Cooking by email

How we started this mess.

     We may have missed the October Snowmageddon of 2011, but we were looking for some comfort food to warm us up on the cold weekend.

    I have this great recipe for chicken and dumplings from the wonderful Chef Mike Stephens. However, I was looking for speed, simplicity, and low cost.  I found a recipe on Cooks.com for Aunt Faye's Chicken an' Dumplings.

That's not steam, that's visible aroma!

     I love to cook, but I'm not yet to the stage where I can create a dish from scratch.  I can make a mean breakfast sandwich or even prepare steak and chicken, but I just don't have the experience to create a dish like this.  

    I do love the challenge though of taking a dish like this and adding some of my own touches to liven it up.  I added some ingredients from the in depth recipe.  A little onions, and other vegetables to give it some flavor.  Comfort food is big on filling you up and being warm.  While I wanted the warm filling carbo-load, so I didn't want it to be a bland carbo-load.

Wanna bite?  The finished product.



Stirring it up - the simmering is almost complete.



Um... and to my friend Matt B. No I don't have any left. I'll work you in on the next batch of somethin' good from the Sapp kitchen. Maybe some BBQ!

School Snacks

You know how you run your tongue over your teeth after you eat popcorn?  Trying to find those last little pieces of shells stuck along your gums?  That’s how my day ended at school. 

Although it wasn’t popcorn I was trying to find…nope I was trying to get down the last of a larva.  Yep, larva.  Luckily it was prepared for consumption, which meant some sort of baking and seasoning.  There were Cheese Flavor, BBQ, and Mexican Spice flavors to choose from(if you wanna buy some -- they're made by Hotlix or on sold Amazon.  I went with the last.  The kids “dared” me to do it.

Courtney Franke(pronounced frahn-KEY), InterpretiveNaturalist with Elkhart County Parks is giving another one of his stellar educational “performances”.  Over the next few weeks he will teach 6 sessions about how scientists classify animals.  We will learn how they are put into the different classes.

Rumor had circulated that Mr. Franke  would have a little snack with him.  The kids cornered me, “Mr. Sapp, are you going to eat one?”

I smiled, trying to be coy, but I couldn’t hide the fact that this would be one challenge I would love to take!  When the time came for our snack half of the students took one of the larvae and popped them into their mouth.  I took a Mexican Spice baked worm and chewed it.  It wasn’t oozy or anything.  It was crunchy and really just disintegrated … leaving little pieces of shell that 20 minutes later I was finding and waiting for a drink to wash it down.