Sous Vide Beer-Braised Bratwurst!
I return from yet another long absence. This time I will not apologize. You forfeited my remorse when you wouldn’t leave me alone. The Tweets, the Reddit posts, the United States postal mail bags of letters full of pleas and deranged illegible family recipes. You want to know why I was gone so badly? Here it is, you degenerate eating addicts.
A few days after the gruesome wetness of Indian Grillers I had a nightmare about infected testicles. My own nuts swollen like grapefruits. I had to walk around bottomless, bow-legged, holding my dick against my belly. Any contact with my overripe man-berries and those suckers would explode. A terrifying time bomb of imminent emasculation.
I awoke in a horrible sweat. Everyone I told the dream to found it very funny. But the next night that dream came true. It started with a cruel pinch while I peed. An hour later I couldn’t walk. I spent a week laying spread eagle in the center of the bed, wrists anchored with wrist weights to keep from rolling on my side in my sleep.
Finally I found some old-fashioned geriatric quack who still made house calls. He gave me the works. The best that premium rich guy insurance can cover. Turkey basters of antibiotics, five rounds of laser scalpel surgery, an airlift to a plush penthouse room in the Hilton of hospitals.
Boring. This part of the story is taking too long. Four paragraphs and I’m barely through the preamble. Here’s the real deal. After my genital premonition I became convinced of my psychic abilities. If I could predict my freak gonad situation maybe I could predict other world-changing events.
I started dropping LSD daily.
If I had any more potentially dismembering prognoses on the horizon I wanted to see them coming and crush their chances before they blew up in my crotch.
To bring it back to my literary absence you all won't leave me alone about, the problem with taking several strong hits of acid every single day is that there’s nothing more repulsive to a trip than cooking a meal and eating it. The rancid smells, the grisly textures, maintaining focus long enough not to torch the whole house. I ate no solid food for nearly six months. You’d think these psychic space tours would help me drop a few pounds, but I got my calories downing five liters of lemon-lime soda a day to prevent sugar-lack. Plus I couldn’t walk (for reasons I’ve already made obvious)
But all this tripping didn’t turn me into a mystic. My mother died alone in a mobile home in Tuscon. My uncle backed his truck over the last breeding-aged male of an endangered bird species. No one came to my birthday. Every day full of unwanted surprises.
Instead I dropped into the grim, toxic, intoxicating world of video game battle royales. Prior to my accident I’d never touched a video game. No need. I had more action than I could handle out in the real world. Now everything was different.
Alone in a room stinking of unemptied bed pans. Trying to avoid looking down, where all the nauseating scars lived. I spent twelve hours a day playing digital make-believe. In that world I was one of a hundred kill-crazy sociopaths dropped on an island with only one goal: destroy everyone without dying.
All that LSD gave me a psychic edge over my pitiful competitors. I saw that digital world as a microcosm of our real one: cruel, empty, relentless, meaningless. I hung above it like a god bearing witness to human failing. Men unloading full magazines into the corpses of their victims. Teabagging their testes on the faces of the fallen slowly bleeding out. 12-year-old boys using their final words to scream racial slurs before their execution. The only path to absolution for these miserable wretches was divine punishment so I brought it to them.
I became the greatest video game player alive.
Check out the video link below for some incredible gameplay you won’t see anywhere else.
But now I’m bored. From the peak there’s nowhere to go but down. I haven’t dropped acid in almost three days and I can’t believe how hungry I am. I made some beer hot dogs in a fancy machine that cooks food in water. The recipe is right here.
Sous Vide Beer-Braised Bratwurst!
Ingredients:
6 bratwurst sausages
1.5 cups beer (mild beer, like a lager or pilsner)
Salt
Pepper
Vegetable oil
2 onions, halved and sliced
2 garlic cloves, minced
½ teaspoon caraway seeds
2 tablespoons dijon mustard (some people prefer whole-grain mustard with their sausage but I don’t like whole-grain mustard)
1 teaspoon honey
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
6 rolls
Heat water to 170 degrees Fahrenheit using sous vide machine.
Put the bratwursts, ½ cup of beer, and salt to taste in a sous vide bag. Place bag in sous vide then get as much air out as possible and seal the bag. If you don’t know how to do this but you have a sous vide machine, find a different recipe that explains all this for your first time. Cook for at least 45 minutes, but up to 3 hours.
Heat oil in a non-stick pan over medium heat. Add onion, salt and pepper. I like to use a lot of salt and pepper so be your own judge if you’re not that keen on it. Cook until soft and lightly browned (about 5 to 7 minutes).
Stir in garlic and caraway seeds and cook about 30 seconds.
Stir in the remaining 1 cup of beer, mustard, honey, and vinegar. Increase heat to medium-high and cook, stirring occasionally, until thickened.
Line a plate with paper-towels then remove the bratwursts from the sous vide bag and pat dry.
Heat pan to medium-high heat with oil. Brown bratwursts about 1 to 2 minutes.
Serve in rolls and top with onion mixture.
To be honest I didn’t like this recipe very much, but I’m including it here because I bet it’s good if you like mustard. I just find mustard mostly repulsive. I was hoping the other stuff would balance it, but all I could taste is mustard. Too overpowering! I also realized I don’t like bratwurst as much as other sausage.
Still, why waste all these beautiful pictures? And I was so hungry I would have eaten anything.
