Massacre-pone

So last night my pa announces, out of the blue, for no reason at all:
"I bought a whole lot of couscous. Do you like couscous?"
"Uhhh, yeah, sure...?"
"Okay."
And then he got up and left the room. He's an unusual man. I'm starting to see where I get it from.

So with that incident in my mind as I wandered around the supermarket aimlessly, I decided to get some appropriately light and healthy (!) accompaniments to a nice bed of couscous. Here's what I picked up.

Okay, okay, so I put in a COUPLE of concessions to my usual dietary habits, namely the big tub of mascarpone cream cheese, because I really wanted to try it, as well as a big pack of streaky bacon, which isn't pictured. Otherwise this might have been... he... hea... heal-thy? Am I saying that right?

There's quite a bit of time involved in this meal because your veg are gonna get roasted, as opposed to my usual quick-fix methods of just grilling or frying everything. Also, the ingredients I used serve two big-ass plated portions, so divide everything in half if you're eating alone.

Anyway, crank your oven up to gas mark 6 (200C), and get chopping! The courgette is cut LENGTHWAYS, and hollowed out using a spoon, and if you have any sense at all, you'll de-seed everything, ESPECIALLY THE TOMATOES. Hack, sever and disembowel your veg so they look like this.

Once that's done, pile your courgettes, peppers and garlic into a deep grill tray, and splash with a tbsp of olive oil. Season using whatever herbs and spices take your fancy, I went for standard staples like oregano, thyme, parsley... and some Cayenne pepper. Just to give it the slightest kick.
Give that about 20 minutes in your oven, turning halfway through to make sure everything cooks evenly. Remove the tray after the 20 mins, and add your tomatoes and chopped chilli pepper, and any more seasoning you fancy. Pop it back in your oven for around another 20 minutes, then boil up your kettle!

You'll need the boiled water for your main filler ingredients, which are about 150g couscous, and 200g chickpeas.

 

When your veg has about 10 minutes left to go, mix your couscous, chickpeas, and 200ml boiling water together in a bowl until the water JUST covers the other stuff, and cover the bowl with clingfilm and leave to stand for ten minutes.

During this time, you can fry up your bacon if you want to make this dish slightly more carnivorous, which of fucking course I do. Scissor it up into smaller chunks of flesh, and fry on a high heat so it crisps up pretty quick. Once it's cooked, pop it into a bowl in the oven for a couple of minutes just to dry it out and make it uber-crispy.

Once your veg have reached their final countdown, take 'em out the oven and spoon a couple of serious dollops (technical term) of mascarpone into the roasted mix, and swirl it all together. Uncover your clingfilmed bowl of couscous, and fluff it up with a fork, adding more water if you think the texture is a little too dry (duh!). Remove your bacon from the oven too.

Cover your plates with the couscous as a base, then dump all your creamy veg mix on top of it, and sprinkle with any leftover chilli peppers you have, as well as throwing a handful of crispy bacon pieces over the whole thing. Serve to your slightly deranged father, to prove that you really DO like couscous.

Also, this, because if you don't like Thin Lizzy, then... well, fuck you, thats what.

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: