leftover Beer Can Chicken, stale popped cord, a questionable cottage cheese tub, and some freshly thawed phyllo dough

Last week, a friendly bartender told me that he had cooked a an entire tray of beer can chicken and that he had so much in leftovers that he couldn’t eat it all. I told him to wait a couple more days and  I would be in to pick it up over the weekend (y’know, let it age a little).  I had actually forgotten about it and walked down to the bar to just have a cocktail…Several hours later, I was stumbling home with a tinfoil tray full of deliciously borderline spoiled chicken. The next day I had a horrible hangover and cooked nothing. Then I woke up the next day with some kind of head cold and made myself clean the kitchen and cook something decently disgusting. The above picture is what I found lying around. Some air-popped popcorn that my sister gave me three prior…a bucket of cottage cheese that I hadn’t opened in at least a week, some phyllo and of course…the chicken.

oh yeah, and an apple:

..and one small mealy apple

I have no idea what this deadly sharp implement is…

I’ve cut my hands so many times with this thing

I mean…what is this even supposed to be used for? Sawing carrots into wedges?Perfectly cutting grapefruits? Making cuts so small on your hands and fingers you don’t know about them until you try and wash your hands or handle something even mildly acidic that the things that you used to call your hands are now just flesh sacks transmitting constant pain to your brain parts? I don’t know…but I’ve found it’s pretty good at coring apples:

A regular knife probably could’ve done that same job…but then what would I have used this dumb thing for?

So then I chopped the apple into slightly smaller bits and put them aside….

mmm

As this used to be an entire chicken…possibly even several chickens, there were lots of little bones and even very large bones– I separated the bones and put the pulled chicken aside…..for……..

If you didn’t see this coming…you really need to go back and re-read my blog posts

The Juicer!

Of course…I put the wrong attachment on and it actually started juicing instead of homogenizing, which is what I wanted, so I ended up having to take the apple-chicken juice (that you can see puddling in the first container) and mixing it with the rather dry chicken-apple pulp.

oof.

PUT ALL OF THE POPPED CORN THROUGH

See, the pop corn serves two purposes here–one, as a filler, and the second to act as a kind of broom, or really more like a mop to get all the left over liquid from the apple and the chicken in the juicer

After this–I mixed about a half cup of this cottage cheese in with the mixture, along with some basil, cumin, and garlic salt…I question these spices still…but I wasn’t really thinking straight as I was sneezing every minute or so.

I didn’t even have to scoop anything growing out of this thing!

Phyllo, while delicious, is incredibly tedious to work with.

Apparently–its best to melt butter and slather it all over the dough before you work with it. Can’t argue with that! The box obviously knows best….butter it is.

just spread this slop all over where you slathered butter over the dough

You’ve got to be really careful with this crap. This dough rips so easily. It’s like humongous delicious and buttery Bible pages…and just as sacred. Don’t be rough with this dough.

I tried to put butter all over where I was rolling it up as well

Butter pretty much everything. What could it hurt?

And into the oven for 15 minutes @350F

NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

After 15 minutes, I pulled the oven open to discover that this thing had split all the way down the side, hotdog-wise.  While devastating, I decided to crank up the heat and leave it in for another 10-15 minutes.

After another 10 minutes or so @400F it was sufficiently crispy on the outside

this looks awful.

This looks even worse.

It tastes kind of like a chicken pot pie or something… But not as good. Buttery…a little apple. ….I can’t actually taste anything in this except cumin and butter. In my shame, I ended up eating the entire thing.

C+