Nearly a year and a half after the first Eggstravaganza, we decided it was time for another.

Cheryl made swedish meatballs, served in egg halves.  They were  amazing, although Meatball+Egg wasn’t particularly more exciting than just Meatball.

Yelena made thee kinds of wholesome deviled eggs: cheddar-bacon, avocado, and smoked salmon.  They were also really amazing.

Beth made deviled Cabury creme eggs.  She carefully unwrapped three eggs, split them in half, and removed the sugary filling.  She filled them with deviled egg yolk, reattached the halves, and rewrapped them in their original wrappers.  She put the three deviled Cadbury eggs back in the box with one real, unaltered Cadbury creme egg.

After our party had been going on for a while, our guests finally noticed the box of creme eggs.  The first person to try one was our friend Charles.  Charles got the real Cadbury egg, and other people grabbed the rest of the eggs, lulled into a false sense of security by Charles’ wholesome experience.  Our friend Erik was the first to bite into a deviled creme egg and experience the unexpected egg yolk.

Astonishingly, he liked it.  Our friend Stephanie willingly ate the next deviled creme egg knowing full well what it was, and she also liked it.  However, we think she’s some kind of weird oviraptor anyway, because when we had hardboiled quail eggs, she ate them with the shells still on, so her opinions are suspect.  Other people split the last deviled creme egg. Beth, Cheryl, and Kristen all agreed that it wasn’t bad, although it wasn’t really good enough to bother making again.

Not wanting to be outdone by the cubecake, Beth made Alex a cake shaped like a Kit Kat Clock.

The base of the cake was made following Shirley’s Crazy Cake recipe from Bakewise.
(The cake is “crazy” because it contains no eggs.  Instead, a bit of vinegar helps the wheat gluten coagulate to keep the cake firm and moist.  Incidentally, this is a cake which is both delicious and vegan, if you’re into that sort of thing).

Two cat shapes were cut out of the cake and stacked on top of one another, with a layer of chocolate ganache  in between.

More ganache was poured over the entire cake. Each eye was made with half of a Lindt white chocolate truffle.

A simple icing made from powdered sugar and milk was used to create the detail, along with more ganache.

The Kat Clock Cake’s body was eaten first, and its head was packaged up to go on a road trip.

The bleu cheese ice cream recipe comes from The Perfect Scoop. The cayenne pepper hot fudge was a combination of store bought hot fudge and cayenne pepper sauce in a ratio of approximately 2:1.

For the chicken-flavored whipped cream, our first idea was to whip chicken bouillon into the cream, but the bouillon did not dissolve.

Instead, the heavy cream should be gently stirred over low heat to dissolve the chicken bouillon cube in the cream (use the ratio of bouillon to water recommended on the package but replace the water with cream). Then, once the chicken-flavored cream is cooled, it can be whipped.

We scooped the bleu cheese ice cream onto a bed of romaine lettuce and buffalo chicken wings. Then, we topped it with the chicken whipped cream, chopped celery and a hot pepper.

Peter handles the buffalo wings, wearing protection

Reviews

Peter: Surprisingly good for what it is. The bleu cheese cools both the heat from the pepper sauce and the heat of the wings themselves.

Alex: Finally a use for that awful ice cream! This almost redeems that recipe. Maybe we should make chicken ice cream.

Beth: Astonishingly, I’m actually willing to eat the bleu cheese ice cream this way. We really needed darker chocolate, more chocolate, and more wings per scoop of ice cream. I actually enjoyed the chicken whipped cream.

Beth topped her sundae with a dinosaur-shaped chicken nugget.

Kristen: The cayenne pepper hot fudge would be an excellent topping for wings. The chicken whipped cream tastes good but makes me sick to think of it.

Last year for Beth’s 27th birthday, Alex made her an ice cream cake.  The cake was a 3x3x3 cube made from 9 blocks each of toasted almond ice cream, chocolate peanut butter ice cream, and Vietnamese coffee ice cream (recipes from The Perfect Scoop: Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, and Sweet Accompaniments).  It turns out those flavors all melt at different rates, so if you decide to make such a thing, serve it right after you take it out of the freezer.

Also, there were rainbow-dinosaur mini-cakes.

Juicy, tender, boneless – and what a lovely color! What is this delightful comestible?

This morning, our cat caught a smurf! Apparently, it was collecting a late harvest of smurfberries in our garden when Azrael pounced on it.

Seems a downright shame – an awful waste. Such a nice plump frame whats-its-name has. Had. Has. With the price of meat what it is…

Recipe

While other tataki recipes call for a coating of spices (sesame, for example), we did not want to tarnish the beautiful color of this specimen.

Heat pan of sesame oil until is smokes and then sear all sides of the smurf flank. As far as we know, smurfs do not carry smurfonella or other diseases.

Using a very sharp knife, slice the flank diagonally, being careful not to tear the extremely tender meat.

Drizzle with a reduction of smurfberries (we couldn’t let those hard-won berries go to waste!). Garnish with a red mushroom house.

Reviews
AK: The meat is incredibly tender and flaky, but I am disappointed to find that there is not even a hint of gold. Could have used a little salt. The smurfberry topping was tart and delicious, but somewhat overwhelmed the delicate flavor of the flank.

Beth: It turns out smurf is somewhat bland and fishy. They probably spend a lot of time wallowing in swamps and eating algae to ward off starvation. I’ll eat beef nearly raw, but I really wanted to cook this longer and slather it with sauce. Steamed smurf houses in smurfberry sauce are great, though. And their little hats puff up into flaky pastries if you bake them.

Kristen: We had smurfberries growing in our garden? They are delish! Say what you will about the flavor of the meat, the color makes for spectacular presentation.

When our friend Jennifer wrote a novel about the teriyaki of the damned, we had to try our own hand at making goth teryaki.  Before we get to the recipe (which may actually our most sane creation so far), we’d like to talk a little about the book.

Terroryaki! (3-Day Novel) was writen for the International 3-Day Novel Contest, which is an awesome even that you should check out.  The book is about two sisters and their trials and tribulations dealing with family, relationships, and cursed teriyaki.

The best part of this book is the descriptions of food — do not read this book while hungry.  There are mouthwatering descriptions of more varieties of teriyaki than you can shake a chopstick at, as well as tantalizing passages about warm chewy cookies and exotic (but wholesome) flavors of ice cream.  This blog may need to steal some recipe ideas from the Puyallup Fair foods described on page 70.  With a name like Corn-nado, how can you go wrong?

Terroryaki! is the kind of story you would get if you turned kettle corn into a book.  It’s light but addictive, full of sweetness and savor.  You’ll find Terroryaki! gone before you know it, and you’ll be hungry for more.

You can buy Terroryaki! (3-Day Novel) here.  For those readers in the Cambridge/Boston MA area, you can meet the author and hear a reading this Friday at 7 pm with the MIT Science Fiction Society.  Details here.

Now on to our food!

Beth and Special-Guest-Chef Anne started by steaming some jet black Forbidden Rice.  We weren’t quite sure what kind of meat the meat-of-the-damned should be, so we decided to take our cue from the band Cake and their song “Sheep Go to Heaven,” which says that goats go to hell.  We’re fortunate enough to live near several markets which sell goat, so we bought a two pound bag of goat parts.

Now, goats are tough, bony creatures, and any sensible person is going to slow-cook their meat on the bone in a stew or curry.  Instead, we got out the cutting board and a nice big knife and cut off as many meaty strips as we could for our teriyaki, and we saved the bones for sensible stewing later.  

As Terroryaki! demonstrates, there are many ways to make a teriyaki sauce.  We used Anne’s personal standard balance of soy sauce, mirin, and sugar.  We also minced some garlic, grated some candied ginger, and added those to the sauce.  Then we put the meat in the sauce to marinate.

Teriyaki is generally grilled or broiled after marinating, but we decided the goat could use some extra time in the heat.  So, we boiled the goat in the sauce while the sauce was reducing.  We whipped up some steamed vegetables for an accompaniment, and made ourselves bowls of the gothest teriyaki you’ve ever seen.  Even with using the flash on the camera, light could hardly escape our dinner.

Reviews:

Beth:  I like it, but I think the flavor of the goat overpowers the teriyaki.  Forbidden rice is also hard to eat since it’s not very sticky.

Anne:  The goat definitely has a strong flavor, but I think the teriyaki comes through pretty well.  It’s good.

Sean:  You guys are right, goat is like concentrated lamb.

Recently, we were baking pie.  We wanted to do a side-by-side comparison of butter crust and oil crust.

The oil crust was very flaky, but there was something odd about it.  The oil we’d used was kind of old.  It wasn’t exactly rancid, but it was not exactly fresh either.

The pie had an aftertaste just like movie theater popcorn.

Which led us to conclude that the secret for making really great movie theater popcorn at home is to use really old oil.

You’re welcome!

(We didn’t have a picture of the pie, so we gave you a picture of some dim sum buns with cheese and pepperoni.  The cheese is pepperoni-jack.)

Despite what you may think, we at Unwholesome Foods actually have a number of friends who enjoy our company.  They invite us to their parties, and they show up at our parties.  Sometimes they inspire us to create terrifying new things, and sometimes they make a few of their own.

Some of our friends recently got a slider press.  What could be more appetizing than mold-formed meat?  Well, the same friends also found some giant marshmallows.  We took some of these little burgers straight off the George Foreman grill and put each one inside a split marshmallow.  Beth wanted ketchup and couldn’t find any, so she put some peanut butter on hers.

We thought the burgers were too dry.  The Fat-Reducing properties of a Foreman Grill take out a lot of the tasty oils, and the peanut butter didn’t help the problem.  A nice thick pat of butter might have been a better idea.  Or cheese.  Maybe even mayo.  Toasting the marshmallow to soften it may have helped, too.  Future experimentation is in order.

At a party this summer, our friend Matt made these beauties: Corn popsicles with barbeque sauce tips.

The barbeque sauce didn’t freeze very well, so a lot of it ended up sticking to the plastic wrappers.  However,  most people agreed that this sauce-loss was actually a good thing that brought the corn and sauce to the right proportions.  The corn-pops were a big hit with the crowd, although the barbeque sauce was too spicy for some, and the corn part was a little dense and dry.  These also deserve another experiment.

Furthermore, without comment, we present this watermelon.

Our second entry to the Fluff Festival cooking competition had the same basic conceit as the Cheese Fluffs: A wacky variation on the rice krispy treat.  However, this recipe had a few bugs in it (not literally!) that weren’t worked out until after the festival.  Maybe we’ll try it again next year and apply our learned experience.

The idea here was to replace the cereal in a rice krispy treat with homemade stove-top stuffing.  To start out, we took some bread (a seriously wholesome and delicious french pullman loaf from Iggy’s bakery) and cut it into bite-sized pieces.  Then we put those pieces in the oven at 200 F for about half an hour to dry them out.

While the bread was drying, we chopped up one smallish onion, several sprigs of parsley, and 5 cloves of garlic.  (The stuffing recipe we were working from called for 2 cloves, but Beth thought, “You can never have too much garlic, right?)  We melted 3 tablespoons of butter in a saucepan over medium-low heat and then sauteed the onions, parsley, and garlic.  We meant to throw in some sage and black pepper, but we forgot.

Once the onion was cooked, we removed the bread from the oven and put it in a mixing bowl to let it cool down a little.  Then we slowly added 1 jar (7.5 oz) of Marshmallow Fluff to the pan, stirring continuously until everything was evenly mixed.

We poured the mixture over the bread chunks little by little, stirring constantly to ensure even coating.  Then we pressed the Fluffing into a parchment lined pan.

Reviews:

Beth:  They didn’t stick together like I wanted.  I think I need to dry out the bread more and use more marshmallow.  I can’t decide if it’s good or not.  It definitely isn’t bad.  I like the sweet, and I like the savory, but they don’t quite mesh.  I think I used to much garlic.  I’ll keep snacking on it over the next few days.

Alex: Yeah, you used to much garlic.  Edible, but I wouldn’t eat a lot of it.

Kristen: I think the garlic is nice.  Still not my favorite food, though.

It turned out that Beth did not end up snacking on the Fluffing over the next few days.  It was too sugary to be desirable for lunch or dinner, but too garlicky to make a nice sweet snack.  A solution presented itself when Beth wanted to cook up a wholesome dinner of roasted acorn squash and she wanted to stuff the squash with something.  The squash was cut in half, and the strings and seeds were removed.  Each squash-half was filled with a large pat of butter,  as much Fluffing as would fit, and then as much cranberry apple cider as wouldn’t spill out.  Then the squash were stuck in the oven at 400 F for 60 minutes.

Reviews:

Alex: They taste good and they look nice.  Some foil around the edges of the squash might have been good to make it cook more evenly.

Beth: Tasty!  I really like how the marshmallow on the top bread got nicely toasted.  The cranberry cider blended all the flavors together well.  Squash is a place where sweet and savory really work together.  I think this is a great starting point for a tasty contest entry next year.