Showing posts with label spice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spice. Show all posts

Saturday 21 November 2020

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.

picture of 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


Thursday 13 July 2017

Laksa (Leftover Symphonies 5)

The US sitcom from the late 70s/early 80s, Taxi, was a launchpad for several actors including Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd and Marilu Henner. It also starred established comedian, the late Andy Kaufman, who is widely regarded, amongst the comednicenti (ie those that know comedy), as a true genius. He played an immigrant from an unmentioned Eastern European country called Latka in the show. Otherwise, latkas are potato pancakes made as part of Hannukah celebrations in the Jewish community and are not to be confused with the subject of this recipe, laksa.


It's difficult to categorise laksa. Is it a soup? Is it noodles? Is it a curry? Fuck knows, but it's bloody lovely. It's southeast Asia in a bowl.

Comfort food varies around the world. As I mentioned in a previous post, in the UK it's usually soup (very often out of a can) or hearty stews. Laksa ticks many of the boxes necessary to qualify as the comfort food of the Malay Peninsula: noodles; rich, thick gravy; lots of vegetables; and a good bit of spice. It couldn't provide any more comfort if it was down-quilted and gave you a shot of muscle relaxant. Like this recipe for vindaloo I posted previously, the dish is another bit of natural fusion as the dish derives from ethnic Chinese people settling in the Straits towns of the peninsula and incorporating local ingredients. It's a staple of Peranakan food which is a particularly eclectic cuisine combining influences from China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the European colonisers (Dutch, British and Portuguese).

This is yet another way of using up some leftovers, this time the remains of a roast chicken but you could do it with fresh chicken or seafood, particularly some big, juicy, shell-on prawns.

TIMING
Preparation:20 mins
Cooking: 1 hour 45 mins

INGREDIENTS
3 cakes of dried egg noodles
1 tbsp oil (neutrally flavoured like rapeseed or sunflower)
1 leftover carcass of a roast chicken (with plenty of meat, a good 150g or more)
4 small shallots, peeled and sliced
1 carrot, roughly diced
1 stick of celery, roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 stalk of lemon grass, chopped
1 thumb-sized piece fresh tumeric root, chopped (or 1 tsp dried)
2 thumb-sized piece ginger, chopped
4 red chillies, whole
1 whole star anise
5 cloves
1 tsp whole black peppercorns
1 stick of cinnamon (approx 5cm)
2 chicken stock cubes
200ml tinned coconut milk
1 lime,juiced and husks retained
2 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp fish sauce
10 cherry tomatoes
100g okra, topped and tailed and cut into 2cm chunks
3 large mushrooms, sliced

RECIPE
Cook the noodles according to the instructions.

Drain and set aside

Pick the chicken meat off the carcass and set both the meat and the bones aside.

Heat 1 tbsp oil in a large pan and add the shallots, carrot and celery and fry until soft (around 10 minutes).

Add the garlic, lemon grass, tumeric, ginger, chillies and dry spices and continue to gently fry for another 5 minutes.

Place the stock cubes and chicken bones into the pan, add 1.5l water, heat to boiling, cover and simmer for 45 minutes

Remove the chicken bones and blend the broth until smooth

Return to the hob and add the coconut milk, fish sauce, lime juice, sugar and lime husks.

Throw in the remaining vegetables and stir

Boil and simmer for another 30 minutes.

Refresh the noodles by running them under cold water

Add the noodles to the soup and stir to warm through

Makes enough for a good working week's worth of lunches or would make a decent dinner for four people.


NOTES
Fresh tumeric is another wanky, foodie ingredient that is not usually that easy to come by in the UK. I used it in this dish as I had some left over, having bought some for another dish I had planned. Use dried as a replacement. The fresh root looks like the picture below.
Fresh tumeric root
Looks like ginger or maggots

image from http://foodfacts.mercola.com/turmeric.html

Tumeric is currently touted as a miracle food that can cure all sorts of shit, including cancer, heart disease and, aptly enough, diarrhoea. Though there is some evidence it contains some potentially active compounds, a recent scientific review suggests these claims are largely bollocks. Besides which, if it does to your insides what it does to a cotton T-shirt, it's actually going to fuck you up. The number of tops I've had to discard because of yellow stains from curry is nobody's business. Of course, feel free to take a good dose when you've got a cold and you'll feel much better, as long as you back it up with a Lemsip.

I used tomatoes, mushrooms and okra in this recipe, but these vegetables could be substituted for others like aubergine, green beans or peppers. You can also substitute light soy for the fish sauce.

Having mentioned Andy Kaufman, I really need to link to this song by REM:

Man in the Moon by REM

Saturday 4 June 2016

Kylie Minogue Burritos

In a previous blog I mused how some dishes from countries outside the English-speaking world (ie largely the very best food on the planet) sound so much more exotic and exciting in their native language. One fantastic example, spaghetti puttanesca, the wonderful, rich Italian pasta dish of tomatoes, olives, anchovies and capers, literally means "prostitutes' spaghetti". It's so called because it's made with tinned ingredients from the pantry rather than fresh produce which a wholesome and dutiful housewife would supposedly use. Not having to work into the night, she couldn't go the market of a morning and get all the ingredients needed for more fancy recipes. Personally, I find this all very misogynistic and judgemental. If you can turn out a fantastic pasta sauce like puttanesca from what you find in your pantry, no matter what you do for a living,  you're not a whore, you're a goddess.

Another great example of a dish in its native language that sounds better than it would do in English is that wonderful, oven-baked tortilla packed with rice and other stuff, the burrito. The name is Spanish for "small donkey" (apparently because it looks like the packs worn by donkeys) or, as I prefer, "little ass" and since I've always been a fan of Kylie Minogue, well, sometimes these things just write themselves.

It would be rude not to.
The picture is from the Mail online but I'll link directly to the website of that shitty rag over my dead body or perhaps the threat of legal action

See? You wouldn't get this on the Great British Menu. On there they serve up fish, chips and mushy peas in a fucking chamber pot accompanied by croutons skewered on the bristles of a toilet brush and it's described as "playful". Playful my hairy, ginger balls. I'll tell you what would be playful. If you coated your collective Michelin stars with Tabasco sauce and stuck them up your arses lengthwise, you bunch of pretentious bellends.

I wouldn't mind, but the programme is all about producing a menu for some function attended by the Queen. She's 90, for fuck's sake. Most 90 year-olds are just happy to be alive  and actually physically eating without having food given through a tube. She's probably not bothered if the dinner you made is supposed to be ironic as long as it's not got any bones in (or isn't getting delivered by speeding Mercedes through a French road tunnel). More to the point, for the purposes of this blog, nobody on that show has actually done anything in honour of Kylie Minogue's bum.

Anyway (as most of the final paragraphs of my preambles tend to begin), this is yet another Tex-Mex creation (see also chilli con carne and fajitas), and as such, essentially a bastardised version of peasant food, emasculated for the palettes of people of white European heritage. While it is a bit of a pain in the arse to make, with several different components to prepare, as well as producing shitloads of washing up, it is actually worth the effort.

TIMING
Preparation:
Rice - 15 minutes
Refried beans - 10 minutes
Salsa - 10 minutes
Chicken - 5 minutes plus at least one hour marination

Cooking:
Rice - 20 minutes
Refried beans - 10 minutes
Chicken - 20 minutes
Burrito - 30 minutes

INGREDIENTS
Rice
100g fresh tomatoes (about 5 cherry tomatoes), peeled and chopped
½ an onion, finely chopped
1 clove of garlic, crushed
Zest and juice of 1 lime
1 red chilli, finely chopped
½ vegetable stock cube
1 small mug rice
½ tsp cumin seeds
Handful of sliced pickled jalapeños, chopped
1 mug water

Salsa roja (see this post for recipe)

Refritos frijoles (refried beans)
50g borlotti beans, mashed
½ a medium-sized onion, finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
Salt and pepper
Dash Tabasco sauce
2 tbsp oil

Chicken
4-6 boneless chicken thighs or breast fillet, cut into 2cm strips
½ a medium onion, sliced
100g mushrooms, sliced
½ sweet pepper (red, orange or yellow), cut into strips
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp Cholula pepper sauce
1 tsp chipotle paste
Dash Tabasco sauce
100 ml dry white wine

Grated cheese
2 large flour tortillas

RECIPE
For the chicken, add the wine and chipotle paste to a bowl.

Drop in the chicken pieces, stir well and leave to marinate for an hour or so, enough time to prepare the other components of the burrito.

Prepare the rice by frying up the onion and garlic until soft.

Add the lime zest, chilli, jalapeños and cumin and carry on frying for another couple of minutes.

Add the tomatoes and crumble in the stock cube before stirring well.

Add the rice and stir well to coat the grains.

Pour in the water, stir gently and heat to boiling.

Turn the heat right down, cover, and leave for 10 minutes before turning the heat completely off.

Leave to stand on the hob until needed in making up the burrito.

Prepare the salsa roja according to the recipe here. (It's basically chopped tomatoes, onions, chillies, cumin seeds, oregano, salt, pepper and balsamic vinegar)

La Salsa

Prepare the beans by adding the oil to a pan and frying the onion and garlic for 10 minutes until soft.

Add salt, pepper and the dash of tabasco.

Stir in the mashed beans and allow to warm through.

For the chicken, add 1tbsp oil to the pan and fry the onion and garlic for 10 minutes.

Add the mushrooms and pepper for 5 more minutes.

Add the dry spices (cumin and coriander) for another couple of minutes.

Finally throw in the chicken and the marinade to allow the chicken to braise for 10-15 minutes until cooked.

Make sure any liquid from the marinade is reduced down to a syrupy consistency.

Chicken

Lay out a tortilla on a good sized sheet of foil on a flat surface.

Add a layer of rice, a handful of cheese, a few spoons of salsa roja and of beans and finally the chicken on top.

Pre-oven loading

Place the second tortilla on top of the first and tuck it round the package.

Wrap the foil around the burrito to cover, place in am oven-proof dish and put in a pre-heated oven at 180º for 20 minutes, then open the foil and bake for a further 10 minutes.

Makes one huge burrito which is enough for two or one greedy bastard

Get your laughing gear round that, Pedro

NOTES
This recipe is actually a bit of a pain in the arse to put together as it has so many things to make. It's worth it, though. as it tastes great when complete. Besides, each batch of salsa, refried beans and rice  make a great part of dinner the next day (eg with something like fajitas) or to make a reasonable lunch in their own right. The rice will probably freeze quite nicely if you are so inclined but don't bother trying to freeze the salsa or it would turn into some reddish-coloured slurry

I've made this with a variety of chilli sauces because they all add their own bit to the dish or perhaps it's just because I'm THAT kind of foodie wanker (and if you're read many of these entries you know that this is true), but you could get away with just one on its own. Given a choice, the one I'd opt for would be Tabasco because, when it comes to simple chilli sauces, it is the dog's bollocks with its fruity habanero kick as well as being easier to come by in the UK.

I realise that in using Kylie Minogue's bum to justify a pun on the word  "ass" I'm objectifying her and putting my feminist credentials on the line, but a gag's a gag.

Tuesday 3 May 2016

Southeast Asian Chicken Curry

Fussy eaters, what can you do about them? They make the chef's life difficult and the sweary chef's fucking difficult. I mean, we all have things that we're not keen on, sure. Personally, as I've told you previously, dear readers, I can't stand dried fruit as, to me they are the tagnuts from the devil's own pet rabbits. However, that's OK. They aren't in an awful lot of recipes, besides which, I do the cooking so you want raisins in, get your fucking own. The problems arise when someone doesn't like something that's a common ingredient in a lot of other things. Mrs Sweary has an aversion to butter, cheese in dishes (she'll eat "raw" cheese, go figure) and creamy sauces. This immediately wipes out half the cuisine of Western Europe as an option for dinner when I'm cooking for us. She's also ambivalent to curries containing a lot of coconut which also renders a lot of the fabulous curries from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Cambodia less than ideal. Sometimes a curry just needs a creamy texture to make it all the better, be it cream in something like a korma or the coconut in Thai red or green curries. Fortunately, Mrs S does like cashew nuts and they make a good alternative to coconut if they are blended into a paste. This curry has a smooth, creamy texture like you would find in a curry with coconut, but the nuttiness also lends it a flavour slightly reminiscent of satay.

While it's understandable that some people are a little bit fussy, the thing that really boils my piss is people that decide they can't eat a major food group as a fashion statement. Of course there are genuine clinical food intolerances and allergies (for example those with coeliac disease or lactose intolerance, which are real and often debilitating illnesses and my heart sincerely goes out to people who suffer with these afflictions), but there's always those people that say they can't eat bread or pasta because they are intolerant to wheat, or that milk makes them blow up like a balloon. The way they talk you might be forgiven for thinking that it was gluten and not polonium that had poisoned Alexander Litvinenko. Most of the time this aversion to a foodstuff is bullshit. Stop pathologising the fact that you're just a fucking fashionably fussy eater!

Anyway, back onto this recipe. This curry has a fresh, aromatic style like those from the various countries from SE Asia, though I think it's probably closest to a Sri Lankan dish. It serves 2 easily, with some left over for a lunch the next day if served with rice.

INGREDIENTS
Spice paste
1 thumb-sized piece of galangal, roughly chopped
1 small onion, roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
half a stalk of lemon grass, sliced
2 red chillies, roughly chopped
1 tbsp tomato puree

Dry spices
2 tsp ground coriander
2 tsp ground cumin
1 whole star anise
1 stick cinnamon (around 6 cm in length)
5 green cardamom pods
4 cloves
1 tsp ground turmeric
½ tsp ground black pepper
Salt
Spices on a plate again
From the top: ground tumeric, ground coriander, ground cumin, black pepper, salt, cinnamon stick, star anise, cardamom, cloves
2 tbsp oil
100g unsalted cashew nuts
20 (or so) curry leaves
I medium onion, sliced
1 medium-large aubergine, cut into 2cm cubes
4-6 chicken thighs, skinned
1 tsp garam masala

TIMING
Preparation: 10 to 20 minutes (depending on if you use a blender or a pestle and mortar)
Cooking: 90 to 120 minutes

RECIPE
Place all the paste ingredients into a mini food processor and whizz up until smooth. Alternatively, if you're a foodie wanker like me, put them into a pestle and mortar and pound crap out of them until they are a smooth paste.

 PASTE:
How low can you go?

Heat half the oil in a heavy pan and fry the cashews until golden brown, about 5 minutes or so.

Remove them with a slotted spoon.

To the hot oil add the dry spice ingredients for a minute, stirring.

Add the spice paste and stir for a couple of minutes.

Put the spice mix into a blender with the cashews and 500ml water.

Heat the remaining oil in the pan and fry the sliced onion until it's soft.

Add the blended sauce to the pan as well as the curry leaves and heat until bubbling.

Add the aubergine and the chicken, pushing the chicken into the pan so it's submerged in the sauce.

Leave to simmer for an hour to 90 minutes, stirring occasionally to make sure the chicken is cooked through.

Add teaspoon of garam masala just before serving to pep up the flavour a little.

Serve with rice, like the golden pilau in the pic below, and/or an Indian bread like a naan or paratha.


NOTES
This curry also works with lamb instead of chicken and, as I've alluded to, you could replace the cashew nuts with creamed coconut.

Galangal is a bit like a more fragrant version of ginger. If you can get it, fine, otherwise the curry doesn't lose much by using fresh ginger.


Galangal
Curry leaves are another wanky foodie ingredient that aren't that easy to come by. You can find them in Asian grocers. Add a bay leaf instead if you can't get any.

Monday 4 April 2016

Butternut squash and ginger soup

Beans are not the only musical fruit
Man Ray will be turning in her grave at this, but at least in this entry I'm not comparing it to a butt plug
Original squash image adapted from http://runitlikeamom.com/2015/10/30/squash-city/

Soup is fucking great. Take any old crap you've got left over in the fridge or larder, chuck it in a pan with some water, blend it up, and there's lunch for the best part of the working week. This wasn't always the case in my life. When I grew up, making soup meant opening a tin. Not that there's anything wrong with tinned soup, generations have been raised on it. It's weening food that graduates to essentially baby food for adults. One day you're suckling at your Mum's breast, the next it's Baxter's Scotch broth complete with lumps of vegetables and no nipple (though it has lamb in it, so I suppose it may have teat, which is almost the same).

Soup is the ultimate in comfort food, so much so that Heinz use this idea to promote their tinned product when the clocks go back every autumn and even Cup-A-Soup promoted themselves as "a hug in a mug" (no it's not a hug in a cup, you marketing twat, it's a sachet of dried of fucking soup). Then there is the legendary recuperative powers of chicken soup. You have the Jewish idea of Mama's chicken soup as a cure all or even bah kut teh, a pork soup from Singapore laced with pick-me-up herbs from traditional Chinese medicine. Now, I know I've nailed my particular colours to that particular mast with a rant on TCM in this blog entry, but if it makes you feel better, especially as a hangover cure, it's not a bad thing. After all, we're not talking about claiming it can cure cancer.

Anyway, as good as tinned soup is, homemade soup is in a different league. You know what's in it, you can put as much or as little salt in it as you like and tweak the flavour any way you want. Best of all it just tastes so much more fucking fresh.

Butternut squash, as I've waxed lyrically about previously, lends itself to lots of dishes, working especially well with the spices of curry. Pairing it with ginger seemed an ideal combination and, as I found out, it was spot on.

INGREDIENTS
1 tbsp olive oil
½ red onion, chopped
½ bulb of garlic, cloves peeled and crushed
A large chunk ginger (about the size of 1-2 thumbs), finely chopped
1 stick celery, chopped
2 medium-sized potatoes, peeled and diced
Half a butternut squash, peeled, seeded and cut into 2 cm cubes
2 chillies, finely chopped
½ tin tomatoes
½ bunch spring onions, chopped
1 litre water
1 vegetable stock cube, crumbled
1 tbsp tomato puree
1 tbsp light soy sauce
Juice of half a lemon
Freshly ground black pepper

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a big, heavy pan and gently fry the red onion, garlic, ginger and celery for 10 minutes.

Add the potatoes and carry on sauteing for another 5 minutes.

Add the squash, chillies, and spring onions for a couple of minutes.

Pour in the water, tomato puree, soy and lemon juice.

Season well with black pepper and bring to the boil.


Cover well and gently simmer for 1-2 hours

Blend the soup until it's smooth

Serve with bread

NOTES
What I said about blending the soup in my recipe for broccoli and Stilton soup still stands. If you aren't careful you could end up spraying the kitchen and your face with napalm-hot liquid.

I prefer this blended until it's pretty smooth, though if you want lumps in it, be less vigorous with the blender,

You could leave the chillies out if you want. The combined flavour of the butternut squash and ginger is the highlight of the dish but, if you have been a sweary follower, you will know that I think if it don't have chilli, it don't taste of shit. Well, none of the recipes should actually taste of shit. No, they taste nice. That's just me talking street for my younger readers. While this might seem a pitiable thing for a middle-aged man to do, it's still better than most of the shite that Torode and Wallace come out with on Masterchef.

Tuesday 8 March 2016

Jamaican lamb curry

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s there was a big influx of migrants from the British Commonwealth to the UK who were a vital part of rebuilding the country following WWII. A large contingent came from the Caribbean, especially Jamaica. In the late 60s, eminent scholar, Conservative politician, and, as it subsequently became apparent, massive racist cockwomble, Enoch Powell, foretold there would be rivers of blood as a result of this influx. Anyone who bought a pair of gum boots to spare their socks from getting stained in the gore must look pretty fucking stupid now as this hasn't happened.

It's nothing new, of course. There were doubtless a few resident Neanderthals probably grunting the same about the Cro-Magnons (ugg ug-uggg ug'g ugg or "fucking neo-hominids. They come over here with their complex language abilities and their way of crafting superior arrowheads and hand-axes from flint") when they arrived; and no doubt there would have been a subsequently vocal minority of the residents who said similar things about the Celts, the Romans, the Vikings, the Jutes, the Saxons, the Normans, the Hugenots, the Jews, the Indians, the Pakistanis, as there is saying the same thing about the Poles and the Syrians now. The worst of the bunch were the fucking Angles. Those bastards came over to Albion, next thing you know we have to change the name of our entire fucking country to Angle-land, or England, to suit them. It's just Germanic feudal correctness gone mad.

Anyway, despite the naysayers, the little Englanders, and the out and out fucking racists, we have a fucking proud history of welcoming immigrants, and them becoming part of the fabric of British life with their culture enriching ours. As I mentioned in a previous entry, the British national dish these days is now accepted to be chicken tikka masala, and Melas and Eid have become massive community events for everyone living in towns with a big Asian population.

This is equally true of the Caribbean immigrants from the late 20th century. One of the most vibrant events in the national calendar is the Notting Hill Carnival, arguably the largest street festival in the world, is a huge celebration of West Indian culture. The musical landscape was changed drastically by reggae and ska in the 70s and 80s; and restaurants specialising in Jamaican and other Caribbean cuisines are often a gem of the culinary life of any town.


The most well known dishes of Jamaican cuisine include jerk chicken, rice & peas and goat curry. Being a bit of an aficionado of curries from across the globe, I had to try this, but goat tends to be a bit in short supply in these parts so substituted lamb.

TIMING
Preparation: 10 minutes (plus marination)
Cooking: 3 hours

INGREDIENTS
500g diced lamb
2tbsp Jamaican curry powder (see notes)
1 onion, roughly chopped
3 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 thumbs-worth of fresh root ginger, finely chopped
200ml coconut milk
200ml water
1 chicken stock cube
1tbsp tomato pure
2 regular red chillies, finely chopped (see notes)
2 regular green chillies, finely chopped (see notes)
2tsp Encona chilli sauce (see notes)
Half a butternut squash, peeled, de-seeded and cubed

RECIPE
Trim off any excess fat from the lamb and put it in a bowl with 1 tbsp of the curry powder and shake the bowl to cover the meat

Leave to marinate for at least an hour, overnight if possible.

In a flame-proof casserole dish, heat the oil on the hob and brown the lamb for 5-10 minutes before removing with a slotted spoon

Add the onion, garlic and ginger to the dish and fry for a couple of minutes before adding the rest of the curry powder

Return the lamb and add the rest of the ingredients.

Stir well, cover and place in an oven at 150°C for three hours.

Check the stew every hour or so and add more water if it's getting dry.

 
 How it is cooking

Makes enough for two people. Serve it with rice and peas (recipe to follow)

With rice and peas

NOTES
There are loads of commercially available available blends of Jamaican curry powder. Now, some cookery columns, celebrity chefs etc would insist you must make your own. As a rule I'd say fuck that for a game of soldiers. Why reinvent the wheel? However, I actually did make my own, but mainly because I couldn't find any in my local supermarket. This is how I made it:
  • 2½ tbsp ground tumeric
  • 2 tbsp whole coriander
  • 1 tbsp whole cumin
  • 1 tbsp black mustard seeds
  • 1 tbsp whole fenugreek
  • ½ tbsp star anise
  • ½ tbsp ground allspice
  • 1 large stick of cinnamon (10 cm)
  • 1 tsp cloves
  • ½ tsp whole black pepper
  • ½ tsp ground ginger
Put the spices in a dry frying pan and heat for a couple of minutes on the hob to toast. Let them cool then grind to a fine powder and store in an airtight container

As mentioned above, this is based on a goat curry. Fortunately it works very well with the lamb I used which is readily available. Goat would probably need more cooking, but who knows? Not me, I've never fucking cooked it.

I'd intended to use sweet potato in this recipe but couldn't find any so substituted squash. Squash or pumpkin is great in any curry, but this would also work with regular potato.

Coconut milk in tins is great for this

I used the chillies I could find in my local supermarket, which were some not-too-hot non-descript variety. However, the chillies used in this ought to be scotch bonnet chillies which are hotter than Satan's urinary tract when he was having a severe case of urethritis during Hell's great cranberry shortage of 1986. As well as being stupid hot they also have a fantastic fruity taste that is as much a part of Jamaican cuisine as the other spices. Again, I couldn't find any scotch bonnets locally so used the bog standard chillies in the ingredients. On the other hand, Encona Hot Pepper Sauce is made from Scotch Bonnet chillies, hence why I add some to this dish.

Scotch bonnet chillies and Encona Hot Pepper Sauce which is made from them(You can get an extra hot version of the sauce)
(Chillies pic from http://huntergathercook.typepad.com/huntergathering_wild_fres/2011/01/homemade-scotch-bonnet-hot-sauce-thrifty-central-heating.html Sauce picture from Tescos website)


Sweary jocularity aside, I'm conscious of the fact that the as well as enriching British culture, the influx of immigrants from former British colonies in the West Indies betrays a dark history of the slave trade that saw huge numbers of African natives captured and shipped across the Atlantic to provide a cheap workforce for plantations in these selfsame former colonies.

Many immigrants live in some of the most deprived parts of the country complete with the social problems that afflict such areas, as well as often being vibrant centres for diverse cultures. The vibrancy then leads to more affluent people moving to the area, gentrification and next thing you know, the area is no longer vibrant and is the setting to some Richard Curtis (yes, him) bland, middle-class Rom-com as was the case for Notting Hill.

Sunday 24 January 2016

Potato Gregg's Last Stand: Tandoori style potato curry

All good things come to an end and so do potatoes bearing vague resemblance to celebrity greengrocers, so it's time to make him useful. Well, I couldn't let him just putrefy into a mouldy, slimy mess, could I? It would do him a disservice to make something boring with him so I decided to make this great curry. It's what he would have wanted.

 Alas, poor Potato Gregg.
I knew him, Horatio

Really, the potato is taken for granted, especially in the UK. Chips (and I did mention the British obsession with the fucking chip previously), mash and the horrendously bland, plain boiled old potatoes were the accompaniment to much of the nutrition in my formative years. I mean chips are OK and mash is great if made right (it rarely was back then), but the plain boiled potatoes were just so fucking bland. Serving them up like that is just such a waste of a really versatile vegetable. Let me count the ways. There are crisps which come close to the very zenith of the art of potato cookery, but nobody I know makes their own crisps. You can have them baked, sauteed, roasted, or get exotic and go for something like hasselback, duchess, dauphinoise and, let's face it, you know if it's got a French name it's going to have a good 50% extra on the price in a lot of restaurants. Alternatively, incorporate your spuds in a stew or casserole for them to braise and they not only absorb the flavour of what they're cooking in, but actually enhance it.

There is a lot of bad press about potatoes as being full of carbohydrate and therefore amongst certain healthy/faddy diet circles (yes, adherents to the Paleolithic diet, I'm looking at you as I mentioned previously, you gullible twats) they rank up there with the jism of Satan himself as a food to avoid. However, it's a little known fact that potatoes, before the global transport network and advances in cultivation made pretty much every vegetable available all year round, were one of the major sources of vitamin C in gloomy Northern Europe in the winter months. Indeed, there is actually more vitamin C in a packet of salt and vinegar crisps than in a fresh apple. Well, I say there is, but I've not checked that fact so it might be bollocks.

Thing is, potatoes are just so fucking versatile and one of the best ways to use them is in curries where they can be a main ingredient in their own right.

INGREDIENTS
½ tsp ground tumeric
½ tsp onion seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp tandoori spice
½ tsp paprika
½ tsp salt
pinch chilli flakes
1 small onion, sliced
2 large cloves garlic, crushed
400g peeled potatoes in 2cm cubes
300ml water
100g fresh tomatoes, peeled
2 tbsp vegetable oil 



RECIPE
Heat the oil in a heavy pan and fry the spices for a minute. Throw in the onion and garlic and cook until the onion is transparent, stirring frequently.

Add the potatoes and keep stirring for 10 minutes to par-cook them and give them a nice coating of spice mix. Add the tomatoes, stir and cook for another couple of minutes before adding the water.

Bring the pan to the boil, cover and leave to cook for twenty to thirty minutes, when the potato should be tender.


This is plenty for three or four people as an accompaniment to another curry, or is substantial enough to be served on its own with rice and/or bread. Like most curries, any leftovers taste better as lunch the next day


Served up with a chicken curry, pilau rice and naan bread

NOTES
So, goodbye then, Potato Gregg. There may be other guest appearances in the future.

This is yet another vegetarian/vegan dish. It's great on its own but it makes a great part of a thali along with some of my other vegie curries and accompaniments like baingan tamatar and butternut squash curry.

I made this with old potatoes in this instance, but making it with new potatoes also works really well.

Monday 14 December 2015

Egg fried rice, Indian style

The word "sundry", meaning "odds and sods", is an odd one because it's almost an obsolete word. In fact, pretty much the only time you really see it is at the back of a menu at an Indian restaurant where it categorises all the accompaniments for your curry, like rice or bread. Ironically, the only thing that appeared in this section (at least, until banned by the EU in 1997) that actually was sundried was Bombay duck. It's fairly common knowledge that it's not actually duck but is in fact dried fish. I can only assume it gets its name because it tastes fucking foul. Even the city of Bombay is no longer known by that name since it officially became Mumbai in 1995 in order to separate the city from it's past as part of the British Raj. Perhaps there's a connection, though if I was pissed off at the imperialistic nature of my former colonial masters, I'd send them even more of that fishy shit for pissed British people to order in the curry house after a skinful and leave them with a taste in their mouth making them worry that they had fellated a dead squid the previous night when they wake the next day.

Bombay Duck
Looking at that picture you'd not know whether to smoke it, put it on your garden or flush it down the toilet

Chinese restaurants in the UK generally do egg fried rice to go with their dishes. You can get boiled rice too (as well as chips, though I've already given my opinion on having chips with Oriental food in another blog) but the combination of rice with egg is actually pretty good and works just as well with a curry if you add a bit of spice. This dish is pretty quick to make as well which is always an advantage and it's less fannying around than making a pilau (like this one, for example). It's also vegetarian.

INGREDIENTS
1 mug basmati rice
good pinch of salt
1/2 a small to medium sized onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp tumeric

RECIPE
Rinse the rice by placing it in a pan full of water, giving it a swirl then draining it. Do this a couple of times more  to remove excess starch from the grains. Finally drain it off into a sieve. Cook it according to the method used in my previous recipe for pilau rice by adding just less than one and a half times the volume of water as the amount of rice you're using (in this case one and a half mugs). Bring quickly to the boil, turn the heat right down and cover for twenty minutes, until the water is absorbed. You should be left with soft, fluffy rice with long basmati grains.

When the rice is ready, heat the oil in a frying pan or wok and add the spice for about half a minute then add the onion and garlic, stirring constantly. Slowly fry until soft. Crack the egg into the onion mix and stir it as it sets. When it's almost cooked, pour in the rice and stir gently to mix everything together without breaking up the rice grains. You should end up with nicely golden, fluffy rice that goes well with any curry.

Indian egg-fried rice
Not the most interesting picture but it has a pleasant colour

NOTES
I already mentioned that the best way to get decent rice is to buy a huge, fuck off bag from a local Asian grocers.

I have to give a mention to my local Asian supermarket, Mullaco in Dewsbury, where a 5kg bag of basmati rice costs less than £8. I realise it's a bit parochial to plug a local shop in a blog that may be read anywhere in the world, but it's that good.

In my introduction I mentioned fellating a dead squid to describe the sort of post-binge-drinking mouth-feel you would likely experience after eating Bombay duck the night before, and even I have to admit this is a ridiculous image to conjure. However, I'm lead to believe that this cephalopod-based act is actually the second part of the initiation ritual allegedly participated in by our Prime Minister when he was at university, the one that follows on from the activity widely reported to have involved sticking his todger in the mouth of a pig. Or not.

Bombay duck picture from http://www.bombay-duck.co.uk/

Saturday 5 December 2015

Baingan Tamatar (aubergine and tomato curry)

Aubergines are funny things. They're called eggplants in the States, apparently because the first ones that Europeans saw were like the little white ones in the picture below. You do wonder though if they may have got a different name if they'd first seen one of the others, like a purple and white stripy arse plant (far right), or a deep violet penis fruit (do I need to point that fucker out?). I should stress that the latter ought not to be confused with a penis gourd.

United colours of aubergines

And what of other vegetables if they had been named after what they look like? I've already alluded to the sex toy appearance of the butternut squash and the phallic appearance of the courgette in previous recipes (to paraphrase the title of my own blog, it's not big, but it is funny). Would we find the "goth carrot" (parsnip); the "leafy stinking football" (cabbage) or the "You wouldn't want one of them up your arse" (artichoke) quite so appetising?

Of course, we Brits, being proudly European (apart from those of the UKIP persuasion), name them aubergine from the French word for the vegetable which is derived from in turn from Arabic al badinjan which itself comes from the Sanskrit vatimgana which is also the root of the Hindi word for aubergine, baingan, the title of the recipe.

All this linguistic nerdism is well and good, but the word aubergine does sound uncomfortably close to the French word for an inn, auberge, which spawned the Chris Rea song below and I'm not entirely sure that can be forgiven.


Whatever you want to call it, the aubergine is a fantastic vegetable. It is often thing of beauty with its vivid colour. It's also substantial enough to make the basis of a good main course dish in its own right, tastes great, and works really well in curries like this one. As I've said before, I've got a lot of respect for vegetarians and a great vegetarian dinner is all the better for the smug satisfaction you get in the knowledge that it didn't have any dead animal in it (at least, none that you knew about. I mean, there's no accounting for the odd fly or spider that made its home somewhere in the ingredients). This makes a decent main course for a couple of people with rice and/or a nice Indian bread.

INGREDIENTS
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 big onions, sliced
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1bay leaf
~10cm piece cinnamon
2 tsp whole coriander seeds
1 tsp onion seeds
1 tsp ground black pepper
4 cloves
pinch chilli flakes
1 tsp salt
1 good sized aubergine (about 3-400g worth if you use smaller ones), topped, tailed and cut into 2cm cubes
1 tin of tomatoes (ideally chopped)
200ml water
1 tsp garam masala




RECIPE
Heat the oil in a nice, solid pan and add the spices.

Fry for a minute then add the onion and garlic and sautee gently to soften.

Add the tomatoes and aubergines and stir well.

Add the water, bring to the boil and simmer.



Leave for at least half an hour, until the aubergine is tender.

Add the garam masala and stir well.

Taste and add more salt if it's needed.


Serve it on its own with rice and/or naan bread or with other accompaniments.

NOTES
Vegetable oil should be neutrally flavoured, like sunflower or rapeseed.

About 30% of the population of India are vegetarian. This amounts to over 350,000,000 people, over five times the entire population of the UK. It's therefore not surprising that probably the best vegetarian food in the world is from India, like this dish. I've got a few more great veggie curries up my sleeve for later blog entries.

I've mentioned before that aubergines are part of the nightshade family, also including tomatoes, peppers and potatoes. We could survive without these plants (in Europe we actually did without most of them before Columbus), but food would be so ridiculously dull.

Garam masala is a mixture of aromatic spices that pep up the flavour of a curry that might be lost during the cooking process.

Wednesday 11 November 2015

Hyderbadi black pepper chicken

Spices are incredible things. Seeds, fruits, roots, even tree bark. They generally look, at best, unimpressive and at worst just plain fucking nasty. Take the star anise. It looks like a brown shuriken but adds the subtle aniseed flavour to Chinese cuisine. Cloves look like rusty nails but they also give the heady, numbing aroma to mulled wine. Worst of all is root ginger which looks like Boris Johnson but is an integral flavour as part of Indian and Chinese food. and of course in sweet recipes like ginger biscuits and cakes. Without spices food would be just so dull.
Spices and the things they resemble
(from top: a star anise and a shuriken; a clove and a rusy nail; root ginger and BoJo)

I could go off on a tangent and twat on about how some spices are important in traditional Chinese, Ayuvedic and other historic mystical system of pseudo-medicine and they can cure all sorts of shit but if you're a regular follower of this blog you'll know I don't subscribe to any of that new age bollocks. True, herbs and spices, like any natural products from animals or plants, contain all manner of substances which may have beneficial effects and there is a lot of good research underway to look into these possibilities. Sometimes the effects aren't necessarily beneficial. For example, I could mention how capsaicin, the component that makes chilli hot, is actually neurotoxic, how you can actually get high on nutmeg if you eat enough of it and if you eat too many poppy seeds you can test positive for heroin at roadside drugs tests. Indeed the "poppy seed defence" is a well known in legal circles when people have claimed that their positive drug test was due to eating a poppy seed bagel rather than being off their tits on smack.

Anyway, onto the recipe in hand. If you've read a few of these entries you'll know I really love my spices. Most of these dishes have a good measure of spice, especially chilli.This doesn't have so much as a whisper of chilli in it. It isn't actually a curry. Yes, it's Indian. Yes, it's got some spice content. Yes, it's actually hot in a spicy way, but it's not really a curry. No coriander, no cumin, no aromatic spices, no chilli. I ranted about what made a curry in one of my previous entries but this doesn't fall into that category because it's only got tumeric, ginger, garlic and black pepper. Lots and lots of black pepper.

I have to say that this dish is probably one of the tastiest things I have ever cooked. The combination of black pepper, vinegar, ginger, garlic and onion is actually quite magical.

INGREDIENTS
2 tsp ginger-garlic paste
1 tsp salt
4 tsp crushed back peppercorns
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
1 tsp ground tumeric
3 tbsp vegetable oil
500g chicken fillet, diced
1 onion, puréed
1 onion, sliced

RECIPE
Mix the garlic-ginger paste with 1 tsp of the black pepper, all of the tumeric and vinegar and 2 tsp of the oil.

Add the chicken and stir, ensuring it's well coated, before putting in the fridge to marinate for 2-3 hours.

Add the remaining oil to a pan, and the rest of the black pepper then fry for a few seconds before adding the sliced onion. Sauté this until soft then add the puréed onion and fry until it starts to gain some colour.

Add the marinated chicken along with any liquid from the marinade and gently cook the chicken through. How long this takes obviously depends in what form the chicken is. For this entry I used diced chicken breast which took 15-20 minutes, though other times I've used chicken on the bone which is in bigger pieces and so takes longer, but I'll come onto that in the notes.



Makes enough for two adults served with rice or an Indian bread, plus maybe a vegetable curry to make a more complete meal



NOTES
Garlic-ginger paste is exactly as it's described: mushed up garlic cloves and fresh ginger. I pounded it into a paste in a pestle and mortar, but you could use a small hand blender. If you don't have either you could get away with crushing the garlic and grating the ginger then mashing it up further with the back of a spoon. Two teaspoons is about 2-3 cloves of garlic and a small thumb-sized piece of root ginger. The actual amount you need isn't actually that critical, as long as there's enough to coat the chicken as part of the marinade.

The original recipe for this was from celeb chef Atul Korcher and uses a whole chicken cut into 8 pieces. That's shit-loads more chicken than I needed since I made this for two people. Also, the original cooking method is a bit of a pain in the arse with on-the-bone chicken plus originally the recipe used 100ml oil which is way too much though makes cooking larger chicken pieces easier but makes the dish greasier than a Tory MP who fell in an oil slick while lubing himself up to participate in an orgy.

Using diced chicken may lose out on flavour of bone-in chicken, but it's so much easier to make as the chicken really needs to be rubbed with the marinade if it's in big, bony lumps. This makes the preparation more messy than Mr Messy visiting a scat party (possibly attended by a ready-lubed up Tory MP) and has the effect of giving your fingers the look of someone who smokes 40 a day plus if you have a cut on your finger it hurts like hell, thanks to the vinegar.

Monday 10 November 2014

Lemon pilau rice

Tim Rice, as part of the award-winning writing team with Andrew Lloyd Webber, was the one that didn't resemble Jabba the Hutt from Star Wars and the least tax-averse and also the one that wrote the words. He wrote lyrics for Evita, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar. He's got fuck all to do with this recipe, other than being called Rice.

Cooking rice can be a regal pain in the arse to get right. You can use loads of water and drain it, but lose all the flavour of the tasty things you put in. The better way is to use just the right amount of water that gets soaked up and keeps all the tasty stuff on the rice, but it's hard to get the balance right between over-cooking and under-cooking.The proportion of water and rice in this recipe just about hits the right balance, though rice does vary, depending on the type and even between different batches of the same type.

INGREDIENTS
1 mug* of basmati rice
1 1/3 mugs of water 
juice and zest of 1 lemon
5 cardamom pods
5 cloves
1 bay leaf
5cm stick of cinnamon
1/2 tsp whole black peppercorns
1 tsp fennel seeds
1 star of anise
1 tsp tumeric
1/2 tsp salt
Yeah, yeah. It's another picture of some spices. It's quite pretty. Get the fuck over it
From the top: lemon zest, bay leaf, fennel seeds, cinnamon, tumeric, star anise, cardamoms, cloves and salt in the middle

*The volume of water you need depends on the volume of rice you're using so it's easier to use the same container to measure both instead of weighing the rice

RECIPE
First it's a good idea to wash the rice to make it less stodgy when it's finished. Pour the rice into a big pan and fill the pan with water. Give it a swirl and drain out the water. Do this three more times, pouring the rice out into a sieve the final time.

Pour the oil into a heavy based pan and heat. Add the lemon zest and the spices and gently fry for a minute. Add the rinsed rice and stir until the all the rice grains look yellow. Add the water plus the lemon juice.

Heat gently until it boils then immediately turn down the heat as low as possible and cover tightly with the lid. Leave it for 20 minutes then turn off the heat completely.

When ready to serve, fluff up the rice. Before you do that though, it's not a bad idea to get rid of the whole spices that have floated to the top of the cooking rice. Nothing spoils a good curry more than lacerating the inside of your cheek on a sharp piece of cinnamon bark.

It depends on how big the mug is, but this makes plenty for two adults.


Yes, it's another blurred picture. I've got a crap phone but the rice does look nice and golden

NOTES

If you've done this right, the rice should be nice and fluffy and neither a sloppy, stodgy mess (overcooked) or like small pieces of grit (undercooked). If there is any left, it can be stored in the fridge for a day or frozen for longer, once it's cooled. When you do reheat it, make sure it's hotter than a bombardier beetle's arse after participating in a chilli eating competition the day before to kill off any nasty bugs. If it is a sloppy mess, it will be even worse the next day so better to throw it out, as nobody likes sloppy seconds.

Admit it, you never get phrases like "sloppy seconds" in any of Rick Stein's programmes