It may come as a surprise to some of you that I don’t already own a deep fryer, but the truth is that up until a week ago I didn’t. You see, it was on that faithful day that I was walking through Target on my lunch break looking at kitchen appliances when I noticed that they had quite a few deep fryers on clearance for half price. Now I’m not a huge religious guy, but obviously this was some sort of sign from God and he was trying to tell me that I needed to buy one of them to better my blog, and who am I to argue, so I grabbed one and headed up to the checkout lane.

The toughest decision when owning a deep fryer is clearly what to deep fry first. Chicken nuggets? Nope, too easy. Oreo cookies? Already been done. Suddenly an idea came to me. What if I were to take a bunch of foods that were normally thought of as healthy and deep fry those? A few minutes later I was on my way to the grocery store’s produce section where I stocked up on baby carrots, bananas, Granny Smith apples, avocados and a watermelon.

When I arrived back at home I got to work slicing everything up and mixing together a batter to dip it all in. Just using a regular batter seemed kind of boring though, so I decided to coat all the fruits and vegetables with a beer batter instead. I figured that since I was already making them far less healthy than intended that throwing some beer into the mix as well certainly wouldn’t hurt things.

Out of all the fruits and vegetables I deep fried that first day the avocado slices were easily my favorite. You know what’s funny though? I expected everything else to taste completely disgusting and it all actually ended up tasting really good. The banana slices got a little soggy, but still tasted fine. Everything else stayed pretty much intact.

The only thing I didn’t really like were the watermelon chunks. There’s just something about biting into a nice cold slice of watermelon that deep frying can’t make any better. Everything else though? Totally better deep fried…

I’ve written about breakfast pizzas that I’ve eaten a couple times before here on DudeFoods, but neither of them were pizzas that I actually created myself. Although both of those breakfast pizzas were good I felt like they were lacking a certain something; a certain creativity that truly made them a “breakfast” pizza. Obviously just complaining about breakfast pizza made by other people isn’t going to solve anything though, and that’s why I set out to create my own.

You see, the problem with every breakfast pizza I’ve ever eaten is that they just use a regular pizza crust. Where’s the creativity in that? I give Palermo’s Pizza credit for creating a pizza crust that tastes almost biscuit-like, but I wanted to take my breakfast pizza one step further, and that’s why I decided to use a Belgian waffle as my crust. The next question I had to ask myself was what kind of sauce to use on my pizza when it suddenly came to me; Hollandaise sauce!

I started off by cooking a Belgian waffle in my waffle maker, whipping up some scrambled eggs and some Hollandaise sauce on my stove and cooking some bacon and some maple syrup flavored breakfast sausages. Once everything was done I poured the Hollandaise sauce over my Belgian waffle and topped it with shredded mozzarella and Cheddar cheese, the scrabbled eggs, sausage and bacon chunks and some chopped up red and green peppers.

Since everything was already pre-cooked I didn’t want to risk burning anything (especially the waffle) by putting it into the oven for too long, but I definitely wanted to get the cheese nice and gooey. I only ended up cooking it for seven minutes at 350°, but that turned out to be the perfect amount of time as the breakfast pizza turned out amazing. Seriously, and I don’t mean to be narcissistic here, but for being a terrible cook I sometimes amaze myself with how good some of my random creations are.

The idea for the Grilled Cheese Curd Sandwich came to me a couple days after I made the Poutine Burger. I still had some white Cheddar cheese curds left and was all set to make myself a regular grilled cheese when I decided to add the remaining cheese curds to the sandwich as well.

I started my grilled cheese off the same way you’d begin with any grilled cheese, by buttering two pieces of bread. Instead of just putting one or two pieces of cheese in between the two slices of bread though I added a layer of orange sharp Cheddar deli cheese and topped that with a layer of white Cheddar cheese curds before adding even more sharp Cheddar cheese to the top of the sandwich. As the cheese started to melt, the orange Cheddar cheese started filling in all the gaps between the cheese curds creating the perfect blend of cheese.

The addition of cheese curds to what would otherwise be a normal grilled cheese sandwich definitely added a nice contrast of not only tastes, but textures as well since the cheese curds didn’t melt quite as much as the deli cheese did. In a way the sandwich kind of reminded me of the Denny’s Fried Cheese Melt, only a whole lot tastier.