Chupaqueso.com

There have been a couple of comments in other threads about a special “omelette pan” that enables you to trifold your omelette without a spatula. Chupaqueso Reader Ford Finley stayed up all night watching TV just so he could track the thing down. Here’s a web address for Chef Giornali’s Omelet Pan, brought to you by the folks at humbly-named “Smart Inventions Inc.”

I’m not recommending any of you buy this thing. I see two problems with it:

1) It’s teflon, so it’s got a limited life expectancy.
2) It’s teflon with moving parts. I bet that life expectancy is measured in weeks if you make a couple of omelettes a day.

That said, if any of you want to buy one and review it for us, how you use your disposable income is no business of mine. But we’ll upgrade your chupaqueso.com WordPress account so that you can submit an article for our editorial staff to review.

(I probably shouldn’t accuse “smartinventions.com” of hubris in the same post where I refer to Jay and myself in the third person as an “editorial staff.”)

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.

Howard’s written a fair amount about low-carb eating in the context of the Atkins diet. Far be it from me to dispute the effectiveness of the diet, given his success with it. I should note here that my interest in the chupaqueso is rather different.

Like many others, I have type II diabetes. I am very thankful that I’m not insulin-dependent, and every day I can stave off that fate is one more day I’m happy. (I’m a former paramedic. In spite of that, or perhaps because of it, I intensely dislike getting stuck with a needle.) For the non-insulin-dependent diabetic, controlling blood sugar is principally a matter of medication, exercise, and consistent carbohydrate intake from one day to the next. I’m not as good about the exercise as I should be. I am doing better than I ever thought I could with diet, though.

Part of that success is consistency in carbohydrate intake. Here’s where the chupaqueso comes in: it’s a snack I can have without affecting my blood sugar. This is a Good Thing. That’s also why I’ll use ingredients that are not cheese and meat, although in small quantities. It works well and really knocks out the munchies.

I’m about to start upgrading the site to WordPress 2.0. Anything you post or comment between now and the time the upgrade is done may disappear. You Have Been Warned.

The site theme will also change, mainly to get rid of a layout bug that seems to mainly affect Safari. Since I use Safari, that bug obviously has to go.

Update: Upgrade complete. Have fun.

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