Chupaqueso.com

I love eggrolls. I don’t know whether or not they’re an authentic asian food, and frankly, I don’t care. I just love ‘em.

It’s probably because they’re deep fried. (That’s as close as we’re getting to “chupaqueso” in this post folks — the word “fried.”)

Years ago I bought some eggroll wrappers and tried to make my own. I remember being frustrated by the results. So frustrated that I think I went an entire decade before allowing myself to be tempted by those wrappers again.

It turns out there are really only three tricks to making delicious eggrolls:

1) Chop the filling finely, and use as many of the “right” ingredients as you can. These include sausage, cabbage, grated carrot, green onion, and ginger–all of which should be cooked together before assembly.

2) Wrap tightly, and use a little water to stick the last corner in place.

3) Deep fry.

We’ve bought eggrolls from the local Chinese food places, and my kids love ‘em. We’ve bought pre-made eggrolls at the grocery store, and nobody will eat them. When I began lifting obviously home-cooked eggrolls out of the fryer, the kids were dubious.

They were even more worried about the homemade sweet-and-sour sauce — I added food coloring, but it wasn’t quite the right shade of obviously-artificial-red.

Then they tasted them, and I got that compliment that home-cooks LIVE for.

“Daddy, these are the better than any of the ones we buy!”

I just got this email from a reader:

Hello Mr. Tayler,
I just wanted to share with you the results of a recent culinary experiment.
Starting out like a chupaqueso, but with a 12 inch cast iron skillet with mozzarella out to the edge. Toast it and flip it over as usual then after re-flipping, transfer to a round foil pie pan. Add tomato sauce and your favorite pizza toppings (including cheeeeeeese of course) then pop into the toaster oven for 10 minutes or so. Presto! Low-carb pizza! It came out quite well and of course was quesoliscious, or is that chupaliscious? Hope you find this usefull. Keep on Schlockin’.
Sincerely,
Jay Scott Raymond, Schlock fan

Thanks for the tip, Jay! This sounds tasty, if a bit tricky. Still, if anybody out there has the chops to flip a conventional chupaqueso, making a pizza on top of the flat “cheese-crisp” part should be no trouble at all.

Ah, syrup-food. Breakfast treats with sweet, mushy innards and mapley goodness drizzled over the top. They’re oh-so-strictly verboten under my current diet.

So I make do with this recipe:

Ingredients
1/4 cup “quark” (yogurt cheese) or cream cheese
1 egg
1 tbsp milk
1 tbsp butter
maple flavoring
banana flavoring
2 packets of Splenda

To begin: soften the butter, add a packet of splenda and a couple of drops of maple flavoring. Mix well. This is the topping.

Beat the egg and add the milk. Add just a sprinkle of Splenda.

Add a drop or two of banana flavoring and the rest of packet #2 of Splenda to the quark (yogurt cheese, which must be made with UNSWEETENED yogurt, or you’re getting sugar in your low-carb meal). Cream cheese will work too, but quark (pronounced “kvark”) is better.

Now… heat your griddle or large skillet, and pour the egg into a thin layer. When it has cooked mostly through, gently spread (or “carefully glop”) the artificially-sweetened, artificially flavored qvark onto it in a line near one edge. Roll it up, let it heat just a little more, and then slide it off onto a plate.

Drizzle the maple-splenda butter over the top, and eat it right now, because it is best served hot.

Carb content is about 5g - 1g/oz in the quark, 1g per packet of Splenda, and 1g per tablespoon of milk.

For me, the perfect skillet is determined by three things:

1) non-stick surface.
2) Nine-inch diameter.
3) A lid that fits.

This is because when I’m not low-carbing, my favorite breakfast in the world is two basted eggs with two pieces of toast, buttered, for dipping in the yolks. Other sides may accompany it — orange juice, grits, and bacon complete the “hearty” variation — but basted eggs and toast are the key elements.

With the impending Teflocalypse (Teflogeddon? Teflognarok? Find me a word that says “the end of the world if the world depends on Teflon”) I need to find a skillet that will work as well as any one of the four 9-inch teflon pans I’ve had over the last sesquidecade.

See, a basted egg BEGINS just like a fried egg — you take a yolk-intact egg and drop it gently into a hot pan, preferably with some butter already sizzling in there. (Note: in terms of timing, this is also the point at which the plunger on the toaster must be depressed). The egg is allowed to fry for a moment, and then the steam-basting begins.

You take the lid for the pan, put about 2 tbsp of water in the lid, and then dump the water in next to the egg. Now pop the lid on and wait for the toast to come up.

Yes, that’s how I time it. So very scientific, I know. It’s more of a performance art.

Anyway, when the toast is done, the egg is done (assuming you like your toast done the way I like mine done, and your toaster works like mine does, and you have the heat set right… so many variables, so many assumed values) and you put both of them on your plate.

If, that is, you can get the egg off the pan. See, with a good teflon pan, the boiling water will lift the egg from the surface, and the whole mess slides right out, no trouble. With stainless steel it just plain WON’T WORK.

The question — will it work with cast iron? I’m not about to go buy a 9″ cast iron skillet to TEST with, because I’m short the disposable income. I hope it works, though, because within five years both of my 9″ skillets are going to be due for replacement, and by then the Fourth Angel will be Brandishing His Spatula and Cleansing the Griddle of the World with Fire and With Olive Oil. Or something like that.

After dinner, I still felt like something dessert-oid. Howard’s posting about the chocolate chupaqueso, along with a memory of reading about chocolate-dipped jalapenos somewhere, combined to inspire me. Here’s the result:

That’s a cheddar shell, with Kraft pizza cheese, sliced jalapenos, and Hershey’s Special Dark chocolate syrup. This turned out suboptimally: the chocolate got too runny to allow picking it up and eating with the hands. Even so, it was yummy. The jalapeno bite was a bit blunted, and the chocolate wasn’t overpowering.

Next time, though, I’ll use chocolate chips.

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.

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.

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.)