Happy Holidays!

Yes, it's that time of year again, when halls are decked, stockings are hung and, most importantly, treats are frying. An early poll in the field informed us that this year the people wanted something completely new: Deep Fried Egg Nog.

A Google search confirmed that we were once again in uncharted culinary waters, but Kurt's ever-steady hand steered us towards a funnel cake recipe that would easily incorporate egg nog and we were like a couple of wise men discovering the baby Jesus. Due to the high concentration of eggs in nog -- hence the name! -- we were able to simply substitute about a cup of nog for the eggs in Alton Brown's funnel cake recipe. To really maintain the integrity of our beloved liquid nog, we added some nutmeg to the powdered sugar sprinkled atop the funnel cake. The results were sweet, crispy, delicious. Just ask our studio audience.

And just to amp up the holiday spirit, that night found Brooklyn encased in snow thanks to the Great Blizzard of 2009.

Finally, some of you may be commenting on Kurt's shabby outward appearance, mindless repetition of the recipe, and general inability to form cogent points. The official press release from Kurt & Amy Studios states that he is suffering from "exhaustion" due to K&ADFS's busy shooting schedule, and not (repeat: not) because of over-consumption of holiday nog during the filming of this webisode.

Happy Holidays!

K+ADFS: Now with 200% More Corgi!

Just in case the "Fry Event of the Year" isn't enough to get excited about, this year welcomed the company of two furry guests: corgis Duke and Gus (courtesy of their indulgent parents Amy and Wing -- thanks again, guys!). It wouldn't be a stretch to proclaim these waddling cuties the hit of the party, but coming in a close second (by a snout, if you will) was Kurt's extensive menu, which featured the debut of deep fried pb&j, hailed by party-goers as an "instant classic." The pb&j was prepared on Wonderbread and dipped in a French toast-style batter enhanced with evaporated milk.

Of the foods that I didn't alert Amy that I was making (sorry Amy!), the frites in particular came out really nice (and one of these days, we're going to get those pumpkin pie bites right). We cut them about 6" long by 1/2" wide/deep, soaked them in cold water for 10-15 minutes, then dried them and fried them in 300 degree oil for 6 minutes. Once they cooled to room temperature, we put them in for another 2 minutes at 350. Another one of those foods that can't really be replicated without a deep fryer. Since one of my friends questioned the practicality of of owning one, I'll reiterate that if you want to eat fried foods every once in awhile (anything from eggplant parm to falafel to any of the treats you've read about on this blog) there is no easier, cheaper, or healthier way to do it than with a deep fryer. Plus under what other pretense could you get a pair of welsh corgies to your apartment?


No corgis were hurt, mocked, or excessively fed in the making of the video. So lay off, PETA.

Fry Party - 11/13/09

Come one, come all!* It is decreed that on the 13th day of November, in the year two-thousand and nine, a Fry Party will occur on the premises of the K&A DFS set. So get your vitamin B supplements, your milks of magnesia, and your bibs, and come on down. The delectables shall include:

Frickles

Belgian frites

Fried Mac & Cheese

Fried Risotto balls

Squash Croquettes

Pumpkin Pie Bites

Fried S'mores

Fried Peanut Butter & Jelly

Apple cider doughnuts

*Invite only.

Campfire to Kitchen

OK, folks. This is it. Time to go pro. Kurt + Amy have achieved the culinary equivalent of splitting the atom and it goes by the name of Deep Fried S'mores. No, no need to drop to your knees and kiss our feet; these treats are as simple as they are delicious and if it weren't for the fact that no one reads this blog we'd almost hesistate to publish such a fact. But you will need nothing more than marshmallows, chocolate pieces to stuff inside the aforementioned marshmallows, egg, crumbled graham crackers, and a little conviction to repeat what you're about to see in all its gooey glory. (And a little aural assistance from the Super Furry Animals never hurt anybody.) So sit back as we break in the new Kitchen Studio with your favorite campfire confection.

We'll save any fact-checkers out there 15 seconds of work: contrary to Eric's estimate, a Google search for "deep fried s'mores" yields a whopping 55,000 results.

A Fond Farewell to 36 Clark

That's right, Kurt has moved into a new apartment, taking our production studio with him. What follows is a very special, final webisode of K+ADFS at 36 Clark Street, and a tearful one it is. So grab your Kleenex and join us as we bid goodbye to the apartment that made us an overnight internet sensation (it'll happen any day now...).

Kurt adapted Giada's Zeppole Recipe, adding ricotta and walnuts, but we'll definitely throw in some lemon zest the next time we whip up a batch of these. Of course, trying our hand at traditional festa fare, we really let the ethnic stereotyping fly here, but all in good fun: we're so very proud of our people's remarkable advances in the field of fried desserts!

Spoiler alert: Kurt's new apartment ultimately had ample space for the kitchen island and it, too, made the big move to Boerum Hill last month. So our melodramatic Goodbye in Two Parts was arguably a bit reactionary, but we make no apologies for uproarious programming! Stay tuned for our inaugural webisode live from the new kitchen... coming soon!

The Amys' Summertime Dessert Truck Tour

Dessert truck fever has swept New York so Amy and Amy decided to take a tour to discover what treats lurk beyond Coco Helado and the Good Humor Man. The tour began at Street Sweets (55th and Park), a great choice since the truck offers confectionery breakfast fare, the main draw being croissants filled at your whim with any combination of jams, nut butters, honey, marshmallow, Nutella... The Amys took the truck proprietor's advice and enjoyed a sinfully buttery croissant generously slathered with apricot jam and almond butter.

..........

Next, it was down to Bryant Park to sample what the Treats Truck (38th and Madison) had to offer. A tantalizing display of brownies and cookies was narrowed down to a caramel and a chocolate sandwich cookie for the Amys. The oatmeal jammies and peanut butter sandwich cookies would just have to wait for another day.

..........

The Dessert Tour's final stop would be Dessert Truck (55th and Lex), but due to a medical emergency* Amy S. had to make like a banana. Fortunately perennial sweet lover Marina was able to tag in and join Amy C. for a cup of peach sorbet served with an almond meringue, a dollop of creme fraiche, and a sprinkling of blueberries.















*Medical emergency neither diabetic coma nor in any way related to rapid, massive consumption of sugars and fats.

Like two kids in a candy store

After a dinner at Caracas Arepa Bar and some beers at the most ironic bar west of the Williamsburg Bridge (whose jukebox, we concede, made up for the hipster overload -- those metallic loafers were ironic, no?) we found ourselves stricken with a fever that only two things could cure. And one of those things was deep-fried candy. So we grabbed some childhood favorites - Reese's cups, Snickers, Twix - and put our leftover breakfast to use. As Kurt mentions, the key to successful battering is to make sure your batter is at room temperature when it hits the oil and, as we learned here, keep the oil between 325 and 350 for optimal frying.

In the preceding video you heard us claim that Kurt + Amy's cuisine is no more unhealthy than what Paula Deen whips up every week. And while there's no pressing need to back up such a statement with just one single piece of hard evidence, I encourage you to take a peek at Paula's Candy Snack Cake which consists of a chocolate cake slathered in frosting made from confectioners' sugar, three Snickers bars, and a stick of butter. Paula then outdoes herself by jamming a final chocolatey nail into each triple-bypass-provoked coffin: an additional Snickers bar in each slice of cake. I gained two pounds just watching that episode. (I suspect that its absence from youtube is by FDA decree.)

We all screamed

Holy fucking sweet ass intro sequence! Featuring fucking Starship! Kudos Amy, kudos. Let'em say we're crazy --- I don't care about that. I feel like we're legit now, that this has permanence, traction, everything a lauded and award-winning blogger would need. Put your arms around me, baby, don't ever look back.

And beyond that, I'd like to say we're doing something no other deep frying vlogger is doing right now. And that's pushing the envelope. Yeah, I just started a sentence with a conjunction, what're you going to do about it? We deep fried Ice(d) Cream, I think this is the right time to say what what's been kicking around here for awhile behind the scenes at K&A Studios: we're bigger than Jesus. Any two-bit conjurer can take a stroll on a sand bar; deep frying a frozen food is sublime.*

Anyway, despite what the intro claims, I'm not sure this entry is "starring" anybody, least of all the pile of used tissues and empty Sudafed boxes that substituted in for Marina this week. In case anyone needs to know what our ethos is, it can be summed up by not having an ice cream scoop. his isn't the sort of show where the right utensil magically appears in the hands (or first basemans mitts as it were) of the hostess, or the sort of show where we get things right the first time. But damnit we fried haagen dazs.

*Physics joke!

Corn Dogs

Although we didn't take any video at the time, the Fabio Party was not with out deep fried delights. Kurt whipped up a few batches of heavenly gluten-free frickles and corn dogs. Fortunately there were some ingredients leftover so we were able to have a corn dog reprise. We did, however, make the mistake of watching various deep fry television programming during the taping of this episode. Oil overkill, indeed. Don't try it at home. Special thanks to our friends (other) Amy, Lena, the good residents of Clifton, NJ (a scant 10 miles east of NYC according to the Travel Channel), and of course "the burgers cum in my mouth" guy.

Fabio's Birthday!

I know it's been a while since we all gathered together in honor of the big man's birthday, so let this be a winsome look back on just a small sliver of the awesomeness of the Fabio Party '09, which began with a twig-infested wig, ended with a couple of cops answering a "noise complaint" (no, I didn't hire any strippers this time), and had some beefcake and a tragic scratched cornea somewhere in the middle. Enjoy the memories!

All photos courtesy of Lauren -- thanks, lady!

'Tis the Season for Man Boobs

Please indulge me as I veer briefly off the topic of deep frying in order to share with you the following video. With the Fabio party right around the corner, I thought I would take advantage of our blog forum to share in advance the vaunted "Fabio movie" also known as "A Time for Romance." I hope this inspires you to costume yourself in a romantically appropriate fashion for the party, invites to which are on the way. I hope to see you there, but until then feast your eyes on the mini-movie.

My sincere apologies for the teeny weeny screen size. Technical difficulties necessitated taping the movie off my old school TV/VCR combo and besides, if you don't mind my saying, you should know better than to look a gift horse in the mouth...

Superbowl Leftovers

Kurt's Superbowl party yielded such a surplus of food that his guests, so full of homemade empanadas and wings -- served in copious quantities despite warnings from Stephen Colbert -- were unable to consume it all. Luckily, our dear friend Lena was available to emerge from the comfort of her Snuggie(TM) and help us out in tackling the leftover jalapeno poppers, goat cheese balls, and ravioli.

The ravioli are easy enough; simply coat in egg, roll in breadcrumbs, and place in basket. For the jalapeno poppers, we halved and seeded the peppers, then filled them with a mixture of cream cheese and monterrey jack, then egged and breaded them. Finally, the goat cheese balls are simply egged and breadcrumbed as well, but with panko (japanese breadcrumbs). They're all fried together at 350, but the ravioli are going to cook first, and they float so make sure you turn them manually after about 30 seconds. What could be easier.

Anyone with a penchant for inscrutable After School Specials will be tickled by clips of Ace Hits the Big Time (1985). This classic tale of a boy with a stye, whose therapeutic eye patch looks so tough that it gets him tapped by the Purple Falcons who are in a heated gang war with the rival Piranhas, and subsequently by a big-time movie director, and his unwavering conviction that cake triumphs over hate.

Finally, to answer Kurt's question about the career trajectory of Horace "Ace" Hobart portrayer Rob Stone...
It turns out his superbly nuanced interpretation of the role of Ace landed him a sweet spot on the cast of the beloved series Mr. Belvedere (1985-90). Looks like that fictional talent scout in Ace spotted a very real rising star!

Rice Balls

Well I'd like to be the first to challenge my own proclamation that the holiday episode was a "rollicking success," both on grammatical and factual grounds. Anyway onto the episode, the rice balls came out really, really well, and it seems like a nice way to take some leftovers that are probably too meager to use otherwise, and resuscitate them into a late-night snack. Amy dined on some leftover vegetable curry that I had hanging around in the fridge, and I took some hoisin sauce, soy sauce, onions, and frozen shrimp, and sauteed it up rather quickly. The point is though, that you could really put anything in there (ground beef? Chicken? Chocolate???) and it'll turn out nicely.

As for the unnecessary apology at the beginning of the video, we know that there was nobody calling us out on the state of our oil, but it was pretty reprehensible. We have since found some religion on the subject and would like to proffer the following websites as sources for good deep fryer (and oil) maintenance:

American Heart Association Guide on Deep Frying

Easy and Informative Best Practices from some website named "stop the clog."

I plan on posting one (or a series) of entries regarding deep-fryer maintenance, but for now, here's a quick link on how to properly dispose of your used oil. This applies not only to deep frying, but any kind of oil used in cooking.

I would also like to take a moment to correct myself and state that the solution should not have a 90%/1% ratio. These are the hazards of the semi-live vlogosphere. And I'll take a second here to apologize to Sir Isaac Newton for uttering the phrase "the Law of Continuity of Matter."

The key for these rice balls was, as usual, temperature. The rice was too cold and dry to work into a ball at first, but the more we worked with it, getting the heat from our hands into the mixture, the more cohesive and moldable it was.

Anyway, as you can tell, Amy and I are not huge fans of Aida and her Tech whelp Noah. To date, no response has come to our email, but we’ll keep you, our faithful viewers, posted.

To back up our libelous rhetoric, here’s her wikipedia page, which details her background, which is decidedly light on actual cooking experience. And even though she could most likely cook circles around Amy and myself (though the straight-faced inclusion of "scrambled eggs" on her show might suggest otherwise), the premise of her show is still ridiculous. To have viewers ask questions and have them answered is one thing; to have them utilize the internet, in some cases even taking the time to send videos(!!!) to ask questions that they could just fucking google is patently absurd. It's as if you required your viewers to write their questions in the margins of the encyclopaedia page on which the information is found, and then mail it to you. And obviously having a "tech guru" on board whose job it is to simply check email is laughable.