Anyone For Croquettes?

One of my life long on-off affairs has been the mighty fishcake. "On" when I think about eating one - "off" when I actually taste one. Perhaps it stems from school dinners when the smell of deep fried fishcakes when entering the dining hall was so appetizing (at least compared to the stench of mushy peas and spam fritters) but the illusion was shattered when I bit through the orange breadcrumbs to see the grey inner (and then found a bone/false eyelash/fingernail jabbing into my gums). The same scenario has played itself many times after in English fish and chip shops and Spanish tapas bars alike; all looks, aromas and promises, no taste bud penetration.

A couple of attempts at making a decent fishcake/croquette have come a cropper by using leftover mashed potato. The theory is sound but in practice if you make your mash with anywhere near the amount of butter that I do then you’re doomed to end up with cakes which want to emulate a slowly moving lava flow. This is how I came to the conclusion that to make good fishcakes/croquettes one has to forsake the dairy.

What you shouldn’t underestimate tho’ is the type of spud you need. A waxy potato will end up making a dry croquake (can’t be arsed to keep writing fishcake/croquette) when not using butter. A floury type (Maris Piper, Desiree, Fianna etc) will make your little spheres of moorishness succulent and soft – even when eaten cold for breakfast.

So this is not a rigid recipe but a base one open for a multitude of adaptations containing either fish, meat and cheese. And it also gives me the excuse for doing something I’ve never attempted before – uploading a picture of the crime itself.

The basic plan is to have roughly 1 part mashed potato to 1 part filling when it comes to fish, 2 parts potato to 1 part filling when ham or cheese or whatever.

Here goes then for my Crab & Prawn (or not) Croquakes

½kg of peeled and quartered floury potatoes

2 tins of crab meat

200 grams of raw prawns (black tiger, purple goat, turquoise vole etc)

2 teaspoons of crab paste (optional)

4 cloves of garlic

Salt & pepper

2 eggs for egging

Plain flour and breadcrumbs for......

"Deep" oil

Peel your garlic cloves and bung them, with the spuds, into a saucepan. Drain the tins of crabmeat into the pan too so as not to waste any flavour (don’t forget to give each tin a good squeeze – there be a lot of cheap water in them there cans and we don’t want water in our croquettes). Fill up with tapable water, add a little salt and boil until nice and soft.

In the meantime empty your crab into a large mixing bowl. Peel your prawns, cut each one into 4 or 5 bits and throw expertly into the crab. Add the crab paste (and here is my first pic – that’s Archie posing in the background). It’s a Thai crab paste with soya bean – if you can only get normal shrimp paste then be very careful as that can go from tasteless to overpowering in a matter of nano seconds.

When the potatoes and garlic are cooked they are drained and mashed. I love my Ikea bought potato ricer which is basically a huge garlic press. If you have one of these then you can “rice” straight into the bowl of crab and prawn mix. Otherwise mash them in a separate bowl before chucking over into the crustaceans. Please never consider liquidizing or blitzing potatoes – this will release starches which will ruin everything, turning it into glue.

Mix well and season with salt & pepper. The way to form into perfect ping-pong sized balls is to keep one’s Madame Palm and her Five Beautiful Daughters moist by sporadically dipping your hand into a bowl of water so as to stop the mixture sticking. Place each ball onto a sheet of grease-proof paper.

Next one has to flour, egg and breadcrumb ones balls. Standard procedure for most of us. The oil temperature should be about 170-180 °c and fry in batches appropriate for the size of your fat receptacle until golden brown, texture like sun etc. Here, for the curious, is a picture of my balls…..


I promise to try to take better pictures in the future. But you can just about see the chunks of pink shrimp poking out. What you should have is the crisp shell, silky soft crabby potato and sweet bites of prawn. Making a homemade mayonnaise as an accompaniment would only take this beyond heaven and into the gastrosphere. Especially if you mixed salmon eggs in the mayo.....

Alternative additives to the base croquakes could be flaked hot-smoked haddock, salmon or herring (I’ve made some wicked ones using home smoked garfish), ham and/or cheese. You can also put in chopped parsley, chilli or chives. Finely chopped fried mushrooms go well with cheese if you squeeze the life out of them after frying.

Candied Samples of Voluptuosness

or
Check Out The Rack

Despite liking Christmas about as much as your average professional footballer likes crosswords I do like the grub. Well, most of the grub because I’ve never really understood mince pies – maybe because they always come out when food is the last thing on your list of must-do’s. And don’t get me started on turkey…

This year I’ve made an early start on Spiritus Festivitus by trying my hand at some sweets, candied ginger and lemon slices to be precise. Mrs B initiated the sudden interest confectionary by purchasing a small (and very expensive) bag of chocolate coated candied stem ginger. Me being me thought “I must be able to do that” so, sans a bit of Googling, I bought myself a load of fresh root ginger, some cane sugar, some very nice Lindt dark chocolate and some frighteningly expensive Valrhona cocoa powder and hit the kitchen.

In terms of quantities the Chocolate Coated Candied Ginger recipe revolves around:

3 or 4 big bits of ginger, peeled and cut into sugar cube sized, erm, cubes (boiling will shrink them a little)

Roughly the same weight of sugar as the ginger

A 250 gram bar of 70% dark chocolate (quality counts here – don’t go for the cheap stuff)

Cocoa powder for dredging/powdering/dusting or whatever

The ginger is boiled for an hour or so in water until it is tender. Drain it off (keep the water for a mean ginger tea), return to the saucepan with the sugar and a two or three tablespoons of the water. Heat until the sugar is dissolved and boil gently for 1-1½ hours. Do not stir as this can cause the sugar to crystalize, just fidget the saucepan a bit now and again. It may be necessary to add a tiny bit of ginger water if the syrup gets too thick. When tender and opaque (they look like bits of amber when done) drain them off and place on grease-proof paper to cool. The syrup is fantastic with vanilla ice cream by the way.

Now you can either zap the chocolate in a microwave or melt it in a bowl over simmering water (or melt it in your specialized chocolate melter, geek). Then take a few bits of ginger, bung them in the choc, fish them out individually (a fork is a surprisingly useful utensil for this) and place them on a new sheet of grease-proof paper. When they are all coated it’s off to the fridge to set for a bit.

Now, when nice and non-sticky you have a choice. You can choose between going straight to the cocoa coating stage or do the chocolate dip a second time to give a thicker, more intense chocolate armour plating. But whether you’re a one or two dip person your sweets should be rolled in cocoa powder only when cool or else you’ll get too much cocoa sticking to them. I was mightily pleased I pushed the boat out and paid almost £7 for 250 grams of Valrhona cocoa powder as this smells and tastes so much better than the cheaper stuff and 250 grams goes a long way.

What you get is the still-quite-fiery-yet-sweet hit of ginger then the bittersweet chocolate soothing takes over and,finally, when that’s gone the ginger returns. It's magic. And, as my foodie work colleague Jacob put it, ginger is terribly good for you.

So, after the success of the ginger, I put my mind to creating something fruity. It was sort of a request from Mrs B who wanted candied orange peel. I was in our local supermarket and they had some nice (and quite cheap) organic lemons so I got a couple and another bar of Lindt’s and thought “bugger the oranges” (they were overpriced and not very ripe anyway).

My recipe is not really anything you can’t easily find on-line. The bit which makes it MY recipe is in the drying out of the candied fruit. Which isn’t really part of the recipe at all to be honest but for the sake of being thorough this is how I tackled my Chocolate Coated Candied Lemons (and one Lime):

2 organic lemons (and one organic lime found in the fruit bowl)

1 cup of non-organic potable water (we have it on tap)

2 cups of sugar

Boiling water (for blanching)

Frozen water (cubed)

Intermediate water (in a bowl) (where the ice cubes go to maketh chilly)

Ok, the on-line recipes called for thee to thinly slice thou citrus fruits on a mandolin. I’ve had a mandolin phobia ever since I lopped a large amount of epidermis from one of my teenage fingers whilst rummaging around in a kitchen drawer (so much blood) so we own nothing more than a blunt grater. And another recipe used the old two-wooden-skewers-either-side-of-the-lemon trick which is too much hard work for a slouch like me so I decided to slice the fruit thinly using a very sharp knife. Vorsprung Trotz Teknik, so to speak.

Once beautifully (if not completely uniformly) sliced and de-pipped the fruit is then blanched in the boiling water for a couple of minutes (to remove the bitterness of the pith), removed with a slotted spoon and dumped into the bowl of iced water (I honestly don't know why you have to do this - I got it off a Martha Stewart recipe. It probably has something to do with insider trading). As with the ginger recipe the boiled water should under no circumstances be thrown out as it makes a splendid cordial when chilled then topped up with the lemon syrup (we’ll get to that).

Now the 1 cup of water (by the by, I just used a normal cup of muggish size – not the proper American unit of measurement) and 2 cups of sugar are added to the saucepan and heated until the sugar is dissolved. Luzz in the lemons and lime (or kumquat, orange, or hell, even pomelo slices if you’re in the mood), bring to a gentle boil and cook for about an hour and a half. As with the ginger you should only swirl the contents of the pan now and again – do not stir. You now have ample candied samples in need of a rack. I do not own a proper rack. Well I do but it’s never completely clean and I’d imagine the brown stuff stuck to it would perhaps spoil my beautiful, translucent, yellow pieces of stained glass windows. And I definitely do not own what the American recipes called “non-stick spray” (unless they mean WD40). So I came up with something I think is better than a bog-standard rack. I call it my Candied Samples Gravity Defying Rack. To make it you take a piece of grease-proof paper half as long again as the baking tray (the one you now know you’re going to need). Then you make a harmonica, folding about a centimeter at a time. This takes quite a few minutes but is worth it. When you’re finished you now have the perfect rack. So to speak. It looks like a lot of W’s (WWWWWWWWWW – if you’re in doubt). I taped each end to the ends of the baking tray for added rigidness (a rack needs to be firm yet pliable). You now lay each slice of fruit across the peaks where it all has to dry for about 24 hours. If there are insects about a cold oven is a good place for drying. The citrus syrup must be saved for adding to soft (or preferably hard) drinks.

So, after your 24 hours, the slices are ready for dunking in your molten chocolate. If you only dip half of each slice it saves chocolate and adds visual wowness. The bare lemon can be a tad sticky so if you want to avoid this then coat the entire slice. Place on (flat) grease-proof paper and put in the fridge to set.

I will try the orange slices soon. After the 24 hour drying period I’ll slice them in two for the sake of size. The plan is to do a good sized batch each of both ginger and citrus sweets and give them as Crimbo prezzies. That’s me done and (cocoa) dusted then.

Edit: January 2012. The next batch of chocolate coated whatevers comprised of lemons, oranges, grapefruit, coffee beans and sour cherries (bought in a jar) which I soaked in Kirsch for an hour before dunking. They were all superb. I also sugar coated some halved candied grapefruit slices (pure laziness - I was rather tired of the choco-dipping by this point) simply by chucking them into a bowl of sugar and tossing them about for a bit.

A Quick Snail Recipe

You would think that if you pulled the shell off a snail it would move quicker. I tried but if anything it made it sluggish.....

Many thanks to our favourite peace artist Mr Gerald Leonardo Salvador Vincent Pablo Dinnage for that one which leads me boldly into my first post of 2011 after totally hurdling 2010 for a variety of reasons none of which were due to the lack of decent nosh which we have lobbed down our gob holes. Indeed 2010 has been the Year Of The Gadget in the Casa del B. We’ve been given a magnificent manual sausage filler by my Godfather. We bought a table top pizza oven (makes unbelievable pizzas in about four minutes), a juice maker, a new rice steamer (wore the old one out), a vacuum sealer, a bread maker and finally coughed up the heady sum of £24 in Ingerlund this Crimbo for a slow cooker.

And to boot I’ve made my own bacon as well as a parma ham, both of which turned out rather well. Next up will be home made black pudding after I bought enough dried pigs blood to make 15 kgs of finished pud.

But back to the gastropods. Seeing as Mrs B and myself “enjoy” a large lunch each day at our respective places of toil we tend to eat lightly of an evening. I suppose we do supper now, not dinner. Anyway we’d had a punnet of parsley in the fridge which needed using, there was a half a packet of butter that couldn’t have been more than a few weeks past its sell-by date and finally there was a tin of snails in the cupboard (as there often is).

And this is what I came up with, basically in an attempt to use up rather a lot of parsley.

Poor Homeless Garlic Snails With Parsley and Garlic Purée

20-24 or so snails serves 2 for a light meal or 4 as a starter

A tin of snails (always a good idea to have another tin in hand as I opened one once only to find it contained but five snails)
Half a packet of butter
A bag/punnet/big bunch of parsley (flat-leaf or curly) including the stalks
Plenty of cloves of garlic
A splash of white wine
Salt and pepper
Crusty bread or baguettes

Ok, start by draining the snails then leaving them for a few minutes to soak in cold water. If you give them a good sniff before you do this you’ll understand why I do it. They do tend to pong and the soaking in fresh water seems to loosen the flesh up a tad, making them even more tender than usual.

To make succulent, juicy garlic snails warm the butter in a saucepan on a medium-low heat with as much chopped garlic as is legally allowed. The idea is to extract as much garlicness from it without actually frying it. If you keep it gently simmering along you can set this going a good half hour or more before you need it. The garlic will eventually disintegrate which is a very good thing. Then when almost ready give it a spludge of white wine then delicately roll in the snails (or just bung them in). These need but a gentle warming through, giving them enough time to absorb the holy garlicbutteryness but without actually cooking them. Finally season with salt and pepper.

Now for the parsley purée. Wash the parsley well then bung it into salted boiling water with a fistful of chopped garlic for two or three minutes. Then, after draining, lob it in a blender/food processer, give it a blitz, season with some finely ground black pepper (and salt if required).

To serve put a couple of spoonfuls of purée on a warmed plate or, preferably, a shallow bowl and flatten it out in a circular motion leaving a couple of centimetres gap to the edge of said serving receptacle. Place some snails in the middle of the purée then pour the garlicybutteryness around the edge of it all. Serve with crusty bread. This is simply the best garlic snails I’ve ever had. The parsley purée is simply a revelation. And, funnily enough, it’s healthier than your normal escargots a la bourguignonne as you use less butter and more gweenewy. Not that I give a thlying thuck about calorie counting, mind....

If snails don’t thingy one’s dingy then one can use fungi instead. My way of cooking mushrooms is a bit different to how I understand is “the right way” where you fry them on a very high heat. I prefer to:

1) Keep my mushrooms, be they whatever type/breed/persuasion, in large bits/slices/chunks
2) Fry them in a little olive oil on a medium heat, they must not burn.
3) Just as they start to give off liquid remove from pan
4) Make the garlicbutterconcoction from above in same cooking vessel
5) Return mushrooms and reheat through

By doing them this way the mushrooms retain a nice bite and texture. I’ve used normal and brown mushrooms as well as Portobello and chanterelles. One day, one autumn, one year, I’ll get to do a bit of proper mushroom hunting coz I just know ceps would taste fantastic like this.

We’re off to Barcelona for four days of gastronomic exploration at the end of the month. This time we’ve rented a rather nice looking apartment overlooking the harbour in Barceloneta. The idea is that, on top of eating in restaurants and bars, we can buy stuff in the various markets to take home and prepare. Goose barnacles are top of our “must buy” list. Can’t-Bloody-Wait.

Peppers With Stuff In

One thing I enjoy is making food out of things at hand. Luckily our cupboards are brimming with weird tins of things like giant beans, snails, olives, nori seaweed, capers and bamboo shoots. Draws full of sheets of rice paper, chickpeas, prawn crackers, lentils and more spices than a Moroccan bazaar. Our fridge, however, is more often than not some sort of cold last chance saloon for things Mrs B brings back from her lunch at work, bits of cheese which have left the “nicely ripe” stage a while back and are hurtling towards Toxic Town, vegetables which seem to be having babies, jars of chutneys and sauces where the sell-by dates go back to the last millennium and, at the back, things wrapped in tin foil which I daren’t open. Actually maybe it should be better to call it a beer fridge with alien elements. Mmm I like that.

I rather envy that bloke Nigel La Lawson who has a spotless fridge full of fresh clean looking produce, all wrapped up in straight-from-the-deli parchment. Ah well, at least I don’t have to wear a corset. One back-of-the-fridge, rather rusty tin I came across not too long ago contained a big block of sheep’s feta and the barely distinguishable sell-by date was still to become history which was a very pleasant surprise. I decided to use it for a side dish that had seeded in my mind when we found a big bag of mini red peppers at the cash & carry. This is not an Oh My God How Original dish but it turned out very well for a big buffet thingy we threw for Big Daughter’s confirmation during the summer. My pet brother-in-law Brian seems to like it, too. And if mini red peppers aren’t available (and they don’t exactly grow on trees – plants, but not trees) then normal peppers sliced into quarters lengthways do the trick.

All the other ingredients were hanging around waiting to die so I dedicate this dish to the Eleanor Rigbys of Kitchenland.

Stuffed Red Peppers

Some red peppers
Some feta cheese
Some capers
Some anchovies
Some olive oil
Some garlic
Some pepper

The observant types may well observe the lack of specific amounts and quantities in the above recipe (does it even qualify as a recipe when it’s so vague?) But this is because one can mix it to ones own particular taste depending on one's love of anchovies and capers.

Well, one takes ones peppers and one tops them. Then one removes the seeds and pith (and one quarters them if using grown-up peppers). Then one puts crumbled or cubed feta, capers, chopped anchovy filets, pepper, crushed garlic and generous splooge of olive oil into a mixing bowl and one mixes it with a wooden spoon or the like. It’s good to mash it a bit which releases the flavours of the anchovies and capers as well as breaks down the feta. Then one fills ones peppers, puts 'em into a dish, drizzles 'em with a little oil and bungs 'em in tut oven at 181.5 or so degrees shellfish (385.7 or so degrees barronknight) for twentyish minutes or until they’re nice and soft (but not nice and soft and black).

One can, if one is in one’s pernickety corner, save the tops of one’s mini peppers and replace them after filling. This, as I discovered as I attempted to fill about 60 of the buggers, is a tedious chore as one a) has to replace the right top that belongs to the right body and b) it has to be fitted correctly to, erm, fit correctly. And even then (and after securing them with a toothpick) some fell off after roasting.

Samosa Summarum

Ah, the humble samosa. A deep fried/baked pastry packet of veg and/or meat and/or dried fruit from India/Turkey/North Africa/East Africa/Portugal/Persia (thank you Wikipedia). My personal experience with them comes from the (mainly Kurdish or Turkish owned) greengrocer shops of Copenhagen which often sell them from greasy trays perched on top of the counter. I prefer the veggie ones filled with a spicy potato and pea mixture as my logic gland tells me there ought to be fewer life threatening diseases in slowly deteriorating vegetables than meat. And I think they actually taste better. Win win.

After setting myself the task of creating my own version I hit my first stumbling block – pastry. Life is too short to make it. Thankfully our local Vietnamese “supermarket” has packets of wafer thin frozen spring roll pastry which I quickly deemed perfect for the job. Then it was simply a case following a meandering path between recipes gleaned from various intaweb and bookish sources and my own intuition-cum-imagination. And the result was fab. And terribly cheap. I used small waxy potatoes despite many recipes calling for floury ones and I thought they were fantastic. They retain a more robust consistency, thinks moi.

Samosas

(makes roughly twenty – any leftover filling can be used to make a mean veggie curry)

Frozen spring roll pastry – 40 sheets thawed
1 kg spuds peeled and diced pretty finely
2 large onions chopped
A few cloves of garlic chopped
250 g frozen peas thawed and drained
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 teaspoon black pepper corns
1 teaspoon fenugreek seeds
2 teaspoons tumeric
2-4 chillis chopped
a handful of chopped fresh coriander
3 teaspoons yellow mustard seeds
salt
vegetable oil
flour & water paste
water

Start by roasting off your cumin, coriander, pepper and fenugreek seeds in a large frying or sautéing pan and bunging them into a mortar for some pestling. Then soften the onions and garlic in a little oil, add the potato, chillis, mustard seeds, tumeric, some salt and about three quarters of the spice mix as well as about half a cup of water. Mix up well, cover and cook over a medium heat for five minutes. Then remove the lid and cook until the potatoes are soft and the liquid is almost boiled away, turning over the mixture continuously to prevent burning. Taste to see if you need more salt or spices. When fully cooked add the peas and fresh coriander.

You now let the mixture cool, a fine time to fill up you now empty wine glass. Then you can make your flour and water glue.

I now have to reveal the second of my stumbling blocks – how to make my samosas geometrically correct. Which I never really did but after ten or so I managed to get them looking sort of ok. I ended up having two rather longish corners which I folded back creating something which looked a bit like a trussed chicken. After deep frying until golden brown they looked like roasted trussed chickens. So to assemble the beasts you peel off two sheets from the masses and fold them over creating a triangle. Then place a goodish dollop of mixture somewhere to one side of the middle of this, smear some flour glue along two edges and fold, pushing out as much air as poss. You then fold the edges back on themselves again and crimp.

I would imagine a healthier option would be to bake your samosas, maybe brush them with a little oil or butter to make ‘em shiny. But I wanted the artery clogging version so into a pan of 180 degrees c groundnut oil they were plopped, one at a time (only had a small amount of oil) until the roast chicken appearance was obtained. They were then drained on a rack.

If not eaten immediately these go a bit soft, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. My idea was to freeze most of my batch but they were so popular among the B’s (Mr, Mrs & Miss) that they disappeared quicker than a botty burp in a wind tunnel.

Mulled Whine

My dad recently called me a Grumpy Young Man. It was due to my opinion that trick or treating is nothing short of mugging. If I went knocking on people’s doors demanding sweets or money (or a flat screen tv or the family silver) or they run the risk of getting their tyres slashed or dog shit put through their letter boxes I would, quite rightly, get my shoulder felt. I read a piece in the Guardian about parents following their offspring around as they terrorized old aged pensioners, not to make sure the little tykes were safe from sleezy men in gaping dressing gowns but to ensure they didn’t cause malicious criminal damage. We weren’t home this Halloween, and our garden is in such a state we can’t see if anything has been vandalised, but I must admit I spent a few evenings beforehand dreaming about fitting a Tazer to the doorbell.

I guess that qualifies me as grumpy.

Autumn has always been my favourite season. The deep colours, the blustery-yet-mellow winds, the migrating birds, the excuse for unearthing your favourite woolly jumper and, not least, the dark evenings calling for comfort food and drink. Here in Denmark a favourite run-up-to-Christmas tipple is gløgg; hot, sweet red wine with raisins and chopped almonds. Naturally most people either buy it pre-fabricated or “make” it themselves by combining red wine, a bottle of “gløgg mix” and a bag of raisins and stale, chopped almonds. It is almost always too sweet and sickly for my buds, and the bloated warm raisins are vomit material, so the only thing to do was to experiment. I tried using a fruit juice base (plum, grape, redcurrants etc) but found it too “busy” so I’ve ended up using red wine. I go for an ultra cheap fruity wine (as opposed to an oaky one) for both the spiced base and the mulled wine proper. The aroma this makes as it boils away is quite fantastic, filling the kitchen with the sort of spicy smells which make even grumpy young men feel good about the world.

Mulled Wine

For the base

1 litre or a bottle of fruity red wine
15 cardamom pods
3 2inch pieces of cinnamon (or 2 3inch pieces even)
10 cloves
5 allspice berries
20 coriander seeds
small piece of ginger
3 star anise things
2 pieces of mace or half a nutmeg clove chopped/crushed
cup of raisins
1 unwaxed orange sliced
1 unwaxed lemon sliced
100g sugar

The specific measurements are not necessarily to be followed to the seed/pod/inch or berry. My personal way of doing things is more “a few of them, a shake of them, a good pinch or more of them etc”. And, other than the cinnamon, cardamom, cloves and orange, things can be left out or replaced with alternatives. I didn’t have any lemons this morning when making a batch but I did have some kafir lime leaves in the freezer so I used them instead. I only add the sugar at this point because otherwise tasting can become a rather puckering experience.

Anyway, bring everything up to a rolling boil and simmer for an hour or two. Strain (through muslin or a coffee filter if you want) into your receptacle of choice. A batch will suffice for two to four litres of mulled wine depending on how spicy you want it. And it will keep for yonks in the fridge.

The Wine (Mulled)

I bottle of red wine
½ - ¼ batch of base
sugar
stout (optional)
vodka

Gently warm the wine, stout (about half a bottle pr bottle of wine – it adds a nice depth) and base in a heavy pan. It is imperative you do not let your wine get anywhere near to boiling point. Alcohol boils at 78.3 degrees celcius and begins evaporating long before then. I keep a (glass) lid on the pan so that any condensation (ie alcohol) can be returned lovingly to the wine. Add sugar as and if required, stirring to dissolve. When nice and (not too) warm pour into mugs or glasses. If you pre-heat your glasses with boiling water the mulled wine won’t cool down too quickly. To give it that extra smack-the-chops effect float a teaspoon or two of vodka into each glass on top of the mulled wine.

And whilst on the subject of Christmassy beverages I’m making a rather splendidly smelling Spiced Vodka. Into a very large jar goes an unwaxed orange (prick it to death with a chopstick), some cardamom pods, star anise, coriander seeds, cinnamon sticks and a handful of raisins. Pour in a bottle of vodka and leave for a couple of weeks. Well, you don’t leave it – you give it a good shake everyday not forgetting to have a sniff at the same time, marvelling at the wonderful aroma. This will be a fine aperitif Christmas morning, one hand up the jacksy of the turkey the other coddling a snifter of this stuff. Can’t wait.

Fire In The Hole!

A while back I watched a totally inane programme called A Taste Of My Life in which Nigella Slater interviews a so-called celebrity about their dull lives through the food memories they have. At the end of it the celeb had to hold an imaginary dinner for a handful of people of their choice. A bit like Desert Island Discs. Or Dessert Island Dicks, even. The guests chosen were usually rather predictable – Nelson Mandela, JFK, Sigmund Freud, John Lennon etc. This lead me to muse on who I’d like to invite to dinner. After scrapping a couple of ideas (Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan, Kenny Dalglish, Graeme Souness and Rafa Benitez would be great – “So Bill, what do you think of these fellas’ handling of your legacy?” “Aye, they’ve all done good, save that money shaggin’ fool who used to have that mole on his top lip”). I’d also invite John Peel along coz he’d appreciate that. And I could thank him for pulling a few heaven strings at half time on a certain night in May, 2005 (always knew it was you, John). But yesterday I found the right combo. Mike Tyson, Bruce Lee, Josef Menegele, Attila The Hun, Sweeny Todd and David Caruso. I would proceed to announce to the first five that dinner will only be served once they had beaten up, tortured and mutilated the ginger twunt. I would then sit back and enjoy the spectacle. Any doubts to whether this guy deserves it should watch this snippet from YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWS7c21jOnI

So, to carry on the theme of things which make one’s sphincter turn inside out this is my take on a humdinger of a chilli sauce. After years, nay, decades of shop-bought disappointments where the fire-breathing, devil-summoning condiment turns out to be a sour, meek, food-wrecking bottle of nothingness I decided to see if I could do any better. And lo and behold the first experiment was fantastic. By using a liquid preservative (in Denmark it’s a sodium benzoate called Atamon) the sauce will keep for over a month after the jar is opened. The strength of the chilli sauce obviously depends on the type of chillis used. I find Thai birds eye chillis are my preferred type, roughly a 7 on the Sphincter Scale. Habaneras are only for ass-assinating people.

Smaug’s Revenge Chilli Sauce

100g chillis (rinsed in cold water)
1 small tin of tomato purée
Vegetable oil (anything neutral – olive oil isn’t good as it goes cloudy in the fridge)
Salt, pepper & sugar
2 or so cloves of garlic
sodium benzoate (optional)

So you peel your garlic, top the chillis and wop them into a food processor together with the tomato purée, preservative, a pinch of sugar, salt and pepper and about 50 ml of the oil. Blitz and taste. Add more seasoning if required. If you want a more loose sauce add more oil. Pour/scoop into sterilized jars and keep in the fridge.