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:
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?
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.
I'm pretty sure I'll be dead by 50, and cross-sections of my arteries will be displayed in medical texts for centuries. This is my third steak sandwich in four days. I fully intend to live up to this blog's title and eat myself to death.
Enough bullshit from me, that there's yer ingredients. The dough-y lookin things are half-baked ciabattas, these take about 8 minutes in the oven on gas mark 5, turning them occasionally so their whole surface turns that nice golden brown. While those are warming and rising, turn your attention to the frying pan. I got super-lucky today and got use of the kitchen directly after someone else had just cooked a full fry-up in the frying pan, so it still had all that lovely meaty oil left sloshing around in it. I turned the flame up and threw in my jalapenos. Fry them until they start to crisp up a little, then take 'em out and set them to one side for now. Thinly slice enough cheese to get some pretty decent coverage across however many sandwiches you'll be filling.
Look at the fucking size of that steak! I got that thing for next to nothing too, sometimes supermarkets are okay. I still prefer to buy direct from a proper butcher when I can, but my local butchers is in a pretty rough part of town, it's not fun getting 'faggot' shouted at you from across the street when all you wanna do is buy some meat.
Anyway, lower your hunk of flesh into the pan, and IMMEDIATELY start to dice it up using the biggest knife you can find. When researching the Philly cheesesteak, one other recipe I saw said you had to do it this way, and I thought surely it makes more sense to cut it either before or after the steak is cooked? I actually had a practice run on this meal due to not being able to find the damn camera the other night, and cut the steak after it had been fried, and for some reason it was just tough as all hell, and just didn't taste... right, y'know? So I gave it a shot at cutting it IN the pan and hey, whaddaya know, it works!
Your ciabattas will be done by this point so remove them from the oven, cut 'em in half, and leave them open, ready to pile your steak, jalapenos and thinly sliced cheese onto. Once thats done, stick 'em under a grill for a coupla minutes, just to get the cheese to melt into the steak. Daaaaamn that even SOUNDS good! As a final, artery-destroying touch, drizzle any excess grease left in your frying pan over the top of the whole thing.
Drive this 10" meat steak into my Glaswegian arteries.
For about a year now I've been talking to my mate Luke about the idea of having a proper chilli cook off. We spent hours discussing all the weird, wonderful, bizarre and disgusting stuff we could put into chilli, stuff that would make it so close to inedible, but we'd eat it anyway, no matter how fucking awful it turned out.
About a month ago, after I actually ventured back into society and saw him again, we decided we'd 'set the date' so to speak, and decided on 2nd October. I've spent about 3 nights since we set that date working on my chilli recipe, so I had a pretty universally lovable chilli, with none of the weird ingredients, or even the stuff that some people aren't into, such as kidney beans, red pepper, that sorta stuff. The plan was to use this as a back-up, incase I really did create something so unholy that it rotted someone's stomach lining away.
Anyway, enough bullshit. Here's the fucking epic mass of ingredients:
To feed four people, you're looking at about 1lb of minced beef there. You can also use chunks of steak, in a similar way as you would in a stew, but as you'll learn later this can be tricky to get right.
As with just about every damn thing I make for this blog, this has goddamn fucking red onions in it. I don't know why I keep doing it to myself, or why every damn dish needs onion, but I guarantee if you ever see me cook, I'll be weeping more than a teenage goth when they accidentally stab themselves in the eye with their eyeliner pencil.
So, dice up those motherfucker onions, cut up a couple of small pickled chillies, and very thinly chop your clove of garlic (consult Goodfellas for tips on that one). Set those aside, and grab your red pepper. Decapitate the top of the pepper, and scrape out the seedy innards so none remain. Then divide into sections, slice, and chop it so it has about the same consistency as your onions.
You'll see from the picture above I bought smaller chilli peppers/haloumi/bacon again, you can consult the Mummified Bacon Bomb post on what I did with those.
Once all your veg/chilli is prepared, light a flame under your casserole dish, and pour in about 2 tablespoons worth of sunflower oil. Just for the sheer fun of it, rummage your hands around in your bowl of mince while the dish pre-heats, and imagine you've just killed the animal with your bare hands, and must now skin, gut and strip the edible flesh from it's bones. Yeah, I'm a morbid cunt.
Add the mince into the dish in stages, stirring it, and breaking it up with a big-ass fork so it has a decent consistency, and isn't just a giant clump of flesh. When it has browned nicely, you should have a decent water-y beef stock in your dish. In order to keep this for cooking your veggies in, remove the mince from the casserole using a slotted spoon, and drain any excess liquid back into the dish. Once all your mince is on a side plate, dump in your onions, chillies, garlic, and let that cook, and soften for about ...7 minutes?
Boil up about 800ml of water, as you'll need this to make even more beef stock. Add in a tablespoon of plain flour: this partly determines how thick your sauce will be, so if you fancy something with the consistency of spicey tar, add in as much flour as you like. Once your stock cube has dissolved in your water, mix it in slowly using your stirring fork/spoon/spork/fpoon, and add in a small tin of tomato puree. If you don't have a tin let's say... about 2 tablespoons of puree will do it. Mix this all up for another 5-10 minutes, until it boils.
If you're weird enough, feel free to cackle, speak pidgin-Latin, and pretend you're some sort of culinary Witch/Wizard as you stir this. Yes, I'm that much of a fucking nerd.
When this has started to boil, when there are bubbles rising your cauldron, re-insert your meat. Dodgy turns of phrase aside, keep stirring for about another 5 minutes, so it all develops the same rich iron-brown consistency.
Pop your oven on at about Gas Mark 2, cover your casserole with it's heavy lid, and place it in the oven for around an hour and a half. While this is cooking, you can prepare any sort of side dishes you want to have with this. As I mentioned, I made the Bacon Bombs again: these only take about 25-30 minutes overall.
I doubt any of you will actually try this, but even if you do, I doubt you'll need to go through the next pain-in-the-fuckin'-ass steps as I did. Since for some bizarre reason, we were not having the cook off in my much larger, better equipped kitchen, I had to somehow find a way to transport all of this stuff up to Luke's for the final stages. I won't bore you with the myriad problems I encountered, and the burn marks on my hands as a result, but safe to say it was NOT an easy process.
Upon arrival at the venue for this spicey showdown, I divulged my plan of action to my cookery nemesis. I was to outdo whatever he had to throw at me by splitting my casserole into FOUR smaller bowls, and cooking four different varietys of chilli, each with different ingredients, sides and tastes, so that I would have ALL bases covered. Yeah, I know, I'm a fuckin' genius.
Here are my four varieties:
Chilli 1: The Universal Chilli
Basic chilli, taken straight from the casserole
Kidney beans
No chilli peppers
No hotsauce
Served with a side of boiled basmati rice
Bacon Bombs on the side too
Chilli 2: Nasty Nacho Chilli
Basic chilli
Add minimal amount of kidney beans
Add ONE variety of hotsauce, for extra bite
Small amount of chopped chilli peppers (seeds removed)
Served with tortilla chips, sour cream, grated cheese and guacamole
Chilli 3: Ch-Ch-Chilli
Chilli
Chocolate
Cherries
Chilli 4: Nuclear-strength,oesophagus-scarring, colon-rotting CHILLI CON CARNAGE!
Basic chilli
Add in a tub of extra chopped red pepper
Add a chopped chilli, with seeds intact
Add in lashings of 4 different varieties of hotsauce: Louisiana, Tabasco, Nandos HOT Peri Peri and Dave's Inanity Sauce. Yeah.
Serve with a warm cerveza, because water is for fuckin' pussies
Incase you're not as hip to hotsauce as I am, may I present:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave%27s_Insanity_Sauce
Basically, using these four weapons of choice, I fucking annhilated the competition. Not that there was much.
Luke had decided to go for the rather bizarre combination of using beef steak chunks, and instead of beef stock, he used a pint of Dark Chocolate Stout beer, by Brooklyn Brewery. He also slow-cooked it the night before, for far too long, as he thought that would tenderise the beef? The boy ain't right.
His own sister charmingly described his chilli as looking like 'when you take a shit when you're hungover'. So ladylike. But yeah, it really did:
As much as I enjoyed making all of this stuff, and as amazing as it all tasted (no ego, it seriously was damn good!), it was kinda spoiled by the fact that only 2 other guys showed up, and they had both eaten already, despite the fact they knew we were cooking for them.
I also got called gay for having a food blog. The great Steve Hughes says it better than I ever could:
