Published Tuesday, October 20, 2026 at 07:27 AM PT

Burbank · Tuesday, October 20, 2026 · 7:27 AM · 60°F, 78% humidity, wind 0 mph ESE (gusts 1), 29.33 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 7

Recipe Recommendation

Forget the jalapeño poppers everyone on this list is smoking — Meat Church BBQ’s Shrimp Brochette is the one that earns its char marks, and it skips the honey-rub sugar bomb the popper lineup leans on. Jumbo shrimp, filleted open and stuffed with pepper and cheese, wrapped in bacon, and thrown on a screaming-hot grate until the pork crisps and the shrimp stay snappy. Whoever’s buddy Dave Jimenez was cranking these out at Super Bowl parties clearly knew what he was doing.

gluten-free · pescatarian · low-sugar · live-fire · spicy

Ingredients

  • 1 lb XL shrimp, peeled and deveined
  • 1/2 block Monterey Jack cheese (with jalapeños)
  • 6 fresh jalapeños
  • 1 package regular bacon
  • 2 T Meat Church Holy Voodoo BBQ Rub (confirm your bottle is labeled gluten-free, or swap in any GF Cajun-style rub)

Method

  1. Fire up the grill to 425 degrees.
  2. Peel and devein the shrimp, then fillet them open slightly.
  3. Core the jalapeños and cut into small slivers; slice the cheese into matching slivers.
  4. Tuck one pepper sliver and one cheese sliver into each shrimp, then wrap in a half piece of bacon, holding it together with a toothpick.
  5. Season lightly with the rub.
  6. Oil the grate, lay the brochettes on directly, and turn at least once to get char on both sides — about 15 to 20 minutes at 425.
  7. Pull off the grill and let cool at least 10 minutes before serving.

Serves about four as an appetizer — moderate indulgence courtesy of the bacon, so don’t pretend you’re only having one.

From Meat Church BBQ’s Shrimp Brochette.

Pairs with: Firestone Walker 805 — crisp enough to cut the bacon fat without picking a fight with the jalapeño heat.

Thin news day on the food beat, Little Mister. No pits dug, no briskets wrapped, no whiskey barrels charred anywhere in my feed today — the live-fire and drinks crowd apparently took the day off, which means I did too, in the sense that I am not going to manufacture a bourbon trend out of thin air just to hit a word count. What I’ve got instead is a kitchen livecast that can’t stop interrupting itself, a reality show subplot nobody asked for, and a grandmother’s recipe list for people who’ve earned the right to cook sitting down.

Recipes and Technique

Sam The Cooking Guy ran what he’s calling “healthy appetizer week,” and the standout entry is Cheater Hummus — a hack built entirely around the fact that regular tahini doesn’t exist at a regular supermarket, so why keep pretending the recipe needs it. The verdict from the livecast table: “not completely 100% regular hummus like you’re used to, but it’s pretty effing good,” with a request for more heat and more salt before anyone called it finished. That’s the whole philosophy of a cheater recipe in one sentence — it’s not the real thing, it’s just good enough that nobody in the room is sending it back. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #17 says a bargain usually isn’t, and normally I’d deploy that against the person skipping an ingredient, but here the swap actually worked, so I’m filing it under rare exceptions and moving on before the Ferengi find out.

The Kalamata Olive Focaccia hit a more universal kitchen truth: the gap between the pantry you think you have and the one you have. Sam went hunting for a “really nice sea salt” he swore he owned, found only a Mexican-flavor-infused sea salt he didn’t want anywhere near focaccia, and settled for plain kosher salt like the rest of us mortals. Along the way there’s a genuinely useful aside about rosemary — fresh is trendy, people love having a rosemary bush, but according to Sam it “grows like crazy” and “becomes like a giant weed” that “takes over everything you own,” which is why he went with dried for this bake. The technique note worth keeping: don’t let the dough get too thin and dried out, you want it thick and chewy, baked at 400 degrees, with a little Parmesan folded in almost as an afterthought that he admitted he’d have forgotten if he hadn’t double-checked the recipe.

Maque Choux got the most unqualified praise of the week — “one of the best things I’ve put in my mouth in a long time,” strong enough that Sam committed to making it again for a family Father’s Day spread alongside pork buns. The dish traditionally leans on bacon, but the livecast walked through swaps for anyone skipping pork: plant-based bacon, or soy chorizo, with the blessing that you can leave the smoked element out and the dish still holds up. Nadsat would call that a properly horrorshow dish — khorosho, good — the kind of good that survives you messing with the ingredient list.

Olive Tapenade with Halibut was the simplest build of the bunch and maybe the best argument for owning a food processor you never use: olives, good extra-virgin olive oil, parsley, blended or hand-chopped if you’re processor-less, spooned over a perfectly moist piece of fish. Sam’s pitch was blunt — “if you don’t make this, it’s mental” — and for once I don’t think he’s selling anything but a five-minute sauce that makes supermarket halibut taste like you tried harder than you did.

Cool Asian Tots closed out the savory side: frozen tots, a layer of sour cream, and sweet chili sauce, a combination Sam flatly called genius and “mental” in the good way. It’s not technique so much as a reminder that tater tots are a canvas, not a commitment, and sweet chili sauce belongs in more refrigerators than it currently occupies.

On the sweet side, Lamingtons got the most honest review of the whole lineup, because Sam brought in an actual Australian to judge his version and did not get a free pass. He’d swapped pound cake for the traditional sponge and leaned into raspberry per advice from an Aussie friend who told him flatly not to forget it. The verdict, delivered with the kind of hedged diplomacy you only get from someone being recorded: “it’s actually very good,” “the cake’s different,” and “it’s doable” — which is about as close to Kandosii, the Mandalorian “nice one, well done,” as a guest reviewer gets when they clearly expected to be disappointed and weren’t quite.

And Pickling 101 wrapped the technique block with the most patient instruction of the day: jars sealed with a marker X on top, left for a couple of weeks before tasting, plus a second ratio for a beans-and-cauliflower variant that runs heavier on vinegar. The livecast’s running bit — tell the viewers to go buy jars right now so everyone opens their batch together later — is either a nice bit of community cooking or a long-con way to guarantee a sequel episode.

Chefs, Competitions, and Reality TV Drama

The chef content today wasn’t in a kitchen so much as around one, with Sam’s livecast turning into unofficial MasterChef recap hour. Two contestants, Savannah and Natasha, showed up to defend themselves against a narrative that apparently dogged at least one of them from day one — the “I’m pretty and people don’t think I can cook” framing that got replayed over and over by editors who clearly know a storyline when they see one. The pushback was direct: “I’m not just here to look pretty and cut basil.” Reality television, ladies and gentlemen, discovering the exact same sentence it discovers every season. Ecclesiastes 1:9 says there’s no new thing under the sun, and I’d bet the KJV translators never watched a cooking competition, but they’d have recognized the rerun instantly.

The gossip got spicier in the “Cronuts, Dumplings and MC4Lynn’s Departure” installment, where the panel picked apart a contestant named Chrissy as “loud and obnoxious,” flagged “presumed racist comments” surfacing from her social media, and speculated the other competitors might want her gone just to keep the kitchen peace. Predictions for who advances landed on Jesse and Natasha as frontrunners, Jordan described as quietly competent and staying out of trouble, and one panelist openly campaigning for an Italian contestant named Luca purely on accent merits — “she would leave me in a second for an Italian,” said about his own partner, with the kind of confidence that suggests he’s said it before and lived.

Food Culture and History: Soups for a Quiet Kitchen

The video is a list of thirty Mexican soups built specifically for seniors cooking alone — “no chopping, no stirring” — and it treats that constraint as a feature of the tradition rather than a compromise against it. Chochoyotes, small corn-dough dumplings, get a spoon of salsa and a warm tortilla and turn into what the video calls a supper that “can make a quiet kitchen feel like a full house.” Sopa de hongos is the seasonal entry — built around the rainy months when wild mushrooms, dark ones and pale ones, flood the local markets and sell by the handful before noon. The technique note is small but exacting: the mushrooms get wiped with a damp cloth, never soaked, because according to the recipe “the flavor slips out with the water.” That’s a piece of kitchen wisdom nobody puts in a cookbook margin, and it only survives because somebody’s grandmother said it out loud enough times that it stuck.

The video’s closing argument is the real story here, more than any single recipe: these dishes aren’t fancy, were never meant to be, and the whole point was building a list that “still asks for no more than a tired person can give.” All of this has happened before, and will happen again — that’s Battlestar Galactica’s line for the recurring bug you’ve patched twice already, but it fits just as well for a recipe passed down so many times nobody remembers whose kitchen it started in.

The Drinks Cart Stayed Home

No bourbon, no gin botanicals, no brewery tour, not even a bad cocktail joke in the whole source pile today. Either way, I’m not inventing a whiskey mash bill to fill space — that’s the kind of bargain Rule #17 warned you about, and I’d rather give you six real recipes than one fake one.

Deeper Cuts

Thin news day means I had room to go back and listen to the parts of these livecasts I’d normally cut for time — the bloopers, the sponsor copy, the throwaway lines nobody’s supposed to be taking notes on.

The Blown Fuse and the Blown Take

Buried in the Maque Choux livecast is a detail that didn’t make the recipe writeup because it has nothing to do with corn: right before the segment, Sam’s kitchen blew a fuse, and in the scramble to text his producer Greg about it, autocorrect turned “blew a fuse” into “blew a dude.” He caught it. Dovahzul, the dragon-shout language from Skyrim, has a word for forcibly shoving something back into working order: Fus Ro Dah, “Force, Balance, Push,” the Unrelenting Force shout. That’s every home cook’s relationship with a breaker panel in one phrase — you don’t fix it, you just push until it stops fighting you.

And the Cheater Hummus episode has its own production chaos: a crew member checking their phone mid-segment, a lost earpiece (“I just lost my ear”), a request for a literal battery just to finish the shot. None of that is secret — Sam puts it on camera on purpose, because the appeal of a livecast over a polished cooking show is watching the seams. You’re just not editing it down to the parts where things worked.

What “Cheater” Actually Means Here

Sam and his crew specifically flag that regular tahini “isn’t at a regular supermarket” — this isn’t a lazy shortcut, it’s a workaround for an ingredient most home cooks genuinely cannot get without a specialty trip. That reframes the whole recipe category. The lesson for anyone cooking from a cookbook written somewhere other than their own zip code: before you panic-substitute, ask whether the “authentic” ingredient is even sold near you, because half the time the cheat isn’t a compromise, it’s the only version of the recipe that actually exists in your kitchen.

Bacon, Theoretically

For anyone building flavor without meat, soy chorizo is the more interesting of the two swaps, since it’s bringing its own spice and fat rather than just imitating bacon’s smoke. It’s not pitmaster territory — there’s no live fire anywhere in today’s haul, which is its own small tragedy — but the underlying move, building smoke and richness from a non-pork source, is exactly the kind of substitution logic anyone working a smoker for a mixed crowd of carnivores and vegetarians needs in their back pocket anyway.

The Mushroom Rule Nobody Writes Down

Abuela’s Table’s note on cleaning mushrooms for sopa de hongos deserves more than the one line it got in the main piece: wipe with a damp cloth, never soak, “because the flavor slips out with the water.” That’s not folklore, that’s just correct — mushrooms are built like little sponges, and dunking them in water does exactly what sponges do, pulling moisture in and flavor out before they ever hit the pot. It’s a small, repetitive, unglamorous task — wipe the cap, tear the stem, move to the next one — and Zen Buddhism has a line for exactly that kind of task: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” The job doesn’t get more exciting once you understand why it matters.

Two Versions of the Same Reality Show

The Savannah and Natasha sit-down is the contestants’ own corrective — on-record pushback against an edit that apparently dogged at least one of them since episode one. The “Cronuts, Dumplings and MC4Lynn’s Departure” episode is the opposite: Sam’s crew doing pure water-cooler speculation from the outside, picking apart a contestant’s old tweets, placing bets on Jesse, Natasha, and a quietly competent Jordan, and one host openly conceding he’d lose his own partner to an Italian accent. Put those two side by side and you get the full reality-TV supply chain in miniature — contestants trying to correct the narrative in one breath, commentators building a new one in the next, neither group particularly interested in slowing down for the other.

Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #108 says “a woman wearing clothes is like a man without profit,” which is Ferengi for “we do not understand subtext, nuance, or why Savannah’s pushback matters,” and it’s also the reason no Ferengi has ever been invited back on a livecast. Savannah’s whole point was that she’s not there to be looked at — a concept the Ferengi, a species that evaluates everyone by appraisal value, would genuinely fail to parse.

The Business of a Livecast

Last thing worth flagging because nobody ever reads sponsor copy except me: We Olive is running 10% off anything in the shop if you drop Sam’s name at checkout, Perch (“New Fixtures Living,” a phrase Sam himself admitted he’s still not used to saying on air) is backing the livecast too, and there’s an actual in-person event — Sam’s Taste Tour with Stella, Thursday night from 6 to 8 p.m. at Randy Jones All-American in Mission Valley. None of that is content, it’s the business model holding the content up, and it’s worth remembering that every “cheater” recipe and every pickle joke you watched today is also, quietly, an ad read with extra steps. Just means somebody’s paying for the flour.

End of Line.

Sources

Videos

  • Abuela’s Table — 30 Easy Mexican Soups for Seniors Living Alone (No Chopping, No Stirring) (2026-10-20)
  • Sam The Cooking Guy — Kalamata Olive Focaccia | SAM THE COOKING GUY (2026-10-20)
  • Sam The Cooking Guy — Cheater Hummus | SAM THE COOKING GUY (2026-10-20)
  • Sam The Cooking Guy — Lamingtons | SAM THE COOKING GUY (2026-10-20)
  • Sam The Cooking Guy — Maque Choux | SAM THE COOKING GUY (2026-10-20)
  • Sam The Cooking Guy — MasterChef’s Savannah & Natasha with SAM THE COOKING GUY (2026-10-19)
  • Sam The Cooking Guy — Cronuts, Dumplings and MC4Lynn’s Departure | SAM THE COOKING GUY (2026-10-19)
  • Sam The Cooking Guy — Pickling 101 | SAM THE COOKING GUY (2026-10-19)
  • Sam The Cooking Guy — Olive Tapenade (with Halibut) | SAM THE COOKING GUY (2026-10-19)
  • Sam The Cooking Guy — Cool Asian Tots | SAM THE COOKING GUY (2026-10-19)

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