Me oh my, pie!

Let's just get this out in the open; I am not a baker. Baking is not something I do regularly. I have committed cookie homicide more times than I care to admit. The dis-justice I have done to baked goods is just wrong. I am now trying to fix that. So, I decided to take on pie. Yes, I said pie. Cherry pie to be exact (cue Def Leppard music).

I will admit I did not make my own dough. I cheated and got some help from Philsbury. I more than made up for it by pitting 2.5 lbs of cherries by hand. The only thing I used was a pairing knife and my newly manicured nails.

While I was pitting the cherries, it looked liked I had killed someone. There was cherry juice everywhere and the pits in the bowl looked like bullets. It looked like a scene from CSI; a yummy cherry splattered scene! About 45 minutes and one ruined manicure later, my filling was done. All I had to do now was just wait for everything to do its macerating magic then it would be baking time.

I learned that I can do lattice work on a pie while playing Cranium, that I can make someone a human puppet without getting flour all over them. I also learned that I can make a pretty decent baked goods when I actually try and when I follow the recipe word for word.

I also had attempted to bake a cardamom peach pie. According to others it came out good as well. But to me, the cherry pie was more exciting to bake and eat!

Tea, Burgers and Cheese.. oh my!

I love burgers. All kinds of burgers. Big ones, little ones, stuffed ones, turkey ones: I love burgers. In my quest to try and eat healthier, I have been eating more turkey burgers than beef burgers. My only issue is the slight lack of flavor that ground turkey has. I have made it a personal and crazy goal of mine to try and come up with a good tasting burger. I have tried mixing ingredients together and making what I called my Greek burger. They came out good but I knew I could do better. I experimented with different kinds of ingredients to mix into the turkey but I was not satisfied yet. So after much thinking and much cooking show watching; I decided on a spice rub. If you can put a spice rub on ribs or steak why can't you put it on a burger. I became determined at that moment! After looking at different recipes for different rubs, I decided to make a spicy coffee one. While trying to make one that tastes good I have come to the conclusion that some spices do not taste good when eaten directly out of the container. Sorry, I digress, so spicy coffee rub it is.

I am a type of person who loves big, bold, in-your-face flavors. So there is no surprise that I chose the flavors I chose.

Of course with every burger there must be cheese so I now had to find a cheese to stand up to the spice rub and homemade BBQ sauce. I decided to use smokey gouda based on recommendations I had read in a magazine. My burger was nearly done. Being a bacon lover (as I mentioned before) I decided to add an apple wood smoked bacon to the mix and everything was complete! All the smoky and spicy flavors mixed and just went POW! To add a little extra crunch I added some arugula and the peppery flavor was perfect.

If all those flavors sound a lot, trust me its not. To me, it was the perfect compliment to a bland turkey burger. To wash it all down I made an iced tea lemonade cocktail. It was perfect meal and drink to end the day.

My burger experimention definitely is not over. Stuffed burgers here I come!

Then and now....

I have had a passion for food my whole life or at least as far back as I can remember(for those who know me will find that amusing). I was the child in school who ate the green beans that came with the school lunch and chose PB&J over pizza. I was the teenager that gave her best friend her lunch money as a trade off for her homemade lunch just because it tasted better. Now, I am the adult who loves bacon and chooses to grate potatoes by hand even though I have lost chunks of my fingers; all because it just tastes better.

With all this craziness inside me, I decided to enroll in culinary school in New York(gasp!). It was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do but I loved every minute of it. Even when I was getting burned, never doing a good med dice and accidentally causing a giant fireball while deglazing my pan; I was at my happiest.

Now having graduated school, I found myself needing to fill that void. My sudden unemployment left me with a lot of time and cooking magazines on my hands. Experimenting at home: what else could be better! Having tried hundreds of recipes, I decided it was my turn to be creative.

While having a beer with a good friend, I was telling him some of the crazy things that have happened while I was doing my experimenting. Being the savvy guy he is he suggested I start a blog. Me being the person I am I say "who would want to read what I write". Then at that point I started to realize it doesn't matter who wants to read it, what matters is that I have something to say. Enter The Slanted Potato Blog, stage left. Thank you and enjoy the ride.