Blu-Tang Pan Pizza

This is just a short show-off post because I'm fucking addicted to making pizza.

Refer to the Pig Destroyer Pizza post for instructions on preparing the dough, the only difference with this pizza is my choice of toppings, and the shape of the base. Pretty fucking good, right?

So this pizza would live up to it's name I crumbled a tonne of blue cheese throughout the toppings, & splashed a shitload of Chipotle hotsauce over everything to give it a kick.
This pizza ain't nuthin' ta fuck wit!

 

Risotto-n Sound

This will most likely be my final entry in this blog, at least for a few months until I have a kitchen again.
It was originally supposed to be a collaborative effort between me and the girl who I first had the drunken conversation with that gave me the idea to do this almost two years ago, but a combination of illness, lack of appetite and good old-fashioned laziness meant that we never got the chance to cook together. Bummer.

A few days passed after buying everything before I actually got the chance to make this dish, so my ingredients were perhaps less than fresh (though it didn't really affect anything except the leek).

The first thing I did was chop my vegetables and garlic, boil up enough water to make my stock, and measure out enough rice (I used about 200g of this paella rice for a portion for one person).

I put about 10g of butter and a little splash of oil into my frying pan, mixed up the vegetable stock cube with boiled water, then added in half a diced onion to the pan. Lightly brown the onions for a couple of minutes before adding in your chopped garlic. Fry that all together for another minute before you chuck in your rice. When that's been in there for a couple of minutes, pour in around 400ml vegetable stock, and let that simmer and soak into your rice.

And that was all I did before following the instructions sent to me by my girl, who is far better versed in the art of cooking white meat than I am. I'm always scared I'll either over or under-cook chicken, and it'll either give me salmonella or taste burnt and rubbery. No such concerns with my beloved bleeding red flesh, I can eat that either bloody as hell or charred to death.

Anyway, her instructions were as follows:
"You'll need a biiiiiiiig pan for this.
Ok, first you hack the chicken breast into biteable chunks.
Salt and pepper it.
Preheat pan, tiny bit of oil, throw the chicken chunks in there.
I cant tell you how long they take, they should be white on the inside (pink is bad, very very bad) and light brown on the outside. Should take like 10 minutes."

"Done? Sweet. [...] Once the paella rice is ready, squeeze half a lemon, mix with the rice. Add the chopped leek and ready fried onion."

ACTION SHOT! WHOOOOOARGH!

"Add max 100g of cream to make a nice, mushy rice concoction.
Thats all your ingredients done, all you need to do is the spice finetuning and let it all simmer til its nom nom nom (boak)."

Which I followed to the letter, adding in liberal lemon squeezes, plenty of paprika and chilli powder, but I definitely screwed up on the cream aspect, since I picked up single cream which is FAR too liquid-y to work as a topping. I'll know better for next time when we can cook this dish together.
/disgusting 'romantic' bullshit

And to tie in with the latest pun-tastic title, here's some live footage of Finnish grind creeps
Rotten Sound playing at last years Obscene Extreme, which I'll be attending this year.
If you see a guy there looking out of place because his denim is covered in doom (rather than grind) band patches, buy him a cheap beer, because that'll be me.

Schnit-system

I don't get many chances to be taught new dishes first hand, since I only know one other person who has an interest in food to the degree I do. So when the opportunity arises to have her teach me some new tricks, I jump at the chance. A few nights ago we spent about 4hrs in my kitchen making all sorts of mess as we threw together a schnitzel main course, as well as a dessert at the same time.
Total fucking chaos.

Since this time I was flying solo, and foregoing the dessert aspect, I wasn't sure if it would take more or less time. I was kinda hoping for less. Here's what ya need:

In hindsight, I now know that is FAR too many potatoes and mushrooms, so don't use as many as shown in that photo. I was cooking for two, so adapt your ingredients according to what kinda portion you want.

First off, clean and chop your potatoes, fill a put of water, and bring it to the boil. Dump your wedge-shaped taters in the water and let them boil for a while.

While they're simmering, prep your sauce ingredients. Chop a whole red onion, and slice a few mushrooms, and set those aside for now.

 

Around this time you can drain your part-boiled taters and start prepping them for roasting. I'm not sure if this type of potato has a name or anything, but basically you're gonna coat them in generous amounts of rosemary and thyme before roasting them in the oven.

Pre-heat your oven to gas mark 6, and grab a coupla small plates. Cover one in sunflower oil and the other in a herby coating of rosemary and thyme.

Start spearing your potatoes with a fork, dunking them on the plate of oil, then smearing them around the plate of herbs so they get a good thick covering. Once they look like a whole herd of pungent little chia pets, put them to death by roasting them alive [insert evil genius laugh here].

Okay, so that photo is misleadingly lame, since all the potatoes in the foreground are bald as coots, but it's only because... well to be honest doing the whole herb thing takes fucking ages and I couldn't be arsed after getting about halfway through. So I cheated and just sprinkled the whole tray with herbs after I'd dunked 'em all out onto it. Lazy fucker that I am.

Leave them to roast and move on to the fun part: THE MEAT!
Lay your pork escallopes out on a chopping board or whatever clean work surface you have, and then dump a fucktonne of plain flour over the top, smoothing it all down into even consistency with your hands. Any excuse to touch dead flesh, right? Hey, saves me from resorting to necrophilia on those lonely nights when I don't have anyone to cook with...
Anyway, flip them over and do the same to the other side too.

Once they're well coated in flour, crack an egg onto a plate, and whisk it up into a consistent consistency. My usual verbosity eludes me at this moment in time.

So yeah, that looks fucking revolting. But it's not like thats what you're gonna be eating, it's just a base coat to ensure that your breadcrumbs (lurking in the background of the above photo) stick to your pork. I would have liked to get some more interesting breadcrumbs with other things through 'em, or to even have prepared my own, but laziness struck again, and I wound up just using the leftovers from last time.
Coat each of your sections of deceased pig in egg, then roll them around in the breadcrumbs until they're completely covered, then throw them into the frying pan. Oh yeah, should've mentioned that earlier, pre-heat your pan, and throw in some sunflower oil and a little butter.

 

While those are crisping up, check on your potatoes, and turn them if necessary, making sure they're nice and browned all over and the herbs are sticking to them. Well, thats what SHOULD happen anyway. Turn your oven down a few notches and pop a plate in.
Flip your schnitzel over and add a little more oil in to ensure they don't burn on one side. Cut on to make damn sure they're cooked through, then put them onto that plate you have heating in the oven.

Sauce time! After a little preliminary research online, I discovered that the sauce we had prepared last time was commonly used in a varation of schnitzel called Rahmschnitzel. The sauce is basically just fried onion, mushrooms, and cream.
Dump your diced onion in your now vacant frying pan, shortly followed by the mushrooms, and let them sit browning and shrinking for a little while before you splash in the cream. For the hell of it, I added a little bisto powder to the mix to try and thicken up the cream and give it a little extra flavour.

Remove your potatoes and schnitzel from the oven, plate it all up, and finally fucking eat the damn meal!

Here's some d-beat greatness from a country who don't really have anything to do with this dish. Fuckit, I present to you Sweden's finest; SKITSYSTEM

Enshroomed

So I had the idea for the title of this meal long before I acually had any idea what to put in it, except for the eponymous mushrooms of course. It was between 'Enshroomed' and 'To imbibe, cook straight and lose a tooth', and the latter is perhaps a little too specific to me alone.

I figured I could pull my usual trick of loading it up with beef, spices and cheese, but then I figured why not make it a bit interesting and use... oh, I don't know, sheep lungs, beef heart, and various other grisly ingredients? Or as most, less morbidly inclined, people call it, Haggis.

So with that idea fully formed in my mind, all I had to do was get the time to actually make the fucking thing. I had originally planned to just use 1 or 2 giant portobello mushrooms, but by the time I eventually got off work and got to the only supermarket open at that time, they had somehow sold out of giant fuckin' mushrooms, DAMNIT! So this recipe was made under extremely compromised conditions, and I apologize for that, it should have been so much better.

My plans for the other ingredients were pretty rough, except that I wanted it to look like a delicious death metal album cover when I was done. So I picked up some good strong red cheddar, some ground peri peri spices, a bottle of Louisiana hotsauce, and for some reason I decided that red food colouring would be a good idea. It wasn't.

So, to start this off, you have to choose your weapon of choice when it comes to cooking your haggis. You basically have 3 options:

• The quick option, 5 minutes in a bowl in the microwave.
• The medium, and probably optimal option, boiling it on the stove in the skin for around 45 minutes.
• The sloooooow tedious option, 90 minutes (!) in the oven, on Gas Mark 5, or whatever the equivalents are.

I went for the slow, doomy option, as always. I needed time to shower as I hadn't felt human in days and I had started to suspect there was a small eco-system living in my hair. Also, it gives you time to throw on some music while you prepare all your other ingredients. Obviously, you should go for Entombed while making this meal, but any death metal will suffice. Wrap your haggis, still in it's skin, in a good amount of tin foil, and stick it on a baking tray with a slight covering of water in it, and shove it into the fire.

So while you're torturing your mushrooms with a big fuckin' knife, removing their stalks and all that... whatever they call that weird-black-shit-inside-mushrooms, your haggis should maybe be around the 80 minute mark.
Pop the disembowled mushrooms on a baking tray, and don't be an idiot and forget you hate oil and accidentally add some like I did. urrrgh. Put those in your oven besides the haggis for around 5-10 minutes.
While those are hopefully sweating out all that gross mushroom-y liquid, take this time to grate up a pretty good amount of cheese, and to gut some red chillies. Don't, whatever you do, decide to make it look good by splashing red food colouring all over your plate like blood spatter patterns, as that stuff tastes NASTY!

Always put taste over presentation, but if you can have some fun with it without sacrificing taste, go for it!

Remove both the mushroom tray and the haggis tray from your oven, and switch on your grill immediately. Your mushrooms should hopefully have 'baked' so they're nice, crispy and dried out. This wasn't the case with mine, but I blame the fact they were just shitty normal-sized mushrooms, not ones of the magnitude that they have an atomic blast named after 'em.
Slit open the skin of the haggis, and dig around inside until you've turned that fucker inside out, scraping out every last disgusting morsel. Cram in as much of the haggis as you can into your mushroom(s), really pack it in.
Finally sprinkle on some of that strong-ass cheddar, splash in some hotsauce, and impale your chilli peppers on toothpicks, then stab 'em all the way into the mushroom, so it looks like some kind of delicious weird voodoo doll. Stick this under the grill for 3-4 minutes, just enough to char your cocktail sticks and melt your cheese.

Finally, serve with a glass of milk, coz this stuff is SERIOUSLY spicey!