Instantly Regret Eating Instant Regret Peanut Butter

If you’ve ever had thai food, chances are that you’ve had what can effectively be called a hot peanut butter. Spice and nuts aren’t unheard of, but a company may have reached unknown limits of mankind’s will when it crafted Instant Regret Peanut Butter. You may have had the usual assortment of peanut butter, but you’ve never had a peanut butter that’s made you sweat.

It’s with great pride (and no little terror) that we bring you the Instant Regret Peanut Butter, following on from recent Instant Regret favourites Vodka, Hot Sauce and Chocolate, this time even the peanuts are angry.

We’ve gone straight to the top and recruited the (relative) ruler of the chilli jungle, the King Naga chilli. We start by milking every last drop of capsaicin from the chillies, which we combine with the finest peanuts money can buy. Throw in a little oil, some seasoning, and a dash of Habanero chilli extract just for good measure. Then we butter it up.

This Firebox exclusive continues our reign of tasty terror, combining a classic spread with the heat of a thousand burning suns. Measuring an absolutely mental 12 million SHU on the Scoville Scale, it’s not your everyday spread.

What’s better than it’s initial description is the assorted warnings that follow.

Please Note:

HONESTLY, THIS REALLY IS HOTTER THAN WE EXPECTED. IT’S REALLY, REALLY HOT.

CAUTION: Hot Sauce contains extreme quantities of chilli and is not suitable for children, pets or the elderly.

CAUTION: Do not put in direct contact with eyes or downstairs area, and wash hands after handling.

CAUTION: This sauce has been made in a factory that regularly uses tree nuts and peanuts, although that’ll be the least of your worries once you try some.

DO NOT go

… Read the rest

Tips For Cutting Board Use

Cutting boards are a requirement for any solid home or restaurant chef, but there’s a good variety of them (a surprising amount for something that equates to “flat piece of material”) and some rules you need to follow with them. With some simple guidelines, you can maximize the use and lifespan of your cutting board.

Material

Plastic will always be the best; you can put something hot on it and it won’t be negatively affected, sure, but the most important reason for using a plastic cutting board is purely for safety. Wood boards can get cuts that can harbor bacteria and glass can shatter (alongside being bad for your knives), but plastic can be washed, abused, and brought back for more.

Avoid Food Contamination

No real issue if you’re going from cutting onions to peppers to carrots, and plan to throw them all in the same roux. The real issue comes in when poultry, or any food that will leak a flavor into others, gets involved. If you’ve got to chop poultry and other ingredients, you should either do the poultry first and clean the board thoroughly, or just do it after the other ingredients (onions aren’t going to make the chicken unsafe).

Upkeep

1 tablespoon of bleach to a gallon of water will help sanitize boards (using unscented bleach only), and no matter how well the board is cleaned, it’ll have to be replaced after time due to various nicks, dents, and cuts. If you must use wood, make sure to dry it after you clean it.… Read the rest

Food Planning For Emergencies

With Hurricane Sandy and the legendary “Frankenstorm” shackling the Eastern seaboard in their houses, with chances of flooding, power outages, and the like disrupting daily life, the simple concept of feeding yourself becomes questionable. No take out, and unlikely to actually drive out to some place for food, one must look to their home for full meals, and in many cases, you may be restricted from cooking food and keeping food cold. What can you stock up on to keep healthy?

Liquids

Water, obviously, should always be your highest priority. Keep some water in simple containers, in case your water supply is cut off. Fill up sports bottles, glasses (but keep them covered), and mugs and such to ensure you have water for free. Additionally, water bottles purchased from a store may cost a bit more than “free,” but it’s a safe way to keep water around. In addition to water, you may want to stock up on some drinks like apple juice for a bit of nutrition. If you think you’ll be bored and not have to worry about your safety, liquor and beer is a good time-waster, but unhealthy. You may need some alcohol to clean wounds if things get bad, after all.

Bars

Simple energy, trail mix, and cereal bars are great ways to pack in some calorie-dense, largely healthy, and self-contained packaged snacks. In case things get hairy, keeping one of these on your person could definitely help out.

Dry Food

There’s a whole world of cereal (yes, you can eat cereal without milk), breads, meats (stay to the dried ones, such as beef jerky), and more that require no preparation. Pasta, beans, and rice usually require cooking, despite being healthy. Soups are, likewise, at the whims of heating (unless you don’t mind eating cold soup). … Read the rest

McDonalds Reveals Big Mac Sauce Recipe

It’s been a long-standing notion that the Big Mac “Special Sauce” is a closely-guarded secret. Much like the vaunted Coca-Cola recipe and many others, people thought they knew the recipe, but were only off by a slight bit. It was easy enough to say it was Thousand Island dressing… and it largely is.

McDonalds Canada uploaded this video recently showing what goes into a Big Mac. Naturally, three pieces of bun, two hamburger patties seasoned with salt and pepper, onions, lettuce, and pickles are all there (and continuing to be a slight disappointment, a pre-packaged slice of cheese, nothing special).

What the real interest is, and what sparked the video, was a customer’s question about what makes the Special Sauce.

Store-bought mayo, sweet pickle relish, yellow mustard, white wine vinegar, garlic powder, onion powder, and paprika are all the ingredients. Sure, they’re not giving out specific measurements, but you can eyeball it from the video.

Will you be making your own Big Macs now?… Read the rest

Learning How To Cook From Video Games

Not everyone has access to personal chefs, cooking classes, or even a parent that can cook well. Sometimes, you have to turn to television, books, and the like to learn how to prepare something, but those can be boring. Over the course of the past three decades, video games have become a defining part of American culture. They’ve also proven, time and again, to become a good source of knowledge on how to do things, from saving the princess to learning how to throw fireballs. Some games make a point to show the player how to cook, accurately or not. If you need to learn a recipe, these games might not be the most accurate, but they might be the most fun way to learn some simple skills.

Cooking Mama

Cooking Mama is the undisputed queen of cooking in video games. The first title, one of the earliest for the Nintendo DS that fully showed off the capabilities of Nintendo’s new and oddly dual-screened handheld (that was so distinct from it’s previous attempts at gaming, they feared to attached the “Gameboy” moniker in case it failed). In this game, the player simply follows Mama’s instructions in how to create dishes; chop these vegetables, slice this meat, mix this broth, and so forth. It’s simple minigame fun, but players can actually learn a fair amount of simplistic cooking skills from it, such as how to cut an onion. The success of the title lead to Cooking Mama 2: Dinner with Friends, Cooking Mama 3: Shop & Chop, Cooking Mama 4: Kitchen Magic, Cooking Mama: Cook Off, and Cooking Mama: World Kitchen, and the cooking free Babysitting Mama, Crafting Mama, Gardening Mama, and Camping Mama.

Mama apparently is busy woman. Who said staying … Read the rest

What To Do With A Food Portioning Scale

You might think that food portioning scales are only for restaurants, diners or cafes. The truth of the matter is that anyone can benefit from having a food portioning scale in their kitchen as one of their major kitchen gadgets. If anything, you can always pull it out to see how much small items weigh.

A food portioning scale might be used in the household by someone who is watching their diet. They may have chosen cutting down on their portions as a way to help them lose a few pounds. They might also be on a particular diet that calls for weighing each item before eating it to allow only a certain amount. The food portioning scale will help you to stay right on your mark if you need to measure the portions of the food that you are eating. One smart way of staying adherent to a diet is to produce a large amount of food you can eat over the course of a week early on, and then divy it up into equally-sized portions. Make sure to stock up on plastic containers, and only buy a food that you can handle large amounts of; something like chicken works great, as you can put any sort of seasoning on it after the fact to vary up your menu.

Once you actually start paying attention to suggested food portions, you’ll realize how much insane amounts of food you may eat without even knowing it. Restaurant portions are notorious for being incredibly large (at even a normal restaurant), and once you start factoring in “indulgence” places like Big Pie in the Sky or buffets, you’ll realize the human body just isn’t meant to deal with that much mass. When the suggested portion size for lean beef is 3oz, about the … Read the rest

Why Use a Pocket Thermometer

Society has so evolved that the meat you cook had to travel quite a long way before it gets even to the fridge. In that long journey comes the risk of food borne illness that increases in likelihood when food is not cooked at the right temperature. If you’ve ever bought groceries and had a long drive home, you’ve risked contamination with every degree it’s raised.

This makes the pocket thermometer a necessity if you want to safeguard your family. Many have mistakenly assumed a brown hamburger, for example, as already done and paid a stiff price with food poisoning. It is not good to entrust the safety of your family with your eyes especially when dealing with ground meat; remember, there’s a difference between “rare” and “still mooing”. With a pocket thermometer, you’ll always have one on hand, or pocket, as it were.

With every type of meat, be it poultry, pork, ground beef, or sausages, there are recommended cooking temperatures that must be reached to ensure all likely pathogens have been killed. For example, poultry has to be cooked at 165 degrees Fahrenheit, ground beef at 160, and fish at 145. Only when these recommended temperatures are reached that you can serve the food with a near-guarantee that it’s clean and ready to eat.

Food thermometers are widely available at reasonable prices.There are two main types: the instant read and leave-in probes.Both are easy to use although they seem to have slight differences in purpose. With the instant read food thermometers, the user pokes holes in the meat and reading is obtained instantly. They are quite useful for spot checking in situations where you have a lot of meet cooking at the same time. From personal experience, I can tell you that this is how supermarket delis … Read the rest