During NA 408, Dvorak described Hominy Grits as a breakfast starch that everyone in the south eats. He share that he even cooks grits occasionally. Adam’s thought that John should share his receipe was rebuffed by John, as you just cook them and eat them!

Adam just took Micky  out to her first crawfish boil! Adam declared them as Outstanding! Afterwards, Adam reported,  ”it’s like a mini lobster!”  Dvorak compared crawfish to a bug. Adam didn’t say where they dined, but said they paired them with Crystal hot sauce (a Louisiana favorite).

Get it some at Amazon

After receiving some food samples from a producer. Dvorak started to discuss the subculture that makes special vegan snacks. Dvorak said the Samba99 Cupacu Anti-Oxidant Bar was absolutely fantastic! You can’t eat the whole thing – you can cut it up into four pieces. John said he could definitely eat these – not so much for the kale snacks. [NA 399]

[update NA 404]

John  mentioned  the Samba 99 Cupacu bars again and has declared them absolutely delicious! He described them as a goo with brazil nuts – essentially a gabagoo! Adam read that it’s a pharmacy in a fruit!

John talked up Griller’s Rub after one of the company’s employees requested some Good Karma before he went off to pitch Costco to carry their product. Dvorak praised this product as most steak seasonings were “crap”.

After looking at Rubio’s mouth watering food porn pics, we can’t wait to get some Griller’s for the No Agenda Entertainment grill!

John also praised the discontinued Astor steak seasoning as “phenomenal”. This spice used to be available at Winn-Dixie stores in the South. Unfortunately, some contaminated batches made the product disappear!

[NA 396]

Here’s John Dvorak’s simple chicken recipe from cosmicweenie.com/chicken

No Agenda Chicken

(Roasted Chicken Full Legs or Thighs)

This recipe is something I cook often, and it became a topic of conversation on a No Agenda show.

It’s perfect when you do not feel like spending a lot of time on a meal since it includes both vegetables and potatoes and can be the entire meal. Adam Curry called asking for an easy chicken recipe to be done in the oven that would produce a crispy skin. This is it.

I tend to serve it with a small salad. The dish is mostly preparation with no work after that. Even a stew, which needs some attention, requires more work than this simple dish.

Ingredients

Cup of rough cut celery pieces

cup of chopped onion

½ cup of carrots cut any way you want (large pieces are best)

2 large red potatoes cut in ¾ inch cubes

6 to 8 chicken thighs or 3-4 full legs (hind quarters)

olive oil

salt

pepper

marjoram

These ingredients are all approximate and the size and cut of the potatoes will change a lot based on cooking times and how covered you roasting pan is with chicken. The pictorial example I show below uses 6 thighs and this will allow the vegetables to cook faster than a pan jammed with 8 or more thighs.

So you take all the cut vegetables and spread them in a normal sized roasting pan. Put some olive oil over the pieces and add salt pepper and marjoram and mix the vegetables and potatoes with your hands so there is a thin layer of oil and seasoning on each piece.

Season the chicken pieces however you like. Greek season works with this dish or just the same ingredients as you used for the vegetables. Coat the chicken on on both sides.

Put the pieces – skin up – on top of the vegetables and bake at 425 for between 40-50 minutes. The shorter time is for the thighs only. Whole legs usually take 45 minutes.

The celery and onions and potato up being cooked in chicken fat and make a quite delicious side dish either mixed up or separated.

In the photos I added some broccoli which is used as a garnish to the disk. You can also add turnips or rutabagas to the vegetable mix. I’ve experimented with a number of things including parsnips and bell peppers. Rutabagas are the best of the lot. Some things such as sun chokes do not work. You can also leave things out. In the dish I photographed there was no celery by accident since I was told we had celery and we did not. It was still good. This recipe was derived from the need to lift some chicken off the bottom of a roasting pan for roasting.

This is a great cold weather dish too. The only tricky part is to make sure the potatoes are completely cooked. This will be dependent on how big you cut them. Know your cooking times by experimenting with roasted potatoes.

Have fun.

The latest, tasty cocktail rage – the Santorum Frothy Mix! We’ve been working on this perfecting this recipe in the No Agenda Entertainment test kitchen, and this is what we’ve come up with so far – it’s basically a variation of a Golden Cadillac, with added Girl Scout Cookies.

• Crush up three chocolate mint girl scout cookies,
• one shot of Creme de Cacao
• one shot of Galiano
• add Half and Half or whole cream (we recommend regular pasteurized and organic – stay away from ultra-pasteurized)
• blend!

Adam went to a fundraiser in Austin recently and had a Texas style delicacy known as a Doritos Pouch. It’s a snack sized bag of Doritos with chili and other taco style toppings dumped on top of the crunched chips – It’s then eaten right out of the bag with a fork! Dvorak thought it sounded terrible. No Agenda Entertainment has discovered that this is better known in Texas as a Walking Taco and usually features Fritos instead of Doritos.

[NA 381]

Adam went to the Austin Farmer’s Market and was chatting with a French seller who was selling ducks and chickens. Adam ended up getting a duck and prepared it with baslamic vinegar and fig preserves. Adam said he was also selling heirloom Blue Foot chickens and wondered if Mimi (Dvorak’s wife) knew about them since she’s writing an egg book. The Book of Knowledge explained that Blue Foot chicken is bred in Canada to resemble the french Poulet de Bresse, also known as “Bresse Blue” which Dvorak has proclaimed Outstanding!

An Outstanding potato chip! Near the end of NA 386, John Dvorak crunched  on some Tim’s Cascade Potato Chips. He opined that you can’t find a crunchier chip.

Held Saturdays, is the Austin Sustainable Living Market. Head on down to 4th Street,  and you can get your very own Outstanding Product like Adam’s delicious, mutant tomato.

During NA #372 Adam chimed in with his own Outstanding Product proclamation. Adam was ecstatic about his crunchy Ottmer’s Family Butter pickles he picked up at an Austin farmer’s market. Adam even got a whole, named chicken to roast. Dvorak was skeptical about buying a chicken with a name – the kids might not like that! Adam said that he and Micky love going to the local farmer’s markets as they only cost a third of what Whole Foods charges.

“Outstanding product” declared John C. Dvorak while he was describing the crisp, tasty carrots available at Port Angeles’s Nash’s Produce. Dure NA #369, he also described them as being extremely sweet and super crunchy. John encourages anyone travelling near the Olympic Peninsula to make an effort to go to Nash’s to try these specially bred carrots.

nashsorganicproduce.com
4681 Sequim-Dungeness Way [map]
Sequim, WA 98382-7834
(360) 681-6274

Adam’s been munching on these tasty Dutch, mini waffle cookies. Consisting of two, thin mini waffle layers sandwiching either a caramel or molasses-like spread.

We at No Agenda Entertainment decided to investigate where to find them near our Oakland home. Yesterday while picking up some items at the Rockridge Trader Joe’s, I  was looking at products in the open refrigerator aisle, when I became transifixed by a little bag of cookies on a higher shelf  labeled ‘Caramel Bites’ – “these look like the little dutch cookies Adam was talking about.” I flipped the bag over and  saw in small type that they were indeed, Stroopwafel!

Dvorak was giving Adam some Thanksgiving cooking tips with this Bourbon Mashed Sweet Potato recipe from Emeril.

John said you just have to take several large Garnet yams and bake them for 1 hour 15 minutes. Let cool a bit, then while carefully holding the potatoes with a towel or pot holder, scoop out the insides into a bowl. Then, you mix in cream, butter and bourbon!

During NA 227, Dvorak mentioned his son is a beer geek and discovered this delicious, seasonal beer from Anchor called “Hummer”. Close John – the beer is actually called Humming and it’s produced by San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing Co. from August through October.

We at No Agenda Entertainment highly recommend the Anchor brewery tour. It’s usually on Friday’s and take a couple hours. At the end of the tour you get to drink a lot of tasty Anchor products.

A long time pet peeve of John C. Dvorak is Canola oil. There is no such thing as a Canola plant (as erroneously reported by PBS). Canola is manufactured from rapeseed oil in Canada. Rapeseed oil is naturally unsafe for humans due to it’s high acidity, so only hybrid or genetically engineered rapeseed with low acid levels are used for oil products.

The Canola name is derived from Canada, Oil and Low Acidity.

Served from a dirty microwave near you...

Dvorak was cranky on Hot Pockets during NA 224. He questioned if these things are even safe to eat! He furthered hypothesized that they seem to be based on an English pastie or a Eastern European Piroshki. Dvorak reminisced while he was in Cornwall and ate ‘the best pastie in Cornwall’ and thought it was crummy, terrible and gross. Adam reported that he was on a Scandinavian airline around twenty years ago and was served a mini version of a hot pocket filled with reindeer meat and it seemed, “quite tasty, I liked it, it was a great snack!”.

I wonder if Mevio makes Head Crank John C. Dvorak sit right next to these young, ‘Millenials’. If so, it probably leads to many peeves!

Rain Vodka

John Dvorak wanted us to make note  of the new, official No Agenda Vodka, Rain!  It comes from New Orleans’ famous Sazerac distillery.