Why hello there! And welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where your auspicious author Jon O’Guin whips up unusual dishes to give you confidence in the kitchen. Does that work? Unfortunately, we don’t hire surveyors or pollsters, so we have no data on that. I am your much-delayed din-din daddy, and I instantly regret writing that, let’s all pretend it never happened. Especially because today’s recipe is for breakfast. So if you just want the deets on how to eat, click this link to jump to the recipe. For everyone else, let’s talk ocean accidents, smoking hazards, and the profitability of patience.

Are We in New Orleans? Because I ASSure you, I am feeling the Swamp

We apologize for Title Jon. We went to two weddings since our last post, and apparently dancing around for a couple hours at the second has paradoxically not worn him out, but wound him up into some new form of energy. At work, I have made at least 4 “-ussy” jokes since Saturday, for reasons literally no one can comprehend. (If you have, until this moment, been spared the knowledge of that style of joke, allow me to shatter that peaceful eon like the Serpent in Eden: For many years now, there has existed the term “bussy”, which (and I urge you to once again reflect on your peaceful ignorance before it is stolen from you, or to quickly scroll down to something less insane) stands for “boy pussy”. As you might guess, it was a term from the gay community, and its overtures, connotations, and intent can be readily derived: our culture’s linguistic fixation on the pussy and its power is well-established, and of course our Boys on the Bottom would want to get in on that. The term reached wide(r)spread acknowledgment around 2018-2019, and then, perversely, evolved. Rather suddenly, you could replace the last syllable of any noun with “-ussy”, in a sort of sexualized pig latin, to refer to the essence or spirit of an object, its full sensory experience, or a hole in it that you could put your dick in.

Ha ha, now you have the same mind-virus I have!

Again, NO ONE understands why an evening of dancing at a wedding reception has wound me up. Maybe it was midsummer madness, and it just took a day to set in. But we’re here to COOK, right? Well, not really. It’s hot as hell over here, so I’m gonna rely on a recipe I cooked like, two months ago. But it’s new to you, and it’s got a mildly interesting story! SO NOW YOU TOO MUST LEARN IT. (Editor’s Note: at this point, since the post as written never acknowledges it other than the oblique reference to attending two weddings, we’d like to apologize for the lack of posts over the last couple months. It turns out that Jon, a man FAMOUS for poor time management, is not up to the tasks of working a 30+ hour a week job, having a robust social life, compulsively watching hours of YouTube a day, and writing a blog. We’d probably be doing more about addressing that third bit if we still HAD A THERAPIST, but such is the tragic banality and brutality of the American mental health care system. We’ll…try and figure SOMETHING out. Maybe steal some adderall and see if self-medicating treats him for a bit.)

Because 5 years ago, a restaurant landed on my radar with an interesting plop: Bon Appetit had declared that its Best New Restaurant for 2017 was a sandwich shop in New Orleans named “Turkey and the Wolf”, and their signature sandwich was a fried bologna sandwich with chips. Not on the side, I should clarify: the chips are a TOPPING of the sandwich.

There’s a lot of red and orange here, but I assure you, there are chips above the fried bologna there.

The article about them also described their Ham and Cheese sandwich (house-smoked ham, cranberry sauce, herb-studded mayo), and a “collard green melt”, but it was the bologna sandwich I focused on. And I thought “that sounds pretty cool”, and resolved to, at some point, try and/or make fried bologna sandwiches, and that one day, if I was ever in New Orleans, to make an effort to go to the restaurant if it still existed.

And that was where the story stopped for a while, with only a couple little pop-ups here and there. I guarantee you, at least subconsciously, that this restaurant was part of the impetus for me to make Fried Bologna sandwiches 3 years ago, which I think you can best see because I spend the first third of the post talking about potato chips.  But every now and again, I’d be reminded  “crap, what’s that turkey place in New Orleans?”

And then, like, 3-4 months ago, I learned wonderful and tragic news. See, it turned out that head chef and owner Mason Hereford had written a Turkey and The Wolf cookbook, which was coming out this summer! Specifically, the story told me, it was SUPPOSED to have come out earlier, but the original print run had been consigned to the bottom of the ocean, when the shipping container holding the books slipped from the deck in transit.

Wild to think that like, losing just one or two of these things could be an entire print run of a book.

“Oops, did I do that?”

So I ordered myself a copy, and then discovered that at least one whole recipe was just clearly legible in the Barnes and Noble pre-view text, so I decided to use those two pages, and make the dish in question. Since then, the cookbook itself has arrived, and Mason did a bit of a press tour to plug it, giving me some greater insight into his culinary mind and method, and the basis of this breakfast sandwich.

The Derelicte of Dining

People remember enough about Zoolander for that comparison to land, right? If not, let me make no bones about it, and then immediately, like a reverse-fish-chef, start pinning some bones back in: I would call the defining theme of the restaurant’s offerings “white trash food, made with love and skill”. This is a cookbook where they teach you how to make hog’s head cheese (“head cheese” being a terrine made by boiling a pig’s head into a mixed-meat jelly) and then use it to make Fried Rice and Tacos. One of their dishes is named “Gas-Station Tostadas”, which is topped with “Dorito Dust”, which, yes, is just equal parts Nacho Cheese and Cool Ranch Doritos pulverized into crumbs. Paddlefish Roe served on Jiffy Corn Muffin spoonbread, “Corner-store Pork Rind Tacos”, where the recipe is “here’s how you make some green taco sauce and salsa verde, and you can put them on a taco consisting of store-bought pork rinds with some cilantro and onion.” This is a cookbook that, whenever it suggests you use Ketchup, immediately follows that up with “(there is only Heinz)”, and then tells you how to make your own “Pizza Cream Cheese” and “Anchovy Crème Fraiche” (For the “McCaviar”, a deep-fried hash-brown topped with crème fraiche and caviar).  One of their recipes, made in honor of a friend, is functionally a “Reuben Hot Dog”: just slices of rye bread with sauerkraut, Russian dressing, and swiss cheese folded around a hot dog. It feels like the simplest idea you could do…and then the next page is “now, to make that BETTER, why not cure the hot dogs like corned-beef for 2 days beforehand, so they taste more like the meat of a Rueben?”

And look, it looks delicious, and OBVIOUSLY I respect calling the brine-cured meat “Corned Dogs”. Game recognizes Game. I never said “fancy white trash food” was a BAD idea.

Thus, it should be little surprise that today’s recipe is the “grand slam Mcmuffin”, a sandwich with the STATED GOAL of combining the Egg McMuffin with a Denny’s Grand Slam. The result is very basic in summation: English Muffins, Hash-brown patties (preferably bought FROM a fast-food place), some…onions that something has been done to (more on that later), American Cheese, and Jimmy Dean sausage. There is a DIRECT footnote to the recipe that, as far as Mason is concerned, Jimmy Dean is the best sausage maker in the country, and he directly recommends using it.

It’s a very interesting dish, because, on an academic level, I think it actually fails pretty hard at merging the two dishes, in a text-book sense. Like, you may have noticed…there are no eggs on this. This is a riff on an Egg McMuffin that threw out the eggs. And like, to me, a primary component of the Grand Slam is the pancakes. Why isn’t there a hit of maple syrup on this sucker? But I think it works on a spiritual and structural level: there’s no eggs because there’s just not enough ROOM: these are quarter-pound sausage patties, close to TRIPLE the size of a McDonald’s patty.

As you can clearly see in this picture with almost no sense of scale or scope.

And I personally ran into a problem with the recipe, as here in Leavenworth, I am somewhat distanced from the panoply of my culinary arsenal. And one of the remarkable absences this produces is that…I don’t have a non-stick pan. Non-stick WOK, sure. But for flat skillets, all I have are stainless-steel. Which, when the initial step of cooking is to sear some thick-cut onions on the flat side so they get “a nice chocolate brown” on the edge, before flipping and doing the same, produced…difficult results.

These onions are browning like I do at the beach.
HEYYO.

Still, if my onions were a little more “charred” than “browned”, that was tolerable. While that was happening, I tried air-frying my Hash-browns, a process that MOSTLY worked, until the combined heat of the summer morning, the medium-high stove-top, and the 400 degree air-fryer tripped the circuit on the fryer’s plug, causing it to shut off without warning.

I took this picture to demonstrate that the read-out in the center was dead. Now that I’m looking at the pic, though, I’ve JUST realized the two knobs mean this counter-top oven/air-fryer looks like a constantly screaming robot head.

Still, some quick searing got the bread toasted and the hashes correctly browned, at which point it was time to cook the sausage, which was, to resort to a line I used when asked about my skill in games of dexterity, “spectacular”. Not GOOD, but definitely a spectacle.

“that’s a nice cast-iron pan you got there, Jon.”
”This is stainless steel.”
”Oh no.”

Oh yeah, that pan charred to SHIT while cooking these things. Which made it really difficult to judge cooking time. At least one of my sausages was damn near raw in the middle when I went for the taste-test. But In the end, I had my starchy, fatty breakfast sandwiches whipped up.

I have not done the math, but I assume eating three of these is at least a day’s calories.

How were they? Pretty good, actually! With the uneven cooking of the sausage and the onions, obviously, they were a little more bitter than they needed to be, and they were, while not a full “gut-bomb” like some dishes I’ve had, definitely impressively heavy for a breakfast entrée. I would love to take another pass at it with the proper pans, and see if the onions turn out sweeter, which would help offset my complaint about the lack of syrup, and give something more than just the ketchup to cut the richness of the dish.

WHEN NEXT WE APPEAR:  MAYBE WE TALK MORE ABOUT THE COOKBOOK, OR, MORE LIKELY, WE COOK SOME POTATOES.

RECIPE

Grand Slam McMuffin from Turkey and the Wolf

Makes 4 sandwiches

Ingredients

                Onions

1 tbsp vegetable oil

Four ½” thick round slices of yellow or white onion

½ tsp kosher salt

                Hashbrowns

4 hash-brown patties, pre-cooked or frozen.

Sufficient oil for frying

                Sausage

1 pound Jimmy Dean pork sausage, formed into 4 ¼” thick patties

                The fixings

4 English muffins

2 tbsps unsalted butter

4 slices American cheese

Ketchup (“there is only Heinz”)

Preparation

1. Start by cooking the onions: in a non-stick skillet, add the vegetable oil, and the slices of onion, and turn the heat up to medium-high, starting in a cold pan. Cook for 10 minutes, without touching, so the onions can become darkly browned on the first side. Then flip them, and cook for another 6 or so minutes to get the same effect on the other side. Add salt, and stir to separate, cooking another one or two minutes to cook off any rawness. Move to a plate and continue cooking.

2. While the onion is cooking, reheat or cook the hashbrown patties. If pre-cooked, 3-4 minutes in a 500 degree oven will re-heat them. If not, deep or air-fry according to the package directions.

3. Place the same skillet you used to cook the onions over medium heat, brush the English muffins  on both cut sides with the butter, and toast. 2-3 minutes. Set aside.

4. Turn the heat up to medium-high, and cook your sausage patties until well browned on the bottom, 2-3 minutes. Flip, and top with some of the set-aside browned onions, and a slice of American cheese. Cook another 2-3 minutes, until sausage is cooked through, and cheese is melted.

5. Assemble the sandwiches by squirting some ketchup on both toasted sides of the muffins, then building the sandwiches: bottom muffin, hash-brown, sausage with onion and cheese topping, top muffin. Enjoy.