by A.J. Coltrane

Five years is a long time. Cheap Seat Eats is older than some of the neighborhood kids.

Even one year is a long time — my comments under the four-year anniversary post referenced Bill Cosby. Cosby was funny, but I’ll likely think twice before linking to him again.

It’s now 1,279 posts, 1,027 comments, and over 266,000 sp*m later. I touched on what I’m personally thinking about the blogging thing here, here, and here.

TL;DR:  More Food posts. Fewer Sport posts. I’ll be making an effort to write more posts about Games.

Other than that? Who knows where we’re headed?

Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to read posts. Extra thanks to everyone who comments. It’s nice to know the blogging isn’t happening in a vacuum.

In one of those whoops moments. I managed to post this before I had it finished.

Last month, the Iron Chef family lost a very dear friend, Linda Keaton. Linda was known in many circles as “The Rabbit Lady” as she volunteered at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle for many years taking care of and educating the public on rabbits. To many of the close friends in the Iron Chef Family, she equally famous for bringing an appetizer to parties which many years ago we dubbed Scooby Snacks because of their delicious and addictive qualities. It won’t be the same without Linda at our gatherings, but fortunately she did show me how to make the snacks and the tradition can be carried on. The recipe is pretty easy to make (the below recipe makes about 40 pieces) and can easily be scaled for a larger quantity.

The Software

• 6 oz. (2 cups) shredded extra sharp cheddar
• 2 cups green onions chopped
• 5 tablespoons of bacon bits
• ¼ teaspoon ground ginger
• ½ teaspoon minced garlic
• 2 tablespoons mustard
• 6 oz. (1 ½ cups) shredded chicken breast, poached and cooled
• 1 egg
• ½ cup Mayonnaise
• 1 ¼ cup flour
• ¼ cup water
• ¼ cup cottage cheese
• 1 teaspoon salt
• ¼ cup margarine

 

The Recipe

Poach the chicken breast in water for about 20 minutes until done. Remove from water, let cool and while it is still slightly warm, shred into bite sized pieces.

Combine cheese, onions, bacon bits, ginger, garlic, mustard, chicken and egg in a bowl and mix until well combined. Fold in the mayo until incorporated. Refigerate until needed.
Combine flour, cottage cheese, salt and margarine in a bowl. Add water 1 tablespoon at a time to the flour mix and knead the dough until it becomes slightly sticky (you may not need all of the water). Let sit for 20 minutes. Roll out onto a floured surface into roughly a 16” by 12” rectangle (although it may be easier to divide the dough in half and roll out in 2 batches, just make sure the dough is rolled out to a uniformed thickness). Cut the dough into 2” by 2” squares. Add about a tablespoon of filling to the dough and fold over to form little mounds (they should be about that size of a half dollar coin).  Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes on a parchment lined baking sheet. Let cool for 5 minutes and serve.

Notes

I have tried a few variations of this recipe (that is going to be in a forthcoming post), but the two suggestions that I have are to use real bacon instead of bacon bits (you may have to add a pinch of salt depending on how salty the bacon is) and to use a mustard with a touch of heat – a spicy brown mustard, good dijon, horseradish mustard or jalapeno mustards will all work here. The recipe can easily be converted to vegetarian – just replace the bacon bits with a vegetarian alternative and the chicken with an equivalent amount of butternut squash that has been cubed into 1/2 inch pieces and roasted. The snacks can be served either hot or cold, but they are better hot.

By Iron Chef Leftovers

According to the blog stats, this will be post #1000 for CSE. Coincidentally, it took us almost exactly 4 years to reach that number – our first post was on February 18^th, 2010 when AJ Coltrane (who was then just known as Coltrane) posted about the NBA Celebrity All-Star game. Blaidd Drwg then followed it up the next day with a sappy post about retiring baseball players. My first post was a few days later about a controversy in Italy over eating cat (and I still see no reason why they are not a viable protein source). Coltrane’s famous pizza posts began with his base dough recipe on March 11^th. Our first comment was posted by loyal reader Junior Joey Jo-Jo Shabadu (somehow I don’t think that is his real name) to Coltrane’s first post on February 19^th.

For those of you who were not with us in the beginning days of the blog, the early posts were mildly entertaining and full of charts and graphs, mostly about sports, some about food and rarely about games (our first games post was June 26^th, 2010), posted sporadically over the first few months, maybe one or two a week. I am pretty sure the first few months the only people reading the blog were the writers and a handful of people who were married to/related to the writers. There were emails between the writers when we would see comments from people we didn’t recognize trying to figure out who we told about the blog and celebrating that someone new was actually reading our stuff.

We had a few hiccups along the way – who will ever forget the failed WordPress update we had in January of 2013 that crashed the site and led to a frantic call from Coltrane and me spending a couple of hours getting the site back up (we still don’t have any pre-2012 pictures on the site – I should get around to that at some point) without losing any content. There were a few posts that my computer crashed on before I ever saved them and there are the spelling errors which drive Mrs. Iron Chfe nuts (I did that for your Mrs. Iron Chef).

The blog has grown since then in term of quality, quantity, scope and readership. I started posting my beer reviews mostly because I wanted someplace that I could reference them easily and not be completely screwed if I lost my notebook. That had the added side benefit of bringing in a bunch of new readers. Coltrane started urban gardening in earthboxes and his lessons and pictures brought in all sorts of folks doing the same thing. Both Coltrane and I have become better cooks and it shows in what we are posting. Coltrane and Blaidd Drwg have become more analytical about sports and make some pretty rock solid cases for what they are writing about. There are now posts almost daily (granted most of those are from the horrible backlog of beer notes I have), but I would also like to think that we have become better writers because of it.

Despite my usual sarcasm, snark and general obscure sense of humor, I would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to all of our readers, whether you started reading us at the beginning or just found us last week. We write on this blog to entertain ourselves and I would have never guessed that I would still be doing that 4 years later. Hopefully you find our blog as useful, entertaining and informative as we do. If you are a regular reader (or even an irregular reader), feel free to leave a comment or drop us a line on Facebook, and tell us how you found us – it is still exciting for us when we find out we have picked up a new reader.

Until our next 1000 posts (or my next post, whichever comes first), this is Iron Chef Leftovers signing off and to quote the immortal writing of the great Bartholomew Jo-Jo Simpson:

It is just a test to see if I have fixed the feed between this site and facebook.

I bet you are wondering what the hell happened to this site. Well, yesterday was not a good day for Iron Chef Leftovers. In both my real job and the blogisphere, I had an issue with a software update causing major issues.

The update we ran on this site basically torched it. We still have all of the content and most of the files, but the recovery process has left the blog without links and comments at the moment as well as a new site design. These are just temporary.

Never fear – in addition to being a mediocre cook, a bad comedian and a lousy blogger, Iron Chef Leftovers is also the webmaster of this site. Well, maybe you should fear?

Until I can get everything back to its original, upright and locked position, enjoy something different. You will still be able to see the newest posts we have, but you won’t be able to comment or search or look at the archives until I get that all restored. Hopefully it will be some time this weekend, depending on how ambitious I decide to be with fixing this.

In the meantime, if you have any comments about our posts, please feel free to leave them on our facebook page.

Thanks
-Iron Chef Leftovers, Blaidd Drwg and AJ Coltrane

 

Update – I am quicker than I thought. Links are working again, archives and search work, comments are working. I just have to fix the pictures and the site look and then we should be back to normal. Well, as normal as is possible for this site.

Final Update – Well, we have a site look that looks like the old site, the pictures are back but only from January 2012 forward (that is my fault – I started the restore before I realized the backup was not finished and lost the data in the process) and everything else seems to be working the way it used to be. If anyone finds any issues, post to the comments section.

 

By Blaidd Drwg

Sometimes I feel like my writing is like this. From “Pearls Before Swine” on July 14th.

By Iron Chef Leftovers

With a couple of changes to the cheapseateats website.

We have added a link at the top for Beer Ratings. This just defines what the 5-point rating system actually means, just so you don’t think I assign arbitrary scores to things.

We have broken the recipe category into sub –categories by type of main ingredient. This will make it easier to look at say our chicken recipes rather than having to hunt through all of the posts in the categories.

You may now resume your regularly scheduled program.

By Blaidd Drwg

Sometimes I think this couldn’t be more true. Nothing to do with Sports, Food or Games, just a random thought for the day.  From Pearls Before Swine: