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

Keralan prawn curry

It's got coconut in
Annie I'm Not Your Daddy by Kid Creole and the Coconuts

Imagine you're Dr Who and you've jumped in the TARDIS and you're going back... back... back.... It's the 1970s. You step out of the TARDIS and head off for a posh dinner. You end up packed into a heaving working men's club for your meal, before a bitter, racist comedian in a frilly shirt starts making jokes with an oh, so funny cod-Jamaican accent (see example below). You know your main course can be only one thing. You know it's going to be chicken... in a basket! Yes, it's a roast or fried chicken portion with chips and possibly peas, but you know it's posh because it's not on a plate. It's only in a basket! I mean, it's a piece of bland, factory-farmed, sub-KFC hen (though KFC wasn't about much in the 70s, even in it's original incarnation of Kentucky Fried Chicken, at least not where I lived), it's a frozen chicken portion with frozen chips and frozen peas, but it's OK, because it's IN A FUCKING BASKET! Still, I suppose it could be worse. It could be cooked in hay, for fuck's sake. Yes, hay. Some well known, expensive, Michelin-starred chefs serve up food that's cooked in dry grass, because, like, it's really rustic. Why stop there? Stick in a bit of cowshit to give it that just made in the field flavour? Maybe serve it with a side of freshly culled, organic badger chips and a drizzle of incest jus for true authenticity.

Top club comic from back in the day, Bobby Chariot
(or alter-ego of Alexei Sayle)

Obviously, that's your main course. Your dessert will have to be Black Forest Gateau. It's like the worst dilemma for your average Europhobic gammon. I mean, it's a cake that originated in Germany, has a French name, and yet, it's the nostalgia crack cocaine that was the "classy" dessert of their youth, even if it's basically just a chocolate cake with cherry jam and whipped cream.

So we've covered main course and dessert, what's the starter going to be? Well, there can be only one. It's got to be prawn cocktail. A handful of tiny prawns embedded in a turd of cloying, pink seafood sauce shat upon a few scabby lettuce leaves, half a forced tomato (with all the flavour of a raw potato), and a couple of slices of cucumber. This was most people's only exposure to the prawn or shrimp when I grew up. I mean, you could get prawn balls at your local Chinese takeaway, but that was foreign muck again. Besides, who wants to eat them weird pink cockroachy things from the sea?

The Three Horsemen of the 70s Food Apocalypse
(All that's missing is Famine, though after looking at this lot, Famine is probably not sounding too bad)
Sources: https://www.retrowow.co.uk/retro_britain/classic_recipes/prawn_cocktail.html
https://violetbakes.wordpress.com/category/chicken-in-a-basket-recipe/
https://www.thedailymeal.com/eat/if-you-grew-70s-you-ll-definitely-remember-these-foods-slideshow/slide-2

We're much more urbane now, though. You can even buy raw, frozen prawns from Farmfoods, which is a retailer only one step up from a shop selling secondhand food. Indeed, it was raw, frozen prawns I used for this dish, allowing them to defrost before cooking them then giving them a rinse under the tap. Because it's from the southern part of the Sub-Continent, this curry is quite different to the other Indian dishes I've posted before as it's missing most of the spice you'd normally associate with curry (particularly cumin and coriander), but the fenugreek gives it a proper curry flavour, as do the curry leaves. I muse on what does and doesn't make a curry here. This version of a curry is very much Indian, but with a tropical twist from the coconut, gaining something from Malaysian or Thai cuisine in character.

In researching this recipe I discovered that there are two main types of eating prawns: large, warm water prawns (or king prawns) and cold water prawns. Cold water, Atlantic prawns are caught by trawling and are cooked on landing which means they can't usually be bought raw. They taste quite good, but their flavour is quite strong (and they hold a lot of water) which means that they don't really work in a lot of recipes where you have to cook the prawns . This is the type of prawn usually used in prawn cocktail. On the other hand, warm water prawns are farmed, mainly in tropical Asia, and can be bought raw so are much better for cooking with. They taste good too, and don't get too mushy from added water, so tend to be plump, firm and juicy when cooked.There are arguments about the impact of prawn farming on the environment but if managed properly this can be minimised.

TIMING
Preparation: 20 minutes
Cooking: 30 minutes

 INGREDIENTS
2 shallots, roughly chopped
2 green chillies, roughly chopped
1 piece of ginger (approximately thumb-sized)
2 fat cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
Small piece of fresh turmeric, roughly chopped (around 2 cm in length)
Juice of a lime
1 tsp black mustard seeds
½ tsp fenugreek seeds
2 cloves
2 green cardamom pods
½ star anise
½ tsp ground black pepper
½tsp salt
Handful of curry leaves (around 20)
200ml coconut milk (half a 400ml can)
100g green beans, topped, tailed and cut into 4cm pieces
120g fresh tomatoes, peeled and chopped
1tsp sugar
250g raw peeled prawns

L

Spices
clockwise from top: salt, turmeric, black pepper, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, anise, mustrad seeds, fenugreek seeds with curry leaves in teh centre

RECIPE
Put the shallots, chillies, ginger, garlic, turmeric and lime juice into a hand blender and make into a paste.

Heat the vegetable oil to a heavy based pan and add the spices, including the curry leaves and fry for a minute or so. The seeds and leaves should start to pop.

Spoon in the paste and cook through, stirring constantly so it doesn't catch on the base of the pan (about 10-15 minutes, when the paste starts to take on some colour).

Pour in the coconut milk and add the tomatoes and sugar, bring to the boil, cover and simmer until the beans are tender.

Add the prawns and allow them to braise in the coconut sauce until cooked (they will change colour from grey to reddish when cooked and shouldn't take much more than a couple of minutes)

In the pot

Serve up with rice and maybe a vegetable curry on the side.

Served up with plain boiled rice and a squash curry

NOTES
It's rare I can cook a dish with coconut as part of the base because Mrs Sweary is not a fan of coconutty sauces. This example, however, has a relatively small amount of coconut milk, so the flavour is not overwhelming. Mrs Sweary actually liked this.

When I was cooking the sauce, I tasted it and couldn't help thinking something was missing. I added the prawns and it turned out that they actually were the missing ingredient. 

Fresh turmeric (haldi) looks like ginger, but is a vivid yellow colour when you cut into it. You can find it in Asian grocers, but if you can't get it, use a teaspoon of dried turmeric.

Curry leaves are quite unique and you can't really substitute their distinctive flavour. If you can't find them, add a bay leaf and more fenugreek seeds.

That sickly prawn cocktail was the only exposure to prawns that the majority of the British public had in those dim and distant times, when they can be a lovely ingredient, is a tragedy. Plump, juicy and sweet and they work really well in spicy dishes, like some Chinese or curries like this one, or Mediterranean cuisine like Spanish gambas pil pil or paella.

There aren't many references to prawns in popular culture. The only one I could think about was Scampi the Prawn in the 79s kids' programme, Fingerbobs. I didn't mention it because, well, I've done way too many references to 50 year old TV shows of late, so I'll keep that one for another time I do a prawn recipe. Do remember, however, if you are going to Fingerbobs, get their consent first.

Whilst prawn reference are pretty thin on the geround, I could get a few references to coconut, such as Kide Creole's at the top of the page and this little gem from the Avalanches. This boy certainly needs therapy.

More Coconut references, but a better song
Frontier Psychiatrist by the Avalanches

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

Murgh Methi (chicken curry with fenugreek leaf)

Paddington: One Bear to rule them all
You're a bear! Lay off the marmalade sandwich and just eat the fucking chicken!
Source: https://www.britishclassiccomedy.co.uk/paddington

Thanks to one of my Aunties who bought me a box-set of his books, Paddington Bear was a prominent figure in my earlier life. Let's face it, out of all the celebrity bears of the time, Paddington was the king. I mean, there weren't THAT many in the public eye, to be fair. Teddy Edward was OK, but pretty dull. Issi Noho was a panda, so only scrapes in on a technicality, and was shite anyway. Rupert the Bear was the worst though. Not only was he the most boring, self-righteous cunt ever portrayed on children's telly, but he was originally from a cartoon in the Daily Express, for fuck's sake, which is basically the Sun with delusions of fucking grandeur. I mean his programmes were so fucking long, and he has a history of casual racism (it's the Express, so he's hardly going to be feel out of place there). So, yes, Paddington was the man... bear (not to be confused with ManBearPig, see notes), despite being (or possibly because he was) an illegal immigrant. 

Don't have nightmares
Bears of my TV childhood (Teddy Edward, Issi Noho and Rupert. The stupid twat can't even do the actions to YMCA properly)
Sources: https://nostalgiacentral.com/television/tv-by-decade/tv-shows-1970s/teddy-edward
https://nostalgiacentral.com/television/tv-by-decade/tv-shows-1970s/issi-noho/
http://www.jedisparadise.com/3/Rupert_Bear.htm

As great as Paddington was, however, he was crap from a culinary point of view. All he ate were marmalade sandwiches. I tried marmalade sandwiches when I was under the thrall of the Peruvian ursinoid, and they were fucking awful, so it's a definite no-no. So, what has Paddington got to do with this recipe?

Parsley the Lion
 Source: https://alchetron.com/Parsley-the-Lion

The author of Paddington, Michael Bond, I discovered, also wrote the kids' programme that was the first exposure children of a certain generation got to any sort of cooking reference, The Herbs. The Herbs was a puppet show whose characters were the personification of actual herbs. There was Parsley the Lion (a lion with a green mane, who looks like the outcome of the Jolly Green Giant fucking a cat, see picture above), Dill the Dog (who looked like Su Pollard) and others who are a bit more foggy in my middle-aged mind. I remember some older lady character called Rosemary and something about a character called Bayleaf. So, in this age of instant access to pretty much all the accumulated knowledge of the human race (and yet people are still thick as pig shit. Go figure), I looked it up on Wikipedia, and this confirmed that there was indeed an aristocratic Lady Rosemary, along with her husband, Sir Basil, and Bayleaf was their gardener. There's nothing like reinforcing the British class system to kids at the earliest possible age so they know their place in society. They also had an Indian character who appeared once or twice, so you might wonder which herb they were named after. Well, it transpires that he was called pashana bedhi which, apparently, is another name for coleus amboinicus. This cooking blog has approaching 60 recipes, many of which being some sort of curry, but I've not heard of this particular herb (not that the name exactly rolls off the tongue). It's apparently some sort of fragrant plant otherwise known as Mexican mint, Indian mint and Cuban oregano. It's certainly not a common ingredient in anything I've come across, though I'm quite limited in exposure to exotic herbs, being a resident of grim and grey Northern England. So, why wasn't he called coriander, for example? That's the herb we usually find scattered on Indian food in the UK. Now, I love the flavour coriander it adds to Indian (and other cuisine, like Mexican for example), but it's an unusual ingredient in that it contains a certain substance that is tasteless to most people but tastes bad to a small minority. Mrs Sweary is one of those people, so I can't use it in dinner I cook for both of us. There's some really interesting science behind this and I could go off on another biochemical tangent on the physiology and genetics of taste, but don't worry, I'll leave that for another post.

Dill the Dog                              Su Pollard
How can you tell them apart?
Sources: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/fame-fortune/su-pollard-last-hi-de-hi-royalty-cheque-1120/
https://parody.fandom.com/wiki/Dill_the_Dog

The other major herb you might find in British High Street Indian cuisine is fenugreek, otherwise known as methi. Like coriander, it's the leafy part of the same plant as the spice seed of the same name used in curries. It's got an earthy flavour, not that dissimilar to its seeds (which in my opinion are THE component of curry spice that makes it taste of "curry"), but fresher and works so well in this recipe. Also, there's enough of the herb used that it almost becomes a vegetable in its own right. Not quite as much as, say, the spinach in a saag, but certainly a significant amount. It's a great, slightly different twist on the usual suspects from British Indian restaurants, though it is on the menu of a lot of curry houses.

TIMING
Preparation: 20 minutes plus marination
Cooking: 1 hour

INGREDIENTS
Marinade paste:
3-4 garlic cloves (medium), coarsely chopped
1 thumb-sized chunk of ginger, roughly chopped
1 shallot, roughly chopped
½ tsp salt
2 green chillies, roughly chopped

400g chicken meat (breast fillet or boneless thighs), cut into bite-sized chunks
2tbsp vegetable oil (a neutrally flavoured oil, like rapeseed)
2 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin
½ tsp fenugreek seeds
½ tsp ground turmeric
3 whole green cardamom pods
3 whole cloves
small piece of cinnamon bark (about 5cm)
½ tsp salt
½ tsp ground black pepper
2 small onions, 1 sliced and the other roughly chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped
1 small piece of ginger (about 2cm cubed)
2 medium to large fresh tomatoes (about 200g in total weight). peeled and roughly chopped
1 tbsp tomato puree
1 green pepper, cored and cut into 2cm pieces
50g bunch fresh methi leaf, coarsely chopped

The ingredients
Clockwise from top left: methi leaf, ginger, garlic, spices, green pepper, tomatoes, onions, topped by one of my favourite knives

RECIPE
Pound the marinade ingredients into a paste using a pestle and mortar, or using a food processor.

Put into a dish with the chicken and mix well so that the chicken is well covered.

Cover the dish and put in the fridge to marinate for a couple of hours or so.

Heat 1tbsp oil in a pan and fry the spices for about a minute.

Add the ginger, the chopped onion and garlic, and fry until the onion is soft (add a splash of water if the spices start to catch on the pan, just enough to keep the mixture moist).

Add the tomatoes and the tomato puree plus 100ml water.

Bring to the boil, turn down the heat, cover, and simmer for about 20 minutes, until the tomatoes breakdown.

Allow this to cool and blend up into a smooth sauce.

In a clean pan, heat another tablespoon of oil and fry the chicken until cooked, adding any excess marinade. This should take about 15 minutes.

Remove the cooked chicken with a slotted spoon.

To the oil add the sliced onion and fry until soft.

Add the green pepper and continue to fry for another 10 minutes.

Throw in the methi leaves and allow them to wilt for about a minute.

Return the chicken to the pan, add the sauce and gently warm up.

Allow to the chicken to heat through and serve with rice and/or naan bread. Feeds two easily.

In the pan

Served up with plain rice and an aloo gobi

NOTES
Fresh methi or fenugreek leaf should be available from Asian grocers in big bunches. It freezes quite well, so use as much as you need for this then wrap the excess in foil (ideally in portions ready weighed out for recipes like this) and put in a freezer bag for use at later date.

This is another recipe where you marinate chicken in a paste made of onion, garlic and ginger (like this one). It does impart a deep, rich flavour to the dish, You could cut down the time in making this by coating the chicken with the marinade and cooking straight away.

Green pepper is a great addition to most curries as it's not too sweet and the taste is perfect for spicy food. Red pepper might work OK too, as would potato or something like aubergine or squash.

ManBearPig made a few appearances in South Park as a monster pursued by former Vice President Al Gore

I'm totally cereal
ManBearPig in action

Again, I think I've broken yet more new ground as the first cooking blog to drop the "c" bomb in the context of a well-loved childhood character. Now I've beaten that path, I look forward to hearing regular guest star, Rick Stein, calling Scooby Doo "a twat", Tom Kerridge naming Big Bird "a tosser" or Nadiya Hussain of accusing Peter Pan of being "a massive fucking nonce".

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.

Jerk stewed chicken

Capsaicin
For what it's worth
Source: https://me-pedia.org/wiki/File:Capsaicin_peppers.png

Regular readers of this blog will know I'm a big fan of the chilli. Probably more than half the recipes I've published in this blog contain chilli in some form or other. The substance in chillies that makes them hot is called capsaicin. There's some interesting biochemistry involved in how it works (to me, at any rate) which I won't go into. One thing I will say, however, is that capsaicin affects a receptor called TRPV1 in mammals, but not in birds. Mammals have great teeth at the back of their mouths to grind things like seeds, whereas birds swallow them whole, So, if you're a chilli plant, you want your seeds to pass through an animal unharmed so they can be deposited elsewhere, and not crushed up in the jaws of some milk-weaned twat. Therefore having some substance in your fruit that give mammals a burning sensation after eating them keeps them well away This means birds eat the chillies, poo the seeds and spread the plant far and wide. On the other hand it means that birds will never know the sweet pain of a really good, hot curry. They'll never experience that life-affirming feeling of a really searing chilli, and its accompanying endorphin high. Imagine that, you're a bird and can't get a really good, ring-stinging curry, which is truly one of the great pleasures in life. Saying that, most of the ring-stinging curries I've had contain birds, in the way of chicken, so that would be kind of cannibalism. Family Guy did address this in one of their episodes (see below). On the other hand, having seen the mess bird poo already makes on a car, it's probably not a bad thing that they aren't affected by chilli.

Taking a tern for the worse
The problems of eating chicken if you're a seagull, though, seagulls are probably as far removed , in evolutionary terms, from chickens as humans are from cows

Of course, there's a major flaw in the chilli plant's strategy to avoid being eaten by mammals, in that it didn't reckon on the masochistic tendencies of a certain great ape to derive pleasure from pain via endorphins. Hell, getting pleasure from pain is such a big thing in humans that some people actually part with large sums of money to prostitutes to sandpaper their testicles... apparently. There's even some suggestion that people who eat lots of spicy chilli may live longer, which means I might actually now be immortal. The effect of capsaicin, however, isn't restricted to the mouth. Anyone who's ever chopped a chilli then touched their eye will know what I'm talking about, or worse, if you've ever needed a wee after preparing chillies. The weirdest thing is having a wee after eating a lot of hot chilli gives a good simulation of a UTI as the capsaicin burns on the way out.

So, anyway, the amount of capsaicin and related compounds in a pepper determine how hot they are and there is a scale to determine that. the Scoville Scale. It was conceived by Wilbur Scoville, an American pharmacist, diluting extract of chilli until it couldn't be tasted any more. Nowadays, of course, we do it by measuring actual capsaicin itself and adding a fiddle factor to give a Scoville heat unit, or SHU. The range in SHU is huge. A sweet pepper has a value up to 100, the jalapeño and chipotle 2.5-10K, the Thai bird's eye 50-100K, the Habanero (as used to make the famous Tabasco sauce) and Scotch bonnet (I'll come onto that in a bit) at 100-350K to the stupidly hot Bhut Jolokia (aka ghost pepper) and Trinidad Scorpion at 750K-1.5M or Carolina Reaper and sinisterly named Pepper X (the current world record holder as the hottest pepper) at 1.5 to 3M or greater, on a par with law enforcement pepper spray.

Chilli Peppers
They're not all red hot
Green pepper, Jalapeno, Chipotle, Birds eye, Habanero, Scotch bonnet, Bhut Jolokia, Trinidad scorpion, Carolina Reaper, Pepper X. They get more deformed, ugly and evil they look, the hotter they get
Sources: https://www.foodcity.com/product/0000000004065/, https://www.veritable-garden.co.uk/small-fruits-vegetables/140-jalapeno-hot-chili-lingot-3760262511665.html, https://www.spicesinc.com/p-84-chipotle-morita-chiles.aspx, https://www.nutrivaso.com/2016/05/, https://blog.sonoranspice.com/the-habanero-breaking-down-the-popular-pepper-with-extreme-heat/, https://www.shutterstock.com/search/scotch%2Bbonnet%2Bpeppers?page=2&section=1, https://www.friedas.com/products/ghost-chile/, https://mychilligarden.com/moruga-scorpion-red/, https://www.lazada.com.my/products/10-seeds-carolina-reaper-the-worlds-hottest-chilli-pepper-no-1-in-guinness-worlds-records-2013-2017-benih-cili-terpedas-i191107705.html , https://twitter.com/buypepperxseeds/status/929442732132716545

The Scotch bonnet is one of the hottest regular peppers you can get hold of fairly easily and cheaply in the UK, especially if you are privileged to live in an area with a large Afro-Caribbean population. It's got a wonderful fruity falvour besides the chilli heat and is a common ingredient in Carribean cuisine, especially that of Jamaica, which I've covered before. It's a major component of jerk seasoning, which is the basis of this dish. Jerk, in food terms, usually refers to marinated grilled meat of some sort, and is a great way to add some pep to your BBQ. However, we found this recipe years ago in an otherwise shit magazine (I think it was actually Take a Break, believe it or not) and have been making it ever since. It uses jerk seasoning, or paste, in a stew with pineapple, peppers and tomatoes. It's probably the hottest regular dish we cook, without adding any extra chilli, but it is really delicious.

TIMING
Preparation: 15 minutes
Cooking: 30 minutes

 INGREDIENTS
2 tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 peppers, cored, seeded and cut into strips (any colour, though at least one of them should be red)
200-250g chicken fillet, cut into bite-sized pieces
1 tin of tomatoes
1 small tin (230g) pineapple chunks in pineapple juice
1 tsp jerk paste
½ tsp ground allspice
½ tsp ground ginger
Pinch dried thyme
Salt and pepper

Ingredients
From top left, clocwise: tomatoes, pineapple, red and yellow peppers, onion, garlic and spices in the dish: ginger, allspice, thyme jerk paste.

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a pan and fry the onion for 5 minutes

Add the garlice and fry for another couple of minutes

Throw in the peppers and fry for 5 more minutes

Add the chicken and the whole tin of tomatoes and the pineapple, including the juice

Throw in the jerk paste, ginger, allspice and thyme, plus a good grind of black pepper and a bit of salt.

Pour in 100ml water, stir, bring to the boil

In da pan

Turn down the heat, cover, and simmer for 30-60 minutes. Remove the lid for a bit if it's a bit wet

Serve up with something traditionally Caribbean like rice and peas or, as we usually do in our house, with oven-roasted diced potatoes. Roasted sweet potatoes work even better. 

Served up and ready to eat

NOTES
This would work well with pork or beef. Chicken on the bone, in the way of thighs or drumsticks, is also a good alternative, and a little cheaper.

A couple of different colours of pepper make it look really great, but you could swap in some sweet potato instead.

Adding the pineapple juice adds a nice sweetness to this dish which goes well with the chilli heat.

Jerk paste is available from supermarkets and is made from spring onions, Scotch bonnet chillies, thyme and allspice which give it a really distinctive Caribbean flavour. It's incredibly potent, so you really need to use it sparingly. It lasts ages in the fridge. The stuff we're using at the moment is from Dunn's River. It's great to marinate meat before barbecueing as well. I add a little extra allspice, thyme plus add ginger to pep up the spice flavour a little.

Jerk spice

Wilbur Scoville is not to be confused with Philip Schofield, though he is also responsible for more than his fair share of eyes watering after he broke the hearts of housewives across the nation when he came out as gay live on national TV recently. Of course, coming out as gay at his age is actually a tragedy, as he should have been able to expresshis sexuality throughout his life without fear of it affecting his career. He also announced he was a Tory at some point recently, so he does have something in his closet that he should have been ashamed about.

Now, I know what you're thinking "So, Iain, I suppose, given the discussion of chillies, you're going to sign this off with a video from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, aren't you?" and the ansewer is no. They're shite and also alleged sleazy sex pests, so, in appreciation of the Scotch Bonnet chilli, there's something way more in keeping with the nature of this blog. This is a song about the joys of the Highland wind whistling round your meat and two veg whilst wearing a kilt, something that would be a good thing to experience to ease the aforementioned ring-sting after an infernally hot dish such as this recipe. Never mind trying to find what's hiding Under the Bridge. What you need to ask is "Donald, Where's Your Troosers?"

Andy Stewart's biggest hit

Donald, where's your troosers?
I took them off because it makes dogging easier.