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:
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
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.
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.
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
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
Undoubtedly the most famous Mongolian is Genghis Khan who ruled the Mongol hordes that rampaged across Central Asia into Eastern Europe in the 13th century. He was also, according to legend, the grandfather of Kublai Khan who, besides being probably the world's second most famous Mongolian, was also a dab hand at building. Well, according to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem named after him, at any rate. Coleridge wrote "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree". Apparently this Xanadu place was fucking immense. It was so big it had a river running through it, entire forests and even the odd hill. This description may need to be taken with a bit of a pinchof salt, though since, Coleridge was out of his head on opium when he wrote it. Mind you, it does appear to detail what was probably the very first concept of a theme park. He'd basically invented Disneyland but was too off his tits to build it. The poem also gave rise to the wonderful slice of 70s cheese from Olivia Newton John and ELO, below, from the film of the same name. I don't think that version of Xanadu was in Mongolia, besides which, Coleridge would have been having some truly nightmarish hallucinations if he had dreamt up the roller disco, assuming there was room to build one between the many an incense bearing tree or sinuous rills.
Xanadu by ONJ and ELO with appearances from Gene Kelly, no less
Anyway, back on topic. There are a few other ethnically named dishes on the blog that aren't especially authentic and this is one no different. My Mongolian beef stew is about as Mongolian as my arse. For a start it's not made with yak, has no trace of fermented ewe's milk to bulk it up and it's been nowhere near a yurt. It is based on recipes I found in a few sources claiming to have Mongolian provenance, though these also seem more Amir Khan than Genghis Khan but, fuck it, it's got soy sauce, black bean sauce and water chestnuts in it, so how exotic do you want?
Frequently twatted on about by regular blog guest, Rick Stein, when he's waxing lyrical about how they are "so comforting" or "like mother used to make", stews are generally easy, cheap and filling. Thing is, my mother used to make the most boring fucking stews ever. I was lucky if it had a stock cube in it. Even so, meat cooked for a fucking age with vegetables will develop a reasonable taste on its own. Therefore it doesn't take much more to make a stew or casserole that tastes great. Often in the West we do this by cooking in booze, like French Boeuf Bourguinon in wine, beef in Guinness or Carbonnade (pork in beer) from Belgium. Many oriental dishes use lots of coconut to give fragrant, creamy stews. However, this recipe, has lots of soy sauce and black bean sauce which combines with the slow-cooked beef to give a thick, rich, satisfying plateful of genuine comfort with an exotic flavour. It's basically oral sex from a furcoat-wearing Ulaanbataar prostitute in casserole form
INGREDIENTS
2 tbsp olive oil
400g diced stewing beef
1 onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1 carrot, peeled and sliced
1 tin water chestnuts (140g drained weight), drained and sliced
200ml water
2 tbsp dark soy sauce
2 tbsp dry sherry
120g black bean sauce
pinch dried chilli flakes
Black pepper
pinch 5 spice powder
1 tbsp tomato puree
1 tsp honey
RECIPE
Pour the oil in a pan and heat then add the beef and sautée until browned. Remove with a slotted spoon.
To the remaining juices and oil add the onion and garlic then fry until soft. Throw in the carrot and water chestnuts and return the meat to the pan.
Add the water, soy, sherry and black bean sauce and stir.
Stir in the chili flakes, 5 spice and plenty of black pepper then mix in the tomato puree and the honey.
Stir well and heat to boiling in the pan.
Cover and turn the heat right down then leave to gently simmer for at least two hours, stirring occasionally. The meat should be nice and tender, almost falling apart.
In the pan it looks like any other stew
Makes enough for two people served with rice, and looks like this:
NOTES
I got onto this recipe because my wife happened to mention that she fancied something made with lamb. I went to my local Co-Op where they had no lamb, so I got beef instead. Besides, it works best as a beef dish with the thick dark gravy made from the soy sauce. Pork or lamb may also work but you might need to tone down the soy sauce, perhaps using light rather than dark.
For black bean sauce, I used Blue Dragon Black Bean Stir Fry sauce, mainly because it was the only thing they had involving black beans in my local super market. This may be a bastardised version of black bean sauce, with all sorts of other stuff in it for the purposes of stir frying, but it works.You could use some more authentic black bean sauce as purchased from a Chinese grocer (or bigger supermarket) if you can be arsed. If using real black bean sauce, add about two big tablespoons.
Many vegetables you might want to put in a stew that needs to cook for a long time will disintegrate by the time the meat is tender enough to eat (eg peppers, courgette). Hard root vegetables work best in maintaining their integrity, like the carrots in this version, which go soft as long as they don't get cooked too long. Water chestnuts, however don't change in the slightest and stay crispy. They are integral to the dish add crunch to the meat which should be falling apart by the time the recipe is served. Another good thing about them is they are tinned so having a couple of tins in the cupboard means you can make this anytime you fancy
You could leave out the chilli flakes if you're not a fan of heat. Also, it's a good idea to not add too much 5 spice powder because if you overdo it, the whole thing will taste like aniseed balls.
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!)
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
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.
