Atomic Buffalo Turds (ABTs)

ABTs, atomic buffalo turds, are the ultimate summer hors d'oeuvre.  These are smoked jalapeno peppers stuffed with chorizo and cream cheese then wrapped in bacon.  ABTs are classic party food at Dave’s old roommates’ house.  These friends are the ultimate do-it-yourselfers and boy can they cook!  ABTs are commonly consumed with homebrewed beer (hard cider for me!) before dinner.  Here’s my take on ABTs.

Ingredients:
1 package cream cheese
6 jalapenos
3 chorizo sausages, raw
6 slices of bacon

Directions:
Clean the jalapenos and cut each of them in half.  Get out all of the inner membrane and seeds to avoid overly spicy ABTs.  Wear rubber gloves when working with mass quantities of jalapenos!  Otherwise, the oils get on your skin and your hands can burn for days.  Also, if you touch your eyes, nose, or other sensitive body parts (think about this for a minute), you may regret it.  Trust me on this one.

Chorizo is a sort of Mexican pork sausage.  You want to find raw chorizo for this recipe.  You can sometimes find it in sausage link form, sometimes in a tube of meat, sometimes just set out in a container ground-beef-style.  You won’t need a huge amount of this, so you may want to just freeze half for your next batch.  On the stove, put chorizo in a frying pan and cook.  If your chorizo was in sausage link form, remove the casing and use the meat only.  Drain the grease.  Remove from heat and stir in the cream cheese until smooth. 

Stuff jalapenos with the chorizo and cream cheese mixture.

Put a half-piece of bacon around the jalapeno it bind it together with a toothpick. 

Smoke on low heat until bacon is cooked.  Dave’s old roommates used an actual home-made smoker for this purpose and let them cook for ~2 hours.  I have cooked these on the grill on low heat (watch out for grease fires!) and also broiled them in the oven on a cookie sheet, which works in a pinch, but to really get a true ABT, smoking over low heat is the way to go!  One of the projects on our to-do list is to make a smoker out of terracotta pots and an old stove we got from Dave’s Grandad.  I’ll let you know if we are successful. 

The longer you cook the jalapeno the less spicy they are, so keep this in mind if you have sensitive guests.  If you get a spicy batch, cut the spice by serving some mild queso with chips, glasses of milk, or spoonfuls of sour cream, depending on your degree of desperation.  I have read that vodka cuts the spice, but this has never actually worked for me.  Do you have any secrets to sooth a burning mouth?