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:
This entry in the book was contributed by the absolute LEGEND that is Bobby Liebling from the mighty fuckin' PENTAGRAM!
I don't care if you don't take anything away from this entry food-wise, but please check out Pentagram, doom pioneers and still going strong!
So, this is probably VERY different to anything I've ever cooked in the past. The only reason I chose it is because I was cooking for my family, and they're all fussy as fuck, and this was the only thing they could all agree on. It's a dish made using both rice and noodles, two things I usually cannot STAND, because they just seem like fatty lumps of tastelessness designed solely to provide cheap sustenance with no real nutritional value or taste.
However, I'm willing to give anything a shot. Here are the ingredients you'll need for this bizarre carbohydrate-packed meal:
You're looking at around 500g of chicken breast, and that white bowl is actually filled with crushed up cornflakes (yeah I know, what the fuck Bobby, right?).
The first step I took was to get out my casserole dish, and smear the entire inside of it with full-fat butter. Once that's done, you can start cooking your various ingredients one-by-one.
First up is the chicken. Arrange all 500g worth on a baking tray, and stick it a pre-heated oven at around gas mark 5. It should take around 20-25 minutes to cook through.
While that's going, slice up your red onion into rings, or you can take it further and dice them, but due to the severe weeping involved with chopping onions, I try to take as little time with them as possible. Fire up your frying pan, and fry the shit out of the onions til they're nice and oily/burnt, then remove them and leave them aside for now.
Boil up a pot of water, and dump in your entire bag of rice. If you're like me, you'll probably only use around half of it, but what the fuck, it costs nothing, just use it all. Once your rice has been boiling for around 10 minutes, quickly remove and strain it, and put that aside too.
Refill your pot with water, re-boil, then dump in your noodles for about 4 minutes. Once the onion, rice and noodles are taken care of, your chicken should be about good to go.
Remove the chicken breasts from the oven, and leave them to cool for a minute or two. Here comes the fun part: tearing apart the flesh of an animal with your bare hands!
Grab the chicken and start ripping it up frantically, so that no strip is the same size. Tear at it like you're filled with murderous rage, like it's the face of everyone who's ever wronged you. Who says cooking isn't therapeutic?
Once your chicken lies in a ravaged heap, flesh clinging to your hands, bring over your casserole dish, and start to add in everything you've prepared so far.
Add it all in stages, so you're getting a good ratio of rice:noodle:chicken:onion. As you do this, splash in some cream of mushroom soup, this might seem fucking weird and gross, but it's pretty necessary to ensure that this doesn't just become a dry, tasteless mess. Once it's all in the casserole, give it a good mix around, preferably using your hands. Close your eyes and feel all those disgusting textures swirl between your fingers. Yeah, I'm a fucking creepy weirdo, what's the problem?
Sprinkle your cornflakes, and any sort of condiments you desire on top of this whole mess. I went for soy sauce, to follow the recipe as close as possible, but maybe go for something with a bit more flavour?
Pop the lid on your dish, and stick this in the oven at (my favourite!) gas mark 5. Give it maybe.... 40 minutes, 50 at a push. Remove the lid 15 minutes before the end so the top layer crisps up nicely, gives it a bit of BITE!
I made enough to serve 4 people if they're REALLY hungry, but this could easily stretch to serve 6 when combined with a starter. I wasn't expecting it to be as tastey as it turned out, I think the mushroom soup and chicken strips helped to liven up the boring-ass rice/noodles combo. I probably wouldn't make this again though, it took me waaaay too long, for very little taste payoff.
A couple of weeks ago I was aimlessly wandering around Waterstones, drooling over their cookery section, when I caught sight of what I can only refer to as some sort of bible. I audibly gasped, and through the haze of excitement I discerned the name of this mighty tome: 'Hellbent For Cooking: The Heavy Metal Cookbook'.
I knew I had to possess this gastronomic grimoire no matter what, so with shaking hands and sweating palms, I handed over the book to the cashier, and prayed to the man downstairs that I'd have enough coins in my pocket to purchase this thing of beauty. I got financially lucky, for once, and came home with the book in my clammy grasp, aching to try out every recipe immediately. Somehow it's taken me until now to actually get around to it.
This will be the first of two posts, as I cooked two recipes in one evening, in an attempt to make up for lost time, and I decided to go for recipes by two bands I really fucking love.
The starters were inspired by AUTOPSY mainman Chris Reifert's contribution to the book.
Due to my inability to find a decent deli in the whole of central Glasgow (even venturing into the shitty affluent hipster/student areas yielded no luck!), the ingredients have changed a fair bit from his original concept. Here is what I managed to find in the shitty supermarkets:
In the original recipe it was jalapenos instead of regular chilli peppers, and Monterey Jack cheese instead of haloumi, but hey, those are some pretty good substitutes.
First things first, buy that album, because you're going to need it as your soundtrack for cooking this stuff.
Secondly, you want to remove the stalks, and the seeds from those chillies, because even I can't handly that much spiceyness. Slit your chillies length-ways, and just scrape out the insides with a spoon/knife. Set those aside for a moment, and open up your haloumi.
For anyone who hasn't tried this cheese before, be prepared for it to taste NOTHING like cheese. It has a texture more akin to chicken, except it's entirely dairy. It's this texture which makes it fucking EXCELLENT on a BBQ, or just to grill in general.
So slice and dice the whole block into a size that you think would fit well within your chillies/jalapenos, and arrange it on a baking tray, and pop it under your grill for... lets say 10 minutes, why not.
Once you have your grilled haloumi nice and golden brown, stuff it into the corpses of the chillies. For embalming fluid, I chose to use spreadable 'smoked' cheese. Take a butter knife and just wedge as much of the cream cheese into every available gap not filled by the haloumi, until it's seeping out of the cavity in your chillies.
Next you want to bring in the bacon. I went for streaky (FINALLY FOUND SOME!), but any kind is good I guess. Cut it into nice manageable strips, and twist it around your entire pepper/cheese things, making sure it completely envelopes them so no innards are spilled. Impale these with toothpicks to hold it all together, arrange them on a foil-covered baking tray, and stick them in your oven at gas mark 5.
In around 20 minutes they should have cooked through, and started to even crisp up the bacon a little. Unfortunately I didn't have time to wait around for that to happen as I was cooking for mi familia, and they have no love for crispy bacon. Serve on a bed of lettuce with bbq dressing. I didn't, because I forgot to buy any, but hey, you live and learn, right?
Everything about it, from every single purveyor of the stuff (except Taco Bell, but you don't get that over here anyway). The whole process of walking into the fluorescent box, surrounded by overweight spotty drones, squinting at the tiny text behind someone's head for 5 minutes, trying to work out which option is least likely to give you the shits. Then trying in vain to explain what you want, to the point of using sign language because the overweight spotty drone behind the counter sure as fuck doesn't speak English past the phrase 'next over here, please'. Within 30 seconds, your pre-made 'meal' is being handed to you shrink wrapped in glossy paper and cardboard, and your drink that is pretty much just flavoured ice is spewed out of the giant gurgling robot on the counter. You sit down at the crappy formica booth, trying not to vomit at the sound of all the other pigs snuffling away in their troughs, and attempt to force this (barely edible) cardboard nightmare down your gullet without the aid of any cutlery whatsoever. Now, to me, that sounds like fucking hell. I'd rather starve to death than eat M*******'s.
Safe to say, when I want a decent burger and fries, the process is anything but 'fast'. Occaisionally I get a craving for one so strong it upsets me, because there are NO decent burger places this side of Glasgow, so I usually end up just not eating. Today I actually stood up and audibly said "Fuck this!" and ran out the door with burgs on the brain, much to the surprise of my family.
Here are the ingredients I picked up:
You can pretty much see from the picture the list of ingredients, but the amount of minced beef there is about 1lb, and that makes enough burgs for two.
As usual, the first thing you want to do is slice, dice, dismember, disembowel, sever and generally destroy your vegetables.
Dice your red onions into the tiniest squares imaginable, and sprinkle them through your mince. Add salt, pepper and chilli flakes to taste, and mix it all up using your hands (shout out to Steff: MEAT MANICURES!). Set that aside for now, and get into those potatoes. Slice them into... let's say 8ths, so that they're more wedges than chips, really. Place those into a basin of water for about 10 minutes.
Now you can get back to the fun of playing with carcass! Yay! Grab a handful of your mince mixture, and round it off and pat it into a vaguely burgerly shape, really squash it together so it's good n' dense. You should get 4 pretty decent sized burgers out of that amount of mince.
Empty your potatoes out of the basin, and into a tea towl to dry them off a bit. Fire up your deep fat fryer, and fill it with oil to about halfway full. Once your tatties are dry and your oil is hissing, dump them into the wire basket, and slowly lower them in. You can basically just leave them alone for 10 minutes while they crisp up, and concentrate on your meat.
Get your burgers into a frying pan, and throw in a couple of slices of (preferably streaky) bacon if you have any space left. You're looking at maybe 3.5 minutes per side for the burgers, but don't take my word for it, always cut the biggest burg in half and make sure they're cooked through.
While that's all just cooking away, slice your cheese (I went for Canadian extra mature, mmm pungent!) along the long side, if that makes any sense? Basically the way that will give you a biiig surface area of cheese. If you're of a healthy disposition, rustle up a basic side salad, and get all your other toppings and condiments ready. When your chips are a beautiful golden brown, and your burgs and bacon are a crisp, meaty pile of deliciousness, well then you're done ain't ya? Put it all together and serve with a non-alchoholic beverage, because you're feeling pretty tender after last nights ridiculous intake of beers.
