Ever since I saw that old Judges Guild recipe for Rats on a Stick another OSR blogger brought to my attention (sorry, forgot who) I'd been wanting to make them for my eight year old nephew. I'm still trying to get him interested in early D&D, or keep him possibly interested (he seemed just a little young for it the last we played). He'd much rather play Zelda when he visits, but does enjoy watching the old D&D cartoons on DVD that I bought with him in mind just about every time he comes over.
I was reminded of these items again recently after my post here about rat diseases and decided I should get to it and do a trial cooking run in order to see how they come out before attempting to serve them to him.
I didn't have some of the ingredients and only had a half pound of ground beef on hand, so they were going to be slightly smallish rats... no honey, and no tails as we didn't have red food coloring for the spaghetti. I had Annie's answer to the Cheddar Goldfish crackers, "Annie's Cheese Bunnies" or something like that so I smashed those up. I had some decent southern barbecue sauce, but no honey, and only had Monterey Jack for the cheese stuffing. In terms of the amounts, I just winged it for the smaller serving size. My recommendation would be to cut the cheese not into cubes but into narrow rectangles, then skewer and mold the egg/cracker/beef mixture around these. There's definitely a trick to the moisture content - if there's too much egg it's too wet to mold properly. I think the crackers might have helped if they were ground up more than just by hand. Very hard to get the cheese coated enough with meat not to leak out with the beef deficit here too.
Pictures:
Ready to go in the pan
Ready to go in the oven
Out of the oven
On the plate
Went well with sweet potato french fries and mayo... Tasty too, but they really didn't much resemble what I think of when I hear about rats on sticks:
I think the only thing to do is to sculpt the little bastards with sausages of some kind. :-)
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6 comments:
Sounds yummy. :)
One of these days I'm going to have to make this! My kids would love it!
"Rat On A Stick" is the quintessential Tunnels & Trolls adventure!
Hmmm... since my fiancee's the cook (I'm just plain dangerous in the kitchen) I'd suggest to her that she make these for us sometime; but given that she's actually eaten real rat on a stick in some Hong Kong back alley, I'd be too afraid she'd mix up the recipes. :P
It's a pretty good recipe, and not that hard to do. I made some (vegetarian, ironically enough) last Halloween, some pics:
http://mikemonaco.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/rat-on-a-stick/
You may have seen it mentioned at Chgowiz's blog, he wrote it about it more recently.
i thought about doing this with tempeh or tofu and sculpting it more somehow, but your use of Gimme Lean is a much better idea.
Yes, gimme lean is most tasty, and seems easily sculptable for "Rat on a Stick" fun! Thanks for sharing this!
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