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#Recipe: Hawaiian Ham & Swiss sliders

March 8, 2020 Luther M. Siler1 Comment

I haven’t posted a recipe in forever; this one is going up because I originally found it on TikTok, of all places, where it is destined to disappear, and I want to make them again:

Line a pan with aluminum foil; apply a light coat of cooking spray. Melt a stick of butter; to the butter add a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce, a tablespoon of minced garlic, half a tablespoon of Dijon mustard, and a half tablespoon of Italian seasoning. Mix well. Cut a … loaf? batch? Let’s go with batch– cut a batch of King’s Hawaiian dinner rolls in half and put the bottom half in the tray. Use a brush or a spoon and lightly brush the butter over the bottom half.

I used a full pound of honey ham; that was probably a bit too much, insofar as “too much ham” can actually be a thing, and I think you could get away with 3/4 of a pound or so. Fold the slices over and arrange them evenly over the bottom half of the bread. On top of the bread, add a double layer of Swiss cheese; half a pound was about right for us. Put the top layer of the rolls on top of the bread and cheese and evenly distribute the rest of the butter-garlic mixture over the tops of the rolls. Cover the whole shebang with foil and bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes; after 15 minutes remove the foil and continue baking for five additional minutes.

Upon removal from the oven, add a liberal coating of Parmesan cheese. Cut and separate.

These were really good; the only thing I’d change is either going with a bit less ham or baking them for a little bit longer, as while everything was plenty warm the cheese in the middle wasn’t completely melted– you can see individual slices in that picture– and I felt like they could be a bit hotter and gooier. The best part was the bread on the bottom which I was expecting to be a bit soggy and toasted up really nicely. We’ll have these again.

You feed a cold, right?

August 19, 2017 Luther M. Siler3 Comments

Last night, at approximately 4:30 in the morning, I was bludgeoned out of a sound sleep by the sudden and overwhelming need to vomit. Like, threw the covers damn near off the bed, kicked the cat, scared the shit out of the dog, damn near fell over clawing for the bathroom before I projectile vomited all over my entire fucking bedroom. And then… nothing. I got into the bathroom and absolutely nogoddamnthing happened. When my alarm woke me up this morning, I spent a moment reflecting on the fact that I was able to breathe normally and thought oh, hey, maybe I’m better! and then got out of bed and was damn near forced to my knees by the virulence of the ensuing coughing fit. How the hell I made it to work this morning is a mystery, and instead of the usual caffeine product that I make sure to bring with me every day (a bottle of tea, most of the time) I brought Robitussin. I literally do not know how I got through the day, but I managed it, and with enough sales to make the effort more or less worth it.

On the way home, I drove past another fucking wild turkey. I live less than a mile from what is effectively open prairie and woodland (yes, both, in different directions) so the occasional deer and the much-less-occasional herd of deer in the neighborhood isn’t unheard of, along with the other usual urban wildlife, but I swear I never saw a wild turkey before this year and now I’m seeing them all the time. Wild turkeys are fucking weird, guys, and I have the same reaction every time I see one, which is to briefly wonder why the fuck a dinosaur is that close to my car. This particular wild turkey was even weirder, because I watched it in my rear-view mirror as I was driving past and the damn thing was hopping, not walking, across the street. So maybe it’s a one-legged wild turkey? I dunno. I’ve never been one for hunting but I kind of do want to see if these things make for good eating or not.

A minute or so later, I had another massive coughing fit and came very close to swerving into oncoming traffic. Frighteningly close, actually. Probably should have pulled over.

And then I got home and made the sumptuous feast you see in the photo above for dinner– yes, that’s turkey– and for dessert I plan to have codeine. I will try to post something more generally useful and less hallucinatory tomorrow; for now I’m just happy to be alive.

The end.

In which I provide good news and then gross you out

March 2, 2015March 2, 2015 Luther M. Siler10 Comments

Okay, maybe I’ll gross you out immediately, because you have to look at this picture before you get any context. Bear with me.

It is possible that you may remember my blog post entitled How to Launch Your New Book: Everything I Know. If you’ve memorized that post, or if you just clicked on it to refresh your memory, you may recall that I recommend taking the mandatory month between finishing a manuscript and rereading it for editing and redrafting and writing something else. Now, I’m not good at taking my own advice, guys. I’ve already broken like half the rules on that page for The Sanctum of the Sphere (preorder available now!) and I’ll likely break more before it comes out.

But! Although I had to channel my college self, who laughed at deadlines and stayed up late when he needed to finish shit, I completed my entry for the Swords v. Cthulhu anthology last night– and, amazingly, I actually think it’s pretty damn good. I think it’s got a solid chance of getting accepted, even if I took forever to finish it and literally didn’t send it in until 11:30 on the night before it was due when I had to be at work in the morning.

(Hah. Do a Google Image Search for “Swords v. Cthulhu” and take a look at what comes up.)

Unfortunately, what this means is that now I have to start editing my stupid novel so that people can, like, read it and stuff, because I want that to happen for some reason. Blargh.

Anyway. Now the gross part.

We went to a local establishment for dinner last night, one I had not previously eaten at. I like new restaurants, although I will admit that I’m starting to cool on the concept of the Italian restaurant, just because I’m pretty sure by now the pasta that I can make in my house is as good or better than the pasta that basically anywhere around here is going to charge me for. (I’ll make an exception for any place that actually makes their pasta fresh on-site, however I know of no such restaurants in town.)

But! This place supposedly has really good vodka sauce. I like vodka sauce! And I’ve never made it! So let’s check ’em out.

I am going to be charitable and assume that we were afflicted with a novice chef last night. Because while it has got to be true that there has been some point before last night that I couldn’t finish a meal at a restaurant because of how terrible I thought it tasted, I certainly can’t remember it– or it fits into some sort of special case where I was deliberately experimenting with something exotic and it turned out that I was overreaching. Because if this shit is the best vodka sauce anyone has ever tasted, I have a frozen meal to recommend to you. Because I am not joking when I say I would rather have Weight Watchers Mini Rigatoni with Vodka Cream Sauce for every meal for the rest of my life rather than eat the food at Polito’s again. This shit was inedible. I have looked at several different recipes for vodka sauce since we got home last night, and not one of them mentioned black pepper as a primary component of the dish, so the fact that this goddamn thing was swimming in black pepper has to represent some sort of error somewhere. I’m not kidding. I am a fat man, goddammit, and for better or worse I have been conditioned over my entire life to not leave uneaten food on my plate. I couldn’t finish a quarter of this shit.

Which brings me to one of the other sins of Polito’s: portion sizes so large as to somehow be offensive. My wife and I ordered the following: an appetizer of garlic bread (which had a sliver of metal in it and still managed to be the highlight of the meal,) fettuccine alfredo and the vodka rigatoni. The entrees came with a single breadstick and the salad bar. Even the salad bar had a number of items that were far too large; we literally were unable to finish a single component of our meal, and my wife actually laughed at the breadsticks when they showed up. The damn things are two inches across and nine inches long; I couldn’t tell if I was trying to eat a breadstick or blow a porn star.

The punchline: before I realized what we were in for, I had some trouble deciding what I wanted to eat, and went to the unusual step of also ordering a calzone, thinking that I’d have it for lunch the next day, mostly because I still really miss being able to eat at Pockets whenever I want and I don’t really have a good source for calzones whenever I want one. I tried to have the calzone for lunch today, and again ate maybe 20% of it before throwing the rest away and going to McDonald’s. Why? Because a sausage and mozzarella calzone was, inexplicably, packed with black pepper.

If I had lived in South Bend during my dating years, I’d be seriously wondering right now if I screwed our waitress at some point and never called her back or something. Because holy shit have I never paid money for worse food. We left with so many to-go bags it was ridiculous; I am not the type to complain at waitresses, so I just brought the boxes home and threw them away, and I’ll never darken the place’s door again.

The final offense? I went to the bathroom while we were waiting for the check. The bathroom has no lock on the door and has a freestanding toilet (no walls) and two urinals that are so close together that no pair of men anywhere on earth would ever use both at the same time. In other words, it’s not a one-seater, which would be fine; it’s just a community bathroom with absolutely no privacy allowed of any kind. I couldn’t have taken a shit in there if I’d wanted to.

I decided to piss at Target instead.