bhut jolokia – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Note that this is not actually a picture of the dinner I made tonight; I stole this one off the Interwebs. It’s the same dish, though, and doesn’t look too far off from what ended up in my Dutch oven– ie, it looked like nothing anyone wanted to eat until we started eating it. This, folks, is Eggs in Hell– apparently originally a Mario Batali recipe, although the one I followed was from Michael Symon’s 5 in 5 cookbook and is not precisely the recipe outlined in that link. In particular, it looks a lot less spicy– for example, it only uses one jalapeño instead of four (this may be the first time in my life I’ve had food with jalapeños in it two days in a row) and no red chili flakes. Basically: Five eggs, a shallot, a can of San Marzano tomatoes, a clove of garlic, some olive oil (too much, I think, actually), parsley, and the aforementioned jalapeño. Combine everything but the eggs and set to a-simmerin’ for a few minutes, then turn down the heat a touch and poach the eggs.

The cookbook claimed the eggs would poach in about two minutes. I have poached eggs in water in two minutes; you cannot poach an egg in simmering tomato juice in two minutes, so there was some consternation about the done-ness of the eggs. Turns out it takes around five and could maybe have handled another minute. The dish looks (appropriately, apparently) like hell upon being removed from the heat, so I didn’t take a picture of it– but take a couple of those eggs and some of the sauce and spread ’em over some cheddar cornbread (that recipe, plus half a cup of cheddar in the batter and half a cup over the bread once it’s done cooking) and you have some damn fine food.

(Seriously, I’m never using eggs in cornbread again. Yogurt yogurt yogurt that cornbread is fantastic.)

Work was annoyingly stressful and I have a feeling if I talk about why I’m going to spend the rest of the entry raining hell down upon a thirteen year old who might actually deserve it for his various acts of stupidity and assholery, but I’m going to refrain anyway. Once in a while I should act like the adult.

Anyway. Point is: I’ve survived two days as a vegetarian, because shut up, eggs aren’t meat. Five more to go!

SUPER IMPORTANT OH I ALMOST FORGOT EDIT: I bought the ghost chilies. So. Do you know me in the real world? Are you interested in a suicide pact? LET US MAKE DEATH CHILI TOGETHER.

Doesn’t look that much different from the original picture, does it? All told I made very few changes to the original recipe for vegan quinoa & sweet potato “chili”; at one point I considered adding some extra tomatoes and almost put in two potatoes instead of one, but at the end the only change I made was adding a jalapeño, a decision I feel pretty damn good about and will be repeating whenever I make this again.

(Yes, I know putting sour cream in it makes it no longer vegan. Shuddup; that’s what the recipe calls it.)

One other thing: I’m renaming sweet potatoes. I’ve eaten many, many sweet potatoes in my time but haven’t actually ever cooked with them before, and from now on they’re to be known as sonofabitch potatoes whenever I’m referring to them. I was startled at how difficult they were to cube properly and they took so much longer than every other element of the recipe to cook up right that I think they were probably still a trifle undercooked when I finally gave up and turned the heat off. My wife has suggested that next time I put them in the microwave for a minute or two before I try to cut them up; that seems like a good idea, as we could have been eating fifteen minutes earlier were it not for the potatoes– I was originally thinking that the vegetable stock in the chili was taking way too long to cook off/be absorbed by the quinoa but I was actually adding water by the time I felt like the potatoes were ready.

Another casualty: I wanted to garnish with avocado, as the recipe suggests, but there were no ripe avocados to be had at my grocery. I bought one that I felt like was the closest to being ripe, but was quickly disabused of that notion when I cut into it; I had to throw it out. I love avocado but the dish doesn’t need it so it wasn’t a huge deal.

All told, despite the issues with the potatoes, this was fucking delicious. I told my wife I’d deny this until I died, but I think I’m going to admit it: I didn’t miss ground beef at all. Quinoa matches it texturally just enough that I didn’t notice it was gone. I’ll make this again.

Right, speaking of my grocery: they didn’t have ripe avocados (they had plenty that will be fine if I give them a day or two, mind you) but what they did have, to my great surprise, was dried ghost chilies, hidden away in a corner, literally underneath a basket of shallots. If you’re not familiar with them, the bhut jolokia, or ghost chili, is (or at least was recently; this is a category with a lot of turnover) the hottest chili known to the human race. So hot that chefs who cook with them have been known to wear gas masks while doing so.

I didn’t buy them; it took me a while to get over the initial “you can get these in Indiana? How the hell did that happen?” shock and by the time I realized what I’d passed up on I was out of the store. Now, keep in mind, I’ve never even used habaneros in anything before, so jumping from jalapeños to goddamn ghost chilies is probably completely insane.

I wanna make chili with them– hell, with one– and have some people over to see if any of us can eat it. With, like, pizza as backup or something like that, because, really, I don’t know anybody with a much higher tolerance for spicy foods than I have and my tolerance for spicy foods, while improving, isn’t exactly notable.

So. Yeah. Who’s in?