Devils On Horseback

This was probably the most impulsive meal I've made in a long time.

My work schedule doesn't leave a whole lot of time for cooking anything weird these days, but today was an exception, I finished while the supermarkets were still open!
During my usual end of day 'I have another 30 minutes before I can catch a train home' internet-browsing malaise, I stumbled upon an article about one of the few chefs whos career I actually follow, one Matthew Matheson, or as Cancer Bats fans may know him, Matty BSOD.
I'm just gonna save myself some typing and link to the article in question, which fills ya in on his impressive background, and gives a sneak preview of what I'd be making this evening.

So after reading that, and being intrigued enough to want to try it out myself, I thought fuck it, why not? Picked up the ingredients within an hour of first hearing of this dish, and got to work!

I was unable to track down the specific cheese mentioned in that article, but luckily they did suggest camembert or brie as a suitable substitute. I went for camembert, as for some reason I had it in my head that it would work better when melty, and brie was more of a cold cheese.
Fuck knows, I know next to nothing about food.
I did however manage to get the Medjool dates after much trawling of aisles, I almost punched the air (and a shop assistant) when I finally found them. I also splashed out a bit of cash on some pretty top notch bacon, because all the other streaky stuff looked like the shavings left on a slughterhouse floor.

So with it all assembled in a photogenic fashion, I got cutting! As you can pretty goddamn clearly see, you need to de-seed the dates yourself, yet leave them intact enough to be able to close like a casket around a particularly cheesey corpse.

Since I was making enough to feed two (HA! as if anyone else would ever eat my cooking), I de-seeded every date, and used half of my wheel of camembert to fill 'em.

Yes, actually, it WAS necessary to arrange them like that. It makes food taste better when you're a pretentious prick during the preparation, true fact. You can probably guess what comes next, but incase you're too fucking stupid, here's a pic anyways...

Yep, big shock, you stuff the dates with the camembert! Holy shit, I did not see that one coming.
Start a fire under a pan, and tear into your over-expensive pack of bacon. Give it a quick sizzle on each side, before removing it from the pan and rolling each streak around a cheesey date, pinning the whole messy thing together with a toothpick. When you have enough of 'em made, pop them in the oven at around gas mark 4 for a coupla minutes to melt the cheese and caramelise the sugar in the dates.
Remove, and serve with something slightly healthier than thick cheese entombed in pure sugar and shrouded in flayed pigflesh. In the spirit of hallowe'en, I went for a Spooky Satanic Salad.

Put it all together, and get ready to taste something that feels like a heart attack as you type up some bullshit about it an hour later.

Here's some weirdo music I've never heard that fits the post title. I can't be fucked finding references to horseback in music I love, and devils is too obvious. Enjoy, or don't, I give no fucks either way.

Ministry-one

Minimal preamble for once. I've never made soup before, and I fancied giving it a shot, so... I did.

Here's what went into it

First up, chop all your veg (celery, carrot, leek, red onion, chilli pepper). I'm not a fan of really chunky soups, so I diced it all pretty finely. Pre-heat a massive pot while you chop, then throw it all in there.

Give that a couple of minutes to reduce down a little, before opening up your tomato puree, and add a tbsp of that into your mix. Open up your tin of plum tomatoes, and chop them up finely by plunging some scissors into the can and snipping away at the innards, blood-red juices spattering your clothes.
Pour the full tin into your pot, and get stirring!

 

This is the point where you can decide to either keep your soup nice and vegetarian-friendly, and skip the 'dump in a tonne of animal parts' stage. But fuck that, I can't eat anything that doesn't have corpse in it. Fry up some bacon, a minestrone standard, cut it into tiny pieces before adding to your pot.

And since I recently returned from Barcelona, which was heaven for a spicey smoked sausage fiend like myself, I can't resist adding some chorizo to this already thick-as-fuck mix. So... do that, too.

Boil up some water to make a stock with. Ideally, if I'd had more time, I would have used a fresh chicken stock made with real chicken, buuut... I was hungry, and lazy, and I wanted to get this made as fast as possible. At the same time as your stock water is boiling, smash up some pasta into small pieces. I used my fists because I'm just cool like that, but probably best to just lightly smack it with a rolling pin while it's still in the bag to break it up, if you're not quite as angry at pasta as I am.

Pour in your chicken stock, shortly followed by adding your pasta, stir well, and leave to heat through for a further ten minutes. Once it's all thickened up nicely, either grate some fresh parmesan, or do what I did and cheat, using the (still fresh) pre-grated stuff. Chop some parsley into tiny pieces for garnishing purposes, and serve!

If this was 2004, I would have more to say about the band that coincides with my latest terrible pun title. I used to fucking love Ministry. Then shortly after I did, they came back all heavy-handed political messages and uninspired songs, so I swiftly fell out of love. Psalm 69 is still a terrifying, stomping, corroded banger of a record though. Those fucking robot-Bonham drums!