Use Your Hot Knives

One of our greatest fears — right up there with the fear that one of our favorite restaurants will pop up on a Rachel Ray show (it’s happened twice) — is that the recipes we toss out here become eye candy rather than useful recipes. Sure, it’s fun to ogle food, ours included, and we firmly believe that talking about food can be very much a sharing of ideas. But if you’re hungry, reading through two pages of recipe directions probably isn’t going to help you out much.
The point is that these recipes we write should, we hope, get used, recreated, even improved upon by readers, friends, cooks in other kitchens. And sometimes we wonder if that’s happening. Or are we just pimps posting food porno for vegan people?

That’s why it warmed our little pairing knives to receive pictures recently from two different dinner parties, on opposite sides of the country, knocking out a Hot Knives recipe in their kitchens. And dutifully taking pictures in the process! So let this be a shout out to them and their stovetop antics.
One group of cooks in Washington D.C. and the other in Portland, both seized on the jalapeño popperz recipe we posted a couple months ago, a favorite fried item. From what we understand, Team Dinner Portland complimented the peppers with our Pa-Tofu Tacos while Team Dinner D.C. served them with the apple-leek pork loin. Both fine choices, people.
Some interesting differences, discrepancies and innovations arose, judging from pictures. For instance, Team Dinner Portland was working with an electric coil stove, whereas the roasting of the pepper, as we describe it in the recipe, is written with a traditional gas stove in mind. To make the pepper both more pliable and more zesty, we stick it in the flame of a stove burner to blacken it thoroughly. Obviously, without a flame this proves difficult. Including alternate directions never occurred to us, but apparently Team Dinner Portland rolled with the punches.

Their peppers, though certainly less charred-looking, must have burned enough to slip the skins off. However, the photos seem to show that they weren’t pliable enough to slit them lengthwise as we suggest. It appears as if they got away with just slicing the peppers at the top and stuffing the fake cream cheese in from there. Nice thinking. Team Dinner D.C. by contrast seems to have attained a perfectly roasted pepper shell, sliced them lengthwise and rolled them up that way. We can only speculate as to how the tastes differed, but we might imagine that Team Dinner Portland’s peppers had more snap and crunch to them from cooking, probably not a bad thing at all.

No photographic evidence currently exists of the batter and breadcrumbs process for either party’s preparations. We’re left to judge that by pics of the end product. However this shot of Claire after the fact betrays an absolutely necessary, reckless abandon to the gooey tempura bath. Fuck yeah! One definite bonus for Team Dinner D.C. was their pan set-up. The wok they were using to fry the breaded peppers looked about a thousand years old, like it had seen it’s share of grease. That’s added flavor.

The finished peppers from both of these kitchens look as cute, delicious and unstoppably poppable as the batch we experimented with. The crispy skins of panko crumbs are expertly browned with little glimpses of charred green skin. The other telltale sign of a proper popper: an occasional hint of creamy white cheese just beneath the surface. We hope that part of their success was that we were sober when we wrote the recipe, and did a decent job of explaining the thing. But no recipe is worth anything without kitchen teamwork and ingenuity and we can tell both were in abundance here.

To be honest, it was uncanny, almost disarming, to see our sweet little poppers in the hands of others. It was our first experience seeing our written words followed dutifully and to awesomely recreate the meal. It was a bit of a postmodern reality check for us. And a nice reminder of why drunk nerds like us spend time penning food blog posts: to share the love.
Any other recreated recipes, feel free to send them to hotknivez@gmail.com