Start 'em early!

From our designer Mythangelo: 

BUTTER.

Goodness Gravy - New How-to Video

Hollandaise Sauce - Video and Recipe!!!

Heart Attack Hollandaise

Soundtrack: Heartbeat of Rock ‘n roll by Huey Lewis and the News

3 Eggs

1 1/2 Tablespoons Water

One stick butter

3 to 4 Tablespoons Tarragon Vinegar

Salt and Pepper

Start by filling a sink (or a pot larger than the one you will be cooking in) partially with cool water.  You’ll use this water to rapidly cool the bottom of the pot later.

Melt butter in a pot over medium heat (or nuke it to melted).  Completely melt the butter, but not so it’s burning hot. Crack open the eggs and place them into a bowl.  Add water to the bowl and whisk the eggs and water together very well until they are one color throughout.

Now comes the hard part.  Turn the heat down on the butter pot.  If you look at the flame, you want it to be a 2 on a 5 scale, the 5 being full flame, 1 being almost no flame.  Low heat, but not too low.  If not sure, go lower, not hotter, until you get the hang of it, lower heat will simply take a little longer and your whisk arm may fall off.  If you go too hot, the eggs will become little bits in a butter mix, not a sauce.  You can recover this by blending the hell out of it.

Pour the egg mixture into the melted butter and start whisking the pot gently, or faster if you see visible egg bits starting to float around in the pot.  Do not stop whisking.  The goal is to keep the eggs from forming a thin omelet on the bottom of the pot.  You want to keep stirring until the eggs "go off" and thicken the mixture from a liquid to a gravy-like sauce.  When you see it turning into the desired thickness of a sauce, immediately pull the pot off the fire and put the pot bottom into the cold water in the sink so the bottom of the pot is immediately cooled off and stops cooking the sauce.  You may want to keep whisking a little bit while it cools.
Now here's the thing - we are told that people use lemon for Hollandaise Sauce.  Why?  We have no idea.  It tastes a bit like dessert that way.  We like tarragon vinegar and like it much.  Once you cool the pot a little, take it out, add two tablespoons of vinegar and taste the sauce.  If it is strong enough for you, excellent.  We usually add at least two more tablespoons of tarragon vinegar, or more, to taste.  Sometimes we make it light for guests and "Rip your face off strong" for ourselves in a separate small pitcher.

Salt and pepper to taste.

Sometimes people use just the egg yokes in the sauce.  The sauce will be really thick and tasty if you do it that way[1].

Now all of this involved process, we are told, can be avoided by the use of a double boiler to even the heat out and cook the sauce slowly, but that is cheating and we will not give you your Girl Scout chef merit badge if you do it.  Actually, we have never had a double boiler when we needed it, and see them as somewhat of a unitasker (bad) unless one makes candy a lot, so we do it our way.

You can also do much the same thing in a blender or a microwave.  How embarrassing.  Don’t talk to us.

We generally make 2 to 3 times this recipe and eat it on broccoli cooked al dente.  Please do NOT overcook the broccoli, American style.  Limp broccoli is a vile abomination unto the gods. 

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[1] Screw your cholesterol.  This is cooking.

Man Meets Stove Cookbook Introduction

We will be posting our cookbook in it's entirety, periodically, one section at a time. Enjoy! Check back in for additional sections and please tell your friends!

introduction

Do you like to eat?

No, do you REALLY like to eat?

Do you like to get lucky?

Because, my man, it is this last question that should inspire you to read on.  Babes like men who cook.  That’s right, it gives them shudders to have you cook them a great meal.  Ecstatic shudders in places you want.  If you like to eat, all the more reason to read on, because frankly, you can cook stuff that tastes way better than that worthless drive-through burger you’re sticking down your blow hole. 

Are we being too harsh?  Deal with it, Opie.  You think bad-ass chefs like Mario Batali, Michael Symon, and Anthony Bordain got there by holding hands and singing Kumbayah?  Hell no.  We can tell you how to make a girl gasp with ecstasy with nothing more than a spoon.  With or without food on it.  So, listen up, and let’s get started…

First, you’re going to need to start off with something simple.  If you’re reading this, you probably have been mostly fed by your momma, girlfriends, or wife your entire life.  Maybe they could cook like Julia Child (may she rest in peace); if so, lucky you.  On the other hand, perhaps the women in your life can’t tell a hand mixer from a vibrator.  The days of “Home Economics” and “Miss Priss Cooking for Ladies” classes are long gone.  Your female sidekick may also cook mostly with a can opener.  This is unacceptable.  Let’s show the world how real men do it. 

Tip: Read all recipes through BEFORE you start. Seriously. 

Man Meets Stove Cookbook Forward Section

We will be posting our cookbook in it's entirety, periodically, one section at a time. Enjoy!  Check back in for additional sections and please tell your friends!

forward

Listen up, soldier.  What good are you to you or anyone else if you can't decently feed yourself?  Or even indecently? You need to learn three F words: Fire. Food. Fun. Two of them are even four-letters.  The “Fun” is, of course, women; but the Food and Fire have to come first. First the food, because frankly we are just not sure you are manned up enough for the rest yet.

One Tuesday night back when we were both in college we were talking about women (what else?) and it came up that both of us had used our cooking skills to impress our women.  We used cooking to move above the pack...cut the other studs out of the running. Alpha males with tongs.  No, not tongues - although we are good with those too - tongs.

We are firm believers that every person should be able to fix a flat tire, build a fire, program a computer, construct a shed, find one of those square states out in the middle, cook a steak, fish, find everything/naughty/interesting on the internet, and learn crap you didn't already know from a book.  So, we pooled our brains and money and bought the Joy of Sex.  Oh wait, that’s another story.  We bought the Joy of Cooking.  Eleven hundred and thirty- two pages of foodie delight, orgasms for the tongue, and all-around-amazing information for the kitchen.  Yeah, we got a tongue theme already going on here.  Think of this as “your training has already begun…”

We settled in with the bible of cooking and learned how to burn things, to create Level-7 disasters with a microwave, and to scare mortal humans out of the house.  We learned to cook, to taste, to smell, to enjoy the bits and pieces of food for what they are, and how the pieces combine for a gastrointestinal orgy of delight.  Our food blossomed, our sex lives improved, and people started saying silly things like “Wow, you two should open a restaurant,” and “Wow, that is delicious. You two should write a book.”

Years later and several million calories gone to the gut, Jim got a wild hair up his chimney and wrote down his sure-fire Hollandaise Sauce; Thomas laughed and laughed and then said, “We should write a cookbook.”   Realizing that we were surrounded by sad creatures with no food skills and lacking second dates, we realized that we had to step up and share our hard-won wisdom.

This book is that Wisdom

Man Meets Stove Cookbook is AVAILABLE!!!!

Hi everyone!  

Just wanted to let you know that our cookbook is HERE! We have signed authors copies, Kindle version, and regular copies available through our ebook store and Amazon at www.manmeetsstove.com/shop !  

We are also going to be posting sections of the book, in consecutive order, periodically for your reading pleasure, so please enjoy!

 

Man Broccoli

Men. Dorito Tacos. Yes they did!

Dorm students and artists working all hours of the night, REJOICE! Taco Bell has managed to elevate junk food with fast food to create fast junk food.

Jim felt an obligation to Man Meets Stove to conduct a scientific taste test. Okay, who am I kidding? I couldn't wait to get my hands on them. Geologists start out their field careers as professional fast food eaters. It's a thing.

So I pulled up to the Bell and ordered two Dorito Taco Loco Supremes and promptly took a bite of day-glo orange Dorito goodness. The taco is, well, Taco Bell. Whatever that meat is, it is not my 70/30 hamburger. That was the unnatural part. The Dorito taco shells though? THOSE are a natural. Natural fit that is. Anything that orangey delicious has to be good, right? The two tacos went down real well. Would I want to eat three? Maybe when I was 18. Okay maybe now, but not four. These are serious junk food folks.

If you cannot get to real mexican food at 2 am, this is just the thing for you.  This florescent orange power pellet and a 44 ounce diet cola will keep those brain batteries running.  Maybe not running WELL mind you, but running nevertheless. 

I give it a three out of four Twinkies.

How to Crack an Egg