Thai Pesto Chicken

I have this lying around in my kitchen on a Wednesday

This is a fantastic chicken sauce, marinade, or even a bomb pasta sauce. It combines the ideals of pesto sauce, with the flavors of great Thai food, with the American values of grilled chicken. It gets spicy, sweet, sour, salty, grilled, creamy, cheesy, etc. Its really good.

C'mon you didn't think I'd go on vacay without creating something to get rid of my stock piled food, did you?

Marinade slash Sauce slash Baste

First make the sauce thing. You can use this as a marinade if you plan ahead, but if you are like me you needed this spur of the moment, and you can use it like a baste. Also, if you have meat to dip, you can use this as a sauce. Its fairly re-donk.

In a blender, combine:

• 1 bunch of Thai basil leaves, no stems
• 4 garlic cloves
• 3 Serrano chilies
• 1T fish sauce
• 1/2c water
• 1 celery stalk
• 2T olive oil
• Juice of 1 lime

It should look like Fig. 2.

Figure 2. What it should look like. Blender needs to be fast to make it this green.

Dismember a chicken (61 seconds, no PR but still 10 seconds faster than my PR from a week ago). Coat in salt and pepper. Grill for 30 out of a planned 40 minutes for a chicken (let this requirement dictate heat levels). Once almost done, baste like in Fig. 3.

Figure 3. Basting in the glory

Toss and then re-grill that shit. Flip and re-baste. Cook the sauce onto the chicken and you have a freaking spicy, delicious Thai Pesto Chicken.

So Close to Ruben's Salsa

Its important to have goals, but salsa goals are especially important

This journey of matching Ruben's Burrito's salsa has continually amazed me in how simple their recipe must truly be. This version is super tasty, super simple, and gives great insight as to what they actually must be doing.

Fresh Version of Ruben's Salsa

• 5 Tomatoes, medium, red, ripe tomatoes
• 4 Unseeded Serrano peppers (mine were green, but red work too)
• 1/2 t Granulated garlic
• 1 T Plain white vinegar
• 4 Big pinches of salt
• 1 t Crushed red pepper
• 2 t Organic tomato paste

Notice: absolutely no cilantro. None needed, none used by Ruben's. Here is a realization I came too as I had to supplement my fresh design with dried peppers and tomato paste to match the color: Ruben probably cuts huge corners by using things like canned, crushed tomatoes instead of fresh, and if I had to bet, some cheap garlic salt that may contain MSG (because the cheaper they are, the more likely they are to have nasty chemicals, and their salsa is so effing addictive).

My Ojai constituency tells me that, though this is too tomato-y it is super close to Ruben's, and I concede that yes, it is too tomato-y, but that is a function of the tomato paste to match the color.

Next time: canned tomatoes and then rolling into Ruben's with a ketchup bottle of this stuff to have a taste off with the employees.

Paleo Baked Almond Pork Chop

For easing back off of junk food, shake and bake style

I am in love with this dish. Maybe it is because I have been eating so much beef recently and anything not beef will make me drool, but I think I really like it because of the taste. The idea is to make a fairly crusty, yet moist, fatty and delicious pork chop. Sorry about the lack of precision here, it really makes no difference, but just make sure you can taste what you add, or what is the effing point?

I recently dried an entire bunch of fresh sage, and I used the vast majority in this dish. In a mortar and pestle, add the majority of a dried bunch of sage with a couple pinches of super coarse sea salt. Grind smooth, take out all large stems. Throw that into a shallow baking dish with (i'm guessing) 1/2c of almond flour. Then, since I also dried some fresh thyme, add some dried thyme! Also add cayenne pepper, dehydrated onions (which are awesome), black pepper, and maybe a little granulated garlic, if that is what you are into.

Drege chops, rinsed but not dried, through the mix on both sides. Bake for 15 minutes at 400F. These were thin chops so you have to adjust according to height, heat, fat rendering desires, quantity, etc.

Fantasticly good, paleo common

For me, the fat was crispy enough, the meat was moist, the flavoring was spicy, sage-ee and most importantly, delicious. I just gave a chop to my roommate to eat with chili. I ate it alone, and then later with soup covered in chorizo. Both were amazing. Although this recipe is far from anyone's consideration of gourmet, it is very good for comfort food.

My dad hates non-conventional foods (for the most part). He loves things like spaghetti, chicken wings, garlic bread, subway sandwiches, cheese, baked beans, and potato salad from the deli counter. All of those things are very very easy to make. In fact, they are so easy to make that you can make them, freeze them, sell them, thaw them, cook them, and then eat them off of paper plates.

My dad would love this dish. There are some hard nuts to crack for pro-paleo eating, and this might be the right hammer to bring.

Two Kinds of Salsa

Blenders like this make rad salsa, authentic restaurant style

Salsa in mexican and Eye-talian, means sauce. These sauces are great and I am currently using them for salad dressings, dips, and crock pot stew juice for a pork shoulder.

Here is the low down on good salsa: it is effing simple and should be simple. Generally, there is truly one consistent ingredient in salsa: tomatoes. There are three secondary ingredients that are almost universally applied in combinations of one, two, or three with tomatoes. Here is a short list of notables with these Super 4:

• Pico de gallo: Tomato (fresh), Onion, Cilantro, Peppers


• Tomatillo: Tomatillo (green tomatoes, fresh), onion, cilantro, peppers, garlic and vinegar


• Pace Picante: Tomato sauce (canned), tomatoes (canned), onions (?), peppers (?)


• Traditional hand cut home made: Super 4 + salt + vinegar + citrus

Salsa is very very easy to make and should be made at least 6-250 times per year depending on usage. If we look at what these salsas above and see what they work with we can learn tons about how to make useful salsa.

• Pico is good for chips and cheap shitty burritos. It is also a decent start for ceviche.


• Tomatillo is very diversely popular for everything from enchiladas to pork roasts to rices to chips. Very very useful.


• Pace is about as bad as I can imagine. Pace is the purpose of this post.


• Traditional tastes like what we are trying to accomplish. Almost universal in application.

Knowing the Super 4 and seeing some examples can give you an idea of how salsas can be tailored. I would contend that cilantro is the dominant flavor that people associate with mild salsas, where hot salsas do not really need that much of the Chinese parsley, nor is it missed or noticed. I would also note that some people do not like onions (which makes them horrible food critics, I would say).

Anyway, I have made two salsas in the recent days and here is how and why I did what I did.

Chasing Ruben
For more than a decade Ruben's Burritos has had the best burrito salsa I have ever tasted. Here is my first attempt. I missed on a lot of fronts to match Ruben's, but next time I'll get it closer.

Blend 5 cubed fresh tomatoes, 2 jalapenos, a cubed onion, 10 stems of cilantro, garlic powder, salt, pepper, apple cider vinegar.

Result: too much cilantro, too much vinegar, maybe needs more garlic powder and way more heat. Consistancy was too watery. Appearance was too green. It was fairly rapidly devoured for its high content of delishisness. Changes to come, I think I'll have it in two or three more trys, and then we move for patents.

Chipoltee
Take a few chipotle peppers and add to blender with one onion, one tomato, a cup of water, salt and pepper, and a little cider vinegar. I used this to marinade and then crock for 30+ hours a pork shoulder. People loved it. It was very very similar to the tabasco brand chipotle sauce they sell at the stores.

More salsa to come.

Oyster Mushroom Sardine Soup

This is a way to test your ideas (a very simple example)

The soup made yesterday on keep your fucking chest up dot com was epic. Though many thought that surely I could not have made my best dish out of asparagus and dried anchovies, I tried an experiment to give credence to my contentions that it truly is epic.

The Challenge: Make a better soup using the same fundamental ideas, with slightly different ingredients. Asparagus yesterday, fresh oyster mushrooms today. Dried Asian anchovy yesterday, dried Asian sardine today. All else was a wash.

The Conclusion: That asparagus shit was seriously, a home run. This mushroom dish was fine, but you should go heavy sardine, heavy sardine soaking oil, lemon squeeze required. Would be better with heavy cream (Almost Paleo).

Sardines were by far the best part, but too big for small bites.