Unthinkable Wings

As usual in Lent, we are doing meat-free (and mostly fish free) meals (always on the look out for good vegetarian weekday teas, incidentally). The way I cook, that means lots of pulses, and as the Asian brands are generally cheaper*, the Ocado algorithm appears to have decided that ALL I want to cook is Indian food, so it kept trying to get me to buy chapatti flour and jaggery... mind you, I might try chapattis some time.

* I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with a kilo of gram flour, but it was cheaper (in absolute terms, not just by the gram!) than 200g of Waitrose chickpea flour, so I guess I'll think of something.

I am attempting to refine a really good slow-cooker chile recipe. I quite like Jamie Oliver's, but I have had trouble getting the right chillis (hurrah for forthcoming trip to the States; I will definitely bring some stuff back). I have cooked Heston Blumenthal's chilli twice, and concluded that it made a wonderful spicy goulash, but was not really chilli, but that some of his ideas were worth stealing. So I'm going to keep a note of what I do this time...

Make some fairly strong coffee. Take 200ml of it, and put three dried chillies in it to soak. Drink the rest of the coffee. You could just make 150ml of coffee, but that's no fun.

Take two 400g cans of tinned tomatoes. Lidl's are the best I've come across. Put them into a saucepan, and reduce them down gently, stirring occasionally. You're aiming to reduce by about a third.

Meanwhile, chop a medium onion to a medium thickness. Fry in a little oil until the onion begins to soften.

Add to the pan:
2 pieces star anise (this is a Heston trick: he says it makes meat taste 'meatier', and he seems to be right)
2 tsp oregano
1 tsp cumin (I'd have used 2, but we turned out to be nearly out)
1 tsp ground coriander seeds
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 small fresh chopped chilli
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped.
the dried chillies, sliced

Leave for about a minute, then put in the slow cooker, with a splash of the chilli infused coffee (I'd chuck the rest, it's not as nice - on its own - as chilli chocolate). Check your tomatoes - they might be sufficiently reduced by now.

Add a little more oil to the frying pan, and briefly brown
400g shin. The key word is 'briefly', so the heat should be high. Shin needs stewing to be good, so you don't want to cook it. Actually you could probably skip this step, but I don't see the point of cooking meat without at least some Maillard reactions.

Add to slow cooker. Deglaze the pan with 100ml red wine. Add that to the slow cooker. Add 200ml chicken stock. (Which was the home-made stock I had handy). Stir.

Cook on low for at least five hours.

At some stage during this time, roast and skin two peppers. (If you're going to be out all day, you CAN skip the roasting and skinning stage, but it really does make the finished result a lot nicer).

... I will come back to this entry later, and finish it off.

ETA: stage two, about one hour before you want to eat is ideal.

Chop your roasted peppers. Drain two 300g cans of beans - I like to use one of canillini, and one black-eyed beans. You could use kidney beans instead of the black eyed beans, or two tins of kidney, if you prefer, but I'm not mad on kidney beans on their own. Taste, and adjust the seasoning to taste. If your chillis turned out to be unexpectedly wimpy, then chop up another and throw it in. Hot sauce, e.g. Tabasco (I like the chipotle variety, which you can sometimes find in UK supermarkets) is also useful and gives you more precise control.

Eat, with rice, corn bread, or - and I know this is probably wrong - cheese grits.

Reflections: I think 1 tsp cumin is too little. The coffee is a good addition to the sauce, but it needs to be properly strong.

So: later this week, I am attempting to make a friend from Louisiana's red beans and rice recipe. Said recipe calls for "a regular sized bag of dried red kidney beans."

Any thoughts on how big a regular sized bag of beans is? I'd guess 1lb, but who knows...?

I have a feeling that it probably shouldn't take just under an hour to walk into town, say evening prayer, and walk back again, but it always seems to. It's quite easy to loose track of time when sitting being quiet by candlelight, at any rate.

It's been a curiously mixed sort of day; I would have got more done had I been able to drag myself out of bed sooner. I have tried on a number of dresses and bought none of them (largely, I suspect, because I am still in love with the Hobbs one). I did buy a wool v-neck sweater, which is delightfully warm yet light and compact and, I realised to my bemusement, bears a suspicious resemblance to the one in emily_shore's Mandelson icon. Oh well, I like it. I also painted a large papier mache giraffe and zebra, went to the library, and bought a book called 'Small Boat, Big Sea', by Peter Owen Jones, a diary of the first year in the job of a priest in charge of three Cambridgeshire parishes (he had some connection with the Che Guevera! Jesus poster; apparently the slogan was originally intended to be 'public enemy number one: discover the story this Easter', which I have to say would have been substantially better than what they went with, 'Meek. Mild. As If.', which is a bit adolescently shocking-for-the-sake-of-shocking, and only half true anyway.)

Now I am going to make toad in the hole, courtesy of the discussion on dolorous_ett's journal. I've learned how to make a lot of delicious things thanks to the flist - schreibergasse's Italian sausage and bean pot and dreamer_marie's chicory with ham and cheese stand out. lj can be marvellous!

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating (or eating again)
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at http://www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

panjianlien's addition: italics for things I have cooked/prepared and/or eaten in my home kitchen

( This way to an odd list of food )

I went round to my friend H's for dinner last night; H has just sent off the first draft of her thesis to her supervisor, and is thus taking advantage of the wait for comments to make bread, cook, etc. That morning, she had decided to try yoghurt, except it curdled. Nothing daunted - or rather, somewhat averse to pour several litres of spoiled milk down the sink without a fight - she resorted to Google, and found an exciting page on making your own cheese. So after a trip to the local fabric shop to get something approximating to a cheese cloth, and a bit of further cooking, she was able to present me with a nameless curd cheese (in German terms, very close to Quark), and a ricotta which she'd made with the whey. Needless to say, I was very impressed, and while part of me wonders about the sanity of home cheesemaking and had to be refrained from cracking Archers jokes, I am tempted to give the marscapone a go.