Dinner is a couple of hot dogs and a wad of french fries, and it took longer to heat the fryer up than it did to cook them...and they're perfect. The fries in particular are better than the ones I get from fast food places.
I like french fries too much. Then again I'm a typical "meat and potatos" kind of guy, so it's really not all that surprising.
But I keep getting ideas.
First off, I was looking at shrimp the other day, because it'd be cool to make tempura shrimp to serve with yakisoba. There's no inflation, but the (frozen) shrimp I normally buy have approximately doubled in price since December...meaning that buying raw shrimp would make for an expensive experiment if it didn't work out.
Well--I buy them (or used to) at the holiday price of around $16 for a 2-lb bag, frozen. I gather they used to be about $20 per bag off sale; but now their regular price is $30. Aiee.
Second, the fryer manual contains recipes, and has one for jalapeno poppers that looks like it'd be good. Also, I've been thinking about my recipe for crab rangoons, and also pondering the manufacture of flautas.
Third, desserts--home-made donuts. Funnel cakes. And I just had an idea for breading chocolate with some kind of graham cracker breading and deep-frying it....
On the plus side, in order to make desserts, I need to get a whole other jug of oil. I'm not deep-frying sweet stuff using oil in which I've deep-fried gyoza (garlic!) and spicy french fries (chili powder!). No.
Periodically, I drain the oil from the deep fryer, straining it through a handy little plastic strainer Mom bought from a catalogue some years ago, and thence into the oil bottle from which it originally came. Then I scrub out the fryer tub to get the deep-fried crumbs off the inner surface. The saved oil is darker than fresh oil, but it's still usable for salty-spicy stuff and the strainer gets the crumbs out.
I could buy another jug of oil specifically for use in making sweet stuff...but if I start making desserts with this thing I'll probably put on about three thousand pounds. It's hard enough to resist the thing's siren song when I can only make hot dogs and french fries, for crying out loud.
I'm out of gyoza (pot stickers) for the moment. Lemonzen and I might hit the oriental grocery store on Sunday, though, where I'll be picking up a few things...including a couple bags of gyoza. *sigh*
Hey! How about deep fried Pocky??