Bri's Night - If it ain't homemade...

Greetings, internet.  It is I, Alex, blogging from My Little Pony Headquarters, aka Brian's kitchen.  Tonight find me learning a whole host of new things.  First off, I learned that My Little Pony, in an effort to reach out beyond fans of Ponies, has jumped the shark, and turned the ponies into humans.

Uh...yeah.  It's kind of irrelevant, but hey, maybe I can use it as a metaphor to describe tonight's meal?  Yeah, sure, welcome to...

My Little Homemade Vegan Hot Dog
Vital Wheat Gluten is Magic!

Oh yes, reader(s), this is a real anthropomorphic giant lizard hot dog logo from a food truck in Seattle, Tokyo Dog.  We're honoring this Dogzilla today by making the "Shinjuku Dog", an apple sage sausage with butter teriyaki onions, wasabi mayo and nori.  We're going to to use some tips from one of Deb's favorite blogs, Vegan Dad to create the sausages, mostly relying on the power of vital wheat gluten to proteinize.

Buttah.

Brian also found this ingenious technique for infusing potatoes with as much butter as possible.  It requires slicing the potatoes so that they stay together, but leave little gulches for the butter to flow through.  This also, by the way, has me imagining a sweet fucking cookbook called "butter gulch".  Anyway!

Jim, in creating the hot dogs, made rather a big snafu.  Vital wheat gluten, when blended, goes from having, like, a little holding power, to OH MY GOD, NEVER LET GO!  So...we kind of had to start over.  Nevertheless, we had enough to start from scratch, and use a fork to mix things rather than a mixer.  What's crazy is that after we mix this dough, we are going to put it into "sausage casings", which in this case are aluminum foil sheets.  We're going to wrap it in the sheets, and then steam them.
 

Homemade buns!

Brian is also taking this homemade everything opportunity to make homemade buns (yesss) as well.  These will hold our vegan hot dogs, and thus give us triple points for phallic foods.  To complete our sophomoric trifecta, we're also making NUTella.  Heh heh heh.  No, seriously, homemade nutella.  I am so pleased by this.  It requires toasting hazelnuts, peeling them, then pulverizing them into a kind of nut butter.  Then, sugar, vanilla, salt and chocolate, and...voila?  We shall see.

Proto-nutella, pre-blender.

In the meantime, back in butter gulch, Deb is putting cheese on each halfway baked potato so that we can melt them into the delightful crevices.

"Do you want to stuff the cheese in the cracks?"

Heh heh heh.

Jim is on to making the teriyaki buttery onions, and I'm trying to help the nutella along.  Fortunately, Deb has a vitamix, which I think might be necessary to translate the nut powder to a creamy paste.  It's kind of crumbly and not spreadable, but hey, what do you want?  It's still delicious, so I'm pretty happy.

And finally, the steaming and baking are complete, and it's time to whip some wasabi into the mayo and make our beautiful photograph...

Hot Dogs

Jim
B-.  If we had taken the steamed hot dogs and fried them to give them some crispy texture, then the good taste would have been helped a lot.  I think we overdid it on sides...as one does.
Deb
C-.  I didn't like the taste or the texture.  And yet, I ate the whole thing, so it doesn't get an F!
Bri
B-.  I'm proud of the fact that we did it and it worked out at all.  It's not something I'd go back to on my own with any sense of joy.  The onions were good.
Alex
B-.  The more sauce, the better!  It was really very gluteny, though, and the bun was so big! 

Potatoes

Jim
B-.  Only because my potato wasn't baked all the way.  The taste and idea were really good, but it was a little undercooked.  Also, it was HUGE!
Deb
B+.  I thought it was great, could have used a bit more cheese in the middle.  And could have been cooked a little more - brilliant idea, though, I love it!
Bri
B.  We could have cooked it longer and if we'd had some ranch dressing to pump up the calorie load...
Alex
I agree with Jim on this one.  Great idea, needed more cooking, and more sauce as it was a little dry.

Nutella Sandwichy Thingy

Jim
B-.  It would have been good with something else inside and maybe some egg to soften the bread.  Has potential!


Deb
C-.  If it had been Brioche...and French Toast....

Bri
B-.  It did have potential!  With a different bread...and a hungrier group of people...and a spreadier nutella...it could have been pretty good!

Alex
C+.  Sourdough bread does not really go with chocolate.  Nevertheless, chocolate!  I even like the weird powder nutella.  But I think I mostly just like chocolate.