The Garbage Plate

Garbage plates are quite likely my favorite meal. If you aren't from western New York it's quite likely you don't know what I'm talking about, so let me tell you a little about them. They started at Nick Tahou Hots and have been wildly copied by many places in and around Rochester. To make a garbage plate you start with a base of two ingredients. Home fries and macaroni salad are most popular but I prefer to use french fries instead of home fries. You could also substitute in baked beans. Then you add your meat. I've always preferred cheeseburger patties, but you could also use red hots, white hots, chicken, fish, or a ridiculous number of other options. On top of that they add mustard, ketchup, onions, and some delicious meat sauce, served with a side of rolls or Italian toast.

If you just want to make a real basic plate they're pretty easy. Just need some mac salad, frozen french fries and some type of meat. I almost always go with cheeseburgers, but other choices are fine. This here is one of my first garbage plates and I didn't even bother making the sauce. The burgers are each a half pound patty and were very juicy, so that was delicious.

Personally, I like to put them in a bowl instead of on a plate. I think it's just easier to work with and won't go spilling over the size. Of course, that depends on exactly how large you make your Garbage Plate, since mine tend to be on the rather large size. I'm still experimenting with making a proper sauce, but a really lazy alternative I have tried is just mixing some jarred tomato sauce with some mustard and hot sauce and a bit of browned beef to make a quick and easy meat sauce. I think I threw in a bit of barbecue sauce in there as well. And, of course, you can always further deliciousize your Garbage Plate is to just add more stuff to it. Which is really my general rule of thumb while cooking. You can see that I've added a couple fried eggs and an awesome amount of bacon to the one on the right. Along with some 5 cheese garlic bread this made an incredibly delicious meal.

Just a quick one. Cheeseburger Salad

So I had a bunch of leftover mats from the Inside Out Cheeseburgers I made in the previous post and I didn't want to make another. I basically just piled them together and saw what came out. Starting with a pile of the Pillsbury crescent rolls to make a base I then layered lettuce on it, topped that with two cheeseburger patties, topped that with bacon, and then topped all that with a ton of tomato slices. It was incredibly delicious and not really salad like.

Inside Out Burger

So I thought I'd call this an inside out burger. It's not entirely inside out, more just all rearranged. But it uses a lot of bacon, so that's pretty awesome.

Here you can see how to shape the bacon to make a cup shape. That's a jumbo muffin pan with particularly deep wells that I got from Michael's. I probably should have used more of a thinner bacon, and maybe cut it in half lengthwise to get a tighter weave. In fact, I seem to recall having a very similar problem with my previous effort at forming bacon into a cone shape. I wonder if I'll ever learn from my delicious mistakes. Into the cooked bacon cups I put in these really tiny burger patties. Maybe 2 or 3 ounces precooked weight. Two patties into each cup with a piece of cheese between them.

From there I took some Pillsbury crescent rolls and cut out a disc about the size of my bacon cup and put it on top to cap it off. Baked that til golden and top the whole thing off with some fresh tomato and lettuce. I managed a single bite of it in a hand held manner before I relented and used a knife and fork. Again, must remember to use more of a thinner bacon.

Mashed Potatoes in a Bacon Cone

So I've been wanting to do something a bit visual. Like art, but with food. Especially bacon. Always bacon. At first I was thinking of something like the Bacon Turtleburgers or Bacon Narwhal, but I thought that was a bit too ambitious, and judging from these results I'm right. It'll take some practice to get the hang of this. Anyways, I decided to try a simple ice cream cone first. Making a cone of bacon and using some mashed potatoes to give the whole thing an ice cream cone appearence.

The form I used was just a bunch of aluminum foil made into a cone shape, about the size I wanted.

So then I laid out the bacon in an arced weave. I laid the aluminum cone on it and just rolled the bacon around it. The top I held on with 4 toothpicks, but I actually probably should have used more. One of the unpicked pieces fell backwards. Not that that mattered in the end, because I didn't allow enough time for the bacon to become crispy. I normally like my bacon not so crispy, so I estimated the times wrong. Everything else was already cooked and ready to go by the time the bacon was cooked but not crispy, so when I took it out and went to transfer it to the plate it kind of fell apart. I pretty much just faked it and stitched it back together to just make it look good for the photo and hide my failure. Hopefully no one finds out.

So here's the finished product. Now, the mashed potatoes aren't just plain mashed potatoes. They're Betty Crocker instant mashed potatoes, just add boiling water, butter and milk. But I also took the left over bacon scraps, a diced chicken breast, and some green beans and cooked them in a frying pan and then mixed them into the mashed potatoes. You can't see the chicken and bacon, but it's there. Another aspect you can't see is the inside of the bacon cone. Or bacone as I like to call it. I thought chicken and mashed potatoes also earned some stuffing, so I made some Stovetop stuffing and just put that inside the cone, to help keep the shape and to also taste delicious.

Random meal

This is just a quick random meal I threw together and have thrown together before. I take some bacon and cut it up into small pieces, toss it into the frying pan, do the same with some chicken. Let that cook for a while, then add some green beans and carrots. I like to serve it on some whole grain pasta. This time I even made a (mostly) homemade sauce. I diced some onion, put it into a pan, added a can of tomato paste and one cup of water. While it was simmering I added some minced garlic. And since this dish was going to be heavily chicken and bacon orientated, I added in some barbecue sauce, which I think gave it a nice taste, making it different from normal tomato spaghetti sauce. I tried adding some Frank's Red Hot sauce to give it some spice, but I couldn't really taste it. Next time I think I'll just add a bunch more.

Bacon Sandwiches

I had some leftover mats from the hot dogs I made the other day, so I decided to make something else. I cut the sub rolls in half like you would a proper sub, tossed them into the oven for a bit to toast them. Once deliciously toasted I put down a layer of cheddar cheese, two strips of bacon and then the rest of the cheese. I was about 2 slices of cheese short to properly cover the bacon in cheese, so that's why there's a some missing. I decided to make them into sandwiches and closed the rolls, but I think open faced would have worked just as well. It could have used maybe a little something more, like some sort of condiment. But it was pretty awesome with just the bacon and cheese.

Hot Dogs

So at work, instead of working, we were watching some Man v Food, the Tucson episode. In it he tried this hot dog that was wrapped in bacon and covered with a ton of things. I can't even remember what all was on there. Jalapeño sauce, peppers, onions, mayonnaise, maybe some other stuff. But this inspired us and we set out to make our own.

I started with just some Ballpark Franks and wrapped them in Oscar Mayer Hearty Thick Cut Bacon. Tossed those into a frying pan with some butter. I also diced up some green pepper and onion and put that into a second pan and did what I thought was sautéing, but apparently was just pan frying. I don't know, I don't really know how to cook. This is just me faking it.

So I need some rolls for this, something a little bigger than standard hot dog rolls. At the advice of a coworker I went with some Wegmans Italian Sub Rolls, which I think worked quite nicely. Though in the future I'll try and find longer hot dogs to better fill the length of the bun.

As you can see, there was some extra bun compared to the hot dog, but it still turned out well. From here I just put on a slice of cheddar cheese so that it completely covered the hot dog and put them into the oven on broil for a few minutes, just long enough to melt the cheddar. Then I added some Picante Pepper Mustard I have that is delicious and covered the whole thing with the peppers and onions.

The meal was delicious. And I feel that I learned something, cooking wise, from doing it. At least getting the experience, which is half of what I'm after. The other half being a delicious meal. I was worried about the wrapping the hot dogs in bacon, and how to cook that but it worked out pretty well. I kept turning them over trying to get all sides done evenly. The only problem was that one of them came kind of unwrapped. If you noticed that I only had one of them pictured for the pre-cheese shot that's because the other one looked less like a bacon wrapped hotdog and more like a hot dog next to a piece of curled bacon that's partly overlaying it. Which is an awkward picture caption, so I went with the better looking one. The peppers and onions turned out well, I'm going to have to do that again for other dishes in the future. I'm getting much better with dicing vegetables, not quite as fast as the guys on TV, but I can at least keep the knife in constant motion while moving the vegetable. No more pausing every three slices or so to reposition everything.