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photo credit: Zesmerelda

Ugg. I am tired of drunken housewives and divorced dads trying to dip wonder bread in beaten eggs and call that French toast. That’s egg coated processed wheat sponge, there’s a difference. If you’ve never made French toast Alton Brown created the greatest recipe here. If you have here are the 3 rules you must follow to make awesome French Toast:

1. Use fresh baked bread, sliced thick. Wonder bread adds no flavor and the thinness of it really makes it hard to get the crunchy, custardy texture that makes French toast awesome.
2. Use stale bread. Let it sit out for at least 8 hours(or up to 48), or dry in in the oven at 250 for an hour beforehand. If you really want to soak up all that custard(and you do) then the bread has to be dry. After all French toast was invented as a way for housewives to reuse old bread.
3. Use full fat milk or, even better, half and half. I know that everyone drinks 2% or less. I know that people are terrified of the cholesteral in dairy. Fuck that. If you don’t have the fat in there it won’t gel right. If the worst thing you eat in a day is French toast made with half in half instead of skim then you’re eating pretty healthy that day.

In spite of my massive number of readers, I’m not making much money off this site. I’ve got a little adsense up, but unless you scroll down the main page a few posts you’ll never see it. I’ve posted some affiliate links, but for some reason no one is buying my favorite zester. And all over this site I’ve had the tipjoy button up:

And so far I’ve gotten a whopping 0 cents.

And according to this article from TechCrunch I’m not alone. They’ve only collected about $2,500 for all 300 blogs that have signed up. I’m not complaining. Nobody owes me anything and a silly little tip button isn’t the kind of thing I would normally click on either, but I hope to do this professionally some day and I think tipjoy could be a big part of that. Let me explain why.

I genuinely believe people want to give to bloggers, writers and video creators who make something good. What they don’t want to do is go out of their way for it. And let’s face it, currently tipping a web site is a pain in the ass. You have to go through paypal and they take a certain percentage and you never know how much to give. Is a dollar enough? If you give $5 are you covered for life? If you give $10 and the guy quits blogging next month does he owe you a refund? The point of tipjoy is to remove all the headache.

Give a dime to any website, the only info they need upfront is your email address. When enough people promise money for it to be worth everyone’s while, they send you an email asking for whatever you promised. It’s a great idea, even with all the news sources I use a dime a piece wouldn’t feel like a burden to me. And I’m a cheap fuck. So what’s the point of this post?

I’m begging for a tip. Please click on the button below and give me a dime. If you’re reading through your RSS reader you may need to click through, or if you have javascript blocked you’ll need to enable it for this page. I think I’m worth it.

In addition to giving me a little bacon money, this is something of an experiment. I want to know how this works for you guys. Do you like this idea? Was this as easy as it seems? I’m looking to make this work for you really, since without you I don’t have a damn thing. How would you like to handle tips, ads or anything else on this site? Let me know with a comment or on the contact page.

photo credit: FLOODkOFF

I’ve taken a slight detour from California, the sunshine state, to Michigan, the mediocre state. A land so savage and backwards they actually experience seasons. And here the beginning of summer is signaled by Memorial Day, about two weeks before the summer solstice signals the middle of summer. Poor suckers.

So in this weeks edition of the trough we’ve got a whole section of summer drinks, grilling debates and unique ways to violate a chicken carcass all in celebration of summer.

• First, Lifehacker brings us a great resource page on becoming a Memorial Day Grill Master. If you can’t grill after all this you might as well become a freegan.
• Serious Eats brings some expert metal to the age old debate, Chunk vs. Briquette Charcoal.
• Summer is the time for an obscene amount of two things, overcrowded, tacky weddings and ice cream. The Leftover Queen brought us both, but I’m more interested in her Papaya-Mango Ice Cream.
• I’ve often wondered how I could further humiliate an animal after it was killed but before I actually ate it. Serious Eats finally gives me what I want. I think the chicken likes it myself.
• “The goal of Beer Suggest is to provide the most informative beer site on the net.” What more need be said about summer’s official adult beverage.
• If you’re looking for a less adult beverage, Tip Nut has a great Home Made Lemonade recipe. Although instead of using lemon rind I suggest using lemon zest, but then again I’m not a fucking heathen.

photo credit: aJ GAZMEN - GucciBeaR

A phrase that’s been thrown around a lot recently is:

Eat food. Not to Much. Mostly Plants.

And there’s certainly nothing incorrect about it, but it’s so alien to the way we eat in America I don’t know how anyone could apply it. We not only eat a huge amount of meat, but we don’t even realize what else there is to eat. We define our meals by what meat we’re eating; Steaks, hamburger, etc.

And as for eating food, that ship has sailed. We eat things that are processed into generic blocks of transportable organic matter then processed again to replicate the taste, texture and shape of food. But we don’t even know where to start with eating actual food. So I’m picking a place to start and throwing down the gauntlet

We start with a definition, what is food? Food, as we’ve come to know it in the western world, is a composition of 4 different groups:

1. Meat. Good old meat. We eat more of it then we should, but there’s no getting around the fact that it’s the most nutrient (and calorie) dense category of food available. I certainly don’t suggest getting rid of it, but if you’re eating more than 4 ounces it really should be a special occasion.
2. Fruits and Vegetables. Nothing revolutionary here. Too often we relegate these to side dish simply because we don’t have the skills to make them as tasty and desirable as meat. That’s something we have to fix.
3. Herbs and Spices. Basically, anything eaten for taste and not calories or nutrients. Again it’s something we are woefully inadequate at using. And considering our ancestors enslaved whole continents just to get a hold of some of these spices, I think maybe we should pay a little more attention.
4. Staples. Staples are building blocks of any meal. If dinner were a cathedral the staples would be the…building blocks of the cathedral. One of the things that always makes me laugh is how cheap staples are in America even when we don’t know how to use them. Do you know that you can make pancake mix for about 25 cents, the same mix you’d pay $3 a box for at the store? Mastering staples will save us huge amounts of money (especially as global prices for them rise) and are the gateway to eating actual food.

So over the next few weeks I’ll be talking about each of these in turn. How we can better acquaint ourselves with each, how we can master them and create real food. So many of us are used to eating frozen mini-hamburgers we heat up with a microwave we’ve forgotten what actual food tastes like. We’ve forgotten how much better our lives can be when we eat it and make it ourselves.

This post is the beginning of remembering(cue the theme music from Red Dawn).

photo credit: Randy Son Of Robert

I’m starting a new series here at Fat Bastard Eats, DIY. It’s essentially how to make things yourself that you would normally buy from a store or from a hairy, foreign street vendor. The normal reason people outsource work is to save money, but in the case of food it’s almost always cheaper to DIY. The reason is they don’t know any fucking better. Here at Fat Bastard Eats we aim to fix that, starting with Mayo.

This much maligned sauce has suffered from bad perception for far too long. It’s not plain or tasteless, it’s tangy and delicious. And easy to make if you have a few simple ingredients that you combine exactly right.

Start with a bowl. Into that dump a half teaspoon salt, a half teaspoon dry mustard, 2 pinches of sugar and one egg yolk(separate it with your hand you Nancy).

Beat with a hand mixer until it’s nice and yellow. Note that you can do this whole recipe with a whisk instead of a hand mixer, but I’m a chronic masturbator and even I can’t imagine moving my wrist that long.

Put 2 teaspoons of lemon(or lime) juice along with 1 tablespoon of white wine vinegar into a cup. Don’t eyeball this, it has to be exact. Then dump half of that in with the egg and beat until smooth.

Now we’re going to start drizzling in a cup of oil(safflower, corn or chili) and beating that into the egg. Don’t add it too fast or the oil won’t mix in and you’ll ‘break’ it. Then you have to start over. I use a regular condiment dispenser just like you would keep mustard in. Whatever you do just remember to go slow.

After you’ve beat in about half the oil in add the rest of the vinegar/juice. If you had added it at the beginning it would be way more work just to get started. Finish drizzling in the rest of the oil(while still beating vigorously). Then store it in an airtight container.

photo credit: erikadotnet

Now leave this on the counter for about 3 hours. For some reason known only to the dark lord of condiments the acid from the vinegar and juice will kill bacteria, but only when it’s at room temperature. After that throw it in the fridge and you have the best tasting mayo you’ve ever eaten. It should last about 2 weeks stored properly.

And if you want some kick, don’t forget you can use chili oil. That’ll teach those vultures who steal your sandwich out of the fridge at work.

photo credit: smet_dk