What can I give him? Christmas biscuits!

Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a healthy contingent of miserly old scrotes banging on about how it's all too commercialised these days and the true meaning of Christmas has long been lost in a big pile of presents, wrapping and sellotape.

I've had some sympathy with this view since I ceased to be a wide-eyed, innocent infant eagerly opening his Rebel Transporter on Christmas morn. But of all the phenomena that are an affront to what the season should be, presents really aren't top of the list.

I mean, tinsel. What the festive fuck is that all about? At least the star on top of the tree (a custom that itself only goes back to the Victorian era) has some sort of significance. Nobody has ever explained to me what bloody tinsel is supposed to represent. And then there's the Coca-Colary bastardisation of Saint Nikolaos of Myra. And that fucking Darkness song about the bell ends. And The Snowman.

So gift-giving, which was always very much a part of the nativity story, is one of the more authentic traditions, even if the legend has expanded over the years from the original trio of gold, frankincense and myrrh to include drum solos and crutches.

The curry of my youth - Lamb Tikka Rogan

Back in the 80s, the longest shadow hanging over the world was the hole in the Ozone layer. Then it was Third World Debt, then the Banking Crisis.

Now it's Shit Takeaways.

I used to be staunchly of the opinion that any curry cooked at home would never be quite as good as the equivalent dish from your local Tandoori restaurant. They had the specialist equipment; The spices you can't buy anywhere without being in the know; The proper Tandoor oven.

Now I'm not so sure - while there are some perfectly good places plying their trade in the 21st century marketplaces of Just Eat and HungryHouse, there are also some right munters, pigstrotters and tugboats out there. (If you accept that these terms can apply as equally to shit takeaways as they might to someone picked up in a shit nightclub before picking up a shit takeaway!)

MasterChef - give us time, give us beer!

I'm always impressed with the quality of the contestants on MasterChef, and in this latest series the standard seems particularly high. Indeed it's high enough to scare me into not applying for the show myself!

(Particularly the ballsy Lancastrian lass who is my tip to beat the moustachioed twatster in the final!)

What I'm less impressed by is how formulaic the programme has become, with contestants slave to the straitjacket of rigid format as they wield their spatulas of conformity. (And, if anybody asks, I'll probably use that rather florid excuse for not entering rather than admitting my shitting fear!)

Too busy drinking beer to go on MasterChef

My biggest gripes can be summed up thusly. Firstly, the samesome timescales:

Pretty much every challenge involves having an hour (or, quite often, an hour and 15 minutes) to cook something, which rules out any slow-cooked dishes and indeed discriminates against chefs whose speciality happens to be slow-cooking.

(Yes, I'd probably include myself in that category.)

My other complaint, which may well be a by-product of the first, is that there is nowhere near enough cooking with beer on the show.

And we could all use some additional beer, right?!?

When life gives you sausages...

'When life gives you lemons, make lemonade', goes the ancient proverb (which isn't actually all that ancient).

But what if you've just conducted a mammothian sausage taste test and your lemonless life has actually given you a fridge full of sausages?

You make a delicious sausage casserole, that's what. Here's the recipe. It's piss-easy.

The Ultimate Roast Chicken Sandwich

People don't seem to have roast chicken as much as they did when I was a child.

I've no idea why. It's just one of those things that has changed over time. Back in the 1980s people would always be roasting chickens like there was no tomorrow.

Yep, that's a roast chicken alright

'Hey Ben, why don't you come over for dinner, my mum's doing roast chicken then we'll play on the Commodore 64.'

'I'm just going to finish driving my Ford Capri around whilst listening to Saxon, then I'm going to cook a roast chicken'

'That's right, kids, it's roast chicken again. Should be ready after Metal Mickey. Have a can of Quatro in the mean time.'

...and so on.

(Your memories may vary slightly, obviously.)

The ultimate Stroganoff

I was saying the other day, following the trip to Moscow, that I can cook a tastier Beef Stroganoff than the rather bland version I found in Russia itself.

Inexcusably boastful, I'm sure, so I wanted to back that up with something concrete. Something on a plate. Something you can actually fucking well eat!

Stroganoff

Now, it's not a dish I've cooked all that often, and my recipe has probably been slightly different each time. But now I've sampled it in Moscow, it's clearly was high time I came up with my definitive 'Strog'.

The influences are myriad, drawing upon research into very old and traditional Russian recipes for the dish, but I've added a wider Eastern European angle through the inclusion of chicken livers.

There's even a hint of the good old curry house about it, as I looked for ways to include tomatoes, which are apparently one of the traditional components, along with the wine and cream.

And so, this is what I've come up with. Enjoy.

Shrove Tuesday isn't as Shriven as it used to be

My ‘giving up chocolate for Lent’ plan proved spectacularly unsuccessful, lasting as it did a mere three days. (Although on the 'being able to eat chocolate again' scale, it's actually been a roaring success, obviously!)

It wasn’t my fault, mind, it was the beer.

Ilkley ‘The Mayan’, specifically, at the Cask in Pimlico. It’s a chocolate chipotle stout, and certainly the best beer I’ve had this year. (And I've drunk some good beer this year).

Chocolate beers can be a bit hit'n'miss, and I’ve never drunk a chilli beer that I could honestly say I really enjoyed, but Ilkley – one of my favourite breweries at the moment –  manage to get the combination just right.

It wasn't that surprising given that, in just a few years, the Yorkshire brewery has shown itself to be remarkably adept at experimental beers - like their Crafty Jane cranberry milk stout - as well as doing a fine line in big, hoppy pale ales, which, to my mind, should be any credible brewer's meat and drink

At 5.3% the Mayan had enough stouty weight behind it not to be watery, but was still staunchly in ‘quaffable’ territory. The cocoa on the nose was like an upmarket chocolate milkshake, while the heat only comes through at the finish and leaves a nice lingering burn.

It's worth breaking your Lenten fast for!

Advent Adjuncts and Minimalist Meals

It's one of the world's great culinary ironies that spices harvested in the hottest countries find their starring role during Winter months on the opposite side of the world. Indeed, it wouldn't feel like Christmas in England without the products of Sri-Lankan and Madagascan Summers.

I have a slightly dichotomic view of cinnamon, nutmeg and their spicy, Wintery bedfellows - I suppose I quite like the novelty value afforded in small doses but probably wouldn't want them in my food all year round.

As an example, this time last year I cooked a festive beef stew (essentially 'mulled beef'), which was interesting and very seasonal, but I haven't been tempted to make it since.

And at this time of year a hot steaming glass of mulled wine full of cloves and fruit is just the ticket, but by January I suspect I shall probably not want any more. (Indeed a couple of Januarys ago I concocted mulled white wine as an alternative).

The official meal of Euro 2012?

The thing about Euro 2012 - and indeed many other major sporting events - is that you get used to having at least one match to watch every day.

Today is the first day with no game since the tournament started, and I feel at a bit of a loss, even though it's only one day without football and the Quarter-Finals begin tomorrow.

Blog-o-nese

Spaghetti Bolognese is boring.

It's the most boring type of pasta, coupled with the most boring type of pasta sauce. 

Boring, boring, boring. Fuck off.

Actually, don't. Because I've been having a lot of thoughts on this subject lately. Sort of.

Why the Internet is Bad and Seafood Risotto is Good

I’ve been playing a stupid-but-addictive Facebook game lately – Solitaire Blitz, which is basically a form of Patience, against the clock, with a bizarre nautical theme.

I logged on at the weekend, hoping to beat my highscore and accrue some more treasure… Oh dear - my score, my treasure, indeed my entire Solitaire Blitz history, had been erased!

Everything was reset to zero, as if I’d never played the game before. Everything.

Damn you, PopCap, if that is your real name!

And it’s not like this is the first time something of this shitty nature has happened on Facebook either - around Christmas time I decided I wanted to play Super Snowman, surely the most amusing drag’n’drop Flash application ever devised.

I’d played it the previous Christmas and the Christmas before that. It was cool.

But...

Pennywise, Poundcake

‘Double Dip!’, ‘Credit Crunch!’, ‘Trough-snout Bankers!’ Whichever buzzwords you choose to bandy around, it can’t be denied that tough times are here to last – for most of us at least.

This week Nik Kershaw is auctioning both his lungs, while the next sequel to ‘Dude, where’s my car’ doesn’t have the budget to feature a car.

The French government has rocked the state-owned cutlery-manufacture business by ruling that all new forks will be made with only two prongs, and the Westboro Baptist Church is having to offer gay marriage ceremonies just to pay the bills!

So, to help people through these penurious times I’ve put together a list of five simple ways to save the pennies but still eat and drink like royalty.

You know the old saying – Breakfast like a King, Lunch like a King, and dine like a King!

Porty Pig

Continuing with the January shopping theme from the other day, I recently found, in Tesco, a sugar-, dairy- and Lord-knows-what-else-free Advent Calendar had been reduced from a couple of quid to a quid to 49p.

And now to just 6p. 

Yep. Sixpence. 

That's 24 tiny shaped chocolates at just a farthing apiece! I think.

At that price, I just had to buy it, even knowing it would probably be awful, and we’d only eat one or two of the things before throwing it away.

And I wasn’t disappointed, in that I was, obviously, if that makes sense. The chocolates were 'bland, yet strange', as many vital-ingredient-free foods often are, and duly ended up in the bin. 

Even if it were still the season of Advent and this was the only chocolate I was eating, I'd probably pass. But it was worth it just for the sense of snouting out an irrepressible bargain!

Another bargain, at just 65 pence (three and six in the old money or something, probably) was a pound of pigs liver, which set the wheels turning in my mind for a new dish – four different bits of pig, slow cooked in a port sauce, accompanied with Stilton mash.

Now, people don’t eat a whole lot of pigs liver in these offal-sceptic times, which is probably why it's so inexpensive, and I’d be the first to admit I wouldn’t want it every day, but it’s probably quite good for you and definitely has it’s place in dishes like this.

While the liver is dirt cheap, you’ll need to buy expensive sausages with a high meat content so they don’t fall apart or absorb liquid and become squidgy, and it almost always pays to buy decent, thick bacon as you probably know already.

I thoroughly recommend Black Farmer sausages, though anything with 90%+ meat content is good for this recipe.

This is a dish you can enjoy at your leisure on a long Winter evening. And afterwards you can choose between Port and Stilton or a 'free from' Advent Calendar chocolate...

Porty Pig with Stilton Mash

Four kinds of pig, Port and Stilton...

Ingredients - makes at least four big portions.

Pigs liver, about half a pound, cleaned, trimmed and sliced into bite site pieces

Lean minced pork, about half a pound

Smoked Back Bacon, 6-8 thick rashers, coarsely chopped

Pork sausages (90%+ meat), 6-8, cut into bite size chunks

Onion, two large or three medium, coarsely chopped

Tomatoes, 3-4, cut into eighths (or twelfths if very large)

Garlic, a few cloves, chopped

Cumin

Sage

Black pepper

Celery Salt

Plain flour or Corn flour to thicken

Worcestershire Sauce

Port

For the mash:

White Potatoes, cooked and mashed.

Butter

Blue Stilton
  

Method: 

Mix some plain flour with the cumin, celery salt, sage, black pepper and cumin (aiming for a 50-50 ratio of flour and spice) and dust your liver pieces. 

In a big, lidded, pan begin frying your bits of sausage in a little oil on a high heat, adding the garlic and onions after a few minutes. As the sausage starts to brown, add the liver and bacon, ensuring everything is kept moving and is evenly cooked. 

Finally add the minced pork, a good dash of Worcestershire sauce and whatever spice/flour mix you have left. 

Cook until all the meat has seen some heat and is nicely grey-brown, then chuck in the tomatoes and your first dash of port. 

Another few minutes at an high temperature, and you'll be able to turn the heat down, add a little more port and put the lid on. Let it simmer and bubble for a good hour or two, stiring occasionally with a big wooden spoon. 

While the piggy goodness is cooking away, absorbing the richness of the liver and port, you can prepare your mash as you see fit, adding butter and stilton to taste. 

For added portiness, add a final dash to the meat shortly before serving, and if the sauce is too liquidy, a little flour to thicken won't do any harm.

Enjoy!

Wine Whine

We take it for granted that it’s pretty easy to buy decent wine these days – certainly compared to the experiences of previous generations.

Armed with a little knowledge and a little money, we can walk into a supermarket or off-license, make relatively well informed decisions and take advantage of the considerable choice available.

Fruity, new-world Merlot in the £6-8 range? You got it. Crisp, dry Chablis to go with that smoked salmon you’re serving as a starter tomorrow? On the bottom shelf – take your pick from these.

What’s probably harder for us these days than it would have been 30 or 40 years ago is buying bad wine. Cheap wine. Wine that your might, perhaps, not want to drink.

‘B-but you are a chap of exceptional taste and discernment’, I can hear the voices saying, ‘Why ever would you want to buy bad wine?’

Fairly obviously, for cooking with. I'll explain why. And buying good bad wine, or rather, buying the right bad wine is trickier than you might think.

Of course, you can use good wine to cook, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with doing so. If you’ve got a big Claret or Burgundy to drink with a joint of beef, I’d fully expect you to add a generous splash to the meat juices to make your gravy.

But if you’re cooking beef for eight hungry people and the quantity of wine required to make the gravy starts to exceed half a bottle or so, you have to question whether you want to waste expensive wine in the kitchen when you could be drinking it at the table.

I use wine in cooking a lot. Pasta sauces, risotto, casseroles, pot roasts. And after a few years of experimenting I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just foolhardy to use anything other than the cheapest suitable plonk you can get your hands on. Suitable being the operative word, mind.

In France, they get this. In the Hypermarkets there are little sections for wines that have the right characteristics for cooking but which you wouldn't really want to drink. They often come in square, ribbed plastic bottles. But in England it's a challenge, almost as if people don't want to admit that cheap wine has a use other than as sustenance for tramps.

It's all good

Taste the difference?

I’m the first person to defend wine ‘snobs’ from lazy philistine criticism, but outside the glass, the rules are different and the quality of wine becomes singularly unimportant.

Hell, I’m the kind of person that fusses about the quality of butter or olive oil I use, but the cooking pot is a mighty Dionysian leveller and will barely respect a Château Lafite Rothschild better than a Tesco’s own-brand Rioja.

There are some who say you shouldn't cook with a wine you wouldn't be happy to drink. And they can fuck right off.  Do they really think they can tell the difference when it's mingling on the stove with garlic, onions and Worcestershire sauce?

I challenge the wine buffs to prove me wrong on this one: Once the wine is absorbed into a sauce, you’ll probably be able to tell if it’s red or white and possibly, just possibly, guess at a grape variety, depending on sweetness, fruitiness, peppery-ness and so on.

But that’s it.

I don’t believe even the most knowledgeable expert would be reliably capable of identifying the region or vintage once the wine is in my pancetta risotto or chicken chasseur – and even I'm wrong, theirs are not the palettes for which I’m cooking on a regular basis.

So, having established that it’s not really worth wasting your drinking wine or paying over the odds for something to cook with, we face the conundrum in the supermarket – that dirt-cheap cooking wine to serve your purpose is actually pretty hard to find, at least at a price significantly lower than wine which is better. (Fairly obviously if a bad wine is the same price as a reasonable wine, you buy the reasonable wine because it gives you additional options viz what to with it!)

The problem is that it’s not just as simple ‘buy any cheap wine’ because most of the cheap ‘wines’ you’ll find on the shelves are aimed not at savvy chefs but at cheap drinkers, and are sweet, weak and sparkling, which makes them unsuitable for most culinary purposes, except possibly some kind of syllabub.

And yet, there are demonstrably acceptable cooking wines available at very low prices (e.g. £2.99 or less) – they just don’t seem to be widely promoted. ‘Acceptable’ will usually mean either a cheap Chardonnay, which is fine for your cheesy and fishy dishes where the acidity will temper the oils, and rough Spanish red which will do for almost everything else.

  

Be prepared to search high and low for them though. And unless you’re doing the chicken chasseur thing - which can easily require a whole bottle - you’ll probably want to make sure any cooking wine you buy is screw-top rather than corked, which limits the choices further.

(Oh, and if you ever plan to explore the world of wine enemas, you'll want the dry white. Don't ask me how I know, just trust me on this one!)

If you’ve been using drinking-quality wines for cooking, just try my advice for yourself, and if you don’t like it, you can go back to using champagne for blanching cauliflower, or whatever it is you do.

With the money you save, you’ll be able to buy better wine for actually drinking, or invest in other better quality for cooking in areas where you will notice the difference (like buying those long, pointy red peppers rather than the stubby ones),

Or you could even buy me a little present. Like a cheap Spanish red...

Moussakettes

‘Tis strange how some recipes find themselves being invented.

Take our national dish, Chicken Tikka Masala for example – apparently devised on the spot after a customer asked where the sauce was for his (dry) Tandoori chicken.

Consider also the enormous impact the Earl of Sandwich has had, just by asking for some meat in between slices of bread when he didn’t have time to eat a full lunch.

And let’s not forget Sugar Puffs, which appeared completely by accident in 1802 when a colony of mad bees swarmed into a field and started trying to impregnate grains of wheat.

Actually one of those isn’t true. But this story is. Read on, Macduff:

If you only learn how to cook one dish, learn this!

You’ll have noticed, or possibly not, that I recently customised the design of Ben Viveur to include a background image that looks like a never-ending portion of chilli.

Mmm, infinite chilli. Feel free to salivate for there are few mental images more alluring than this.

A good chilli is, it has to be said, one of my favouritestever foods. So long as the guiding principles are right, it's a hugely flexible dish, and if you only teach yourself how to cook one thing, chilli would be a pretty good choice because a few variations can turn it into something that's more like a curry or a Bolognaise sauce or a cottage pie filling.

Not all chilli is good though. Rubbishcunt chilli makes me shudder, and there are so many ways in which chilli can be substandard – too bland, too mindlessly hot, too full of the wrong things - it’s a minefield out there, so it is.

 

Not that you'll ever find anything approaching consensus on what a chilli should contain, mind. A heated debate has been raging for a great many years - for some, kidney beans are a defining feature, but to some purists in certain parts of the US, beans of any kind are strictly verboten. Personally I like them, but they’re not mandatory.

In fact, almost no one ingredient is essential in my chili recipe, though if you left out too many of them, it might cease to resemble a chili.

There are, however, a few things that I’ve encountered in some unfortunate chillis over the years, which I really don’t think ever have a place –  prawns, peas, carrot, quorn… and a chilli should never EVER contain sweetcorn in my view. Not even a veggie one.

The only thing a chilli really definitely ought to contain is, I guess, some actual chillis, although I’ve tried some that seemed notably bereft!

Generally I’ll cook my chilli using either minced beef or chopped stewing steak, but I’ve made chicken chilli and an all-veggie version (with extra mushrooms, chopped celery and a variety of beans) too.

It’s satisfying and nourishing, and if you use extra-lean meat and low fat sour cream, it can be an extremely healthy dish.

This recipe is the classic – you can figure out your own variations – and it’ll keep well for a couple of days, improving over time.

My chilli, what I done made

I cooked one the other night. We ate with garlic bread balls, and finished it the following evening with rice. I'd have happily tucked into it a third night running if it weren't all polished off. Chilli be good.

Chilli

Ingredients

Minced beef, extra lean ( ¼ to ½ half a pound or so per serving)

Onion, finely chopped (roughly 1 small onion per serving)

Fresh chillies, finely chopped (either green or red, to taste)

Red peppers, finely chopped the long sweet twisty ones are best

Shitake mushrooms, finely chopped

Kidney beans, (¼ to ½ a tin per serving, depending on how beany you like your chilli). Get a tin that doesn’t have extra sugar or salt or anything else added to it, obviously.

Tomatoes, finely chopped, lots

Garlic, finely chopped, lots

Cumin, lots

Paprika

Black pepper

Cayenne pepper

Celery salt

Ground Ginger, a little

Chives

Fresh lime juice

Dark chocolate, a little

Dark (but not heavy) beer – dark lager is best, but a mild or porter will do

Worcestershire sauce

Olive oil

Butter

Sour cream

Method

Set a big sautee pan upon an high heat. The pan will need to have a lid for use later on.

Fry the chopped onion, chilli and garlic in a small amount of oil for a few minutes, then add a knob of butter and throw in your mushrooms.

Now put your beef in there, along with a big splash of Worcestershire sauce and generous quantities of cumin, black pepper, cayenne, and celery salt and a little ginger, and cook until almost browned, adding the peppers along the way.

Chuck in your kidney beans and a few squares of dark chocolate. Don’t drain the beans – the juices will enrich the sauce, as will the chocolate.

When the meat is brown, add the old tomatoes and cook for a few more minutes on maximum heat, then pour in a little beer for liquidity, whack the lid on the pan and turn the temperature right down.

Allow to simmer for an hour, stirring periodically if it makes you feel better about yourself. Midway through, chuck in some chives and the juice of a lime or two.

You might want to taste the sauce and see if it needs any more cumin or cayenne or whatever – just make sure it’s to your taste.

The longer you cook it on a low heat, the better it will get. If it looks dry, feed it with some beer.  

You can transfer it to a casserole and continue cooking it in an oven if you prefer - I have no strong argument for doing this, unless you need your hob for other purposes.

Serve it when you want to eat! And swirl some sour cream on top before so doing.

Chilli goes well with bread, garlic bread, green salad leaves, rice, baked potatoes, burgers, well pretty much anything really.

To drink? Dry, fruity whites or dry, fruity beers would seem to be the order of the day.

Cordon Bleug

Today's Menu

 

To Start

Pickled Cloves (v)

Whole cloves, steeped in Spirit vinegar, just the way you like 'em.


Double Foie Gras

What could be more delicious than the liver of a force-fed goose? The liver of a goose that's been force-fed with Foie Gras, that's what!


Baked Toast (v)

Slices of finest toast, with figs, hand-baked until dawn. Tastier than watching a film.

Main Courses

Braised Tusk

A whole Walrus tusk, slow cooked in poo wine and garnished mit curds.

Served with your choice of fries, baked potato or Arctic Roll.


Pork Wombs in Brine

Three succulent, tender young pork wombs, stuffed with bletted quince and hand-cured in a spicy brine.

Comes with a big hunk of stale granary bread - perfect for mopping up the briney amniotic juices!


Arse Pie (v)

Our house speciality - a bigger slice than you can comfortably manage, with a salad of deadly vines.


Mashed potato with rice all mashed up together (v)

Served with chips, pasta and chips.

Dessertines

A lime (v)

Nothing more; nothing less.


Choco-nutty-toffee-coffee-fruity-mallow slice

With skipjack tuna chunks and cream.

For parties of one or more a discretionary charge of 12.5% will be added to your bill.

... And relax!

You see, the thing is that a lot of top chefs today are preoccupied with making their food unique rather than making it tasty.

If it can be radical and different and delicious than that's all well and good, but the loss of touch with ones diners is a cardinal sin that a select few can get away with purely because of their fame.

It's a similar pitfall faced by artists and musicians - where originality ceases to be useful in itself and exists purely for novelty value. Everyone can sit around talking about how worthy and unique Steve Reich's music is, without wanting to admit even to themselves that they'd rather be listening to Teh Quo.

How many people actually order Heston's famous Snail Porridge at the Fat Duck? And of those how many actually thought 'hmm, this is delicious; I'd like to eat it on a regular basis'?

I admit that I haven't tried it, and I'm in no hurry to do so, being no huge fan of either snails nor porridge, but I'd hazard that a more prominent reaction might be 'hmm, well, it was interesting... I'm glad I tried it... such a novel idea, isn't it?' - that sort of thing.

Maybe it's fantastic. I don't know. But it doesn't need to be, because the novelty value and fame element ensures a waiting list at the Duck, even in these austere times.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who I admire greatly, took several steps up the ladder of fame by cooking a human placenta and making it into paté. In some circles, this is what he's most famous for, and to some, all he will ever be, which is a great shame.

Celebrity chefs have, I've no doubt, spent most of their careers cooking fantastic dishes, and the creativity and flair for experimentation should be encouraged. (Heston, I want the credit if you steal my pork wombs recipe, I know you read my blog!)

But when radical foods succeed solely because of the reputation of their creator, and the repute itself feeds off controversy rather than quality, we're living in a dangerously hypocritical place.

If the snail porridge had been served up by some anonymous arthritic crone at the Bray parish church fete, the reaction would, surely, have been one of unanimous disgust and few would even have sampled its escargian oatiness.

Cooking shouldn't be conservative, and it shouldn't have boundaries and constraints. Last night, on a mad whim, I fried shards of apple in with my sausages. Never done it before like that. Yeah, I know, really radical.

But it tasted good, which is the important thing.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to start braising my walrus tusk and brining my pork wombs, because that's far more radical, and therefore will taste even gooder, obviously.

Or possibly not.