#ShowdownBook Giveaway x Parabo Press 📸

Get a signed (and maybe doodled) copy of my cookbook Showdown: Comfort Food, Chili & BBQ plus $100 credit for Parabo Press. I printed these cute cards as exclusive thank yous / DIY recipe cards for the nice people that pre-ordered my book. Use this prize $ to make your own zine, album or prints from your own photos. Especially awesome for cooks who are trying to show off their work.

To enter:

1. Follow both @Randwiches & @ParaboPress on Instagram.

2. Comment on this post with your favorite summer food.

3. Tag a friend in the comments to increase your chances of winning.

A winner will be chosen on Friday, 5/5/2017 at 12:00 PM ET. Everyone who enters gets a prize!

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I met Parabo Press at Alt Summit: Winter 2016. Here's more about their rad printing company:

Parabo is a different kind of print service for design-minded photo takers. Inspired by small batch print processes, we’re all about making fine art materials and printing techniques accessible.

Here's What You Get When You Pre-order #ShowdownBook

We have less than a week until my first ever cookbook Showdown lands in bookstores! As an extra incentive to reserve your copy, I have a couple fun surprises for my early birds. The first 25 people who email me at randwiches+win@gmail.com your preorder receipt and mailing address will get the following:

Signed & doodled book plates! If you don't live in Brooklyn, this is one way to get your copy autographed. The first batch have fun food doodles from my talented friends. When you get yours, peel off the backing and stick it on the inside of the front cover. 

Food hack card! I got special cards printed at Parabo and on the backs I'm going to give you extra food hacks to supplement the book. I want to jump start your brain and get you thinking the way that I think about food (so you can cook more!).

Heirloom Tomato Salt! I have a story in the book about getting a fine dining cookbook for the first time and feeling overwhelmed. The only thing I could make was tomato confit. Tomato salt is my tribute and super easy cooking hack. I've made a batch as a thank you. It is made made with sea salt from Pangasinan, Philippines; it really smells like tomatoes.

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If you prefer to get your copy signed and doodled, please join me at one of my book parties!

• 5/2/2017 Release day at WORD (Brooklyn, NY)
• 5/7/2017 Release party at Atelier Roquette (Brooklyn, NY)
• 6/24/2017 at Barnes & Noble (Palmdale, CA)
• 7/6/2017 at Green Apple Books (San Francisco, CA)

Already pre-ordered? Help me spread the word, here's how!

Showdown! My First Cookbook (& How You Can Help)

Ah, it's real ! My first ever cookbook is coming out on May 2,2017 on Page Street Publishing and distributed by MacMillan. 

For every copy of the book sold, we are donating to 1% for the Planet. 

Order your copy from your choice of

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• IndieBound (use their search to find a store near you!)

The first 25 people to email me their receipt and mailing address get a special prize! Send me a message here: randwiches+win@gmail.com

I'm also putting together a book tour and here are all my stops so far (latest list on my book's webpage).

• 5/2/2017 Release day at WORD (Brooklyn, NY)
• 5/7/2017 Release party at Atelier Roquette (Brooklyn, NY)
• 6/24/2017 at Barnes & Noble (Palmdale, CA)
• 7/6/2017 at Green Apple Books (San Francisco, CA)

Here's how you can help:

1. Preorder the book :)
2. Ask your local book store if they will carry Showdown (if not, send them this page!)
3. Invite friends to my book events
4. Help me share the book info on social media:

   • When posting please include the following:

   • Hashtag: #ShowdownBook

   • Link: http://amzn.to/2nMjpId

   • Twitter tag: @Randwiches

   • Facebook tags: @Randwiches, @PageStreetPublishing

   • Instagram tags, if possible: @Randwiches, @PageStreetPublishing @ColinClark

5. Share a story about how we met

6. Share a story about eating my food

7. Share a story about us eating together

8. If you know a book shop where I can have an event, please tell me!

9. If I can take over your restaurant or space for a pop up, I'd love to.

Thank you and I'm excited to share these recipes with you.

Really Easy Decadent Weybridge Smothered in Honey & Pistachios

// Adapted from Nerds with Knives // As seen on Feed Feed: Cheese boards //

As cheese boards editor of The FeedFeed, I get to feature the best cheese boards and platters from Instagram every month. What I look for are interesting cheeses, awesome food styling, fun color palettes, new ways to cut fruit or display accompaniments.

Baked brie is probably one of the easiest dishes to serve at a party. When it comes with its own wooden dish, all you need to do is remove the wrapping paper and bake it for 20 minutes at 350 degrees F.

This will work for any camembert, brie, double creme and triple creme. However there are few key things to keep in mind before baking any kind of bloomy cheese.

• Double and triple creme cheese have way more fat than just regular brie. That means they will pool or have a more likelihood of bursting. When baking these and if they don't have a wood case, put them in a ramekin on top of another baking sheet to catch drips.
• To prevent bursting, cut a few slits in the top of the cheese like you would a pie. They're vents!  Make a cross or two parallel slashes.
• Brie wedges pre-cut from the store can still be baked but remember to remove all plastic and paper labels before proceeding. Similarly to above, you need the right vessel to bake it in. If you put a wedge in a circular dish, it'll melt to fit the container--kind of like fondue!

I found a recipe from Nerds with Knives for baked brie with honey and pistachio. It acts as both a showstopper for your board but also an all-in-one pairing. It is texturally diverse: you have a gooey brie, smooth honey that only gets even more drippy when it hits the warm cheese and satisfyingly crunchy pistachio.

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When I made this, I crushed the pistachios to vary the texture even more. When it is powder thin and packed together, it has almost the oily texture of a Reese's peanut butter center; and the bigger chunks provide a crunch to the molten cheese you are about to eat.

Instead of brie, I used a wheel of Weybridge from Jasper Hill Farm. Named after the Vermont town, Weybridge is a cow's milk bloomy cheese featuring Dutch Belt milk. It is taller and has a smaller circumference than a grocery store brie. It fits right into a small ramekin.

I also decided to try a new honey substitute that I found. Bee Free mint honee is completely vegan and made from apples. Creator Katie Sanchez was trying to make apply jelly and made something that totally wasn't jelly, she stumbled upon honee. It is a little thinner than honey and doesn't seem to crystallize (so far as I have seen). This opens up so many crazy thoughts about bees, honey and fruits. Like, do you know how figs are made?

Off-topic! Anyway, this recipe is great. Let me know if you try it.

Have you seen a great cheese platter on Instagram? To participate, simply add the hashtags #CheeseBoard #FeedFeed to your Instagram post, feel free to tag @Randwiches or send a DM to let me know.

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Put a Egg on THIS! Celebrating 1 Year as Editor-At-Large

That was quick! I'm celebrating 1 year as editor-at-large of Put A Egg On It zine.  What does that mean? It sort of means that I'm a roving reporter, on call to brainstorm and execute features or projects. We announced this last year on my birthday and with this post where I made a version of Momofuku's Bo Ssam for my fellow Egg staffers.

Since then, we've been busy cranking out new issues, coordinating pop-ups and making videos. Visit our shop to grab a copy of our latest issue or ask your local independent book store why the heck they don't carry this zine, GOSH.

Here are highlights from the year:

DINNER WITH CHEF MARIA GRUBB AT XILLI LAB

PUT A EGG ON IT #12 + DINER JOURNAL #32 + FBF2016

BASIC KNIFE SKILLS + CONTEST

VINTAGE RECIPE CARD (styled for issue 13)

From our long, long out of print recipe card library! Here we have one of our cocktail party mainstays - Cheesy Cheer. Goat cheese and cream cheese whipped together with garlic and topped with sage, created by our editor-at-large @randwiches, astoundingly many years before her birth. With the Put A Egg On It Recipe Card Library you will NEVER be without fabulous, scrumptious treats for your party guests. Look for it on eBay. #vintagerecipes #cheese

53 Likes, 4 Comments - Put A Egg On It (@putaeggonit) on Instagram: "From our long, long out of print recipe card library! Here we have one of our cocktail party..."

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If you're interested in contributing to Egg, here's what we're all about:

Put A Egg On It is looking for writing, photography and drawings by people who love food. We’re interested in essays and art that document the culture and community surrounding eating and cooking; work that explores the historic, artistic and metaphysical qualities of food. We’re looking for personal stories – not journalism. You don’t need to be a “food writer” or a “food photographer.” Everyone eats! 

For essay proposals, please write a short abstract, at least 250 words, and email to  submit@putaeggonit.com.

We’re also always looking for proposals for these regular features: 

• Short pieces on a classic, regional food product: a loved packaged food item that is as much about time and place as it is about flavor. 
• Photo essays of a dinner party: An interesting meal shared by friends and/or family. 
• An illustration of a favorite childhood food memory for the back cover
• Food and cooking-related poetry

Illustrators and photographers should send links to their portfolios; Writers should email a PDF or link to samples along with their proposal to: submit@putaeggonit.com 

Please note: Put A Egg On It does not do product or restaurant reviews.

St. Patrick’s Weekend Brunch: Shortcut Corned Beef

Confession: half the time I don’t know what I’m doing or I’ve never tried it before. I’m lucky to have so many successes from pure logic, observations and research. 

My idea of corned beef came from a can with a key where you twisted a strip of metal off. It was more precarious than the Spam can. My mom and grandma would make corned beef hash for breakfast with a plain omelette and steamed rice. Neither is it the kind of hash where it’s more potato with beef pressed into a cake, nor discrete pieces of dry fried beef or potato; but softened, almost bolognese, beef with tender medium dice potatoes. Spoonable. I’ll have to make it to show you sometime.

My real encounter with legit corned beef didn’t occur until fairly recently at Katz’s deli. Oh, it’s a sliced, cured meat? And damn, it’s great. Two days before this St. Patrick’s day brunch, I looked up Alton Brown’s corned beef. I felt optimistic because I had all of the spices on hand, but to my dismay, the recipe calls for a 10 day cure. Ain’t nobody got for TIME for that. Could I pull off a shortcut corned beef in a day and a half? The short answer is resounding, "YES!".

1. Start with marinating the beef the same way as Alton Brown but making sure to omit the curing salt and reduce the regular salt to only enough to cover the meat with a snowy crust. You won’t be needing the chemical preservative because you’ll be eating this thing relatively soon (as opposed to ten days from now).
2. Leave it in the fridge for 8 hours or overnight. Because you forgot to buy celery for the slow-cooking part, empty a can of Cel-Ray soda into a quart container with a chopped onion and sliced carrot. 24 hours before show time, drain the celery soda into a slow cooker, reserve the carrot and onion for a roasted side.
3. Put the glorious meat into the cooker on high and cover until you feel sleepy. Before bed, turn the slow cooker to low because you don’t want the meat to fall apart when you try to move it.
4. In the morning, turn the slow cooker off and remove the lid.
5. If you can lift the meat without breaking it, transfer to a rack over a sheet pan and dry under a fan for two hours. If you can’t move it, let it cool until you can.
6. Meanwhile, strain the juices and discard the spices.
7. Slice thick slabs and layer them in a pan, as best you can. Reserve the bits that fall off and keep in a corner of the pan.
8. Pour the reserved slow cooker liquid over the meat and keep it warm in the oven until you’re ready to eat. Do not dry it out! 

Serve with a spatula because these babies are super soft.

Cook with Me at Local Roots Cooking Club 4

Looking for the ticket link? Click here!

I'm spending my St. Patrick's day in the kitchen with Local Roots, a CSA started by my friend WenJay. Her cooking clubs are small, intimate classes to show customers how you can use everything from your farm share. We'll be at Brooklyn Foodworks roasting up a lot of winter veggies, sipping on wine and learning basic knife skills to help us through the night. 

Learn to cook new dishes with Local Roots NYC inspired by the season's harvest in a fun and casual setting. Led by Chef De la Vega, creator of Randwiches and editor at large of Put an Egg On It, you'll prepare dishes in groups with a glass of wine in a unique setting: a food incubator kitchen that is home to many of NYC's small-batch food producers. Learn how to take the same set of ingredients and turn them into different dishes that complement each other to create a farm to table dinner which you will enjoy together as a group at the end of the evening. Participants will also learn basic knife skills and will walk away with recipe cards for the night's dishes, an opportunity to meet other like-minded individuals, and an immersive culinary experience. 

The menu will be inspired by Chef De la Vega's new book and Local Roots NYC seasonality and available items from their producers.

Limited spots are available. Buy tickets here!

If you're attending, let me know by tagging @Randwiches on Twitter.

Speaking of knife skills! You can win a Misen knife from Put a Egg On It. Details here.

Enter to Win a Misen Knife (& Learn How to Use It, Too!)

Put a Egg On It and Misen have teamed up to give away one heck of a knife. I loved shooting this short tutorial video. I picked this salad because it had so many elements that displayed the different ways you can cut vegetables. 

Here's how to enter:
1. Follow @putaeggonit on Instagram 🍳

2. Take a selfie in the kitchen and tag @putaeggonit + #putmisenonit. It's ok if you're camera-shy, we accept photos with your hands in it, too.

3. Head to the Put a Egg On It blog to grab a recipe for my gingery garlic and sesame salad dressing from the video.

A winner will be chosen by jury to receive a FREE Misen Chef's Knife! Contest runs March 1st to March 13th! Sorry, U.S residents only. Get snappin' so you can get to slicin'.

Hip to the Dip! An Ass Kicking Super Bowl LI Menu

I could care less about football but I do love a reason to cook up a storm until halftime.

Here's what's on the menu for Super Bowl LI:

Squash fundido

I don't have a Vitamix, so this "queso" is woefully grittier than the photos from the original recipe. I altered this by adding a chipotle pepper. I also used an acorn squash because it was what I had on hand.. It made the whole thing kinda sweet and spicy, I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. This tastes nothing like cheese, but it sure looks like it.

I didn't get a good photo before I served it but it was an unexpected hit of the night!

Cheddar bacon ranch ball (Tasting Table)

I got to stop by Tasting Table to visit my friend Vance a couple weeks ago and this masterpiece was sitting on the counter. I tried it and felt like I had to make it today. Instead of buying a packet of ranch dressing, I made my own mix and used tarragon instead of chives. I'm going divide this in half, cover one ball with bacon and the other with smoked peanuts (for my vegetarian friends).

Roja sauce 

This sauce came from a vegan imitation of a Torchy's Taco recipe. Pasilla chilis are great because they have a deep roasty flavor without being too spicy. I added double the garlic and added double the amount of vegetable broth in place of water. It's not a very exciting sauce by itself but with nachos and brighter flavors, it really stands out.

Taco seasoning 

So I get annoyed with anything asks for "chili powder" because it's one of those meta-mixes of things you probably already have in your pantry. In this case: chili, onion, garlic and paprika.. I throw in a bit of each until it tastes good. However, I made a tiny mistake dumping a little too much cayenne pepper after I ran out of ancho. "Not to worry, not to worry", she says, worrying.

What could I add that toned down the spice but didn't throw off the flavor of the whole seasoning mix? The answer is nutritional yeast! Now I have a cheesy taco seasoning.

God, I love messing things up so I can rescue them later.

Beefy Queso  (Cook's Science) 

This is the smoothest cheese recipe I've ever encountered. With the help of sodium citrate, cheese, beef tallow and water are whisked together and blasted with an immersion blender. What I took away were the proportions: 300g of any cheese, with 150g any liquid and 12g of sodium citrate will work. I tried another version with beer and vegetable broth and it was killer!

Bacon Corn Dip

Jury is still out on this one because I'm waiting to bake it for the party. I hope it's good.

Hamb Pies

Even if I get shortcut pie pastry from the store, I'm still dragging my feet about baking. I pre-made these last night and have them waiting in the freezer for a brush of egg and sprinkle of sesame seed. I spiked the hamburger mix with shallot, garlic and nuoc mam cham before sautéing. 

These were amazing! I have to remember to make this more often and with different fillings.

Green olive bocadito 

What a surprisingly great flavor. Milk mellows out the seemingly salty anchovy and green olives in this spread. It's kind of a milky tapanade. I'm into it.

Nopales

I only stuck myself twice while prepping these cactus paddles. I'm almost robotic when I'm taking off the needles after handling 30 of them for a pop up last year. I liked this recipe from Williams Sonoma but I found a cool bottle of pipian (pepita sauce) at Food Bazaar. I whisked a tablespoon of pipian with vegetable broth and folded in the cooked nopales. They're still a little tangy, so I'm going to add some mustard before serving.

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I keep notes on all the recipes I test in my Flipboard Magazine Randwiches: Tested & Approved.

View my Flipboard Magazine.

What are you cooking up for the Super Bowl? Tell me on Twitter @Randwiches.

Daring Creative Exercises with a Gigantic King Oyster Mushroom

An old friend named Adam Demartino got in touch recently and asked me, "Do you want some fancy mushrooms?"

It's not an inquiry that I took lightly. He sent me this photo:

Like high schoolers at dance, Kings like to cluster, stick in the corners, and mainly hang out with members of the same sex.

A photo posted by Smallhold (@smallhold.co) on Jan 10, 2017 at 4:03am PST

And I said, "OH HELL YEAH, DUDE!"

It was like a culinary drug deal

It turns out that Adam lived very close to my apartment, so I walked over. He produced an Amazon box from his fridge, like one that would hold several books. When he opened it, my emotions were a blur. I slightly remember hearing words like mycelium and how Smallhold's distributed farming worked. He gave me these mushrooms to see what I could do with them. I was up for the challenge!

I also packed a small gift my pocket: a small vial of Pangasinan salt that I had blended with dried shiitake mushroom and tarragon. Adam's eyes widened and quickly searched for a surface to pour it out on. He settled for a piece of junk mail and tapped a bit of salt out of the bottle like it was cocaine. This was going to be a fun partnership, I could tell.

Here's what I learned

As soon as I got home, I started texting this photo to my friends; 1) for the laugh and 2) because I couldn't think of anything but making very large vegan scallops with these mushrooms. I went on a quest to find out how other people prepared them.

King Oyster (or also called King Trumpet) mushrooms are moist, canvases for flavor. Most other mushroom stalks are way too tiny to do anything with except make stock. King Oyster's iconic thick stalks are striated enough to act like crab, lobster or scallop. 

Here's what I made

ROY-L-T. 👑  (Recipe coming soon)

One of my first findings was Serious Eats vegan mushroom bacon. Sign me up for anything-bacon, really. The only change I made was simply smoking on a grill. If you put a little too much maple syrup on the pan during the last round of drying in the oven, it makes this fun, savory candy you can peel off.  The results are crispy, sweet, salty and spicy. You can store them in an air-tight container on the counter. Naturally I made a BLT.

Queen Rachel 👑  (Recipe coming soon)

In the same vein as meat-substitute, I thought about what other kinds I could make. I started by running a couple of the smaller king oysters through the mandoline set to 1/8". Mushrooms are like sponges. When cooking them, you have to devise ways to wring them out with either heat or physical pressure and then to infuse them. If you don't get rid of the initial moisture, you're left with soggy mushies (and we hate those, don't we?).

I smoked a sheet pan of mushrooms until they lost a little volume, almost like mushroom chips. Then I brushed them with a healthy dose of pastrami butter (seasonings from this recipe) folded with a couple drops of red food colors to give it that signature pink color.  Did you know? When you make a reuben with pastrami, it's called a Rachel.

Fresh lumpiang kabute 🍄 (Work in progress)

Continuing with the thought of drying out mushrooms in sheets, I started to tackle the very large king oyster. It made no sense to just cut the mushroom up and treat it as normal, I wanted to demonstrate what you could do with its unique length. I've never seen a mushroom with this long of a stalk. I had a difficult time slicing consistent sheets of it with my mandoline because the fungi is so squishy and my blade was simply not wide enough. 

In the Philippines, there are many kinds of lumpia or what we Americans know as eggrolls. One of my favorite kinds is just called fresh lumpia, which is a vegetable stir fry wrapped in a very delicate crepe and topped with a thick garlic sauce. Instead of putting the sauce on top of my mushroom, I thought to infuse it and use the sheet as a wrapper.

I started by drying the mushroom sheets in the oven on low at 200 degrees F. Once they looked dehydrated,  I soaked them in vegetable broth spiked with a lot of raw garlic. The sheets became pliable! I made a quick stir fry with pork sausage and mushroom scraps and wrapped them in a mushroom sheet. It was a little hard to bite through, perhaps needs more time to soak.

"Stroganoff" 🐮  (Recipe coming soon)

I had several broth-soaked mushroom sheets left and I cut them into fettuccine noodles. Excellent because it already had a vegetable flavor from the broth and could adhere to sauce like stroganoff, a power chord of taste. I chose stroganoff because it normally has mushrooms in it but what if the mushrooms were the noodles?

Topped the whole thing with rare AF grilled adobo skirt steak because, I had not had a lick of meat throughout this whole experiment and I was growing blood-thirsty.

Surf n' dirt 🌊  (Work in progress)

Making scallops with king oyster mushrooms isn't new. But I wanted to play with the idea of making them taste more like seafood. I was going to try infusing them with lobster juice but my stock of it did not keep very well in my freezer. I kept going but cooked thick mushroom coins sous vide with truffle, thyme and garlic at 150 for 4 hours. I wrung them out and poached them in chive goat butter. Served with luscious mashed potato with the rest of the goat butter and a pinch of sumac.

Pulled Porque 🐷  (Recipe coming soon)

I had mentioned that king oyster mushroom is striated, like strings packed together. I took all of my scraps and sous vide cooked them in another bag with garlic adobo marinade. The next day, I pulled them with forks like I would pork. It was surprising! I tossed the strings with brown sugar and broiled them until the top layer was crisp.

Love mushrooms? Check out these other posts.

• An important guide to lion’s mane mushroom

• Super savory mushroom rubbed Delmonico steak

• Shiitake tartines with arugula salad

• Pickled oyster mushrooms

• Zero waste mushroom powder

Stay tuned for links to the recipes as I finish developing them! If you have more mushroom suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Tweet me @Randwiches.