…but there ain’t no fuckin’ way we’re sticking to the “approved dialogue”.

This recipe experiment brought to you by the absence of unnecessary Crisco.

Yes, seriously.

I had planned on cooking one thing, but as of 5:30pm, one ingredient I thought I needed hadn’t arrived from Amazon – Crisco¹.

At that point my brain went into overdrive — what can I cook from what I already have? I went looking through the fridge, and I found some of the leftover Mojo pork from the other night. I had gotten some boxes of coconut milk on my most recent trip to the grocery store, so my mind snapped to some sort of ad-hoc pork and coconut milk curry.

I had also purchased some okra to make a Caribbean coo coo to use as the base of something, and the fresh okra wouldn’t hang around forever. It wouldn’t be traditional, but coo coo often is made with coconut milk instead of water or stock…it could work.

Print Recipe

Collected Recipes

Spinach-stuffed squash

Author: John R Cooking Method: Baking, Boiling, Sauteeing Cuisine: American Courses: Side dish

Difficulty: Beginner Cook Time 45 mins

Servings: 6

Dietary:

G gluten-friendly

Description

From the cookbook “Louisiana Entertains: A Complete Menu Cookbook”, compiled by the Rapides Symphony Orchestra of Alexandria, LA in 1978.

Ingredients

Scale

1/2x 1x 2x 3x

• 6 yellow squash
• 2 cup chopped cooked spinach (well-drained)
• 4 tbsp minced green onions
• 4 tbsp butter
• 4 tbsp flour (Use glutinous rice flour to make gluten-friendly)
• 1 cup milk (room-temperature)
• 1 pinch nutmeg
• 1 pinch salt
• 1 pinch pepper
• 1 pinch cayenne pepper
• ²⁄₃ cup shredded cheddar cheese
• 8 bacon slices (cooked and crumbled)

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Trim ends off squash, then boil whole until barely tender, about 10 minutes. Halve lengthwise and scoop out centers. Chop up the centers with the spinach.

2. In a heavy saucepan, melt the butter. Sauté green onions until wilted, then whisk in flour to make a roux. Whisk milk in slowly, stirring continually, then cook until thickened.

3. Add spices to thickened sauce, then mix in the spinach/squash mixture. Spoon mixture into the squash shells on a baking sheet, then top with cheese and bacon. Bake for 15-20 minutes.

Rate this recipe:

Do not adjust your monitor – this is not a mistake recipe².

Ordinarily this is when I’d post the recipe references, but when a recipe goes THIS wrong, I’m making the executive decision that the recipe sites don’t want to be associated with what I did³.

I started with about 1 1/4 pounds of leftover pork. I put it in a saucepot with two quarts of coconut milk, half-a-dozen makrut lime leaves, and 3 bay leaves to simmer while I focused on the coo coo.

In my research I had found a few coo coo recipes, and a few Instant Pot polenta recipes, but no Instant Pot coo coo recipes. That shouldn’t be a big deal – coo coo is just polenta with some other stuff sautéed and cooked with it. I set the Instant Pot to sauté, then cooked the onions, okra, and poblano peppers (I can’t leave well enough alone with anything).

Looking at the Instant Pot polenta recipe, it mentioned two ways to cook it: one that is the “normal” way, and an alternative way to get around the “burn” error.

Dear reader, I had purchased the Instant Pot in December. Surely a brand-new Instant Pot wouldn’t be susceptible to that sort of error.

I confidently put the uncooked coarse cornmeal into the Instant Pot along with the cooking liquid, locked the lid in place, turned it on to high pressure for 11 minutes and waited for the preheating to finish.

beep, beep

“Burn” error. I removed the lid, stirred things around, reset the lid, and put it back to cook on high pressure.

beep, beep

FUCK!!!

I grabbed the pot out of the Instant Pot and poured it into a Dutch oven on the stovetop. The bottom was coated with stuck cornmeal that I wasn’t able to get out with a simple scrape of my wooden spatula.

By this time I was overly frazzled. I was loosely following a recipe for the curry, but I forgot some important ingredients. I also forgot to make a slurry with the cornstarch, so all I got were lumps. Meanwhile, the coo coo never cooked out all of its liquid, so it was more like porridge than polenta.

Thoughts:

1) Making things up didn’t turn out as well for me as they did for Arnold.

2) The tasting panel tried to cheer me up, saying that the pork curry was good. There was no salvaging the coo coo though.

3) Five minutes really CAN make a huge difference⁴.

Verdict:

Taste: 2.5/10. I didn’t make anyone sick. The pork was OK on its own, but the entire dish together was barely edible.
Availability: 8/10. I could see the curry working with any chunks of leftover meat, and a trip to the local Asian market can get you a variety of pantry staples that work for this. The only difficult part for me was the okra in the coo coo.
Story: 9.5/10. If nothing else, I needed to prove I’d post when my cooking adventures left a LOT to be desired.

Administrivia:

I have the two recipes that were the basis for this bookmarked. I will try them again at some point to give them a fair shake.

1. I’ve never cooked with Crisco. I’ve never thought I needed it for anything. Now that I realize that I don’t need it for that one purpose, I’m not sure that I’ll ever use it. ↩︎
2. This is, in fact, a recipe I’ve cooked several times before — one of a handful that are in cookbooks that I remember enough to be able to find instantaneously. It just has nothing to do with the dish I was attempting to make. ↩︎
3. I was planning to post a photo of what I cooked. Evidently I forgot, which is bad for storytelling but good for preventing scarring reminisces. ↩︎
4. I went downstairs to start menu planning at 5:30. I had come up with the basic idea and headed back to my office upstairs to start looking for actual pork and coconut milk curry recipes by 5:35pm. When I got back upstairs and checked my email, I had a notification that the Amazon package had been delivered. ↩︎