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.
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.
Get your hands dirty knawing on my Rosemary's Baby Back Ribs. You'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 in her 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 Stree - 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 entree is made with real chicken pieces, not a pink slime meat composite.
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!
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 in her 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 Stree - 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 entree 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! So, I'll leave you with an appallingly tasty ghost story.
