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!

Carniwhore Burgers

Okay, okay, so I completely stole this recipe idea, at least certain elements of it. If you fancy a SRS recipe, not just my fast-as-fuck 'snack' version, you can get your drool on here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bookshark/sets/72157624856923391/

Now that my plagiarism has been exposed, I can get on with the usual bullshit. Heres what ya need:

Before I start, the only thing I didn't buy myself was the meat, because for some weird reason, we had... an entire slaughterhouse worth of minced beef in the fridge. I have no idea how much, weight-wise, I used, I just thrust my hand into the gigantic bowl of ungulate remains and pulled out a pawful.

I'm sure I've done a burger recipe before, so just... any prep involved in making burger patty, follow my old instructions. Be sure to use your hands to break up the meat and mix things into it, I can never stress that enough. Get bloody.

By now I'm goddamn sick of typing anything to do with chopping veg. Just fucking do it, right? Finely dice a red chilli if you fancy a dinner that's gonna kick your ass.
Also, cut off some pretty decent chunks of feta, for reasons that will become clear later/are already clear if you read the link above.

For something a bit weird, I decided it'd be a good idea to add a pretty serious amount of chilli powder, as well as powdered ginger, into my pattys. I know, ginger, I'm weird, I get it. It wasn't through any real desire to taste it in the burger (I couldn't in the end), just another excuse to experience the smell. Goddamn, that smell...

Anyway, where was I? So your meat is seasoned and mixed, your veg is chopped, your feta is primed.

Fire up your frying pan, splash in your oil, and seperate your meat into two decent sized pattys. Smash it flat with your fists, if you've had a particularly stressful day, or even if you haven't because pounding dead flesh is always fun. And surprisingly no, that's not a necrophilia joke, you sick fuck.

Once the meat is good and spread out, take your chunks of feta, place them on one side of the flattened patty and sprinkle in your red pepper and add in a fucktonne more chillis, powder and general spiciness, and fold the other side of the patty over on top of all of that, to seal it within. If you're worried the meat will just crumble and all your ingredients will spill out, lightly coat it with a mixture of a single whisked egg, milk and flour.

Lift these meaty beautys into your frying pan, and... well, just wait for 'em to fry, dumbass. They might take a little longer than your average burger because they're thicker, what with having 'layers' and all. So leave them in a good long while, and cut one through the middle to check it's all thoroughly cooked before serving.

The feta melts and gets all gorgeously gooey in the centre, it's honestly fucking amazing. I bought enough of it, and we have enough mince to ensure this is gonna be the only meal I eat for a week. Funnily enough, I am more than okay with that.

Since for once I didn't come up with my OWN clever post title, I'll settle for a clip vaguely related to it, in name alone.

Carnivore were a thrash band outta Brooklyn, featuring the late, great Peter Steele.
I know this is a food blog, but just listen to this track! The segue from all-out thrash, to the gloomy gothic doom mid-section, back through to thrash with an almost-crust-like vocal delivery... most bands still can't touch this prime late-80's stuff. RIP Pete.

Chilli Con Carnage

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:



Cookery nerd for life, no surrender.