Caesers In Barren Praise

Okay, I'll be honest, the main reason I wanted to make a ceaser salad is so I could use that semi-obscure pun title. And because I think Ive listened to so much Trap Them recently, I pretty much hum their stuff in my sleep now.

Anyway, the OTHER reason I reckoned a salad would be a good idea is because, as this blog will pretty much attest to, almost everything I eat contains either enough spices to scar your throat, copious amounts of alchohol, or there is so much carcass on my plate I'm starting to feel like I'm running a farm animal mortuary.

So salad: a nice, light, fresh, healthy option for once... oh wait, I'm smothering it in thick dressing and adding 2 whole chicken breasts and fried-to-fuck bacon on top. Ah well.

This theoretically SHOULD be a short description, as it took me fuck-all time or effort to prepare, but given my propensity for rambling sidenotes and grammatical gymnastics, it'll probably be a longer, more complex and convoluted read than The Iliad.

Okay, so I already had pre-rinsed and shredded lettuce, chopped peppers, spring onions, and two pre-cooked chicken breasts, but if you don't have that stuff... well, sort it out.
The chicken only took 15 minutes in the oven, so first thing you gotta do is pop your oven on at gas mark 6, then contain your breasts.

While that's going on, get your frying pan ready for the bacon. Personally, I like my bacon burnt to a fucking cinder when it's going into a salad, give it some CRUNCH! So I fried mine for a suuuuper long time, eventually cutting it into strips/squares while it was still in the pan.

While the bacon and chicken are getting all hot n' stuff, organise your salad on your plate, using the lettuce as your base. Throw on as much 'healthy' stuff as you fancy. As ever, this is wiiide open to interpretation, put whatever the fuck you want on your plate, pineapples, camembert, dog biscuits, whatever.

During this time, you'll also want to prepare a caeser dressing, otherwise this is just gonna be a random salad with meat all over the damn place. You would think this would be the point where I'd go into great detail about exactly HOW to make the dressing. But I won't, because my pa decided to micro-manage that aspect of his own dinner, wouldn't even let me near the condiments! I seem like a pretty trustworthy, albeit amateur as hell, cook, right? Not to him, I guess.

Shut off your oven, remove the chicken, and tear, not cut, tearing it is very important. Mainly because it's just fun to rip flesh apart (oh HI, vegetarians!), and because it looks better for the purposes of food blog photography. Sprinkle your torn strips of chicken haphazardly over your salad, then do the same with your blackened bacon. Drop some croutons on top from a great height, like some sort of bread-based re-enactment of Hiroshima. Finally, let whatever obsessive, secretive weird relative prepared your dressing splash it everywhere. You want so much of it that your croutons soften up, LASHINGS of dressing!

I figure that's enough words. Here's the aftermath:

And here's the disjointed, mangled, sexy audio filth that inspired the title:

NOLA Jambalaya

This was gonna be dinner last night, but I got... distracted. You know someone rules when they somehow manage to make you completely ignore food in favour of stayin' up all night talking to them instead. Big talk, from a guy who writes a food blog, right? Technically I could have started cooking this at 3am last night, buuut... I figure falling asleep with my face in a frying pan won't do me any good.

Anyway, enough excuses, onto the food! I've wanted to try a recipe from the Southern states of America for... well, forever. In the not-too-distant future when I decide to drop out of life in favour of travelling/eating my way around the world, the South, and specifically Louisiana, is waaaaay high on my list of desirable delicacy destinations.
So as a warm up, I decided to cook one of the best known Creole dishes: Jambalaya. There are a few different varieties of jambalaya that I won't go into, but most of them seem to involve a seafood ingredient at some stage. Not being a confident enough seafood cook, I decided to scratch this ingredient from my shopping list.
Here's what I did pick up:

Incase it's not immediately obvious, that there is a big-ass link of chorizo, as well as a 12-pack of chipolatas. Like I didn't eat enough pork in those hotdogs yesterday, right? Death by pork, it's the only way to go.

First thing you gotta do, like seemingly every other damn thing I cook, is chop your peppers/onions/tomatoes/fingers-through-sheer-vegetable-boredom into decent cubed chunks. Set that aside for now.

Heat 1 tbsp of olive oil in a standard frying pan, chop your chorizo, and drop it in there. It should INSTANTLY start turning the oil this insanely sexy orange colour. Try not to get too into the orange-ness, and turn your attention to yer chipolatas. I don't know how common these are outside the UK, I'm probably way too ignorant to have any business writing a blog like this, but fuck it. Chipolatas can be replaced by standard think pork links, they're essentially the same thing anyway. Hack em up into.. let's say quarters of their original size, and throw them into your pan too. After a couple of minutes, drop in all your onion too, so it has plenty of time to soften up and absorb some of that golden oily goodness.

While that's frying away, boil up around 280 ml vegetable stock. I just used a shitty little stock cube, obviously home made stock is better, but who has the fucking time for that? Anyway, while your stock is boiling, measure out around 200g of long-grain rice, then just scatter all of that into your frying pan. The rice should instantly start to absorb a lot of the meaty oil sloshing around in there, so when it's done it's job, you want to pour in your stock, so it has something else to drink. At this point, you should probably open a beer so you have something to drink too. I'm not educated enough about the trillion different beer brands of Louisiana, but hey, that's pretty much why I wanna go there!

Anyhow, where was I? Oh, yeah. Throw in your chopped tomatoes, ENSURING to remove the 'brains', because... well, I just don't trust tomato seeds. I have my reasons.
Cover your pan with either tin foil, or if you've run out like i did, another upside-down pan. Be sure to remove your covering every coupla minutes to stir everything around, make sure the rice is getting nice and fat. Add more stock as needed.

After around 15 minutes of this, you can add your chopped red and green peppers, as well as any additional seasoning you desire. I went for a hefty sprinkling of Nandos periperi spice rub.
Give it another 5-10 minutes under your covering, then let hunger get the best of you and serve it up. One day I'm gonna move to the South and eat enough of this stuff to put me in the ground.

Now for some NOLA heavyweights whose noise is almost as thick, meaty and fucking beautiful as this recipe:

English Dogs

This was a pretty spur of the moment decision, fuelled by absolute starvation and a desire to eat my weight in pork.

I don't know where the hot dog originally hails from, and to be honest I'm too lazy to look into it. The use of frankfurters makes me think Germany, but hot dogs are seen as a typically American, specifically NYC thing, right? Wherever they come from, the ones I made were very English. You'll see why in the ingredients photo:

Since I was buying all my ingredients in a standard supermarket and not some specialist infinite spice and condiment market (if one exists in Scotland, or anywhere, let me know, I'm movin' in!), I had to settle for pretty standard choices in the condiment department: Colman's English mustard and English tomato sauce.

The actual process of making hotdogs is so damn easy, even my retarded ass can do it! Or not, as you'll see from the finished result photo. I bought pre-made baguette dough, as I couldn't find any buns big enough to accomodate my meat. Stop laughing, perverts.

Stick those baguettes in the oven for around 12 minutes, turning them occaisionally so they heat through and turn golden brown evenly. While you do this, you can prepare whatever additional toppings you want.

I WAS going to go for the standard tomato ketchup, mustard and fried onion, but being my usual forgetful self, somehow I completely failed to fry, or even chop, my onion. So all I had to do was stick my sausages in the microwave.

I'm usually VERY anti-microwave, I hate ready-meals for the most part, and nothing ever tastes quite... right, when cooked by just waves of radiation, as opposed to good ol' FIRE! However, sometimes it's unavoidable. Anyway, the brand of sausages I got said they only required a minute, but that didn't sound right to my neanderthal brain, so I stuck 'em in for 2, just before my baguettes had finished browning.

Remove your baguettes from the oven, and your meat from the radiation chamber. Tear open your bread, completely scalding your already ruined hands in the process, and try and somehow fit those bizarre curved radioactive pork monstrosities within them. As you can see... it's easier said than done:

For fucks sake, those look awful, right? Although, I can actually say that hotDAMN, they were pretty damn good! The one with the burnt baguette, broken dog, and condiment massacre on top was mine, my sister pretty much stole the one in the foreground that actually turned out pretty well.

Anyhow, enough of my shit, this is a quick-as-fuck snack that's cheap as hell and takes all of 15 minutes to prepare, and who doesn't like hot dogs, right?

South Of No North Pancakes

For once I couldn't come up with even a bad music pun for a post title, but then I got to thinking about what the actual ingredients were for this little bit of alchoholic alchemy and came up with a suitably pretentious literary-inspired title instead.

Basically, all I did was make standard pancakes (or 'dropped scones' as my weird Northern 1950's bakery book calls 'em), with a couple of little twists. The main attraction for me was the syrup, but we'll get to that in a bit. First, here's the obligatory ingredients shot:

Firstly I'd like to point out that YES, Southern Comfort is ENTIRELY necessary when making pancakes, or at least when I make 'em anyway. Also, I was ill and tired as fuck when I put that shot together, so yeah, I'm missing... well a lot of the ingredients I actually used. Bite me.

The first thing you wanna do is measure out around 5 ozs (I know, ounces, what the fuck right? blame the ancient recipe book) of plain flour, and also around half an ounce of butter. If you're as fucking weird as me and you can't touch flour because for some reason it creeps you the fuck out, get someone else to knead the butter and flour together, so it all breaks up into disgusting flour-y disgustingness.
Then you want to crack a couple of eggs into a pyrex bowl, and get stirrin'! Add in the occasional splash of milk as you stir, just to thin out the consistency, unless (again) you're like me and like a reeeally thick goopy mixture.

This is the point where you can deviate from most standard recipes and get a little bit creative with ingredients. Not that I did anything batshit crazy like add crack cocaine or centipede legs, I stuck to pretty safe choices like demerara sugar, ground ginger and cinnamon. Mix your flour mixture together with your egg/milk mixture, and chuck in all your sugar or whatever. Whisk the hell outta all of that, and leave it to sit in a bowl in the fridge for about 20 minutes. I don't know why you gotta do that, but the recipe told me to.

While that's pointlessly chilling, you can get to the REAL reason this dessert is so damn fun.
First get yourself a mini-cauldron, and add in COPIOUS amounts of Southern Comfort, then pour in about the same amount of real Canadian maple syrup. Seriously, you want to make this about half and half, for maximum boozey goodness.

It might not look like a lot in the photo above, but when you're only serving one, trust me, it's more than enough! Remove your pancake mix from the fridge, and for the sheer hell of it, splash in a little more Southern Comfort, because clearly your throat doesn't hurt enough.

Fire up your frying pan on a pretty high heat, and slooowly pour in a good helping of your mixture. It should only take a minute before you start too see bubbles form, so if you're skilled enough, try and flip your pancake when you see the first bubbles. If you time it right, you'll get pancakes that are a fucking beautiful golden colour. Basically just repeat this as many times as it takes until you've used all your pancake batter, I managed to get 4 decent sized pancakes, but if you wanna make 'em even bigger, you could settle for 2 HUGE pancakes. Anyway, enough horseshit, top your stack off with a chunk of butter, and then drown em in Southern Syrup.

Et voila, the ideal drunken breakfast!