Man vs Food Party-ette

If you’re a fairly regular reader of my blog, or if you actually know me, you will know that I was very poorly for seven whole days last week. (You can read some whining about it here)

I’ve been a bore. So today I decided to treat the boys and make a spectacular MAN VS FOOD dinner.

Man vs Food is a brilliantly mesemerising TV programme from the US and stars Adam Richman as he chomps his way around the States. Each episode culminates in Adam taking on a “Food Challenge” and it is just…mind boggling. I have watched him eat pounds and pounds of burgers and fries, 12 dozen oysters, enormous MANcakes (*snigger*), pizza slices bigger than a human baby.

We love, love, LOVE the show and watch it, aghast, as a family. You can find out more here. (Also I love him)

So, I got up early this morning and had a good hunt around the internet for some authentic American recipes. I landed on a site called Soul Food and Southern Cooking and plumped for a meal consisting of:

Southern Fried Chicken

Macaroni and Cheese

Cornbread

Corn on the Cob

Homemade Lemonade

and

Peach Cobbler for dessert.

I headed off to the Supermarket and filled my trolley with abandon…

On the way home we listened to the radio and Oliver suddenly asked me why the woman was singing about “choking him”. I was somewhat confused as the song playing was “Jump!” by the Pointer Sisters. Although, hilariously, it really does sound as if they’re singing “Choke HIM!” during the chorus, and so then I couldn’t stop laughing and tears were spurting out my eyes a bit and I had to pull over.

When we got home I got the chicken ready, by placing it into a mixture of full fat milk, salt and buttermilk…

and placing it into the fridge for a few hours.

While the chicken bathed itself like Cleopatra, I got on with making the cornbread. I’ve never even tried it before, and so was quite excited.

It’s really easy to make. You just mix together the dry ingredients of cornmeal, flour, baking powder and salt in one bowl, and the wet ingredients of melted butter, egg and milk in a jug and them combine them, stir well and pop into a fairy cake tray with cases.

While the cornbread cooked, I started on the macaroni cheese. Quite frankly, I was staggered at the amount of cheese and butter the recipe called for. A stick of butter (115g) and one and a half pounds of grated cheese (500g) makes this side dish a real gut buster…

The cornbread had cooked, and had been tasted, an essential task for the serious cook..

and so the macaroni cheese headed into the oven to bubble away and turn into Certain Death By Dairy.

I was starting to flag a bit by now and decided to make a jug of lemonade, just to have a couple of glasses with a little splash of vodka in to have a taste and liven me up a little.

After a drink I felt ready to tackle the peach cobbler. *childish snigger*

The recipe called for a “Baking pan” and whatever the fuck that is, I don’t own one. I do have a silicone cake tin in the right measurements though and decided that it would probably turn out OK. I’m telling you now, that it didn’t. So if you’re planning on trying any of the recipes, I strongly urge you to buy a “Baking Pan”. Good luck with that.

I think the problem was that you’re meant to melt the butter in the “Baking Pan” and then add the batter and the peaches; instead of melting the butter in the microwave, pouring it into the cake tin and then spooning the batter on top to form an unholy alliance of fat with a thin batter which, sort of, curdled. MMMMmmmmmmmm

“Ah Screw It!” said the vodka I and bunged it into the oven with the Macaroni Cheese to cook for an hour.

And onto the chicken. I diverted a little from the recipe online and followed some advice from Nigella Lawson about poaching the chicken in it’s milky bath before coating in flour and frying.

I cannot begin to tell you how bad this smelled. All I can do is ask you to engage your imagination and think about chicken boiling in milk and buttermilk until the liquid becomes some sort of horrific cottage cheese floating on…plasma?

Once the chicken had cooked through, I let it cool down, double dipped it in seasoned flour and egg and fried in an entire block of solidified vegetable fat. *arteries weep*

Finally everything was ready and the table groaned with a billion calories.

It was all…unbelievably delicious. We couldn’t finish it all, not by a long chalk as it was all so heavily fat laden that we became full very quickly, but my GOD it was good.

So for the next two weeks I will be living on rice cakes.

The peach cobbler was a freaking disaster. It looks OK in the following picture, but it hadn’t cooked through and was just..ick.

If you fancy trying some authentic soul food then check out Soul Food and Southern Cooking

You can find a handy recipe converter here.

As we ate we decided that there is definitely a great party idea here. Maybe a dinner party with a good number of guests would manage to finish the food, and the “Food Challenge” could be a stupidly hot chilli laden dip served with nachos and the person who managed to eat a certain amount in a certain time could be the “winner”

*ponders*

You could rig the house up in stars and stripes and serve lager and cocktails in teacups   a la the prohibition. Maybe throw the party on the 4th of July (it’s a bit late now for me to be having these sort of revelations…but hey! there’s always next year)

In conclusion…

In the fight between Man vs Food? On this occasion Food won.