Friday, October 31, 2025

Halloween Recipes - Creepy Kool

Gory Halloween warning! It's time to get squeamish with the Ghoulish Gourmet's creepy imagery of raw meat and viscera. I'm about to get medieval for Halloween, and the following Dia del los Muertos, or Day of the Dead.

This Sinister Cheap$kate's ghastly recipes are laid out like a bloody scene from a Stephen King and Edgar Allen Poe story. Once you've digested this macabre blog post, your taste buds may nevermore be the same.

And if you're a vegetarian, avert your gaze! Or peak through hand-covered eyes to read my queasy prose. I'm sure to be on Morrissey's #hit list if he ever sees this - he's pop music's most morose vegan. (And I'm a big fan of his songs with The Smiths.)

Some of my most spooky recipes may make your skin crawl, while others will have your taste buds baying at the moon with pleasure, mouthful after mouthful.

Witches Brew - a bubbling cauldron of Pozole.

So read on, and don't forget to click on any recipe name that will bring you kicking and screaming to my original blog post to see all the hair-raising details -- presented with gory gifs, bloodcurdling photos, grisly videos, and eerie text. 

Right off the bat, I like my Chupacabra Carne Asada steak and hamburgers medium-rare. Oozing is fine by me - E. coli be damned!


Grilling meat supercharges the flavor and brings out the knuckle-dragging Neanderthal in this Paleo Chef.

The Terminator T-bone

Raw, bloody carcasses of meat have been disturbingly depicted in fine art. Rembrandt van Rijn is primarily known as a Dutch painter of moody portraits during the 17th Century, and I am especially influenced by his "Carcass of Beef" (flayed ox) study - just check out the audacious composition with gory details.


And here's the British artist Francis Bacon's 20th Century version, below.


The Chiaroscuro Chef photographs flesh against dark backgrounds lately (shot on a blackened cookie sheet) - usually lit from a single direction, with deep shadows, very much inspired by Caravaggio. An artfully dark and forbidding example is my recipe for Pasta alla Genovese, where I slice and dice cheap beef shank, slaughterous enough to make a zombie weep.


Offal is not so awful to this Carrion Chef. After watching a classic horror flick on the big screen, I cruise LA's fog-shrouded boulevards and alleyways during the midnight hour looking for ways to quell my ravenous appetites...for tacos, that is! 


Buche (stomach), lengua (tongue), and tripas (intestines) are on the menu at sidewalk taquerias and taco trucks throughout Los Angeles. Watch the shuddersome viscera-splattered video below to see what stops me in my tracks.



On a sweeter note, while not meat, the gooey insides of a Halloween special edition Oreo cookie are like sweetened bone marrow. You don't smash it to get to the finger-licking orange frosting; a simple twist will do.

Oreo Cookie Monster

Get your hands dirty knawing on my Rosemary's Baby Back RibsYou'll need extra napkins to soak up the BBQ sauce smeared on your lips and dripping from your fingertips.



My Silence of the Lambs Curry is creepy-delicious. And my video cooking directions are as easy to follow as leading a lamb to the slaughter.



It can get messy cooking with meat. You have to have an iron stomach. Try breaking down a pork shoulder sometimes, like I do below for my ghastly Texas Chainsaw Carnitas video recipe.


It's probably the most artistically nauseating footage I've ever shot - but, boy, does it taste heavenly when you cradle a stuffed tortilla, plump with citrus and cola-marinated, slow-cooked pork.



Ground chicken and turkey are mushy and wet, more so than ground beef or pork...ugh.


Check out my ground poultry The Blob Patty Melt video to see what I mean -- yuk!



After chicken, pork is the cheapest flesh. When hacked, mangled, and minced into sausage, it's delicious for breakfast or added to stir fry like my Garroted Green Beans and Gruesome Ground Pork recipe below.


This may sound perverse, but it's actually fun to animate with ground meat; it's like playing with Play-Doh, just greasier. Check out my video below to see the messiness.



Are you still with me? Man, are you hardcore! I'm getting extra creeped out just assembling this blog post.


Ever gut a fish? Whoa, that is one freaky task! Slice the belly open, yank out the internal organs, then chop off the head -- oh, I'm feeling faint just remembering the slimy viscera and the nauseating smell - barf !!

If you want to scare the bejesus out of your dining guest, then serve them a Jaws Whole Grilled Fish - head on!


This tin-framed, bloody-looking slaughter scene, comprised of tomato-sauced fat fingers of sardines, is one of my most visited food blog posts. And the morbid visitors are mostly from Europe (Transylvania?) - go figure. My pasta dish, Suspiria Sardines in Tomato Sauce with Olive Oil over Pasta, is a delicious mouthful worth sinking your incisors into.


Sushi is typically made with freshly butchered raw fish. It's so artfully presented that you miss the gore that goes into each delicate slice of aquatic flesh.

Here's one of my tastefully shot Sushi recipe videos, the simply presented Mothra Tuna Sushi.



Shrimp would not seem spooky, right? But buy head-on jumbo shrimp and try beheading, peeling, and removing the digestive tract/backbone sometimes...yuck! But, man, are they delicious when my Mom serves them up, named after her favorite author, Stephen King Shrimp & Rice recipe.


Halloween has a dark streak of humor, and some of my recipes do, too. Take my wacky Nightmare on K Street - Trump Orange Chicken....please. It's the color and shape of a pumpkin and looks like a McDonald's Chicken McNugget, just like our former Twit-in-Chief, but my entrĂ©e is made with real chicken pieces, not a pink slime meat composite.


How about a recipe where a slice of Bride of Frankenstein Turkey Bacon swallows up a Brussels sprout like a disembodied human tongue...yikes!


I like to cook a whole chicken or leg quarters. There's nothing like the carnal pleasure of ripping apart a cooked poultry carcass and sucking every piece of succulent meat off the bones. My Tingler Chicken Tinga and Paranormal Poached Chicken are some saporous examples.


 Below is the Eviscerating Cuisinier's squishy butchering of a chicken breast and leg quarter. It's the cheapest flesh you can get, and I have all kinds of poultry recipes here.



So get out there and have an entertaining Halloween holiday. It's not all blood and guts! My recipes may haunt you in a tasty way. So, I'll leave you with an appallingly tasty ghost story.


Thursday, October 30, 2025

Happy Hour During the LA Dodgers Baseball World Series - Izakaya Go for Japanese Tapas

If you are looking for an authentic Japanese Happy Hour in Little Tokyo, Izakaya Go has a delicious and varied selection of bites, along with a 60-ounce pitcher of Sapporo Beer for $16 to wash it down with. Their regular menu is extensive and a click away, here.

I tried small Tapas plates of Spicy Garlic Edamame, Fried Chicken Karaage, and Crispy Pork Belly, plus Hand Rolls, and raw Oysters, all on the cheap.

There are a dozen food items on the Happy Hour Menu, and they all look good. I'll be back to try them all.

Click on any photo to see larger.

What brought me (and my friend Drew) here was the LA Dodgers Baseball Playoffs. The Dodgers have 3 Japanese Players on the roster, and I wanted to watch a few games with the locals in Little Tokyo, located in Downtown Los Angeles.

 

Little Tokyo is only a few city blocks and easy to walk around and window-browse the restaurants, looking for food and drink specials. 

Izakaya Go is a restaurant on Central Avenue, conveniently, right down from the *LA Metro Little Tokyo Station at 1st Street. It's a short walk past a cool LA Dodgers mural.


Entering Izakawa Go, you pass a small sushi bar on the left, large tables in the center, and small tables on the far right with a long upholstered bench seat against the wall. A large TV screen is centered, above and in front of the back wall, so anywhere you sit, the Dodger Playoffs are easily viewed. 

If you have been following my Happy Hour Tour of Little Tokyo this week, my previous stop at the Far Bar, down on 1st Street, is where you want to watch sports, as the crowd is loud and boisterous on game days. Here, at Izakawa Go, the crowd is there to nosh, not yell out "Let's Go Dodgers". 

The Happy Hour is only an hour and a half, and most baseball games last 3 hours, so I can always end up at the Far Bar for the rest of the game. (Read my Far Bar Happy Hour review by clicking here.)

My friend, Drew, and I started with Spicy Garlic Edamame and a Pitcher of Sapporo Beer. 

Usually, Edamame is plainly steamed in the shell and a bit bland, and that's fine. I liked the addition of pungent garlic and spicy chili flavors.

The cold Japanese pale lager, Sapporo, kept things in check. Sapporo Beer is smooth and light and goes good with any food.

We followed up ordering Chicken Karaage and Crispy Pork Belly, both were fried. Might as well get the heavy stuff first.

The Chicken Karaage nuggets were large, tender, and so juicy - done perfectly. The crunchy coating is not heavy like typical Southern Fried Chicken. 

The Karaage batter is light like Japanese tempura. This is a large tapas plate for only $7 and is very tasty. It was easy to split between these 2 Dodger fans.

Crispy Pork Belly reminded me of fried pork rinds I've had in Louisiana.

Very dry and crispy, light and airy, like fat matchstick potato chips, the Crispy Pork Belly order is like crunchy Beer Nuts snacks. They did not last long.

We finished up with seafood: Sushi Handrolls and fresh Chef's Choice Oysters


The Oysters are only a dollar apiece - a great deal. The raw Oysters are served on a half shell with a light soy/vinaigrette and dressed with chopped scallions. The Oysters were small but pungent and briny. 

You could slurp the whole thing down, but be prepared for a tasty sour kick from the vinaigrette. I wanted to taste the oyster with minimal extra flavorings, so I used chopsticks to pick out the Oyster, and gulped the vinaigrette as a chaser - Whoa!

The waitress wrote down the type of Oyster for me. The Kumiai Oyster is cultivated in Baja California, Mexico. They went down smoothly.


I was fooled by the California Roll. Typically, it is made with krab, or imitation crab. Looking closely at my Handroll, the filling did not look like krab, it looked like real crab and tasted like it, too. I asked a waiter if they used real crab in their California Roll - they did not.

The krab was shredded and finely chopped to look like real flaky crab meat. Plump sushi rice, crunchy cucumber, and creamy avocado slices filled out the roll, wrapped in a sheet of seaweed. It is a fine California Handroll for $5. (Click here to see my easy-to-do, cheap$kate recipe.)


The Spicy Tuna Handroll had a nice balance of chili heat and cool, raw chopped tuna. Again, a great treat for $5. And an excellent finish to a Japanese Happy Hour. (Again, I have a Spicy Tuna Roll recipe, here.)

They have a Yakitori menu with grilled skewers of Japanese Eggplant and Shiitake Mushroom, I want to try, and the prices work for me, even without the Happy Hour.

 

 Izakaya Go is a grand slam of a Little Tokyo Happy Hour in Downtown Los Angeles, especially when you leave the driving to the *LA Metro rail line.


Izakaya Go
Los Angeles, CA 90012
(213) 265-7324

Website: izakayago.com
X (Twitter): x.com/GoIzakaya
Email: izakayagola@gmail.com

Monday, Tuesday: Closed
Wed: No Lunch, Dinner 5:00PM - 12:30AM
Thurs: Lunch 11:00AM - 2:00PM, Dinner 5:00PM - 12:30AM
Fri:   Lunch 11:00AM - 2:00PM, Dinner 5:00PM - 12:30AM
Sat:  Lunch 11:00AM - 2:00PM, Dinner 5:00PM - 12:30AM
Sun: Lunch 11:00AM - 2:00PM, Dinner 5:00PM - 12:30AM

LA Metro

Website: www.metro.net

Seniors 62+/ Medicare/ Customer with Disability: www.metro.net/riding/fares/seniors

When you are a senior (62 years old) with a senior-issued LA Metro TAP card, it only costs 35 cents per ride during off-peak hours. The normal base fare is $1.75 per ride - it's a steal. 

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

Far Bar - Baseball World Series Happy Hour in Little Tokyo, LA

I just missed 3 shots of sake for free. Every time Shoehei Ohtani hits a home run, the Far Bar in Little Tokyo pours a free shot of sake for everyone who's there.

I was across the street during that game at another Happy Hour watching the LA Dodgers battle the Philadelphia Phillies, the afternoon Shohei Ohtani hit 3 home runs in one game

Oh well, wins some, lose some. Happy Hour at the Far Bar, in downtown Los Angeles, is a deliciously fine time with or without winning a free sake shot. 

I started watching the Dodgers at different restaurant/bar Happy Hours around Los Angeles during this year's Baseball Playoffs because I'm too cheap to buy cable TV channels. And, a senior *LA Metro ride is only 35 cents, so I hit the rails.

Click on any photo to see larger.

The star attraction for the LA Dodgers is Shohei Ohtani, originally from the Nippon Professional Baseball League in Japan. The Dodgers have two other Japanese players, so I wanted to hang out with the locals in Little Tokyo (in downtown Los Angeles).

I found the Far Bar on 1st Street in Little Tokyo a cool restaurant/bar with cheap food and drink specials, and their Happy Hour goes 4 hours, from 3pm to 7pm, Monday thru Friday. 

The tall neon sign, above the outside entrance, has "Chop Suey Far East". A flyer outside says "Free Shohei Sake Shot When He Hits A Home Run". Shohei Ohtani has hit 55 Home Runs this regular season. That's a lot of free Sake Shots! Who knows how many he will hit in this year's Baseball World Series

When you enter the historic Far East Building, the Far Bar's large front room has half a dozen tables and a long bar lined with television screens. 

If you keep walking to the back and bear right, past the restrooms, then make another right, you enter a long outdoor patio, or a smaller bar in the back room. I planted myself in the small room with a bar and four small 2-chair tables. 

For a quieter experience, sit in the outdoor patio. I like the small back bar for watching the LA Dodgers on two TV screens, while nursing a Sapporo Draft with a Sake Shot for $9. Even the wait staff and the cooks do a quick peek in the bar for the TV screen baseball scores. 

The draft Sapporo is smooth and light, and the Sake is sweet - it's a good combination.

I decided on the Happy Hour Shrimp Tacos for $8. You get two small, but loaded, tacos. Inside the corn tortillas were whole, lightly sauteed shrimp.

The Pico de Gallo salsa is chunky with tomato, chopped onion, and jalapeño.

The additional Salsa Verde is mildly spicy when topped with a light Cilantro Cream. These are very tasty tacos, well worth the Happy Hour price.

That was enough to last me for half of the ball game. For the second half of the game, I had another round of Sapporo + Sake Shot, and Wasabi Fries

The French fries are McDonald's-style, thin and crispy, just the way I like them. The fries are topped with a wash of Wasabi Mayo and flecks of dried seaweed. Across the pond in Europe and the Far East, they like mayonnaise on their French Fries, and it works for me. Next time, I would ask for a small cup of Wasabi Mayo on the side to dip the fries. I do like a lot of ketchup (or Wasabi Mayo) when I have fries.

The first time I came here, early in the Dodger Playoffs, the small back bar was jammed and I barely squeezed in.

For my next game visit, there was plenty of room at the bar and small tables. The back room bar is less raucous than the front of the house.

I ordered a Sapporo and a Sake shot again. This time I tried the Ming Wings from the Happy Hour menu. They were crisp, Japanese Tempura-style. The batter is light with the possible addition of light cornstarch to heavier flour. 

They have a sweet coating similar to a Thai dipping sauce.  The chicken wings had whole spicy red chilis, chopped green onion, and specks of garlic - a very tasty chicken wing coating. 

The order included 5 chicken wing pieces, combining drummets and flats. They were large and meaty, moist and perfectly cooked.

The last Happy Hour item I ordered was Teriyaki Mango Sliders for $7. They come 2 to an order.

The Teriyaki Mango relish on each small beef patty is sweet and tangy. You get about 3 bites per Slider. No cheese, but that's okay.

The regular menu has a nice variety of entrees and specialty drinks, with prices in the low teens and twenties. (Click here, to see the full menu.) The menu is mainly Asian Fusion cuisine. Far Bar is a casual setting that gets rowdy on sports game days.

The Far Bar hits all the bases for Happy Hour during the World Series Playoffs. The crowd is there to cheer on the LA Dodgers, and you can't help but join in with high-fives, fist pumps, and chants of "Let's Go Dodgers". And, the *LA Metro's Little Tokyo rail stop is half a block away.

Far Bar

347 1st St, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Phone: (213) 617-9990

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday:  3pm - 12am 

Friday - Saturday:  12pm - 1:30am

Sunday: 12pm - 12am

Happy Hour: Monday - Friday 3pm - 6pm


Social Media:

Twitter: x.com/farbartweets

Instagram @farbar_la

Facebook: facebook.com/farbarlittletokyo


* LA Metro

Website: www.metro.net

Seniors 62+/ Medicare/ Customer with Disability: www.metro.net/riding/fares/seniors

When you are a senior (62 years old) with a senior-issued LA Metro TAP card, it only costs 35 cents per ride during off-peak hours. The normal base fare is $1.75 per ride - it's a steal. 


Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...