FREAKING SPAMTACULAR!

As you may recall from previous late-spring/early-summer E-blasts, our friend, neighbor and certified (or should that be "certifiable"?) Alfa Romeo nutcase Steve Crowley hosts an outdoor sort-of barbeque/pot luck built around the twin pillars of being "Alfa Queer" and trying to make something great to eat out of Spam. It's quite the happy tradition (particularly after a few wines or beers) and I'm pants-buttons-bursting THRILLED to pass along that I won FIRST PLACE this year for my somewhat unusual "Spamma-Lamma-Ding-Dong!" And here's how it's done:

See, usually I cook sort of the same way that Jackson Pollack used to paint, and sometimes it's good and sometimes I throw too damn much shit into the same pot or frypan and, just like when an artist smooshes and mooshes too many colors together on his or her pallette, it all turns a kind of muddy gray. Or sometimes a way-too-spicy muddy gray, which is even worse. So this time, based on watching a few cooking shows when we have our coffee and tea together in the morning (or "Somebody Feed Phil," which we absolutely love), I came to the realization that you have to keep the flavors and textures separated--like the adolescent boys and girls in a parochial school system--until they're ready for serious commitment. Or at least serious fooling around.

So here's what you need to do:

Start out with a can of pineapple chunks in their own juices. Open it up (that should be obvious) and put the juice part in a mixing/marinating bowl with several hefty shots of your favorite hot sauce (I like "Cholula," but, since they're not paying me, you can use any damn thing you want), plus say a half cup of red wine vinegar, ditto olive oil, a little dab of maple syrup, some lemon juice, some powdered ginger, ditto cinnamon and smoked paprika. Stir that all together, then cut your Spam block(s) into cubes, rectangles and trapezoids roughly the size of very large dice. I mean the kind you roll in a game of backgammon. Then set aside so the spam can absorb all those flavors. Which takes awhile, since Spam is less of a sponge-type material and more of a wet-linoleum or modeling clay type material. But give it a half-hour or 45 minutes and you should be good.

Now we start on Part Two: the root-vegetable yellow rice! First you need one huge or two smaller sweet potatoes, four or five hefty carrots at least as big around as a Wall Street fat cat's cigar and one good-sized parsnip. Y'gotta be careful with parsnips, because they pack a lot of flavor and can easily overpower most other root veggies unless you cut them back on quantity. So now you peel all the sweet potatoes, carrots and parsnip and cut them up into chunks. Not quite as big as the marinating Spam chunks, but not little candy-ass size, either.

Now y'gotta put a little olive oil in a big pot, get it slightly hot, add a couple tablespoons of butter and after that melts, throw in some chopped up onion (I like Vidalia sweet onions, but you can use whatever you prefer), cook till soft, then add all the chopped up root veggies and cook and stir a bit (if you get them soft, you've done too much) and add, oh, say, four cups of chicken broth. Cook that up a bit and add two cups of Jasmine rice (wife Carol claims the organic tastes better and is better for you, and I wouldn't argue with her if I wuz you) and now comes the spices. I use a lot of Tumeric (most of a teaspoon) plus some more ginger and curry powder, a little cumin and celery salt. Stir and bring to a sizzly boil over high heat--stirring regularly--then move to a back burner over low heat, cover, and let the Rice Magic begin.

While the rice is cooking, take a big frypan, give it some EVOO and a little butter and then drain those marinated spam chunks a bit and fry them up, harrassing them with a spatula so's they get nicely & evenly browned but not burned. Once they look about right (think of the skin color of a thin and spindly old Jewish man down in Florida who spends all of his time out on the fishing pier with no shirt on, trying to catch a lunker Snook), then move to paper towels to drain a bit.

Check the rice. Stir it a little so it doesn't stick to the bottom and re-cover.

Back to the recently Spam chunk-filled skillet. Chop up some more onion, toss that in plus one each yellow, red and green bell peppers cut into edible-size pieces. Wife Carol prefers organic, yadda-yadda-yadda. Cook a bit (but not too much). Then throw that lot (and the drained Spam chunks) into the rice pot & stir it all up. Almost done now.

The final two ingredients:

The rice should be all yellow, mellow and tender by now with all the other crapola mixed in, and now you add the pineapple chunks you've been saving from the very beginning AND (trumpet fanfare, please) roughly a cup of cold pomegranate seeds. I used to think you had to buy whole pomegranates and get the seeds out yourself (a thankless task at best) but you can buy them all done for you, which is much easier and much less mess.

Now stir everything up a bit with a big spoon or ladle, put in an appropriate deep serving dish & cover until the guests are ready to eat.

I don't know what kind of luck you'll have with it, but MY Spamma-Lamma-Ding-Dong was a first-place hit.

PIX from the SPAM PARTY: