Four Offbeat Recipes

A Friday Hodgepodge

If I encounter a recipe I like or something food-adjacent, I bookmark it under recipe so i can refer to it later. Here are four things that I found when looking through these recently.

1. When I was a kid, a cafeteria we'd go to (but whose name I don't remember) served fried clams, which I liked.

I once looked around and found a recipe that I think would have a similar taste: Howard Johnson's Fried Clams at The Food Dictator.

No, I haven't made these yet, but now that I've jogged my memory, I might do so in an attempt to satisfy my nostalgia and my son's oddly-limited palate.

2. If you like wild game, pitmaster Steven Raichlen has a marinade that will make ordinary, store-bought meat taste like game:

You'll be amazed by the power of this simple marinade to turn tame supermarket pork, beef, and even lamb into "wild" game. 3 cups dry red wine ½ cup balsamic vinegar ½ cup extra virgin olive oil 2 tablespoons gin 1 medium onion, thinly sliced 1 carrot, thinly sliced 1 rib celery, thinly sliced 2 cloves garlic, flattened with the side of a cleaver.

I haven't eaten enough wild game to know if I'd like that taste, but the ingredients have piqued my curiosity.

3. If you have kids, don't throw out your pumpkin seeds at Halloween. I use this roasted pumpkin seeds recipe every year and the kids love them.

4. I love poached eggs, but find my egg-poacher enough of a cleanup hassle to use that I rarely make them myself.

This recipe, "Poach a Dozen Eggs at Once with a Muffin Tin," looks useful, although I might use a half-dozen tin -- or just make fewer -- since I'm the only person in my family to like poached eggs.

I like the idea of having to clean one thing rather than ... counting ... 4-7 parts, depending on how many eggs I poach.

-- CAV