Last year I got a box of seasonal nuts in the mail from Planters and used some of them to make some pretty delicious bacon & almond pumpkin spice pancakes. A few weeks ago I received another package from them, but this time I was fresh out of ideas as to what I should make with them so I took to the DudeFoods Facebook page and asked for ideas. One reader suggested I try making pumpkin spice almond crusted chicken strips, and a couple nights ago I did just that!
To make them I pretty much just followed the exact same process I used when I made my cheese ball crusted chicken strips, which involves cutting boneless, skinless chicken breasts into strips, covering them in flour and then dipping them in a mixture of egg and milk. After that I just dipped them in a bowl of Planters Pumpkin Spice Almonds that I ground up in my Ninja Blender and then cooked the chicken strips in my oven at 375° for about 25 minutes.
As far as dipping goes I actually tried dunking my pumpkin spice almond crusted chicken strips in a few different sauces and found that sweet and sour sauce tasted the best. I know that might sound a little weird, but the flavor combination totally worked. Then again, I also like dipping French fries in my ice cream so feel free to take my advice with a grain of salt.
To the naked eye this probably looks like a few slices of French toast topped with some spiced apples, but in reality it’s a version of French toast that I came up with last Saturday. I call it drunken French toast.
The bread? Beer bread made with Sprecher Brewery’s Abbey Triple Belgian style ale. Instead of just battering the bread in a mixture of egg and milk like you do with traditional French toast though I swapped out the milk for RumChata, which if you’ve never had it is Caribbean rum mixed with dairy cream and spices. Basically RumChata tastes like the leftover milk that you have in the bottom of your cereal bowl when you eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
Once my French toast was done I finished it off by topping it with apple slices that were mixed with cinnamon, sugar and a little bit of nutmeg and boiled in whiskey. Yep, beer, rum and whiskey all in one meal! And a breakfast meal at that!
The French toast slices on their own were awesome, and the whiskey soaked apples were super good, but together they combined for some pretty top notch drunken French toast! I even had some of the egg / RumChata mixture left over when I was done so I made scrambled eggs with it. They turned out to be some of the best scrambled eggs I’ve had in a while, so it looks like I might need to start incorporating RumChata into some more of my recipes. I do have 3/4 of a bottle left over after all!
I have no idea why, but I really love eating food out of cones. This is evidenced by the fact that I’ve already made and written about a chicken and waffle cone, a pizza cone and my favorite, the Tacone. This time I’ve created something a little more healthy than you’re probably used to reading about here at DudeFoods, but you know what? That doesn’t make it any less delicious!
What you see here is a cone stuffed with Cobb salad. It isn’t just any cone however, it’s a cone made out of crushed up croutons! It actually took me a few tries to make my crouton cone and I considered throwing in the towel before my final attempt at it, but I decided to give it one more shot and it turned out wonderfully!
I made the cone by combining half a cup of finely ground croutons with an egg and a teaspoon of olive oil. I rolled the mixture into a ball, put it in my waffle cone maker and pressed down as hard as I could. A minute later I took it out, wrapped it around my waffle cone roller, surrounded it with aluminum foil and put it in my oven for ten minutes at 400° to complete the cooking process. Ideally I would have liked to cook it for a few more minutes so the cone got a little crunchier, but my waffle cone roller started melting. I guess that’s what I get for putting plastic in the oven though….
After letting my cone cool I filled it with chicken, bacon, avocado, tomato, diced hard-boiled eggs, blue cheese and of course, lettuce. I then drizzled vinaigrette dressing over everything and took a bite. It was pretty amazing. Normally I don’t even like croutons because they always end up either too soft or WAY too hard, but this cone was sort of the perfect medium. At this point I’m also starting to think that there isn’t a single food out there that isn’t better in cone form….
After realizing how well bacon and melted cheese go together when I made my bacon weave pizza a little while back this idea seemed like a no-brainer. Yep, the bacon weave is once again making it’s triumphant return to DudeFoods and this time it comes in sandwich form!
Instead of one bacon weave I made two this time, each of which was roughly the size of a piece of bread. Instead of putting them in the oven like I did with the bacon weave pizza though I decided to cook my bacon in the microwave this time. I don’t necessarily prefer one cooking method over the other, I was just really, really hungry and didn’t feel like waiting for my oven to preheat. Once they were done I threw them into a pan on my stove with a couple slices of cheese between them and waited until it melted into gooey perfection.
The trick with a bacon weave grilled cheese is that you want the bacon crispy enough to eat prior to adding the cheese, but not too crispy to the point that the extra few minutes on the stove will burn it. I cooked my two bacon weaves in the microwave for five minutes each and they turned out perfect, but it will obviously differ based on the type of bacon you use so your best bet if you want to make your own is to check on it after three minutes and then cook it in 30 second increments after that until it’s done.
Alright, this is the part of the blog post where I should probably tell you how the bacon weave grilled cheese tasted right? Do I really even need to though? I mean come on, just look at it! It’s melted cheese between two squares of bacon so obviously it was delicious! In fact, after this and my bacon weave pizza I’m seriously considering switching to a low carb diet. Not because I want to lose weight though, but because I’m hooked on bacon weaves and because things like bread and pizza crust can’t even compare to them in terms of taste!
Have you ever thought to yourself, “Man, I love fast food, but sometimes it just isn’t unhealthy enough?” No? Come on, I can’t be the only one who has ever had that thought!
Alright, so maybe that wasn’t quite what was on my mind when I decided to deep fry some White Castle sliders in a batter that consisted of beer and bacon, but sometimes you just get tired of the same old thing and want to try something different.
My love of burgers topped with eggs has previously led me to combine White Castle burgers with fried quail eggs, but with no eggs on hand this past weekend I had to come up with something new. That’s when I decided to try whipping up a beer and bacon batter.
Now, I’ve beer battered plenty of things before, but I’ve never tried adding bacon to the mix as well and wasn’t sure how well it would work out, but it ended up tasting amazing. All I did for my batter was combine equal amounts of beer and flour and then stir in some diced up pieces of fried bacon and I was set!
It’s funny because with regular sliders I feel like I can sit there and keep eating and eating them and never get full. With these beer and bacon battered White Castle sliders however my hunger ceased after only a few. I still ate five of them, but that’s mainly just because they were so good that it was impossible to stop myself until they were all gone.
After I finished them I drove to White Castle, bought another bag of burgers and began the same process all over again. OK, that last part didn’t really happen, but if there was a White Castle closer than 30 minutes away from my house I definitely would have gone back to restock!
Last year I got a box of seasonal nuts in the mail from Planters and used some of them to make some pretty delicious bacon & almond pumpkin spice pancakes. A few weeks ago I received another package from them, but this time I was fresh out of ideas as to what I should make with them so I took to the DudeFoods Facebook page and asked for ideas. One reader suggested I try making pumpkin spice almond crusted chicken strips, and a couple nights ago I did just that!
