Graboid Grub (#108)

This year's November film was Tremors, an early 90's film and the first film in our chronology from that decade. This film is a childhood favorite of mine and is a bit of genre bender as at times it feels like a horror film and in other scenes it feels more like a body comedy.

For dinner, there aren't any obvious food scenes. While researching, I did find a scene early in the film where our two main characters are arguing over whose turn it is to make breakfast. During their back and forth, they mention bologna, beans, and eggs. These are the kinds of foods that one might cook in a skillet over a campfire. Though we don't see them do that, the imagery seems to fit their modern cowboy, open range lifestyle. I decided to make a breakfast-style skillet meal inspired by the kind of campfire cooking I envisioned they might do.

For dessert, my first thought was to make something similar to "cup of dirt" that I would sometimes eat as a kid which was made with Oreos, chocolate pudding, and gummy worms. As I wanted it to fit the movie a little better, my first thought was to change out the chocolate Oreos with something pale like graham crackers or vanilla Oreos and the pudding with a vanilla or banana pudding. After thinking a little longer about it, I wondered if instead of representing the large graboid worms with gummy worms, I could make the pudding in a pan, and use whole bananas to represent the worms. This ultimately ended up being what I made.

Campfire Cookout Skillet Breakfast

For this recipe, I looked at recipes for skillet dishes similar to what I had envisioned and then made some of my own twists to it. These kinds of dishes are typically made with bacon or sausage along with eggs, potatoes, cheese, and often chopped onions or peppers. I knew that I wanted my dish to feature eggs, beans, and bologna because they are mentioned at the beginning of the film.

I don't eat pork and my partner is a vegetarian, so I decided to make this dish vegetarian as well and to serve the bologna as an optional topping for those who wanted it. I also used beef bologna for this, since standard bologna is made with pork. Beef bologna has great flavor, so even if you are not opposed to eating pork, I would recommend beef bologna for this dish.

For the beans, I suspect that Kevin Bacons character was talking about baked beans, but I didn't think that baked beans would not work well with this dish. I decided to use kidney beans instead. Not only do they fit the dish better, but they act as a meat substitute and provide good flavor and protein to this vegetarian dish.

For seasoning, I decided that I wanted this dish to have a bit of a southwestern Tex-Mex feel to it. While shopping, I came across cheese that already had taco seasoning and canned kidney beans that also had some mild spice to them, so I purchased these hoping that they would give me the flavor I was looking for. I was absolutely right. I could have added more seasoning if I had wanted to, but ultimately, I didn't need to add anything other than salt as these spices were more than sufficient. If you end up seasoning yourself, I would simply suggest that you season it to your own taste preference.

Ingredients: (serves 7 or 8)
1 stick of butter

2 cans of 16 oz kidney beans

2 to 3 lbs of chopped golden Yukon potatoes

10 slices of beef bologna (chopped)

2 8oz bags of cheeses (I used a pack with colby-jack, cheddar, and manchego cheese and taco seasoning)

7 or 8 whole eggs

salt to taste

other spices to taste

Directions:

1. Melt 7 tbsp of butter in a deep sauté pan over low heat. I cooked this dish over a stove, but it could be made over a fire if you have the right equipment. Set the remaining butter aside for later.
2. Add kidney beans to pan. Stir occasionally to make sure nothing is burning or sticking to the pan as you prep your potatoes.
3. Wash and chop your potatoes into small bite size pieces, then add them to the pan.
4. Raise the temperature to a medium cook and mix well.
5. Cover pan to keep moisture inside and let potatoes and beans soften while they cook. Stir occasionally to make sure everything is evenly coated and cooked.
6. Melt remaining tbsp of butter in a separate frying pan on low heat.
7. Chop bologna into small pieces and add to frying pan.
8. Increase temperature of frying pan to medium and pan fry the chopped bologna, stirring regularly with a spatula until the pieces begin to darken.
9. Bologna will be greasy so allow the pieces to rest on a plate lined with paper towels. Then put another paper towel over top and pad to catch the additional grease. Let rest while we finish the dish.
10. Once potatoes are soft, mix in one bag of cheese. Continue mixing until cheese is well melted throughout. Watch out for any cheese that might try to stick to the bottom of the pan.
11. This is a good time to give your dish a taste and add any additional spices and salt to taste.
12. Once cheese is melted, reduce temperature back to low. Crack eggs and drop them individually around the dish. You will not be mixing these in. Instead, they will cook on top of the dish.
13. Cover dish again and let eggs cook low and slow.
14. Once the eggs look cooked, top with remaining cheese, sprinkle a little more salt on top, and cover again until cheese melts.
15. Remove from heat and serve warm.

When done, everything should be well cooked and you should still be able to make out the shapes of the individual eggs under the top layer of cheese. To serve, each guest should scoop out one whole egg along with the mixture of food under and around it. Then, they can sprinkle the fried bologna over it if they want meat with their dish.

Overall, my guests really enjoyed this dish. There was almost none left by the time we were done. It was flavorful and filling and had that greasy goodness that makes it a great comfort food or a good hangover meal. I really don't have any suggestions for improvements as it came out pretty much exactly as I wanted it to.

Tremors Graboid Banana Pudding

This dessert is essentially just a reimagined banana pudding inspired by the large worm-like graboids featured in the Tremors movie. Instead of the bananas being chopped and mixed into the pudding, I left the bananas in large pieces and laid them around the baking tray like a large winding snake. Most of it is meant to be hidden with just a little bit of the head poking out. Then the "sand" hides the pudding and banana.

Ingredients:

light brown sugar

cinnamon

4 bananas

2 3.4oz vanilla pudding mix

2 3.4oz banana pudding mix

4 cups cold milk

2 2/3 cups heavy whipping cream

2 tsp vanilla extract

2 14oz cans of sweetened condensed milk

graham cracker crumbs

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
2. Combine some light brown sugar with a little cinnamon. If you want, you could add a little nutmeg as well.
3. Roll bananas in sugar mixture and arrange in the bottom of a baking pan to create a winding snake or worm. It may help you roll and arrange the bananas if you cut them in half first.
4. Put pan in oven for a few minutes. The goal is that the sugar starts to caramelize and the bananas start to soften. You don't want the sugar to melt completely.
   
   
   
5. Remove pan from oven and let cool while you make the pudding.
6. With an electric mixer, whisk pudding powder, milk, heavy cream, vanilla extract, and condensed milk starting at the lowest setting and slowly increasing the speed as it starts thickening. Every once in a while, use a spatula to scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl.
7. Once the pudding is thick, pour it over the banana in the baking tray. If you want the head to poke out like mine, stage one banana half to sit upright as you pour the pudding around it. Try to keep the pudding mostly level.
8. Mix some of your remaining sugar and cinnamon mixture into your graham cracker crumbs.
9. Sprinkle a thick layer of the graham cracker crumbs over the pudding, avoiding covering your piece of exposed banana.
   
   
   
10. The graham cracker topping probably looks bland and pale. Set oven to broil mode and put baking tray into oven until the graham cracker topping starts to darken. Be careful not to let it burn. The goal here is to toast the crumbs to give them more color and crunch. (See picture at the top of this recipe to compare to uncooked crumbs above.)

Overall, this dessert doesn't really taste any different than a typically banana pudding, but it certainly looks different. Also, serving is a bit different as you are literally cutting the banana chunks as you serve. I did have one guest who seemed to appreciate that as she said she doesn't like the texture of mushy bananas in most banana puddings. My dish did not have that. The fact that the bananas are distinct and separate from the pudding is also why I decided to make the pudding with a combination of vanilla and banana flavors. I wanted you to taste some banana even if you weren't biting into one.

All in all, the night was a hit. Everyone seemed to enjoy the food and how well it tied into the themes of the film. This is a movie night that I would recommend.