Pork adobo

The Filipino flag
Source: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Philippines-Flag/18868.html

There is a quote about Mexico attributed to its former president, Porfirio Diaz, which is "¡Pobre México! ¡Tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos!" which means "Poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to the United States!" Obviously, the country of Mexico is literally nextdoor to the United States, geographically and it is something of the bitch to the US, providing cheap labour and a destination for cheap healthcare but also lending them some great genuine cuisine from the New World (and probably providing a lot of drugs for them too). The country isn't the only one that has been culturally overwhelmed by the USA. Another more geographically remote and recent addition to this list is the Philippines. 

The Philippines
So many islands
Source: https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/philippines

The Philippines is a huge archipelago of 7641 beautiful tropical islands in the South China Sea. It's an interesting country in that it's the only Christian country in Asia, thanks to being a former Spanish colony (to be fair, pretty much every country in the region, with the exception of Thailand, was colonised by Christian European powers, but retained their culture and religion largely intact. However, no-on expects the Spanish Inquisition). It came under the influence of the US after it became a prize in a war between Spain and the US and, later, as a place from which the Americans would launch attacks on Japan in WWII. It's also a very poor country, which is why Filipino nurses staff hospitals the world over, Filippino sailors man ships traversing the world and Filipino bands play in bars across SE Asia. The other reason for this is because English is so widely spoken (again, relating to the American influence). As much as I dislike sweeping generalisations and at the risk of being patronisingly colonial, the Filipino people are actually lovely: friendly, fun and happy, like those of many other countries in the region. Sweeping generlisations are seldom universally correct, and this is true of the Filipino people. As well as being ruled as a colony, they've had more than their fair share of in-house despots, such as Ferdinand Marcos and current populist "hard man" Rodrigo Duterte. Both Filipino, both tossers, along with their cronies who have enabled them to gain and retain power.

The Terminator has let itself go
Roberto Duterte, Self-styled hardman and wannabe dictator president of the Philippines

As much of a tropical paradise and as wonderful the Filipino people are, unlike many other countries in the region, the Philippines are not renowned for their cuisine. If you think of the food of SE Asia, you think Thai curries, you think Malaysian satay, you think Singaporean noodles (or chicken rice, truly one of the pinnacles of world cuisine, for that matter), but nothing from Manila. I know a little about Filipino food. I visited Manila once (I mentioned it here), and, as great as it was, I don't recall any outstanding food I ate (pork scratchings aside). It's not too surprising as the capital, at least, is swamped with US fast food restaurants

As far as we ignorant Westerners are concerned, Filipino food is probably noteworthy for three dishes: balut, pagpag and adobo. Balut is a steamed, fertilised duck egg, so basically a boiled egg with little-biddy chick inside it. Pagpag is the shit McDonalds and KFC, or any food outlet, throw out after its best before date, reheated and served to the poor; and then there's adobo, a rich stew that is unctuous and comforting, giving lie to this idea that the Philippines don't have any decent food (which makes them the Britain of Asia in that respect, because our food is laregly crap, but we have our moments). 

Adobo is a pretty simple dish, without any fancy spices or obscure ingredients. However, it's got a lot of the elements that are common in Thai, Chinese and other cuisines with simultaneously being sour, sweet, salty and umami

TIMING
Preparation: 10-15 minutes plus marination
Cooking: 3½ hours

INGREDIENTS
4tbsp dark soy sauce
6 cloves garlic, crushed
3 tbsp white wine vinegar
1tsp whole black peppercorns
5 bay leaves
250-300g belly pork, cut into bite-sized chunks
1 medium onion, sliced
1 medium sweet potato, peeled and cut into 2cm chunks
2 tsp sugar
½ tsp ground white pepper

RECIPE
Put the soy, vinegar, garlic, black peppercorns and bay leaves into a dish and add the pork, tossing to ensure it's well covered.

Marinating away

Cover and marinate in the fridge for at least a couple of hours, or, ideally, overnight.

Heat the oil in a heavy pan and, using a slotted spoon, remove the pork from the marinade and fry for a few minutes until browned, about 10 minutes.

Remove the pork from the pan using the same slotted spoon

Add the onions to the pan and gently fry the onion until soft, about 5-10 minutes.

Add the sweet potato and cook for a further five minutes

Return the pork, pour in the remaining marinade to the pan plus 150 ml water, the sugar and white pepper and bring to the boil

In the pot

Pour into the slow cooker dish, cover and set to medium for 3-4 hours. Alternatively, you can do this on the hob for an hour or two

Serve up with plain boiled or steamed rice

A bowlful of satisfying, meaty, Filipino goodness

NOTES
You could add some chilli, as either a pinch of dried chilli flakes and a chopped fresh chilli if you want add a bit of a kick to this.

Belly pork is nice and moist, thanks to the large amount of fat it contains. You could use pork tender loin instead which is leaner and takes less cooking, so you can reduce the cooking time. The dish would also work with chicken, in which case I'd suggest skinless, bone-in thighs which have a bit more flavour than breast fillet. Beef would also work.

Sweet potato works quite well, though if cooked too long can go quite soft. Like many of these slow-cooked stews, root vegetables stand up to long cooking, so carrots work well, regular potatoes would also be good. Otherwise, that old standby of squash or something like celeriac perhaps would work.

As I mentioned above, I have visited Manila. As much as the American influence in the Philippines is all permeating, but they have found some great ways to subvert it. Take, for example, the Jeepney. A surplus of WWII Jeeps were taken and converted into small buses which have been a vital form of public transportever since. They are usually colourfully decorated, and as individual as their drivers. They are the Philippines' answer to Thailand's tuktuks or India's bicycle rickshaws. Given the horrendous traffic in Manila (the 2nd worst in the world), there is no better way to experience heavy air pollution than in the back of a pimped out former wartime military vehicle.

Jeepneys
Source: http://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/riding-a-filipino-jeepney-101

When I was visiting Manila, we were sat in a bar enjoying a beer, and there were hawkers coming round to sell all sorts of things such as pork scratchings (awesome), other snacks, eggs, live snakes and knock-off viagra. How could I tell it was counterfeit Viagra? It wasn't hard.

Source: https://giphy.com/gifs/drum-tsss-badum-kPIswn0RfPTGxOvDj5

This is another of those amazing, comforting stews that I've done a few of (here, here and here, for example), that are from Asia, based around some sort of fermented soy beans. It's interesting that such food that we might consider as being winter staples are so common in a lot of countries that are actually warmer than our own.

I mention that the Philippines is the only predominantly Christian country in Asia, but they have their very own style of Catholicism, analagous to the Thaipusam festival celebrated in the Hindu faith, where, on Good Friday every year, some people are so taken in their religious ecstasy that they actually have themselves crucified. Personally I prefer the Easter Bunny as a way to celebrate Easter. Anyway, this is my in for the obliquely relevant music video that has become a feature of this blog. Get a load of this slice if camp 90s Europop from Swedes Army of Lovers which was written about this practice in The Philippines.

I'm crucified
Army of Lovers

I'm obviously doing a major disservice to the country. With a huge number of islands, covering huge metropololises of Manila, Quezon and Davao to relatively unspoilt jungle and untold kilometres of coastline populated by a huge variety of indiginous peoples, there is a rich and diverse culinary culture to be explored, so if anyone wants to fund me a trip to go over and discover this, all donations will be gratefully received. You can guarantee the resulting TV series would be more entertaining and a damnsight funnier than anything that Rick Stein has come up with, but you might not want to watch it with your Mum.

Chicken saag

So how am I going to start this entry off, given that the recipe is a spinach curry, and many of my blog entry intros have focused on childhood TV memories? If only there was a connection between spinach and some children's TV character...

Hello sailor!
Source: https://popeye.fandom.com/wiki/Popeye

So, I mentioned Captain Haddock from Tintin in a recent recipe as being the ultimate in matelot cliche, but really, in terms of sailor-based cartoon characters, there can be only one: Popeye. He is a dying breed, the salty seadog with his one good eye, his over-developed forearms and his very idiosyncratic way of talking (is it an accent or is it a speech impediment? I need to know!). Don't get me wrong, someone who can achieve what he achieves as a disabled man is an inspiration, but those forearms are a bit odd. I mean, you only get muscles that big if you're training them. To get to that unnatural size, you need some serious external stimulus, like steroids or lots of exercise, or a combination of the two. It's obvious he's been doing lots of work on his grip strength. Now, if you're familiar with this blog, you'll have some idea where you think I'm going with this, but you'd be wrong. I'm obviously talking about weight training, where he's clearly working on this aspect of his musculature. Saying that, and looking at his physique, it's clear he regularly skips leg day, probably because he's too occupied with the monumental amount of wanking he was doing to continue to develop his forearms to that extent on the days it's not arm-day. OK, I did go there, but at least I didn't do a pun on the word "seamen".

He's not the only character that appears in his adventures, though. Olive Oyl, his on/off girlfriend was actually created first (in 1919, so she's looking pretty good for a centenarian) and managed 10 years before Popeye popped onto the scene and promptly took over her strip to make it his own. Fuck the patriarchy. The poor girl looks like she needs a good meal inside her, which is ironic for someone who's name is a form of cooking fat. Then there's his arch nemesis, Bluto. Bluto is clearly a troubled man. Troubled mainly by morbid obesity and 'roid rage it seems. I'm sure he's the role model for many blokes, as he is the epitome of toxic masculinity. However, you just know that behind closed doors he bawls his eyes out whilst furiously masturbating because his Mum didn't hug him enough, rendering him unable to share his feelings. There's probably also some closet homosexuality in there somewhere, given his bear-like characteristics.

Beauty and the Beast
Olive Oyl and Bluto
Sources of images: https://heroes-and-villians.fandom.com/wiki/Olive_Oyl and https://comicvine.gamespot.com/bluto/4005-12754/

Obviously, as anyone knows, Popeye himself doesn't indulge in steroids. No, he follows a more natural, holistic approach to performance enhancing substances.You know what I'm talking about. He's addicted to the "superfood", spinach, long before some hipster twat with a beard and an ironic pair of plus-fours invented the term . I mean, it has a reputation for being a superfood in modern parlance, because of its trace nutrients, particularly iron. There is some mythology behind this. Modern folklore states that there was an error in reporting the iron content in spinach when the German chemist responsible, Emil von Wolff, purportedly put a decimal place in the wrong place, suggesting spinach contained 10x more iron than it actually had. More recently this myth has itself been debunked, and, rather than a transcription error related to the decimal point, the amount of iron was over-estimated because of poor science and contamination from the experimental aparatus used. This widely-held belief in the erroneously high iron content at the time was supposedly the reason spinach was favoured by our hero, though a little thumbnail calculation would have suggested this to be bollocks. To put it another way, the amount of iron reported to be present in a 100g portion of spinach was 35mg when the actual amount is 3.5mg/100g. 35mg of iron amounts to about about 1% of the total amount in an adult human or 3.5mm of a standard paperclip.

A paperclip
Tastes better than a tin of spinach. Eat this and you too could be Iron Man
Source: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/paperclip

From a personal point of view, and because of the apparent potency of spinach in Popeye cartoons, as a child I mithered my parents to buy a tin of spinach for years. Finally they relented and we had it. It was disgusting. The paperclip is actually a more appetisng prospect.

Anyway, coming back to the recipe in hand, saag is yet another one of the standard curries you get from your local Indian takeaway. Because of my early traumatic exposure to spinach mentioned above, I was hesitant about trying it. However, the fresh leaves work really well in a curry, the vague bitterness enhancing the spiciness of the dish. It's a fairly easy to make dish and makes a satisfying, quick midweek dinner.

TIMING
Preparation: 15 minutes
Cooking: 45 minutes

INGREDIENTS
300g chicken fillet cut into bite-sized pieces
2tsp tandoori spice
3tbsp vegetable oil
1 onion, sliced
4 garlic cloves, crushed
A piece of ginger, finely grated (about the size of your thumb)
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin
½tsp fenugreek seeds
½tsp fennel seeds
½tsp ground black pepper
½tsp ground turmeric
½tsp salt
3 cloves
2 whole green cardamom
4cm piece of cinnamon
1 bayleaf
2 green chillies, finely chopped
250g fresh tomatoes, blended to a puree
125g bag of fresh spinach

The main ingredients
Clockwise from bottom left: spinach, tomatoes, onion, garlic, ginger, chilli

I do love a nice spice picture
Clockwise from 9 o;clock: fennel seeds, fenugreek seeds, coriander, cumin, turmeric, salt, black pepper then i nthe centre from 6 o'clock: bay leaf, cinnamon, cardamom. cloves

RECIPE
Pour 1 tbsp of the oil into a pan and heat.

Add the tandoori powder and allow to sizzle for a few seconds before adding the chicken. 

Stir-fry the chicken in the spice until cooked through (about 10 minutes).

Remove the chicken with a slotted spoon then add the remaining oil to the pan before adding the ginger and garlic

Fry these for a minute or two before adding the onion.

Turn down the heat slightly and slowly cook the onion until soft, about 15 minutes.

Pour in the pureed tomatoes plus 150 ml water and the chillies.

Bring to the boil and simmer for five minutes.

Return the cooked chicken to the pan then add the spinach and stir in.

Allow the spinach to wilt into the sauce over about 10 minutes

In the pan

Serve up with rice and/or naan bread

NOTES
As with most recipes I've done for curries, you could use lamb instead of chicken, or substitute potatoes to give a filling, satisfying vegan dinner

I recently dabbled with using standard curry powder (actually a Madras blend) to streamline the cooking of dish and make it that much quicker to knock up. It won't make a huge time difference, but selecting the various spices and measuring them out can take a bit of effort. It turned out OK, though without the depth of flavour you get with individual spices. It's also less faff and expense than getting the various individual spices.

You could alter the dish, replace spinach with, for example tomato, to give a rogan josh (technically, as rogan josh is lamb with tomato, it would really be a rogan murgh).

I used fresh baby spinach leaves in this recipe, but frozen or tinned would also work. Frozen spinach is a useful stand-by to have at a pinch.

Even if the amount of iron in spinach was as high as initially thought, it would have been rendered useless as it would most likely combine with the relatively large amount of oxalic acid in the leaves to make insoluble ferric oxalate and be lost next time you went for a poo. Because of this, spinach is actually, quite literally, a crap source of iron.

Spinach is, however, a very good source of vitamin A and other carotenes, so Popeye wasn't too far from the mark as a fan and he could see really well in the dark from his one good eye.

Back in the olden days, when colour TV was something of a luxury item, and a lot of people had black and white sets (because they used to be called "television sets"), I remember getting our first colour telly (rental, because many people didn't buy a TV, but rented one by the month). I came home from school for lunch and walked into the living room where the new telly was and there, in glorious technicolour, was a Popeye cartoon.

Speaking of iron...

As much as a Marvel fan as I am, there's only one true Iron Man
Iron Man by Black Sabbath
Ozzy, Tony, Geezer and Bill in their pomp

Korea advice 2: Yang. Doenjang beef stew

How much is that Doggie in the window,

The one with the fine marbling through its rump?

OK, so it's time to address the elephant in the room when it comes to Korean cuisine. And the elephant I'm referring to is furry, has a waggly tail and pisses on lamposts. As regular readers of this blog know, I'm not afraid to approach some of the more unsavoury subjects related to food so, yes, I'm going there: the eating of dogs. This is something of a custom in Korea, at least according to good old Wikipedia, though it's now banned to slaughter dogs for food, yet it's still legal to eat them. Where are they going to get them from? I mean, it's not like they've got a family pack of St Bernard mince or a four-pack of Labrador burgers in Aldi, or whatever the equivalent is in downtown Seoul. I've covered cultural differences in food before, and we can't be at all judgemental about what people consume in other cultures. While we in the west think eating dogs is barbaric, Koreans probably regard putting a piece of mouldy, rotten milk in your mouth utterly disgusting. These things are very much relative, and, to coin a phrase, in the belly of the devourer. Having said that, given the current situation the human world finds itself in at the time of writing, the bats were probably a bad thing to eat.

I suppose it's not just the revulsion at the act of eating the meat of dogs, though. It's the fact that we're a nation of dog lovers and have trouble seeing them even as animals, much less food. We love our pooches. They're part of the family. True, a part of our family that licks its own arsehole and requires you to follow it around in order to pick up any crap that emanates from that same arsehole, but a part of the family none the less. Total dog lovers. Just don't mention dog fighting, puppy farms or severe in-breeding in pure-bred dogs giving them a shallower gene pool that the British Royal Family and leading to massive health problems, pain and suffering. Anyway, consumption of dog meat in Korea is apparently on the wain, whereas the UK will soon be feasting on a diet of rat tikka masala, mouse fricassee and cow pat soup when the food shortages hit following Brexit, or the North Korean Weight Loss Plan, as it could be called.

I'm sure all you readers will appreciate that the recipe, as written, has no canine content whatsoever. On the other hand, it's probably the meatiest dish you can make. Beef, mushrooms, soya bean paste. It's like the world festival of umami and is incredibly filling and satisfying. It's just like Mum used to make, if Mum was born in Pyongyang and was part of the ruling elite, as most North Koreans probably couldn't buy beef. Indeed, if news reports are to be believed, they can't buy much of anything since there are massive food shortages, as I alluded to above.

Glutamic acid

The source of umami

So, it's another long, slow cooked stew, suitable for the slow cooker. Doenjang is a fermented soya bean paste, like gochujang, but without the chilli (see my recipe for pork gochujang, the Yin to this recipe's Yang). I suppose its closest relative you can buy fairly easily on the UK high street or supermarket is probably Chinese yellow bean sauce, though they do taste distinctly different.

TIMING

Preparation: 20 minutes, plus soaking for the shitake mushrooms

Cooking: Six hours plus in the slow cooker. Three hours or more on the hob

INGREDIENTS

Flavourings

Clockwise from top left: doenjang paste, chilli, garlic, ginger

2tbsp vegetable oil (not olive)
400g cubed stewing beef

1 leek, trimmed, tailed, and cut into 1cm slices

1 thumbsized chunk of ginger, finely chopped

3 cloves of garlic, crushed

250g potatoes, peeled and cut into 2cm chunks

4 dried shitake mushrooms, soaked in a mug of water for at least 20 minutes then sliced, water reserved

225g tin sliced bamboo shoots, drained

150g fresh mushrooms, sliced

100g baby sweetcorn, cut into 2cm chunk

1 red chilli, finely chopped

2 tbsp doenjang paste

2 tbsp mirin

Vegetables ready to go

RECIPE

Heat the oil in a heavy pan, add the meat, and fry it until it has some colour, around 10 minutes.

Remove the beef with a slotted spoon then add the leek.

Fry for 5 minutes to soften, then add the ginger and garlic and fry for another 5.

Add the potatoes, mushrooms (both types) and bamboo shoots and baby corn and contiue to stir for a few minutes more.

Add the water from soaking the shitake mushrooms and mirin.

Return the meat to the pan, along with the chilli and doenjang paste.

Stir well and put in the slow cooker on medium for 6 hours or more, or else cover and leave on a low heat on the hob.

Check the post intermittently and add the odd splash of water if it looks to be getting too thick or dry

Makes more than enough for two people, served with boiled, steamed or egg-fried rice.

NOTES

Beef is the best meat for this dish, but it may work with pork or lamb. You could even get away with chicken, but might have to use a little less doenjang. In fact, add more potato, leave out the beef and you would have a very hearty vegetarian version and it could be the meatiest vegan dish you could imagine. 

This works well with plenty of vegetables. Potato really absorbs the flavour of the sauce fantastically, so you need to keep this in. Otherwise, mess about with the vegies to your heart's content. Water chestnuts would work well, as would courgette (add towards the end of cooking or it will disintegrate in the slow cooker), cauliflower should stand up to the flavour or green pepper would also work

Dried shitake mushrooms add another dimension, over and above regular mushrooms, and the water you rehydrate them in adds further depth to the stew. You could omit them if you can't get hold of them, and maybe add a vegetable stock cube plus 200ml water.

Mirin is essentially rice wine. Replace with the same amount of dry white wine or dry sherry if you can't get hold of it.

I know the whole thing about eating dogs is often used as a racist trope directed at anyone who is a member of any Far Eastern ethnic minority in the UK. It's just a short hop from this to urban legends of cats going missing around Chinese takeaways which, as well as being offensively racist, quite frankly don't make sense. Given your average takeaway probably gets through a good couple of dozen chickens on a good night, the odd cat isn't really going to save an awful lot of money, and the risk of being caught and losing business too great. Snopes has a good discussion of this urban legend here  an article that is now over 20 years old and refers to these stories from the mid twentieth century, so it's hardly new, and is just as much a load of bullshit now as it was then.

Adam and the Ants addressed eating dogs way back in the early 80s. Well, they didn't, not literally, but it was still a decent song.

It would be remiss of me not to post this track

Chicken garlic chilli stir-fry

Bacofoil is the new black
What the conspiracy nutter is wearing this year (and any other year for that matter)
Source: https://www.perpetualkid.com/tin-foil-hat/

Conspiracy theories really piss me off. Actually, that's not true. They crack me up because they are ridiculously hilarious. No, people who fiercely believe conspiracy theories, and cling to them in the face of overwhelming evidence against them, are what really, really piss me off. "Lizards run the world" (as espoused by a famous British conspiracy fuckwit who I'm not going to give the oxygen of publicity by naming). No they fucking don't. I've been to countries where lizards literally run all over the walls, and they are ace. However, there is no way they could collude with the Rothchilds and comandeer the global finance market. What, human-sized and shaped lizards you mean? I've seen some fucking huge monitor lizards, but they aren't very smart. What, masquerading as world leaders? I've never seen Bill Clinton regenerate a limb, Bill Gates catch a fly with his tongue or anyone with the name Rothschild lay an egg. Actually, to be fair, I don't know what any of the Rothschilds look like, but given that I've not seen any person lay an egg, I can safely say I've not seen a Rothschild lay an egg. It's almost as if the word "lizard" is a cypher for "Jew" and it's all a form of twisted antisemitism.

That moment you're at an illuminati meeting and you see one of your buddies who is also a member of the British Royal Family and you've not seen one another since you took control of the IMF
Source: https://www.storytrender.com/77851/fighting-lizards-hug-it-out-after-playful-tussle/

The lizard thing is on the fringes of conspiracies, it has to be said, but there are less immediately outlandish myths. The Rothschilds (who aren't lizards in this iteration, but are still Jewish. Do you start to see a pattern?) run the world, and are planning the New World Order via the Illuminati or the Freemasons or, I don't know, the WI, which flaunt their symbolism everywhere, from buildings to actual currency to appearances by prominent popstars. I mean, they don't, but nice try. Again, no real evidence, apart from some badly spelt meme written by some racist 35 year old virgin who still lives with his mother and isn't allowed out on his own after 6pm following his prosecution for the contents of his hard drive in 2012. The theories claim that pop stars like Beyonce and Jay-Z (who aren't Jewish, but are black. Or are they? Of course they fucking are, see link below) promote the New World Order through the way they hold their hands in videos. No they don't.

Freemasons you say?
A  corking dance track by the act of the same name, a cover of an Alanis Morrisette song, The Uninvited

At the time of writing, under the spectre of Covid 19, it's like every conspiracy theorist's wank fantasy has come true all at once. Claims include it's man-made (it's not), it's got some connection to 5G (utter bollocks) and that Bill Gates is paying for a virus that contains nanobots to control people (oh, for fuck's sake). You can argue the point of the imperialistic and paternalistic implications of Gates' approach to philanthropy, and that, far from throwing money at their own pet interests, billionaires like him should contribute to countries by paying their full commitment of tax, so their wealth can be distributed more equitably, but this doesn't change the fact that he (via his Foundation) is putting large amounts of real money into things that do save people, like vaccinations and measures to prevent the spread of malaria. It's funny that many of the people criticising Gates as a do-gooder are the sort of people who say "charity begins at home" yet don't actually donate anything to charities at home either.

SARS-CoV2 the virus
The resemblance between this and a 5G mast is... non-existent as this is a computerised model of what the virus is supposed to look like. It is too small to actually have any colour
Source: https://www.crick.ac.uk/news/2020-03-16_tackling-covid-19-at-the-francis-crick-institute

The thing with conspiracy theories are the ridiculous assumptions that have to be made to believe in them. They fall down with any sort of close scrutiny, but the thing over-ruling all these leaps of faith that ultimately indicates they are, in fact, bullshit is that they need to have been organised by the people in charge. Can you really believe someone who has been impeached, bankrupt 6 times and divorced twice, having had numerous affairs, could manage to hold together some huge global plot to subjugate the human race? Or that the same someone, who has bragged about pretty much every aspect of their lives (usually without anything to be proud of), could possible keep their part in such a massive global operation quiet, even during those long, dark toilet trips of the soul at 4am (a common ourcome of a diet based on fast food, showing they are as devoid in dietary fibre as they are in the moral variety) with nothing to keep you company apart from a Wi-fi-connected smartphone and a Twitter account? Or could a different someone, who lacks the foresight to plan contraception in numerous affairs, resulting in an untold number of children (apparently at least 6) by any number of women could play any part in something so meticulous to enslave the population? Really, could someone who has lost several jobs because they have been caught lying and have several abandoned pie-in-the-sky projects that have held their name, be trusted by the overlords to be a part of something of such scale? Honestly, if you do fall for these sorts of fables, would you be interested in buying some magic beans? They came as a topping on a pizza sold from the Pizzagate restaurant. Of course, I could be part of the conspiracy, writing a sweary cooking blog in the privacy of my own home that conspiracy theories are bollocks. Just follow the money, bearing in mind I get fuck all for writing this stuff. Wake up sheeple!

So where is all this going? Trust me, I'm dragging it back to the recipe in hand. The science suggests that Sars-Cov2 originates in a bat, but may also be found in pangolins which possibly act as a reservoir for the virus, though we're not sure (given that we only became aware of this virus about 9 months ago at the time of writing, this is hardly surprising). Both animals are sold as food in wet markets across China, including Wuhan, where the disease was first reported. so people are in close proximity to this and other viruses. While wet markets obviously present a possible route for transmission of animal diseases from animals to humans (zoonoses), they are in no way the only one (BSE anyone? Possibly HIV/aids, maybe? And how about looking up the derivation of the word "vaccine") All this adds to the myths surrounding the eating habits of people in other cultures, which further contribute to the "othering" of people from different cultures, giving ammunition to the sort of people who sit in their dimly lit bedrooms making up racist conspiracy theories, when they're not wanking over child sexual abuse images. 

Oriental food in general, and Chinese in particular, gets a bad rap ("rap", not "rat", but I'll be covering this in a soon to be published edition of this blog, once I've got some pictures), largely because of stories like this. However, to be so dismissive of the entire cuisine of over a billion people, incorporating numerous regional varieties, covering tropical coastline to inland tundra and all in between, is a culinary crime. One of the fundamental techniques involved in Chinese cookery is stir-frying, which is a very quick way to cook and uses relatively little oil. The technique orginates, apparently, because when you make fires using bamboo, they burn very hot, very fast, so you have to do quick cooking at high tempreature. The important thing to remember about stir-frying is that all the ingredients need to be prepared to be a similar shape and size, so they cook evenly, and though the actual act of cooking by stir-fry is actually pretty rapid, the preparation takes longer.

This recipe is something similar to what you might find in any Chinese takeaway, and chilli and garlic work very well together with chicken. You can of course buy ready-made sauces with similar ingredients, and they make a really quick dinner mid-week, but any homemade sauce has a much better flavour.

TIMING
Preparation: 20 minutes
Cooking: 20 minutes

INGREDIENTS
Sauce
1½ tbsp light soy sauce
2tbsp dry sherry
2tsp white wine vinegar
2tsp sugar
1tsp cornflour
½tbsp sriracha chilli sauce

A thumb-sized piece of ginger, finely chopped
2tbsp vegetable oil
5 cloves of garlic, finely sliced
1 small-medium sized carrot, cut into julienne strips
2 green chillies, finely sliced
3 spring onions, trimmmed and cut diagonally into 3cm batons
1 green pepper, seeded, cored and cut into thin strips
200g chicken fillet, cut into strips

RECIPE
Combine the sauce ingredients and mix well, ensuring there aren't any lumps of cornflour, and set aside.

Heat the vegetable oil in a wok or frying pan until it's really hot, almost smoking.

Add the chicken and stir fry until cooked (about 7-10 minutes).

Remove with a slotted spoon, reserving the remaining oil.

Add the ginger and garlic and stir-fry for a minute before adding the spring onion, chilli and green pepper for a further 5 minutes.

Mix up the sauce mixture and pour it into the wok, stirring contantly while it thickens.

 A wok full of joy

Serve it up with rice (ideally egg-fried). Feeds two easily.

NOTES
The basis of this recipe can be modified to make other Chinese style stir-fries. The meat can be changed to beef, pork or prawn. You can even make it vegetarian by just adding lots of different vegetables, or tofu. You can flavour it differently by omitting the chilli sauce, chilli and most of the garlic (it always need some garlic). the important factors are the soy sauce, wine/sherry and the cornflour. That by itself has a great flavour, but mess about with it, adding black pepper, lemon, or whatever is in your favourite Chinese takeaway.

Cornflour acts to thicken the sauce, and if you use too much it can become a bit too thick, so try not to overdo it. It gives the sauce a lovely, clear, gloss that you wouldn't get from regular flour.

Like most of these Chinese sauces, dry sherry is used in place of the more authhentic rice wine. I've never used rice wine in one of these dishes asit seems a bit overkill. Do use decent dry sherry, however, like a fino and not oversweetened shite like Harvey's Bristol Cream which tastes like alcoholic syrup.

Sriracha is the archetypal hot sauce of Asia, particulary in Thailand. It's rich and warm, but there are similar sauces that could be used. Thai sweet chilli sauce would work. In a lot of countries, (notably Malaysia and Singapore) there is a bottle of Maggi Chilli Sauce on tables in food centres everywhere, and this would also be a good alternative.

You generally don't have to scratch too deep below the surface of most conspiracy theories to find the true motive of the myth. More often than not there's a racist trope (very often in the form of antisemtisim) just sitting at the bottom, like that awkward turd in the toilet bowl that won't flush away. Many of these stories have their roots in Nazism or hate propaganda from even earlier.

The problem with most people who believe in conspiracy theories is that they add two and two and get a dirty weekend for two in Skegness. The X-Files and The Matrix have shit-loads to answer for. At least the first Matrix film ended on a banging anthem against the murder of black people in the USA by the police. There was a great cover of it made by New York protest collective, Brass Against, below.

Brass Against: Wake up
Cover of Rage Against the Machine's polemic railing against murder of black people in the US. This version is every bit as angry as the original and the song is more relevant now than when the original was released 28 years ago.

Black Lives Matter

Haddock baked with tomatoes, capers and chorizo

Summer holiday morning TV for kids in the 70s and 80s was great. Well, some of it was. Actually, no, most of it was crap. I mean there was an inordinate amount of cheaply bought in stuff from the near continent and Eastern Europe, usually in black and white and badly dubbed. These included things like White Horses, The Flashing Blade, Belle and Sebastian. They were fucking diabolical, if I'm telling the truth. Why Don't You? was OK, I suppose, but gets a black mark against its name for bestowing Ant from off of Ant and Dec onto the viewing British public. I think the biggest problem was there weren't enough cartoons. I longed for a bit of Hanna-Barbera animation. Scooby Doo, Hong Kong Fooey or Wacky Races were always worth watching, but it was the other dross you had to wade through while you waited for these gems to come on. Bear in mind this was the time when there were a mere three channels available and TV didn't start broadcasting until about 9am after taking the night off. There was none of this 24/7 Cartoon Network/Boomerang/CITV/CBBC nonsense that you have nowadays So, knowing that British kids liked cartoons, they bought in some cartoons, but not as we knew them. They gave us Tintin.

 Tintin.
You really couldn't tire of punching that smug fucking face with it's smug fucking "Something About Mary" hairstyle
 Sourve: http://en.tintin.com/news/index/rub/0/id/4465/0/welcome-to-the-new-tintin-boutique

I fucking hated Tintin. It was just so boring and he wore plus fours, for fuck's sake. The programme started OK with the announcer excitedly proclaiming "Hergé's Adventures ot Tintin!", but went rapidly downhill from there. Maybe it was the dreadful dubbing, but I just couldn't connect with the characters and didn't get any sense of adventure from the stories. If the characters were in a rowing boat and it got attacked by a big shark, I was chanting "Go Jaws!". Later in life, I discovered that Tintin is quite a big thing in certain sections of British popular culture, mainly in book form. The books were originally written in the late 1920s, but a translation into English from the original French was popular in middle class families even recently. What can't be denied is the effect of Tintin on British popular culture, particularly music. Acts Stephen "Tintin" Duffy and the Thompson Twins took their name from Tintin, and there is even a former Thin Lizzy guitarist called Snowy White who had a solo hit. (though his name probably has nothing to do with Tintin or his dog of the same name ). Tintin is even referred to in The Beach (the book version, which itself is a middle-class, late GenX, travel wank fantasy, and the film was worse).

Killer on the Loose by Thin Lizzy
Featuring Snowy White on guitar.
I was never going to have somethnig like Tintin Duffy or the Thompson Twins, was I?

So, what the fuck has Tintin got to do with this blog entry? Well, one of Tintin's companions is the sailor, Captain Haddock. He was to the maritime community what the Black and White Minstrels were to the Afro-Carribean community. To say he was a cliché is understating things. The alcoholism, the gruff demeanor, the bushy beard, the knitted sweater, it's all there. To make him any more of a cartoon sailor they would have to have removed his leg, perched a parrot on his shoulder and infected him with a strain of antibiotic-resistant syphilis found only in Jakarta. That he was the foundation for Captain Birdseye is almost certain and a sad indictment of the minds of advertisers in the UK. Even less so in this age of Operation Yewtree. The trope of a grizzled old salt merrily taking a bunch of children away on his boat lost its allure as an advertising premise faster than you can say Edward Heath.

Anyway, back to haddock. It's one of the most popular fishes consumed in the UK, along with cod. As I've mentioned previously, we're shit at eating fish in the UK, especially as we're surrounded by water, and most people will only eat fish if it's deep fried in batter. That fish is usually cod or haddock which are not the most flavourful piscine offerings in the fish mongers, though, given a choice, I do prefer haddock as it has a little more flavour than cod. There are other similar types of fish which are probably cheaper, like hake (great) or coley (grey and dire), or even fish exported from other parts of the world, like hoki. These latter examples were gaining more popularity in the UK up to a few years back due to the crash in popultion of gadidae in the North Atlantic as a result of industrial-scale trawling. More recently they had seemed to have made something of a recovery, but numbers are still on the brink. As a relatively tasteless fish, it does work with a piquant sauce, such as this. The capers really add a great tanginess and pretty much any dish can be improved through the addition of chorizo. 

TIMING
Preparation 10 minutes
Sauce cooking: 30 minutes
Baking: 30 minutes

INGREDIENTS
1 tbsp olive oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
100g mushrooms, sliced
50g chorizo, chopped
150g tomatoes, peeled and roughly chopped
1tbsp drained pickled capers, chopped
2tbsp dry white wine
1tbsp lemon juice (about half a lemon's worth)
2 frozen fillets of haddock (about 100g each)

 Sauce ingredients
Clockwise from top left: tomatoes, chorizo, capers, mushrooms, garlic, onion

RECIPE
Preheat the oven to 170°C/

Heat the oil in a pan and add the onion to fry gently for about 10 minutes.

Add the garlic and fry for another couple of minute/

Add the mushrooms and fry until they look cooked, about 5 minutes.

Throw in the chorizo and fry for another 5 minutes/

Add the tomatoes, capers, white wine and lemon juice then stir.

Add plenty of black pepper, cover and turn down the heat to a gentle simmer for about 20 minutes, long wnough to brak down the tomatoes.

In the pan

Prepare an oven proof dish by greasing it with a bit of oil.

Place the fish fillets on the dish then pour over the tomato and caper sauce, sufficient to cover both fillets as best as possible.

Put into the hot oven to bake for 30 minutes (or 20 minutes if you're using fresh fillets)

Serve up with oven-roasted potatoes.

Ready to eat
Served with roasted new potatoes and roasted cauliflower

NOTES
I used frozen haddock fillets in this recipe which you use strainght from the freezer without defrosting. Paradoxically, frozen fillets are usually fresher than "fresh" fillets as they are frozen almost immediately after being caught. and not having to hang around in a supermarket fish counter for a couple of days. The instructions on the packaging suggested you can cook them in 20 minutes, but I found the fish was still raw, so made the time 30 minutes. If you used fresh fish portions, 20 minutes would be plenty of time, so adjust accordingly.

Haddock and cod are essentially interchangeable in cooking, so you just as easily use cod, You could also substitute the other fish I mentioned in the preamble, such as hake.

The preamble to this entry may sound like notalgia for a bygone day, but it's nothing of the sort. It was shite. The TV in the summer when I was growing up was there for one reason: to keep the kids occupied. This may have been so Mum could sneak in a large gin in the kitchen in peace, or could have been so kids that had been left to their own devices didn't set fire to the house while parents were out at work.

One interesting thing that I discovered when working on this was that Hong Kong Fooey was voiced by Scatman Crothers who also appeared in The Shining.

Captain Birdseye has been in the news lately as Birdseye have decided to revamp the image of the character and he is now a 24 year old woman. This has caused a major meltdown amongst the sort of person who accuse other people of being snowflakes.

Pork in cider

Cider in rock
The Worzels

Traditionally, cider has the reputation as being something associated with country bumpkins in the West Country. The Worzels even did a song about it, parodying Una Paloma Blanco (see above). More recently, however, its image is very much Janus-faced. At its best, it's a wonderfully refreshing drink, catching the best of the British summer in a glass, and can have depth and complexity similar to wine. At its, worst it's diabolical, mass-produced. massively over-strong and is directly responsible for a torrent of tramp piss in public spaces across the country. As booze goes, cheap white cider offers the very most bang for the buck, being able to buy a big bottle of a couple of litres of 5% cider for about £2 which is why it's the tipple of choice for the itinerant and teenagers alike. No park is complete without an empty plastic bottle of White Lightning, along with the dog ends of a couple of spliffs. It's a scene that, were they alive today, JMW Turner or especially John Constable would have immortalised in oil on canvas.

Wivenhoe Park by John Constable (1816)

If you look closely, you can see the two guys in the boat are getting wankered on cheap cider

Source: https://www.atlasofplaces.com/painting/landscape-and-place/

It's fair to say that, in the UK at least, many people's first exposure to alcohol is with a cheeky sip of Woodpecker Cider when they're a teenager (or, heaven forbid, Babycham, which is not actually cheap champagne, but is in fact cider's pear cousin, perry). Woodpecker is dreadful. It's largely tasteless, but sweet enough to give you a molar cavity by just thinking about it. Couple this to the myriad of sweet fruit ciders that abound today, it's like the alcopop explosion of the 90s all over again. Those were the days. Hooper's Hooch, Metz, Bacardi Breezers. Many a teenager will have woken up with a splitting headache and the flavour of one of these aberrations in their mouth from the night before (usually mixed with the taste of vomit), and mushrooms growing on their teeth because of the sugar content. What goes around, comes around, but with a slicker marketing spin on it. Just don't get me started on Snakebite and Black

Cooking with booze is a great thing. If I'd bothered to do any research, I'm sure I'd find it's to do with the huge variety of chemicals produced during fermentation and the same thing could be said of recipes with other fermented ingredients, like gochujang soya bean paste as used here, for example. I've already featured a few dishes that include some sort of alcohol, by way of beer, wine or even rum and I've previously used cider in pulled pork. Like that recipe, it works so well in this dish as apples are a natural partner to pork, hence apple sauce with roast pork. Couple this to the aromatic herbs of thyme, bay and especially sage (again, think sage and onion stuffing), this stew is a wonderful, easy to make weekday dinner

INGREDIENTS

2 tbsp olive oil

1 leek, trimmed and cleaned then cut into 1cm slices

2 garlic cloves, crushed

1 stick celery, finely shopped

200g mushrooms, roughly chopped

1 medium carrot, peeled, topped, tailed and cut into rounds

250g pork tenderloin fillet

200ml decent dry cider

1 vegetable stock cube

Large sprig of fresh sage leaves, finely chopped (about a tablespoon when chopped), or 1 tsp dried sage

Small sprig fresh thyme, leaves stripped from stems and chopped (or a pinch of dried thyme)

1 bay leaf

1 large tsp Dijon mustard

1 apple, peeled, cored and chopped (I used two small Gala, but traditionally it would be a Bramley)

1 large tsp cornflour, mixed with a little water

Salt and pepper

Herbs

Sage and thyme

And, yes, I'm one of those foodie wankers that has a mezzaluna to chop herbs

RECIPE

Heat the oil in a pan and add the leeks, stirring until soft (10 minutes).

Add the garlic and celery and continue to fry for 5 minutes.

Add the mushrooms and continue to fry for a further 5 minutes.

Add the carrot, cider, herbs, stock cube and 200 ml water then gently bring to a boil.

Add the pork and stir.

Stir in the Dijon mustard.

Mix up the cornflour in water and pour into the pan.

Stir well, turn down to low, cover, and simmer for an hour and a half or so (long enough for the carrots to become tender).

Serve it up. Serves two easily and works really well with mashed potato.

NOTES

The leek adds a subtlety that is missing with onion. but you could use an onion instead if you don't have a leek. Likewise, you could use a different form of pork or even braise pork chops in this sauce

Add a splash of cream to make the sauce more rich. Not an option in our house as Mrs Sweary is not a big fan of creamy sauces, but really, it would elevate this dish to something that bit more special

I recall something Delia Smith had written about how pork goes well with apples because they come from the same sort of terrain. Your wild boar, where pigs come from, are very much at home in the old orchard.

Choose a good quality cider for this. Nothing too fancy or expensive, but not Woodpecker or, heaven forbid, some cheap white cider. The offerings from Westons would be good, like the example below. Hell, Strongbow might even work as a budget option, just nothing that's got other fruit in it as it would be too sweet.

Henry Weston's Vintage Cider

A good cider for this recipe

Leek, mushrooms, carrot, pork and cider. This dish couldn't be any more rustic if its parents were first cousins and it was caught fucking a sheep. That's not a bad thing (I mean the rustic thing, not the near incest or the sheep worrying, obviously) as this is good, honest food with no pretence. Indeed, it's a very good thing and adds yet another great recipe to make a lie of my scoffing at the awful cuisine of England which I've mentioned on a few occasions.

I have to do a Rick Stein and twat on about the Constable picture I posted above. This is Wivenhoe Park which is now the site of the University of Essex, where I studied. This was where I spent many years, through two degrees  (and quite a few Snakebites and Black, especially early on), and where I met my wife. I had a postcard of that very paintings on my wall throughout my student days. I did get wankered by the side of that lake on many occasions, though not usually on cider.

Korea advice 1: Yin. Slow cooker pork gochujang stew.

South Korean flag
I kind of like it

It takes a lot to become an expert on a particular topic, especially if you're talking about an entire country. Take knowledge of Korea, for example. I recently got rid of a Hyundai car that I'd had for for 8 years, so that pretty much makes me an expert on Korea. Basically, I'm Kim Jong Un. To be honest, he's probably not the best person to compare yourself to as he's a brutal dictator who's as mad as a hatter, and he's got nuclear weapons. He's basically an oriental, slightly more agreeable version of Donald Trump, with better hair (which is saying something as, let's face it, KJU's hair is fucking terrible) though is less likely to be in jail come the start of 2021 (this prophecy might not age well, so ignore it if I'm wrong). Saying all this, to an ignorant Westerner like me, there's not a lot of choice in well known Koreans in the Western public sphere. Apart from him, there's Psy, who sang Gangnam Style; and there's Oddjob from Bond movie, Goldfinger; and the bloke who created the Moonies, Sun Myung Moon. Oh, and speaking of Moons, there's also Ban Ki-Moon, former UN Secretary General. This is more of a yardstick of my general ignorance of Korean culture, and not of the fact that there aren't large numbers of famous Koreans. I mean, K-Pop alone has probably hundreds of well known people, but I'm not really an afficianado and couldn't name any of them, apart from Psy, if he counts. We do owe K-Pop fans a debt, however, as it was a group of K-Pop fans that sabotaged a Trump election rally to ensure it was less than half full. thus rendering the massive stadium booked for the event looking pitfiully empty

Famous Koreans

(clockwise from top left: Bond baddie, Oddjob (the character is Korean, but the actor is actually Japanese-American wrestler Harold Sakata); Cult leader and self-proclaimed Messiah, Rev Sun Myung Moon; Gangnam Stylist, Psy and former UN Director General, Ban-Ki Moon.

(sources of images https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddjob, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0600671/  https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/11/u-n-secretary-general-ban-ki-moon-honored/, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20483087

Oppan Gangnam Style!
Apparently it's a satirical song about rich people in Seoul

What else do I know about Korea? Well, obviously, it's not one, but two Koreas following the war in the 50s, or, to use a football cliche, a country of two halves. It's got a lot of contradictions. It's a country that was literally torn apart by conflict, but has given the world a sport that's so violent, its aim is to try and kick an opponent's arsehole out through their mouth, taekwondo. It's a modern, high-tech country that clings onto traditional values, despite having American culture rammed down its throat. Hell, even the flag of S Korea features the yin-yang symbol (see above)

So, this is a cooking blog, where's the recipe? Well, I've covered dishes from at least three corners of the world, if not four, but so far not Korea. To be honest I didn't know much about Korean food, apart from the offerings from a great Korean restaurant in Manchester called Koreana, which I went to a few times and does great food. To my shame, I can't remember much about it (mainly because I was usually pissed by the time I got there), but the barbecued beef ribs were sublime, and Korean BBQ is probably the most well known contribution of Korea to world cuisine. Otherwise the most famous dish of Korea is probably the fermented cabbage of kimchi. The third most famous foodstuff of Korea is probably gochujang, a fermented soya bean paste with chilli. As soya bean products go, it probably just scrapes into the top 10 in terms of international recognition, after soy sauce, hoisin sauce, tofu, black bean sauce, yellow bean sauce etc. Don't be fooled by the fact you might not have heard about it before, it's a fantastic ingredient, with the rich flavour of fermented beans and a deep, but subtle, chilli heat which makes for wonderfully warming and filling stews like this. This is another of those recipes that you try once and know it's a keeper, and that you'll make again and again.

TIMING

Preparation: 15 minutes

Cooking: 30 minutes or so on the hob plus 4 or more in the slow cooker (see notes for alternative timings using hob or oven)

INGREDIENTS
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 leek, trimmed, tailed, cleaned and sliced into 1cm discs
2 garlic cloves, crushed
A thumb-sized piece of ginger, grated
200g pork loin fillet, cut into bite-sized chunks

250g potatoes, peeled and cut into 2cm cubes

150g mushrooms, chopped

1 red or green chilli, finely sliced (or pinch of dried chilli flakes)
2 tbsp gochujang paste
1 tbsp sesame oil

The main flavours
(from left, clockwise: garlic, ginger, gochujang paste, chilli flakes)

RECIPE
Heat up the oil in a heavy pan and add the leeks, frying to soften for a couple of minutes

Add the ginger and garlic and continue to fry

Throw in the potatoes and mushrooms and continue to sautee for a couple of minutes.

Stir in the gochujang paste and chilli

Pour in 200 ml of water and the sesame oil.

Stir well and bring to a gentle simmer.

Transfer to the slow cooker, if you're using it, cover, and set to medium for four hours or more.

In the pan before putting in the slow cooker

Serve with rice (either plain or egg-fried) to soak up the rich, red sauce.

Makes enough for 2 people easily, with some left over for lunch the next day.

NOTES
I couldn't get hold of actual gochujang paste the first few times I made this recipe, so had to rely on this bastardised version from Blue Dragon. It worked quite well and had the right flavour, but was a bit sweet and didn't have the depth of taste you get with actual gochujang paste. Next time I tried to get it, the supermarket brought sriracha instead of gochujang which is the equivalent of, when you're fixing a bike, asking some one to pass you a particular spanner and them giving you a kick in the bollocks. I did order the real deal from an online Asian food shop and the difference is immense. This BD version still makes a decent version of this stew, mind, and is easier to get hold of.

Possibly your best chance of GCJ
It's not too bad and is available in supermarkets

The original recipe suggests courgette in this dish, and it is a good match, but for the purposes of slow cooking, mushrooms work better as they stand up to long, slow cooking, as would carrots. I've also tried this green beans but add them (or courgettes) later in the cooking so they don't disintegrate. The potatoes are essential though, because they really absorb the flavour of the sauce. Leeks make a nice, subtle change from onion that is in almost every other dish I make. I've not tried it, but you might be able to get away with a good vegetarian version by omitting the pork and upping the potato content or adding a pulse, like chickpeas. Also, feel free to omit the green chilli. Gochujang is not very hot, but it does have some kick if you're not used to spicy food.

In tribute to the South Korean flag, I'm making this dish one of a series of two, designated "Yin", to go with the similar recipe to follow soon, which I'll call "Yang".

I adapted this from a recipe in a cook book I've had for a while of Japanese and Korean dishes. I've tweaked it for making in a slow cooker, and messed with the ingredients a bit.

You can do this on the hob or as a casserole in the oven. On the hob, given it's made with tenderloin fillet, it shouldn't take more than an hour or two. Allow a couple of hours if you're doing it in the oven in an oven proof casserole dish, though make up in a pan (unless your casserole dish is OK for use on the hob).

So, apart fron Psy's opus above, where's the tenuously linked music video that's become something of a regular feature on these recipes? Well, you know me, I'm a Seoul man.

S(e)oul man by Sam and Dave

When I say I'm an expert on Korea, I'm obviously being ironic. However, I did have a job interview some time ago where the interviewer rather pompously stated he was a world expert on the Japanese healthcare system. I popped his ego by saying that he was, apart from a few million Japanese people. Not for the first time, I smart-mouthed myself out of a job, but, call it sour grapes if you like, he was a wanker and I wouldn't have lasted very long with that comany. See, you might get anecdotes from Rick Stein, but not a single one of them ends with him calling the person in the ancedote a wanker