Epifurious

A Recipe For The Sorrel Pesto I've Been Eating On Everything

Sorrel is kind of my "new thing".  It's delicious and tart and healthy and I wish it were more common.  I tried it for the first time last summer, when IFC and I made a sorrel and scallop steamed dumpling.  When I get a new ingredient, I generally like to just experiment with putting it in regular things that I think it might add a nice flavor to (which yields mostly hits, but a few misses -- I'm talking to you, dandelion greens) though I sometimes like to internet it up. 

After doing some internet research, it seems people primarily cook the sorrel and make soups from it, but I like it raw.  My research did yield the proper spelling of the word, however.  This is what I found when I first looked: Herb Sorrell.  He wasn't a commie!

After using all this current batch of sorrel to make a pesto, I'm convinced this is THE best use for it.  I'll probably never make a plain basil pesto again.  The sorrel adds a nice, lemony bite (you can really taste the oxalic acid!), that meshes nicely with the sharpness of the feta and the creaminess of the nuts and olive oil.  I find plain basil pesto often has a undernote that tastes the way a basement smells, and the sorrel completely mitigates this problem. 

The recipe after the jump.

Curb Your Infusiasm

Sorry that was so dumb. IFC and I just started a red and black currant
and lavender infused vodka. We'll tell you how it tastes in a million
years. If this entry seems super lame, it's because we're MOBLOGGING it
from the Sidekick 3! Get ready for many, short, unfunny, drunk,
misspelled posts! You may as well stop reading now!

What To Do With Everything Left When You Overbought Weird Things At The Farmer's Market

Well, if they're these weird things. 

A New and Exciting Egomaniac Project, Day 1

My sister, Belle Boyd Meinhof, left for Alaska for an 8 day camping excursion last weekend.  I was fascinated to watch her pack 8 days of food for 2, that she and her friend would carry with them the entire week.  I couldn't decide whether it was more or less than I would have imagined.  She promises to guest blog about it, with pictures of cooking it in her tiny and adorable camping pots and camping stoves when she returns. 

Epifurious Labs Creates 90% Pio Pio Green Sauce

As you've read, we here at Epifurious love ourselves some Pio Pio.  The pollo a la brasa, the jalea, the saffron rice and those amazing beans.  Mmm!  The real secret of Pio Pio, however, is the green sauce--a creamy, spicy confection with which you bathe everything on the plate.  Ahh, to be able to put it on everything!

Well, this week Ulrike, Idahomie, and I ordered in Pio Pio while watching the YouTube/CNN debates, which were as almost as delicious to consume as the meal.  I saved one of the little tubs of green sauce, and set about some internet research, hoping to learn the secret of making my own Pio Pio sauce.

Lesson From The Past

Don't Drown Your Food!

Pork-ish

OK, I know I've mined this topic before, but I can't help myself!  As the New York Times reports, there are delicious pork buns available in China that are, in fact, made of cardboard, chemicals, and fatty scrap meats!  Yum-O!

''What's in the recipe?'' the reporter asks. ''Six to four,'' the man says.

''You mean 60 percent cardboard? What is the other 40 percent?'' asks the reporter. ''Fatty meat,'' the man replies.

The bun maker and his assistants then give a demonstration on how the product is made.

Squares of cardboard picked from the ground are first soaked to a pulp in a plastic basin of caustic soda -- a chemical base commonly used in manufacturing paper and soap -- then chopped into tiny morsels with a cleaver. Fatty pork and powdered seasoning are stirred in.

Now that's  molecular gastronomy!

Make This Now.

If it's at ALL hot where you live, make this now. 
•  5 ice cubes
• 1 cup pineapple juice
• 1 handful of fresh basil.
Blend in a blender!

It's sweet and grassy and relaxing...  delicious! 

The Pride Comes Before The Fall

Here's a riddle: what holiday comes after Memorial Day, before July 4th, and is NOT Father's Day?  Give up?  It's PRIDE, silly!  IFC, Caesar Chavez, Bosie Douglas and some others gathered to commemorate this fine season with a brunch at my apartment.  Brunch is nice for apartment dwellers because you can play your music loud, and your guests can get as Bloody Mary-drunk and rowdy as they want and your neighbors don't mind.  And what with the Danny Tenaglia mega-mixes, the jello shot mold, and the drunken, homosexual shouting, it was a good thing.

Sorry it took so long to post -- the pictures were trapped in IFC's broken camera.  Maybe you can use the following recipe if it's PRIDE in your city this weekend, or if you've just been feeling a bit shamey these days.  More pictures of rainbow foods and directions for constructing the jiggling quintessence of PRIDE to the left after the jump.

INTERACTIVE FEATURE!

I seem to have recently contracted the ever-annoying summer cold, which means that I am still at work (of course), but am taking a regimen of Dayquil and Airborne and Ricola and all kinds of other overpowering powders and potions that seem to do little to stem the tide of sneezes and coughs and moments of vertigo. Yay!

But this leads me to an interactive feature.  You see, when I get a sickness of the sinusoidal variety, the first thing I do is look for the nearest bowl of spicy soup--Tom Yum Gai, Pho Ga, heck, even a Soon-Tofu can do the trick (though the lack of noodles puts it in a distant third).  A fever-inducing illness will find me consuming massive quantities of saltines and stale 7Up (i think this some kind of primal reaction to fever requiring the quickest ingestion of glucose).  So yes!  Sick foods!  Strange cravings!  What are your preferred medicinal foods?  Share your secrets!

[See, it's interactive in that the post requires your input via the Comments feature of Epifurious.]