- My grandfather always
used to say things like "If I was an apple, I'd
be eaten every day." - What do you think he meant by that? - That he had a secret family
he didn't tell us about. (funky music) - We've all found ourselves
hungry for something delicious, but low on cash. So today I'm gonna help a mythical beast make something delicious on the cheap. - Today's struggle request
comes from Philip in New Jersey. - He's not requesting a struggle. No, he's requesting like a struggle meal. Like he wants help- - From Philip in New Jersey. - Yeah, Philip, New Jersey, he's a person, but you gotta say, the nouns matter. - Today is Philip from New Jersey. - What's up guys, I'm Philip and I'm from Atsion, New Jersey. And I just found $2 and
80 cents worth of change under my Ric Flair Funko Pop doll here. Whoo! And I was actually
wondering, what can I make, Mythical Chef Josh? - Philip, two dollars and 80 cents, that is no problem at all. But you got it a little bit wrong. WHOO! - Wah! - WHOO! - Kaflew! - WHOO! - It's time for a segment
we're calling Nickel and Dine. I mean 2.80, Josh, that's like,
that's not a lot of money. What, you know, hit me, dude.
- You're so stupid and ignorant. So what we're gonna do, we're
making Slim Jim risotto. So I have this bag of rice for 89 cents. I have this can of chicken broth, normally 59 cents, on sale for 50 cents. I have these four snack size Slim Jims, four for a dollar from
the local gas station. I have these free Parmesan cheese packets. I accumulate them when I order from Big Mama's and Big
Papa's, that's zero money. I steal some butters from the NoHo diner. - No, you reallocate. You don't steal. - And then I have a shallot for 36 cents is gonna offer a huge flavor punch. Lucas you ready to- - Snap into a risotto? You bet I am! - Oh yeah. Lucas, I need you to take all
these Parmesan cheese packets, this must be what, about
12, 13 Parmesan cheese, you ever seen that much
Parmesan cheese packets in your life? So what you do, is
whenever you order pizza, you ask them for a couple
extra Parmesan cheese packets, a couple extra crushed red
pepper, you have a drawer, where you're gonna open
it and you're gonna put all your Parmesan cheese
in, that's called aging. Don't eat the Parmesan, give me some. - It's not good Parm. - No, not pure. - Let's not use this. You got a more expensive Parm around? - No, then we're screwing over Philip. - 'Sup, Philip? - [Josh] I'm gonna cut
open these Slim Jims, I'm just gonna take it- - Well you didn't tell me,
where am I putting these? - Put 'em in a bowl, one
of the many bowls you have. But do one bowl of
Parmesan, then I'm gonna put minced Slim Jims in the other. So what risotto is, it's rice, it's typically short grain,
we're using long grain, 'cause that's what you find for cheaper. That's rice that has been
cooked and constantly stirred in an incremental amount of broth. But you need aromatics to
really drive in flavor, so typically, some people might use a little bit of prosciutto, sometimes even some guanciale, to kind of sweat in the pan. But that's too expensive, so what we're doing, is we're taking a heavily spiced meat
in the American canon, this is the American version of 'nduja, or porchetta di testa. This is like a beautiful American salumi, the Slim Jim, it's got
so many aromatics in it, when it's fancy I like to
call it Slimothy Jimothy, by its full name. - Did you say salumi? Do you mean salami? - No, salumi is the greater overarching... So you might think that shallots are something that's expensive, but there's more flavor
concentrated into a shallot than something like an onion, so this is only 36 cents, so you're gonna get a
ton of flavor with it. So I'm gonna mince half of that, save the other half for garnish. - So I think last time I was here, I said something about the
shallots being the onion that if you know what's going
on you get the shallots. - Yeah, yeah. - And I still stand by that. - The inflection in your voice sounded like you had more to say. - Don't. - Oh, you don't, you're
done, that was the end, "Shallots are good" was
the, you were worried that someone forgot that you
thought the shallots were good. - There were a lot of comments about my opinions on shallots. - Yeah, yeah, there were a
lot of comments about you. - There were a lot of comments about me. - Try and chop this as finely as possible, I almost want it to really
kinda dissolve in there, I don't want any Slim
Jim chunks, sorry, Lucas, there's gonna be a little bit
of Slim Jim skin in there, that Slimothy Jimothy skinothy
if we're really talking... - You love the Slimothy Jimothy thing. Did you like wake up last night like "Ah, Slimothy Jimothy!" - Yeah. - I also thought up a joke last night. - Oh, hit me, what's it? - So when I was a kid, a Slim Jim was not made of meat, it was a thin piece of metal with a little hook on the end that you'd use the jack cars open. Done with the butter. - What was the joke? - It's funny that they
named the meat stick after something that you
commit felonies with. - Oh, okay. Yeah, I
guess felonies are funny. What do you think about them? - They're not, that wasn't the joke. But what do we do now? I
got all the butter out. You okay? - I'm cool, you okay? - I thought up another joke. - Okay, yeah, I'd like to
hear, I'd love to hear it. - Was about bats, but I couldn't really remember the punchline. - Is that an appropriate
joke for this time? - Bats? Why aren't bats appropriate? - Well, let's hear the joke first and I can tell you. - Why do bats sleep upside down? - I don't know. - They like it. - That's an appropriate
bat joke for this time. - Wanna hear an inappropriate bat joke? - I'm just gonna cut little notches in, a little technique called a brunoise. Do you have any dinosaur facts? - Yeah. - Unfortunately, yeah. I
got a couple dinosaur facts. - Honestly, you didn't really
seem so hot on them last time. - No, it's not that I wasn't... - It's just that you
think that I couldn't see when I was off camera and you looked straight into
the camera and you said, "I don't even know why he's
talking about dinosaurs." - Yeah, what's the most
interesting dinosaur fact you know, buddy? - [Lucas] A triceratops has three tops. - That's right, I don't care. - You really want a dinosaur fact? - Yeah. - They are big. Like they are BIG. Let's not waste airtime here, keep going. - Okay, yeah, hey, so I
got the shallot minced, that's gonna be a nice little aromatic to add to the start of the risotto. You'll see it later. - What's an aromatic mean? - So an aromatic is
something you would add to the base of a dish
that's really gonna give it a nice perfumey aroma throughout it, so that can be onions,
celery, garlic, shallots. - Squirrel. - Did you know? Squirrels and dinosaurs
have a common ancestor. - It's kinda not really your place to do the dinosaur facts. The Ice Age squirrel? - Yeah. - I don't care for that squirrel. My favorite part of that- - So I'm gonna take this
other part of the shallot, and I'm just gonna slice it very thin, so there are just gonna
go all on top for garnish. I wanna fry 'em in some brown butter, 'cause we got all this
free butter right here. And so I think that we
can really put that to use when you get that butter nice and smoky, typically you might fry shallots in a vegetable oil or something, and it's gonna get nice and
browned and caramelized. But these I'm just gonna
keep really fresh and pure in butter, and so hey, Lucas, you ready to start this risotto? - And the teeth were huge. - The biggest teeth. We're gonna start our risotto, so we have equal parts stock and water, most people would do
this with straight stock, also common misconception
that you're supposed to put cream in a risotto,
it's actually the starch that's gonna create the
creaminess of the rice dish. So we have our stock and
water mixture heating there. We're gonna get a lot of
flavor from the Slim Jims, it's kinda gonna create its own stock. So I'm just gonna get, oh,
is Lucas still down there? Yeah, he's not, he's
coming over, he's curious, he's a curious boy. So we have this nice wide saute pan. So hey, do you wanna wash this rice? - Nope. - Ah, I'm gonna just trust
that you're gonna wash this. - You gotta stop asking me, give me demands, I need demands. - Lucas, wash the rice! - Yes, Daddy. - Wow. I had the shallots in a little bowl, I just added them to the hot butter, we're gonna get those sweating in there, we don't want them to brown, and now I'm also gonna take
all the Slim Jim grind, nice, powdered Slim Jim in there. Slim Jims, I mean, what have they got? They got all this
pepper, they got paprika, they got garlic, they
got a lot of beef fat. - This is not washing my hands at all. - No, your hands wash the rice, the rice does not wash your hands. So we have the shallots, you see they've soaked up all that fat, you can actually see the
shallots and the butter changing color from all that Slim Jim. And so now you're actually
going to add the rice to the mixture of fat and aromatics. Put that in there, please. All right, so now we
have the rice in there, and we're gonna give it
a couple little flips, and you can actually see
the rice is changing color, you may add Saffron if you had
more than 2.80 to work with, and you were like "I'm a rich person!" - So what we're doing now
is we're smelling the rice, and oh, you guys can't smell this, but that smells like butts. It really is gonna lose
that butt aroma and gain- - It smells really nice,
there's a lot of really lovely, spicy in that Slim Jim that
you smell in the shallots, you're smelling the butter, you're smelling the nice
toasty grain flavor. - I can't stop thinking about mushrooms. You know some people are
really scared of eating them. Whoa! Everybody rewind, we just pushed up our
glasses at the same time. (slowed down "Whoa!") - Just ladle in about a
quarter of this stock, and while you're ladling it, you're gonna take your spoon, and you're gonna swirl around. - [Lucas] This is like
we're getting married and we're eating the cake.
- There it is, you wanna see that bubble, but you want the heat at about medium, 'cause you don't want... - Really nice, dude. - Thanks, man, I got high blood pressure. So you don't want your stock
to ever come to a boil, 'cause then you're losing
moisture on that liquid, so we're just gonna give it another- - That's my job. - Just act like you ladled it, just a little bit. Yeah, there it is. You might be wondering, "Whoa, we got all this Parmesan cheese, what are we gonna do with it?" - Wait, wait, lemme do that. Whoa, we got all this Parmesan cheese, what are we gonna do with it? - Wow, Lucas, what a great
question about cookery. So what's gonna happen is when the rice is almost fully cooked, but there's still a substantial
amount of liquid left, we're gonna add the
Parmesan cheese to that and it's gonna kind of
thicken up the sauce, and then we're gonna use a
little bit to dunk on top. Ask what we're gonna
do with the rice water. - What do we do with the rice water? - [Josh] Chug it. - I thought about doing that as a gag, I'm not gonna do it. I heard somebody died doing that. - Chugging rice water? - No, drowning. I have another joke. - Okay, go ahead. - I thought this up when I was in college. And I found it really really really funny. - I think I'll find it as funny as you do. - Well, how do you drown a giraffe? - I don't know. - You just tilt its neck back and pour a cup of water down its throat. - Oh, I get it, okay. - I was really funny in college, and I kinda lost it a little bit. - Well I mean now you
have a space to practice. - What is that? - Right here, this is like a kind of... - I do this twice a year, and it's not... - Yeah, but I'm glad you
brought all your best material. - My grandfather used to
always say things like "If I was an apple, I'd
be eaten every day." - What do you think he meant by that? - That he had a secret family
he didn't tell us about. - You think he was trying to, 'cause I know that's true, we
talked about that recently. And you're fine with that being? - Last time I was on this show, I actually called out my parents in a way I didn't have
the guts to in 26 years. Vicky and Kevin, what the hell? - What the hell? - What the hell, Mom? - So this show is kinda
like therapy for us. - If apples were peaches, everybody would get a
tree in their backyard. - If candies and nuts
were trees and butts, then we'd all have a Merry Christmas. - See, I love jokes like that. - Those are my favorite kinds of jokes. - If I was a thing of risotto, I wouldn't have Slim Jim in me 'cause that looks disgusting. - If broth was cheese, then
who knows which way's up? - If broth was cheese, then
all pasta would be soggy. - Yeah. See a good thing about risotto is really it's a dish of love. - I've always had a problem with that. With all the Food
Network people being like "And the last ingredient
is attention and love." I don't get it, I don't like it, it doesn't mean anything to me, I don't have surplus love
to put into my risotto. - For me love in cooking is
kind of the unexplainable, the intangible, the step that
someone tells you to take, like "Hey, make sure you
use the back of your hand to knead out this dough
instead of the palm." It's you trusting that that technique, that can't be explained
in any scientific way, really, trusting that
that technique works. - No, it can be explained scientifically. - If you really got
down to nuts and bolts, everything is molecules... - That's what I'm saying, don't discount- - When people are like "Do you know that technically
we're never touching because if you put your hand together..." So the Parmesan cheese, it's
gonna act as a thickener, especially because the
stuff from the packet, it's not like pure Parmesan, it actually is cut with cellulose. - It doesn't look like real cheese. - No, and so we're just
gonna add that in there, we're gonna save some for garnish. Hey, Lucas, what's that cheese gonna do? - Well the whole thing
about the cheese, Josh, is it's really gonna
thicken everything up, and it's gonna give that particular snap that you always kinda talk
about, and you really want, but what I like to
really see the cheese do, it sort of adds a kind of character and intelligence to the risotto, whereas before you weren't
elevating anything, now you're really elevating
as much as you possibly can, and if I've learned anything
from Chef Gordon Ramsey, it's that you gotta
elevate, elevate, elevate, elevate, elevate, okay, we're done. - So we're just gonna make a little quick garnish to top this, we've got some of these shallots left, we sliced 'em, we're waiting
for this butter to brown, until then, we're just
gonna pour this risotto into a bowl, that's nice to see some nice liquid pooling around the edges, that is exactly what we want. So now this butter's foaming a little bit, so we're just gonna take the shallots, we're just gonna drop it in the butter, and then we're gonna let the
butter get to super high heat. - You don't wanna caramelize it. - You don't wanna caramelize, so caramelization is a process that happens over a long period of time, much like the way that raptors...
- I left my home. - So wow, Lucas, check this out, so yeah, as you see the butter's starting to brown a little bit, it's getting nice and frothy, what a lovely topping this
is gonna be for our risotto. - Those are almost caramelized, Josh. - They're not caramelized,
they're browned, they're nice and toasty,
and so what I'm gonna do, is just get some of
those browned shallots, and kinda... - Burnt butter me up, dog. - Yeah, sprinkle sprinkle Parmesan cheese, we got a little extra for snacking later, you know how much I love it, but there's only one thing left to do. - Rick Flair me. - We gotta eat it. - Okurrr. (upbeat music) - Lucas, this looks gorgeous, I think you did a great job helping me, I think I did a great job cooking it, Philip, I think you did a great job finding two dollars and 80 cents under your Rick Flair Funko Pop doll. - Really, you did the best job, Philip. Picking up that Rick Flair
Funko doll was really, it was great. - I think you have other talents too. Lucas, let's dig into this. - Wow, this is a really nice towel, Josh. - [Josh] This is the Mythical Kitchen bib. - Oh, I love it. - All right, let's dig in. - Okay, I'm gonna get a little
bit of that caramelized... - [Josh] I'm gonna get a little bit of that caramelized shallot on top. - You take care of the
caramelized shallot, I'll take care of the risotto. - A thing they don't tell
you on cooking shows, food sits for an hour before you eat it, like Chopped, they're
eating all that stuff cold, that's why the ice cream is always melted, they're like "Well the
ice cream's all melted," yeah, they let it sit there for an hour. - This is very good. - This is very good. - The mouth feel fantastic. - Tell me more about the mouth feel. - My mouth feel good. - My mouth feel good, too. What's funny, we used
half stock, half water, we even used a little bit more water, so typically you wouldn't get
that much flavor out of it, but the Slim Jim that we ground up, actually creates almost a stock in itself, because it's such a highly spiced meat that it really works when
worked into this risotto. - You know, I was gonna
say that too, Josh, but what I'm really focusing on is the amount of butter present. 'Cause I love the butter. The one thing about this that
I really wish you hadn't done is sprinkle about the
worst Parmesan cheese that we could find on top of it. Underneath that Parmesan cheese is layer upon layer of goodness, Josh. - Lucas, wow, this
risotto's really delicious, it's only a dollar 40 per serving, these are big old dinner servings, obviously it's worth it, but, do you see yourself
actually incorporating this into your daily life? - No, I don't, honestly, I mean it's kind of a broken wet rice. Don't know really what you want me to say. - I thought you were like "Yeah, Josh, thank you for
equipping me with the tools to make a nice, easy weeknight dinner for not a lot of money," but no, you just- - Oh, no, in that respect,
I do appreciate it, 'cause me, I'm a penny pincher, I like to spend my money on certain things that aren't exactly edible, which could really be anything but food, I'm not insinuating a
specific thing at all. I would eat this again this week, I wouldn't eat this again next week, but the following week I would, sort of an every other
week scenario for me. What kinda is confusing to me is, I don't know what a Slim Jim tastes like. - I forgot, you've never had a Slim Jim, well I just happen to have one right here, put it in your mouth. - You put it in my mouth. - All right. Airplane's coming in the hangar, choo-choo, the sound airplanes make! - Nope. - Not for you, huh? - I like that a lot less than I like that. But I'm more interested
in exactly how much the ingredients came out to. - Literally all of the ingredients for two large dinner portions,
two dollars and 75 cents. - But hold on, Josh, he had 2.80, so what are we gonna do with
this fantastic little nickel? - Use it in a poorly crafted story about, if someone had a nickel for every time a very specific situation
happened to them. - If I had a nickel for every time somebody tried to get me to tell a joke off the cuff like that, I'd put this nickel in my pocket. - Thank you so much to Philip
for submitting that video, and than you for stopping
by the Mythical Kitchen, we've got new recipes for you every week, we got new episodes of our podcast, "A Hot Dog is a Sandwich," out every Wednesday wherever
you get your podcasts, hit us up on Instagram @MythicalKitchen with pictures of your mythical dishes under #DreamsBecomeFood, we'll see you next time. - Eat. - Whoo! You can cook up your own feast while wearing the Mythical Kitchen apron, available now at Mythical.com.
What a chaotic episode!
Just glad it ended so well.