I like beer. It is good.

For complete lack of a clever post title, that will have to do. I mean, it is true and all, it says everything that ever needs be said about my relationship with the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.

Enough horseshit, here are the beers:

There was no great process behind the selection of these particular bottles, other than I couldn't make it to Peckham's in Glasgow, my usual source of undiscovered alchoholic delights. So these were just about the only drinks I hadn't tried out of the shitty supermarket selection.

First up, or should that be furst up (yeah, I want to punch me too) is the Fursty Ferret. Ferrets kinda freak me out, I don't know why, they seem way too over-excitable and... burrow-y. Like they'd get up the leg of your jeans somehow and cause all sorts of havoc up there... anyway, what the fuck am I on about? Oh yeah, beer review. On first sip, I thought this was pretty... nothing-y. It says on the neck 'full of character' but there's really nothing here to distinguish it from any other ale, really.
Nearing the end of the bottle, and that opinion just ain't gonna change I guess. Not bad, but nothin special either.


Right, onto another 500ml-er next. Gentleman Jack? sounds a little too close to Jack Daniels for my liking, definitely not a fan of THAT particular bourbon, so here's hoping the two are entirely unconnected.
Okay, first swig... YEAH. I like this. it fizzes. it has tang, kick. heft. A real flavour to it. It's not too heavy either, like some ales, this is something I can easily see myself working through a few off in a night without feeling like it was about to start seeping out of... whatever, I'm gonna stop that right there before this gets disgusting and puts me off my booze. This is a damn good ale. Would drink again. and again. and again. until I fell over.

Next up: Savanna Dry! First impression is the smell as I pry off the bottlecap. It hits like a serious fucking gust of appley goodness. First sip? Whoah. Appley. South African apples are as potent as a fucking nuke, I;d imagine. What does that even mean? Fucked if I know. I'd just like to point out at this stage that these beers/ciders/ales, whatever, are not the first drinks I've consumed today. Yeah, again, I know, but it's a saturday and I got everything I needed to done by midday, so yeah, from about 1pm I've been steadily knocking back cheap shitty beers as an almmost warm up for these beauties.
Back to the Savanna Dry. This is quite... pungent, but not as unpleasant as that word is. It has a real odour to it, but in a nice way.

Last, but in no way least, is something I've been looking forward to... well for about 12hrs since I bought it: 1488 Whisky Beer. Whisky Beer. just LOOK at those two beautiful words, juxtaposed. Ahhh, his truly has gotta be the pinnacle of human achievement, in a bottle.
First sip: WOOOOO does that ever have a fucking kick to it! What's the percentage? ONLY 7? nofuckingway. I'm not even sure if I like this as a beer, theres no way you just sit and casually swig one of these. It does delivery on a good, strong, whisky-tinged taste though, there ain't no denying that. Urgh, there is no fucking way I'm finishing this, it's like 3am. I'm such a fucking lightweight in my old age. Moral of the story is: this beer rules, but I cannot fucking handle it right now.

Here's a song about a situation I find myself in all too often

Prawn-creation Of The Wicked

This was kind of a last minute idea because I really couldn't be fuckin bothered making some big elaborate meal with tonnes of prep time and that took an age to cook. And when that happens, pasta is your friend!

This was originally a meal made when I was in desperate need of a shopping trip, and the ingredients used were pretty much all there was to eat in the house at the time, which kind of explains why they seem so... disparate.

Yeah, prawns in pasta, I don't know if thats a common thing, but it's certainly not something I'd ever eaten before. Surprisingly, it really worked out, hence the reason I'm making it again, fuckin duh.

This takes all of 15 minutes to prepare and cook, so the first thing ya gotta do is fill a pot with water, and heat that to a boil.
There's fuck all to do prep-wise except grate your cheese (I used my beloved Mexicana, but I guess normal cheddar will do too. If you're a loser, that is), and chop your chillies. Honestly, I only chopped one, left the seeds in, and even that was too much. I know, I'm a fucking wimp.

For your sauce, all there is to it is to whip up a basic white sauce as your base. If you don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, all ya do is pre-heat a pot, tip in a tbsp of plain flour, a decent shake of grated parmesan, a small-ish chunk of butter, and half a pint of milk, and whisk until it develops a nice thickened consistency. For a bit of a kick, I usually throw in a tsp of mustard powder and a pinch of cayenne pepper.

When your basic sauce is simmering away nicely, throw your bundles of tagliatelle into your boiling water. Keep an eye on both of these pots, and once you pasta is almost done, chuck your cheese into the saucepot, stir through, then add your prawns.
I cheated and used pre-prepared prawns because the aim of this meal was to encourage my own laziness, but if ya have time to pick up some prawns that still have claws and beady little eyes, and prepare those yourself, I suggest ya do it. There's very little in life thats more fun than busting apart shellfish to get to the meat within. The sound of the shells cracking open is... so goddamn satisfying.

Anyway, once everything is pretty much good to go, all you need to do is drain your pasta and transfer it into your saucepot. Give it a minute or two in there, stirring the sauce through, adding any last minute seasoning you deem necessary, then spatter it out onto your plate. Add your far-too-spicey chillies on top, and don't touch your nose after picking them up, like this stupid cunt did.
Serve with side salad if you fancy eating something that isn't yellow for once.

To Seperate The Yolk From The White

So originally the plan was to make Belgian Waffles, buuut that soon turned to shit when my waffle iron decided to sink before it's maiden voyage, so to speak. In short, this dessert turned into a hastily improvised pancake-esque mess. Fuck it, after a few initial test runs, I actually got some pretty good results!

Here's what ya need to prepare dark, bitter, abrasive waffles (or thick as fuck pancakes):

If, unlike me, your waffle iron is fully operational, pre-heat it. Thats the first thing ya want to do.

Lay out 3 seperate mixing bowls, and divide your ingredients thusly: Sift two cupfuls of plain flour into your first bowl, and then add 2 tsps of baking powder, and a pinch or two of salt.
Next bowl: Crack your eggshells, and using your hand to strain the whites, pour them into the bowl, ensuring that the egg yolk stays in the palm of your hand, and the whites slip through the cracks in your fingers.
Third bowl: drop your four yolks into this bowl. Most recipes I consulted for inspiration/ripping-off used either plain or caster sugar. I decided to go for my own personal favourite, dark muscovado. Whichever sugary goodness you go for, dump 2 tbsps of it into your egg YOLK bowl.
Before you go any further, scoop out 4 tbsps of butter, and put them in a FOURTH bowl (this is getting fucking stupid, I know) and stick this bowl in the microwave for a minute or so to melt the butter.

Take your whisk and beat the absolute hell out of your egg yolk/sugar combo until it resembles a disgusting sludgy mess. Add in your hot melted butter, and two mugs worth of milk. Get beating again. The use of muscovado made this a bit... grainier than most recipes will be, so just really stir it up, and use the face of a spoon to crush all the granules down as much as possible.

Once that's done, pour this mixture into your flour/baking powder bowl, and yeah, you guessed it, get back to beating fuck out of it with that whisk.

This is the part I fucked HATE. If you don't have an electric mixer/whisk thingy, don't even bother attempting this next stage, you'll be there for hours. Use your electric mixer to whip up your egg whites into a frothy, meringue-y substance, until it's pretty much white as a ghost, and solid as a rock.

In the recipes I read in cookbooks, and online, they all describe the next stage as 'folding' your whites into the rest of the mixture. I have no fucking clue what that's supposed to mean, so I interpreted it as best I could, and plopped the whites into the mix in stages, using a ladle to cover each scoop of white with the rest of the mix. I literally had no fucking Idea what I was doing, but I kept doing it regardless.

Once all your white mix is enveloped in dark brown muscovadian goodness, light a fire under your frying pan, and splash some oil in there. Obviously if this was an ACTUAL Belgian waffle recipe, you'd simply pour the mixture into your waffle iron. But, y'know...

While your pan is heating, prepare your 'toppings'. I went for a sliiightly-too-expensive vanilla ice cream, dark morello cherries (why the fuck does nowhere have FRESH cherries this time of year? fuck supermarkets) and dark, slightly bitter, Swiss cooking chocolate. Break off about half the bar of choc, pop it in a bowl and microwave it for 2 minutes until it melts into utter fucking foodporn heaven.

Leave your chocolate to the side for now, and either check on your waffles, or pour your batter into the frying pan. Give it just a minute or so on a high heat for either side, you don't want the batter burning or going flat. Flip it out of the pan (onto the floor on your first attempt if you're me. the ten-second-rule applies here). Apply your toppings in a suitably pretentious fashion, et voila!

If you're surprised by how good this actually tastes, then you'll think you can handle a second portion. Believe me, you can't. Didn't stop me from pushing my ironclad (Steff! I got to use it in a sentence! yesss) stomach to it's absolute limit.

The obligatory, VERY loosely connected to the title/dessert theme, clip that follows features the almighty Jeff Walker. If you don't know what band he fronted, jump off a tall building.

Curry-osion Of Conformity

So I literally racked my brains for... I'm not gonna say hours, because that makes me sound like some sad loser who had nothing to do with his day but cook... uhhh, yeah, totally not the case at all. Either way, I couldn't come up with a decent pun title for this post, hence settling on the kinda lame title I did choose. I don't give a fuck, curry is awesome, and so are COC.

Anyhow, I've wanted to try my hand at preparing a curry from scratch for a long-ass while now, but laziness and other excuses prevented it from happening. My pa makes a pretty mean pot every now and again, so I decided to use his recipe as the basis for my own first attempt.
I think he bases his on a traditional Rogan Josh, which is usually made with lamb, but since I was cooking for four, and I'm the only one cool with eating supposedly 'cute' animals, I switched lamb for chicken.

So here's the obligatory ingredients shot. I'm missing a coupla things, like the basmati rice, and a lemon, but fuck it.

So, as ever, the first thing I did was the slicing and dicing. Blahblahblah dice your onions blahblahblah slice your garlic cloves. The fun part, which I've never had the chance to do before now, was preparing the root ginger. You don't need a whole lot, so don't use the ENTIRE root, just peel the outer layer off of one small part of the root, then slice this exposed section into veeeery thin slivers. The smell of this stuff is goddamn incredible, I would happily work for slave labour wages if it meant all I ever did was slice root ginger all day. Love the stuff.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, prepping the spices. First, light a low flame under a dry frying pan, and tip in 2 tsps of whole coriander seeds. Then tip in the same amount of cumin seeds. Give these just a couple of minutes to gently roast them, then empty your pan into your mortar. I've never used a mortar and pestle before, but since I'm kind of a nerd, I got a set from Annual Gift Man, and have been dying to use 'em since. Crush, grind, and generally pulverise your roasted seeds until they're basically delicious-smelling dust. Once that's done, add 1 tsp of red chilli powder to your mortar, and then the same amount of turmeric. Grind all of that together to produce a pretty consistent powder.

Once all that stuff... well, looks pretty much exactly as above, light a fire under a medium-sized pot, pour in a decent glug of sunflower oil, then chuck in all of your diced onions. Give those about...5-10 minutes, just to soften them up a little, before adding in the garlic and ginger. Tip in 3 tsps of garam masala powder, and then the rest of the spices from your mortar. I really like saying mortar. COVERING FIIIRE! ...ahem.

Once all of that is mixed together pretty nicely, until it seems like a dry paste, that's when you want to add in your tin of chopped tomatoes. Scrape every last drop from the tin, and stir that all together. It'll look pretty red and firey, so for a bit of colour correction (and for taste, obviously) you want to stir in 3 tbsps of organic yoghurt. This should give your sauce a rich, iron-y colour, and start to give it a pretty good texture too, just the right mix of chunkiness and smoothness. Quit yakking and move on already...

While your sauce is simmering away, it's meat mangling time! I'm no expert when it comes to handling chicken, I'm really not a white meat kinda guy, and obviously it's a little tricker to get juuust right, texture-wise, but the method I use for cutting it into chunks is perhaps a little different, and a lot more fun, than most people's. I think the phrase 'hung, drawn and quartered' just about says it all.
Impale the thickest end of your chicken breast with a fork or skewer, hang it high in the air, then get to work with your scissors/garden shears. Snip off bitesize chunks, starting from the bottom, and imagine you're trying someone for treason as ya do it.
I know, I know, "why can't he just cook ANYTHING without medieval references", but fuck you, get your own food blog if ya don't like it.

Anyhow, once all four breasts lie dissected in your bowl, light up your frying pan from before, splash in some more oil, and tip in your chicken. You don't want to completely cook it through in the pan, just enough to whiten the outside layer. This takes... maybe 5 minutes at most. Keep turning the chunks with a spatula until every surface of your meat is white. It won't be cooked through, not yet, so add your chicken chunks into your sauce pot.

I say this like fifty fucking times with every post, but... ONCE ALL OF THAT is mixed together nicely, cover your pot and leave to simmer for a while. While the chicken cooks through in the sauce, take a lemon, and a ZESTER (Such a fun word. Zester. Say it aloud. Shout it even. Repeatedly. Endless entertainment.), and scrape off the entire surface of the lemon.
Set your ZESTER aside, and turn your attention to the fresh coriander.
Rinse it off, cut off the root/stalk, and begin to dice the leaves into the tiniest sections that you possibly can. Split this into 2 portions, one half will be added to your sauce in the pot, the other is for garnishing your rice. Add your pot half... well, to the fucking pot, obviously.

Take a mug, and measure one cup basmati rice to two cups water, and add these to another pot. Light a high heat under this, cover, and bring to the boil. Both of your pots, should be covered, and left to simmer, with occaisional stirring, for around 10-15 minutes at this point.

With only around 5 minutes left before the sauce, chicken and rice are ready, heat your oven to around gas mark 4, and pop in your naan bread. I would have made a naan from scratch, but frankly I couldn't be fucking bothered.

In the final minutes, taste your sauce, and add in any additional spices, salt, lint, hair, whatever the fuck you want. Also, add in your lemon zest and remaining coriander to your pot of rice, and stir thoroughly.
Once your naans are browned, your rice has absorbed all the water, and your chicken is cooked through, serve it all up to your family, who will then complain that it's too spicey. Fucking wimps.

And to make the title self-fulfilling, here's something else with warm tones, and a kick to it. Vintage, fuzzed-out COC. Dig in.