Chupaqueso.com

I finally got clear of my other stuff going on and added the words to go with the pretty pictures on the basic howto page. Hopefully, that page will demystify the process of making the chupaqueso and allow even the most inexperienced computer geek to successfully make the first one. Please comment here if there’s stuff that needs clarifying.

One problem with low-carb diets, for me anyway, is that I get really tired of eggs every morning. I don’t mind eating salads, I like grilled chicken, fish is fine, and we’ve already established that I really like cheese.

I do like eggs, but defaulting to an omelette every morning wears on me.

This morning I had tomatoes and fried cheese, drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. There are a few grams of carbs in there, but not enough to cause a problem.

You’ll need:
1) A bottled Roma tomato (or a fresh one, but it’s January, and my garden is empty), sliced or chunked so the bits are bite-sized.
2) some thick slices of mozzarella
3) two tbsp of extra-virgin olive oil
4) two tsp of balsamic vinegar

The hardest part about all of this (assuming you can find a good tomato) is frying the mozzarella. The griddle or skillet needs to be a little hotter than pancake temperature — I’d say between 300 and 400 degrees F, but I’m guessing. Lay the cheese on the nonstick (or oiled) surface, and have your spatula ready. When the cheese has a bubbling layer around the edge, it’s probably ready to flip. Be quick, and press down on the spatula so you don’t smash the fried part of the cheese out of the way and end up with a spatula full of goo. Flip.

(Note: If you’ve made a chupaqueso or two successfully, you’ll be able to figure out frying a thick slice of mozzarella.)

Flip the cheese again in about 30 seconds. Remove it from the griddle, and slap it down on the plate next to the tomato slices. Drizzle with olive oil and vinegar. Eat.

Sandra and I bottle our own tomatos (read that “Sandra bottles tomatos and I help eat them”) so we’ve got plenty of tasty romas on hand. You can bet I’ll be doing this again.

Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters (and mufters, lest I leave anyone out), we here at chupaqueso.com have been fleened.

I think that’s the word. It’ll do until someone suggests a better one. Gary Tyrell at Fleen wrote a couple of paragraphs on chupaqueso.com and the possibility of a food-related trend in webcomics. I then wrote half a dozen anal paragraphs attacking his use of a helpless adverb.

So… which site has more readers? Did chupaqueso.com just get fleened, or did fleen.com just get… chupa’d?

The Chocolate Chupaqueso had its origins at Linucon 2.0 in Austin, Texas. Jay Maynard and I were running the Chupaqueso panel in the Con Suite, and Steve Jackson was one of the notables present.

A little back-story: Steve Jackson is one of the biggest names in tabletop games. Steve Jackson Games continues to produce new stuff, and they handle the merchandising for Schlock Mercenary. I was down in Austin a day before the convention in order to meet with Steve, and that Thursday evening I got to play-test the new Illuminati expansion deck.

To make a long story short, during the course of game play I ended up creating a new card for the game — one that mirrored the “Microstuff” card, and paid homage to Open Source computing. It was a real thrill for me to watch Steve noodle around on the computer looking for cards he could remove from the deck to make room for mine.

Well, fast-forward two days to the chupaqueso panel… somebody (I don’t recall who) asked what would happen if we used Cheez-whiz as a filling. Jay and I both figured the answer was “neither of us will eat it,” but this gal ran out and grabbed a can of cheez-whiz from somewhere, and we made a Cheez-Whiz Chupaqueso. It was as nasty as I expected it to be.

But the door had been opened, and anywhere there’s an open door, folks like Steve Jackson won’t just walk through and look around — they’ll widen the door frame. Steve located a bag of chocolate chips, and suggested that we try a chocolate chupaqueso.

Now before you cry “foul,” bear in mind that chocolate fondue often has cheese for dipping. Chocolate and cheese have a long history together. They’re not quite as tight as wine and cheese, or cheese and crackers, but they’ve been flirting with one another for years, and I’m led to understand that there have been trysts enough to make both the crackers and the wine quite jealous.

So we made one. Cheddar shell, as usual, and then a handful of chocolate chips.

Reactions were varied. They varied between “this is sticky” and “make another one.” Oh, and there were a couple of 14-year-old girls in the con suite who really did NOT need more sugar, and who thought the chocolate chupaqueso was the best thing going. This is probably because their hyper-thin, hyperactive bodies reacted positively to the presence of actual protein molecules, and therefore subconsciously the girls preferred the chocolate chupaqueso to straight chocolate chips.

Anyway, I figured that since Steve was including “Open Gnoonix” in his Illuminati deck, it was only right that I include the Chocolate Chupaqueso in my blog. It’s probably a bigger honor to design a card for a Steve Jackson Game than to design a snack for this site, but look at it this way — you folks can try out Steve’s snack today (depending on what you already have in your kitchen) while if you want to try out my Illuminati card you have to wait until it ships.

This reader-submitted recipe comes to us from “ficmod” (dunno his/her real name — sorry!)

Now… I personally hate peanut brittle, but since some of you do NOT, I figure I’ll pass this along. After all, it’s a microwave treat that might just end up being really tasty.

I was told you were looking for recipes for easy-to-make ‘geek food’, so to speak. XD I have a recipe here my Uncle dug up on the web a few years ago, for excellent microwaveable peanut brittle. Sets up in any conditions, so long as you aren’t slow about it. Here’s the recipe:

Munchy Microwaveable Peanut Brittle
1.5 Cups of Raw Peanuts
1 Tsp Butter or Margarine (Butter Preferred)
1 Cup of Granulated Sugar
1 Tsp Vanilla
1/2 cup White Corn Syrup
1 Tsp Baking Soda
1/8 Tsp Salt

Stir together the peanuts, Sugar, Syrup, and salt in a 1.5 Qt Heat-Resistant Casserole dish (we use a 8-10 cup Pyrex Measuring Bowl, ourselves).
Microwave 7-8 minutes, stirring well after 4 minutes. Return mixture to microwave for 3 minutes, 30 seconds. Add butter and Vanilla. Return mixture to microwave for 1 minute, 40 seconds. Add baking soda, stir it well and VERY QUICKLY. Pour onto buttered cookie sheet. Stuff sets up fast, and is VERY HOT. Let it cool and dry, and there you have it.

What does this have to do with the chupaqueso? Well… they’re both food. Or at least, the chupaqueso is food, and this looks like it will PROBABLY be food. That’s close enough for me.

You’ve made microwave nachos before, right? Just grate cheese on chips, nuke for 30 seconds to a minute, and then eat. Well, we had those for dinner (with taco meat on the side, to be scooped with the chips — we’re good parents, really) and about the time Sandra realized I was going to have a plate (I was off the low-carb wagon for the weekend) we BOTH realized we were out of cheddar.

So I told her to grate some of the Meadow Creek Appalachian Shitake/Leek cheese on mine instead.

Man, those were some gooood nachos.

Later, Sandra used some of it in a quiche. Good quiche, too.

I still think this cheese is best just eaten straight (after being allowed to come up to room temperature, of course) but it’s good for melting and cooking, too.

–Howard “Meadow Creek Dairy’s Unofficial Evangelist” Tayler

So… is chupaqueso.com here to stay, or is it just a flash in the pan (pun obviously intended). Are you wondering whether you should keep checking back?

Well, here’s a short list of things I need to blog about. I don’t have a schedule, but we DO have an RSS feed (allowing you to nudge a bookmark and see what’s new without linking in):

• - Low Carb Dieting
• - The Chocolate Chupaqueso DONE!
• - Cheese Books
• - Something more erudite re: Cast Iron
• - The elusive Microwave Chupaqueso
• - A photo tour of the Tayler kitchen

Speculate all you want on these topics, but know that I’ve got enough to say on each of them that I won’t be commenting in response. But I will say that the Chocolate Chupaqueso was the brain child of none other than Steve Jackson.

This morning for breakfast I experimented a bit. I made a chupaqueso (on my cast iron sweetheart) with a mozzarella shell and a filling of Meadow Creek Appalachian Shitake/Leek (henceforth called “MCA”).

I’m of two minds about it:
1) Delicious. Let’s do that again.
2) Just because you have 3/4 of a wheel (about 7 pounds) of MCA doesn’t mean it’s okay to waste such a delicious cheese by MELTING it.

The MCA is oily when melted, like cheddar only more so. It also has a stronger, earthier flavor. Sure, it’s a better filling than cheddar would be (and I fried some, just for giggles, and it makes a tastier cheese crisp than cheddar does ,too) but that’s not the same thing as saying “that’s what I’m going to do with 7 pounds of cheese.” I think that MCA really is too much of a treat eaten straight to be sacrificed to more than a couple of these chupaqueso projects.

(An omelette, though… I may have to try it in an omelette.)

Jay’s got some pictures up here, but hasn’t added explanatory text yet.

If you flip through them fast enough, you’ll have a chupaqueso movie! (Jay takes a LOT of pictures.)

I was enamored once. I had a crush. I thought, like most men with crushes, that She Was The One. I thought that come whatever, We Two would grow old together, aging gracefully, and sharing a love that endures.

She was the perfect cooking surface. Ah, my sweet Teflon. I brought home the bacon, and she was the pan I fried it up in. The hotcakes like which some things went always went best on Teflon’s smooth skin.

Her smooth skin… so amazing to the touch. It was as if it wasn’t even THERE it was so soft. And when Chupaqueso was but a twinkle in my eye, she was there, ready to bear it through the heat, the turning, the twisting… Teflon bore my child, and I thought we two were forever.

But it couldn’t last. I tried to treat her with care, I was as tender as a man can be, never abrasive, and never EVER using metal utensils. For a while it seemed like we WOULD see forever, but then her skin began to discolor, and my sweet Teflon started to grab things.

I did what I could. I worked around her rough edges, forgiving her the occasional stuck spot. But it only got worse. Her rough edges only got rougher, and Teflon’s smooth skin gave way to bare metal a bit at a time. And one day I realized the two of us were finished. I could no longer trust her to help me with meals, because she just wouldn’t let go of them. She had changed, and what she had become I could no longer abide atop my stove.

I thought about taking a younger bride into my kitchen, one whose Teflon skin was still supple, but the infatuation was gone. After all, I knew that no matter how kindly I treat her, any Teflon I bring home will eventually turn on me, ruining meals and making cleanup a nightmare. Oh, it might be years before that happened, but having seen the past I felt I could see the future, and it held only heartbreak, and stuff stuck to the pan.

Then I met her… Cast Iron. She seemed so ungainly at first. She wasn’t just rough around the edges — she was ALL rough edges, and bare metal ones at that. But she gave me this look, and she promised me that she could do everything teflon could, and that she really COULD do it forever… if only I’d spend a little time at the beginning of our relationship learning to use oil.

I was skeptical, but I got the oil, and my Cast Iron sweetheart and I worked on those rough edges. Two hours and three hundred degrees later I saw that her skin glistened, darkly daring me to TRY to stick something to it. So I did, and it didn’t, and we did it again and again and again. French toast, pancakes, omelettes, and of course fried cheese… she was untiring, and I had a big appetite.

I have a new love. She may look like she’s still a little rough around the edges, but OH! can she ever cook. She’s not as glamorous as Teflon, but she’s beautiful in her own way. And I can see already that she’ll grow more beautiful with time. The first time we made chupaquesos together, it was as if we’d been doing it for years. And the promise of Cast Iron is that we WILL be doing it for years. If I treat her well, breaking out the oil from time to time, and never throwing her in the dishwasher or leaving her outside in the rain, she’ll easily outlive me.

Okay, I’ll admit that it’s a little creepy thinking of my new love, my Cast Iron griddle, cooking with another man. But that’s decades away. When the time comes, I’ll just have to make sure that I find her a man who likes chupaquesos, and who knows how to use the oil.