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.

Chilli chicken drumsticks with basil

Something that really pisses me off is when you get a recipe and try it out, following it to the letter, then it doesn't work or, worse, turns out to be crap. Often it's a recipe from a book from a really trendy chef, some currently hot restaurant or some newspaper column. You think "that sounds good, I'll give it a go" then you try it and you find the dough has the consistency of mayonnaise or the potatoes have the qualities of marbles or the chicken is still raw in the middle. It's the equivalent of really looking forward to a film and it turning out to be Batman and Robin. It's essentially epicurean premature ejaculation

I don't understand how this can be the case. The recipes must have been tested a few times before writing them up. Is it because the flour wasn't bought in the right pissing souk in Marrakech? Perhaps the aubergines weren't twatting organic enough? Maybe the cow was a fucking Capricorn and needed to be a Gemini. Who knows? Whatever the reason, it gets on my tits not being able to rely on a recipe from a respected and/or trendy source.

This recipe is a good example of this. The original version of this involved stir-frying the chicken drumsticks until cooked. It took ages and you can't tell exactly when the fucking things are cooked. On the plus side, it's a great way to start slimming, since salmonella will make the weight drop off you.

So I added the idea of having the drumsticks in the oven to part-cook them before adding them to the pan. It's a really easy recipe and tastes fantastic, despite having no really fancy ingredients, with the sauce being ready-made dipping chilli sauce.

INGREDIENTS
6-8 chicken drumsticks (depends on the size, enough for two people), skinned,
2-3 tbsp light soy sauce
Black pepper
1 tbsp cooking oil
3 cloves garlic, crushed
4 or 5 spring onion diagonally cut into 5cm lengths
2 assorted peppers of any colour (though at least one should be a sweeter re/orange or yellow one), cut into thin strips
1carrot cut into matchsticks
3 tbsp sweet chilli dipping sauce
1 tbsp dry sherry
pinch dried chilli flakes
handful of fresh basil leaves (20 or so)

RECIPE
Make deep slashes diagonal to the bone in the drumsticks

Put them in a bowl and add the light soy and black pepper

Using a basting brush, coat the drumsticks well with the soy and pepper working it into the cuts

Cover, place in the fridge and allow to marinate a couple of hours or so

 To marinate

Heat the oven to 200 and cook the drumsticks for 10minutes.

Heat the oil in a wok and add the part-cooked drumsticks and gently cook them over 20 minutes, constantly keeping them moving.

Cut into one of the drumsticks to ensure it's cooked through.

Add the garlic, spring onions, peppers, chilli flakes and carrot and keep stirring for another 5 minutes until the vegetables are tender.

Add the chilli sauce and sherry and allow to heat until bubbling while coating the ingredients.

Stir in the basil leaves just before serving

Serve with rice, preferably egg-fried.

NOTES
I don't know what nationality this is supposed to be. Thai? Chinese? Whatever, the basil adds a really different twist to your usual stir fries.

Another deviation I do in this from the original is that demands you deep fry the basil leaves before adding them to the dish at the end. I'm too mean to waste the oil this requires, and it tastes just as good

The marination of chicken in soy sauce and pepper really adds some flavour to what would otherwise be fairly bland chicken. I do this any time I do a Chinese chicken dish, as was the case on my chicken chow mein. It's great for any old bog-standard stir fry.

Chilli sauce in the recipe is something like this:

Rice and peas

Rice and peas is up there along with delicacies such as Bombay duck (see my thoughts on this from an earlier blog recipe here), water biscuits and crab sticks as actually not being composed of what their name actually suggests. And don't even get me started on the whole fucking omnishambolic multiple personality defect that is the "pudding" (steak and kidney? Christmas? Black? Bread and butter? Sweet? Savoury? Make your fucking mind up!)

The "peas" in rice and peas are actually beans, kidney beans in this case. It's a Caribbean classic and goes very well with my Jamaican lamb curry or something like jerk chicken.

As in most Jamaican cuisine, the chilli ought really to be a scotch bonnet and put into the rice whole to impart a bit of flavour, rather than making it spicy hot. In this instance I used a bird's eye chilli which doesn't have the same fruity flavour as a scotch bonnet, but it still worked.

INGREDIENTS
1 large spring onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 whole chilli
½ tsp allspice powder
200ml coconut milk
200g rice
300ml water
½ a vegetable stock cube
½ tin of kidney beans

RECIPE
Rinse the rice in a couple of changes of water to get rid of excess free starch.

Add the oil to a pan and fry the garlic and spring onion.

Add the allspice and chilli.

Stir in the rinsed rice.

Add the water and stock cube, stir, then add the coconut milk.

Stir well, bring to the boil, cover, and turn the heat right down.

Leave for 15-20 minutes to let all the liquid get absorbed by the rice leaving (hopefully) a pan full of light, fluffy, delicately flavoured grains.

Serve with any Jamaican main course such as my Jamaican lamb curry or jerk chicken.

OK, it's not much to look at

It's rice and it's got beans in it. What do you expect?

NOTES
The mild coconut flavour works well to temper the heat of something really spicy like jerk chicken.

Unlike a lot of rice dishes, which can be a bit bland, this has enough taste to make a light lunch in its own right with the leftovers next day. Make sure the leftovers are kept in the fridge. Also, if you do have it the next day, make sure you seriously fucking nuke it in the microwave to kill off any bugs and avoid food poisoning from good old bacillus cereus which is actually quite fond of rice and doesn't like to share.

Other beans can be used in this, like black turtle beans. Some recipes recommend using dried beans and using some of the cooking liquid from preparing these. I didn't. Some versions of rice and peas  call for bacon in as well. If you do use dried kidney beans, bear in mind that if you don't prepare them properly you're arse might end up resembling a garden sprinkler the next day, thanks to the fact that the beans are poisonous if they aren't soaked and cooked according to instructions.

I used Thai jasmine rice for this. It tastes great for any savoury rice dish. As I've said in several previous entries, but a huge fuck-off bag of it from an Asian supermarket and you will have great rice on tap for months and it's cheaper and better than most of the crap you buy at the local Western grocer.

Leftover symphonies 2: Broccoli and Stilton Soup

Who first thought the idea of eating some rotten milk that had putrefied so far as to be actually mouldy was actually a good idea? I mean, eggs are a pretty dodgy concept when you think it just came out of a hen's arse, but at least they are in a shell you get the edible part out of. But, blue cheese, it's just there, all veiny and smelling like a tramp's underpants in the middle of a heatwave. Whoever it was, he or she was definitely onto something as it tastes fantastic. And probably the best of all blue cheeses is Stilton

I know Stilton has its haters, but there are worse forms of cheese. Take Casu Marzu, for example. This cheese from Sardinia has actual live maggots in it. Thinking that you might try the cheese with the blue mould on it is one thing, but to actually have an internal monologue saying "You know what this cheese needs? Maggots who've been pre-eating the cheese" really is overstepping the mark. The taste of this monstrosity apparently lingers with you for hours. I've not actually eaten Casu Marzu, but I hazard to guess that even this aberration of putrid milk, complete with maggots, still tastes better than Cheese Strings. Young Master Sweary would probably eat shit if you sprinkled it with chocolate, but even he won't touch Cheese Strings and, having tasted them myself, I can understand why. They are truly fucking diabolical.

Though it's in the shops all year round, Stilton in the UK is really only promoted to sell at Christmas. Indeed, most people who eat it only have it in the festive period when it accompanies crackers after a stomach-rupturing Christmas dinner as the Queen delivers her message to the Commonwealth. The nature of the extravagant feast of Christmas means that there is invariably a mountain of food left over, most of it perishable. This includes a pyramid's worth of cheese which presents the dilemma of what to do with what's left before it goes completely off. Stilton probably doesn't lend itself to using up in sandwiches, besides which there is usually the remains of a large turkey to consume which is best in sandwiches (as well as the obligatory turkey curry, which is another recipe in the pipeline to post at a later date). This soup is ideal to dispose of, not only the large block of blue cheese that needs to be consumed, but also the remains of the broccoli that is likely to be festering in the salad bowl of the fridges. This pleases me greatly since, when it comes to food, I really fucking hate throwing good stuff out. Better still if it makes something like this classy soup that gave me three or four good lunches at work the following week.

This soup, despite being made from leftovers, really is fantastic.The subtle blue cheese and broccoli go together so well and it beats anything you can buy in a tin.

INGREDIENTS
1 tbsp olive oil 
1 onion chopped
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 carrot, diced
1 stick celery
1 potato, diced
1.2 litres water
2 vegetable stock cubes
100g Stilton, crumbled
300g broccoli, cut into chunks, including stalk
Black pepper

"SMELL MY CHEESE, YOU MOTHER!"

RECIPE
Heat the olive oil in a pan and add the garlic and onion to gently sauté for 10 minutes or so.

Add the potato, carrot and celery and carry on cooking for another 15 minutes.

Add the water and stock cubes and throw in the stalk pieces of the broccoli.

Bring to the boil and gently simmer for 15-20 minutes then add the broccoli florets.

Simmer for another 10 minutes then scatter in the Stilton and add black pepper to taste.

Allow the stilton to melt into the soup then liquidise until smooth, or leave it a little chunky if you prefer.

I took this to work to have as lunch. You could serve it as a starter, maybe. Serve it however you want to, I'm not your Mum. It is great with some crusty bread, though.

NOTES
You could add to the richness of this soup by adding a slug of cream (again, a common thing to use up after the Christmas binge). A good nip of sherry would also be a good idea.

To liquidise, use a hand blender or put the soup in an upright blender. However, if it is an upright the soup might have to be cooled if the jug is plastic and also it might spray all over the kitchen and could give you a broccoli and Stilton face peel if you don't close the lid properly. I don't know, as I said above, I'm not your Mum. Figure out how to use your own kitchen equipment for yourself.

This recipe is a rare event for this blog in that it includes cheese in it, and blue cheese at that. The recipes I usually post are things I make for my family and Mrs Sweary doesn't eat anything containing cheese or with a creamy sauce (yeah, yeah, go on with that line of thought and its eventual outcome yourself). I knocked this up for my own benefit to bring to work for lunch from Christmas leftovers before they needed to be chucked out.

I appreciate the irony of this is a way to use up Stilton before it goes off since it is, by pretty much any definition you care to look at, already off.

I couldn't mention cheese in a humorous cooking blog without referencing the famous sketch.So here is the reference, courtesy of the Young Ones

Rhubarb Triangle 2: Baked chicken thighs in sherry and rhubarb

Despite my profane critique of the 1970s in an earlier blog recipe, there was actually quite a lot to enjoy about that decade. I had a great time growing up then, though hindsight suggests that's as much to do with the fact that I didn't manage to get onto Jim'll Fix It to meet R2D2 and C3P0 as I asked for in a letter. Talk about a lucky escape.

One of the best things I remember was that five minute slot that was the bookend of the children's programmes on BBC1, just before the news on schooldays. That had some truly wonderful animated shorts like The Magic Roundabout, Ivor the Engine, or my particular favourite: Roobarb and Custard. Whereas the Magic Roundabout was suggested to have been influenced by psychedelia and LSD, you could had to suspect a hint of amphetamine, crack cocaine or possibly methamphetamine use in Roobarb and Custard, with it's wobbly, seizure-inducing animation and bright colours. It's got fuck all to do the rhubarb the vegetable, beyond the name.

So here's side 2 of my Rhubarb Triangle (side 1 here). This is based on a dish that Mrs Sweary does with chicken thighs, lemon and white wine that's then roasted in the oven so the chicken skin gets nice and crispy, while the meat is braised in the wine and stays really moist. It's the most easy recipe I think I've made. Apart from toast. Or Pot Noodles.

INGREDIENTS
1tsp runny honey
150ml fino sherry
Juice of half a lemon and the husk sliced into 1cm strips
1 tbsp olive oil
4 garlic cloves, crushed
 ½ a red onion, sliced
2 sticks rhubarb, leaves trimmed off and finely sliced
4-6 chicken thighs with skin on
Salt and pepper

TIMING
Preparation: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 2 hours

RECIPE
Combine the sherry, lemon juice, olive oil, honey and pour into a shallow oven-proof dish or baking tin (it needs to be big enough so the liquid is deep enough for the thighs to wallow in)

Add the garlic, red onion, rhubarb, lemon rind and garlic

Mix so that there is an even distribution of ingredients

Place the thighs in, skin side up into the liquid

Lightly drizzle a little olive oil on the skin of each thigh (the chicken's, not your own you fuckwit) and a little salt and pepper

Cover the dish with foil and place in a heated oven at 150°C for 1½ hours

Remove the foil and turn up the heat in the oven to 200°C for15-20 minutes to crisp the skin.

Serve the chicken thighs with the braising sauce along with baked, sauteed or Hasselback potatoes (recipe to follow). Alternatively, it makes a good meat addition if you're doing a range of tapas.

Ready to serve as part of a tapas dinner

With Hasselback spuds and asparagus

NOTES
Roobarb and Custard was one of the animations made by Bob Godfrey in his very long career. He made various other films for kids like Noah and Nelly and Henry's Cat which all had the same simple artwork, multi-layered humour and great voicework (Roobarb and Custard was voiced by the late Richard Briers). Besides this, he also made animations for the more mature audience like Kama Sutra Rides Again, a humourous take on kinky sex; and Great, an animation about Isambard Kingdom Brunel, which won an Oscar.

Mrs Sweary's original version of this is pretty good too. The major difference is use a full lemon (juice and segments) and throw in a handful of whole garlic cloves in their skins, replace the sherry for a nice dry white wine and leave out the honey and red onion. Mrs S would probably also use less oil (but that's just her way, so I wouldn't). Cook it exactly the same way. Serve with bread so you can spread the cooked garlic cloves on it.

The sherry needs to be decent stuff. Dry and pale. It also makes a good aperitif while you wait for the chicken to cook.

If you have any left over cooked thighs, they are great cold for lunch the next day.

As great as the cartoon Roobarb and Custard was, it was no excuse for this piece of shite rave tune from 1992 which sampled the theme tune

There's another rhubarb triangle recipe in the pipeline and will be posted soon.

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.

Carnival!Notting Hill in full swing
(picture from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/7970631/Notting-Hill-Carnival-wont-be-down-in-the-dumps.html)

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.

Rhubarb Triangle 1: Hot and Sour Soup With Chicken and Rhubarb

50 Shades of Rhubarb

I live in West Yorkshire, in the heart (actually, it's really more of an apex) of The Rhubarb Triangle, so called because they grow arguably the world's best forced rhubarb here which comes into season in February, around the time I'm writing this blog entry. We are so proud of it in these parts that weeven have an entire festival dedicated to it. You see, although we might not have much to be proud of, what we are proud of will fuck up your kidneys and kill you if you eat the wrong bit (how fucking Northern is that?). OK, so rhubarb's not got the risk of fugu, but it's still fucking great to eat: long, deep pink stems with a unique tartness.

It's a traditional British thing to have your rhubarb in sweet dishes, like rhubarb crumble for example, but if you've read much of this blog you'll know that's not my style. Where's the spice, the chilli, the fucking profanity in that? No, I decided to get some rhubarb at the Festival and do my own sweary rhubarb triangle of three recipes, starting with this hot and sour soup. It's an Asian-based dish that I'm adding a bit of northern grit to*. Stick this one up your arse, Jamie! Fusion recipes? I shit 'em!

Hot and sour is one of the common soups you get from your average local Chinese takeaway in the UK, though usually in the UK the version we get is about as authentically Chinese as the late, great Christopher Lee yellowing up to play Fu Manchu (yes, this actually happened, for five films in the 60s). It's a great dish all the same, and you can put just about anything in it. So much so, in fact, that you do wonder if, sometimes, the less ethical establishments might gather the ingredients from the sweepings of the floor round where they prepare their food. Anyway, the point is that the throw-together nature of hot and sour soup, along with the sourness that gives it its name and the touch of sweetness it has, means that it really does suit the tart flavour of rhubarb really well.

TIMING
Preparation: 10-15 minutes chopping plus1 hour to prepare the stock base
Cooking: 30 minutes

INGREDIENTS
Stock base
2 litres water
3 or 4 chicken thighs with bone in
1 thumb-sized lump of root ginger,
1 stick of celery
half an onion, quartered
4 cloves of garlic (whole)
1 tsp whole black pepper corns

Soup
1 tbsp vegetable oil 
1 carrot cut into julienne strips
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, finely chopped
100g mushrooms, sliced
3 or 4 spring onions, sliced
2 stalks of rhubarb, leaves removed and thinly sliced
2 red chillies, finely chopped (including seeds)
4 tbsp vinegar
5 tbsp light soy sauce
2 tbsp sesame oil
4 tbsp dry sherry
2 tsp sugar
2 tsp cornflour
2 eggs, lightly beaten

Vegies chopped
(clockwise from top left: ginger, mushrooms, spring onions, red chilli, rhubarb, carrot.
Oh, and that's my favourite knife at the top of the chopping board)

RECIPE
Put the water in a big pan and start heating it on the hob.

Meanwhile, remove the skin from the chicken thighs and throw this and the thighs they came from into the pan, along with the other stock ingredients.

Heat to a rolling boil, cover and simmer for 60 minutes.

Remove the skinless thighs and shred the meat off the bones and set it aside.

Strain the stock and return it to the big pan.

In a small pan heat the vegetable oil then add the garlic, ginger and carrot to cook for a couple of minutes before adding the mushroom and cooking gently for a further 2.

Add the sauteed ginger, carrot, garlic and mushrooms, as well as the spring onions, rhubarb and chillies to the stock and allow to mix for a couple of minutes.

If only pictures had smells

Add the rest of the ingredients, apart from the cornflour and egg, to the pan and allow it to simmer gently for 15-20 minutes.

Add a little water to the cornflour in a cup and mix into a thin paste. Pour into the soup, stirring constantly.

Stir the soup so it swirls and dribble the beaten egg into the pan to make thin strands of cooked egg as it meets the boiling broth.

Serve up and enjoy. This made enough to make at least 5 hearty lunches or is a good starter for 6 people.

NOTES
*Despite being regarded as Northern as cloth caps and whippets, rhubarb actually originates in China and has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for literally thousands of year so, technically, this isn't actually a fusion recipe at all. It took the West a further couple of millenia to get to the stage of civilisation where we had developed custard in order that we could claim rhubarb as our own.

Where I mention "julienne strips" for the carrots, it's another wanky foody word for "matchstick sized pieces".

The vinegar used in this recipe would traditionally be rice vinegar if it was an authentic Chinese soup. I've never bought any rice vinegar in my life and wouldn't know what it looked or tasted like even if someone rectally assaulted me with a bottle of it. I'd usually use white wine or maybe cider vinegar instead. However, in the instance I wrote up for this blog I discovered, after buying the rest of the ingredients for the soup that I needed, that I'd ran out of wine vinegar and had to make do with some white pickling vinegar I had in the store cupboard. The soup still tasted fucking great so it's not that critical what form your acetic acid comes in. I'd probably draw the line at malt vinegar, mind and balsamic vinegar probably wouldn't work nor be worth the expense. The same thing goes for the sherry. In an authentic version it would be rice wine. As my local supermarket is in Yorkshire and not Canton, a dry sherry is (apparently, according to the cookbooks) a suitable alternative.

The word rhubarb is apparently spoken repeatedly by background actors on TV as a non-descript word to show them talking without actually saying anything, much the same way that politicians do when they're evading questions, the vacuous twats.

I couldn't do a recipe about rhubarb without mentioning the fantastic silent comedy short by Eric Sykes from 1980 called "Rhubarb Rhubarb" which I've embedded below. It's hilarious and (assuming you appreciate the ethos of this blog) you won't regret watching it, though it has got nothing to do with food.

Look out for further rhubarb-related japery in the next two recipes of my Rhubarb Triangle

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.

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.

Bruschetta

It's a Sweary Brucie-Bonus!
Fucking nice to see you, to see you, fucking nice!

Bruce Forsyth is a showbiz legend in the UK. He's also older than God's dad. Despite his advanced years, until a couple of years back he was still presenting Strictly Come Dancing on the BBC. He's most famous for his shit jokes and godawful catchphrases involving audience participation, though nowadays you can't help thinking that he uses the audience to help remember what he's supposed to be saying. The reason I mention him is so he cannot be confused with the subject of this blog entry, the wonderful Italian starter bruschetta.

First thing's first, this is how it's pronounced:

Bruschetta (or this version, at any rate) is basically an open tomato sandwich on toasted bread. This description really doesn't do justice to the dish, and it's a bit like describing a blowjob as a moist wank. The combination of the toasted bread, fresh tomatoes, olive oil garlic and fresh basil is fantastic.

INGREDIENTS
1 loaf of fresh bread (French baguette or ciabatta)
1 large clove of garlic
Good olive oil (extra virgin)
100g ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped
Small handful of fresh basil leaves
Black pepper

RECIPE
Slice the bread diagonally to give plenty of area to put the rest of the ingredients on and toast the bread on both sides.

Rub the clove of garlic on the toasted bread then crush what's left.

Gently fry the crushed garlic in some olive oil for a couple of minutes and set aside

Pile the chopped tomatoes on the bread

Liberally drizzle olive oil on the bread and tomatoes

Tear the basil leaves roughly and scatter them on top of the bruschetta

Pour the fried garlic and oil over then grind plenty of black pepper and serve it up.

This amount of tomatoes is enough to make four decent-sized slices which is a good starter for two or something smaller for four. It makes a great starter with something like my recently posted ham and mushroom pasta dish

NOTES
This recipe lives or dies on the quality of its ingredients. It needs fresh bread; fresh, ripe tomatoes; a decent quality, fruity olive oil and fresh basil.

You can toast the bread in a toaster. On the other hand, you can make it look good by the art of food wankerie and doing it in a hot, dry griddle pan. Being of the epicurean onanistic persuasion, I used the griddle pan method

As I said above, the tomatoes need to be nice and ripe and quite soft. To be honest, this recipe is best made in the summer when tomatoes have the most flavour. If it's out of season, at least look for the reddest and most fragrant tomatoes you can get.

Pasta with ham and mushrooms

Time for a sweary confession. It's hopefully obvious from this blog that I really love food and, more, that I'm fairly discerning about what I eat. I believe that great meals need good quality ingredients. All this is true, but I absolutely fucking adore pork scratchings. Pig rind, pork crackling, pork crunch, call it what you will, but in my opinion scratchings are the food of the fucking gods. Quite honestly, to me, scratchings are the ambrosia (no, not the rice pudding, you knob) to the nectar (no, not the loyalty scheme, you knob) that is beer. I would live on them if I could, though you would definitely be well advised to stand upwind of me if I did as they do not make a pleasantly aromatic bedfellow with my gut microflora.

I'm so much of a scratchings nerd it's often the second thing I look for in a new pub, after what beer they do. The most exotic of these was when I was getting pissed on San Miguel (Filippino version, not the Spanish version. They are supposed to be the same but they taste very different) it is in a small beach bar in Manila (in a street, not on a beach). They had vendors coming round to sell all sorts of weird things including knock-off watches, knock-off viagra (at least I assume it was knock-off) and even live snakes. Then a guy appeared who was selling actual pork scratchings which were fantastic. Of course, scratchings are also quite possibly the very worst thing you can actually eat: thick with fat, caked in salt and can shatter your teeth if you get bad batch. And don't even get me started on the smell that literally farts from the bag when you open it. Negative points aside, the point of all this is that, with all due respect to my vegetarian, Muslim and Jewish friends, surely pigs are meant to be eaten if even their packaging tastes so fantastic.

Filipino pork scratchings!

Obviously, there is far more to (from?) the pig than scratchings. There is a phrase from Spain saying they use "everything but the squeal" from the pig, (which is also the title of a book by a British expat living in Galicia), in that pretty much the entire animal is used in some way. If you think about it, there are a multitude of things derived from the original pig. Scratchings I've already mentioned, then there's bacon, sausages of various types, uncured pork meat in various forms, a whole anatomy of offal and even the blood in the form of blackpudding. There are less "meaty" products like lard and suet, then there are other uses for pigskin as leather and gelatine. Let's also not forget a wealth of medical uses: porcine insulin is used in treating diabetics and pig skin can be used to make dressings to treat burns patients. Pig products even find their way into cosmetics. 

I couldn't do a comedy/cookery blog mentioning Spam and not put this, could I?

One of the greatest product of the pig is ham. Like any food, ham can vary from the sublime, like Jamon Iberico from Spain, to the revolting, like tinned spiced ham otherwise known as Spam (so bad they named nuisance e-mail after it). In fairness, Spam is not a good representation of actual ham since it is at least partially mechanically recovered meat and not entirely pig in origin. Generally, real ham tastes good however much you pay for it.This is especially true if you intend to use it in a recipe like this rather than stick it in a sandwich. True, cheaper versions are pumped full of water so you're getting less meat per penny, but the flavour should still be there which, for the purposes of this recipe, is all you need.

This is yet another cheap, quick and easy meal. These factors are all well and good, and they form a bit of a theme in many of my blog entries. The most important thing, however is that this dish really tastes fucking fantastic which is a more prominent theme I hope runs through every single one of my recipes.

INGREDIENTS
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 red onion, finely chopped
3 cloves of garlic, crushed
100g chestnut mushrooms roughly chopped
150g cooked ham, roughly chopped (smoked if you prefer)
pinch of fennel seeds
pinch of mixed herbs
dash of lemon juice
1/2 a vegetable stock cube
100ml red wine
100ml pasata
Black pepper

All ready to cook
From 9 o'clock: ham, mushrooms, garlic, red onion

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a good heavy pan and add the onion and garlic.
Slowly cook the onion for 5-10 minutes then throw in the mushrooms.

Keep sauteing until they are cooked and add the ham to warm through.

Add the fennel seeds, herbs and lemon juice before crumbling in the half stock cube.

Pour in the wine and pasata and stir well, adding freshly ground black pepper. Leave to simmer for 5-10 minutes.

Serve on pasta. Tagliatelle works quite well

Ready to eat

NOTES
You can use smoked or regular ham. The tastes are different but both make a great dish.

For the version I took photos of for this recipe I used a cheap off-cuts pack of smoked ham from my local super market. It's not going in a sandwich and you're chopping it up so the original form doesn't matter too much and this was also quite cheap.You could use panchetta if you were feeling particularly foodie wankerish but it is a little over-powering in this dish.

I'm glossing over the recent WHO report naming  processed meat products such as ham as carcinogenic.

Yet again I need to point out that, while my regular blog guest star, Rick Stein, may mention being somewhere exotic like the Philippines in his painfully meandering stories, he probably wouldn't be talking about getting rat-arsed on cheap local beer and being offered drugs to give you a prolonged stiffy, or indeed pork scratchings. Sweary Chef wins again.

Burgers!

Source:  http://leyendomucho.blogspot.co.uk/2013_10_01_archive.html

William Shakespeare was not only probably the greatest writer in the English language, he was also incredibly prophetic, when his witches from Macbeth accurately predicted the composition of your standard burger available on the British High St, 500 years after his death (see above). Generally, if a burger is made of crap it will taste like crap. Mind you, putting a slightly different spin on things, who needs to go to the zoo to see lots of animals when you can take a bite of a cheap burger and have an entire menagerie parading across your tongue and into your stomach? It's like a multi-species game of Operation "I'll go for the aardvark pancreas, then the walrus foreskin, and the hypothalamus of a couple of squirrels". On more pertinent note, a good burger can be a wonderful culinary experience and even better if you make it yourself and you know what's in it.

Authentic street or peasant food is often wonderful and can tell you a lot about the place it originates and the people who make and eat it. This stuff is often made for workers in offices, in the fields, those cleaning streets, often all standing in the same queue, all of whom need something quick, cheap and nutritious. More than that, good street food thrives through word of mouth recommendation so any street food seller depends on the quality of their offerings and is therefore usually made with more than a little bit of love. It's often eaten on the hoof, or at plastic tables at the side of the road, served from a shack, a kiosk or just a barrow. Think Belgian waffles, Thai noodles, German wurst and even, dare I say it, Gregg's pasties. On the other hand, street food is also one of those current wanky food fads that are increasingly misappropriated of late by middle class people in gingham shirts and tweed, sporting ridiculous facial hair (aka fucking "hipsters") and sold from the "pop-up" restaurant. These are the sort of people who had a couple of tacos at Chiquito's and then decided to go off touting their food as authentically Mexican when, in fact, all they've done is buy an economy tub of Old El Paso fajita mix and thrown it over some Iceland chicken portions in a huge fuck-off bucket the previous night before banging them out from the back of a trailer for a tenner a pop.

Hamburgers get their name because they were once street food in Hamburg, or maybe it was because  they were produced by German immigrants in America. Actually, the true origin of the burger seems a bit fucking hazy. Well, after a cursory Google search it does, at any rate. Wherever the thing started, the hamburger basically uses cheap cuts of beef and makes them quick to cook, easy to eat and downright delicious if done right, so what's not to love?

Now, while it's true that hamburgers are still very much the food for poor, lazy or inebriated people, with our streets lined with fast food outlets, many upmarket restaurants now also have them on their menus. Probably the most ridiculous and obscene example is something like the Fleur Burger made in Las Vegas and costs $5000. OK, it's not really your normal hamburger. It's got truffles in it and it's made with Wagyu beef, but it's a bit of a stretch that one of these is a few hundred times better than a Big Mac. Wagyu beef is rumoured to be the very best sort of beef there is, as the cows it comes from are given the finest grain, plied with beer and their farmers massage them and probably fellate them on a daily basis, all in an effort to give beautifully fat-marbled beef. This attention doesn't come cheap, making Wagyu beef the most expensive form of cow flesh in the world. I have trouble understanding what sort of fuckwit takes the finest quality steak, mashes it up then puts it back together again in the form of a burger. It's the kind of cuisine that kind of makes you hope for a shred of truffle getting stuck in the recipient's windpipe. Nothing fatal, you understand, just enough to require a fairly violent and undignified Heimlich Manoeuvre to project the sliver (all couple of hundred quidsworth) across the room.

The Heimlich Manoeuvre
Never has the line between first aid instruction and soft-core gay porn been so blurred
Source:http://www.firstaidreference.com/first-aid-for-choking-heimlich-maneuver-adult-choking-infant-choking/139/

INGREDIENTS
 ½ medium sized red onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves
1 tbsp olive oil
500g beef*
2 tsp Worcester sauce
dash Tabasco sauce
pinch mixed herbs
1 tsp smoked paprika
½ tsp (or more) freshly ground black pepper
½ tsp coarse grain mustard
salt
1 medium egg

To serve:
Buns

Grated cheese
mixed leaf salad
Tomatoes, sliced
1 red onion, sliced
Gherkin slices

Ketchup
Mayonnaise
Mustard
Chilli sauce
Sliced jalapenos

*The beef can be mince, stewing beef like chuck steak or, on a couple of occasions, I've used some very cheap sirloin steak from my local butcher which was awful as steak but made pretty good burgers. If not using mince, remove any really stringy or gristly bits from the meat then chop it roughly. I'll twat on about this more in the notes

RECIPE
Heat the oil is a small pan and add the onions and garlic to fry gently until soft, around10 minutes.

Allow to cool and add it to a food processor along with all the other ingredients. If you don't have a food processor, you need to use mince and mix everything together by hand in a bowl though the texture won't quite be as fine and the burger is more likely to break apart when you cook it

Take a quarter of the mixture, roll it into a ball then squash it into a patty between your hands.

Alternatively, if you're a foodie wanker like me, you might possess a burger press which means you can make nice, regular-shaped burgers.

When formed you can keep these in the fridge for a while if need be, for example if you are planning to barbecue them later, and they also freeze pretty well too.

A burger press doing its stuff

 

Smear the burgers with a little oil, slap them into a hot griddle pan and cook for maybe 4-5 minutes each side, turning regularly. Alternatively do them on the barbecue where they taste fantastic.

Unlike steak, the suggestion is that burgers are cooked through. See notes.

Before

After
Perfectly griddled
Stripes like this are NEVER out of season

Toast the bun a couple of minutes before the burgers are cooked then serve them on the buns with the salad ingredients plus condiments of your choice. Serve them up with chips, or better still, potato wedges like these I posted a while back.

Done to perfection
I'm not going to win any awards for food photography.  I'm not David fucking Bailey, OK?

NOTES

I've tried making burgers a few times in the past and they never worked as they tasted just like mince. The key is in the other things that go into the mix: the onions, garlic and condiment.

Having tried this with different types of beef, they all have different properties. The cheap sirloin I used tasted great but the burgers were a bit dry. Chuck steak made burgers that were a bit more moist but still a little drier than I prefer. Mince made the best patties in terms of being moist as it's all down to the fat content so cheap mince would probably work best as it has a higher percentage fat. This means that the cost of the burgers is really low as well, and the recipe could even be classed as yet another of my mince wonder.

Burgers ought to be cooked through completely. This is apparently true even if they are made from steak. The reason is because if you cook a steak, the bugs are on the outside and get killed by the searing whilst the under-cooked inside stays fairly bug-free (don't mention the parasites!). However, if you mash it all up to make a burger, the bugs are then spread through the whole patty. Saying this, I'd risk doing a burger rare if it was made from steak, but if it's made from mince you really need to make sure they are cooked properly. Besides, minced beef tastes like shit if it's under cooked.

The composition of the final burger in its sandwich form is very much a personal thing: how much salad, what salad ingredients, which sauces. Personally I like some cheese, a bit of lettuce, some sliced tomato, sliced onion, sliced gherkin, mayonnaise, ketchup or some sort of chilli sauce and perhaps some jalapenos. Mrs Sweary, on the other hand, has her burger totally bare with perhaps a few leaves of lettuce and a bit of sliced onion, a statement which would not have been out of place in the script of a Carry On film or indeed on my blog entry for pork afelia.