Category Archives: Good Food Recipes

Anti-Cookbook – Crispy “Crab” Rolls

A quick and easy appetizer, dinner or snack that I adapted from a TikTok (yes, TikTok) video that Emma showed me. Pretty good!

Ingredients:

  • 1.5 cups sushi rice
  • 1 8oz. package of imitation crab meat (you only need 4oz.)
  • 1 cup potato starch (can user corn starch in a pinch)
  • 1 bunch scallions
  • 1 sheet nori
  • 2 tbsp. mayonnaise
  • 1 tsp. chili garlic crisp
  • 1/4 cup seasoned rice vinegar (if you don’t have any, just use regular rice vinegar and add 2 tsp sugar and a good pinch of salt.)
  • 1 lime

Recipe:

  1. Prepare the sushi rice. Add 1.5 cups of rice and 2 cups of cold water to a pot. Allow rice to soak for about 15 minutes before turning on heat.
  2. Bring rice to a simmer and cook about 15 minutes or until water is absorbed. Remove from heat and let stand for another 10 minutes before using.
  3. Season your rice and pack it into plastic wrap in the bottom of a casserole dish. The goal here is both to form the rice into a brick from which you can cut sushi-size nuggets from, but also to help it retain shape when frying. Put the rice in the freezer to cool down quickly.
  4. While the rice is cooling down, get about 4-5 ounces of your fake crab meat and pull it apart in a bowl. Next, add a pinch of salt and one teaspoon of your chili garlic crisp (see previous recipe) and 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise. Adjust the mixture to your liking (more crab/less crab, more mayo/less mayo).
  5. When the rice is very cool, but not frozen, remove it from the dish and cut into nigiri-sized nuggets. Or maki-sized nuggets. Whatever. I don’t care!
  6. Roll the nuggets lightly in the potato starch and then place them gently in a sauté pan on medium heat with 1/4 inch of oil covering the bottom. Allow each side of the nugget to brown, turning gently to get even coverage.
  7. Remove nuggets from pan to plate lined with paper towel and salt lightly.
  8. Plate your dinner! Put a drip of chili oil down first, then the rice nuggets. Next, place a small scoop of crab salad on top using a spoon and your fingers. Finally, slice up some scallions and a sheet of nori into strips as thin as you can, and liberally distribute over the rolls.

That’s it! I know the knife work is bad, I could only find the worst, dullest one. I also only had corn starch around so I wasn’t able to do this 100% true to the video, but I also didn’t have avocado, because avocado isn’t good on rice to me. The corn starch was a little heavier of a breading than I would have wanted, but the finished product still tasted great. I bet this would actually work really well if you did a traditional double dredge in panko breadcrumbs too… nice.

Anti-Cookbook: Chili-Garlic Crisp

Just a little condiment that ends up going on or in about 30% of the food I eat.

Ingredients:

  • 1 Qt. Neutral oil (Canola, Peanut, Vegetable)
  • 2 cups dried chilis (spicy!!)
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • Salt

Recipe:

  1. Put your chilis in a food processor or blender and completely obliterate them. Not like to the point of a powder, but you want the chunks to be seed-size or smaller.
  2. Give the garlic a small dice.
  3. Add chilis, salt and garlic to the oil in a small saucepan.
  4. Bring to about 185 degrees and continue cooking for as long as it takes for the garlic to stop releasing water bubbles and totally dry out. This could take hours, so make sure you are checking on it every now and then to make sure it’s remaining at a suitable temperature and that the garlic isn’t burning.

The resulting oil is bright orange on the plate and the fried chili and garlic adds a nice crunch on top of just about anything. As per usual, I’m not sure how a chili crisp is made traditionally, but I think this one is as close as it could be.,

Anti- Cookbook – Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

  • 2 1/4 cups flour
  • 1.5-2 cups brown sugar (Sometimes I accidentally add 2 whole cups, which makes the cookies chewier and flatter)
  • 2 sticks butter (1 cup)
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 tsp. baking soda
  • 1 tsp. salt (I like more!)
  • 1 bag (2 cups) chocolate chips
  • 1 tsp. vanilla extract
  • Dash of cinnamon

Directions:

  1. Preheat the oven to 370 degrees
  2. Unwrap butter and cook in microwave on low power until it’s half-softened, half melted
  3. Mix brown sugar, melted butter, eggs and vanilla and whisk vigorously (or use a hand/stand mixer) until the mixture becomes lighter in color and texture
  4. Mix flour with baking soda and salt and add this mixture slowly to the other mixture
  5. Once the dough is made, mix in the chocolate chips and add about half a teaspoon of cinnamon
  6. Scoop out balls onto parchment-lined tray and bake for 10-12 minutes.

Blog Post:

I’ve been making these cookies since I was a little kid and they always turn out good. Except for that one time in fifth grade when my friend and I baked cookies together and I accidentally replaced the flour with powdered sugar. Her mom wasn’t happy and I didn’t cook in their kitchen again for a long time. Anyways, these cookies are chewy in the middle and crunchy around the edge. Sometimes I make small adjustments or call audibles–white sugar & molasses, extra salt, hot melted butter– if I’m out of an ingredient and as long as I stick to the base ratios provided above, the cookies always turn out pretty good. I can pretty much guarantee that everybody will like them.

Cookbook – Sticky Chicken

Ingredients:

  • 2-4lb. chicken breast
  • 1 packet Lipton onion soup mix
  • 1 (12oz.) jar apricot preserves
  • 1 bottle Wishbone Russian or Ken’s Country French Dressing (not creamy)
  • White rice
  • Broccoli (optional)

Instructions:

  1. Preheat the oven to 350 and literally just combine the soup mix, dressing and preserves in a bowl and mix them up.
  2. Pour the sauce over the chicken in a heavy baking dish
  3. Put it into the oven.
  4. While the chicken is cooking, prepare your rice and broccoli–I steam it in the rice cooker
  5. Cook chicken until internal temperature is 160 degrees and remove from oven, about 30-45 minutes depending on how big your breasts are
  6. Let it cool! The chicken will cook the rest of the way through and you won’t burn 3 layers of skin off of the roof of your mouth.

Blog Post:

That’s it! Sticky Chicken is my essential comfort food. Cheap, easy and filling, it’s truly the lowest risk/highest reward dinner that I can recommend. It’s got that premium combination of sweet, sour and savory (even more with some soy sauce) that we all know and love. Mixing onion soup mix and apricot preserves and salad dressing might sound a bit weird, but Americans have made much stranger casseroles over the course of the last 50 years and longer. Sticky Chicken is especially good in the wintertime when you want something that will make you feel the good kind of bloated that comes with eating a big bowl of stew. It was what my mom made when she didn’t want to go all-in on dinner but still wanted to make sure my sister didn’t whine about it. You’re bound to get really fat if you eat a lot of it, but once you eat it it probably won’t matter. And make sure you save your leftover sauce too! Use it again, put it in a stir fry or repurpose it into a barbecue sauce or marinade. Again if you’re worried about undercooking your chicken, get a probe thermometer they’re like $12.