Steak & Shake Is Trying To Kill Me

KILL ME. Do you understand? I love it with a relentless, unavoidable love, a love that knows no boundaries, that knows nothing of time or death, and what do I get in return? Death. Delicious death.

Here is my favorite sandwich from Steak & Shake, the Frisco Melt:

Hey, baby, you so fine...

Look at that. Just take it all in for a minute. Toasted sourdough bread. Two all beef patties grilled to perfection. TWO kinds of cheeses - yellow american and swiss. And then, the ultimate topper and spread, Frisco Sauce, a magical potion that descended from heaven above inside a mother of pearl or possible number two plastic chariot. It is delicious. It is perfect. It is...

That popping sound is your heart valves exploding from shock.

It is almost twelve hundred calories. Twelve. Hundred. Twelve? No. Twelve hundred.
WHY DO THE THINGS I LOVE MOST HURT ME?

I was not privy to this information until recenty. In fact, even though I have lately been counting calories Steak & Shake hadn't even occurred to me at all, because they don't have any out here in Godless Cheyenne. Then, last week, I was at the Laramie County Library looking through the cookbooks for something to make and came across Fast Food Fix by Devin Alexander.

"Hey!" I thought to myself as I searched the table of contents. "The Frisco Melt! Man, I haven't had one of those in months! You know, I hadn't even thought about how many calories might be HOLY ROMAN CHOIR WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?"

"BITCH WHAT HAVE I BEEN TELLING YOU?" my heart screamed from my chest, scaring an elderly woman behind me. "HOW BAD DO YOU HAVE TO FEEL AFTER A MEAL BEFORE YOU GET IT, HUH?"

It was enough for me to get the book and stop at the Safeway on the way home to make my own Frisco Melt (whoever planned this city so that the Safeway is directly between the library and my apartment is evil).

My beef patties, both of them 2.5 ounces each. How do I know? Because I bought a food weight, that's how. Tendencies! I just have OCD tendencies. Also, the beef is 96/4, which means 96% beef, 4% fat. It's the leanest type of ground beef you can get, and you can't get it anywhere. If you can I recommend going for it. The leaner the beef the better. If you can't, most places do have 93/7, which is the next best thing.

When you're making your own sandwich you can toss everything into the same pan and fry it all up together. The recipe technically calls for sourdough bread, but that's wheat up there. One, because Safeway did not have any sliced sourdough bread, and two, I didn't feel like going anywhere else, and, I guess, three, I have shunned white bread in favor of wheat bread because wheat bread is healthier and I miss white bread so much! I do, I really do! But I figure if I keep eating wheat bread eventually I'll forget what white tastes like and I'll get over it. So, uh, you can use any bread you want, is what I'm saying.

The magical Frisco sauce, the thing that vaults the Frisco Melt over the bar of perfection to land softly on the mat of deliciousness. And I'm not going to put the recipe here. You should get the book yourself, at the library or at Amazon or something, because Devin Alexander put a lot into figuring out these recipes. As she says when making the McDonalds Big Mac Sauce:

"In order to re-create the sauce, I had to ensure that I had a supply that I could taste on its own - away from the other great flavors this burger stacks. So I requested "extra on the side." The friendly woman behind the counter didn't flinch. She quickly produced a sundae cup half-filled with the neon, salmon-colored sauce."

That is a visual I never, ever needed. Naturally, the recipes for the sauces are not spot on, as what gives the real stuff their extra edge probably isn't found anywhere in nature. But Alexander comes so, so close it doesn't really matter, and the recipe for Frisco Sauce she has bestowed unto me will be among my most cherished possessions. I might tattoo it on my arm.

And the finished result. Now, I know it doesn't look quite so delectable as the real deal, but I didn't have any of that fancy touch up stuff they use in food photos, like glue, and nail polish remover. But believe me when I tell you it's good enough to replace going to Steak & Shake. And nutrition wise?

I WANT TO LIVE!!!

Steak & Shake, I love you. But I've found a less abusive relationship, so until you can keep from pumping my veins with liquid death, we need to see other people.

Work In Progress: Elvis Cookies

Because if there's one thing Elvis really loved, it was really, really, spectacularly tacky shit. But if there was another thing he loved it was fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Now in cookie form!

Not all of my posts are going to be food based, I promise. The problem is that I’ve been home alone all weekend, and when I’m home and there’s a stocked kitchen, things just kind of happen to get made. So, I had two bananas that had gone past their eating prime and needed to be baked into something. I also have an unbridled love for peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and this recipe lying around for peanut butter cookies. Easiest math I have ever had to do.

(Mushy bananas + peanut butter cookies) x hours of free time = AWESOME

Ingredients

·         1 ¼ cup whole wheat flour

·         1 tsp baking soda

·         ¼ tsp salt

·         1 cup peanut butter

·         ½ butter

·         ½ cup light brown sugar

·         ¼ cup unsweetened apple sauce

·         1 egg

·         ½ tsp vanilla extract

·         2 medium sized, mushy bananas.

Yes, again with the whole wheat flour. I put whole wheat flour into everything I think I can get away with. About three months ago I switched over from white everything to wheat everything: bread, pasta, tortillas, whatever. I become one of those people you see in the supermarket checking the ingredients on packages before I buy something. For the record, just because you’re buying whole wheat something doesn’t mean that it’s all whole wheat. If you see the words ‘enriched’ or ‘bleached’ in the ingredients list, than the packaging is a lying sack of shit.

With the peanut butter, chunky and creamy both work, like in any peanut butter cookie.

The unsweetened apple sauce replaces sugar in this recipe. Not only am I one of those people checking ingredients in the supermarket, I once spent two hours doing my food shopping consulting a copy of Eat This Not That without shame. That’s where I learned that unsweetened applesauce is, if I remember right, half the calories and with zero sugar, obviously. And it tastes the same. Namely, delicious. So if you get those snack packs of unsweetened apple sauce, each one is half a cup, so you can put in half into the batter and eat the rest. With cinnamon and nutmeg. Mmm.

In the end, I put in about a sixth of a cup of sugar into my batter just because it looked too loose and I wanted to thicken it up and actually I have no idea of going about that. The bananas I mushed separately and then put into the batter.

I spooned the batter on with a tablespoon and sprinkle just a little bit of sugar on top. And then I sprinkled cinnamon on just a few of the cookies, just to see how that would taste.

I left them in the oven for thirteen minutes. BUT, I like my cookies slightly undercooked and soft. These cookies are going to be light and fluffy, more like cake than the traditional ‘lead sinker’ consistency some of the best peanut butter cookies come with. I’m not sure you can get these guys to be crunchy without burning them, is what I’m saying, but you can leave them in longer if you want to.

Result

Next time, I’m putting in another half cup of peanut butter, cutting the butter in half, and putting cinnamon in every cookie because damn that’s good. These are a just a work in progress, remember, so if you have any tips let me hear them, and I'll post again when I've tried something different with the recipe.

 

Dammit, Elvis Cookies. Be more delicious!

Delicious American Treats

Happy Independence Day! Have some Will Smith punching out an alien!
Also, have some cake. I would have had this up last week, except it didn’t occur to me to make this until this morning on my run (Similarity #1 between runners and drug users: munchies), so maybe you can make it next year. Or next week. Or tomorrow. Really, can’t we show America love anytime of the year with delicious and sugar laden treats? (Spoiler: yes)

So, this is my Welcome to Earth Cake (If you don't want to read about how I made it, scroll to the bottom). To start out with, you’re going to need:

• Two medium sized mixing bowls
• Two small sized mixing bowl
• Two pans, circular or rectangular or square, anywhere from 7x7 to 9x9. I'm flexible.
• Two mixing spoons
• Strainer or cheesecloth
• Pam
• Red and blue food coloring
• Measuring cups
• Fork, knife, spoon
• Prayer

I need prayer, anyway. This is my very first right-from-scratch cake, and considering it took me over ten years to get those box mixes down to a science, I probably should have phoned the Vatican and asked if they could pull a team together for me (I like how I envision the Vatican as some sort of A-Team-like group, always ready to help some schmuck trying to make treats) – seriously: mix, eggs, milk, oil, mix together and bake, and I cannot count the ways I have managed to mess that up. If I had a nickel for every cake I damaged in some way over the course of my life, I’d have enough to get me a song on iTunes. Not one of the popular ones, though, the ones that are a buck twenty nine. Definitely one of the ninety-nine cent ones. Something eighties or nineties.

For ingredients, you’ll need:


• 2 cups white sugar
• 1 cup butter
• 4 eggs
• 4 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 3 cups flour
• 2 ½ teaspoons baking powder
• 1 cup milk.
• 1 ½ cups raspberries
• 1 ½ cups blueberries

BUT, this is everything you’ll need to make the two separate cakes, one raspberry and one blueberry. So, in other words, what you’ll need for each cake looks like this:

• 1 cup white sugar
• ½ cup butter
• 2 eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 ½ cup flour
• 1 ¾ teaspoons baking powder
• ½ cup milk
• 1 ½ cup raspberries OR raspberry extract

AND THEN:
• 1 cup white sugar
• ½ cup butter
• 2 eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 ½ cup flour
• 1 ¾ teaspoons baking powder
• ½ cup milk
• 1 ½ cup blueberries

Get it? We’re basically making two small cakes here that will be two layers of the finished product. Honestly, if I’ve lost you already, maybe you should just get a Dairy Queen Ice Cream cake. They have caramel crunchies! Oh, and grab me a Dilly Bar while you’re there. CHERRY DIP, OM NOM. I made both cakes side by side, so complete each step twice. You’ll also need a carton of vanilla ice cream, but not until later.

ANYWAY, the first thing you want to do is preheat the oven to 350, then you want to cream the sugar and the butter together in the medium sized bowls. For the uninitiated, ‘cream’ in the baking world means ‘mash together with a heavy spoon until you’ve created a thick paste that makes the mouth water and the heart call its union rep.’ It’s just faster to say. So, the bowl on the left has the sugar and butter just hanging out together, while the bowl on the right has been 'creamed.' Ahh, I can hear the dial tone now.

"Hi, Frank? It's Lub....It's butter and sugar, Frank. Nothing else...No, I will NOT stand for this..."

After you’ve creamed the sugar and the butter, add the eggs. The recipe I found said to add them one at a time. I have no idea why, but I’d do it, just in case. You want your cake to suck because you were the idiot you added two eggs at the same time?

After the eggs comes the vanilla extract. Just mix it in, nothing special. Vanilla is pretty laid back. Expensive, but laid back.

Next, take your small sized bowl and mix together the flour and the baking powder. With my cakes I used ¾ cup whole wheat flour and ¾ cup all purpose flour. I did this for two reasons. One, as of late I have been on a health kick and whole wheat flour is better for you. Two, because of the added moisture of the raspberries and blueberries I thought whole wheat flour, which is thicker than all purpose flour, would even out the mixture and get the correct texture for the batter. You can use all purpose flour for the whole thing. If you do use whole wheat, don’t use more than ¾ cup. Never replace more than half of your all purpose flour in baking recipes. Why? Shit if I know, but the internet keeps telling me it’s bad, so I assume that if you do, you’ll rip a hole in the universe.

Okay, so you have your flour and baking powder in the small bowls. Oh, one more thing: DO NOT MESS WITH THE AMOUNT OF BAKING POWDER. It is so small, and you start to think you can just eyeball it. DO NOT FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY AND GOOD AND JUST. YOU WILL KILL INNOCENT KITTENS IF YOU DO. Mix the flour and the baking powder well so it’s blended.

Now you’re going to add the flour and baking powder mixture to the creamed mixture. I usually do this in thirds just so it’s easier to mix. After I got all that mixed up I started to get worried because it looked more like dough than batter and I was afraid I messed up with the flour and I was going to ruin the cake and I did NOT have the butter to start again and WHY can’t I do ANYTHING right I might as well just TOSS IT ALL DOWN THE EVERYLOVING SINK. And then I remembered the milk.

Pictured on left: OH GOD WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?!? Picture on right: Oh. Never mind.

I used soy milk. It has less sugars and, if you’re using the light stuff, less calories. You can use whatever. Mix in the milk and then your bowls of batter should look more like the stuff Betty Crocker puts out there. Always go with Betty Crocker. That little doughboy scares the life out of me. Look at it, all anthropomorphic and shit. You KNOW drugs were involved in the creation of that thing.

Okay, fruit time! Because I decided I was going to make an Independence Day Cake ON Independence Day, and because Safeway was having a sale, there were no raspberries, so I had to use extract. If you use extract, use between four and five teaspoons, about half of the bottle. If you use real raspberries, YOU NEED TO GET THE SEEDS OUT. Seriously, have you ever had a raspberry seed stuck in your molar all day? It’s crunchy but it won’t split into smaller pieces to fall out of the crevice, and you THINK you know where it is in your tooth, but then you try to get it out there – an endeavor that requires your whole finger to get back there so of course you don’t want to be doing that in public all day – and you can’t find it, although you CAN hear it mocking you until you break down and floss. Raspberry seeds suck and you need to cut the shit and just get the juice before using them in baking anything. You can either use the strainer in the picture above and squeeze with the back of the spoon or use cheese cloth and squeeze with your hands. You want maybe a quarter cup of raspberry juice. It’s going to suck to get that much, but it’ll be better, trust me.

With the blueberries, I mushed the first cup just so the juices could escape better, and then put the last half cup in whole. That’s what I like about blueberries: it’s so freaking easy to put them in whatever it is you’re baking.

Food coloring time! Red food coloring for the raspberry cake, blue for the blueberry, unless you like screwing with people, or have never had raspberries outside of Slushies and THINK that raspberries are blue (they aren’t.) Mix in as much as you want, but know that the red will never look more than a deep pink and the blue is going to look like Day-Glo. Just get close enough. America will appreciate your effort.

Take your pans, whatever size you picked/had lying around, and Pam the CRAP out of them. I cannot stress that you can never use too much Pam. Leaving cake behind in the pan because you didn’t grease enough? It is like dropping your ice cream cone on the pavement: that deliciousness is gone forever and you’re never getting it back. After you’ve greased, pour the batter into each pan and put it in the oven.

Food Coloring: When every holidy is Easter.

For baking time it’s going to be really variable. My raspberry cake took forty-five minutes, but my blueberry cake took fifty. Just put it in for half an hour to start with, then test it every ten minutes, putting a fork or a toothpick into the center until it comes out clean.

Cool your cakes! I used to get really excited when I was kid and frost the cakes as soon as they came out of the oven. No good! The frosting gets all melty and slides off the cake, and that’s the stuff in the cans. As we will be attempting to make our own frosting today for the first time in the history of ever, we need all the help we can get. When the cakes are cool in the pans, take them out and make sure they’re cool completely. THEN we can frost.

My cooling cakes, complete with stab marks.

As I said before, lately I’ve been on a health jag. I’ve been running more, eating less, and trying to eat better. So usually when I bake I’ve been substituting apple sauce for sugar, putting in whole wheat flour, using more fruits, etc. This is not one of those times. It’s a holiday, I’m hoping that I only eat a piece of this cake and not the whole thing, and low fat versions of anything that’s supposed to be decadent usually sucks. So, for the butter cream frosting, I went all out:



• 3 cups confectioners’ sugar
• 1 cup butter
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 to 2 tablespoons whipping cream.

This is the easiest thing ever. EVER. The only reason I’ll probably go back to buying frosting instead of making it is HOLY CRAP THREE CUPS OF SUGAR. One Touch should advertise on the bags of that stuff, you know?

So, if you dare, cream the confectioners’ sugar and the butter. After it’s smooth, continue to mix for about three minutes. Add the vanilla and the whipping cream, starting with a VERY small amount, maybe even less than 1 tablespoon. Mine came out very thin, so to thicken it up I added small handfuls of flour until I liked the consistency, and then I refrigerated it for ten minutes. I have NO idea if adding flour to stuff like this is normal or if I’m just making stuff up, but it worked. And don’t worry about losing any of the sweetness. You’d have to toss it into the ocean to do that.

With the cakes cooled and the frosting made, it’s time to get out the vanilla ice cream. First, though, put one of the cake layers on whatever plate you intend to serve (read: eat directly off) with. I put down the blueberry one because the middle of it sagged. Take the ice cream carton and put it in the microwave for about ten to twenty seconds until it becomes easy to work with, then start scooping it out onto the bottom layer of the cake. Make it fairly even but don’t worry about making it look professional. This isn’t the Food Network, no one cares if it looks perfect, and you’ll just end up tearing the cake and pitching a hissy like you always do. I used about half of a 1.5 quart carton of ice cream, but you can use more. Once you’re done, put that into the freezer.

Take your top layer and your butter cream frosting and go to town. Mine was too thin to do the sides, and anyways I wanted to show off the layers, so I only frosted the top. Then, decorate your way. I was going to use sugar cookies with the red, white, and blue decorations cut into stars but, uh…that didn’t work. So I used blueberries and raspberries for the top.

What’s that? I said Safeway didn’t have raspberries? They didn’t. The first time I went. I had to go again to get more butter for the frosting. And there they were, all sitting nice and pretty like they’d just been put out. Jerkfaces.

Anyway, I made a flag top that came out fairly decent. When you’re done decorating, take the bottom layer with the ice cream out of the freezer and carefully put your top layer on.

Congratulations! You have successfully created my Welcome to Earth Cake!

Here, have some mood music as you gaze at your creation!
What? No, there's just something in my eye. No, YOU'RE crying.