Author: Benjamin Woodley Judd

Candace Cameron Bure-ito Bowl

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I am thankful that Candace decided to be the bigger person and get in touch to end our eleven year feud. While we have many differing viewpoints now (and neither side will take blame for the ruining the Kids Choice Award venue), our Friday dates were our personal highlight of the 90s (before we got in with the BH Crew).

It started out pretty awkward, with us politely chatting about what we have been up to in the last decade; her recent stint on Dancing with the Stars, our return to the A-list simply through documenting our celebrity catch-ups. Thankfully by the end, we were friends again and are (spoiler alert) looking forward to working together on the Full House reboot.

In the effort of bringing us back together via food (which thankfully was a success), we thought something warm, spicy and casual (capturing the essence of our old catch-ups), was best. This obviously meant three big old serves of our famous Candace Cameron Bure-ito Bowl.

 

Candace Cameron Bure-ito Bowl_1

 

The original recipe we based this on was light on the spice and as our motto is “make food so hot it burns its way out and liquefies your organs” we upped the spice levels, so adjust according to your own tastes.

Then enjoy, obviously.

 

Candace Cameron Bure-ito Bowl_2

 

Candace Cameron Bure-ito Bowl
Serves: 4.

Ingredients
500g chicken mince
3 tbsp of olive oil
1 small onion, diced
1 cup of uncooked long grain rice
1 can diced tomatoes
1 can of black beans, drained and rinsed
½ green capsicum, diced
1 tsp of cumin
½ tsp of chilli powder
¼ tsp smoked paprika
¼ tsp ground coriander seeds
¼ tsp cayenne pepper
pinch ground cinnamon
½ tsp of garlic powder
2 ½ cups salt-reduced chicken stock
2 cups grated cheddar cheese
salt and pepper
freshly diced tomatoes
diced spring onions
sour cream
guacamole

Method
Sauté onions in 2 tablespoon of olive oil until they start to soften.

Add chicken to pan and cook over medium high heat until chicken has started to brown. Season with salt and pepper.

Move chicken to one side of pan, in the other side of the pan add an additional tablespoon of olive oil and sauté uncooked rice for about 2 minutes or just until some grains start to turn golden brown.

Stir in black beans, canned tomatoes, chicken stock, spices and capsicum and bring to a simmer.

Cover, reduce heat to low and cook about 20 minutes or until rice is tender.

Season with additional salt and pepper as needed.

Sprinkle with cheese, recover and let set for 2-3 minutes off heat to melt cheese. Serve with fresh tomatoes, green onions, sour cream and guacamole.

Whatever happened to predictability?

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Every Friday night during the 90s, our friend-date / Full House episode parties with Candace Cameron-Bure were so legendary that they were considering an edit to the start of the theme song.

We first met Candace Cameron-Bure while Annelie was working as a stand-in / body-double to the Olsen Twins on Full House and I was down the road acting as Mara Wilson’s PA (still the greatest job I have ever had) on the set of Mrs. Doubtfire.

Sadly we have been in a feud after an incident involving Melissa Joan Hart and Anna Chlumsky at the Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards in 1994 where, obviously, the police were called, buildings destroyed, charges pressed and our friendship destroyed.

After twenty-one years, Cameron-Bure reached out hoping to make amends and we felt it was time to, as Adele Dazeem said, let it go.

I hope my love of show tunes and peen doesn’t offend her like it does Kirk? This could be interesting.

Picture source: Fanpop.com

Ice(d) T

Drink

Yes, he isn’t the washing machine kid but damn Ice T is good company. Better yet, he definitely thinks we should become members of the HFPA for our contribution to the arts, Hollywood and the planet.

I think that is my favourite part about him.

We have been friends for some time, following a chance encounter on the Law & Order set where I was fired for sneezing when playing Corpse #2 (B.D. Wong over peppered my lunch after catching wind I would appear in Jurassic Park 2) and Annelie and Ice have been friends since their days hanging with 2Pac.

It was so nice catching-up, hearing about what our dear friend Coco is up to (she helped form and helped choreograph for our dance troupe, Jazz in your Face) and laughing about the time Meg Ryan caught us egging her house across the canyon…all over a refreshing glass of Iced T.

 

Ice(d) T 1

 

The rich flavour of the rooibos tea cuts through the tart lemon and raspberry, add to that the mint and sugar and you have the makings of a perfect summer drink for when you aren’t rapping or solving crimes.

Or learning to play the washing machine. Have I mentioned this kid is the greatest?

 

Ice(d) T 2

 

Ice(d) T
Serves: 4.

Ingredients
3 bags of rooibos tea
¼ cup raw caster sugar
½ cup raspberries
½ lemon
a small handful of mint leaves
ice, ice and ice

Method
Steep tea bags in a pitcher of freshly boiled water for 2-3 minutes, or to your liking. Remove tea bags, stir in sugar and leave to come to room temperature.

Once cooled, slice lemon into discs and add to tea with the raspberries and mint leaves.

Give a good stir, add ice and serve. With or without liquor, obviously.

Law & Order: Sexy Catch-Ups Unit

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

As you’re aware, we decided to prioritise this year’s dates based on levels of fame and importance…as we decided that the only way to have the Hollywood Foreign Press Association waive the So-Cal residence rule for membership, was to be in with the MEGA famous.

Who would have thought future co-best friend-om with Tina/Amy wasn’t enough?

Anyway, during the course of our scientific rankings, I incorrectly identified the kid that did this as Ice-T and I knew that if we didn’t catch/butter-up our (faux) number two for support for HFPA status, Annelie would get aggressive.

Justifiably aggressive.

What says, sorry your house overlooks Meg Ryan’s/why aren’t you as talented on a washing machine/when do we vote for the Golden Globes?

Picture source: RollingStone.com.

Lil’ San Choy Bow Wow

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Our decision to rank the importance of this year’s celebrity catch-ups was (another) stroke of genius! Bow Wow (he will never be Shad to us, his closest friends), as always, was charming, funny and a straight up pleasure to be around.

Fresh from hanging with my (unwitting) ex JVDB and Annelie’s frenemey, Academy-Award nominee (and spoiler alert, soon to be winner) Patricia Arquette on the set of CSI: Something-not-starring-Caruso, Lil’ was able to fill us in on all the haps of the awards season and tinseltown.

Sadly, he couldn’t confirm whether JVDB talks about me. I assume he does though?

We also got to work on project Bring down Lipdicki 2015 over a celebratory lettuce-cup of Lil’ San Choy Bow-Wow.

 

Lil San Choy Bow Wow 1

 

 The heat and spice were perfect for the horrific Queensland summer we are experiencing and were able to open our minds to a new, exciting avenue for revenge, faux-kindness.

On that note we’ll probably see Lipnicki soon. In the meantime, enjoy!

 

Lil San Choy Bow Wow 2

 

Lil’ San Choy Bow-Wow
Serves: 4, hunger dependant.

Ingredients
1 iceberg lettuce
1 medium carrot, peeled
4 tbsp vegetable oil
½ red onion, sliced
2 stalks celery, finely diced
Thumb(ish) sized piece of ginger, finely sliced
3 cloves garlic, finely sliced
10 fresh shiitake mushrooms, finely sliced
1 x 230g tin water chestnuts, chopped
500g pork mince
1 tbsp palm sugar (raw would do in a pinch)
2 tbsp soy
3 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tsp sesame oil
3 tbsp Shao Hsing rice wine (dry sherry works in a pinch)
6 spring onions, finely sliced on the angle
2 large red chillies, cut on the angle
1 bunch coriander, leaves picked
½ cup crushed peanuts
sriracha hot sauce or hoisin, to serve

Method
Trim the lettuce to create cups and soak the lettuce cups in cold water in the fridge to ensure the leaves are crisp. Grate the carrot and set aside.

Heat wok or pan over a high heat. Add the oil, onion, celery, ginger and garlic and cook for 20 seconds, then add the carrot and mushrooms, cooking for another 10 seconds.

Add the pork mince and fry, breaking it up with a wooden spoon, for approximately 2-3 minutes.

Add the sugar, soy, oyster sauce, sesame oil and rice wine and cook for another 30 seconds, before adding half the spring onions, half the chilli and half the coriander and give it all a good stir. Remove from heat.

Divide the pork mince mixture between the lettuce cups and garnish with the remaining spring onion, chilli, coriander and peanuts.

Devour.

Guess who’s back?

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

We’re baaa-aaaack! We hope you had a lovely holiday period and were able to enjoy some down time…because we didn’t.

With the resounding success of the documentation of our catch-ups (aka the blog…that you are currently reading), we spent the break fielding calls from our celebrity friends (and hangers-on from the D-List) and hosting date after date.

Yes, we love it and enjoy seeing our friends but sometimes you just want to eat two kilos of cookie dough and take a nap in front of the fridge in your underwear, you know?

Anyway with such a volume of friends wanting to catch-up, we were forced to initiate a ranking system to deem who was more important to see. As such, obviously, Lil’ Bow Wow was the top of our list.

We’ve known Lil’ Bow Wow since he was even lil’er. You see, I was cast as Jonathan Lipnicki’s stunt double in Jerry Maguire for the airport scene; one thing led to another and I was escorted off the set for a brawl that Lipnicki started.

After recovering from the altercation, Annelie (she was Tom’s stunt double) and I set about enacting our revenge on Jonathan and stalked the set of Like Mike where we met and befriended Lil’ over our mutual hatred for Lipdicki and a burning desire to bring him down.

Nothing bonds three people like a revenge plot and nothing bonds three people for life like a failed revenge plot.

What says we will get him eventually, Lil’?

Picture source: Unknown.

Merry Holidays etc.

Uncategorized

Once again the Fame Hungry team would like to say, Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays / etc.

We will be taking a three week(ish) break while we sail the French Riviera with some very A-List friends that we can not name (you know that isn’t our style).

While you may not have the connections and celebrity that we do, we would like to thank you for your support, readership and aspirations to be more like us.

In the mundane downtime, you can always make all of our recipes like grumpy-version Amy Adams in Julie and Julia…or you can create a vision board to achieve our lives.

From Probst’s bed to yours, Merry Christmas!

See you next year,
Annelie and Ben

J’Tiamisu

12 Days of Survivor Christmas, Dessert

I’ve said it before (well, at the very least alluded to it), sometimes we are terrible people and that is how we first connected with Cagayan contestant, J’Tia Taylor.

Don’t get me wrong, while her moves with the rice were pretty cruel/amazing, J’Tia is a lovely friend…it is just that we befriended her to try to live out Annelie’s dream of going to space.

You see, while we could have used our friendship with Panama contestant Dan Barry to get on the space program, I incorrectly read her profession to be Rocket Scientist when she was on the Brains tribe (she is a Nuclear Engineer, a job I still wouldn’t understand).

You see, I convinced Annelie that J’Tia could build us a rocket and we could cut out the middleman that is NASA. After a year of awkward hints, blatant threats and blackmail, J’Tia kindly told us she couldn’t build us a spaceship, but offered her friendship as a consolation prize.

To celebrate our first Christmas as friends, we decided to catch up for a dessert of J’Tiamisu as a symbol of her sweet nature…and the fact that we all may need a boozy dish to get along/be tolerable humans.

 

J'Tiamisu 1

 

Inspired by Nigella Lawson’s Tiramisu layer cake, the dish is made of a chocolate cake base, with Tia Maria providing the coffee and the kick. We decided to serve them in individual martini glasses so that we wouldn’t have to worry about portion control (lest J’Tia thought we were going to vote her out) and as we love anything kitsch, and they looked kitsch.

Enjoy!

 

J'Tiamisu 2

 

J’Tiamisu
Serves: 8.

Ingredients
700-1000g chocolate loaf cakes (shop-bought variety is fine)
400ml (ish) Tia Maria
1 tsp cocoa and 1 tsp espresso powder combined, for dusting

Cream Filling
2 large organic eggs
75g caster sugar
500g mascarpone
250ml double cream
125ml Tia Maria

Method
Wash and dry 8 martini glasses and leave aside until assembly.

Slice the chocolate cakes thinly, and pour the Tia Maria into a shallow dish (keep the bottle handy as you may need more), ready for soaking the cake.

Whisk the eggs and sugar, mascarpone and double cream in an electric mixer (I am lazy, you can just use a whisk). Slowly add, the 125ml Tia Maria and continue whisking until light, fluffy and combined.

To assemble, dunk the slices of cake in Tia Maria and press into the base of each martini glass (it will probably be a slice per glass at the start), ensuring that the layer is firm but not too thick. Spoon a layer of cream filling over the cake (roughly 5mm thick). Continue layering, alternating between cake and cream until you have almost filled the glass.

Finish with a generous layer of the cream mixture and dust with cocoa/espresso powder mix.

I always want to add cinnamon, but I think I have an unhealthy obsession with adding cinnamon. Maybe don’t add cinnamon?

Eat straight out of the glass and pretend you’re at a festive swingers party in the eighties.

Festive Cirie Fields Mushrooms

12 Days of Survivor Christmas, Side

It is a fact universally known that Cirie Fields is the greatest player to never win Survivor; in addition, she is also our personal saviour.

You see, before becoming a universal treasure on Exile Island, Micronesia and Heroes vs. Villains she worked as a nurse in one of the many rehab facilities Annelie and I frequented in the mid-nineties and can be credited as being the person to get us clean (not sober, baby steps).

We have always kept in contact with Cirie (and almost relapsed following the shock final 2 on Micronesia) and see her as a member of the family, so it is only fitting that she dropped by for a Christmas dinner complete with her signature Festive Cirie Fields Mushrooms.

 

Festive Cirie Fields Mushrooms

 

While it is a very simple dish, the garlic, chilli and parsley mingle together to create a side packed with flavour that is still festively appropriate and would go perfectly with any roast. (Or you could have the leftovers with some scrambled eggs for breakfast the next day).

Enjoy!

 

Festive Cirie Fields Mushrooms 1

 

Festive Cirie Field Mushrooms
Serves 4

Ingredients
4 large mushrooms (they don’t necessarily need to be from a field)
1 red chilli, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon italian parsley, chopped
50g butter melted
salt and pepper, to season

Method
Pre-heat a griddle pan until very hot.

While heating, melt butter in a small saucepan. Remove from heat and mix in chilli, garlic parsley and salt and pepper.

When the griddle in hot reduce to medium heat, add mushrooms face down and cook for about three minutes. Flip mushrooms over and press down into pan to ensure even cooking. Fry for further three minutes. Flip again (I make sure the griddle lines form criss-crosses, but I am anal) and cook for a further three minutes or until they are how you like them.

Turn off heat and pour melted butter mixture over the top. Rest for a minute and serve.

Jonathan Penne Pasta Salad

12 Days of Survivor Christmas, Side

Survivor three-peat, Jonathan Penner, is another person we knew before his appearances on Cook Islands, Micronesia and Philippines. (They should just cast us as opposed to our many friends).

Annelie and I were working in New York (before the ugliness in LA) and were cast as the stunt doubles for Gracie on the hit show The Nanny, where Jonathan played the role of Danny…you know, the boyfriend who kicked her out in that crushing scene.

We connected on set after Jonathan got caught in the middle of our long simmering feud with Charles Shaughnessy (it started when we were on Days, don’t ask) and we ended up as his dates when he was nominated for an Academy Award.

Nothing has changed between Jonathan and us, as you would expect of a relationship built on sarcasm and snark between three of the world’s greatest minds. We discussed future twists and themes we need Probst to bring to Survivor and a treatment for his next Academy Award nomination (a documentary on the lives and times of Annelie and Ben).

To celebrate the season and Jonathan’s visit we opted for the Jonathan Penne Pasta Salad, a dish we invented following his crushing loss at the Oscars.

 

Jonathan Penne Pasta Salad 1

 

The richness of our bond was highlighted by the creamy blue cheese, complimented by the bitterness of the rocket and his failure to win (on Survivor and at the Oscars) and the sweetness of the caramelised walnuts and knowing that he is one of the fan favourites to play.

Survivor, not with us. We wish. We would enjoy, as you should the salad!

 

Jonathan Penne Pasta Salad 2

 

Jonathan Penne Pasta Salad
Serves: 8

Ingredients
Approximately 2 cups Rocket
2 pears, quartered and thinly sliced
1/2 cup walnuts
50g butter
1tbsp muscovado sugar, heaped
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
150g blue cheese, crumbled
500g penne pasta
Olive oil, salt and pepper, to taste

Method
Heat large pot of water over high heat until boiling, once boiling add penne and cook for 10-12 minutes (until al dente). Drain, rinse in cold water and leave to cool.

Meanwhile, melt butter and sugar together in small saucepan after low heat until combined. Add walnuts and cook for 5 minutes, or until coated and caramelised.

Pour the walnuts onto a flat, lined baking tray to cool. When cooled slightly, pour vinegar over them to create the dressing.

Combine cooled penne, rocket and pear and drizzle lightly with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Layer on large dish or transfer to large bowl, depending on how you’d like to serve.

Crumble blue cheese and walnuts over the salad and pour over the caramel/vinegar dressing.

Season and dress further, to taste.