Kuma's Corner

If you're as much of a burger fanatic as I am, with an added obsession for all things heavy, who also spends far too much time on the internet, you'll no doubt have already heard of this mecca: Kuma's Corner.

picture taken from http://dawchicago.wordpress.com/

Kuma's is a bar and burger joint in Chicago, established in 2005, which I've had the most insane desire to visit since I first learned of it's existence a couple of years back. They have a great selection of both bottle and draft beers, mainly of the American craft beer variety, as well as a tiny kitchen which has a worldwide rep for cranking out the tastiest, most adventurous burgers you'll ever eat. They also blast metal constantly, the rules on their site on their site stating 'NO REQUESTS!'.
Yeah, it pretty much sounds like heaven.

Anyway, it's pretty much the only thing that could drag me all the way over to Chicago, and since I don't see that happening any time soon, I'm destined to live Kuma-less for the foreseeable future.

So I decided I'd take a little 'artistic inspiration' from their burger list, and create my own (no doubt inferior) versions of their burgs!

Here's the ingredients I picked up to create these monsters:

Incase some of those aren't immediately obvious, there's some chipotle sauce (which I have been trying to find in this country for what seems like forever!), BBQ sauce, a fresh salami, Swiss Emmental cheese, a big wedge of Gouda cheese, a clove of garlic, streaky bacon, and 500g of minced beef.

Kuma's uses pretzel rolls for their burgers, but since those aren't readily available here, and I was too goddamn tired and lazy to try making them from scratch, I settled on a freshly baked poppyseed roll and a couple of sesame bagels.

First step in creating the four different types of burgers is.... to create four different burger patties! No fuckin' duh, right?

This is where things branch off. I figured that since I would kill to try pretty much every burger on Kuma's menu, I should make as many of 'em as I could in one night!
I decided on making my own attempts at the YOB, Clutch, Mastodon and Goatwhore burgers.
The full menu can be found here http://www.kumascorner.com/food


YOB

To make the YOB burg, Kuma's uses

• Smoked Gouda
• Bacon
• Roasted red peppers
• Roasted garlic mayo

Chop your red pepper into strips rather than chunks, cut a pretty large chunk of gouda, and finely dice a single garlic clove to use in your mayonaisse.

So first step with this one was to fire the burger under the grill. I'm not used to cooking burgers in a non-barbeque context, so I was a little hesitant about grilling them indoors, not knowing how much time each patty might take, especially not since I'd made them about twice the size of my normal burgers.

Next I oiled up my frying pan, and threw in a coupla strips of streaked bacon, as well as my strips of pepper. Give it around 5 minutes to crisp up the bacon, then throw your diced garlic into a small corner (in a circular frying pan, yeah, I know) just to lightly brown it before mixing it into a paste in your mayo.

I checked on my burgs at this point and they were cooking much faster and much more evenly than I had expected for a grill, so I quickly cut a bagel in half and stuck it in the toaster. Once that popped, you basically just tower all the ingredients on top of one another, like so!

Admittedly, YOB aren't a band I've been into for long, I only got around to checking them out after hearing one of my favourite bands of recent times, Dark Castle, would be playing shows with them in the US. The limited amount of stuff I heard confirmed that this would be an ass-kicking tour that I will never see. So yeah, check out YOB, then check out Dark Castle too, for good measure.




CLUTCH

I was actually a little hesitant about making this, as Kuma's recipe calls for

• Cheddar
• Swiss
• Jack (which I assumed meant pepperjack)
• Smoked Gouda

Yep, that's FOUR cheeses right there. Given that one of my most hated foods in the world is four-cheese pizza (just WHY?! that's too much cheese, it's just dumb, fuck off with your four cheese pizza), I knew there was no way in hell I was making this with all four. There was the added factor that pepperjack cheese is nigh on impossible to find in my part of the world.

So I took a liberty with the 'Jack' aspect of the recipe and convinced myself they meant Daniels. Then I remembered I hate Jack Daniels, and opted to marinade my burger patty in the VASTLY superior Jim Beam.

This one is relatively simple in terms of prep work: marinade your patty in a liberal dose of Jim Beam for as long as it takes for you to chop slices of gouda, cheddar and swiss cheese, then fire your bourbon-y burger under the grill, and once it's cooked, stack it with cheese. Et voila!

The taste of this one was... a little strong for my liking. The Jim Beam marinade didnt really do a whole lot for the burger, it seemed to almost cancel out all the herbs and spices I added in to my minced meat, so it was a pretty bland patty, topped with 3 VERY domineering cheese flavours, all fighting for supremacy over my tastebuds. Overall taste was somehow simultaneously overwhelming AND underwhelming. Oh well, two more burgs to go!

Before that though, here's some vintage Clutch, one of my all-time favourite bands.



"Brown sugar, sweet potato
Sourmash, baby back
Redneck romance
Bless my soul!"


MASTODON

I was looking forward to trying this one as it involves BBQ sauce, something that I don't get to use anywhere NEAR as much as I'd like to.

Kuma's sez...

• BBQ Sauce
• Cheddar
• Bacon
• Frizzled onions

This is the closest to the type of burger that I usually make, so I was pretty confident I would be into it, there's no 'risky' ingredients or anything, just tried and true burger mainstays! I did however decide to marinade the patty in the BBQ sauce, rather than just cover the whole thing in a big dollop of it once it was cooked.

Burger: grill. Bacon: frying pan. Likewise for your onions. Once all of it is cooked, put it together. Easy as that.

This one went exactly as I expected: tasty as hell! The onions turned out slightly sweet, counterpointing the SERIOUSLY salty bacon. Also, the BBQ-marinaded patty was so juicy and just goddamn delicious. I would recommend this burger the most out of all the ones I made.

Major label record companies suck, we all know this, so as a result of them not wanting anyone to hear their artist's music, I can't embed my favourite Mastodon track....

I can however post a pretty excellent quality LIVE version! That guitar... hotdamn!




GOATWHORE

Last up, and yeah, least, is the Goatwhore burger.
This one didn't really get a fair shot, because after eating the other three GIGANTIC burgers and working my way through a couple of Sol beers as I cooked, I was way too full to eat this.
I promise I'll give it another shot, and give it the attention it no doubt deserves.

Kuma's ingredients for this surprisingly include to goat's cheese...

• Fried salami
• Provolone
• Giardiniera salad

For starters, provolone is IMPOSSIBLE to find in central Scotland. At least in all my usual deli haunts and the two major supermarket chains that I tried to find it in. So that was stricken from the list. Also, I wasn't ENTIRELY sure what a giardiniera salad actually was, it seemed to involved a whole lot of olives, and pickled cauliflower...? Either way, that was off too. I at least followed the 'salad' part and bought a few fresh leaves of lettuce.

So yeah, this one was super quick since all I had to do was lightly fry the salami and place it on top of the burger. Pretty boring, really.

Like I said, i really didn't give this one it's due, and couldn't even finish it when it sat there oh-so-pretty on my plate. I packed it up in tupperware, took it to work the next day and ate it cold for breakfast. Urgh. Not recommended.

Goatwhore are Celtic Frost-worshipping blackened thrash from the murky South, featuring guitarist Sammy Duet, who played in the phenomenal Acid Bath.



This blog was far from chronological, I actually prepared all four of these at the same time, and the insanity involved in trying to seperate the right ingredients to go with the relevant burger, shoot pics of before-and-after ingredients, and then find time to actually EAT the fuckers... goddamn, that was a frantic meal! All respect in the world to the chefs who actually prepare burgs all damn day in Kuma's.
Hopefully one day I'll make it for to Chicago and try the genuine article.

(Hell)Mouth full o' beer

Another saturday night of avoiding the shitty draft beers in all the local pubs, dreaming of one day living somewhere that has at least ONE decent place to get a drink.
A pub that doesn't assault your ears with 1000bpm computer music (is there any more useless profession than the pub DJ?), where the staff don't sigh with exasperation every time you order another drink (hey, not like it's their JOB or anything, right? oh, wait...), and the powder-nosed clientele don't stare at you with thinly-veiled desire to slit some pretty big holes into your skin.
A man can dream. Or just move outta central Scotland.
Anyway, where was I...?

Yeah, so one of the UPSIDES to Scotland is that we do actually happen to have some pretty damn good independent breweries. Perhaps leading the charge of the new generation of brewers who want to make new, exciting, fun and experimental beers, are Brewdog.
I won't go into their history or any of that, if you're that fucking interested, abandon reading this and visit their site instead at http://www.brewdog.com/

Anyway, they have a whole tonne of drastically different beers on offer, I thought for the purposes of this 'review', and for the purposes of gettin drunk on a tight budget, I'd choose the cheapest, most basic 4, which are available in most good stores UK-wide.

So yeah, all their beers have slightly nonsensical names, but I'm such a sucker for packaging that of course beers with 'hardcore' and 'punk' in the name are gonna catch my eye. Anyway, here goes...

First up I'm going with the Punk IPA. Which is kinda cheating, because I actually drink this a lot. But that kinda tells ya somethin, right? It's a damn delicious beer, that's what it tells you.
However, I have introduced it to other people, who haven't been quite as enamoured as I am. I'll admit, it does have a very... distinctive taste upon first sip. It's quite hard to describe, as you'll know from any previous 'reviews' of mine that you mighta read, I'm fucking shite at conveying what the beers are actually like further than 'durrrrh, I like it because it is beer and it is good and I like good beer guuuurrrrh'.
I want to say it's almost fruity, but that's so damn inaccurate... but it just has this slightly sweet, organic, natural taste to it. It's really smooth, but still has a little kick to it, a nice refreshing fizz. I could throw adjectives at it all day, but it'd take less of your time to just go buy a bottle. So... y'know, do that.

Naturally, I'm drinking chronologically, and following punk with hardcore.
Whooooah, this lives up to it's name! After the first slug hit me like a delicious fist, I checked the percentage, this shit's 9.2%, not half bad! The taste is real strong, and it takes a couple of swigs to actually figure out what kinda taste it actually HAS. It's a real dry, slightly bitter beer, but somehow very distinct from a traditional pale ale.

The label is pretty good (yeah, I'm buzzed enough already to start sitting grinning and staring at the bottle), using phrases like 'robustly delicate toffee malt canvas' and a whole bunch of colourful descriptions and pretentious bullshit... which I dig! I'm not sure how 'robustly delicate' it is, but I can say that it's a damn savoury beverage which will kick your ass after just 2 or 3 bottles.

Next up: 77 Lager.
In comparison to the last heavy hitter, this beer is pretty damn lightweight. Halfway through the last one, I found myself sitting in front of the TV, watching Indianda Jones and the Temple of Doom, and finding the shurnken and shrivelled monkey's heads they served for dinner really appetizing. So yeah, dangerous drunkeneness. But this bottle is a lot tamer, but just as tastey. This bottle is definitely more of just... a standard beer, no real distinctive traits other than it's an average beer, but it's a damn finely brewed one!

Lastly, and as ever, by no means least, is the 5am Saint. By now, extenuating circumstances have put a decent gap of 2 hrs between this beer and the last, so I'm pretty sobered up for starting it. First impressions are... good! It's another smooth one, not much of a kick at all. I wonder why they call it the 5am Saint. I reckon this would be pretty good as a 'wind-down' beer after a pretty heavy night. Get home at 5am, there's this little beauty chillin in the fridge waiting for ya, the perfect nightcap. Which even though I'm far from going to sleep, even at 1am, it kind of is for me. As a last beer of the night, this works perfectly.

So yeah, somehow I DIDN'T end up wasted by the end of that little escapade. That's gotta be a first for this blog!

There is literally no connection between this band, this clip, and the beers I chose to drink, except a hastily-assembled pun post title, and the fact they just happened to be what I was blasting when I started drinking tonight.

Grill 'em All!

For starters, I would like to apologise to the girl who partially inspired this post, since she's spent the weekend longing for barbeque food and steak.
So me, being the absolute prick that I am, decided 'hey, I know, I should totally have a barbeque and cook steak on it!'.

Disclaimers and apologies aside, I do genuinely LOVE barbeque season, which for me lasts pretty much from the first day there's still daylight past 7pm, pretty much up until the first snowfall of that winter. I think last summer I must've set some kind of record by attending barbeques for EVERY dinner for just over two weeks. Seriously, even if it was someone I didn't know who was hosting it, I got to know 'em pretty damn quick when I showed up at their home bearing dead animal parts and exotic sauces.
So I never pass on the opportunity to start fires outdoors, and tonight was my first of 2011.

It should go without saying that the first thing you do is fire up your grill. If you use firelighters, or that scooshy liquid shit, you should have your fucking FACE barbequed, you cheating motherfucker. Either charcoal ONLY, or use blocks of chopped wood, anything as close to 'natural' fire as you can get, because that other shit gives off an awful chemical odour, and will make your meat taste of deodorant. Fucking vomit.

So yeah, incase you're completely fucking numb in the brain, the most obvious choices for barbeque-ing are STEAK & BURGS! I usually come up with some extremely booze-sodden meat monstrosities, and tonight was no exception. I blew what little I had left of this weeks food budget on the biggest steaks I could find, and didn't think they should be sullied with just any old swill, I was gonna go all out for these babys:

Yep, any of you who actually read this sensory-serving, starvation-solving, solipsistic, salivation-inspiring soliloquys (yeah, I'm a pretentious, overly-verbose cunt, fight me about it) who know your bourbons will know that this shit just got SRS! Woodford Reserve will burn your throat and blacken your lungs, and is not for the faint-hearted. So I poured a pretty goddamn decent measure of it into the craters I carved on my steak.

I also figured I would (yet a-fucking-gain) make my own burgers. Insert previous blog entries about that process here. I did pull a Frankenstein and create some fuckin' MONSTERS tonight though!

So basically the prep work takes up all your time with barbequing, because once your meat is set to go, and your flames are licking your grill tray, all you gotta do is introduce them!

It's as easy as that, just keep a very careful eye on your steaks if you're like me and like 'em pretty much just bloody as all hell. When I bite into a steak, I want to hear that fucker moo. A figure about a minute for one side, and 30 second on the other is optimal, but if you're against mild bestial vampirism, cook it for a while longer. Pussy.

Yes, thats a strawberry milkshake, sofuckinwhat? There's enough bourbon soaked into the meat to get me nice and drunken. Drunk on carcass, life don't get much sweeter.

Just a short intoduction to a couple of guys you should already be familiar with if you're reading this blog, and thus probably already into metal and food, the awesome GRILL 'EM ALL foodtruck, out of Los Angeles, California. I can't tell you anything this video won't, but safe to say this truck is the ONLY reason I would ever visit Cali. Enjoy, and get salivating!

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!

Pesto-lence

First of all, I apologise for the fact that my ingredient photo looks like a goddamn promo shot for Sainsburys. It also doesn't help that I used their spokesperson/corporate shill Jamie Oliver's basic pesto recipe, before mangling and bastardising it to make my own twisted creation. Anyhow, here's all the shit that goes in it:

I should probably mention that a couple of vital pieces of kit are not pictured, such as a giant-ass pestle and mortar, and  an electric food processor (or if you prefer, simply a blender).

Also if anyone ever actually uses my ridiculous attempts at cookery as guidelines (ha!), then that's all the stuff you need to cook pesto my own weird way. Due to my complete lack of photographic ability, some of that might not be so obvious what it is, like the block of parmesan cheese, or the sun-dried tomatoes.

First things first, get the usual boring shite outta the way, chop pepper and red onion, set aside.

Next, use about a third of a pack of pine nuts, pour 'em out onto a baking tray, stick them under the grill for a minute or two, you don't even want to brown them, just veeeery lightly roast 'em. Take those out, and set them aside too.

If your tastes are similar to mine, and you don't give a fuck how bad it makes your breath smell, take 2 whole cloves of garlic, peel and chop them, and throw 'em into your mortar. Sprinkle in some big-ass rocks of sea salt, and tear off a sparse amount of basil leaves. I don't like a whole lot of basil, so feel free to use a forest's worth, if that's your thing.
Grind it all up, really smash it until it becomes a pulverized paste, then scrape it into your blender.

Next, take your gently roasted pine nuts, chuck those into your freshly emptied mortar, and proceed to destroy those too. As anyone who has talked to me for even 5 minutes will know, I don't eat anything unless it has some sort of chilli or ridiculous spice in it, so I threw in a good few pinches of mixed dried chilli seeds, and ground those into the pine nut mush.
Once those are sufficiently obliterated, scrape them into the blender with your garlic/basil paste.

Here comes the part I was wary of, as most pesto recipes recommend using a liberal amount of parmesan cheese and olive oil, neither of which I am into in any way (seriously, the smell of oil makes me want to vomit out my entire digestive tract. I hope that mental image just ruined your appetite. you're welcome.).
Instead of just bitching out and substituting these ingredients for something more palatable to my... well, palate, I decided to face my food fear, and I grated that fucking parmesan like I was downright goddamn pissed off at it. Sprinkle about half of what you grate into the initial blender-ful, drizzle in some (BLURRRRGH) olive oil, stick a lid on it, and blend away.

At this point you can start adding in whatever ingredients you think will work, to supplement the basic pesto paste. I went for a coupla sun-dried tomatoes, which are salty as all hell, as well as a nice big splash of Louisiana Hotsauce, and just a few chunks of my sliced red pepper.

I know, that looks fucking revolting, but trust me, once it's all blended up to fine paste and added to all the other ingredients, aesthetics will be the last thing on your mind.

Blend all that yet again, splashing in more (but not too much!) olive oil as needed to give it a good sloppy consistency, and any additional parmesan if it gets TOO viscous.

Scrape it all out into an empty jar, with any luck you'll have enough to either feed four people, or to be eating nothing but pesto for a whole weekend.

Boil up a pot of water, and drop in your choice of pasta. Normally I'm a fusilli or penne man, but seeing as I used up all of that on my other dinners this week, I was left with tagliatelle.

Start a fire under your frying pan, and lay your bacon in it, making sure to cut off every sliver of excess fat. This is one of the rare occasions that I like my bacon burnt to a crisp, so... do that, and chuck in all of your red onion and red pepper, to lightly fry those too.

When your bacon is the consistency of a corpse's skin putrefying and crackling in the glare of the sun (apparently reading too much Stephen King will make you think of everything in terms of corpse metaphors), and your onions are starting to brown, scoop in a good 3 or four teaspoonfuls of your pesto mix, and stir it all together.
Drain your pasta, and add all of that into your frying pan too. Stir it around for a couple of minutes, so the pasta starts to burn slightly. This is a personal preference, you could also make this without the pasta going anywhere NEAR the frying pan.
Finally, get bored of stirring and feeling hungry as fuck, and serve it up!

While you gnash away hungrily at that, listen to something appropriately (and yes, connected to the post title, as fucking ever) technical and carnivorous sounding. Some prime late-80s death metal for ya: