Spaghetti Bolog-Nasum

This was kind of a last-minute idea, since I wasn't all that hungry, I didn't really plan on making anything for dinner. But I got bored and needed to do something to fill my night, so thought I may as well just cook for other people.

First off, as usual, gather all this shit together:

Before you light any fires or heat any metal, you gotta do all your prep work, which involves turning a couple of the raw ingredients above into this:

Boil up a pint of water to make your beef stock, as well as finely chop your onion, crush and slice your garlic, grate your block of parmesan, and of course, my favourite, tear apart your carefully sliced meat and re-assemble it into balls. The final result is a little-known delicacy known only as 'meatballs'. Don't say I never teach ya anything.
Since I didn't really plan this out very well, I didn't have any standard minced beef available, and had to make do with 4 slices of lorne sausage. I think I've said before that this is almost exclusive to Scotland, so you should probably just use the standard mince option.

Anyhow, light a fire under a saucepan, and another under a frying pan. Pour in two tbsps of olive oil into your saucepan, and place all your meatballs into your frying pan. Give the meatballs 5 minutes or so, turning them until the exteriors are all browned, and anything interior which isn't cooked through will be in the next step.

Dump all your onions into the saucepan, then drop your balls (insert Beavis and Butthead-esque snigger here) in too. Stir 'em around for a coupla minutes, then throw in a tbsp of plain flour to thicken it up, as well as adding your crushed garlic and tiny tin of tomato puree.
Now that your frying pan is empty, you may as well take advantage of all that lovely beef-fat-stock sloshing around in there. I poured half into my saucepan, and used the other half to fry up some bacon (for extra carnivore points, and because it needed used up).

Mix all of this together for another couple of minutes, then add in about a quarter-pint of your beef stock. Some recipes say you can use red wine in bolognese sauce, but fuck that, wine is for goths and housewives. If you do however feel like alchohol is just downright necessary for your recipe, than time-travel back to the start, and marinade that minced beef in some disgusting rotgut bourbon.

Ordinarily I would chop my own whole tomatoes for this next stage, taking great care to ensure not a single goddamn seed or single drop of green goop is left, but since it was a last minute thing I needed to use tinned tomatoes. You should really make the effort to always use fresh ingredients though.
Add in these chopped tomatoes, stir, cover, and bring to a boil.

A lot of recipes tell you to leave it at this stage for close to an hour, but fuck that, I was cooking for others, and they wouldn't shut the fuck up about how long it was taking, so I only gave it about 15 minutes.
During this 15 minutes fill another pan with water and bring it to a boil, then with around 10 minutes to go, chuck in your pasta.

Keep stirring both of these pots for ten minutes, until your tomato sauce reduces down a little and isn't quite so gloopy, and your pasta softens up nicely. Drain your spaghetti, and transfer your sauce into the spaghetti pot. Mix it all together and give it another coupla minutes over a flame before serving.

This amount should serve 3 people pretty well, so dish up 3 plates, ladel it on there, garnish with grated parmesan and basil leaves, and then enjoy the silence as your test subjects finally stop complaining about how long it took to make. I'm sorry not everything is a fucking ready meal that takes two minutes and a PING to make.

And now for some shinfo. The title of this post was (fucking obviously!) inspired by one of the greatest grindcore bands, the incredibly crushing NASUM.

Nasum were the first grind band I ever heard, on a free compilation CD about 10 years ago. Other bands on that comp were Discharge, Iron Monkey, The Birthday Party, Black Flag, Eyehategod, Turbonegro and Void. Safe to say, the instant my young(ish), innocent(ish) ears were exposed to these bands, my life changed forever.
Corrupted would be one way to put it. Musically set free would be another.

Enough of my boring-as-shit rambling, here's a song with an opening blast of a riff that I hear in my head at least once every day. In Grind we trust!

Pesto-lence

First of all, I apologise for the fact that my ingredient photo looks like a goddamn promo shot for Sainsburys. It also doesn't help that I used their spokesperson/corporate shill Jamie Oliver's basic pesto recipe, before mangling and bastardising it to make my own twisted creation. Anyhow, here's all the shit that goes in it:

I should probably mention that a couple of vital pieces of kit are not pictured, such as a giant-ass pestle and mortar, and  an electric food processor (or if you prefer, simply a blender).

Also if anyone ever actually uses my ridiculous attempts at cookery as guidelines (ha!), then that's all the stuff you need to cook pesto my own weird way. Due to my complete lack of photographic ability, some of that might not be so obvious what it is, like the block of parmesan cheese, or the sun-dried tomatoes.

First things first, get the usual boring shite outta the way, chop pepper and red onion, set aside.

Next, use about a third of a pack of pine nuts, pour 'em out onto a baking tray, stick them under the grill for a minute or two, you don't even want to brown them, just veeeery lightly roast 'em. Take those out, and set them aside too.

If your tastes are similar to mine, and you don't give a fuck how bad it makes your breath smell, take 2 whole cloves of garlic, peel and chop them, and throw 'em into your mortar. Sprinkle in some big-ass rocks of sea salt, and tear off a sparse amount of basil leaves. I don't like a whole lot of basil, so feel free to use a forest's worth, if that's your thing.
Grind it all up, really smash it until it becomes a pulverized paste, then scrape it into your blender.

Next, take your gently roasted pine nuts, chuck those into your freshly emptied mortar, and proceed to destroy those too. As anyone who has talked to me for even 5 minutes will know, I don't eat anything unless it has some sort of chilli or ridiculous spice in it, so I threw in a good few pinches of mixed dried chilli seeds, and ground those into the pine nut mush.
Once those are sufficiently obliterated, scrape them into the blender with your garlic/basil paste.

Here comes the part I was wary of, as most pesto recipes recommend using a liberal amount of parmesan cheese and olive oil, neither of which I am into in any way (seriously, the smell of oil makes me want to vomit out my entire digestive tract. I hope that mental image just ruined your appetite. you're welcome.).
Instead of just bitching out and substituting these ingredients for something more palatable to my... well, palate, I decided to face my food fear, and I grated that fucking parmesan like I was downright goddamn pissed off at it. Sprinkle about half of what you grate into the initial blender-ful, drizzle in some (BLURRRRGH) olive oil, stick a lid on it, and blend away.

At this point you can start adding in whatever ingredients you think will work, to supplement the basic pesto paste. I went for a coupla sun-dried tomatoes, which are salty as all hell, as well as a nice big splash of Louisiana Hotsauce, and just a few chunks of my sliced red pepper.

I know, that looks fucking revolting, but trust me, once it's all blended up to fine paste and added to all the other ingredients, aesthetics will be the last thing on your mind.

Blend all that yet again, splashing in more (but not too much!) olive oil as needed to give it a good sloppy consistency, and any additional parmesan if it gets TOO viscous.

Scrape it all out into an empty jar, with any luck you'll have enough to either feed four people, or to be eating nothing but pesto for a whole weekend.

Boil up a pot of water, and drop in your choice of pasta. Normally I'm a fusilli or penne man, but seeing as I used up all of that on my other dinners this week, I was left with tagliatelle.

Start a fire under your frying pan, and lay your bacon in it, making sure to cut off every sliver of excess fat. This is one of the rare occasions that I like my bacon burnt to a crisp, so... do that, and chuck in all of your red onion and red pepper, to lightly fry those too.

When your bacon is the consistency of a corpse's skin putrefying and crackling in the glare of the sun (apparently reading too much Stephen King will make you think of everything in terms of corpse metaphors), and your onions are starting to brown, scoop in a good 3 or four teaspoonfuls of your pesto mix, and stir it all together.
Drain your pasta, and add all of that into your frying pan too. Stir it around for a couple of minutes, so the pasta starts to burn slightly. This is a personal preference, you could also make this without the pasta going anywhere NEAR the frying pan.
Finally, get bored of stirring and feeling hungry as fuck, and serve it up!

While you gnash away hungrily at that, listen to something appropriately (and yes, connected to the post title, as fucking ever) technical and carnivorous sounding. Some prime late-80s death metal for ya: