Something that many of you may not know is that Coolio has a cookbook called Cookin’ With Coolio: 5 Star Meals at a 1 Star Price.
Yes, that Coolio, rap superstar known primarily for Gangsta’s Paradise. In case you don’t know who he is, here is the music video, which you should watch no matter what:
The way you know Coolio is an extremely cool dude is that Michelle Pfeiffer is in the music video.
Man, I wish I knew Michelle Pfeiffer, whose name is very difficult to spell on your first try.
Coolio won a Grammy award for his music, but he did get in plenty of trouble too. He’d been battling addiction and got arrested for crack possession in 2009. Really, when you think about it, he reminds me of me, without, you know, the cocaine habit.
I am often described as being “quite street.” And my secret motto is “Smoke rocks everyday, assface.” The difference between Coolio and I is that I attempt to smoke actual rocks. I prefer a mix of jasper and a dazzling piece of galena. The mouthfeel of the vapors is exquisite.
My friend Pete, who was quoted about poo in my latest A.V. Club article (it’s about surviving for a few days on camping/army food, which you can read here) gave me Coolio’s cookbook for a Christmas gift some years back.
However, having been on my coffee table for over two years now, I have never attempted to cook anything from it. I was afraid that I would turn into Don Dannis and have a crime empire the size of my tiny mildly abused testicles.
“Dannis Ree,” I said to myself, “It is time to explore the magic that is known as Cookin’ With Coolio. Why have you waited so long for this moment?”
It was because I was not mentally prepared enough. But since I used a baseball bat on a piñata full of unseasoned ground beef last week (here), I feel like my street cred is on a whole new level.
See?
This is what you call street justice.
Since I’m not supposed to put the actual recipes on my blog without permission from the publisher (sorry), I will simply go through the steps I took to cook the recipes in Coolio’s book along with their results.
His intro contains the phrase “everything I cook tastes better than yo’ momma’s nipples,” I feel like he and I are secretly brothers in food.
I tackled two masterpieces: Fork Steak and the Hot Fruit Sandwich.
Fork Steak starts with simple ingredients that are easy to buy, including a cheap cut of steak, a buttload of garlic, onions, balsamic vinegar, seasoned salt, and bell peppers.
I chopped up my vegetables on an extremely tiny cutting board for no reason at all. This was extremely difficult, but so is life, when you’re a straight bangin’ street prince like me.
Speaking of, I straight banged your mother last night. She likes my urban vocabulary in bed, especially when I call her a “janky-ass chickenhead.” Skeet skeet skeet! I also have to demand her to stop smoking crack while we are copulating. Plus Harvey and Mr. Bee are also allergic to cocaine.
After I chopped up the vegetables, I stepped back in unspeakable horror as I gazed upon my kitchen island.
If you look carefully, almost all of these ingredients have been featured in past Pizzle posts. My God. This is what my life actually looks like. Fuck.
Anyway, the recipe for Fork Steak calls for two 12 oz. steaks from “just some regular-ass steer,” so I just picked two giant 12 oz. sirloin tip steaks, which are very chewy by nature unless they are braised for hours.
Coolio claims that cooking them in the oven for an hour will make them so tender you’ll just need a fork to eat them, and since I pray to Coolio before bed every night, I take his word as gospel.
And man, you guys need to see how he writes his recipes. They are very interesting. Salt and pepper are measured in dime bags, which for you squares out there, is a small portion of drugs which generally costs $10. One of the janitors at a building I worked at used to sell people dime bags of weed, which is a true story. He eventually got fired.
Thankfully, a dime bag, according to Coolio, is approximately a tablespoon, so it wasn’t entirely necessary for me to find actual dime bags.
I did look through all my belongings to see if I had any dime bags, but I do not, which is a shame. Your mother frequently has them, but the issue is she smokes those tiny plastic bags along with the highly illegal narcotics. It’s her little quirks I love so much.
The recipe calls for 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar, so I used my fancy 18-year-old balsamic that tastes like God’s semen.
Does God have a penis? I imagine God has both a penis and a vagina and that they are spectacular. I have a penis. I would also describe it as spectacular, but at the rate I’m going, nobody will never know.
I topped the garlic-rubbed steak (you use a whopping 1/4 cup of garlic) with onions.
So far, so good. I love garlic.
You’re supposed to use an unspecified beer that is “not watery lite beer,” so I chose a hipster champion, Miller High Life.
Miller High Life proclaims itself as “The Champagne of Beer,” which is generally makes no sense. It’s like saying, “This is the whiskey of cough syrup.”
It is very affordable, however. I generally avoid beer, not because I do not enjoy it, but because I cannot burp. Drinking beer makes my stomach very uncomfortable, and after one pint, I usually retreat somewhere private to force myself to almost-vomit just to get the carbonation out. If I do not, I fart about an hour later, for a full continuous hour. It’s an extremely sexual experience.
See those mushrooms?
You’re supposed to use exactly six of them and place them in the four corners and the sides in a pattern for no discernible reason. This is the artistic part of Coolio’s cooking.
Next, you need to decorate the top of the steak with the sliced bell peppers.
I wrote “Dannis” in green bell peppers and I am very proud of myself. It is difficult to write your name in bell peppers, even though it’s a very cute thing to do. I bet you guys thought I was going to make a pepper penis.
Joke’s on you! I managed to get a penis on it anyway by drawing one on the foil.
I also included a smiley face, along with the words poo, ass, and fart.
After 45 minutes at 400°F, you’re supposed to check on the steak.
It was not tender at all. In fact, it was downright rubbery. I threw one at your mother’s head and it bounced violently off her head and back into the pan. I put the pan back into the oven for another 15 minutes, since that’s the most he suggests you cook it for, which is an hour.
Here is the finished steak.
For the record, it smells terrific, and the cooking juices are absolutely delicious, thanks to the monster amounts of garlic and onion. The balsamic vinegar and beer cook into a pleasantly sweet broth mixed with the juices from the beef, and the seasoned salt adds an extra dimension of savoriness. Not too shabby, Coolio!
But not so fast; what about the beef?
Instead of being fork-tender, the meat required a hacksaw to slice. It ends up being bone dry and quite difficult to chew. Considering this is more or less supposed to be pot roast, I think his meat choice should have been chuck or something, cooked at a lower temperature for a longer time. But since you’re supposed to pick the steak yourself, well. Proceed with Coolio caution.
Fuck it — onto the Hot Fruit Sandwich!
The main ingredients are simple; all you need is strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and chopped apples. For most cooking purposes, frozen berries work quite well and tend to be cheaper than the fresh variety. One of the unusual ingredients is the olive oil — most desserts call for butter when cooking down things like fruit, but Coolio knows what he’s doing.
Coolio knows everything.
Coolio knows that I once threw away my underwear in a police station bathroom because I had sharted badly in them. This really happened.
For additional sweetener, Coolio calls for something called “peach syrup.”
After some consideration, I came to the conclusion that he did not want peach-flavored syrup, but rather heavy corn syrup that comes out of a can of peaches. I did not know where to find peach-flavored syrup anyhow and this seems much more likely.
However, as you notice in this picture, in typical Dannis Ree fashion, I was not paying attention to the cans I was using, and ended up opening a can of cannellini beans by accident. That juice almost went into the dessert!!! OMG!!!
Thankfully, I recovered from my mistake and was able to get exactly 1/2 cup of peach syrup from the peach can.
I shoved the cannellini beans up my ass and shot them into your mother’s mouth like a gatling gun.
All you need to do is simmer the fruit until it is soft, 5-10 minutes.
Coolio is like Martha Stewart. As you are already know, Martha Stewart is one of my favorite felons, and Coolio is up there too. I bet seeing them speak to each other is like watching angels sing.
In another unusual twist, you’re supposed to toast some white bread in even more olive oil.
Cheap white bread soaks up a lot of olive oil, I found out. In fact, it absorbs a whole two tablespoons. Oh boy.
The last step, before you assemble it, is to smash the bread as thinly as possible.
I mustered up a whole three pounds of force to squash these bad boys until they were flat. Since I am as strong as a feeble grandmother I did not do a very good job.
Coolio’s recipe does not state whether or not it is supposed to be an open-faced sandwich or if it is supposed to be a traditional sandwich.
I opted for the traditional sandwich style of serving, because it is, after all, called a Hot Fruit Sandwich. After singing another one of Coolio’s hits, 1,2,3,4 (Sumpin’ New), I dove right in with an enormous bite. I was very puzzled. This tastes exactly like you would imagine. It is a Hot Fruit Sandwich that is dosed with a shitload of olive oil.
Is it bad? Not at all! Is it good? I still cannot tell. It simply tastes like a jelly sandwich with some mushy lumps of sweetened fruit on the inside, along with a massive attack of olive oil flavor. I think if you diced the apples into very small bits and added peanut butter to the bread, this would actually make for a fantastic peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But it does not feel like a dessert, as it is intended. It is simply a Hot Fruit Sandwich.
If Coolio came to my house and decided to cook for me, I would be very happy no matter what. Considering this is a man who instructs you to beat eggs “like Michael Richards at a Katt Williams show,” (think about that one for a minute), I am not too concerned about his culinary abilities. After all, he won a Grammy, showed up on Celebrity Big Brother, and Celebrity Wife Swap.
As I reflect upon what I’ve learned through Cookin’ With Coolio today, I gaze into a lyric from Gangsta’s Paradise.
We keep spending most our lives living in the gangsta’s paradise.
I’m assuming this means I’m an OG in the kitchen. That’s what it means, right? Please say that’s what it means. I want to be an OG. I want to be a cool guy.
Please?
[Oh, before I forget, you can buy Coolio’s book, Cookin’ With Coolio: 5 Star Meals at a 1 Star Price from Amazon or the discount bin at the bookstore.]
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