Bean and potato hotpot

Northern stereotypes

(at least Micahel Palin is an actual Yorkshireman)

Whippets, cloth caps and coronary heart disease, but we do talk to people on buses and don't wear coats in the depths of winter. We Northerners have had to put up with all sorts of lazy stereotypes. I mean, don't get me wrong, at least we're not Scottish, but, as far as England goes, we get the shitty end of the stick most of the time. Shat upon by the London-centric ruling elite through under-resourced transport and other infrastructure and the arts, we are the former industrial heart of the country given lip service in the modern, service-industry UK. The current government has set up the "Northern Powerhouse" initiative to promote the north of England. It is, of course, a load of hollow-sounding bollocks, in the light of the disparity in funding for transport for London being £708 per capita compared to £289 in the north of England. All that money so people in London can continue to avoid eye-contact with their fellow commuters on better, more frequent trains. Like I say, lip service.

All the same we are fiercely proud of our identity, though. Geordies, Yorkshiremen, Scousers, Mancs, people have a pride of where they are from. A component of this is culinary heritage. Pies are a big thing across the North, especially in the capital of all that is pastry-encased, Wigan. Fish and chips is another, saveloys in the Northeast. Don't even get me started on the regional variation of names for bread rolls. That just boggles the fucking mind. Go into a bakers in any Northern town and ask for a bread bun by the local name and there's no problem. Wander a mile down the road and you ask for a bread roll by the same name and they look at you like you're just regaining the power of speech after suffering a stroke.

One local delicacy that is synonymous with the part of the North is Lancashire hotpot. Basically this is a lamb stew topped with sliced potato, so the potatoes become crispy. It's shepherd's pie for lazy people who can't be arsed to mash their potato.

I don't know why I chose to call this recipe a hotpot as it has fuck all to do with Lancashire hotpot, other than it's got potatoes in it, but the name seems to fit. Like most of my recipes, it's quite spicy hot and made in a pot. It's another meat-free Monday recipe (it's actually vegan, in fact) that I fancied flinging together with beans to give it a bit of extra protein. It's very substantial and tastes great, very much a comfort food type of dish. I've written the recipe for the hob, but I actually made this in a slow cooker, so I've included a timing for doing it by that method.

TIMING
Preparation: 15 minutes
Cooking:  1½ hours on the hob, 6 hours in the slow cooker

INGREDIENTS
2 tbsp olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
200g mushrooms, chopped
1 large courgette, topped, tailed and sliced
2-3 small potatoes, peeled and cut into 2cm pieces 
4 medium fresh tomatoes, peeled and chopped
1 tin mixed beans (the one I used said it was 290g)
½ tsp dried mixed herbs
½ tsp smoked paprika
Pinch chilli flakes
Good dash of Tabasco sauce
1 bay leaf
Small stick of cinnamon
1 vegetable stock cube
Black pepper to taste

All chopped up and ready to go

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a pan and fry the onion and garlic until soft.

Add the courgette and mushroom and allow to sweat for 10 minutes or so.

Chuck in the potatoes, tomatoes and beans.

Top up the volume with 500ml water and add the rest of the ingredients.

Stir well, turn down the heat, and allow to stew until the potatoes are soft, may be 45 minutes or so.

 In the pot

Serve it up with some fresh bread to mop up the sauce

Ready to eat

NOTES
The beans I used in this came in a spicy, tomatoey sauce (I think they were sold by the supermarket under the name "taco beans"). The sauce added a little extra oomph to the flavour. You could use plain beans, or even use dried mixed beans, but maybe add some ketchup to pep up the flavour. Mixed beans add a nice variety, but you could use kidney or borlotti beans, or even (God forbid) baked beans at a pinch.

Many of the recipes that are traditionally Northern originate from other parts of the world entirely. Liverpool's signature dish, scouse, a meat stew, is derived from a similar dish made around the Baltic ports of northern Europe. Saveloys are originally a type of sausage from Switzerland (the name derived, apparently, from the Latin "cerebrus", for brain, as they were originally made from pig brains), possibly arriving in the UK with Jewish immigrants. Jewish immigrants/refugees from Spain and Portugal are also purportedly the original creators of that most British of dishes, fish and chips.

The slow cooker I got is fucking amazing. I've been doing shitloads of recipes in it. Chuck the ingredients in and fuck off for a few hours. When you come back, supper's ready. Speaking of which, and if you have a half hour to spare, get a load of this turgid slice of prog rock

Supper's ready!
You could watch this at least twice while the dish is cooking

For the slow cooker version, do the frying of the onions, garlic, etc on the hob then transfer to the slow cooker for the main cooking part.

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

Pasta with aubergine, basil, chilli and pine nuts

Pasta is funny stuff. On the one hand, it's been the staple of student diets, in one form or another, for years. Often just served with grated cheese as it's cheap, filling and quick. At the other extreme, it's the lynchpin of the cuisine of an entire country where it can be covered in all sorts of over-priced shit, like truffles or caviar for fuck's sake. Yet another example of the gentrification of what has been a peasant food for centuries, a subject I've already ranted about.

Let's face it, pasta is usually nothing more than wheat and water, pressed into some fancy shapes. Obviously this belies the long culinary history of pasta. all the way from Italy. There are estimated to be over 350 varieties of pasta, many of which named after a dizzying array of things. Body parts seem a common theme with ears (orecchiette), tongues (linguine), moustaches (mostaccioli, another name for penne) all having pasta shapes named after them. Invertebrates get a bit of a look in too, with snails (lumache), squid (calamarata), worms (vermicelli) and butterflies (farfalle) all having a starring role. Then there is the really odd like bibs (bavette), cooking pots (lasagne) and thimbles (ditalini). Sadly there aren't any obviously rude official regional pasta varieties, as would fit the nature of this blog, though, as I pointed out previously, the word penne is just one "n" too many away from meaning penis. Then, I consulted everybody's friend Google and found that there is actually a dick-shaped pasta variety.

Al dente

 Picture from http://brokenoakranch.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/pornographic-pasta.html

Anyway, moving back to the recipe in hand, when considering vegetarian dishes, pasta is a perfect base and the Italian love of fresh vegetables make for some delicious possibilities. This concoction is no exception and really is a cracking little recipe. Aubergines, garlic, chilli, basil and a few crunchy pine nuts mean it's stupidly simple and quick to put together. 

TIMING
Preparation: 5 minutes
Cooking: 30 minutes

INGREDIENTS
4 tbsp olive oil plus additional for pouring on
2 tbsp pine nuts
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 large aubergine (around 300g in size), chopped into 2cm dice
2 tbsp tomato puree
1 tsp dried chilli flakes
Salt and black pepper to taste
Handful of fresh basil leaves
150-200g dried pasta (penne or fusilli work)

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a large pan and throw in the pine nuts

Fry them for a couple of minutes, until they are golden brown before removing them with a slotted spoon

Add the garlic to the hot oil and fry for 2 minutes before adding the aubergine.

Fry for another 10-15 minutes until the aubergine pieces start to colour

Add the tomato puree, black pepper and salt to taste and continue to cook for another 10-15 minutes, adding the odd tablespoon of water if it gets too dry

Meanwhile, cook the pasta and drain.

Turn the pasta into the pan with the cooked aubergine, mix, and add the pine nuts.

Finally, tear the basil leaves and add to the pasta and aubergines and stir, adding additional olive oil to give the dish a glossy look.

Serve up with some nice crusty bread.

NOTES
Probably because my pedigree is more factory-made by Clarks in northern England than hand-made in Milan, I don't have much time for the whole idea that a certain shape of pasta must be served with a certain type of sauce. In this instance, the dried penne and fusilli I used (there was half a portion of fusilli left so had to add some penne from a new packet) held onto the sauce well. I've also served this with fresh tagliatelli and it works just as good.

The basil and pine nuts really make this dish. Dried basil is not a substitute for fresh leaves as the taste is very different. Pine nuts could possibly be swapped for other nuts, perhaps peanuts or cashews, but the dish will be missing the subtle coniferous fragrance that they impart.

One rare problem with pine nuts is pine mouth syndrome. This can happen after eating some pine nuts when, as I found out one time, you end up with a bitter taste in your mouth for a few days after eating the kernel. It does fade, but you don't enjoy your dinners for a few days as a result.

Contrary to urban myth, pasta was not brought to Italy by Marco Polo coming back from China, but by Arabs from North Africa. Is nothing sacred? Next thing you know they'll be claiming Arabs gave the world mathematics like algebra or made early advances in astronomy. Oh, wait, they did.

Aromatic courgette curry

So it's another recipe for meat-free days. I went into some of the environmental arguments for going vegetarian in my last blog entry but one real advantage for eating vegie is that it's just much cheaper than meat. It's not that I'm pleading poverty, and I've no intention of giving up meat any time soon, but there is something great about knocking up something like this which costs next to fuck all and takes little more than an hour.

I've twatted on about courgetttes and how great they are in a previous post, but what I was unaware of is that this humble vegetable is another import from the Americas. So, along with peppers, chillies and tomatoes, which were also brought over from the New World, European and Asian cuisine would have been so fucking dull before the Conquistadors made it to America. They also brought back syphilis, so, I guess that's a case of swings and roundabouts. And let's not forget that chocolate also came from the New World, so, on balance, it's a win for white Europeans, in addition to the devastation they wreaked on the native civilisations and the population as a whole on the other side of the Atlantic. We got a whole new pantry full of ingredients, they got genocide.

Conquistadors
OK, we'll swap you horses, the wheel and Catholicism for the contents of your gardens

picture from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/10/conquistadors-sacrificed-eaten-aztec-acolhuas

TIMING
Preparation: 10 minutes
Cooking: 50 minutes

INGREDIENTS
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tsp ground tumeric
1 whole star anise
1 tsp ground coriander
3 cloves
4 whole green cardamom pods
1 tsp ground cumin
½ tsp whole fennel seeds
1 bay leaf
1 10cm piece cinnamon stick
pinch ground black pepper
pinch  dried chilli flakes
1 small onion, roughly chopped
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 large courgette, topped, tailed and sliced
2 medium tomatoes, peeled and chopped
100ml water
1 tbsp tomato puree
Salt

More spices
(clockwise from 12 o'clock: ground cumin, bay leaf, tumeric, cinnamon stick, ground coriander, star anise, cloves, chilli flakes, black pepper, cardamom pods with fennel seeds in the middle)

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a pan and add the spices for 2 minutes.

Throw in the onion, ginger and garlic, and fry gently for 10 minutes.

Add the courgette and stir-fry for another 5 minutes.

Add the tomatoes and water, stir then add salt to taste.

Bring to a boil, turn down the heat and simmer for 30 minutes

Serve with rice

Ready to eat 

(on right of plate with aloo gobi on left on a bed of plain, boiled basmati rice)

NOTES
 This is a great dish to serve with aloo gobi that I posted a recipe for recently. This uses more earthy flavoured spices which contrast well with the richly fragrant nature of this courgette curry.

Courgettes are members of the pumpkin/squash family, the cucurbit. It's not all about versatile vegetables, mind. This family also contains the penis gourd which has made an appearance in this blog in a previous post.I'm not sure who dreamed up the idea, but they must have had a pretty eccentric outlook.
"That's a funny looking vegetable. Does it taste nice?"
"Not really. Not sure what to do with it"
"Well, if you dry it out it would make a great cover for your cock"

A decorative penis gourd from Papua New Guinea

Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koteka

Aloo gobi (potato and cauliflower curry)

I have mentioned vegetarianism in previous posts, how I even tried being a vegetarian as a pretentious student. What I didn't mention then was that the reason for this was, in part, to get on the good side of a girl who was in the same student hall as me that I quite fancied. It's a scientifically proven fact* that most guys who perform a coup de theatre in terms of lifestyle in their late teens, like turning away from meat for instance, are generally doing it to get into the pants of someone they like. Anyway, at the time, my justification was the poor yield of protein per hectare from raising livestock for food compared to arable farming which was morally wrong when people were starving in the world. Using this justification I could then allow eating lamb doner kebabs as sheep were raised on scrubby hills that had no use in growing vegetables, and fish, since this was mainly gotten from out of water.The spell of vegetarianism lasted for a few weeks before I lapsed back into eating meat properly. A legacy of this time is the fact that I have absolutely no qualms about eating vegetarian food on a regular basis.

More recently, it has become well publicised that meat production leaves a far larger carbon footprint than growing vegetables alone. While it's true that most people in the west have larger carbon footprints than a sasquatch in snow shoes that are five sizes too big, and any change in diet would have a pretty minute effect on this, it still gives a chance to prevent the liberation of a tiny amount of additional carbon into the atmosphere. There are other ways to reduce your carbon footprint, like not flying, having children, having pets or driving a car, but who wants to stop doing any of that?

One of the main causes of the increased carbon emission through raising livestock is the effect of intestinal gas from cattle. Cow farts are making the world a warmer place as they release methane which is 23 times worse at causing atmospheric warming than carbon dioxide. One possibility to offset this might be to stop the cows farting in the first place and one way of doing this is using charcoal. Perhaps giving Ermintrude a load of charcoal tablets might help alleviate this source of pollution. It may even have the added bonus of the cows shitting ready-formed BBQ briquettes, so everyone's a winner. Well, apart from the cows, who would be producing the fuel by which they would be cooked of a nice summer evening.

Charcoal tablets

A possible solution to global warming

from http://www.hollandandbarrett.com/shop/product/lifeplan-windaway-activated-charcoal-capsules-60002792?skuid=002792&&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_adid=185747624549&utm_adgID=58700002241441623&gclid=CMC26Z3xjtUCFYIaGwodisEPAw

So where am I going with this? Well, it's another vegetarian recipe as I am planning a regular meat free dinner every week. India has more vegetarians than the population of most countries, so it's not surprising that some of the very best vegetarian cuisine comes from the subcontinent.

I have done a recipe for another potato curry previously, but this is a take on an aloo gobi, where the spud is partnered with cauliflower in one of the tastiest vegetable curries found on the menu of an Indian takeaway. As I mentioned before, potatoes have enough substance to them to make a decent main course in their own right, plus the lentils add extra protein and make for an even more substantial meal.

*It probably isn't scientifically proven, but I've not looked at the literature so it might be.

TIMING
Preparation: 15 minutes
Cooking: 70 minutes

INGREDIENTS
150g dried red lentils
200g cauliflower florets broken into bite-sized pieces
450g potatoes, peeled and cut into 2-3cm cubes
1 medium onion, sliced
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin seeds
½ tsp whole fenugreek seeds
½ tsp ground black pepper
½ tsp black mustard seeds
½ tsp onion seeds
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp ground tumeric
pinch of chilli flakes
Salt

It's another spice picture
(from 10 o'clock: coriander, black pepper, mustard seeds, chilli flakes, cumin seeds, fenugreek seeds, onion seeds with paprika in the middle)

RECIPE
Boil the lentils for 20 minutes, strain and set aside.

Heat the oil in a good, heavy pan and add the spices, onion and garlic and gently fry for 10 minutes.

Add the potatoes and continue to fry for another 10 minutes.

Throw in the cauliflower and keep stirring for another 5 minutes.

Add the lentils to the pan and add 200ml water and salt according to taste.

Bring to the boil, cover, lower the heat and simmer for 30 minutes (until the potatoes become tender).

Serve with rice and/or naan bread, on its own or with another curry or two
.

 Aloo gobi 

(on the left, with a courgette curry on a bed of plain boiled rice)

NOTES
In contrast to most of my previous curry recipes, this dish uses lots of earthy rather than the more aromatic spice flavours and doesn't have a tomato base. It is a good contrast to these if you are serving more than one dish

I used floury old potatoes in this recipe as the texture works better than new potatoes.

A cow farts aren't the only trump that cause a stink and fucks up the world.

Traditionally, cauliflower has been a fairly unassuming vegetable, being boiled on its own or perhaps upping the ante a little with cauliflower cheese, the vegetarian staple of the 70s. However, cauliflower is currently having a bit of a surge in popularity as a "low carb" food and is finding uses as a substitute for rice, pizza base or even steak. Why stop there? How about cauliflower chocolate brownies, cauliflower yoghurt, cauliflower flavoured condoms? It's fucking cauliflower for Christ's sake. It's a lovely vegetable in its own right and doesn't need to be given superpowers. However, if you are using it in some other dish, I would say that aloo gobi is as good as it gets.

There aren't a huge number of songs that mention curries in general, let alone aloo gobi in particular. One that does, however, is this spoof of Kula Shaker's Govinda, by former Radio 1 DJs Mark and Lard performing as their band the Shire Horses.

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

Butternut squash and ginger soup

Beans are not the only musical fruit
Man Ray will be turning in her grave at this, but at least in this entry I'm not comparing it to a butt plug
Original squash image adapted from http://runitlikeamom.com/2015/10/30/squash-city/

Soup is fucking great. Take any old crap you've got left over in the fridge or larder, chuck it in a pan with some water, blend it up, and there's lunch for the best part of the working week. This wasn't always the case in my life. When I grew up, making soup meant opening a tin. Not that there's anything wrong with tinned soup, generations have been raised on it. It's weening food that graduates to essentially baby food for adults. One day you're suckling at your Mum's breast, the next it's Baxter's Scotch broth complete with lumps of vegetables and no nipple (though it has lamb in it, so I suppose it may have teat, which is almost the same).

Soup is the ultimate in comfort food, so much so that Heinz use this idea to promote their tinned product when the clocks go back every autumn and even Cup-A-Soup promoted themselves as "a hug in a mug" (no it's not a hug in a cup, you marketing twat, it's a sachet of dried of fucking soup). Then there is the legendary recuperative powers of chicken soup. You have the Jewish idea of Mama's chicken soup as a cure all or even bah kut teh, a pork soup from Singapore laced with pick-me-up herbs from traditional Chinese medicine. Now, I know I've nailed my particular colours to that particular mast with a rant on TCM in this blog entry, but if it makes you feel better, especially as a hangover cure, it's not a bad thing. After all, we're not talking about claiming it can cure cancer.

Anyway, as good as tinned soup is, homemade soup is in a different league. You know what's in it, you can put as much or as little salt in it as you like and tweak the flavour any way you want. Best of all it just tastes so much more fucking fresh.

Butternut squash, as I've waxed lyrically about previously, lends itself to lots of dishes, working especially well with the spices of curry. Pairing it with ginger seemed an ideal combination and, as I found out, it was spot on.

INGREDIENTS
1 tbsp olive oil
½ red onion, chopped
½ bulb of garlic, cloves peeled and crushed
A large chunk ginger (about the size of 1-2 thumbs), finely chopped
1 stick celery, chopped
2 medium-sized potatoes, peeled and diced
Half a butternut squash, peeled, seeded and cut into 2 cm cubes
2 chillies, finely chopped
½ tin tomatoes
½ bunch spring onions, chopped
1 litre water
1 vegetable stock cube, crumbled
1 tbsp tomato puree
1 tbsp light soy sauce
Juice of half a lemon
Freshly ground black pepper

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a big, heavy pan and gently fry the red onion, garlic, ginger and celery for 10 minutes.

Add the potatoes and carry on sauteing for another 5 minutes.

Add the squash, chillies, and spring onions for a couple of minutes.

Pour in the water, tomato puree, soy and lemon juice.

Season well with black pepper and bring to the boil.

Cover well and gently simmer for 1-2 hours

Blend the soup until it's smooth

Serve with bread

NOTES
What I said about blending the soup in my recipe for broccoli and Stilton soup still stands. If you aren't careful you could end up spraying the kitchen and your face with napalm-hot liquid.

I prefer this blended until it's pretty smooth, though if you want lumps in it, be less vigorous with the blender,

You could leave the chillies out if you want. The combined flavour of the butternut squash and ginger is the highlight of the dish but, if you have been a sweary follower, you will know that I think if it don't have chilli, it don't taste of shit. Well, none of the recipes should actually taste of shit. No, they taste nice. That's just me talking street for my younger readers. While this might seem a pitiable thing for a middle-aged man to do, it's still better than most of the shite that Torode and Wallace come out with on Masterchef.

Rice and peas

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

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

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

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

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

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

Add the allspice and chilli.

Stir in the rinsed rice.

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

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

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

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

OK, it's not much to look at

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

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

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

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

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

Leftover symphonies 2: Broccoli and Stilton Soup

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

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

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

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

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

"SMELL MY CHEESE, YOU MOTHER!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Potato Gregg's Last Stand: Tandoori style potato curry

All good things come to an end and so do potatoes bearing vague resemblance to celebrity greengrocers, so it's time to make him useful. Well, I couldn't let him just putrefy into a mouldy, slimy mess, could I? It would do him a disservice to make something boring with him so I decided to make this great curry. It's what he would have wanted.

 Alas, poor Potato Gregg.

I knew him, Horatio

Really, the potato is taken for granted, especially in the UK. Chips (and I did mention the British obsession with the fucking chip previously), mash and the horrendously bland, plain boiled old potatoes were the accompaniment to much of the nutrition in my formative years. I mean chips are OK and mash is great if made right (it rarely was back then), but the plain boiled potatoes were just so fucking bland. Serving them up like that is just such a waste of a really versatile vegetable. Let me count the ways. There are crisps which come close to the very zenith of the art of potato cookery, but nobody I know makes their own crisps. You can have them baked, sauteed, roasted, or get exotic and go for something like hasselback, duchess, dauphinoise and, let's face it, you know if it's got a French name it's going to have a good 50% extra on the price in a lot of restaurants. Alternatively, incorporate your spuds in a stew or casserole for them to braise and they not only absorb the flavour of what they're cooking in, but actually enhance it.

There is a lot of bad press about potatoes as being full of carbohydrate and therefore amongst certain healthy/faddy diet circles (yes, adherents to the Paleolithic diet, I'm looking at you as I mentioned previously, you gullible twats) they rank up there with the jism of Satan himself as a food to avoid. However, it's a little known fact that potatoes, before the global transport network and advances in cultivation made pretty much every vegetable available all year round, were one of the major sources of vitamin C in gloomy Northern Europe in the winter months. Indeed, there is actually more vitamin C in a packet of salt and vinegar crisps than in a fresh apple. Well, I say there is, but I've not checked that fact so it might be bollocks.

Thing is, potatoes are just so fucking versatile and one of the best ways to use them is in curries where they can be a main ingredient in their own right.

INGREDIENTS
½ tsp ground tumeric
½ tsp onion seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp tandoori spice
½ tsp paprika
½ tsp salt
pinch chilli flakes
1 small onion, sliced
2 large cloves garlic, crushed
400g peeled potatoes in 2cm cubes
300ml water
100g fresh tomatoes, peeled
2 tbsp vegetable oil 

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a heavy pan and fry the spices for a minute. Throw in the onion and garlic and cook until the onion is transparent, stirring frequently.

Add the potatoes and keep stirring for 10 minutes to par-cook them and give them a nice coating of spice mix. Add the tomatoes, stir and cook for another couple of minutes before adding the water.

Bring the pan to the boil, cover and leave to cook for twenty to thirty minutes, when the potato should be tender.

This is plenty for three or four people as an accompaniment to another curry, or is substantial enough to be served on its own with rice and/or bread. Like most curries, any leftovers taste better as lunch the next day

Served up with a chicken curry, pilau rice and naan bread

NOTES
So, goodbye then, Potato Gregg. There may be other guest appearances in the future.

This is yet another vegetarian/vegan dish. It's great on its own but it makes a great part of a thali along with some of my other vegie curries and accompaniments like baingan tamatar and butternut squash curry.

I made this with old potatoes in this instance, but making it with new potatoes also works really well.

Broccoli and cashew pilaf

"Know who I love? That James Bond. Movie heroes don't come tougher than him. Everything he did was thanks to broccoli and, me being a greengrocer, I know all about broccoli Yum, yum, yum! Apples and fackin' pears"
Actually, Potato Gregg, I think you're getting confused about Albert "Cubby" Broccoli. He wasn't actually a vegetable. He was the film producer responsible for the James Bond franchise.

Broccoli is actually quite a tasty vegetable considering it's often touted as a "superfood", which is usually a synonym for "unevidenced bollocks propagated by people who's grasp of science is obtained from Frankenstein films or somewhere really unbelievable, like the Daily Mail". In the case of broccoli, however, there is actually some evidence to suggest that it does, as a cruciferous vegetable, have a high content of some compounds research suggests may be beneficial in preventing cancer, plus various antioxidants and is a source of various minerals and vitamins, so eating it is a good thing.

It's the bête noire of many children who generally hate it. Sweary Jr actually quite likes it, probably because it makes him break wind and there is nothing Sweary Jr (or Sweary Sr for that matter) thinks is more funny than farting.






"Bodily functions don't get any funnier than farting"


Oh, for fuck's sake, Potato Gregg, this is getting tedious. Please get another catch phrase or you're going to be featuring as an ingredient in my next recipe.

Anyway, despite its virtuous qualities, it's quite difficult to incorporate broccoli into recipes. It's good on its own as part of a Sunday roast, but in other things? OK, there's broccoli and Stilton soup and from Chinese takeaways you get it with beef and oyster sauce but not much else. Then there's this, a recipe that I've been making for a long time which makes great use of broccoli, pairing it with cashews plus a little spice to make a satisfying rice dish. It's a great accompaniment to anything from the Mediterranean area, be it South  European, Asian or North African. It's also good for anyone wanting a wheat-free alternative to cous cous.

INGREDIENTS
1 mug of decent quality dried rice (works out at about 200g)
½ a vegetable stock cube
75g cashew nuts
2 tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 tsp ground cumin
1 cinnamon stick (about 10cm long)
Black pepper
150g broccoli, broken up into bite-size florets

TIMING
Preparation: 15 minutes
Cooking: 15-20 minutes

RECIPE
Put the rice in a heavy pan and wash it in a couple of changes of water. Drain well and return to the pan and add 1½ times the volume of water as rice. Crumble in the half stock cube and stir well before heating to boiling, turning down the heat as low as possible and covering for 15-20 minutes. When it's ready, the liquid should be fully absorbed leaving nice, fluffy rice.

Meanwhile, heat the oil in a deep frying pan or wok and throw in the cashews and brown them by stirring or tossing regularly for 5 minutes or so, then remove with a slotted spoon.

Add the onion, garlic and spices to the hot oil and sauté until the onions are transparent, about 10 minutes. Add the broccoli and stir fry for another 10 minutes or so until tender. If the mix gets dry add a splash of water.

Throw in the fried cashews and the cooked rice. Mix well and serve.

This recipe makes easily enough for a couple of adults and goes well with something like my recipe for pork afelia or perhaps stuffat tal fenek


NOTES
This is the second pilaf I've done in the blog after my tomato pilaf a few months back.

The word pilaf is derived from the Turkish word "pilav" which is in turn derived (by way of Persian) from the Hindi pulao or pilau.

I know I twat on about this every time I do a rice dish, but do use good rice like Thai jasmine or Basmati, and not that American long grain shit they sell on the same shelf in the supermarket. The rice is the main part of this recipe, so bland, tasteless polystyrene-textured grains just make it not worth the bother. It is the difference between a pilaf like this being something you'd be proud to serve your parents and something you'd serve your parents once you discover they're leaving the house to a local donkey sanctuary.

I don't put any salt in this recipe since stock cubes contain an awful lot.

This could be the last we see of Potato Gregg for a time as I think there is a risk of this blog turning into a ventriloquist act which, though it may be unique in terms of cooking (if you don't count Fanny Craddock and Johnnie), there's probably a good reason for that. On the other hand, I would have paid good money to see the late Keith Harris and Orville do a cookery show where Orville's nappy comes into its own when Keith mentions he's going to be making an orange sauce.

 

Keith Harris and Orville
I wish I could fry...

Baingan Tamatar (aubergine and tomato curry)

Aubergines are funny things. They're called eggplants in the States, apparently because the first ones that Europeans saw were like the little white ones in the picture below. You do wonder though if they may have got a different name if they'd first seen one of the others, like a purple and white stripy arse plant (far right), or a deep violet penis fruit (do I need to point that fucker out?). I should stress that the latter ought not to be confused with a penis gourd.

United colours of aubergines

And what of other vegetables if they had been named after what they look like? I've already alluded to the sex toy appearance of the butternut squash and the phallic appearance of the courgette in previous recipes (to paraphrase the title of my own blog, it's not big, but it is funny). Would we find the "goth carrot" (parsnip); the "leafy stinking football" (cabbage) or the "You wouldn't want one of them up your arse" (artichoke) quite so appetising?

Of course, we Brits, being proudly European (apart from those of the UKIP persuasion), name them aubergine from the French word for the vegetable which is derived from in turn from Arabic al badinjan which itself comes from the Sanskrit vatimgana which is also the root of the Hindi word for aubergine, baingan, the title of the recipe.

All this linguistic nerdism is well and good, but the word aubergine does sound uncomfortably close to the French word for an inn, auberge, which spawned the Chris Rea song below and I'm not entirely sure that can be forgiven.

Whatever you want to call it, the aubergine is a fantastic vegetable. It is often thing of beauty with its vivid colour. It's also substantial enough to make the basis of a good main course dish in its own right, tastes great, and works really well in curries like this one. As I've said before, I've got a lot of respect for vegetarians and a great vegetarian dinner is all the better for the smug satisfaction you get in the knowledge that it didn't have any dead animal in it (at least, none that you knew about. I mean, there's no accounting for the odd fly or spider that made its home somewhere in the ingredients). This makes a decent main course for a couple of people with rice and/or a nice Indian bread.

INGREDIENTS
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 big onions, sliced
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1bay leaf
~10cm piece cinnamon
2 tsp whole coriander seeds
1 tsp onion seeds
1 tsp ground black pepper
4 cloves
pinch chilli flakes
1 tsp salt
1 good sized aubergine (about 3-400g worth if you use smaller ones), topped, tailed and cut into 2cm cubes
1 tin of tomatoes (ideally chopped)
200ml water
1 tsp garam masala

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a nice, solid pan and add the spices.

Fry for a minute then add the onion and garlic and sautee gently to soften.

Add the tomatoes and aubergines and stir well.

Add the water, bring to the boil and simmer.

Leave for at least half an hour, until the aubergine is tender.

Add the garam masala and stir well.

Taste and add more salt if it's needed.

Serve it on its own with rice and/or naan bread or with other accompaniments.

NOTES
Vegetable oil should be neutrally flavoured, like sunflower or rapeseed.

About 30% of the population of India are vegetarian. This amounts to over 350,000,000 people, over five times the entire population of the UK. It's therefore not surprising that probably the best vegetarian food in the world is from India, like this dish. I've got a few more great veggie curries up my sleeve for later blog entries.

I've mentioned before that aubergines are part of the nightshade family, also including tomatoes, peppers and potatoes. We could survive without these plants (in Europe we actually did without most of them before Columbus), but food would be so ridiculously dull.

Garam masala is a mixture of aromatic spices that pep up the flavour of a curry that might be lost during the cooking process.