Colmus Recipes and Blog Disasters

Hello friends. I am sorry for my absence this past week. I was away for a nerd convention, and one would expect such a convention (which took place at Penn State) to have some sort of internet for visitors. This wasn't true, so I couldn't check my email OR update this blog. I came back to Friends Recommend to see what kind of good stuff our Tuesday-Thursday bloggers had for us and saw that it was Recipe Week! My original intention was for the week starting today to be Recipe Week, but something was lost in translation. Since everyone who posted thought last week was the week, I must have done something wrong. I apologize. This might work out well though, since the only recipe I have is from Colmus. I'll post that here today, and if Todd wants to do something tomorrow not related to recipes that would probably be great. A big thanks to Colmus for this. This guys blog posts are some of my personal favorites:

Since I'm pretty sure this Recipe Week mess is partially my fault, I feel honor-bound to submit an entry. I'm sure the history books will show that this week peaked on Monday and careened off the clif like Toonces was at the wheel. But we managed to trick Ricky into giving out his mashed potato recipe, so mission accomplished. (Sorry Ricky.)

Anyway, I don't really have any Knock-Out dishes. Not one. I'm not a dreadful cook, but I'm usually too lazy or theoretically busy to bother with much in-depth cooking. I likes 'em fast and no-fuss. Like my coffee.

But I have picked up a few things in the kitchen that I don't mind passing along. They taste pretty good to me. I'm comfortable with their taste-effort ratio - the "torque" of the meal, if you will. Enjoy.

Quesadillas

Mike Ward might consider me a purist with my spatula and frying pan, but I'll never let a damn machine make my quesadilla.

In fact, the only Recommendation I can make for this simple ethnic treat is in the way that it's cooked. (In a pan, for chrissakes.) You've all probably got your favorite ingredients, and I'm not going to recommend any here because I usually keep mine simple - usually sauteed mushrooms and red onions, with diced jalapenos sprinkled inside. Add an egg if it's before 2pm.

But my endgame goes like this:

Heat an ungreased skillet over medium heat for about two minutes. When it's properly warmed, place a tortilla in the skillet for about 20-30 seconds on each side, nicely toasting them. After you've removed the tortilla from the pan and started heaping your filling in, fold the tortilla over the filling. (Don't do this two-tortilla Mexican Pizza shit.) Drizzle the outside of the tortilla with about a 1/4 teaspoon of olive oil, spreading it all the way to the edges. Then sprinkle with salt, about 2-3 shakes of the shaker.

Carefully slide the quesadillas onto the heated skillet (still at medium heat), oiled sides down. Now repeat the oiling and salting on the newly-exposed other side of the tortilla, and prepare that to be flipped in about a minute-and-a-half to two minutes, just until it's nicely browned. I was pretty surprised by how much something as simply as the oil and salt add to the taste, even for dessert quesadillas (like "King Killers" - peanut butter and banana).

And no goddamn robot is gonna top that.

Roasted Green Beans

Everything tasted better roasted - nuts, vegetables, legumes, Andlers. But the dish I turn to the most often is roasted green beans, mainly because a ton of fresh green beans anyway. They might be my favorite vegetable (narrowly edging out Betty Crocker Mashed Sweet Potato Mix).

Here's my take on it:

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees, and begin snapping off the stems and whatnot from your green beans. (Run them under some water while you're at it.) Put your cleaned green beans in a mixing bowl and pour a tablespoon of olive oil over them, tossing to coat. Then add 1/2 teaspoon of salt and toss again.

Line a cookie sheet with aluminum foil and spread the green beans evenly across it. If you're making a lot, like I do, it might get cramped. Deal with it quickly and move on.

Place the sheet on the lower middle rack of the oven for about ten minutes, flipping them afterwards (or at least pushing them around). These things take to sizzling pretty quickly, and you might notice you can hear them from outside the oven.

Put the beans back in the oven for another 10-15 minutes, removing them when they're lightly browned and pretty well shriveled. (If you burn them, you've got about five minutes to eat the entire batch before they harden. It's totally doable.)

The roasting brings out an almost nutty flavor to the beans, and the salt contributes to that. (You can use a pinch less salt and it'll still taste great, but not quite as great.) Pair this up with some Stovetop Cornbread Stuffing and some leftover birthday cake and you're good to go.

Bon Voyage!

The Steve Colmus (and last!) Top 5

This is it, friends. Thanks for sticking with us, but it's time to put the Top 5 to rest for a little while. Maybe we'll be back with something new for you all to sound off on. Thanks to everyone who participated. I have some really great Top-5 playlists on my iPod now. And for better or worse, I feel like I know everyone here a little bit better.

Jenny-list greatness will be coming your way in my next post. Like I said, not sure what these other jokers are going to write about this week. We'll see! I just bought Junot Diaz's The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao today on the strong recommendations of Heather and Mike Gittings. Also picked up The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, who's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and Yiddish Policeman's Union have been recommending in this very blog. Should finish at least one on my trip to San Francisco this week, and I'm looking forward to whichever one I pick. And here goes Colmus...(editors note: Colmus has a potty mouth, if you are under 18 please send your permission slip to me via email to read this post):

I apologize to Adam for having taken so long pulling this together, but I was torn between contributing my Top Five Songs and mounting a defense of Jack Kerouac, because you all are some hatin’ ass fools. In the end, I decided against the Kerouac piece (for now) after being reminded of the old saying about how you can lead a horse to water, but he’s got to figure it the fuck out from there for his own damn self. Plus, after Ward and Myers’s Top Fives, I figured it might be nice to offer a man’s perspective.

These aren’t necessarily my Five Favorite Songs of All-Time, but they’re in the shooting match.

The Replacements “Bastards of Young”



This is what rock n’ roll should sound like - loud, sloppy and drunkenly heartfelt with a healthy dose of alienation. This is from their major label debut and it’s an amazing Statement of Purpose from a band who really couldn’t give a fuck about anything - record sales, being famous, even learning how to play their own songs. I love this recording because it’s warts-and-all - Westerberg can only barely sing the song, the solo two wheels it around the corners, and the whole thing feels like it could fly off the rails at every minute. In the end, it’s all held together by sheer excitement and force of childlike abandon - it sounds like the drunkest high school band in the world. It’s real, it’s honest, and it fucking rocks.

Supergrass “Alright”



One of my friends thinks that the indie rock of the 1990s will become the next Classic Rock when our generation is old and rich enough to afford our own radio stations. If so, this deserves to be in heavy rotation because this is about as perfect a pop song as anyone wrote in those years. This just feels like being 17 years old and careening through the streets in your friend’s car, trying to find something - or someone - to get into.

Bob Dylan “Mr. Tambourine Man”




I probably don’t need to explain this one. There are two dozen Dylan songs that could make this list, but I always come back to this - especially this version, from a concert on Halloween of 1964, before either he or the Byrds had released their takes of the song. The studio version is great enough, but this just seems to pour out of him effortlessly, in a gorgeously drowsy fashion. At the risk of sounding like some asshole Phish Phan, he really seems to climb inside the song on this. These are maybe my favorite lyrics of all-time, even if I really have no idea what he’s going on about. I think it’s an idealized peace the narrator is desperately in search of, where he can “forget about today until tomorrow.” Or it’s about smoking pot.

ABBA “Waterloo”



Someone who knows far more about the architecture of The Modern Pop Song than I, once told me that this is a mathematically perfect song - the first turnaround comes exactly one minute in, as prescribed; the second follows one minute and one second later; and then it’s all driven home with one last chorus, burying that hook in your brain. I hit things with sticks precisely so I don’t have to worry things like that, but I love this song simply because it always puts a smile on my face. Its so tight and perfectly arranged, and those crafty Swedes thought to compare an episode of romantic capitulation to Napoleon’s great defeat. SOLD! I really, really love the shit out of this.

Foreigner “Feels Like The First Time”



Bands don’t write shit like this anymore - tell me that chorus doesn’t have balls so big, they drag. It’s fucking enormous. For a long time, Foreigner was nothing more to me than the ironic soundtrack to my friends and mine’s illicit high school games of Risk in my parent’s basement, when we’d hide the beers under the bean bag chair and root through my Dad’s record collection. But I gradually realized that this song kicked so much ass that it almost made up for “I Wanna Know What Love Is.” When they launch out of the bridge and into the chorus around the 2:15 mark and Lou Grant is just riffing in and out of the backing vocals, it makes the hair on my ass stand up every time. You can scoff if you want to, but that probably just means you’re an asshole with no taste.

That’s enough out of me. I’ll re-introduce myself whenever I make the cut here again.