In the Kitchen w/ Andrew (& his Mom!)

So as a promised before I decided that most of everything prepared for the next post was going to have bacon involved. Therefore over this past Easter weekend when my parents came up to visit my mom helped me to prepare a feat of epic proportions While she was shopping for the usual holiday fare I managed to sneak some gastronautical goodies into the cart. I found Austrailian goat, escargot, cuttlefish in ink, and quail eggs. I grabbed all that stuff without knowing exactly what I was going to do with it when I got it back home but we managed to improvise a pretty sick meal out of it. And by “sick” i mean really good like how the young kids say it nowadays because it’s clever. We would wind up making curry candied goat and bacon strips, escargot wrapped in puff pastry with garlic, bacon, and provolone cheese,  and quail eggs with bacon and sweet chili sauce.

BEFORE:

Most of the prep for this stuff was pretty simple. Goat can be a tough meat so I went all Freddy Kruger on it and trimmed off all the gooey fat and separated all the bones and gristle. After that I added a little meat tenderizer, curry powder, and brown sugar and tossed it in the oven with some bacon and it was good to go. The quail eggs needed to be soaked for a little while in a half water half vinegar solution and then hard boiled for five minutes. Then we just peeled them and split them. We added some sweet chili sauce on top to “glue” our bacon down tight. The escargot came in a can so it was pretty simple to drain it and wrap it in the puff pastry. We sprinkled a little garlic powder on them and added some bacon and provolone cheese on top and popped them in the oven with the goat. A few minutes later everything came out looking/ tasting delicious!

AFTER:

Now with the cuttle fish we didn’t really end up doing anything with it cause it looked like this:

We couldn’t really find a way to wrap it in bacon or anything fun like that so I just kind of snacked on it while we cooked. It’s alot like any other kind of canned fish/squid/octopus you might encounter. The taste and texture is between the fishiness of tuna and the gumminess of squid or octopus. It’s not at all bad considering it looks like this thing was recovered from the BP oil spill. The ink didn’t really have much of an “inky” taste but after sitting out for a while a red oily liquid pooled around the black meat seemingly from out of nowhere. I’d like to think it was the cuttlefish’s way of communicating with us from beyond the grave, but I’m probably wrong. Either way it tasted fine. I would say i was actually decently surprised how tame the taste was for black canned fish stuff.

My mom also made her world famous Scotch Eggs while she was up to visit. Not anything too crazy just crazy delicious. We take five or six good size eggs and hard boil them. We peel off the shells and then wrap the eggs with breakfast sausage. From here we could have possibly wrapped them again in a layer of delicious bacon but alas it wasn’t meant to be since we were all out and were experiencing a serious bacon drought in the area apparently. From here we fry of the eggs on the oven until they are golden brown and delicious. And there you have a super awesome, super simple, next level breakfast maneuver

Until next time fellow Gastronauts. Keep eating what you don’t understand… or something!