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

Rouladen-ial Of Life

I had waited to try this meal for what seemed like forever, ever since I first saw this amazing creation, so when I fiiinally made it over to Germany 3 weeks ago to spend a week with the awesome girl who first told me about it, that was one of the first things we did.
I think we started preparing this meal around 10pm or something ridiculous, which considering it takes around 3 hours to cook, including prep time, was semi-retarded. When I finally got around to eating it, it was a totally sacrilicious experience.

Even though I would unfortunately be making it alone this time, I didn't change a thing about the recipe or the process, since it turned out so goddamn incredible first time around. My only concern was finding decent quality thinly sliced beef, since it's not something that I'd ever used before, and didn't know a whole lot about.
Luckily my local butcher had a pretty incredible selection, and the wee girl of about 13 behind the counter knew exactly what I wanted from my less than eloquent description "uhhhh, it's like a thin steak, but with no fat, and it's real big, like... an A3 sheet of paper?" "ummm, you mean beef ham?". BEEF HAM! Amazing name for it, considering it has fuck all to do with ham. Good ol' retarded Scotland.

Anyway, here's all the stuff you need...

First step would be to dice both your onion and your cornichons, then fry them for a coupla minutes without burning them.

Next up is the fun part! For some reason I can't remember, you need to smash the meat flat, so lay down a big piece of greaseproof paper and sit your beef on top of it. Cover with another piece of greaseproof paper, then take a pot or pan, and start battering the hell out of it.
This is yet another one of those moments where I might come across as mildly psychotic, as I kinda enjoyed the feeling of repeatedly slamming the pan down and seeing the blood spatter out of the lifeless tissue. Mmmurderous.

Top the meat with a LIGHT sprinkling of chilli powder and herbs, you dont wan;t anything to overpower the taste of your filling.

Speaking of the filling, the carnivore in me enjoys the hell outta the fact this dish is basically wrapping meat inside another kind of meat: bacon cubes!
First, spread a tablespoon of mustard on each piece of meat, getting really even, but not too thick, coverage. Next take your bacon cubes and sprinkle a handful on each mustard-coated beef section, and then grab a handful of your fried onions and cornichons and do the same.
Spread them out evenly across the meat, but not too close to edge so they don't fall out when you roll 'em up.

Next you... well, roll them up, basically. No fuckin' shit, right?
Once they're rolled into delicious beef parcels, cut about... say a metre of thread (I'd prefer to have something thicker, twine or whatever, but I don't have any), and wind it around the rouladen several times, then tie a series of overly complex knots (which any good serial killer should already know) to bind them tightly.

This is the last stage before you have nothing to do for a coupla hours. Fire up your frying pan, and lower your delicious meat parcels into the frying pan like Norman Bates disposing of Marion Crane's body in the trunk of her car.

Give them around 5 minutes, just to brown the outside and seal them.

To continue the metaphor, you then push the wrapped victims into water, but best not to use swamp water like Bates, a pot of standard boiling water will do. Cover the top, and leave for around 2 hours, checking on them occaisionally.

While you wait, check out the song that inspired the latest awful metal-tastic pun post title.



Even if you're not much of a death metal aficionado, you cannot deny the power of THAT riff that first rears it's monstrously catchy head around 0:49. The legendary late Chuck Schuldiner is one of the inventors and innovaters of death metal, and with riffs like that, no wonder he's still considered one of the greats. RIP Chuck.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah, it's two hours later, because you've sat mesmerised by that riff and played the song a further 23 times.

When we made this meal in Germany, it was served with a whole bunch of sides, including plums in their deliciously syrupy juice. Unfortunately, I'm kinda weird and just don't get the appeal of having sweet things in a main meal (sorry Steff!), so I decided to skip that side dish.

However, there were these awesome ready-made dumpling things, which I later learned I could make using suet. When your rouladen have around 30 minutes left in the pot, fill a bowl with 100g self-raising flour, a pinch of salt, and around 50g shredded suet. Whisk this into a thick, doughy mixture using around 5 tbsps of water, and all your flour and suet has been absorbed into the mixture. Place the dough onto more greaseproof paper, dust your hands with flour before dividing the dough into 8 individual balls.

Drop these into your pot along with your rouladen, cover again, and leave for around 20 minutes.

When your 20 minutes are up, uncover your pot and the dough balls should have expanded out a helluva lot, and absorbed some of that incredible meat stock. Remove your rouladen, place them on a tray, then remove the dumplings with a slotted spoon, and place them on the same tray, and pop it in a pre-heated oven for 5 minutes.

During these 5 minutes, you can prepare your gravy. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I like my gravy like I like my music; thick, black and sludgey. The amazing juices from your meat should have given you a pretty heady beef stock to work with, but it was still nowhere near thick enough for my liking.
Mix up a decent amount of Bisto gravy, using 4 heaped tsps and hardly any water, so it's thick as fuck. Add it into your beef stock, stirring the whole time, until it thickens up. Skim off the oily fat, and pour the remaining goodness into a gravy boat.

Remove your rouladen and dumplings from the oven, and serve! Then annoy the hell out of whoever you made it for by spending 5 minutes taking a million photos of their dinner...

I gotta say, these turned out incredibly! Admittedly, I was a little surprised that they did seeing as I was flying solo this time, and I didnt really have the benefit of a genuine German carniwhore to make sure I didn't completely fuck it up.

I guess I'll just have to cook 'em for her again to see if I did good, right?

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!

Curry-osion Of Conformity

So I literally racked my brains for... I'm not gonna say hours, because that makes me sound like some sad loser who had nothing to do with his day but cook... uhhh, yeah, totally not the case at all. Either way, I couldn't come up with a decent pun title for this post, hence settling on the kinda lame title I did choose. I don't give a fuck, curry is awesome, and so are COC.

Anyhow, I've wanted to try my hand at preparing a curry from scratch for a long-ass while now, but laziness and other excuses prevented it from happening. My pa makes a pretty mean pot every now and again, so I decided to use his recipe as the basis for my own first attempt.
I think he bases his on a traditional Rogan Josh, which is usually made with lamb, but since I was cooking for four, and I'm the only one cool with eating supposedly 'cute' animals, I switched lamb for chicken.

So here's the obligatory ingredients shot. I'm missing a coupla things, like the basmati rice, and a lemon, but fuck it.

So, as ever, the first thing I did was the slicing and dicing. Blahblahblah dice your onions blahblahblah slice your garlic cloves. The fun part, which I've never had the chance to do before now, was preparing the root ginger. You don't need a whole lot, so don't use the ENTIRE root, just peel the outer layer off of one small part of the root, then slice this exposed section into veeeery thin slivers. The smell of this stuff is goddamn incredible, I would happily work for slave labour wages if it meant all I ever did was slice root ginger all day. Love the stuff.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, prepping the spices. First, light a low flame under a dry frying pan, and tip in 2 tsps of whole coriander seeds. Then tip in the same amount of cumin seeds. Give these just a couple of minutes to gently roast them, then empty your pan into your mortar. I've never used a mortar and pestle before, but since I'm kind of a nerd, I got a set from Annual Gift Man, and have been dying to use 'em since. Crush, grind, and generally pulverise your roasted seeds until they're basically delicious-smelling dust. Once that's done, add 1 tsp of red chilli powder to your mortar, and then the same amount of turmeric. Grind all of that together to produce a pretty consistent powder.

Once all that stuff... well, looks pretty much exactly as above, light a fire under a medium-sized pot, pour in a decent glug of sunflower oil, then chuck in all of your diced onions. Give those about...5-10 minutes, just to soften them up a little, before adding in the garlic and ginger. Tip in 3 tsps of garam masala powder, and then the rest of the spices from your mortar. I really like saying mortar. COVERING FIIIRE! ...ahem.

Once all of that is mixed together pretty nicely, until it seems like a dry paste, that's when you want to add in your tin of chopped tomatoes. Scrape every last drop from the tin, and stir that all together. It'll look pretty red and firey, so for a bit of colour correction (and for taste, obviously) you want to stir in 3 tbsps of organic yoghurt. This should give your sauce a rich, iron-y colour, and start to give it a pretty good texture too, just the right mix of chunkiness and smoothness. Quit yakking and move on already...

While your sauce is simmering away, it's meat mangling time! I'm no expert when it comes to handling chicken, I'm really not a white meat kinda guy, and obviously it's a little tricker to get juuust right, texture-wise, but the method I use for cutting it into chunks is perhaps a little different, and a lot more fun, than most people's. I think the phrase 'hung, drawn and quartered' just about says it all.
Impale the thickest end of your chicken breast with a fork or skewer, hang it high in the air, then get to work with your scissors/garden shears. Snip off bitesize chunks, starting from the bottom, and imagine you're trying someone for treason as ya do it.
I know, I know, "why can't he just cook ANYTHING without medieval references", but fuck you, get your own food blog if ya don't like it.

Anyhow, once all four breasts lie dissected in your bowl, light up your frying pan from before, splash in some more oil, and tip in your chicken. You don't want to completely cook it through in the pan, just enough to whiten the outside layer. This takes... maybe 5 minutes at most. Keep turning the chunks with a spatula until every surface of your meat is white. It won't be cooked through, not yet, so add your chicken chunks into your sauce pot.

I say this like fifty fucking times with every post, but... ONCE ALL OF THAT is mixed together nicely, cover your pot and leave to simmer for a while. While the chicken cooks through in the sauce, take a lemon, and a ZESTER (Such a fun word. Zester. Say it aloud. Shout it even. Repeatedly. Endless entertainment.), and scrape off the entire surface of the lemon.
Set your ZESTER aside, and turn your attention to the fresh coriander.
Rinse it off, cut off the root/stalk, and begin to dice the leaves into the tiniest sections that you possibly can. Split this into 2 portions, one half will be added to your sauce in the pot, the other is for garnishing your rice. Add your pot half... well, to the fucking pot, obviously.

Take a mug, and measure one cup basmati rice to two cups water, and add these to another pot. Light a high heat under this, cover, and bring to the boil. Both of your pots, should be covered, and left to simmer, with occaisional stirring, for around 10-15 minutes at this point.

With only around 5 minutes left before the sauce, chicken and rice are ready, heat your oven to around gas mark 4, and pop in your naan bread. I would have made a naan from scratch, but frankly I couldn't be fucking bothered.

In the final minutes, taste your sauce, and add in any additional spices, salt, lint, hair, whatever the fuck you want. Also, add in your lemon zest and remaining coriander to your pot of rice, and stir thoroughly.
Once your naans are browned, your rice has absorbed all the water, and your chicken is cooked through, serve it all up to your family, who will then complain that it's too spicey. Fucking wimps.

And to make the title self-fulfilling, here's something else with warm tones, and a kick to it. Vintage, fuzzed-out COC. Dig in.

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:

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.