tl;dr

It was all Matt’s fault. Skittles and vodka, together at last. Toby and I decided we had to try this for ourselves. At 4:55pm the suggestion was made; by 5:15pm we were back from Asda.

(tucked away behind a clickthrough because of copious pictures)

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Food

Well, that didn’t quite go as planned.

What is supposed to happen is the chilli paste sinks down into the jar and a layer of clear vinegar forms on top, which you skim off. This vinegar will contain a good chunk of the capsaicin from the chillis in it (this is the chemical which gives chillis their hot flavour), which calms the sauce down. Except I have no vinegar layer, for whatever reason. So I have an entire jar of very potent, rather sour sauce.

Not that it’s unpleasant — it’s rather tasty, in fact, I just ate a teaspoon of it — but it’s probably not all that useful as a table sauce. I might freeze most of it in ice cube trays and use it as an additive to curries and suchlike. The original recipe says this will keep for months in the fridge but even so I’m not sure I’d get through it all.

Food

Well, not quite, but it did feel that way.

Started on Saturday afternoon when my friend Scott came around. As we were making a curry for tea, I followed his advice and made up a batch of his curry base sauce. He’s taken and modified a number of recipes from a currymaking forum (I can’t remember the name, unfortunately); they are aimed at reproducing, not authentic Indian cuisine, but rather “authentic” takeaway curry. As such, most of the recipes start with a generic base sauce you make in large quantity in advance and typically freeze in small portions. The recipe for this:

700g cooking onions, chopped into 8 pieces
4 large garlic cloves, roughly chopped
15g of fresh ginger root, roughly sliced
1 red (or green) pepper, cut into 16 pieces
120g salad potatoes, peeled and halved
120g carrot, sliced (2-3 carrots)
1 large tomato, quartered
20g coriander stems, finely chopped
200ml vegetable oil
1500ml water
1 tbsp salt

2 tsp cumin powder
1.5 tsp coriander powder
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp chilli powder
1 tsp Kashmiri mirch (MDH) (or paprika as an alternative)
1 tsp Madras powder (Rajah)
0.5 tsp fenugreek powder

1. Boil all ingredients in a pan, covered, for 45 minutes.
2. Add one (400g) tin of chopped tomatoes and a further 500ml of water.
3. Liquidise thoroughly.
4. Simmer rapidly for a further 30 minutes to reduce volume to around half; you are aiming for 2.65 litres in volume (a depth of 7cm in a 22cm soup pan; go go pi-r-squared).

It looks like this before reduction:

Note the use of vegetable oil, rather than the more traditional ghee. I’m going to try a smaller batch with ghee; Scott thinks it would be too rich. He could well be right.

Then we got drunk and played the drums:

Growing hungry, we decided to make a curry we could actually eat, rather than a vat of generic sauce which, whilst tasty, wasn’t particularly satisfying on its own. For this we followed a pathia recipe of Scott’s own devising:

600g of lamb steaks, diced and pre-fried in one ladle of base sauce and some oil

3 ladles of base sauce
1 onion, finely diced
2 tbs red wine vinegar
1 tbs brown sugar
½ a lemon, cut into wedges
2 plum tomatoes, cut into wedges
Fresh coriander (to taste, as much or as little as you like)
3 tbs vegetable oil
1 tsp mustard seeds

Make a paste of the following ingredients in a blender:
3 fresh or 4 dried red chillies
4 garlic cloves
2 tsp coriander
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp turmeric
½ tsp chilli powder

1. Warm base sauce through.
2. Heat oil and fry onion until golden.
3. Add the mustard seeds to the pan and wait for them to pop, then add the paste,  fry for a few minutes. Add red wine vinegar (and stand back from fumes!)
4. Turn up the heat and add 1 ladle of base sauce to the pan and allow it to boil.
5. Add the brown sugar and lemon and a second ladle of base sauce to the pan, keeping the heat up and the contents of the pan moving. Bring back to the boil.
6. Add the pre-cooked lamb. Add a ladle of water if needed to stop the sauce sticking, but make sure it’s hot before moving on.
7. Add the third ladle of base sauce to the pan along with the tomatoes and cook for a few minutes.
8. Keep the pan on the hob, cooking through until you get your preferred consistency.
9. Just before removing from the heat, stir through the chopped coriander.

We served this with this pilau rice recipe — which requires timing just a fraction too precise to tackle after half a bottle of Rioja and a few rum’n'cokes. Sorry, guys who ate my overcooked rice.

Here’s the final dish:

The curry there has too much lemon in; being of a “chuck it in” mentality by this point we put the entire lemon in, but it came out just a little too sour. Temperature was just right though, the perfect pathia being (in my opinion) slightly too hot to eat comfortably but so tasty you can’t stop either.

Then we played more drums:

Sunday, following a cooked breakfast, Scott went home and I made a roast dinner with Toby. Whilst waiting for the chicken to roast we thought we’d make some chilli sauce to this recipe:

1. Place chillis in blender
2. Add enough vinegar (the colourless stuff, distilled malt vinegar)
3. Add handful of salt
4. (Optional) add tomato puree, garlic, sugar, and/or anything else
5. Blend, transfer to saucepan
6. Bring to boil for 10 minutes
7. Transfer to a jar and leave covered with a cloth (but with the lid off) for a week
8. Skim the vinegar from the top of the mix and refrigerate

This is what it looked like before blending:

The stuff is… whatever you call it. Not fermenting. Resting perhaps? Anyway, it’s resting now, but I can confirm it’s pretty damned hot (there were a number of bird’s eye chillis in there, so that’s unsurprising).

Food

I’ve struggled with this in the past, usually getting the quantity of water/stock/time/heat just right. Last night I tried this recipe from Delia Smith and it worked flawlessly. Here’s exactly what I did:

1. soak 275ml of Basmati rice for 1/2 hr in a few changes of water (Delia says this is not necessary)
2. grind 2 cardamon pods, 3/4 tsp cumin seeds, 1/2tsp coriander seeds
3. using a large frying pan with a lid, toast the spices for 1 min over a high heat
4. reduce heat, add 1tbsp groundnut oil and one small finely chopped onion, fry for 3 min
5. add rice to pan and toss to cover the rice in the oil
6. add one pint of boiling water with one chicken stock cube dissolved in it (supposed to make 3/4 of a pint, so it’s weak stock)
7. add one bay leaf and a 1 inch piece of cinnamon stick
8. stir the rice just once, gently
9. put the lid on (I wrapped it in a teatowel for a tight fit) and put on your smallest hob on the lowest heat
10. after 15 min, all the liquid was absorbed (40min for brown rice says Delia)
11. it’ll keep with the lid on like that for a while
12. before serving, fluff the grains with a fork

Delia says this serves “four to six”. I say it serves three, maybe four, because I am fat. It could probably use some saffron or yellow food colouring for cosmetic purposes, but it tasted very nice. Compared to what I did in the past, using a broad frying pan and not stirring it were probably the reasons this came out better.

Food, Games

Steve has sent me word of another horrible/ingenious bacon related recipe: bacon caramel.

Essentially: make caramel, fry bacon until crisp, mix into liquid caramel with some roasted almonds, and leave to set. The question of “why would you do this” I leave to a higher power.

Bacon, Food

One pound of smoked bacon, minced, formed into a patty, stuffed with mozzerlla, beer-battered and deep-fried: good grief. I have my doubts that it would be too salty… perhaps better made with a mix of smoked and unsmoked bacon. His battered jalapeños look very nice too.

(Thanks to Craig for the link, who has no blog for me to link to.)

Bacon, Food

Oh my.

• two pounds of bacon, woven
• two pounds of sausage meat
• wrap bacon around sausage meat, roll into a sausage
• roast
• roll out a large sheet of croissant dough
• cover in scrambled egg
• cover in cheese
• place the bacon/meat… thing… in the center of the dough and roll up
• cook

The unholy result is the Bacon Wellington:

Edit from two hours later — god, this is making my hungry. This is the first one of these “stupid bacon creations” I’ve considered making. It’s the delicious looking croissant dough that keeps drawing me back.

Bacon, Food

Earlier, my very good friend Scott emailed me to ask: “what time is it? BACON TIME OF COURSE!”

Meanwhile, at almost the same minute, my spooky opinion twin Rodafowa queried my bacon obsession. I replied to him:

I’m not as obsessed with bacon as my blog suggests. I quite like eating it but I’ve never felt the need to weave it. My audience, however, is obsessed – my bacon posts get the most comments, and bacon related topics get emailed to me now. I have no idea what that’s all about, but I’m not knocking the hits!

and he came back with:

That’s awesome. And as the years go by it’ll inevitably snowball, each link you’re sent leading to a bacon-related post that convinces more people that bacon is the primary driving force in your life and inevitably causing even more links to be sent to you. Soon each time you look in your inbox there’ll be a dozen new items related to every possible aspect and permutation of sliced schweinfleish until you’re so heartily soul-sick of the stuff you never want to so much as lay eyes on a Frazzle again. But by this point it’s taken on a life of its own. People have been relating amused anecdotes to friends about the Internet’s Bacon-Lover, and despite your pleading you’re now subjected to a relentless bombardment of bacon-related stories from every corner of the world. Because you’re the Bacon Man now. You can’t turn on the TV for fear of catching a Walls advert or soap-opera fry-up that’ll leave you howling at the screen and tearing at your hair. You can’t go work because every potential employer is scared off by the growing madness in your eyes and the stories of your life-consuming bacon obsession. You definitely can’t go near the Internet.

Eventually, it all becomes too much, your mind snaps under the strain and you’re eventually shot by counter-terrorist police trying to blow up Denmark. The headline the next morning reads “MISTER BACON DIES”.

So, there you go, my epitaph is all wrapped up already. Which is convenient I suppose.

Bacon, Personal

I had a “late in from work / feel ill / cannot be arsed to cook” evening tonight, combined with an unwelcome bareness in my kitchen cupboards.

So: coarsely chop red onions, sautee in a ovenproof pot over a low heat. When softened, add some garlic (lazy garlic in jar for me), stir, and add a pack of sausages; preferably some robustly flavoured ones. Fry for ten minutes or so to cook the sausages. Add a tin of baked beans (yes, baked beans, I like baked beans), some tomato ketchup, and random dollops of stuff from your sauce cupboard (tonight that was Reggae Reggae sauce and tobasco). Put in oven for 45 min or so. Meanwhile, peel potatoes, boil until soft, mash with plenty of butter, some cream, English mustard powder, and Dijon mustard.

Done!

Food

Clearly, my reputation as a bacon connoisseur is growing, even though I’d never actually cook any of these crazy recipies. I’m just in it for the madness. Nevertheless I am now getting sarky comments about non-bacon content, so for all your schweinfleisch needs I urge you to consider Bacon Explosion: The BBQ Sausage Recipe of all Recipes at bbqaddicts.com.

Basically, it’s a bacon weave, covered with a layer of sausagemeat, coated in BBQ rub, filled with a layer of cooked bacon, covered in BBQ sauce, rolled into a sausage shape and hot smoked for a few hours, then finally coated in more sauce. The result:

Bacon, Food