshit, but I'm not a vegan, so my ideas don't matter to their classification one way or the other. Anyway, none of that matters, because this time I'm totally super serious and  confident that I made a vegan meal tonight. I even used fake butter and fake cream! Granted, I did make sandwiches, but they were, like, really fucking good sandwiches. While I was at Kroger Saturday, I spent a long time staring blankly at the wall in the produce department trying to figure out what to get. I didn't want to keep getting the same old shit, but there wasn't a whole lot else available. Then I saw them: a small pile of eggplants near the edge of the section. I grabbed one, and the rest will be history.  I sliced up some of the eggplant on my mandolin, chopped up a little red onion and a few stalks of asparagus, sliced up a mushroom and a couple tomatoes, and diced a big-ass clove of garlic. I star...

Okay, so I'm already tired of chicken again. I've got a few pieces left from the last bird, so I'll be finishing that up before too long, but I finally got to go grocery shopping again this weekend and picked up a 2lb bag of frozen swai fillets for $10. Five bucks per pound really isn't the best deal, obviously, but it's still better than then $8+ for beef. For those unfamiliar, swai is a Vietnamese river fish pretty similar to catfish. According to The Googles, it's a type of catfish, but, as far as I'm concerned, there's only one type of catfish, and that's catfish. Swai, thankfully, costs quite a bit less than catfish (which was something like $8/lb), which is why I bought it instead. My idea for this meal changed a few times over the course of prepping it. Originally, I was thinking miso-soy glazed broiled swai, so I started up by scooping some of my miso paste into a bowl and pouring some soy sauce, sesame oil, and rice vinegar over it, then mix...

 So I've got some chicken wings I want to cook, and I'm thinking, "You know what would be awesome? I can make a batter and bake these. It'll be amazing." I then proceeded to fuck it all up to hell and back. Luckily, I made some kickass risotto to go along with it, and that pretty much saved the meal. See that shit? That's before it was finished, mind you, but it was already looking spectacular. First, though, let's address the absolute shitshow that was my chicken wings. I had a little bit of my spicy mayo left, so I was originally going to coat the wings with that, then cover them with bread crumbs seasoned with salt and cayenne. Then I had the bright idea to mix the mayo into the bread crumbs to make a batter. Unfortunately, that made a thick paste that didn't stick to the chicken and just looked like dog shit smeared on the wings. I said "fuck it" and threw it in the oven at 350 to cook for about 45 minutes. It essentially ended up as unse...

If you're anything like me, and God help you if you are, then you've probably had a conversation with yourself similar to the one I had earlier this evening: "How the fuck do you forget to thaw chicken for dinner four days in a row?" So yeah, sardines may work for a day or two, but you've gotta have some variety, too, right? So tonight, I went for some veggies and pasta. In the red bowl, I had some sliced mushroom and zucchini; the blue bowl had halved cherry tomatoes, crushed and sliced garlic, some odds and ends from an onion, and a few big chunks of green(?) bell pepper; and my clear bowl had some chopped kale. I started off by heating up my pan, adding some olive oil, and dumping in the blue bowl. This bowl was my sauce bowl. I let all of that cook until I was able to pull off the tomato skins. Then I removed everything but the bell peppers until they were ready to peel. You can tell when they're ready because the skin gets all wrinkled up. Now, if you...

So anyway, I got to drinkin, then I got to hung'rin, then I got to cookin.  I bought a value pack of cans of sardines on my last Kroger run. That's the kind of impulse purchases you can expect from me. I made sure to get the cans packed in olive oil as opposed to those packed in mustard (which are also great for snacking, but I didn't want the mustard on in case I decided to cook with them). Now, if you want them whole, you've gotta be careful pulling those fuckers out of a tin since they're packed in there really tightly (if you weren't aware of that, now you'll understand the phrase "packed in like sardines") and are also quite tender, so they can break apart quite easily (as evidenced by the broken ones above). Now, I had had a few ideas on what I wanted to do with the sardines and some zucchini, so I took another shot of mezcal and got to work. Dish 1: Fried sardines and zucchini noodles I kept it simple for the first dish. I took some corn sta...