Challenge Entry: The Cucone

Meet the cucone.

Based on the bacone.


Here's me holding it.

Here's that guy with his.


The bacone is a cone make of cooked bacon filled with scrambled eggs, cheese, country gravy, and topped with a biscuit. The cucone is a cone made of peeled cucumber, filled with poached egg whites, goat cheese, and topped with a piece of smoked salmon.

I'd say this guy speaks entirely for himself, but... Boo-Yah!!!

Zucchini Challenge: Disastrous Plating Failure

While drunk in a Manhattan bar after a trip to the Guggenheim, Erin and I were discussing the challenge. Here's what we came up with. Tuna tartare with chopped vinegar soaked zucchini topped with a poached (because I wasn't sure about raw) quail egg. The plate is rimmed with tonkatsu sauce and dollops of spicy kewpie mayonnaise and garnished with zuchinni peel (as per Kyle's bitching). I have never been able to plate dishes for my life so trust that it tasted better than it looked. Erin agreed.I started with fresh sushi grade tuna I had gotten at the asian market on rt 18. I badgered the hell out of the guy because neither of us could find a common language but eventually we agreed it was in fact fresh sushi grade tuna and that we are both fans of giving thumbs up. I guess we all speak the international language of The Fonz.Here is the chopped zucchini sitting in vinegar. I did that just for some extra taste. We then rinsed the zucchini and incorporated it with the tuna.I couldn't get the water spinning fast enough so the eggs poached a little wispy but they were still good. Not quite as good as a raw egg yolk sitting on your tartare but I wasn't 100% sure about these quail eggs so I didn't want to chance it.Erin spent most of the time snacking on these spicy wasabi crackers and cherry tomatoes I picked up at the asian grocery while getting the tuna. I eventually convinced her to chop up some zucchini and tomatos together for a cracker topping. Here's her rebuttal to my dish. She incorporated leftover tuna. It was miles better than what I made.She also topped these suckers off with some spicy kewpie mayonnaise leftover from my dish. These little bastards were increadible. Perfect spice to match the coolness of the zucchini and the tuna. I think she beat me. Not afraid to admit it.

BENTO BOXES

Meredith and I have been obessed with bento boxes for quite some time now. Whenever we go out for Japanese, Meredith orders the bento and we are constantly talking about buying our own boxes to bring to work or school or pretty much anywhere. Today we had decided to bring them to the movies. The original plan was to put together some bento boxes based on whatever movie we were gonna go see and sit in the theater with them. We had spent maybe half an hour sending eachother pictures of different crazy bento boxes on the internet. Unfortunately I over slept and we ended up not going to the movie. We spent way too long wandering the aisles of the RT 18 Asian Market to get all our ingredients including two packs of sashimi from the restaurant we love out in front of the market. Then we went home and got to work. The picture above is the ingredients we were going to use. Once we got the rice going we started opening up the canned fish and making the "tuna mayo" (CwD).

This picture is Meredith packing one of her rice balls. I think this one is "tuna mayo" wrapped with a strip of nori and covered in rice topping. We kept forgetting to cut the nori first and it turned into a mad scramble with our hands covered in sticky rice.

This is one of the bentos filled with rice balls (boxes courtesy of our mom). They were all sooooo gooooood. Luckily Meredith didn't eat all of hers and I had leftovers that I'm eating while I'm typing this.

This is my finished bento. I wish I had a picture of Meredith's. It was much more elegant. I kinda just shoved stuff in there. Below my initials and the sashimi is a bed of sticky rice. Above it is cucumber strips, broiled eel and mackerel covered with avacado and eel sauce, oysters, fake crab meat, and an anchovy.
This is a picture of Meredith eating a rice ball and getting pissed at me for taking pictures of her eating. She hates when I do that. Anyway the bentos and rice balls were delicious. We ended up sitting around eating them and watching Metalocalypse. A truly blogworthy night.

KETTLE CORN

This one goes out to Matt Keys! The genius cook! The master of the corn!

because he did what i'm not sure i could have done. he kettle-cooked some corn! mmm so good. some of the kernels were cooked a bit too much for me (see the golden brown corns above) but he preferred those, so it worked out quite nicely.

2 parts kettle corn
1 part white sugar
1 part oil (corn, preferably... though matt used olive oil and it seemed to work)
salt

(he cooked this with 1/2 cup corn)

take the oil and put it in a kettle, or for those of us in urban america, a thick-bottomed pot. put the oil on the stove on HIGH. put three kernals in the oil, and when the pop, take them out and stir the sugar in until it dissolves. i assume this was pretty quickly. then throw the rest of the corn in, and shake the pot until all the corn is popped! be careful not to burn the corn, which WILL happen if you dont keep shaking the pot. better to have unpopped kernals then a whole bunch of black and gross ones.

salt to taste. then strip down to movie-watching clothes (underwear, preferably), sit back, and pop in The Matrix and eat that kettle corn. oh yeah. best summer night ever.