I'm pretty sure I'll be dead by 50, and cross-sections of my arteries will be displayed in medical texts for centuries. This is my third steak sandwich in four days. I fully intend to live up to this blog's title and eat myself to death.
Enough bullshit from me, that there's yer ingredients. The dough-y lookin things are half-baked ciabattas, these take about 8 minutes in the oven on gas mark 5, turning them occasionally so their whole surface turns that nice golden brown. While those are warming and rising, turn your attention to the frying pan. I got super-lucky today and got use of the kitchen directly after someone else had just cooked a full fry-up in the frying pan, so it still had all that lovely meaty oil left sloshing around in it. I turned the flame up and threw in my jalapenos. Fry them until they start to crisp up a little, then take 'em out and set them to one side for now. Thinly slice enough cheese to get some pretty decent coverage across however many sandwiches you'll be filling.
Look at the fucking size of that steak! I got that thing for next to nothing too, sometimes supermarkets are okay. I still prefer to buy direct from a proper butcher when I can, but my local butchers is in a pretty rough part of town, it's not fun getting 'faggot' shouted at you from across the street when all you wanna do is buy some meat.
Anyway, lower your hunk of flesh into the pan, and IMMEDIATELY start to dice it up using the biggest knife you can find. When researching the Philly cheesesteak, one other recipe I saw said you had to do it this way, and I thought surely it makes more sense to cut it either before or after the steak is cooked? I actually had a practice run on this meal due to not being able to find the damn camera the other night, and cut the steak after it had been fried, and for some reason it was just tough as all hell, and just didn't taste... right, y'know? So I gave it a shot at cutting it IN the pan and hey, whaddaya know, it works!
Your ciabattas will be done by this point so remove them from the oven, cut 'em in half, and leave them open, ready to pile your steak, jalapenos and thinly sliced cheese onto. Once thats done, stick 'em under a grill for a coupla minutes, just to get the cheese to melt into the steak. Daaaaamn that even SOUNDS good! As a final, artery-destroying touch, drizzle any excess grease left in your frying pan over the top of the whole thing.
Drive this 10" meat steak into my Glaswegian arteries.
For about a year now I've been talking to my mate Luke about the idea of having a proper chilli cook off. We spent hours discussing all the weird, wonderful, bizarre and disgusting stuff we could put into chilli, stuff that would make it so close to inedible, but we'd eat it anyway, no matter how fucking awful it turned out.
About a month ago, after I actually ventured back into society and saw him again, we decided we'd 'set the date' so to speak, and decided on 2nd October. I've spent about 3 nights since we set that date working on my chilli recipe, so I had a pretty universally lovable chilli, with none of the weird ingredients, or even the stuff that some people aren't into, such as kidney beans, red pepper, that sorta stuff. The plan was to use this as a back-up, incase I really did create something so unholy that it rotted someone's stomach lining away.
Anyway, enough bullshit. Here's the fucking epic mass of ingredients:
To feed four people, you're looking at about 1lb of minced beef there. You can also use chunks of steak, in a similar way as you would in a stew, but as you'll learn later this can be tricky to get right.
As with just about every damn thing I make for this blog, this has goddamn fucking red onions in it. I don't know why I keep doing it to myself, or why every damn dish needs onion, but I guarantee if you ever see me cook, I'll be weeping more than a teenage goth when they accidentally stab themselves in the eye with their eyeliner pencil.
So, dice up those motherfucker onions, cut up a couple of small pickled chillies, and very thinly chop your clove of garlic (consult Goodfellas for tips on that one). Set those aside, and grab your red pepper. Decapitate the top of the pepper, and scrape out the seedy innards so none remain. Then divide into sections, slice, and chop it so it has about the same consistency as your onions.
You'll see from the picture above I bought smaller chilli peppers/haloumi/bacon again, you can consult the Mummified Bacon Bomb post on what I did with those.
Once all your veg/chilli is prepared, light a flame under your casserole dish, and pour in about 2 tablespoons worth of sunflower oil. Just for the sheer fun of it, rummage your hands around in your bowl of mince while the dish pre-heats, and imagine you've just killed the animal with your bare hands, and must now skin, gut and strip the edible flesh from it's bones. Yeah, I'm a morbid cunt.
Add the mince into the dish in stages, stirring it, and breaking it up with a big-ass fork so it has a decent consistency, and isn't just a giant clump of flesh. When it has browned nicely, you should have a decent water-y beef stock in your dish. In order to keep this for cooking your veggies in, remove the mince from the casserole using a slotted spoon, and drain any excess liquid back into the dish. Once all your mince is on a side plate, dump in your onions, chillies, garlic, and let that cook, and soften for about ...7 minutes?
Boil up about 800ml of water, as you'll need this to make even more beef stock. Add in a tablespoon of plain flour: this partly determines how thick your sauce will be, so if you fancy something with the consistency of spicey tar, add in as much flour as you like. Once your stock cube has dissolved in your water, mix it in slowly using your stirring fork/spoon/spork/fpoon, and add in a small tin of tomato puree. If you don't have a tin let's say... about 2 tablespoons of puree will do it. Mix this all up for another 5-10 minutes, until it boils.
If you're weird enough, feel free to cackle, speak pidgin-Latin, and pretend you're some sort of culinary Witch/Wizard as you stir this. Yes, I'm that much of a fucking nerd.
When this has started to boil, when there are bubbles rising your cauldron, re-insert your meat. Dodgy turns of phrase aside, keep stirring for about another 5 minutes, so it all develops the same rich iron-brown consistency.
Pop your oven on at about Gas Mark 2, cover your casserole with it's heavy lid, and place it in the oven for around an hour and a half. While this is cooking, you can prepare any sort of side dishes you want to have with this. As I mentioned, I made the Bacon Bombs again: these only take about 25-30 minutes overall.
I doubt any of you will actually try this, but even if you do, I doubt you'll need to go through the next pain-in-the-fuckin'-ass steps as I did. Since for some bizarre reason, we were not having the cook off in my much larger, better equipped kitchen, I had to somehow find a way to transport all of this stuff up to Luke's for the final stages. I won't bore you with the myriad problems I encountered, and the burn marks on my hands as a result, but safe to say it was NOT an easy process.
Upon arrival at the venue for this spicey showdown, I divulged my plan of action to my cookery nemesis. I was to outdo whatever he had to throw at me by splitting my casserole into FOUR smaller bowls, and cooking four different varietys of chilli, each with different ingredients, sides and tastes, so that I would have ALL bases covered. Yeah, I know, I'm a fuckin' genius.
Here are my four varieties:
Chilli 1: The Universal Chilli
Basic chilli, taken straight from the casserole
Kidney beans
No chilli peppers
No hotsauce
Served with a side of boiled basmati rice
Bacon Bombs on the side too
Chilli 2: Nasty Nacho Chilli
Basic chilli
Add minimal amount of kidney beans
Add ONE variety of hotsauce, for extra bite
Small amount of chopped chilli peppers (seeds removed)
Served with tortilla chips, sour cream, grated cheese and guacamole
Chilli 3: Ch-Ch-Chilli
Chilli
Chocolate
Cherries
Chilli 4: Nuclear-strength,oesophagus-scarring, colon-rotting CHILLI CON CARNAGE!
Basic chilli
Add in a tub of extra chopped red pepper
Add a chopped chilli, with seeds intact
Add in lashings of 4 different varieties of hotsauce: Louisiana, Tabasco, Nandos HOT Peri Peri and Dave's Inanity Sauce. Yeah.
Serve with a warm cerveza, because water is for fuckin' pussies
Incase you're not as hip to hotsauce as I am, may I present:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave%27s_Insanity_Sauce
Basically, using these four weapons of choice, I fucking annhilated the competition. Not that there was much.
Luke had decided to go for the rather bizarre combination of using beef steak chunks, and instead of beef stock, he used a pint of Dark Chocolate Stout beer, by Brooklyn Brewery. He also slow-cooked it the night before, for far too long, as he thought that would tenderise the beef? The boy ain't right.
His own sister charmingly described his chilli as looking like 'when you take a shit when you're hungover'. So ladylike. But yeah, it really did:
As much as I enjoyed making all of this stuff, and as amazing as it all tasted (no ego, it seriously was damn good!), it was kinda spoiled by the fact that only 2 other guys showed up, and they had both eaten already, despite the fact they knew we were cooking for them.
I also got called gay for having a food blog. The great Steve Hughes says it better than I ever could:
