Chupaqueso.com

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.

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.

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.

I was clicking around LJ, and found this thread in the Schlocktroops Live Journal.

My quote: “If any of my creations survive me, I hope the chupaqueso does, if only because the universe deserves a good joke.”

Who’s laughing NOW, mister Universe?

I just posted the Original Recipe for the chupaqueso, and you can find it by following this link, or by following the link over there on the right under “Pages.”

The original recipe may be original, but it’s hardly the best. Jay needs to weigh in here with HIS recipes, because he took the original and improved it immeasurably. (He even improved the PROCESS).

–Howard

Welcome to chupaqueso.com!

The site is live now — “up and running,” as promised in the “Hello World!” post, complete with sponsors, room for more sponsors, and a FAQ. All it needs now is for Jay and I to get around to posting our favorite chupaqueso recipes, tips on picking cheese, and whatever else strikes our dairy-area fancies.

I guess we’d better get on with it, then. Until then, if you you’ve got questions not covered in the FAQ, use the comments feature to ask ‘em below.

–Howard

(Cross-posted and back-dated from schlockmercenary.com)

At almost the precise moment my “Cheeeeese” blog entry aired, a Schlocker emailed me with what sounded like an anecdotal or urban-legend-esque tale. Supposedly there was this young woman who saw a block of queso blanco on a neighbor’s table, decided it was uncut cocaine, and hired a hit man to kill everyone in the house so she could steal the coke and resell it.

To her misfortune (and to the good fortune of everyone in the home) the hit man she hired was an undercover police officer. And the cops searched the house, having reasonable cause, and determined that the queso blanco was not, in fact, cocaine.

A little googling pulled up the original article. Here it is, from the Washington Post. The article aired on December 6th (here at Schlock Mercenary we’re less than 10 days behind the rest of the journalistic world) and at that time Jessica Sandy Booth remained in jail, with bond set at a cool million dollars, on four charges of attempted murder and four counts of soliciting murder.

All over a block of queso blanco. I think I’ll go fry some right now, and get my buzz on.

(EDIT: The Post article is gone… here’s another article instead.)

This is a placeholder until we can get things up and running.