Category Archives: Food and Drink

Articles relating to dining out or simply cooking at home.

I Am The Egg Man – In A Sense I Guess

Or should I have said “I am an egg man”?

Since the PiercingKen blogsite is often about some of the kitchen skullduggery that I involve myself in, I decided to invite you all over for breakfast. Well, in a manner of speaking that is. It was Saturday and the day before Easter and I was not only hungrier than usual for this kind of morning but I also felt like putting a bunch of stuff together and work out a recipe for you all to potentially enjoy. Sadly, I had not thought of taking individual shots of each and every ingredient this time around because not only have I done that before, but how exciting are shots of chopped up stuffs anyway. My goal this morning was to fix up a great omelet and I just love the things in all honesty. Write this down for reference okay? This one used three medium sized eggs, some sliced pepperoni, chopped up mushrooms, pepper jack cheese and salsa (of the medium hotness). I will type out the steps I took after you enjoy the yummy photos. Here is the final result on the plate with a tasty onion Bialey. Looks good right?



Here’s a shot from the side of the plate. I could not wait to sink my fangs into this one and finish enjoying the non-pictured but massive cup of coffee I had made. This was clearly going to get me prepped for the evening’s Metal show. In order to learn about that you will have to monitor my Official PiercingMetal Musings Blog (which I think a lot of you are doing as well).



OK so now the steps. For this particular omelet I used three medium sized eggs as opposed to two jumbo ones, and once they were nicely blended together I toss them into the medium pan. A small pat of butter was added for good measure.

After about thirty seconds of this cooking in the pan I tossed the chopped pepperoni, mushrooms and the cheese right on top to cook a little deeper into the eggs. Then the tricky part of flipping it was done but as you can see in the image I did alright this time. Figures on a day without company it comes out perfect. The insides were nice and cooked and the cheese super gooey.

This was the perfect fuel for the later evening Metal show that I would be seeing. That’s all I have for you now though. Back to your day you go.

Cooking Up Some “Extreme Baked Potatoes”

This one was pretty easy and I decided to share the concoction with you all based on my just chilling out one evening and feeling like cooking up something tasty and relatively quick. I love baked potatoes, and I also love “amping them up” or making the eating experience a little bit more Metal. This is a simple one and I didn’t photograph it in a step by step fashion since there was no need to.

Ingredients:
2 reasonably sized Idaho Potatoes (I used two smaller ones since I am trying to watch what I eat every now and again).
4-6 wedges of cheese. For this experience I used both a Sharp Cheddar and a Pepperjack Cheese. The latter one has a nice little kick to it that is wonderful.
6-8 Jalapeno Peppers
2-4 Pepperoncini Peppers
4 slices of smoked kielbasa
4 slices of pepperoni
Salsa of Choice (mild, medium, or hot). I went with Medium. I find the brand I use perfect for this. Their hot is too much so and their mild is in a word, lame.

The Steps:
First bake the potatoes. I use the setting on my microwave and that takes no more than 3 or 4 minutes to get them done. Then let them sit a moment so you can handle them easily. You obviously should thoroughly wash the potatoes and poke them a couple of times with a knife before putting them into the micro.

The rest is pretty easy and just a placement project. I technically made two different kinds of this recipe today and had the kielbasa, pepperoncini, and cheddar cheese on one while the other had the pepperoni, pepperjack cheese and jalapenos. One of these was much hotter than the other. Can you tell which one?

This is a slightly different angle of the whole shebang before I nuked it a little more. I didn’t take a photo of the final product but it pretty much looks the same as this. Only much gooier.

After they are melted to your preference you can put the salsa on the top of them. I don’t melt the cheeses with that on the top and opt to wait until it is finished and ready to be served. That’s all, this takes about ten minutes in total and depending on how many people you have hanging out is how many you will need. This could be considered a two person nosh since we made four individual segments of it. Give it a try.

Getting My Food On @ Villa Verde Restaurant

A couple of days ago I posted a blog with some quick photos of a scenic view I had while on a family gathering. We had all convened at a Spanish/Portuguese restaurant called Villa Verde and it is located in Wayne, NJ. Anyways, I am one who sometimes considers himself a foodie and while not someone with a upper echelon palate I like what I like, and Spanish cuisine is one of them.

After seeing how the Foodspotting website worked with its members taking pics of food and sharing it with the member community, I figured I would practice for my own submissions by taking photos of the fine far being offered up here at Villa Verde. Starting us off here is a plate of mussels. They were very tasty but my only problem with mussels is how the actual mussel is so very small. You end up eating a bunch of them if your really hungry I will say that much.

Next on the table were some amazing chorizos and I did a number on these since I don’t get to eat them all that often.

Some stuffed mushrooms. I liked but did not love these. I am still kind of amazed at how I even eat mushrooms now considering for many years I avoided them like the plague. Not sure why but I do use them a lot nowadays. Hmm, that makes me think that a nice chorizo and portabello mushroom dish might be nice to make. If I do it, I will post the recipe here in my cooking with Ken section.

Here is a pretty standard but still tasty fried calamari. Don’t get me wrong as they did a fine job of it but I have been spoiled to this kind of cuisine ever since I went to my now favorite Vietnamese restaurant Nha Trang and sampled their crispy squid in garlic. OK, I am hungry just writing that down.

The baked clams were a popular hit at the table and as you see I could not even get my photo fast enough without someone snaring one of the plates occupants. They did a nice job on the clams for sure.

I saw these shrimp listed as “Riojasm Shrimp” and I am sorry that I do not know what that means. I guess its the way they prepare them. As a shrimp lover there are really no ways you can offer me shrimp and not have it appease my appetite. Suffice it to say there was a lot of seafood going on at the place. Never a bad thing unless you are allergic to the stuff. Oh in this shot you can see the bread as well, and I believe they made this in house. I love bread. LOVE it.

This was a simple plate of yellow rice. It was nice to have this on the table as well. I usually order this kind of rice with black beans when I order Mexican food but this was not a Mexican restaurant of course.

One of the folks at my table had ordered salmon as their entree so I snapped a photo of this for you to see. As you might notice it comes with a veggie medley and some in house prepared potato chips. I’ve seen this at a few places of late and I enjoy it if they do it properly.

I ordered the Filet Mignon simply because it was Filet Mignon. I’m not going to pass that up. It was good.

Cake. What else should I say?

More Cake 🙂

This is flan. That’s a tasty caramel custard for dessert.

Check them out if you are ever in Wayne, NJ or close enough to visit them. I liked it enough and should I be in the region you know I will be heading there for sure to enjoy more tasty goodness. If you want to check out my Foodspotting please click HERE or read some Yelps click HERE.

Official Website: http://www.vilaverderestaurant.com/main.html

Foodtastic: The Ungrilled Cheesy Sandwich

I’ve been meaning to post this simple little recipe for a quick comfort grilled cheese sandwich which in all honesty is not grilled at all and more melted to achieve its effect. I started making them like this to avoid the extra intake of excess butter or cooking oils. That’s no good for you if overdone after all. Sharing this one with you was based on one of my friends posting on her Facebook how much she loved grilled cheese sandwiches so now the rest of you readers benefit. Let’s begin.

We are starting with a couple of pieces of white bread but these days I have opted to use something a little healthier like a whole wheat or seven grain bread. It surely adds to the taste and if you want to be brave go with pumpernickel.

Bread Is The Beginning

Once toasted we move over to the toaster oven. I hope you have one of these as otherwise the rest of the recipes steps are kind of useless to you. You CAN use a microwave but that is just not the same in my humble opinion. Of course you can try and let us know how you made out with the comments section. We’ll leave the kitchen light on for you.

Toast The Bread

For this recipe I decided to use some spicy brown mustard. I like a little kick to my food and you can also use a good hot sauce (not the pepper water that is often sold as the stuff) for a different vibe to the fun. Since I had the Gulden’s stuff in the house I went that route.

Add Spicy Brown Mustard

Lay a few slices of American cheese on each slice of bread. I went with two for each side as that was going to be more than enough. My goal is to eat and not overdo it and we still had some ingredients to go.

Layer The Sliced Cheese

As I assembled my working area I noticed I still had some mozzarella cheese and I wanted to put it to good use. I sliced it up nice and thin and applied to the top of the slices of American cheese.

I Added Some Mozzarrella

Now we’ll put the tray back into the toaster over and click the toast button which should run for about a minute on a standard device. You need to stick around for this since its a very quick process and you don’t want to burn your sandwich. Once melted it looks like this if you didn’t over melt and its quite visually appealing. We’re almost done.

Cheese Is Meltified

I mentioned loving some spice so I took some whole pepperoncini and sliced them into halves. For this particular sandwich I only used one larger pepperoncini as it was more than sufficient. If they were smaller you could surely use a couple of them or even try out some Jalapeno peppers. Mind you that I have NOT yet tried those on this but it would probably work out fine.

Add The Peppers

Take the whole thing and put them together and press lightly so these two sides of cheese meet and connect. We’re still working with some hot stuff so that should happen with no incident. Doesn’t look too bad in the end right? I know that I was happy with it.

Combine The Sides

Now it’s time to eat and you can serve this with a sour pickle and some chips or perhaps pretzels. Total preparation time is less than ten minutes if you need an exact count and that is great. It’s also easy to clean up after this one.

 

Ingredients Used:
Sliced Bread
Sliced Cheese
Sliced Mozzarella
Slicked Pepperoncini
Spicy Mustard

When Good Things Go Bye Bye: The Pizza Coupons >:0

OK I am pissed. Why you might ask? Well let me tell you what happened and its all because of these little clip out coupons that one normally finds on the boxes for the Nino’s pizzeria in Bay Ridge. For as long as I can remember in terms of a healthy amount of recent years, this particular pizzeria offered you the means to get a free large pizza pie after collecting 10 of the coupons that you would find stamped on the pizza box. Here’s a visual of a single one for reference.

Over the last couple of years you seemed to need about twelve of the coupons but that was easy to attain if you invited some friends over for a sporting event and some beers.  Totally pizza munching kind of things let you stock up on the coupons a little faster but with the last pizza I ordered I noticed that there was no coupon on the box.  I thought it was a mistake but then Mom and Dad told me that they didn’t notice one either when they last ordered pizza for themselves.  At this point I had a decent amount of the coupons stocked up and I felt I was very close to a free pie which would be wisely used on a night of blogging about some of my recent adventures in music or just conventional photographic discoveries.

So while out on some errands I popped in and spoke to one of the managers who said “Oh no, we are not doing that anymore since it got out of hand”.  Apparently some idiots figured out a way to clone these coupons and were ordering free pie after free pie.  Rather than dealing with the likes of that, the management of Nino’s Pizza decided to simply end the coupons.  The economy has been rough on everyone lately and I had to admit that losing something that was a nice treat every once in awhile downright sucked.  Fortunately my frequent patronage of the establishment found me able to use these last ones and as I handed over the stack I felt a little sad.

Below are the final fruits of my collecting the coupons from Nino’s.  I really hope that they choose to rethink the process as its not fair that the real and loyal customers have to suffer because of some idiots.  I guess my Dad saying “there is always one who can ruin it for everyone” is true.  Man I hate when he is right sometimes 🙂  I mean look at that slice below, isn’t it awesome?  Just think of how much more awesome it becomes when you sometimes get one for free.  Sigh.

While I am not going to stop hitting this particular pizzeria in the neighborhood based on it’s being so damned good, I do curse the schemers and scammers who have killed my occasional reward of a free pie for my continual business.  I hope you idiots choke on something really soon.  Thanks for effing up a really nice thing that was looked forward to a couple of times a year.  You’re kind always seems to find a way to do that.  Fucktards.