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.
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.
Couscous is the New York of starchy meal bulkers: so good they named it twice. Before the British public became all up to date on their international foods, if you asked the man in the street what it was, he might have thought couscous was some horrendous tropical disease, up there with dengue, ebola or gonorrhoea contracted from a kathoey you picked up in a bar in Pattaya. Now, of course, it's common knowledge that it's the stuff that's a bit like rice that they have in Morocco. It's the height of sophistication, Mockney wanker Jamie Oliver uses it because it's "pukka" (whatever the fuck that means). It's made of wheat. If you were a foodie wanker, in fact, you could say couscous
was deconstructed pasta or pasta not yet constructed. It's so fucking exotic! It's semolina made from durum wheat. Hang on a minute, but isn't semolina that gruel-like stuff they used to serve for dessert in school dinners in that dazzlingly day-glo pink sauce? Oh, yeah. So it is. Shows you, repackage any old bollocks and you can make a fortune.
Anyway, that reminds me of a joke. What is the Pink Panther's favourite type of wheat? Durum, Durum, Durum-Durum-Durum-Durum. OK, that works better if you say it out loud and you know this tune
INGREDIENTS
1 tbsp olive oil
1 garlic clove, crushed
1 small red onion, finely chopped
Zest and juice of 1 orange
1 red pepper, finely chopped
1 stick of celery, finely chopped
5 cherry tomatoes (or about 100g regular sized), skinned and chopped
handful of green olives, sliced
pinch of saffron
pepper
salt
1 mug of dry couscous (see instructions, but should be about 125g for two people)
1 mug of boiling water
RECIPE
In a shallow pan, heat the oil and fry up the onion and garlic on a medium to low heat until soft.
Add the celery and pepper and continue to fry for another couple of minutes until they are also soft.
For the saffron and orange zest, put it in a cup and add about a tablespoon of boiling water and let it steep for a couple of minutes.
Add this to the pan along with salt and pepper to taste.
Throw in the chopped olives, tomatoes and pour in the couscous.
Stir well so all the grains of couscous get a good coating of oil. Pour this mixture into an oven or microwave-proof dish.
Next add the boiling water and orange juice. The total volume you add needs to be the same as the volume of the couscous added, so add the orange juice to a cup then makeup the volume with the boiling water.
Mix well, cover as tightly as possible and put in an oven for 5-10 minutes if you happen to have something in it (such as the previously posted recipe of lamb tagine) or else, stick it in the microwave for about a minute then leave to stand for another two or three.
NOTES
This dish is a great accompaniment to Moroccan food such as my lamb tagine, but it can work as a meal in its own right, especially if you add a few more vegetables. Also, it's got no meat in it
There's none of this "boiling for a few minutes" bollocks with your
couscous. Oh no. Just add boiling water, let it soak in and it's pretty
much cooked.
I said it above and I'll say it again. It's made of wheat. There's a big, faddy movement against wheat in some circles, especially in the fitness business. Wheat is often portrayed as the most evil foodstuff in the larder, responsible for many of the dietary ills of modern life. Probably the most vocal of these critics are those selling the Paleolithic Diet. Proponents of the Paleo diet believe that we should be eating only food that cave-people ate before the dawn of organised agriculture because it is is what we evolved to eat. This is the cuisine of Luddites. These people really are drawing the fun out of food. They are the Jimmy Savile presenting a really good episode of Top of the Pops 2 of the food world. No pasta, no couscous, no bread, no beer and absolutely no scientific basis for the whole Paleo dietary movement. If, however, you do want to make a Paleo version of this dish, simply substitute the couscous for shredded sabretooth tiger.
Sorry for no pictures in this recipe. I shall take some next time I do this recipe and post them as an update.
What can you say about courgettes? They're green and phallic, like a verdant winky, disembodied from its Martian owner in some horrendous intergalactic Bobbit incident. They're small marrows with a French name, except in the USA and Italy where they call them zucchinis. They are also quite tasty.
After an opening salvo of dishes which are New World, in-your-face, chilli-laced and full of dead animals to start the blog, this is a simple, fresh, vegetarian dish that works as a side dish as one of the two veg of a Sunday roast dinner or on its own as a pasta sauce. It's the sort of recipe that Rick Stein would twat on about in a flowery manner, relating how he had seen it made from vegetables fresh from Monet's garden by some elderly matriarch in Provence one year when he was a student. It's at that stage in his programme when you're screaming at the telly "Just shut up and cook the fucking recipe, you pretentious prick!". I got my courgettes from Sainsbury's.
INGREDIENTS
1 medium courgette: topped, tailed and sliced
Half a red onion, finely choppped
Two cloves of garlic, crushed
Half a tin of tomatoes
1 tbsp tomato puree
2 tbsp or more olive oil*
Pinch of Salt
Black pepper
Small bunch of fresh oregano, finely chopped (or a pinch of dried)
RECIPE
Pour the oil in a pan and heat. Fry (or sautee if you're of the foody wanker persuasion) the onion and garlic until the onion is transparent, about a couple of minutes.
Throw in the courgette and fry for another 10 minutes until they start to get tender.
Add the tomatoes, tomato puree, oregano and salt and pepper.
Let it stew for 30 minutes or so, until the courgettes are cooked, and serve.
NOTES
You could pep up the dish by adding a splash of lemon juice but taste before serving as it might need some sugar to offset the tartness. Also, like any dish, this would be improved by a good slug of white wine.
Herbs
Oregano goes well with tomato, but you could use thyme.
*This is what Nigel Slater might call "a glug". Now, I'm not aware in which system of mensuration (no, not that) the "glug" is a unit. Presumably it's from the same descriptive system as "a tit of milk", "a turd of mashed potato" and "a fart of lettuce". Whatever, it's definitely not an SI unit. This is in contrast to the "slug", as mentioned for wine above, which is (SI standing for "Sweary Implementation" in this case).
