Hot Chicks

My friend Brian asked me for a simple but delicious appetizer that everyone will like.  So for Brian and his Christmas party, here is how to assemble some Hot Chicks.  You will need the following:

• Thick sliced bacon - one piece of bacon will do two Hot Chicks

• Boneless skinless chicken breasts - depending on the size, you can get six to eight slices from each breast

• Fresh jalapeno peppers - depending on the size, you can get eight to twelve pieces from each pepper

• String cheese (mozzarella) snack sticks  - each stick will do four Hot Chicks

• Toothpicks  - one per each

• Your favorite spicy hot rub - I use a rub I developed for my pork buttts and spare ribs on my smoker, but you can use any commercial dry rub you particularly like - there are hundreds of them out there.

Do the prep work:

1. cut each cheese stick in fourths
2. cut the bacon slices in half
3. cut the outer shell off the pepper and discard the stem and seeds, then cut pieces about the same size as the cheese
4. out of the widest part of the chicken breast, cut thin slices crossways as shown below;  they will need to be long enough to wrap around the cheese and pepper.  Save the remaining end pieces of chicken for other use.

Lay a chicken strip overlapping one end of the bacon strip, and then add a piece of cheese and of pepper as shown below.

Roll the chicken strip over the filling like this:

Continue to roll the chicken and bacon up fairly snug, keeping the cheese and pepper centered inside.  Secure the roll with a toothpick.

These go pretty fast once you get the parts all ready...

Sprinkle  the tops of these with the rub mentioned above

Here is a little tray of 16, ready to firm up in the fridge before hitting the oven.

 

I put these on a middle rack in my electric oven on high broil with the door open. Mine take about 15  minutes, but depending on your oven - Your Mileage May Vary.  I'd start checking them after 10 minutes.  

You can also top them with extras after they are finished - here I used slices of tomato and avocado and some coarse ground pepper.  I have also served them with an avocado cream dip, very popular.

Breakfast Bites - 'Bacon and Eggs To Go'

Here's to a different, but very tasty take on the lowly egg. There are thousands of recipes out there for evening finger foods and hors d'oerves - but what about breakfast? If you don't want pastry, you're out of luck - until now. Try these little babies, they're almost like breakfast tacos without the taco!

Ingredients:
12 eggs, hard boiled, prepared as in this post.
3 Tablespoons light canola or vegetable oil
4 Tablespoons water
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
2 Tablespoons sour cream
4 Tablespoons cooked and chopped: bacon bits, breakfast sausage or chorizo
salt & pepper
finely shredded mild cheddar cheese


Method:

Round up the reshaped eggs and a very sharp knife. Sure, you can make this recipe with round eggs, but they are less stable, and where's the fun in that?

Cut the above boiled eggs in half, around the largest diameter with a flat spot on each side. Remove the yolk form each half to a bowl. If you miss a little bit, it's not an issue.

Smash up the yolks and mix in the oil, water, onion powder and sour cream. Make sure this is well integrated. Once well-mixed, chop up and stir in the bacon bits.

Sample and adjust for salt and pepper to taste. Remove yolk mixture to quart sized zip bag.

Service:

Lightly warm the egg whites in microwave, and then warm the bag containing the yolk mixture. Snip off a small corner of the quart bag, turning the bag into a makeshift pastry bag. Use this new tool to pipe the yolk mixture into the waiting whites.

Lightly sprinkle the cheese over the eggs, and heat briefly in microwave until cheese just starts to melt. Serve immediately.

See... breakfast tacos without the taco!

FireCrackers

Don't blame me for perspiration or weight gain!

These things are far too delicious and addictive - when you make them be sure to give most of them away or you'll weigh 500 lbs. These simple little fiery nuggets are based on a recipe I got from my dear friend Nanette - I just tweaked it.

Ingredients:
1 box (4 sleeves) 100% wheat saltine crackers (wheat is important)
1 envelope of dry Hidden Vally Ranch Dip / Salad Dressing mix.
1 1/4 cup of light canola oil
2 tablespoons garlic powder
2 tablespoons dried red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon caraway seed (recommended but optional, but really fills out the taste)
6 tablespoons dried parsley (optional, but makes a nice addition)

Method:
Basically, you combine all the ingredients except the crackers and whisk them into a frenzy to combine well. I cheat and use my stick blender (immersion blender) in a mason jar - it's much faster and easier. Next, you pour it over the crackers and make sure they are all evenly coated.

I do this by using a large rubber spatula in a large plastic bowl, turning them over gently for a while until the oil is all absorbed. I have a friend who puts them in a seal-able plastic cake box and shakes them like crazy. Whatever floats your boat, the idea is to just get them all coated so the spices coat the crackers. I use wheat crackers as as barely-noticeable nod to healthiness, but you can use the regular crackers if you like. You may have to let them sit and go back and re-stir them a couple of times to get everything absorbed. Let them sit for a while before you dive in, and they will be less greasy.

I recently took a double batch of these to a church get-together, but I made them with only half the listed amount of red pepper flakes. Most folks still thought it was too hot!

Let me know if you try these and especially if you tweak the recipe to make it better!

Walkabout Mini-Fatties

This has been poking around in my mind for some time, so I finally decided to give it a shot. I know there are many of you out there that love a good fattie, or would like to. No, I'm not talking about THAT kind of fattie, but the kind that you cook in a smoker. As delicious as they are, they have one drawback - they aren't all that handy to eat neatly and they tend to be a bit messy. Well, here's my attempt to fix that problem. And no, walkabout doesn't mean they are made with kangaroo...

INGREDIENTS
1 lb. of my homemade sweet & spicy Italian sausage
4 pre-packaged mozzarella sticks
1 pkg egg roll wrappers
4 oz. marinara sauce
fresh Parmesano Reggiano cheese
fresh Peccorino Romano cheese
bell pepper, julienned
onions, julienned
sun-dried tomatoes, julienned
oregano, basil, salt & pepper



METHOD
First of all, prepare your mise en place. That's fancy French chef talk for "get all your stuff ready first!"
Roll the sausage out into a thin layer. As these are going to me small fatties, the sausage needs to be pretty thin while still staying together. Divide the sausage into individual thin sheets, about 4 1/2" by 6" inches. Apply a decent stripe of marinara, add your spices, onions, and grate the Parmesan and Romano onto the sauce.
For each fattie, add the strips of pepper and tomatoes, and the mozzarella stick. You might need to trim off a bit of the cheese depending on the length, or the size of your wrappers. I had to cut off about 3/4" of mine so the wrappers would be long enough.
Roll up your fattie nice and tight, sealing the ends well. Twist then into shape in a wrapper and put them in the fridge to set up. Once nice and firm, unwrap them and get them in the smoker. Realize as small as they are, they won't take very long and so won't take up a lot smokiness. Check them after 20 minutes, and take their temp every 5 minutes until the sausage is at 160 degrees F. Take them out and let them cool on a rack, and wick away any external grease with paper towels.
Once cooled, roll each fattie in a couple of egg roll wrappers. Two sheets makes the package a little more substantial for easy handling. Moisten the final flap of the wrap with a little water, and press it tight to seal.
Wet your fingers again, and wet the inside and outside of the ends of the wrapper that extend past the meat. Now fold them in a bit at a time, overlapping the folds and sealing the ends of the wrapper.
When you are all done it should look something like this:
Now it's time to heat up your oil. Get it to 360-370, and understand that your fatties won't be in it long! Prepare a place to drain them when removed from the oil. One trick I learned is to put a couple of paper towels in a sheet pan, then put a cooling rack on it - upside down. This way, the oil will get absorbed into the paper towels without sticking to them, because the rack is there. Using it upside down allows oil to flow tight into the paper, without having to accumulate and drip through an air space.

Put them in the oil carefully, two at a time, to keep from dropping the oil temperature too much.
Pull them out when they are the shade of brown you like, and place them on your draining pan to shed the remaining oil.
That's it! Pass 'em out and eat em'. The egg roll wrappers are nice and crunchy, and if you paint them inside with garlic butter before rolling - instant garlic bread!

I guess you could have a little dipping sauce available, but not if you want to go walkabout....

. . . . .

It's hard to tell the scale of these things with no point of reference, so here's a shot of my hand on the plate, a Walkabout Mini-Fattie, and my miniature cheese grater.







Now you have some convenient Walkabout Mini-Fatties - eat them with no muss and no fuss!

Snack Sticks

Another experience in the sausage world - snack sticks. I'm going to spare everyone the tedious meat preparation, seasoning and grinding - that pretty much is the same for most types of links.

I rounded up a nice fresh pork butt, prepared a good seasoning mix, and loosened up the casings. Since I don't have a stuffer, and I was only making 5 lbs. of sticks, I re-cleaned and prepared the Jerky Cannon. For those of you unfamiliar with such a thing, it is like a giant, food-safe caulking gun with interchangeable ends. Here's a picture of it next to dozen eggs, to give you the idea of the size of the thing:
Usually it is made for forming jerky, but with a sausage tube it works great for filling snack sticks. Here is the stuffed casing, freshly made:
After running down the length of the casings to even out any over- or under- filled sections, I loaded it all up on a tray for an overnight rest in the fridge:
Once out of the fridge the next day, it had firmed up quite a bit. I then proceeded to cut it all into sticks, getting ready for cooking:
Here they are, after getting to 154 degrees internally. I then gave them a shower to cool them down quickly, and let them sit out for a couple of hours to reach equilibrium:
And finally, it's time to enjoy the rewards of all this activity - eats! These are mighty tasty, but I think the next batch will benefit from the addition of a bit more garlic and red pepper flakes. After all, who wants dull snack stix?

South Texas Afterburners

Did some ABTs but don't have any prep pictures - sorry. I'll take some the next time. These were good-sized - those two grates are 8" across each. Split 'em down the sides and scooped out the innards and stuffed.

INGREDIENTS
24 lg large jalapeno peppers, fresh
1 lb Queso Fresco (or your choice of firm cheese) grated fine
8 oz cream cheese, softened
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
Salt, pepper and garlic to taste
1 lb chorizo (all meat, no filler Mexican pork sausage, not Spanish dried version)
2 lb bacon (thick and peppery is more $$ but better)
48 ea toothpicks
2 pr surgical gloves

METHOD
If you are smart, you will work on the peppers wearing surgical gloves. The hot pepper stuff is terribly hard to get off of your hands completely, and you don't want to scratch anything important for a while.

Set cream cheese out to soften. While softening, finely grate the cheese.

Cook the chorizo in a frying pan, breaking up chunks and stirring as necessary. Cook until done,; it should release a lot of orange grease. Discard grease and drain on paper towels or a brown paper bag, let cool.

Don set of surgical gloves #1. Split the jalapenos on one side, from near stem to near tip. Don't cut them in half; you want a slit you can open and close, like a change purse. Carefully scrape out all the seeds and ribs and pulp, this is where the really evil heat lives. Lay peppers on a tray. Remove and discard gloves.

Mix shredded cheese, cream cheese and chorizo until incorporated. Mix in the cilantro. Add salt, pepper and garlic to taste. If it seems a little thick, you can always mix in a little bacon grease for texture and taste (Pork fat rules! - Emeril). Pack it into a heavy (freezer type) quart Ziplock bag. Don set of surgical gloves #2.

Break out the prepared peppers. Snip a small corner off of the Ziploc bag. Pick up the first pepper and squeeze it so that the slit opens up. Use the Ziploc like a piping bag to fill the peppers with the mixture. Be sure to get down in the ends, but do not over fill. Repeat for remaining peppers.Next, use a toothpick to pin one end of a strip of bacon to the tip of a pepper. Wrap the bacon around the pepper, overlapping into a spiral, so that the other end of the bacon comes out even with the top. Pull bacon tight, sealing slit in pepper and pin through pepper with another toothpick at the top. Repeat for remaining peppers.

Toss the second set of gloves. Now, you have two options, you can either grill these or smoke them. If you grill them until bacon is done, you'll get what we had at the rally. If you smoke them, it'll take 2-3 hours, but the peppers will soften, darken and lose a lot of their 'heat'. Both of these methods taste great, but are different.

"Smoke 'em if you got 'em"