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.

Ratatouille

Smooth jazz from The Manhattan Transfer
Nice!

The 1970s were great*. Cooking (since you're probably interested if you're here) was all about Fanny Craddock, The Galloping Gourmet and the new CILF on the scene, Delia Smith. Films mirrored these culinary giants of the small screen in the shape of Alien, Jaws and Princess Leia in Star Wars (or Star Wars Episode VII: A New Hope as it's known now).

Music had a massive shift also, with disco and, most significantly, the advent of punk happening in this decade. It needs stating, though, that while there was a revolution going on in popular music, there was still a major stream of less challenging fare flooding the UK top 40. There was a slew of easy listening and novelty songs throughout the decade, from the cliche-ridden Europop celebration of the package tour to Spain, Sylvia's "Y Viva España"; to the Rupert Holmes cheesy ballad telling the story of a bored married bloke who replies to an ad in a lonely hearts column in order to have an affair, but with an obvious twist, the Piña Colada song. Another one was Chanson D'Amour by The Manhattan Transfer as seen in the video at the top of the page. The latter is a piece of light jazz which includes the actual lyric "Rat-ta-tat-ta-tat". However, as anodyne as that song is, that lyric starts running untrammeled through your head as soon as you hear the name ratatouille. Less ear worm and more ear rat, or maybe it's just me on that. I can guarantee, however, that, if you know the song, the very fact that I've mentioned it means that the tune will now be in your head for at least the next couple of hours. You're welcome.

70s TV chefs and iconic 70s movies. The similarities are mindblowing!

Left to right, top to bottom Fanny Craddock; HR Giger's Alien from the Ridley Scott movie; Graham Kerr, the galloping Gourmet; Jaws; Delia Smith; Carrie Fisher as Star Wars' Princess Leia. Coincidence? I don't think so!

(Images from http://www.turnipnet.com/whirligig/tv/adults/other/cookery.htm, http://www.wallpapers-web.com/aliens-movie-wallpapers/3789979.html, http://bunchedundies.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/real-men-jump-over-chairs.html,  https://www.kentuckycenter.org/all-shows/family-film-night-on-the-belvedere-jaws, https://www.eatyourbooks.com/library/12849/delia-smiths-complete-cookery-course, http://www.xaluan.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1668805)

Ratatouille is a classic vegetable stew from Provence and is best described as pure sunshine in a pot. Fresh aubergines, peppers, courgette and tomatoes, they're all there. As a meat free meal it's a great way to use the fresh produce you get in the summer and it tastes fucking amazing, especially if it's with some fresh, crusty bread.

*They weren't. They were pretty shit. We had the Three Day Week. We had Baader-Meinhof. We had flares and wing collars (see here for my take on this). The Cold War was still quietly raging and virtually nobody in the UK had even heard of couscous, let alone eaten it.

TIMING
Preparation: 15 minutes
Cooking: 60 minutes

INGREDIENTS
4 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, chopped
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 aubergine, cut into 2cm dice
1 courgette, sliced into 1cm rounds
1 yellow pepper, cored, seeded and chopped into 2cm squares
1 red pepper, cored, seeded and chopped into 2cm squares
4 medium-large tomatoes, skinned and chopped
1 tbsp tomato puree
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp sugar
salt and pepper to taste
handful of basil leaves

Chopped and ready to cook

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a pan and gently fry the onion and garlic for 10 minutes.

Add the aubergine and fry for 10 more minutes.

Throw in the courgette and fry for another 10 minutes.

Add the peppers and fry for another 10 minutes.

Stir in the tomatoes, balsamic vinegar, tomato puree plus salt and pepper to taste before adding 100ml water.

Bring to the boil, cover and simmer for 20-30 minutes (until the vegetables are tender).

 I smell a rat
And it smells fantastic

Makes plenty for a big bowlful each for two people plus a decent lunch with the leftovers.

Serve with fresh bread.

 Ready to eat

Just add bread

NOTES
Big, ripe tomatoes work best in this.

Other herbs would work well in this, like oregano or (sparingly) thyme. The fresh basil is sublime, however.

As I mentioned, this dish is from Provence which became the Nirvana favoured by the British middle classes in the late 80s/early 90s, thanks in main to the book A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle and the subsequent TV mini-series based upon it. It spawned a load of imitators as people with more money than sense followed through on their French rural wank fantasy, with often limited success and financial insecurity, the gullible cons de chez con, as they might say in France.

There is a little known incident on a teatime programme called Nationwide in the UK which had a cooking piece presented by Fanny Craddock in which she was making meringues. When this piece was finished, the anchor man of the programme, addressing the viewers, said "And I hope all your meringues turn out like Fanny's"

The most famous version of Chanson D'Amour is the one I put at the head of this post. However, this is not the best. That belongs to the version in the video below, as perfomed by the Muppets, which is actually sublime.

The Muppets do Chanson D'Aamour
They weren't only just about mna mna

Spicy tomato and pepper soup

Recently on the children's TV channel Cbeebies they started showing a new version of the classic 60s/70s animation The Clangers. It was pretty faithful to the original, even down to using the same traditional stop-motion animation technique over modern CGI. If you don't know what it's about, it centres on the adventures of a group of mouse-like things, the Clangers, that live on a planet in the middle of space. It's got a definite whiff of the psychedelics about it as, in addition to the Clangers there is also an iron chicken, flying cow things and a Soup Dragon. Not that I'm implying that there was consumption of any mind-altering substances on or around the set of the original series but, yes,  a Soup Dragon. A Dragon that makes and sells fucking soup. Furthermore, the Soup Dragon (or SD) is a lone parent with a baby or, a little Soup Dragon. An LSD, if you will. As I say, I don't mean to imply anything. Anyway, if the good old Soup Dragon produced something like the soup from this recipe, I can see why the Clangers were happy and well fed (they are quite portly, see below).

A Clanger and the Soup Dragon
It's kind of like Breaking Bad for toddlers

Image taken from https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC59ACN_the-soup-dragons-secret?guid=858f9ee6-89d0-4f96-9433-6d65ab0e9d32

I've really got into making soup recently. It's just so fucking easy, it tastes great and it saves shitloads of cash. You make a pan full of soup and it costs maybe a couple of pounds, then take a big portion to work the next day when it saves you three or four quid that you might pay in buying a sandwich. Then you take it the next day, and the next... Nothing can beat that first taste of your freshly made soup of a Sunday night you use to check if it's any good. Thing is, it's a good job if it does taste great because you're going to be eating it for lunch for the next three or four days. I admit it does get a bit boring by Wednesday. It shows you really can get too much of a good thing.

Thing about soup, though, is, what's not to like? Warming (usually, gazpacho is on my to-do list come next summer), tasty and filling. As I said in a previous entry, it is the ultimate comfort food, though usually in the UK that equates to something you open a tin to heat up or a sachet of dried gunk you add boiling water to. Tomato soup from Heinz is advertised as being the comfort food of winter. So much so that some twat they have on the advert is looking forward to the end of summer and welcoming the dark, damp, cold winter evenings so she can enjoy the tomato soup.Talk about over-egging the pudding. That's like looking forward to sleeping on the wet patch after sex, for fuck's sake. It hardly fits the image they peddle as being wholesome, either, as it's made by the megatonne in some fuck-off huge factory in Wigan and it contains, amongst its ingredients, modified cornflour, milk proteins, acidity regulator and herb and spice extracts. Just like mother used to make. Not that I have anything against industrial-sounding ingredients in prepared food. People whine about "chemicals" in their food, but food is actually nothing but chemicals, whether it comes from a wanky, organic delicatessen or from a huge factory. No, the problem I have is marketing this shit as something "wholesome" to give it the veneer of being made in an earthenware pot by some buxom farmer's wife when it's actually produced in a massive stainless steel vat in an industrial plant the size of an aircraft hangar somewhere.

While I really, really object to food fads and that kind of bollocks, tinned soups are rightly gaining a bit of a reputation for being very high in salt and sugar. Tinned tomato soup especially tends to be incredibly sweet and quite sickly. But, if you make your own, you know what's in it and it won't be as cloying.

TIMING
Preparation: 20 minutes
Cooking: 60 minutes

INGREDIENTS
2 tbsp olive oil
2 medium red onions, roughly chopped
1 stick of celery, roughtly chopped
1 carrot, roughly chopped
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 red chillies, chopped
1 red pepper, roughly chopped
1 yellow pepper, roughly chopped
700g fresh tomatoes
½ tsp dried mixed herbs
2 vegetable stock cubes
1 tbsp tomato puree
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
1 litre water
2 tsp sugar

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a good-sized pan and throw in the onions.

Gently cook these for a good 10 minutes then add the garlic, carrot and celery

Keep these cooking for another 10 or so minutes, so it gets soft but not brown, and add the peppers and chilli and cook for another 5 minutes

Add the rest of the ingredients and stir well

Heat to a gently boil, turn down the heat and leave to gently simmer for 30 minutes.

Blend to smooth with a hand blender

It's a pan full of soup.
Not much to add, really

Serve with bread. Makes a great lunch or, I suppose, if you're into that sort of thing, a starter. A panful this size would make a good four to six hearty lunch portions.

NOTES
Pretty much all of my soup recipes are like this: onions, celery, carrot, other vegetables. Stew, blend, done. You can use any old crap you have in the fridge or vegetable rack, season it and there's your soup. You can put anything in it, tinker with the flavour with a few spices and other stuff and Bob's your uncle. I've done lots of different soups and they all tasted pretty good.

I'd be doing a disservice to pop culture and the very ethos of this blog if I didn't do a call-back to the Soup Dragon and post this piece of early nineties Madchester scene by the band of the same name

Double Ska Jamaican Chicken burgers with pineapple salsa

While looking for ideas for recipes to try, I chanced upon one for Reggae Reggae burgers. The Reggae Reggae brand originated on Dragon's Den in the UK when Levi Roots strummed a guitar in his pitch and got some rich fucker to buy his sauce (ooer, sounds a bit rude). The brand is now a corporate behemoth incorporating not just the original sauce, but various other table sauces, spice mixes and other products up to and including pasties and even soft drinks. I'm sure Levi Roots did start off with family recipes, but sold out faster than a Tory MP with a... Actually, no need to qualify that, he sold out faster than a Tory MP because that's what they fucking do. Then again, Dragon's Den is, by its very nature, all about selling out, so good on him.

He used the unique selling point, or USP, of his Jamaican culinary heritage and home-cooked, family recipes to create his brand. It's not as if he's an American who's voice is the auditory equivalent of having your head pushed into a bucket of wallpaper paste, nor is he some wanky, angry TV chef who's face is plastered across a range ready-made sauces which they wouldn't actually touch with a barge-pole topped with a Michelin star. Of course, not all USPs are created equal. Take mine for example. I'd probably go on Dragon's Den, force-feed the dragons a bowlful of chilli that would have them shitting napalm for the next week and I'd probably end up going home empty handed having subsequently called them a bunch of twats.

I've done a recipe for burgers previously, of the beef variety, which is the origin of the hamburger. You can get chicken burgers at your local corporate fastfood joint, but they do tend to be breadcrumbed and deep-fried so, in my humble but profane fucking opinion, aren't actually "burgers". Burgers, for me, should be made of minced or ground meat. Flavour them how you like, but they need to be, for all intents and purposes, a reconstituted steak 

So, I wanted to do something that had a Caribbean feel, I love burgers (as I've made clear before) and thought chicken burgers just don't get enough coverage. Now, chicken is basically pretty bland on its own so you need to give it lots of flavour. A bit of ginger, lime juice and chilli add just enough tropical character to justify me ripping off Levi Roots' Reggae Reggae brand to call mine Double Ska. And because of that, why not have a bit of ska before we start (like you need a reason to play a great bit of Prince Buster)?

One step beyond.
RIP Prince Buster

TIMING
Preparation: 60 minutes (including roasting the pepper and leaving it to cool)
Cooking time: 15 minutes

INGREDIENTS
Pineapple salsa
1 small yellow pepper
Half a small, fresh pineapple, cored, peeled and the flesh diced
3 or 4 spring onions, trimmed, cleaned and finely sliced
Juice of  ½ a lime
1 tbsp rum
½ tsp ground allspice

Burgers
Half a medium red onion, finely chopped
1 medium to large garlic clove, crushed
1 tbsp vegetable oil
500g skinless chicken thighs, boned (or bought boneless)
half a thumb's size of fresh root ginger, finely chopped
Juice of ½ a lime
Pinch of dried thyme
1 chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
1 egg
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

To serve
Basic green salad or a few washed lettuce leaves, shredded.
Bread buns

RECIPE
For the salsa
Wash the pepper and place in an oven at 200°C for 30 minutes.

Remove from the oven and place in a plastic bag and seal until cool.

Remove the pepper and peel off the skin.

Core and dice the pepper.

Mix the chopped pepper with the pineapple and spring onion in a bowl.

Add the allspice, rum, and lime juice.

Mix well and chill until you need it.

Pineapple salsa

For the burgers
Heat the oil in a pan and gently sauté the onion and garlic for 5-10 minutes, until the onion is soft and near-transparent.

Add the ginger and carry on gently frying for another 5 minutes.

Allow to cool.

Trim any stringy, white bits from the chicken and cut it into smallish chunks.

Throw the chicken, the cooled onion, garlic and ginger, plus the other ingredients into a food processor and blend for a minute or so, occasionally stopping to scrape any larger pieces of the mixture back into the bowl.

Form the chicken mix into patties. This amount of mixture will make around 4 and (as I stated in my post for hamburgers earlier) I use a burger press to make evenly sized patties, but I'm one of those people.

Cook in a little oil in a frying pan of griddle pan. They take around 5-7 minutes per side. Ensure they are cooked through.

 Urban griller
Chicken burgers. They are difficult to keep in shape

Serve in a toasted bun with salad and a dollop of the salsa and a side order of chips/wedges (sweet potato wedges work especially well).

NOTES
I do call these Double Ska burgers and I realise that I've only posted one ska track, so here's the second one, a little more recent. Listen to this as you read the rest of this post.

Skank while you cook
Prince Buster and Suggs on Jools Holland doing Madness and Enjoy Yourself

The burgers can be quite soft and break up easily so it's worth putting them between sheets of clingfilm or grease-proof paper and leaving them in the fridge for an hour or more to help them keep their shape when cooking.

I de-seeded the chilli in the burgers because you want the burgers to have only a mild kick. On the other hand, you could completely leave the chilli out if you're effetely inclined.

I didn't put chilli in the salsa, but you could if you wanted a bit more heat. I appreciate that this salsa is similar to the pineapple sambal I posted previously, but the flavours are very different in character and really encapsulate the respective cuisines they come from.

Like in a lot of Caribbean food, the best chillies to use are Scotch bonnets which have a fantastic and distinctive fruity flavour.

Scotch bonnet
No, I don't see the resemblance either

Finally, given the ska theme, it would be remiss of me not to give a plug to a band called Skaface, a 10 piece ska band from the coastal English town of Blackpool. My pal Colin is their drummer and they are ace, so, if you get a chance, go and see them.

Leftover symphonies 3: Turkey jalfrezi

I've already stated how much I despise cold leftover roast meat. The way in which the delicately tender slices have turned into sheets of greasy polythene really gets on my tits, so any recipe that makes it more palatable is a great thing. If this is a proper hearty, dinner-sized meal, all the better (as opposed to a soup, for example).

In the UK, the granddaddy of roast meat is the pteranodon-sized Christmas offering, the roast turkey. Tradition dictates that you need to buy the biggest fuck-off turkey you can find or the biggest turkey that will actually fit into your oven, whichever is smallest. How this tradition arose I have no idea. I mean, it's not as if it's biblical, is it? The domestic turkey is native to North America and wouldn't be seen east of the Atlantic for 1500 years after the birth of Jesus. Besides which, the gifts mentioned were gold, frankincense and myrrh, not gold, frankincense and a fucking ginormous turkey.

Just your average family turkey for Christmas
You'll get a cracking curry from this

Image taken from http://www.theonion.com/article/thousands-gather-for-stuffing-of-giant-rockefeller-2605

However the tradition started, it means there is enough leftover meat for at least a full week of meals for the average sized family. The cold leftovers themselves become part of the Christmas holiday tradition. There's using it as a sandwich filling for the Boxing Day buffet. Then there are other options that work as recipes. Cold turkey makes a pretty good Chinese-style hot and sour soup (recipe to follow, at some point) or turkey and sweetcorn soup, for example. The turkey curry, however, is another part of post-Christmas rituals and I have had some truly fucking diabolical versions in my youth. The sort of curry I have nightmares about, where the turkey is thrown in with fried onions and a random selection of spices, or worse, generic "curry powder", and fuck all else.

The thing is, reheated roast meat really needs to be prepared properly. Turkey, especially, tends to be pretty dry, so that's something to consider, and then there's the awful, vaguely wet dog aroma that dry, poorly stored cold roast meat develops. It doesn't matter how much garam masala you use if it's still got the all the culinary qualities of licking the arse of a Lhasa Apso (it's a Dougal dog from Magic Roundabout, see picture below) that's just been fetching a stick from Lake Windermere. However, this version of turkey curry does work and does the meat justice, mainly due to the acidic lemon that cuts through the moist canine character of reheated roast meat.

Dougal, the only Lhasa Apso worth mentioning
The scent of Christmas past.

Image from http://albionheart.tripod.com/id28.html

One last thing, this curry should have a decent chilli kick to it. Picture the scene: you've been cooped up in the house for a few days; plied with way too much rich food, chocolate and booze; bored to death by the shit programming on TV. You've still got a mountain of cooked turkey to get through and you need something to really give your guts, your tastebuds, indeed. your very soul, a defibrillating shock to get you back to something like a normal routine again. A pallet-cleansing, tangy, hot curry is just that shock. Just don't forget to shout "CLEAR!" as you use the toilet next day.

TIMING
Preparation: 5-10 minutes (not counting the time to roast the turkey first time around, obviously)
Cooking: 15-20 minutes

INGREDIENTS

2 tbsp vegetable oil
300g leftover roast turkey meat, shredded
3 small onions, sliced
5 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 red or orange pepper, cut into 2 cm squares
1 tsp cumin seeds
2 tsp ground coriander
½ tsp ground tumeric
1 tsp ground ginger
½ tsp ground black pepper
1 whole bay leaf
4 red or green chillies, finely chopped
4 med/ 6-8 small tomatoes, peeled and quartered
1 tbsp tomato puree
juice of 1 lemon
50 ml water
2 tsp garam masala

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a pan and add the spices to gently fry for a minute or so.

Add the onions and garlic and fry until soft, around 5-10 minutes. Add the pepper and and fry for a further few minutes.

Pour in the water along with the rest of the ingredients, except the turkey. Mix well and allow to simmer for 10 minutes.

Gently stir in the turkey to heat through.

A panful of leftover joy

Finally, pep up the flavour with the garam masala and serve.

Like many curries, this works with plain rice, or something a little more fancy like a pilau like my lemon flavoured version  or this Indian egg fried rice, with or without a South Asian bread, like naan.

NOTES
One of the other beauties of this recipe is how fucking quick this is to cook. I'll probably go into this a bit further in a subsequent recipe entry, but my worst habit in cooking is how slow I am, mainly as a result of being really anal about how I chop vegetables. I can't help it, I cook like I'm making love (no, not anal): with care and attention to detail. However, even I could bang this out in about half an hour.

This recipe would work pretty well with leftover roast chicken.

It's not the most appealing looking dish as you can see, but what can you expect from leftovers? It tastes fucking great, and that's all that matters.

Jalfrezi is one of my favourite curries in UK curry houses. The local curry house version bears almost no resemblance to this recipe. On the other hand, research tells me this is a more authentic version of jalfrezi since it is supposed to be a really dry curry.

I have a recipe waiting to be written up for roast turkey with various trimmings, but I reckon that may be better posted in the run up to Christmas.

I made it through this whole blog without once taking the piss out of a famous TV chef. I really am slipping.

Chicken chow mein

Yes, it's supposed to be chow mein and this is Chop Suey.   
It's a great song so fucking sue me

While I've been doing this blog I've done recipes from various parts of the world, but so far not from China, as such. And that's not going to change with this recipe, since this is yet another bastardised/Anglicised variation on an authentic regional dish. OK, it's Chinese, in that the ingredients are oriental but, like chicken tikka masala in Indian restaurants, it's basically thrown together to appease the delicate pallets of us poor, fragile westerners. There's no sharks' fin, no rotten smelling durian fruit, no bird's nest composed of dried avian spit (or other exotic ingredient regarded as a delicacy in the orient). Not that there's anything wrong with these ingredients from a culinary point of view per se. Tastes vary around the world and what one culture find a delicacy other people find repugnant. I mean, nobody east of the Danube in their right mind would even consider bringing a lump of rancid, congealed, mouldy milk (or "blue cheese" as we refer to it in Western Europe) anywhere near their mouth, never mind eat it. Or there is surströmming arguably the most disgusting "delicacy" in the world, which is a tinned form of effectively rotten fish originating in Sweden. On the other hand, and taking a broader view, the demand for sharks' fin in the east and in oriental restaurants all over the world is seriously depleting the global population of sharks. This is because sharks' fin soup is a luxury dish and a burgeoning middle class in countries like China, Singapore and Malaysia, keen to show off their wealth and status, has increased demand.

I've eaten sharks' fin soup. It tasted delicious. Not because of the fin but because of the ingredients that went to make the broth of the soup. The fin itself added fuck all to the flavour, only being present as strips of slightly chewy gristle floating in the broth.

This raises an obvious question. If it doesn't have any taste of its own, why is sharks' fin so popular? It's so highly prized because, according to traditional Chinese medicine, it's supposed to impart sexual potency. So sharks are being hunted to extinction because businessmen can't get a stiffy. That is bad enough, but there is actually no evidence that sharks' fin is in any way an effective remedy for erectile dysfunction. In fact, since sharks are apex predators, they accumulate toxic metals like mercury in their tissues which can lead to all manner of health problems including sterility and erectile dysfunction in men. Ahh, the irony. Personally, if any bloke wants to show his social status or how magnificent his tumescence is, I think he should buy a bigger car, shag his secretary then just fuck off, and leave sharks alone. Or try Viagra.

Dragging myself back on track, noodles are huge in east Asia. They are the perfect foodstuff: filling, cheap and versatile. They are popular street food, taste fantastic and really keep these countries running.You can have fried dishes like this or soups with noodles in. In fact most eastern Asian countries have their own versions of a noodle dishes: pad Thai in Thailand, mee goreng and laksa in Malaysia, Japanese udon. They are the origin of pasta, brought back from China by Marco Polo, apparently. Like shark fin, they also taste largely of fuck all. This means they need a well-flavoured sauce (or broth in soup recipes) and other ingredients to turn them into something worth eating.

This is a really easy dish to make. The most time-consuming part is preparing the ingredients. Chopping carrots into matchstick-sized pieces, slicing peppers into strips and finely chopping ginger are a collective pain in the arse, but they cook quicker and the results are worthwhile.

INGREDIENTS
150g dry egg noodles
300g chicken fillet cut into strips
2 tbsp light soy
black pepper
3 or 4 cloves garlic, crushed
1 piece ginger (about 3 cm), finely chopped
1 small bunch spring onions, cut diagonally into pointy sticks
1 small-medium carrot, cut into matchstick sized strips
1 red pepper, cut into thin strips
100g washed bean sprouts (about a handful)
200g mushrooms, sliced
2 tbsp vegetable oil (not olive, see notes!)

Sauce
2tbsp dark soy
1 tbsp sweet chilli sauce (the thick dipping kind)
3 tbsp dry sherry 
1 tbsp sesame oil
1 tsp sugar

RECIPE
Put the chicken in a bowl and pour the light soy over it and add a liberal grind of pepper.

Mix them well so they are well coated in the soy and put in the fridge to marinate for a couple of hours or so.

Boil up a large pan of water and add the noodles.

Simmer gently until they are soft, about 5 minutes (depends on their thickness). Drain them and set aside.

Make up the sauce by adding the dark soy, chilli sauce, sherry, sesame oil and sugar to a cup and mix well then set aside.

Add half the oil to a frying pan or wok and heat until it's very hot.

Stir fry the chicken until it's cooked (about 10 minutes).

Remove the meat with a slotted spoon, leaving the oil plus any juices from the cooked chicken in the pan.

Add the remaining oil and the throw in the garlic and ginger and stir fry for about a minute.

Throw in the carrot, pepper, spring onion and mushroom and stir fry for 5-10 minutes.

Add the bean sprouts and carry on stir frying for another couple of minutes.

Return the chicken to the pan and keep moving on the heat to make sure everything is warmed.

Refresh the noodles by running them under the cold tap, drain well and add them to the pan.

Try to mix up everything and once the noodles are warmed through add the sauce mixture, and the best way I've found to do this is to gently turn them over like you might do when dressing a salad.

I would add a warning that it is a bit of a ballache to make sure that the noodles are mixed with all the other ingredient.

NOTES
Use a neutral-flavoured oil for this, like sunflower or soya, but NOT olive oil which has too much flavour and is definitely not Chinese and doesn't tolerate the high heat you need to stir fry.

The chilli sauce adds a little spicy edge to the sauce as well as a bit of sweetness and stickiness. It should be the Thai sweet type as made by the likes of Blue Dragon or Encona. These aren't very hot, but if you really can't tolerate chilli, leave it out. Then again, if you do have an aversion to chilli, why are you using a cookery blog which has a significant Scoville rating in almost every recipe?

You can put lots of different vegetables in this. I've done the same recipe with combinations including mange tout, sugar snap peas, green beans, baby sweet corn, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts. They ought to be fairly crunchy, but otherwise it's up to you. You could also make it with any other meat like beef, pork or prawn. You could even omit meat altogether and make it vegetarian.

Recipes in Chinese cookery books suggest using Chinese rice wine, or sherry as an alternative. The sherry works perfectly well, but it needs to be a dry type. Something like a fino is what you need but definitely not Harvey's fucking Bristol Cream

Like rice, soy sauce is best bought from Asian supermarkets where you can get a huge bottle for the same price as you might pay for a tiny one in your usual place.

No pictures on this entry yet. I'll take some next time I make this.

This isn't intended to be a racist blog. The rant about sharks' fin is a rant against general fuckwittedness anywhere it raises its head in the human race. All of these superstition-based remedies are as idiotic as one another. For "Chinese traditional medicine" you could just as easily read "homeopathy" or "astrology". If this sounds cynical, I can't help it. I'm a Sagittarian, it's in my nature

Butternut squash curry

Despite resembling a large, cream-coloured sex toy, the butternut squash is one of the most delicious vegetables you can get and it makes fucking great curries. This also means that, yes, I'm doing another vegetable dish. The Indian subcontinent provides some of the absolute best vegetarian cuisine in the world, which isn't too surprising given it's the place that Buddhism started. If there was stuff like this to eat all the time I could happily remain vegetarian for the rest of my life. Well, almost, until I start jonesing for pork scratchings, a juicy steak or even just some roast chicken flavoured crisps because sometimes a tub of fucking dhal just won't cut it.

INGREDIENTS

Spices for the curry
Clockwise from the leaf: Bay, cloves, cardamom, onion seeds, black pepper, coriander, mustard seed, salt, cinnamon and star anise in the middle

2 tbsp vegetables oil
1 medium onion, sliced
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 star of whole anise
1 piece of cinnamon, about 4 cm
4 green cardamon pods
4 cloves
1 tsp black mustard seeds
1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1/2 tsp onion seeds
1 bayleaf
1 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp chilli flakes
half a butternut squash, peeled, seeded and cut into big (2-4 cm) chunks
1 green pepper, in 1-2 cm dice
150 ml water
2tsp tomato puree

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a pan and add the onion, garlic and spices and stir fry until the onion is soft (5-10 minutes). Throw in the pepper and squash and fry for another 5 minutes. Add the water and tomato puree, cover and leave the curry to stew for 30-60 minutes, whenever the squash is tender.

This makes enough for two adults as an accompaniment, leaving enough for a lunch the next day. Serve it with rice and/or Indian bread, on its own or with other curries (like my profanity-laced chicken tikka curry)

Nothing says dinner like a pan full of curry, even a crap, blurred picture of one

NOTES
I did the recipe with butternut squash, but any other pumpkin-like vegetables will work, including pumpkin itself. Just the thing if you get pissed off with the enormous fucking mountain of pumpkin flesh you end up with at Hallowe'en when carving a lantern.

You would be right to anticipate that a recipe I do sometime following Hallowe'en will be some shit with pumpkin in it for this exact reason. Hey, this is Sweary Chef, not Jamie Oliver, Delia Smith or Genghis fucking Ramsay. I do the recipes I have the ingredients for at the time, take shit pictures on my phone then write them up, usually libelling, or else being generally unpleasant about other, more accomplished people in the process. I'm basically Fanny Cradock with a penis.

Sweary chicken tikka curry

Curry really is such a fucking woolly name for a dish. What does it actually mean? For example, you have your Indian/Bangladeshi/Pakistani from curry houses all over the UK which have become so very much part of the fabric of the UK that chicken tikka masala is, for all intents and purposes, our national dish. So much so, in fact, that former BNP leader and hypothyroid guppy-faced, racist cockwomble, Nick Griffin, apparently insists that his favourite food is actually that self same dish. Of course, most of us probably wouldn't have exactly the same culinary experience of dining in Indian restaurants that you might imagine Mr Griffin would get:

"Abdul, guess who'd just ordered chicken tikka masala!"
"Who?
"Only that twat from the BNP, Nick Griffin!"
"You'd better pass me my copy of Penthouse, then. We're all out of 'special sauce'"

The thing about South Asian curries is that they're all about dried spices. In contrast you  have Thai curries, which use fresh, aromatic flavours from herbs like lemon grass and kaffir lime leaves plus lots and lots of chilli. Then there are "curries" from other countries in SE Asia, from Japan, from parts of Africa, from the Caribbean. Yet the tagine I posted in this blog earlier on isn't a curry, though it has a lot of the same spice flavours. So, what about the celebrity chefs? Jamie Oliver, on the pay roll of Sainsbury's a few years ago, did an ad for the supermarket where he declared he was making a "Ruby" for his mates,before hopping onto his scooter to pick up the ingredients, the mockney wanker.

This recipe requires a lot of effort and takes frigging ages, but it is worth it.

INGREDIENTS
Chicken tikka
150g plain natural yoghurt
Piece of ginger (about the size of your thumb) coarsely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, coarsely chopped
 Juice of half a lemon
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tbsp tandoori spice
1/2 tsp black pepper
1 tsp tumeric
1 green chilli, finely chopped
400g chicken, cubed

Curry sauce
3 tbsp vegetable oil
2 medium onions
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
2-3 cm ginger (about a thumbsworth), finely chopped
4 green cardamom pods
4 cloves
1 bay leaf
stick of cinnamon (about 5cm)
2 or 3 fresh chillies
grate of nutmeg
2 tsp whole cumin
2 tsp whole coriander seeds
1 tsp fennel seeds
1 tsp tumeric
1/2 tsp fenugreek seeds
1tsp paprika
1/2 tsp whole black peppercorns
1/2 tin of tomatoes
1 green pepper
2 tsp garam masala

RECIPE
First you need to prepare the chicken tikka marinade. Put the garlic and ginger in a pestle and mortar and pound them into a paste. Put the paste plus all the other ingredients, minus the chicken, into a dish and mix well. Add the chicken and make sure all the pieces are well covered by the marinade mixture. Cover, put the bowl in the fridge and leave it for at least three hours.

Marination

Have a beer or two while you wait, watch a film or do something else like have sex (with someone else or on your own, just don't forget to wash your hands afterwards).

Heat 2 tbsp oil in a pan and add the marinated chicken. Fry it gently for 15-20 minutes until it's cooked. You could do this on a griddle pan, under a grill or even on a barbecue if you can be truly arsed. Remove the chicken from the pan and keep on the side on a plate

Spices
(from the leaf: bay, red chillies, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, fenugreek seeds, cardamom pods, tumeric, cloves, fennel, black pepper, nutmeg and cinnamon in the middle)

For the curry sauce, heat 2 tbsp oil in a nice, solid pan, and add the sliced onion, garlic and ginger. Fry them gently for a couple of minutes then add all the spices (and I know, there are shitloads), and fry for another 5-7 minutes while the onion gets nice and soft. Pour the tinned tomatoes into a blender then add the onion/spice mixture from the pan and liquidise to give a nice, smooth sauce.

Add the rest of the oil to the pan, add the chunky onion and fry for 7 minutes. Add the pepper and fry for another 5 minutes. Return the chicken (including any liquid that might have seeped out of the chicken) to the pan and mix well. Add the sauce from the blender. It might be pretty thick, so add a splash of water to the blender jug to get all the mixture into the pan.

Leave the curry to simmer on a low heat for 20-30 minutes then add the garam masala. Mix well and serve.

Apologies for the crap photo, but that's the curry with rice and squash curry

This makes plenty for two adults and is great with Indian bread, like naan, and/or rice (like my pilau to be posted soon) plus a vegetable accompaniment like the squash curry, also to be posted soon.

NOTES
As I said, this is quite a laboured task to do all the way through. You can cut the time down by doing away with the chicken tikka marination palava and frying up some chopped ginger and garlic with the tandoori spice and cooking the chicken in that as the first stage. To be honest, this is the way I usually cook this dish when I'm not pursuing my mission to bring the best recipes with the foulest language to the fucking masses.

It's a little known fact that the aforementioned guppy-faced racist cockwomble, Nick Griffin, actually has tried his hand at a cookery video blog of his own. I resent this, since I feel it's challenging my crown to be the most offensive food blog on the web. And no, I'm not posting a link to it and giving old endocrinologically-challenged-goldfish chops more traffic.

As I said above, this dish has more spices in it than you can shake a shitty stick at. You could buy branded spices in tiny jars by companies like Schwarz if you really like. However, they cost a fucking fortune. One alternative is supermarket own brand jars which are a lot cheaper. Better still, get spices from an Asian grocer or supermarket. They cost a lot less and come in much bigger packets. On the down side you need to get airtight containers to put them in.

This version wasn't especially hot with chilli, though it really needs a kick like a mule with a urinary tract infection to enjoy it's full potential.

Pollo Español (Spanish chicken)

There is a long relationship between Britain and Spain. However, the traditional British image of Spain is quite lopsided and very different to the reality. It's Manuel from Fawlty Towers (as portrayed by a Jewish Englishman). It's colonies of retired middle-Englanders who want warm weather, bingo and the Daily Mail. It's holidays on the Med. It's places you can get egg and chips and a pot of sodding Tetley's or a pint of pissing Tetley's any time of day, where you can buy a souvenir straw donkey that disintegrates into razor-sharp fragments that are just the right size to lodge in a toddler's windpipe as soon as it encounters the British climate. It's Torremo-fucking-linos, Costa del-shitting Sol, Beni-cunting-dorm.Yes, this is a seriously fucking skewed image of what is actually a magnificent and varied country.

Salvador Dali's The Great Masturbator
Well, this is a blog written by a massive pretentious wanker

OK, from that opening paragraph, two things are plainly obvious. 1: I'm an insufferable snobby and arrogant prick as far as travel is concerned and 2: I absolutely fucking love Spain. I love the food, the wine, the people, the lifestyle, the climate, even the language. Their beer's not all that, but, hey, nowhere's perfect. Besides, since this is also the place that gave the world Velazquez, Dali, Picasso, Miro, Gaudi, Cervantes, Almodavar I can let them off that. Anyway, since this is a food blog, let's concentrate on that aspect of Spanish life. Spanish food is hugely varied from region to region but is crystallised in one thing: tapas. Plates of food you get in a bar when you order drinks. Often they're even fucking free! And it's not even crap food, either. It's usually things like jamon iberico, chorizo, seafood morsels, portions of hearty stew, paella. FREE! And the ingredients are so fucking fresh. It's all about meat with real flavour and vibrant vegetables. You can actually taste the sun in this food. It's like felching a star. Seriously, what's not to love about a country who approaches food like that?

That brings me onto this recipe. It's yet another quick and cheap meal that tastes frigging great. In reality it's a pretty pale imitation of a genuine Spanish stew like carcamusas*. For a start it's got tinned tomatoes, the peppers are most likely to be from Holland or Morocco, the onion is British. The chorizo is probably Spanish, mind. On the other hand, while it's a diluted version, it still tastes very much of Spain though.

TIMING
Preparation: 10-15 minutes
Cooking: around 90 minutes in total

INGREDIENTS
2 tbsp olive oil
500g chicken fillet, cubed
1 large onion, sliced
4 cloves garlic, crushed
100g chorizo, chopped
1 sweet pepper (red, orange or yellow), chopped
1 tin of tomatoes
1 tbsp tomato puree
2 tsp smoked paprika
Pinch dried thyme
Black pepper to taste.
150 ml dry sherry
juice of half a lemon (or 1tbsp of bottled stuff)
1 tsp sugar

RECIPE

Onions, garlic, pepper and chorizo frying in olive oil

Heat the oil and add the chicken to seal and gain a little colour.

After about 5 minutes, remove it with a slotted spoon and add the onion and garlic to the remaining oil and fry gently for 5-7 minutes until the onion is softened.

Add the chorizo and fry for another of couple of minutes.

Throw in the pepper and fry up for another two minutes before adding the tomatoes.

Return the chicken to the pan and stir in the tomato puree, paprika, thyme and pepper.

Leave to simmer for another 5-10 minutes.

Add the sherry and lemon juice and stew for 30-60 minutes, at least until the chicken is cooked. Taste and add the sugar if necessary (it's to offset the sourness of the lemon juice).

Add salt if required.

Works well with fresh bread and sauté potatoes, especially if you tart them up with a bit of rosemary and salt.

The stew ready to serve

NOTES
*Carcamusas is a stew of pork in tomatoes which is from the city of Toledo. That's a sweary blog to come.

By sherry I mean a manzanillo or fino. It has to be dry and pale. Not QC, not "medium" and definitely not Harvey's fucking Bristol cream. This is not the same drink associated with the WI. Real sherry is a wonderful, crisp drink that is a great aperitif or actually goes well with the dish instead of a regular white wine.

For something that's essentially just a fancy sausage, chorizo is one of the most fantastic ingredients in savoury cooking. It makes almost anything taste fucking great.

While the recipe above works all year round, you could make it that much more authentic at the height of summer with ripe, fresh tomatoes, fresh thyme and better quality peppers.

Pasta Arrabiata

There are few dishes that are truly as easy to make, as cheap or as utterly fucking delicious as this little gem. You could buy a jar of factory-made pasta sauce, but you'd be frigging stupid when this will take probably just as long and tastes infinitely better. It's really like the difference between Corn Flakes from Kellogg's and corn flakes from a chiropodist.

In our house we call this recipe "bacony thing" for some historic reason we can't remember. It is probably the stupidest name for a meal there has ever been, but it's ours. This is especially the case because, in many restaurants, arrabiata is made as just a spicy tomato sauce without the bacon (or in some cases the bacon is replaced by salami or even chorizo). There would be other differences between "bacony thing" and "arrabiata" on a menu, most obviously about ten quid a fucking portion as a second language supplement, because anything in a foreign language costs more.

Naming issues aside, I started making this many years ago when I was a student. A wanky, pretentious student with a foul mouth so, obviously, I've changed in the intervening time: I'm no longer a student. Yet, I still come back to this fantastic dish. It's a family staple which we have every week. It's usually the first thing we make when we have our first dinner after coming back from holiday. I got the idea of this from a recipe book I purloined from my Dad before I went to university. That recipe is called penne arrabiata, meaning angry (pasta) quills.

Funnily enough, in Italian, spelling penne with one fewer "n" apparently means penis. Pene arrabiata is therefore "angry penis". This makes me think of Noel Edmonds getting upset and stamping on the pavement after receiving a parking ticket. Why is he called "Noel"? Because there's no "L" in "smug, hideous shirt-wearing, bearded prick"

INGREDIENTS
2 tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, crushed (or more, you can't put too much garlic in this dish)
220g smoked bacon, finely chopped (an odd quantity, I admit, but that's how they package it)
1 medium red pepper, finely chopped
1 tin tomatoes
1 tbsp tomato puree
Black pepper
1 red chilli, finely chopped
1/2 tsp mixed herbs (dried work, but fresh are better if they are available)
1 bay leaf
2 tsp balsamic vinegar

Arrabiata Ingredients

The bacon, finely chopped along with the fresh vegetables. Note the fresh thyme on the plate

RECIPE
Pour the oil in a pan and heat before adding the onion and garlic. Fry for 5 minutes until translucent then add the bacon and continue to fry until that's cooked. Throw in the pepper and fry for another minute or so. Pour in the tomatoes, add the puree and stir well. Grind in plenty of black pepper, add the chilli, the herbs and bay leaf then pour in the balsamic vinegar and stir well. Cover and simmer on a low heat for 30-60 minutes. You may need to reduce the liquid in the pan if it's especially runny.

How it looks when it's finished
Note bay leaf

 Serve it over pasta with bread on the side to mop up the sauce

NOTES
The recipe I developed this from didn't have red pepper in it but it bulks out the dish and works well. It needs to be fairly finely chopped like the other ingredients to make a smoother pasta sauce.

As I mentioned above, this recipe can be made without bacon for an even cheaper, vegetarian/vegan version which is still better than some ready-made crap you can buy in a jar.

Unlike most of my previous entries, whilst containing chilli, it's only there to add a slight kick. It does need shitloads of garlic though. It can't really have too much garlic.

While the original recipe was penne, virtually any type of pasta would do: spaghetti, fusilli,even tagliatelli. You'd probably be best drawing the line at tinned ravioli, mind.

Lamb Tagine

Eat tagine and you too could look like this.
Morocco Mole, popular sidekick of Secret Squirrel and also the first indication you've got malignant melanoma after spending too long in the sun in Marrakech

You can't do any recipe of North Africa or the Eastern Mediterranean without mentioning the name of arguably the most trendy cook of the moment, Yotam Ottolenghi. He has a reputation for delicious food which is simple and rustic. However, he also has a tendency to use authentic ingredients in his recipes which, although they may be common in a souk in Tripoli, are not so easy to come by in the UK outside of a few small, wanky, over-priced delis in Notting Hill. For example, you have more likelihood finding a 70s male celebrity without a sex-pest-shaped skeleton in his closet than finding freeze-dried organic gerbil spleens down your local Co-Op. Anyway, I've mentioned him now, so onto my own recipe for lamb tagine.

A tagine is the name of the cooking pot which is essentially a glorified casserole dish with a lid shaped like a slightly squashed witch's hat. The dishes that take their name from the pot are usually mildly spiced stews that are cooked long and slow. This is actually doing an entire cuisine a huge disservice since, if cooked well, Moroccan food is fucking fantastic.

As well as being famous for its subtle, aromatic, spicy flavours, Moroccan food also uses a lot of dried fruit. Now, forgive me for riding rough-shod over centuries of culinary culture, but I largely think that dried fruit has as much place in a savoury dish as Clostridium botulinum. This goes doubly for dried apricots which, though commonly used in Morrocan tagines, are the dessicated haemorrhoids excised from the infernal arseholes of the devil's own herd of Apocalyptic wombats, in my opinion. I mean, if you want to add fruit, why not go the whole hog and stick in a packet of Fruit Pastels while you're at it and maybe serve it up with custard?

Anyway, the upshot of this preamble of dissing the Yot and admitting how much I despise dried fruit in main courses means this recipe is about as authentically Moroccan as a fez made from polyvinylchloride in Taiwan and purchased on Blackpool seafront. You want authenticity, piss off to Agadir and eat there. Meanwhile, this recipe tastes fucking great and it's well worth the time and effort to make it.

INGREDIENTS
2tbsp olive oil
500g cubed lamb
1 medium onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic
100g mushrooms sliced
2 preserved lemons,
150g fresh tomatoes, peeled then halved
2tsp paprika
1 tbsp cumin
10cm cinnamon stick
1 bay leaf
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp ground black pepper
1 fresh red chilli, finely chopped
pinch of saffron
vegetable stock cube
500ml water
1 red pepper chopped into sticks
1 courgette cut into sticks

Spice: the final frontier

RECIPE
Heat the olive oil in a hob- and oven-proof casserole dish and fry the meat to seal it. Remove it with a slotted spoon and add the onions to remaining oil to soften. Add the spices and garlic for about a minute, mixing to make sure they don't stick to the dish. Throw in the mushrooms and fry for another couple of minutes.

Add a little of the water to a cup and mix up the stock cube.

For the preserved lemons, cut them in two and scoop out the middle with a spoon. Discard the flesh and finely chop the skins.

Return the lamb to the dish and add the preserved lemons, tomatoes, water and the stock cube mix. Bring to the boil, mix well then layer the pepper and courgette on top of the rest of the stew. This means that the vegetables steam rather than boil and totally disintegrate over the long, slow cook.

Cover and put into the oven at 145°C for 2-3 hours

Tagine ready to go in the oven

Note the vegetables layered on the stew. Also note this is a Pyrex casserole dish and not an actual tagine pot. I'm not that much of a foodie wanker

This serves two people easily. Dish it up with rice, bread or couscous, like the recipe I'm writing next  for orange couscous.


NOTES
Preserved lemons are available from supermarkets. They are not the same as fresh lemons. They look like this:

You could put any combination of vegetables in this. Well, OK, not any combination. Lettuce would be a mistake, for example and cabbage would be a bad idea (cabbage is actually generally a bad idea in any situation, to be fair). However, carrots work well, as does aubergine, green beans or squash.

In best Rick Stein style, I could twat on about how I tasted something like this recipe, as cooked over a bottled gas stove in individual pots, in some street-side cafe in Marrakech a few years back. A place which had a spice shop round the back where I bought a large bag of saffron at a really good price, but that's really not the fucking point of this blog, is it?