charlie's Recipes

Ingredients

My friend Adekemi gave me this recipe for Nigerian barbecued beef. It's particularly interesting because the marinade is dry, but even though this goes on the barbecue, the beef remains soft and tender. Traditionally you should use peanuts, but the first time I cooked it, I used almonds, and that seemed to work reasonably well.

A cup of raw peanuts (or almonds)
Chilli powder
Smokey Paprika (La Chinata is good)
Salt
Ground ginger
Garlic Powder
Onion Seeds
Some nice beef, cut into kebab chunks
Some other items for kebabs: peppers, tomatoes, onions, etc.

Method

Grind up the almonds and spices. Rub the meat in the spice mixture, leave for a few hours. Stick on skewers with the kebab veg and barbecue. Badda bing!

Ingredients

2 Pork fillets (these are the crazy tube of meat-type things that are just sliced off a pig's back)
Lots of garlic
Lots of ginger
Chillis (I like Scotch Bonnets for Chinese food, but they have a very distinctive flavour, which some might not like. Also, when I cook them, everyone starts coughing and has to leave the kitchen. This is because I live with a bunch of girls).
Spring Onions
Peppers (any colour you like, I like a mixture)
Raw Cashew Nut Kernels
Three Egg Whites
Cornflour
Soy Sauce
Shaoshing Rice Wine (or dry sherry if not available)
Sesame Oil
Cheap Oil
Chicken Stock
Tomato Puree

Method

Chop the fillet, removing any huge chunks of fat, but don't worry about making it all lean, as it's basically impossible. In a big bowl, put the egg whites (I use the retained yolks for Charlie's Fried Rice, in order to prevent too much waste). Throw in a tablespoon of cornflour and whisk up with a fork until you've got the lumps out. Add a couple of teaspoons of soy sauce and rice wine, then add the pork, and coat thoroughly. Leave to soak while you prepare the rest of the ingredients, and ingredients for side dishes, if you happen to live with Seffers, who always insists on side dishes.

Heat up a fair bit of oil to almost smoking point (the pork needs to be cooked in a lot of oil, in order to get the coating fluffy, in order to reduce the fattiness of the dish, once the pork is cooked I put it in a colander over a bowl so that the excess oil drips through, some people use kitchen towel, but I think that's pretty wasteful). Fry the coated pork in batches. You want to avoid stirring it all too vigorously at the beginning, until the surface has a chance to harden, otherwise, you'll end up with uncoated pork, and fried egg all over your wooden spoon. When nicely brown, remove and put in colander over bowl (to get rid of the fat). Once all the pork is done, throw away all the oil in the work, then look in the bowl underneath the pork, you need about a tablespoon of that stuff, trying to get as much of the pork juices as possible. Bear in mind that most of the pork juices are water based, so will foam up and not add to volume of oil once the liquid has evaporated off. What I do is pour the whole lot into the wok, heat until the liquid has evaporated, and then pour off the oil I don't need. In this oil, fry the garlic, ginger and chillis, you will probably find your housemates leave the kitchen now, and will retire to watch telly, all the while squawking "it burns, it burns". Ignore them, they were not made for greater things like you were. Once the garlic has lost some of its potency add the cashew nuts and the peppers. Fry until peppers have softened, and the cashew nuts have started to brown. Then add the pork, stir for a bit, and finally the sauce, which is the stock, soy, rice wine, tomato puree, sesame oil, and a bit of cornflour to make the sauce gloopier. Heat through for a bit, test the pork for rawness (if necessary, cook like this for as long as it takes). Serve. Badda Bing.

Ingredients

Chicken Breasts
A ready made haggis (making your own haggis is a nightmare, so for the purposes of this recipe use a ready-made one. McSween haggises have a good reputation, and are probably the most commonly available in good butchers)

For the sauce:
Olive oil
Leeks
A nice whisky, single malt if possible
Lots of double cream

Buttery, peppery mashed potatoes as a side dish.

Method

Heat an oven to 200C (400F).

Take the haggis out of all its wrapping, and chop into strips. Take the chicken breasts, put them on a chopping board, and bash them with a meat hammer until they are nice and flat. Sprinkle salt, pepper and olive oil on one side of the chicken breasts, then put strips of haggis in a line across the chicken breasts, and roll the chicken breasts up, so it's like a very long chicken sausage with haggis filling. Once you've created however many chicken haggis sausages that you think you need, stick them on a baking tray and in the oven until cooked (maybe half an hour or so).
While they're cooking, chop and fry the leeks, add the cream until you get a pourable sauce, and spice with a dram of the whisky.
Take the sausages out of the oven, and slice nicely in diagaonal pieces, serve with the sauce poured over them, accompanied by mashed potato. Badda bing.

Ingredients

1 Turkey
Duck fat
Chipolatas, loads
Very fatty streaky bacon, get the fattiest you can
Lots of red wine
Lots of shallots, peeled but not chopped
Lots of garlic, peeled but not chopped
Meat thermometer (not vital, but it will make your life a fair bit easier)

Method

As many of you may know, MANT and I are big fans of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and this recipe is partly his, as well as being partly derived from various folk Thanksgiving recipes on the internet. As Hugh says, the question when roasting a turkey is not "have I got too much fat on the turkey" but "have I got enough". The more fat you smear on, the better, basically. So step number one is to get clouts of duck fat on your hands and rub it all over the turkey, then put this on a wire rack. An important rule to note here is DON'T STUFF THE TURKEY. If you stuff it, you'll have to cook it for longer, and the meat will go too dry. If you cook it only until the meat is nicely done then the stuffing will be underdone and you might get food poisoning. Basically, it might sound counter-intuitive, but just don't bother with actually stuffing the turkey, cook the stuffing separately. This is better anyway, as it means that vegetarians can eat the stuffing (as long as there's no meat in the stuffing). Then chuck your whole shallots and garlic in an oven pan which will sit the turkey and wire rack on top of it. This way the turkey will not be swimming in the fat, but the shallots and garlic will be swimming in the fat that drips off the turkey. Heat the oven to a sizzling 210C. This is for a short "sizzle" to seal the skin. Once the oven is hot, put the turkey in for half an hour. Then turn the heat down to 170C and take it out to fiddle with it.

This can get a bit complicated. Basically you want to do the following things (and you'll need to do then with oven gloves as the turkey will be hot):
- Turn the turkey UPSIDE DOWN, so that the breasts are directly over the pan. This is so that the breast is kept moist by the bubbling wine in the pan (which you will soon put in) so that it doesn't dry out while the rest of the bird gets cooked (as breast takes less time to cook).
- Using a baster or a spoon, take as much of the fat that's now bubbling in the pan and drip it over the top of the turkey. This won't do anything for the moistness of the meat, but it helps to crisp up the skin, and crispy skin is nice.
- Cover the exposed side of the turkey with bacon.
- Drape chipolatas all around the base of the turkey, but above the fat-drip pan.
- Take out any remaining fat in the drip pan and keep separately in a bowl somewhere, the idea is to get as much wine as you can into the fat-drip pan now. You'll need to keep topping this up as time goes by, and if you can be bothered, basting the skin with more fat for crispening.
- Stick a meat thermometer deep into one of the legs, trying to get the probe into the furthest to reach bits, so that you'll know when the very core of the turkey is done.

Stick your creation in the oven for roughly 20 minutes per kilogram. I say roughly, as the eccentricities of your oven may require you to check it constantly as the time approaches. The meat thermometer should be about 170C whereever you stick it in the turkey when it's done. Another test is testing whether the juices run clear when the meat is pierced. All the gubbins beneath the turkey can now be used to make gravy, although you might want to remove as much of the floating fat as you can.

Ingredients

We eat a lot of meat (especially MANT) at our regular barbecues. As a result it's a bit anti-social for our veggie friends. This is an excellent recipe for veggie barbecue food which can be enjoyed by the veggie and the carnivore with meat exhaustion alike.
Peppers, stem taken out and seeded
Cashew Nuts (a few cupfuls)
Ginger
Garlic
Chillies
Charlie's Famous Tandoori Powder
Charlie's Famous Garam Masala
Ground cardamom seeds
Ground fennel
Salt
Pepper
French beans
Carrots, finely sliced
Tomatoes

Method

Stir fry the cashew nuts, ginger, garlic and chillies. Add spices once rawness cooked out. Stir fry for a bit longer, add the veg, keep stir frying until the carrots and french beans taste nice. Stuff the peppers with the mixture and take outside to barbecue. You want to cook the peppers on all sides, save the top so that the skin blisters off. Badda Bing.

Ingredients

Potatoes
Onions
Eggs
Flour
Lots of freshly ground pepper

Method

Grate the onions and potatoes. Beat the eggs with the flour and stir it all up, add the pepper. You don't need the grated potato and onion swimming in batter, just a very light coating. Heat some oil to medium in a frying pan, then tablespoon out the mixture into the oil and cook it for however it takes to get golden on one side, then turn it over and do the other side. Repeat for as many hash browns as you want. Warning! It's important not to heat the oil to high. All this will mean is that the hash browns get burnt on the outside, and you'll set off the smoke alarm in your house.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons raw cashews
3 large tomatoes, chopped
1 coconut (you'll actually only need half the flesh, so this recipe will leave you with extra coconut flesh, if you can't be bothered with this, just get a lump of creamed coconut and use about 100g of it)
1 teaspoon salt
4 green chillies
1/2 teaspoon Charlie's Famous Garam Masala
4 tablespoons coriander leaves
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
1 teaspoon chana dal
10 curry leaves
3 carrots, peeled and julienned
1 cauliflower, cut into small florets
1/4 cabbage finely chopped
1 handful french beans, topped and tailed
2 tablespoons yoghurt

Method

Cover the cashews in hot water and leave to soak for an hour. Get your coconut, and a small robust knife that you can live with getting broken (or else use a hammer and nail, that might even be easier, but I don't have either of those), tear off the hairy bits aggressively until your coconut doesn't have a beard any more. Investigate both ends of the coconut, one end should have three spots. You should be able to stick a knife or a skewer in each of these spots. Do so, going as deep as you can. Try to open up the holes as much as you can with a skewer, poking the skewer all the way through. Turn the coconut upside down over a bowl. Clear liquid should come out. Shake the coconut until you think it's mostly all out. If it's not happening, then just move on to the next stage, but be aware that there'll be coconut water in the coconut when you crack it. It doesn't matter if lots of coconut hair gets in the coconut water, you can strain it a couple of times, and the bits that still get through won't kill you. Now, you'll need to do the next bit in a basin. You want to insert a small knife into one of the holes as far as you can, and then turn the knife to try to crack the nut. You'll probably need to try each of the holes. If you have a hammer and a nail, you can just crack the coconut any old how. Once you've cracked it, try to get large chunks of the flesh off. You should find that large chunks will come off if you really encourage it with a knife. You don't want lots of small bits. Anyway, use your initiative. You should end up with three or four large chunks of coconut flesh and lots of random small bits. Take the large chunks, and as best you can, using a peeler, peel off the brown skin. Don't bother peeling off the skin of the small bits, it doesn't matter if some skin goes in.

Right, well done, you have some peeled coconut flesh, and some strained coconut water. Put all the water and maybe half the coconut flesh into a blender, or even better, a liquidiser. Add the tomatoes, salt, chillies, garam masala. Blend like you've never blended before. You'll probably need to do this for absolutely ages, as you really want the coconut to be as finely pulped as possible. Strain the cashews then add them to the blender, blend further (this thickens the mixture significantly, so do this after you've pulped the coconut, otherwise the coconut won't pulp sufficiently). Lastly, throw in the coriander, but then only pulp for a few seconds, as you don't want the coriander all that broken up.

Heat some oil in a large pan (large enough to stir fry all the veg), add the channa dall and the mustard seeds. When the mustard seeds start to pop and the dall turns red, add all the veg and the curry leaves, stir fry until it starts sticking to the bottom of the pan, then add two cups of water to deglaze. Stir around and bring to the boil. Then add the paste from the blender. Simmer gently for a minute or two (long enough to take the rawness out, but to keep the veg very crunchy). Add the yoghurt, stir and serve immediately. Badda bing.

Ingredients

1 Pork Fillet, sliced
Juice of 1 lemon
2 Heaped teaspoons coriander seeds, roasted and ground (or else just bashed up in kitchen towel with a hammer if you haven't got a grinder)
A whole load of garlic, sliced
olive oil
Half pint white wine (or cider, if you're Seffers)

Method

You need to watch out for the pork in this recipe. The key is to cook the pork quite quickly, but leave it a bit undercooked when you put it aside, then it will cook in the marinade when you boil everything up.

Mix all ingredients together and marinade overnight, or however long you have.

In a pan, heat up some more olive oil, then remove pieces of pork from marinade with slotted spoon, and quickly fry, when browned, move to a separate plate, and start more pork cooking. When it's all done, throw the pork back in the pan, and add the marinade back, boil up, and serve when pork is cooked nicely.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons coriander seeds
1 tablespoon cummin seeds
2 teaspoons mustard seeds
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 teaspoon fenugreek seeds
1 teaspoon onion seeds

Method

Dry fry seeds until they start popping. Grind. Badda bing.

Ingredients

Onions
Breadcrumbs (whizz up some cheap, stale bread in a smoothie maker)
Cooking apples
Pecans, shelled
Maple Syrup
Cinnamon
Pepper
Salt
Cider

Method

Chop and fry the onions in some olive oil. Peel, core and chop the apples and add to the pan, cook until apples have softened, add the other ingredients except for the breadcrumbs. Whizz it all down roughly in a blender. Mix in enough breadcrumbs to make a gloopy stuffing, then you can bake with the meat, or just microwave to get hot before serving.

Ingredients

1 Large Bottle Heinz Ketchup (squeezy or glass, it's not important)
1 Bottle Encona Chilli Sauce (if, for some reason you prefer sweeter or milder chilli sauces, such as Sharwoods or Blue Dragon, then you can use it, but you probably need to use less sugar if you do)
1 Bulb Garlic, peeled and mulched, pureed or chopped (note this is a bulb, not a clove, you need at least ten cloves, ideally more)
2 Heaped Tablespoon Brown Sugar (dark molasses sugar is best)
1 teaspoon white wine or rice vinegar
Hickory Salt, or Garlic salt
1 Teaspoon La Chinata Smoked Paprika (they sell it in Sainsbury's, but I'm not sure where else, it comes in a little tin)

Method

Heat a little oil, fry garlic for about ten seconds, add Smoked Paprika and cook, stirring constantly, because otherwise it will stick to the pan and burn, then add all the rest of the ingredients, bring to boil, turn heat down and simmer for fifteen minutes. Badda Bing

Ingredients

2 Aubergines
Ginger
Garlic
Chillies
Charlie's Famous Garam Masala
Salt

Method

Heat the oven up to "scorching". Stick the unprepared aubergines into it, and leave until they go wrinkly. Then take them out and you should be able to just pull the skin off, and the vegetable inside should be very soft, like a banana. Fry up some garlic, ginger and chillies, and add the garam masala. Cook the rawness out of the garam masala, then throw in the aubergine, and mash up into a mush, add some salt, and serve. Badda bing!

Ingredients

Baking Potatoes, peeled and diced
Savoy cabbage
Butter
Roughly ground black pepper
Maldon Sea Salt

Method

Boil and mash potatoes with some of the butter. Finely chop cabbage, boil this very lightly and mix in with the mash. Add pepper and salt. Make a well in each serving of the mash and put in more butter. If you want, you can make a shamrock shape in the mash with your finger like with Guinness.

Ingredients

A pound of: either beef mince (don't need to bother about lean or cheap, as most of the fat can be poured away.) or else some nice steak put through the blender (only do this if you're really trying to impress someone though, the real point of chilli is that it costs almost zero pounds to make, tastes great, and can feed an army, so you're slightly missing the point if you puree steak).
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 large onions, finely chopped
A couple of bulbs of garlic, pulped or finely chopped
However many chillis you can handle, finely chopped
2 heaped teaspoons cummin seeds, ground
2 heaped teaspoons peppercorns, ground
1 stick cinnamon, ground
5 cloves, ground
2 teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon paprika (smoky paprika if you can get it)
1 tablespoon oregano (fresh or dried)
Peppers (1 red, 1 green, 1 yellow), finely diced
800g cheap tinned tomatoes
800g tinned kidney beans

Method

Heat wok, don't bother adding oil. Chuck in the mince and vigorously stir until all the meat has gone a ropey grey colour, and doesn't smell very nice. Once it's cooking like this for a bit, the fat in the mince should melt, and you should have a fair amount of liquid, using a plate to hold the mince in the pan, pour as much as you can of the unpleasant mince fat away.
So, we have taken the dirty animal fat away, but we need to fry the onions etc in something nice, so keep the meat in the pan, and throw in two tablespoons of olive oil, heat and add the onions and garlic, stir fry until softened up, then add the herbs, spices and salt, carry on stir frying until you think you've got the raw taste out of the paprika and cummin. Then add the tomatoes, peppers and kidney beans (including the water from the tins of the kidney beans). It should now be quite sloppy. Turn the heat down to a simmer, and leave for at least an hour, ideally longer. It just gets better the longer you leave it, so it's up to you.

Ingredients

Garlic
Ginger
Chillies
Cashews (Raw)
Nice big fat raw prawns
Yellow Bean Sauce
Soy Sauce
Rice Wine
Sesame Oil
Sugar (not much a teaspoon or something)
Spring Onions

Method

Defrost the prawns (if frozen) then shell and devein them. Chop and stir fry the garlic, ginger and chillies, chuck in the cashews. Stir fry until cooked a bit, then add the prawns, stir fry a bit more then chuck in the rest of the ingredients, cook until prawns are done. Add the chopped spring onions at the end.

Ingredients

Ginger
Spring Onions, finely chopped
Pak Choy, roughly chopped
Broccoli, with as much stalk removed as possible (stalk does not stir-fry very well)
Sugar Snaps
Sesame Oil
Soy Sauce
Rice wine (or sherry)

Method

Fry ginger, and spring onions. Throw in the veg, whizz around for a bit and chuck in the liquids, allow the liquid to steam up for a bit until the veg looks nice (you want it all to be crunchy still, but you might need to take off a little bit more rawness than you managed to with the initial stir-fry, it's up to you as the judge, the important thing is not to overcook it, so check it regularly). Badda Bing.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons cornflour
1 teaspoon five spice powder
1 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons sunflower oil
dash of sesame oil
4 chicken breasts or thighs, boned and chopped into small pieces
1 bulb garlic, peeled and finely chopped
2 inches ginger, peeled and finely chopped
1 chilli (or more, to taste), roughly chopped
2 tablespoons raw cashews
3 peppers (ideally 1 red, 1 yellow, 1 green, but up to you), seeded and quite finely diced
1 handful sugar snaps
1 bunch spring onions, finely chopped
1 tablespoon Charlie's Famous Curry Masala Powder
1 tablespoon yellow bean sauce
1 tablespoon dark soy sauce
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
2 tablespoons rice wine
1/2 pint chicken stock
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons cornflour

Method

Mix the cornflour, salt and five spice powder. Throw in the chicken pieces and toss until each piece is covered in the mixture. Heat the sunflower oil in a wok and add a dash of sesame oil. When the oil is smoking, add a handful of the chicken pieces (don't put too many in at a time, three separate batches should do it), and stir fry until they've gone golden. When chicken pieces are done, remove them with a slotted spoon and put them in a sieve or colander over a bowl (this is to let as much of the oil as possible drip off), you'll need to do the chicken in batches. When all the chicken is done, pour away all the oil in wok, this will still leave a film of oil in the wok, which is all you need for the rest of the cooking. Heat the wok again until oil is smoking and add the garlic, ginger, chilli and cashews, stir fry aggressively, trying to prevent sticking, until cashews have browned, then add the peppers, and stir fry until they have gone soft, then add the sugar snaps and the spring onions, stir fry for another minute or so, until the onions have gone soft, then add all the rest of the liquid ingredients, and throw the chicken back in the pan, bring it all to the boil and let the sauce thicken slightly, but don't cook for very long, or you'll overcook the sugar snaps. Badda Bing.

Ingredients

Chorizo
Wine (I like to use a Spanish Red, but a white wine will work as well)

Method

Cut the chorizo into thin slices, if the chorizo is very fat, then you might want to cut it into sliced quarters. Heat a wide based pan without any oil and throw in the chorizo slices. The fat in the chorizo should melt and so oil shouldn't be necessary. Stir and fry aggressively until chorizo slices look a bit cooked, then glug in enough wine to cover the chorizo slices, keep heat on high until wine is boiling, then reduce heat and cook uncovered for an hour or so, regularly checking that mixture isn't getting too dry (and adding more wine if it is). You want most of the wine to have evaporated off by the time you serve.

Badda bing.

Ingredients

This is quite a traditional chutney (i.e. without sugar and vinegar) so it won't keep for more than a few hours, but it's very quick to make, and is useful to give to people who aren't used to Chilli Con Carne as hot as you are.

Cucumber
Dessicated Coconut
Salt
Lemon Juice
Cummin Seeds
Coriander Seeds
Peppercorns
Paprika

Method

Roughly peel cucumber (it doesn't matter if there's some skin left on, as it adds texture and colour, but lose most of the skin as it's presumably full of pesticides and stuff). Chop into tiny, tiny pieces. Mix with a teaspoon of the coconut and toss around a bit. Add salt and lemon juice. Roast and grind the spices, but only add a dash of the resultant mixture, as this really needs to be a mild dip.

Ingredients

4 Chicken breasts, sliced up (thinnish slices)
2 tablespoons roughly ground (or bashed between some kitchen towel, or in a pestle and mortar) coriander seeds
Lots of fresh ginger, chopped
Lots of garlic, chopped
Tomato Puree, 4 tablespoons
Lots of roughly ground pepper
Salt
Lemon Juice (about 1 lemonsworth should be good)
2 tablespoons single cream
cashew nuts

Method

Put chicken in bowl with ginger, garlic, coriander seeds, tomato puree, lemon juice, and some olive oil. Grind loads of black pepper on to it, and some salt. Marinade overnight or as long as you have available.

Preheat oven to 175C. Put mixture in a covered casserole or oven dish in the oven until chicken looks tasty (probably 15 minutes to half an hour). Meanwhile fry up the cashews in olive oil, add them to the mix, and then just before serving add the cream, stir and heat through. Badda Bing! Serve with rice, and maybe some kohlrabi.

Ingredients

Breadcrumbs (cheap old bread whizzed up in a blender)
Cranberries
Dried Apricots
Onions
Thyme
Vegetable stock
Salt and pepper

Method

Chop and fry the onions, add the rest of the ingredients (bar the breadcrumbs), cook through, then whizz down in a blender. It's difficult to judge exactly how much breadcrumbs to use, so add these slowly to the mixture until the required consistency is achieved.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons coriander seeds
1 tablespoon cumin seeds
1 tablespoon fenugreek seeds
1 tablespoon gram flour
2 teaspoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons garlic powder
2 teaspoons mustard seeds
1 cinnamon stick
10 cloves
1 teaspoon asafoetida
2 teaspoons turmeric
2 teaspoons paprika
1 tablespoon peppercorns
2 teaspoons chilli powder

Method

Dry roast all the whole spices, then grind. Mix up the lot, and add further turmeric and paprika in order to get the colour how you want it.

Ingredients

For the rice:
Sushi rice (pudding rice will also do, it's practically indistinguishable)
Mirin
Rice Vinegar
Caster Sugar
Kombu Seaweed

For the fish topping
Wasabi
Smoked Salmon (or sliced raw tuna, if preferred. Smoked Salmon is very decadent, and obviously rather sacrilegious to the cult of sushi, but it tastes really nice)
Soy Sauce
Mirin
White sesame seeds
Black sesame seeds
Finely chopped wakame seaweed
Pickled Ginger

Method

Put the rice in a saucepan with about 130% volume of cold water (in comparison to the rice). Put the kombu in as well. Bring to the boil, covered, then turn the heat right down until all the water is absorbed. You'll need to stir regularly, as the rice will stick to the pan. Remove the kombu, and add the mirin, rice vinegar and sugar to the rice. Put in the freezer until cold.

Marinade the smoked salmon or tuna in the soy sauce and mirin for as long as possible.

If you have sushi moulds (very cheap, and useful) you should use them. If you haven't, you'll need to hand-craft the blocks of rice, and then balance the fish on top, which is quite fiddly. Put a tiny bit of wasabi on the fish before putting it in the mould/balancing it on the rice. Serve with a soy sauce dip, a wasabi dip, pickled ginger dip, and the sesame seeds/wakame mixture as another dip. (This is known as furiyami seasoning, I think).

Ingredients

I strongly recommend lamb's kidneys, they're a lot nicer than pork kidneys.

Kidneys, ideally lamb's kidneys, chopped in half, otherwise pork kidneys chopped in chunks work, but they're much tougher
Shallots
Butter
Salt and pepper
Worcestershire sauce
Dijon Mustard
Sherry
Chilli sauce

Method

Fry the shallots in the butter, when soft, add the kidneys. When the kidneys have browned, add the rest of the ingredients. Simmer until kidneys are cooked. Mmmm, badda bing.

Ingredients

For the falafel:
2 Tins Chickpeas, drained (I don't know why anyone would use dried chickpeas, soak them for 24 hours and then boil them for two more hours when you can just buy tinned chickpeas)
3 large cloves garlic
1 Small onion, roughly chopped
1 Egg, beaten
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 tablespoon sesame seeds
1 chilli, roughly chopped
1 large handful parsley (flat leaf, or curly, don't mind. Flat leaf is more mediterranean, but I think that curly is getting a bit underused now)
2 tablespoons plain flour
2 teaspoons cumin seeds, ground
1 teaspoon salt
lots of freshly ground pepper

Extras:
Oil for deep-frying (sunflower oil is good for this)

Optional Extras:
Tahini, for drizzling
Charlie's Famous Tzatziki, for dipping or smearing
Charlie's Famous Hummus, for dipping or smearing
Pitta breads and salad

Method

Put all the ingredients (bar the oil) in a blender. Whizz it up for a long time until it's nice and smooth. If you have time, whack it in the fridge for a bit, as this will make it easier to manipulate before deep frying.

Heat some oil in a smallish saucepan (or if you have a deep fat fryer, you could use that). To tell if the oil is hot enough, dip the handle of a wooden spoon in it and see if it bubbles furiously. If so, you're ready to go. If it's smoking, it's too hot, turn the heat off, stand well back, and prepare some damp sand to throw over your kitchen when it inevitably catches fire.

Put some flour into a bowl, and use this to flour up your hands before reaching into the bowl of falafel mix, and taking out a golfball sized amount, patting it a bit with the flour so it's not sticky, and flattening it to a disc. Drop this into the pan. Not sure how many your pan will hold at a time, mine's quite small, so it holds three at a time. Don't be tempted to put too many in at the same time, as you need the oil to keep hot in order to cook the falafel crispy on the outside. Once the falafel has hardened and darkened on the outside, take out with a wooden spoon and put either on some kitchen towel or in a colander to let the oil drop off. Once you've done all of them, throw on a plate and drizzle some tahini on top for decoration. Serve on their own, ideally while still hot, with some dips (hummus and tzatziki are nice), pitta breads and salad.

Ingredients

OK, this is a bit of a weird recipe. But it's a good filler for using up weird stuff in the kitchen.

Miso (a little goes a long way, watch out)
Soy
Chicken Stock
Spring Onions
Ginger, whole, but peeled
Sesame Oil
Kombu Seaweed
Wakame Seaweed (finely chopped)
Sake
Pasta shapes (I used the curly ones. Can't remember what they're called, but they're not farfalle or penne)

Method

Mix soy, miso, chicken stock, kombu and whole ginger. Bring to boil, and simmer for about 10 minutes. Remove the ginger and the kombu. Add the rest of the ingredients, and simmer until pasta is cooked.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons Peppercorns
Cassia Bark (or cinnamon)
2 teaspoons Mustard Seeds
Small piece of Star anise
2 teaspoons Ground Ginger
Bay Leaves
2 Nutmegs
1 teaspoon Fennel

Method

Dry fry all whole spices. You'll need to manually cut the nutmeg up into smaller pieces, then grind and mix in the lot.

Ingredients

1 teaspoon dried yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
2 tablespoons milk
1 pound plain flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 egg
1/2 pint milk
1/2 pint live yoghurt
1 tablespoon melted ghee
1 tablespoon cumin seeds
1 tablespoon chopped coriander leaves
A lot of very roughly chopped garlic
A lot of very roughly chopped birds eye chillies
More melted ghee (or butter will do)
Onion seeds
Sesame seeds

Method

Warm milk gently, it needs to get to a bit warmer than body temperature, but not much more, about the temperature of a nice bath. Add the yeast and sugar and leave for half an hour. When you come back to it, it should be all frothy and smell like a brewery, if it hasn't you've either heated up the milk too much, or else the yeast is really old, and now dead.

Very gently fry the garlic and the chillies in some ghee (or butter if you haven't got any ghee) for about ten minutes.

Sift the flour with the salt. Add in the yeasty milk, the beaten egg, the milk, the yoghurt, the ghee, the seeds, the coriander leaves, the chillies and the garlic. Knead until the dough is doughy (add milk and flour in appropriate quantities to get the dough the right consistency). Leave for about two hours in a warm place. When you come back the dough should have risen. Beat it down and roll out into amusing shapes. Heat up the flat side of a griddle, and slap a naan down on it. You'll need to flip it very often, and after you've flipped it brush some ghee onto it and sprinkle some onion and sesame seeds. Repeat until it looks cooked, and put in a basket with some kitchen towel in it. Continue for all of them. If you're not serving right away, you can microwave up the naan bread and it will still be nice, but don't leave it longer than a few hours, as stale naan isn't very nice.

Ingredients

Pork Fat
Shoulder of lamb
Lots of garlic
Dried Rosemary
Dried Mint (not too much of this, it's very over-powering)
Salt
Lots of freshly ground pepper
Casings

Method

Mince up items. Stuff them into casings. Badda Bing.

Ingredients

Not much to this bread, but it's fun to make, and looks quite cool.

3 cups flour
2 tablespoons baking powder

Method

Sift flour with baking powder. Add water and stir slowly until you have a good dough. Leave for fifteen minutes or so. Heat a griddle to hot. Flour a rolling surface. Roll a bit of the dough, grab it and slap it on the hot griddle. Keep flipping it over until you've got brown spots. Take it off, put it on some kitchen towel, and make some more. Once you've got a pile of them, microwave them to finish them off for about thirty second. Badda bing.

Ingredients

Man, this is pretty traumatic, and takes an incredibly long time. I'm not sure how many more times I'm going to do this. This recipe is, however, quite nice, and it's reassuring to know exactly what's gone into your haggis.
You will need:

1 Lamb's Pluck (or a sheep's pluck). This is basically the inside of a lamb, scooped out, i.e. the windpipe, with both lungs attached, the heart attached, and the liver attached. It's really fairly horrible. You should be able to get this from a butcher, but you might need to order it in advance, as it's not in high demand.
2 Large onions, finely chopped
Some beef suet, 500g will be easily enough
Oatmeal, 1 kg should be enough
1 nutmeg, chopped finely, then ground in a spice grinder
1 teaspoon allspice
1 chipotle chilli (this is a smoked and dried chilli, optional), this also needs to be cut up and ground in a spice grinder.
Some beef stock
1 Sheep's stomach. I actually used an ox bung, which can be bought from SausageMaking.org for £4 including postage and packing. By the way, if you do go here, don't get the haggis making kit, it's just a bag of suet mixed with oatmeal.
Needle and thread

Method

First you'll need to boil the pluck. You'll need to do this in an enormous pan, and you need to drape the windpipe over the edge of the pan into another pan, as all the nasty gunk comes up from the lungs, and you don't want that stuff in the stock. You'll need to boil this for about 2 hours, I reckon, but if you go short or long of this, you can adjust the second round of boiling accordingly.

Once it's all boiled, take the pluck out of the water, and cut the bits of meat off. Hopefully this should be obvious, but for reminder, you want to get the liver off, the lungs off and the heart off. Anything that looks vaguely meaty, basically. Try to cut anything that looks like a gristly pipe out, but you don't need to worry too much, I didn't find anything too fiddly, just bang-bang cleave the meaty bits out. Easy. Chop the meat roughly and shove it in a blender. Add cups of strained stock from the pot to keep the meat moist (you'll find it blends easier as well if you do this).

Now, take a load of oatmeal, stick it in a frying pan and dry fry, stirring constantly to avoid burning until it's heated through, then add enough suet to make it into a paste (the suet should melt). Then shove the offal paste that you blended in a big bowl, and try to add a similar volume of the sloppy oatmeal mixture (maybe not quite as much). Add the onions and the spices as well. Stir up until you're happy with the relative quantities.

Now, you've got your haggis mix, and your stomach. I think you can guess what to do here. Spoon the mixture in, and sew up the end of the stomach. If using an ox bung you might find you just have tube (if you've cut it in half) so you'll need to sew up both ends. Either way, the important thing here is DON'T COMPLETELY FILL THE STOMACH, leave about a third as much room, as the oatmeal expands, and you don't want the haggis to burst as it's not nearly as nice if it does. If you have left over haggis mixture, then so be it.

Once you've completed making the haggis(es), put them in a pan covered with boiling water, and simmer for three hours. Served with Buttery Mashed Potatoes and Buttery Mashed Swede. Swede is the same family as the turnip, so in Scotland this is known as neeps and tatties.

Badda Bing.

Ingredients

2 Pork fillets, chopped into medium size pieces (you can cut the meat off some chops as well if you can't get fillets. Pork fillets are those weird alienesque long tubes of meat that supermarkets sell in heavy-duty shrink-wrapping. Don't worry, they aren't processed, they're just neatly sliced off the pig's back, I think).
Lots of shallots
Lots of garlic
Lots of butter
A few cooking apples, peeled, cored, and chopped up into bits.
Some crystallised ginger, or else stem ginger that's been stored in syrup, or else ginger preserve. You can even use fresh ginger, but then you really need to pulp it. You can usually find crystallised ginger in the cake section of supermarkets.
A pint of cheap apple juice
A big tablespoon of English mustard (although you can use Dijon, I just wanted to keep the whole thing hearty and English)
2 Tablespoons of cheap honey
1 Teaspoon of ground cloves
1 Tablespoon of roughly ground pepper
A large pinch of salt

Method

Chop shallots and garlic, fry in the butter, when soft, add the pork, and stir until sealed.

Add the rest of the ingredients, turn heat low and simmer until pork is tender. Watch out for this one, as pork switches from underdone within a short space of time, so keep checking regularly.

Ingredients

1 tin chickpeas
3 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon tahini
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon freshly ground cumin seeds
salt and pepper

Method

Mulch all the ingredients in a blender. Sprinkle some chilli powder and toasted pine nuts on top for a sophisticated look. Badda bing.

Ingredients

Leg lamb
Yoghurt
Garlic, mulched
Ginger, mulched
Almonds, ground
Coconut Milk
Salt
Oil
Charlie's Famous Tandoori Masala
Charlie's Famous Garam Masala
1 teaspoon ground cardamom seeds
1 teaspoon ground fennel seeds
2 teaspoons poppy seeds
1 tablespoon dried mint

Method

Stab the lamb all over. Mix up all the rest of the ingredients as marinade and rub it in. You'll need quite a lot of ground almonds, as the marinade needs to be quite sticky, not too runny. Wrap the whole marinaded lamb in tin foil and leave for as long as possible (ideally overnight). Then heat an oven to low (about 150C or 300F) and cook slowly, in the foil, for a couple of hours. For best results, finish off on a barbecue, keeping as much of the marinade as poss, and ladling it on the meat as it cooks.

Ingredients

Together with kippers and kidneys, this makes the tasty, but slightly dodgily named KKK breakfast which I highly recommend over the usual bangers, bacon and beans breakfast.

Smoked Haddock fillets (actually kippers work nicely as well)
Butter
Basmati rice
A teaspoon of Charlie's Famous Curry Masala
Shallots
Dill
Eggs

Method

Boil the fillets for about fifteen minutes, or until flaky and cooked. Keep the water they were cooked in. Heat the butter and fry the shallots. Add the curry powder. Fry out the rawness. Get the fillets out of the boiling water and measure out four cupfuls of water (if you run out, just use tap water, the important thing is to get the proportions right relative to the rice). Put the water in the pan and add two cupfuls of rice (or half the volume of water, basically, you can adjust based on how many people you want to feed. Mush up the fillets with a fork, if you can get rid of the skin, good for you, I can never be bothered. While that's simmering, hard boil the eggs. Add the fillets to the pot. When the water has nearly all been absorbed add the roughly chopped dill, and then shell the hard boiled eggs (top tip: have a big pan of cold water ready to put the hot boiled eggs in, this means you don't scald yourself when trying to remove the shells of the eggs), and chop them roughly and add to the mixture. Stir and serve. Badda bing!

Ingredients

I invented this when MANT was looking like winning the "Inventive Sausage" Competition with his, admittedly brilliant, pork chorizo sausage. I decided we needed a spicy competitor that no-one else would ever have imagined possible.

Lamb shoulder (I actually used chump steaks, basically, the fattier the better).
Bacon (again, the fattier the better, so streaky better than back)
Ground Black Pepper
Salt
Bread (yes, bread, you mince it up with the meat and it should soak up the fat when the sausage cooks to prevent the sausage getting too dry)
Charlie's Famous Curry Masala
Dried Chillies
Casings

Method

Blend, Mince, Stuff. Mmmm.

Ingredients

1 lamb's liver, maybe 100g or so, chopped into bite size pieces. If you're squeamish and don't like offal, then you could use chicken breasts.
5 Tomatoes, roughly chopped
2 onions, finely chopped
1/2 bulb garlic, finely chopped
2 inches of ginger, peeled and chopped
4 green chillies, cut in half
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
5 cloves
small piece of cinnamon, maybe 1/2 inch
1 teaspoon poppy seeds
1 tablespoon paprika
1 large cucumber, peeled
2 tablespoons mango chutney

Method

Heat some oil in a pan, and stir-fry the liver or chicken breasts until not quite down. This will take hardly any time for liver, it will take longer for chicken breasts. Remove from the pan, leaving as much juices in the pan as possible.

Fry the onions, garlic, ginger, and chillies in the pan. Grind the spices, then sieve and add to the pan. Stir fry for thirty seconds, then add the tomatoes. Turn the heat down and let the tomatoes mulch down.

Cut the cucumber in half lengthwise, then scrape out the seeds with a teaspoon. Discard the slimy seeds and keep the meaty cucumber shells. Chop the cucumber into chunks and throw in the pan. Add the mango chutney. Bring the heat up and boil, then add in the meat, and cook until the meat is done (shouldn't be too long).

Ingredients

This is really quite a simple recipe, I've added in instructions for appropriate accompaniments, because I think they work quite well together, but obviously you'll want to play it to your own taste.

For the duck:
4 Duck breasts
1 teaspoon juniper berries
1 teaspoon roughly broken cassia bark (easier to remove than cinnamon quill, but cinnamon is also fine)
1 teaspoon szechuan peppercorns

For the sauce:
1 ripe mango
2 oranges

For the accompaniment
1/2 swede
1 butternut squash
Butter
Lots of spinach
Soy sauce
Sesame oil
Broccoli

Method

The Duck Breasts:
Score the fatty skin of the duck breasts several times deeply, criss-crossing the scores. Take the whole spices and put into the scores.

Heat a frying pan (no oil necessary), and put the breasts in skin side down. When the skin seems to be really crispy (may take five to ten minutes), flip over and cook in the fat (a lot of fat should have been released) for about a minute, then remove to rest. Now, using a small knife, prise out all the whole spices that you can find. It doesn't matter if you miss the odd peppercorn or juniper berry, but you want to make sure you've got rid of all the cinnamon / cassia. Put the spices in a bowl and pour all the fat from the pan into the bowl as well. You now have some seasoned duck fat, and some almost cooked duck breasts. Hopefully the duck should be very rare in the middle, and well cooked on the outside.

The Mash:
Peel and chop the swede and squash. Boil until swede is soft (the squash will be soft quite quickly, but it doesn't matter if it gets cooked for longer as it's being mashed. If you're a real perfectionist, you could boil them both separately, so they are both just right.) Mash up with some butter.

The Spinach:
Heat a small amount of sesame oil in a wok, throw in the spinach in handfuls, the spinach will reduce down as you stir fry it, so although there won't be room for all the spinach at the beginning, there will be if you add the spinach in batches. Add few tablespoons of soy during the process to help with the wilting.

The Broccoli:
Cut the broccoli into floret removing as much stalk as possible, put them in a large oven dish. Remove the whole spices from the duck fat, discard the spices and pour the duck fat over the broccoli. Grill on a high heat until the florets have gone a little brown, the broccoli will still be very crunchy, but the rawness will have been taken out.

The Sauce:
Zest both oranges, and squeeze out their juice into a bowl. Halve the mango around the long plane (so that each half is as wide and flat as possible, you won't be able to cut right through as the stone will be in the way, but feel your way around it with the knife), and cut out the stone from whichever half ends up with it. Then score the flesh in fine criss-crosses making sure your knife goes down to the mango skin BUT DOESN'T PIERCE THE SKIN. You should then be able to turn the mango half inside out, it should now resemble a hedgehog (which is why this process is known as hedgehogging the mango) you can now cut off the chunks of mango flesh quite efficiently. Throw the mango chunks in a blender with the orange juice and zest and blend until smooth.

Putting it all together:
When absolutely everything else is ready, chop the duck into large slices, return to pan with the sauce and heat through. Serve immediately with the mash, spinach and broccoli on different parts of the plate. I find that the sweetness of the sauce is nicely counterpointed by the saltiness of the soy-flavoured spinach.

Ingredients

4 underripe mangoes
A medium handful salt
8 ripe plums (or other soft, juicy fruit)
Lots of garlic
Lots of ginger
Chillies
1 tablespoon Charlie's Famous Garam Masala
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
1 cup dark brown muscavado sugar

Method

Peel mangoes. Then you have to remove the massive seed in the middle of them. Unless anyone knows a magic way that I haven't been told about, this is an absolute pain in the balls, and it's even worse if the mangoes are underripe, as they have to be for this recipe. You need to insert knife as if to cut it in half, and sort of feel your way around the mango stone until you've cut it all the way around the stone, then you need to twist it off. This is the theory anyway. Most of the time I had to cut in the three other dimensions as well, and then I had to insert the knife and twist in order to separate the segments. Anyway, good luck, and once you've done it, chop them up to the size you want in the chutney. Sprinkle with the salt, and set aside.

Mulch up the ginger, garlic and chillis in a blender, add the vinegar, and the brown sugar. Transfer this to a saucepan, and simmer for ten minutes, keeping an eye on it to make sure it doesn't dry out and burn. If it looks like it's drying out, add some more vinegar. Once it's thick and gloopy, and the ginger, garlic and chilli look and taste less raw, add the mango chunks slowly, stirring them in as you go. It'll seem like there's too much mango, and not enough sauce, but if you patiently stir it all in, you'll be fine. Turn the heat right down, cover, and leaving very gently simmering for at least an hour, or until it looks nice. Stir regularly. Then put in sterilised jars. If you put the lids on when it's hot, the cooling air should suck the lids in so that you get that satisfying "pop" when you open them.

Ingredients

6 Eggs
Ginger
Garlic
Chillis
Spring Onions
Loads of cracked black pepper

Method

Chop the veg finely, fry it. Beat the eggs, pour it into the frying pan. Turn the heat down, and cook like a spanish omelette, i.e. by pushing the cooked egg at the edge towards the centre, to let uncooked egg dribble past it to get cooked. When the base has a reasonably firm consistency (the top will still have lots of raw egg on, don't worry), put a plate on top of the frying pan, then flip over both the plate and frying pan, and remove frying pan, to reveal the underside of the omelette, then slide the omelette off the plate back onto the frying pan so that the uncooked side can have a go. Sprinle with loads of cracked black pepper and serve. Badda bing!

Ingredients

For the meatballs themselves

Beef Mince, ideally you'd mince up some topside, but this is London, so you'll just buy some from the All-Night Tesco
2 tablespoons Flour
3 Eggs
1 teaspoon salt
About 5 Bulbs of garlic
However many chillies you think you can handle
1 Shallot
1 Tablespoon Oregano
1 Tablespoon Cumin seeds
A handful of walnuts

For the sauce

2 Onions
1 red capsicum
1 tablespoon Olive Oil
1/2 pint stock cube in wine (red or white, whatever you fancy)
Chopped tomatoes, about half a pint (or a tin will do)
2 Tablespoons Tomato Puree
A couple of chillies

Method

Blend the meatball ingredients. Form into meatballs. From here you have two options, either of which work, but produce quite different dishes. You can either fry them, in which case the meatballs have to be really quite small (some recipe books say "golf-ball sized" which is WRONG. They must be smaller. I can't think of a household object with a correlating size, but I suggest you buy a walnut whip, and cut it horizontally halfway up its vertical axis, the top half, when melted down and reformed into a sphere represents a good size, and it'll be chocolatey, creamy, and walnutty as well. Actually, can you still buy walnut whips? I remember buying them as a child, but you could get them for 30p then). Alternatively, you can mix up the sauce, make it a bit more watery, and put the raw meatballs in the mixture, then stew it in a medium oven (about 350F) for an hour or so. You can make the meatballs a bit bigger if you do it this way. Basically, frying the meatballs is nicer, but it's a real pain in the ass frying them in batches, so I quite often just stew them.

Anyway, to make the sauce, just fry the onions, capsicums and chilli, when soft add the rest of the ingredients, simmer until a bit more watery than required consistency, and either add the meatballs and heat through (if you've deep-fried them) or add the meatballs and stew.

It's worth mentioning that if you stew them, the garlic is given even more potency, when we last tried it, two of the house members went blind for a week. The rest of us just suffered severe nausea and bleeding eyes. Badda Bing!

Ingredients

I don't think this is really very Nepalese, but the taste and texture reminded me of an incredibly nice dish as the Gurkha Kitchen in Balham. That was the idea anyway. Either way, it's very nice. Lentils are always a good way to bulk out a meal made from random ingredients.

1 cup masoor dal (red lentils)
1 cup channa dal (not sure what these are in English, they're yellow and much chunkier than normal lentils)
1 butternut squash (goddammit these things are tasty, I should cook with them more)
Loads of garlic
Loads of ginger
Loads of green birds eye chillis
A sprinkle of curry leaves
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 tablespoon Charlie's Famous Curry Masala
Chopped tomatoes (I use a tin, not sure it's worth the effort to use fresh tomatoes, as they are cooked until mulched anyway)
1 tablespoon brown sugar
2 tablespoons single cream

Method

Cover the lentils in cold water, bring to the boil, and cook for an hour, skimming off the foul-looking scum that rises to the surface every so often. When cooked, the red lentils should basically be mush, but the channa dal retains its shape, this, in my opinion, is what makes the dish nice.

Peel the squash, chop it in half then spoon out the seedy gunk in the middle. Then chop the squash up into chunks and boil for a few minutes until yielding, but not completely cooked (this won't take long, squash takes less time to cook than potatoes). Chop up the ginger, garlic and chillies. Heat some oil and stir fry the leaves and seeds, then add the garlic, ginger and chillies. Fry until you stop coughing, then add the curry masala, and fry the rawness out. Then add the tomatoes and cook down to a nice liquid. Add the squash and the drained lentils. Simmer gently until squash is nice and soft. At the end, add the brown sugar and cream, stir in. Badda bing.

Ingredients

For the Marinaded Fish:
Tuna Steaks / Fillets
Salmon Steaks / Fillets
Sesame Seeds
Soy Sauce (Japanese, ideally Kikkoman)
Sesame Oil
Chopped Ginger
Dark Brown Muscavado Sugar
Chinese Rice Wine

For the Salad
Spinach (lots, fresh, young)
Cucumber (chopped)
Soy Sauce again
Sesame Oil
Lemon Juice
Salt
Pepper

Method

Marinade Fish for at least an hour, ideally more. Barbecue the steaks (this is tricky, as the fish has a tendency to fall apart, basically don't flip until you're absolutely sure that the downside is cooked, then flip it in one clean movement). Meanwhile, combine salad ingredients, then mash up the fish when it's ready, and put into the salad. Toss. Badda Bing.

Ingredients

New Potatoes, scrubbed or peeled, about a pound or 500g
Olive oil, probably two tablespoons
2 Red Onions
Lots of garlic, perhaps a bulb
2 nice chillies
Oregano, 1 teaspoon
Salt, pepper
7 plump tomatoes
Red Wine

Method

Cut potatoes into 1 inch chunks, if potatoes are small enough already, you can leave them. Boil them for ten minutes and set aside (if you can be bothered, drain them a bit early and then fry them to get them crispy).
Chop onion, garlic, and chilli very finely and fry in a liberal amount of olive oil. Fry until onions are soft and slightly golden. Grate the tomatoes over the mixture and season with the oregano, salt and pepper. Bring to the boil, then reduce heat and cook, covered, for at least an hour, until tomato sauce has mulched down, glug in some red wine if mixture gets too dry. Add the potatoes and heat through. Badda bing.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon butter
5 Cloves garlic, chopped
1 large red onion, roughly chopped
2 leeks, cleaned, and chopped
200g niceish ham, ideally not sliced, but if sliced, then thickly sliced. The ham should be chopped into squares or cubes (depending whether sliced)
250g garden peas in their pods. Basically loads. It's quite cheap to buy garden peas in their pods. You want to pod all these, keep the peas, and discard their pods. If you're lazy, use frozen peas, but it won't be as nice, as the soup has the peas still a little raw (basically beware of overcooking the peas if using frozen peas)
Handful of mint leaves
1 pint of vegetable stock (or chicken stock, don't really mind)
1 tablespoon double cream
salt and pepper

Method

Heat the olive oil and butter in a large pan. Add the garlic, fry for 30 seconds, then add the onions and the leeks. Cook until soft. Add the ham and cook, stirring to prevent sticking for another 2 minutes. Add the stock and the mint. When the soup is boiling, add the peas, cook for another two minutes (if using fresh peas, 30 seconds if frozen). Optional step to give nice consistency: spoon half the soup into a blender, whizz up and return it to the pan. This will make the soup base thick, but still mean you have lots of nice chunky goodies floating around. Finally add the cream, heat through and serve immediately with thick slices of buttered bread. Badda bing.

Ingredients

2 Pheasants, plucked and drawn
Salt and Pepper
Smoked Garlic, chopped (difficult to get hold of, use normal garlic if you can't find it)
Streaky Bacon, chopped up
Onions, finely chopped
Carrots, peeled and cut into huge chunks
Red wine
Honey
Cooking apples, peeled, cored and chopped very roughly
Bay leaf
Thyme
A couple of handfuls of chestnuts
Leeks
Kale
Cabbage
Double Cream

Method

- Take pheasants whole, cover them in salt and pepper, and pan fry them in some olive oil, you should work a fair amount of fat out of the skin doing this. Once skin has crisped up a bit remove and separate into three piles:
1. The breast meat
2. The leg meat
3. The bones, skin and any other meat clinging on elsewhere. Bash this up a bit to break up some bones so that you can boil maximum goodness out.
- In a separate pan, boil some water and add the bones, skin etc. Boil furiously while doing the rest of this recipe.
- In a baking tray, throw in the chestnuts (unpeeled) and bake them until they get quite charred on the outside.
- Take pan you used, and heat the fat and oil again, throw in the smoked garlic, bacon and onions, and big chunks of carrot.
- When onion has softened and browned, add some red wine, a tablespoon of honey and the apple chunks.
- Add the legs to the stew, turn down to a gentle simmer. Add bay leaf and thyme.
- Remove the chestnuts and leave to cool.
- Chop up the breast meat and throw it in the stew
- Once stock has boiled some goodness out of the bones, remove and discard the bones. Add the kale, cabbage and leeks, all roughly chopped to the stock.
- Once chestnuts are cool, tear off the shells, and mulch half of them with some of the stock from the veg. Add this mulch to the stew.
- Strain the veg, reserving the stock. Add some stock to stew if stew is too dry. Add a tablespoon double cream to stew.
- Serve stew on a bed of the mixed greens.

Ingredients

Some pheasants (this recipe assumes two, which should feed three people). Ideally you'd have the giblets as well. It doesn't matter too much if you don't. Also if these are pheasants you've shot yourself, don't bother plucking, just tear off the skin and bin it. The skin's really not that necessary, and skinning a pheasant is much, much easier than plucking it.
Olive Oil
100g nice lardons
Sprigs thyme
1 Onion
3 Carrots
1 Celery plant
500g whole chestnuts
1 tablespoon double cream

Method

Wash, peel and roughly chop the onion, carrots and celery. Throw into a big baking tray with the thyme, and drizzle olive oil on top. Put the pheasants on top, and splash the breasts with a bit more olive oil, if you have giblets, stick those in with the veg, as they can go into the stock. Stick the tray in a pre-heated oven (200C) for half an hour.

While that's in, get a knife and mark a cross in all the chestnuts, this is so that they don't explode when you put them in the oven. Put all the crossed chestnuts in another baking tray.

After half an hour take the pheasants out of the oven. Pull the legs away from the body to check if the meat by the legs is still undercooked, if it is, stick it back in the oven for a bit longer. It doesn't matter if it's a bit undercooked, as there is a chance to stew the meat later.

Once the pheasant is done remove that tray from the oven and stick the tray full of chestnuts into the oven. The chestnuts will take about another half hour, so meanwhile put the pheasants on a chopping board, and proceed to take as much meat off them as possible, and put the meat aside. I find the easiest way to do this is to cut through the top of the wish-bone, then you can slice off both breasts pretty much whole. Then get to work on the legs with your fingers, tearing off meat, but trying to separate off the tendons if you can. Once you've got as much meat off the pheasants as you think you can be bothered with, put the pheasant carcasses (i.e. NOT the meat, just the bones and stuff) together with the vegetables (and thyme) in the bottom of the oven tray, into a big pot. Take a rolling pin and smash up the carcasses as best you can in the pot, this will expose lots of tasty bone insides to the stewing process. Cover with hot water and simmer for at least an hour, ideally overnight.

Take the chestnuts out of the oven and shell them, trying to get rid of the furry husk as well as the outer shell. They should look like shrivelled yellow brains, and they should be incredibly hot.

Once the stock is ready sieve out the carcasses and the veg chunks. Make sure you keep the stock, and chuck away the carcasses (not the other way around - it's all to easy to strain the stock into the sink before you realise it). Strain the stock again with a fine mesh strainer, and then put the nicely strained stock into a pan, and spoon off some of the oil and fat that's floated to the top and bin the fat. Then boil the stock down furiously to reduce it. Meanwhile, gently heat a big pan with some olive oil and throw in the lardons.

Once the stock is reduced down to a strong, gamey liquid, put it in a blender with half of the chestnuts, blend to a paste (the chestnuts probably will remain in small chunks rather than going to a puree, but that's fine). Once the lardons are a bit crispy, chuck the chestnut stock mixture in, then roughly chop the leftover meat and throw that in as well, add the cream and the remaining whole chestnuts, and heat through until meat is cooked.

Serve with mashed potato and cabbage. Maybe some broccoli as well. Badda bing.

Ingredients

Another barbecue favourite. Great hot, but doesn't bear reheating from cold very well.

Pork fillet
Coconut milk
Soy sauce
Charlie's Famous Curry Masala
Chillis, chopped
Garlic, chopped
Mint, chopped
Peanut butter, crunchy

Method

Chop the pork into chunks. Marinade in all the ingredients. Thread onto skewers and barbecue.

Ingredients

Olive Oil
Cheap Whisky (the relative proportions of the whisky and oil should be as with mixing salad dressing, with the whisky taking the place of the vinegar)
Garlic
Bay Leaves
Cumin Seeds
Peppercorns
Dried Chillies (Fresh will also do, but it might still be best to bake them a bit, but it won't matter) (needless to say, you need a lot of these)

Method

Blend all ingredients. Put in a jar. Store for at least a month. If you taste it early, you'll probably go blind, or mad, or both. Huggie's currently only just recovering his vision after being a bit over eager with the premature tasting. Badda Bing.

Ingredients

Onions
Pumpkin, chopped and boiled until soft
Chestnuts, baked until shells are brittle, then peeled (remember to puncture the chestnuts before baking, as they'll explode if you forget)
Honey
Crystallised Ginger
Cinnamon
Pepper and salt
Sherry
Breadcrumbs

Method

Chop and fry the onions, add the rest of the ingredients (except the breadcrumbs). Cook until mixed in, then whizz down in a blender. Add breadcrumbs until it achieves the right consistency.

Ingredients

Nice yoghurt
Salt
Peppercorns
Cummin Seeds
Coriander seeds
Chillis
Cucumber
Garlic
Paprika

Method

Dry fry the seeds and peppercorns and grind. Whisk the yoghurt with the salt. Chop the cucumber, garlic and chillis into tiny, tiny pieces. Combine all ingredients save the paprika. Sprinkle some paprika on the top for decoration, badda bing.

Ingredients

Sausagemeat (maybe a kg)
Onions
Dried Prunes
Armagnac
Breadcrumbs

Method

Fry up the onions, add the rest of the ingredients save the breadcrumbs. Whizz down in a blender, add breadcrumbs until required consistency is achieved. Now you need to bake this (because of the sausagemeat) until the sausagemeat is cooked.

Ingredients

Pint Glass
Ice to half-way up pint glass
Bombay Sapphire to just over the ice mark
Cheap cheap vermouth to brim
Cocktail chilli

Method

Drink. Lose memory. Pass out or vomit according to choice. Badda Bing.

Ingredients

Now souvlaki is basically skewers of marinaded lamb. You can still do that if you like, but what I really like is boneless chump chops of lamb, so this recipe assumes you marinade the chops and then grill them on a bed of lamb. If you want to be more traditional, then chunk up the lamb (leg fillets will probably be the best as you want the meat quite lean), marinade it, then stick it on skewers to grill.

For the Souvlaki:
Four lamb chump chops, thick ones
4 fresh bay leaves, with the thick main stem removed, and the leaves chopped up with a knife
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
2 teaspoons dried oregano
5 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 onion, very finely chopped
salt and pepper

For the veg to go underneath (if grilling):
half a large aubergine, chopped into thinnish discs
2 courgettes, peeled and chopped into discs
Olive oil

Method

Mix up all the souvlaki ingredients and marinade for as long as you can, ideally 24 hours, but a couple of hours will do.

If grilling, arrange the veg on an oven disk and drizzle some olive oil over generously. Stick under the grill (at a reasonable distance from the grill, not too close) for fifteen minutes or so. Then get your lamb steaks and put them on top of the veg in the oven dish, and return to the grill, but this time put as close to the grill as possible. Leave for five minutes, then turn the lamb, and leave until tender (maybe another five to ten minutes depending how rare you like your meat). Take the lamb off, and check the veg. If necessary, return the veg to the oven, although this would a shame, as you really want to eat the lamb as soon as it comes off from under the grill.

If barbecuing, then just whack the souvlaki skewers or chops on the barbecue at high heat. Also whack the aubergine discs, with some olive oil on them, but the courgette discs will fall through the grill, so don't bother with them.

Ingredients

6 Tomatoes
1 Chicken, jointed
Olive Oil
2 Large red onions, sliced finely
Garlic, 1/2 bulb
3 Large Red peppers
100g Chorizo or Jamon cut up into small, thin pieces
1 Tablespoon chopped thyme
2 teaspoons paprika
Handful pitted black olives
Handful pitted green olives
A few dashes of Rioja

Method

Heat an oven to 200C. When hot, throw in the whole peppers, whole tomatoes and unpeeled garlic cloves. Leave in for fifteen minutes, or longer if necessary (the idea here is to make the tomatoes easy to peel, and to take the rawness out of the other ingredients). Peel the garlic and chop, put it in a separate bowl. Seed the peppers and chop the flesh, keep separate. Peel the tomatoes and try to get as much flesh into a bowl with as few seeds as possible (obviously it doesn't matter that much, you're really trying to get rid of the harder, whiter centre, and just keep the really soft flesh).

Season the chicken pieces with salt and pepper, heat some oil in a very big pan, and throw in the chicken pieces, cook skin side down until nicely golden brown, turn them over and give them a few more minutes. Take out the chicken pieces with a slotted spoon and put on a plate. Heat the retained juices and oil, then add the chopped onion, chopped garlic, chopped peppers, chorizo, and thyme. Stir fry until onions have softened. Add the tomato flesh and the paprika, bring to the boil and mulch down those tomatoes. Chuck in the chicken pieces, turn down the heat, and cook for about 20 to 30 minutes (basically until the chicken's cooked). Add the olives and the rioja, bring the heat up so it boils, and it's ready. Badda bing.

Ingredients

Eggs, three
Rice, basmati, ideally Tilda, it's the best rice I've used, steer well clear of Supermarket brand, especially American Long Grain.
Chicken, cut up into tiny strips
Sesame Oil
Cheap Oil
Spring Onions
Garlic
Ginger
Chillis
Prawns (optional, I don't particularly like prawns in rice, but they're easy to add, if you've got raw ones, remember to devein and boil before adding to stir fry)
Peppers (2, different colours)
Bamboo Shoots (from a tin will do, must be chopped very finely, as large chunks of bamboo shoots are absolutely revolting)
Soy Sauce
Rice Wine (or sherry)

Method

Boil lots of water, when bubbling vigorously, add the rice (or else prepare in rice cooker). Cook for about 13 minutes, check that it's done at the end of this, different brands of rice need different amounts of time. Actually Tilda basmati is quite quick cooking, maybe check after ten minutes if using that. American Long Grain normally takes twelve and a half minutes. Once it's ready, sieve and leave. Some people say put it in the freezer, but I don't see the point, I think it's just culinary show-boating, to be honest. You want it to be dryish when you fry it, so make sure that if it's in a sieve, the bottom part isn't sitting in some water. I like to rinse out the rice with cold water here, as it's nice to get rid of the starch (as the frying process will make sure the rice is sticky anyway), but it's up to you, a lot of people like very sticky rice.

In a separate pan (ideally a huge wok, but a giant casserole will do), heat up some sesame and normal oil, fry the ginger, garlic, chilli, spring onions, peppers, prawns, bamboo shoots and bits of chicken until the meaty stuff looks done. Throw in the beaten egg and quickly stir around to half cook the scrambled egg. Then chuck in the rice, and stir fry like a mad thing (this will really make your wrist ache). Add the soy and rice wine, and keep stirring. All of a sudden stop, and scream "IT'S REEEEEEAAAAADY AT THE TOP OF YOUR VOICE".

Badda Bing.

Ingredients

A great one for when you just want to mix up a huge tub of cheap tasty curry. Works well as a side dish to bulk out the more spartan meals.

Mince, lots
Onions, chopped
Garlic, mulched
Ginger, mulched
Tomatoes, chopped
Chillis
1 Tablespoon Ground Coriander
2 Teaspoons Ground Cumin
1 teaspoon ground mustard seeds
2 teaspoons turmeric
2 teaspoons paprika
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 tablespoon garam masala
1 Tablespoon fenugreek leaves
More Onions, sliced very thin
1 tin tomato soup
1 Tablespoon brown sugar

Method

Fry up mince, try to remove as much fat as possible. Throw in the onions, garlic, ginger, chillis and fry, when soft, add all spices, and fry until cooked. Add tomatoes, mulch down, then add the soup and the sugar. At the end fry the slices of onions in some butter on a low heat until they're super crispy, sprinkle them on top and serve with rice in a bucket.

Ingredients

"Rissoles" are really just burgers that you eat without a bun, so you can treat this as a burger recipe if you like.

Lamb mince, 1 kg
Garlic, chopped, a bulb
Ginger, chopped, 2 inches
Two large onions, very finely chopped
Pecans, roughly chopped (a little go a long way here, so a small handful should be ample)
Two eggs, beaten
1 tablespoon Charlie's Famous Curry Masala
1 tablespoon oregano
Some chillis
Salt and pepper to taste
2 teaspoons cumin seeds

Method

Mix all the ingredients with your hands in a bowl. Form into flat patties. Fry each patty on both sides in oil until surface browns (this is to seal the patties). Remove from oil, and bake in an oven at about 180C until cooked (probably half an hour).

Ingredients

Garlic
Ginger
Chillies
Charlie's Famous Garam Masala
Charlie's Famous Curry Masala
Coriander seeds, roasted and ground
Cumin seeds, roasted and ground
Paprika
Sweet potatoes, grated
Tomato puree
Frozen peas
Lemon juice (optional, and just use a splash anyway)
Filo pastry
Ghee (or oil or butter, if ghee not handy)

Method

Heat some oil, and fry the garlic and ginger. Add the spices, and stir fry to get rid of any rawness. Add the grated sweet potato, and turn the heat right down. Add the tomato puree. You'll need to cook it slowly for about an hour, I reckon, to get the sweet potato soft. If you're lazier, or short of time, you could just boil the sweet potatoes, mash them, and add them to the mix. When it's soft, add the frozen peas, and remove from heat (the peas hardly need cooking, so they will just be cooked when the samosas go in the oven). Squeeze the lemon juice in at the last minute, if you're using it.

Making the samosas is a bit tricky. You'll need to get a sheet of filo pasty, and cut in half down its long direction, so that it's just as long, and half as thin. Then put a small bit at the top, and fold the corner over to form a triangle, then roll the whole triangle over, and carry on until it's all wrapped up, then brush with ghee and put on an oven tray. Carry on, until you've either run out of filo or run out of filling. Bake the samosas in a hot oven until the pastry changes colour a bit.

Ingredients

3 Plantains
Some butter
Crystallised ginger (a handful)
1/2 tin Coconut Milk
1/2 cup cashew nuts
1 teaspoon Chilli Powder
2 tablespoons Dark Brown Sugar
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 cup yoghurt
1 teaspoon roasted and ground cumin seeds

Method

Heat an oven to 200C. Peel the plantains, and chop into thin semicircles. Spread out some kitchen foil and put the plantain pieces on the foil. Chop up the crystallised ginger and the butter, sprinkle this mixture over the plantains and wrap up the foil so it's a neat package. Stick this in the oven for 20 minutes, or until the plantain pieces have gone translucent (difficult to check, given that they are wrapped in foil, but you'll see that when they are done, they have changed colour and texture).

Meanwhile, blend the cashew nuts with the coconut milk, transfer to a pan and VERY SLOWLY bring to the almost boil, if it's too dry, add a little milk (or cream if you want it to be even richer than it is already) when it is just below bubbling, add the rest of the ingredients, stir through, and keep it only just simmering (if in doubt, let it cool down, and reheat it when the plantains are ready) until the plantains are ready. Stir in and serve. Badda bing!

Ingredients

Chicken, probably a breast per person, I will assume cooking for six in this recipe
2 tablespoons Cornflour
1 Teaspoon Chinese five spice powder
Szechuan Peppercorns (ground) (optional)
1 teaspoon salt
Oil
A lot of ginger
A lot of garlic
However many chillies you think you can handle
Spring onions, 5-10
Soy Sauce, if possible, use Kikkoman
Some Shaoshing Rice Wine if available, if not, then dry sherry will do
Chicken bouillon, or else a chicken stock cube
Rice Vinegar (a teaspoon, no more, if in doubt, err on the side of caution)
1 tablespoon white sugar
Sesame Oil

Method

Chop chicken. Mix cornflour, Szechuan Peppercorns (if you have them) salt and chinese five spice together and sprinkle on chopped chicken. Heat quite a thick layer of oil in a wok, or saucepan, add the chicken in batches with a slotted spoon, try to shake off the spare cornflour that hasn't adhered to the chicken, it doesn't matter if you don't get all of it.

Chicken should turn golden brown, remove from heat with slotted spoon and put either on a paper towel, or in a sieve balanced over a bowl or saucepan (this is to get rid of all the oil left on the chicken.

Chop up ginger and garlic and chillies (if you're cooking for people who don't like spice, you might want to leave the chillies really chunky, so just slice them down the middle, that way they can fish them out). Fry this mush in a tiny bit of oil. Add roughly chopped spring onions.

Then add 2 or 3 tablespoons of soy sauce, the bouillon or stock with enough water to make it about a pint, a few tablespoons of rice wine, a drop of vinegar, a teaspoon of sesame oil, the sugar, and a bit more cornflour to thicken up (it's probably best if you add the liquid ingredients and cornflour in a cup together earlier.) Add the chicken, and you're done. Badda Bing.

Ingredients

As yet, I don't have a tandoor, maybe one day, but in the meantime, I'm going to give you instructions for tandoori chicken on the barbecue, which is still very nice.
Chicken pieces (I'm still a big fan of plain old chicken breasts because I hate dealing with bones, but obviously legs, wings, thighs etc. will be very nice, and probably more flavoursome)
Lemon Juice
Yoghurt
Oil
Garlic, mulched
Ginger, mulched
Chillies, mulched
Fresh mint, mulched
Fresh coriander, mulched
Cummin seeds, roasted and ground
Charlie's Famous Garam Masala
Charlie's Famous Curry Masala
Charlie's Famous Tandoori Masala
Salt

Method

Slash chicken pieces with knife to let marinade pentrate deeper. Rub in the lemon juice. Leave for a bit (this is supposed to tenderise the chicken before the marinade, but I'm not sure it really works). Mix up the rest of the ingredients separately in a big bowl and then stir in the chicken. Leave for as long as you can, ideally 24 hours. Then barbecue. Badda bing!

Ingredients

Obviously important for Chicken Tikka and Chicken Tandoori, this masala is also nice as a general barbecue marinade ingredient.
3 Tablespoons Coriander seeds
3 Tablespoons Cummin seeds
3 Tablespoons Garlic powder
3 Tablespoons Paprika
5 Teaspoons ground ginger
5 Teaspoons mango powder (amchoor)
5 Teaspoons dried mint
Chilli powder to taste

Method

Roast and grind whole spices, mix all together.

Ingredients

Tuna steak
Soy sauce (kikkoman if possible)
Mirin
Sake
White sugar

Method

Heat the soy, mirin and sake. Stir in the sugar until it's all dissolved. Leave to cool. Put the tuna in the marinade when it's cooled down. Leave for an hour or so. Take the tuna out of the marinade and grill on both sides for a few minutes. Heat the marinade in a saucepan, and when it's boiled down a bit, add the cooked tuna and coat in the cooked marinade. Then, presto! You're ready to eat. Try it with some ever-so-slightly boiled mange touts and thin slices of carrots.

Ingredients

Chicken, again probably a breast per person, we'll stick with the assumption of six
2 tablespoons Cornflour
1 teaspoon salt
Oil
A lot of ginger
A lot of garlic
However many chillies you think you can handle
Shallots, a bunch, maybe about ten
Basil, very roughly chopped
Coconut Milk, probably about two tins
Soy Sauce, if possible, use Kikkoman
Some Shaoshing Rice Wine if available, if not, then dry sherry will do
1 tablespoon brown sugar
Chicken bouillon, or else a chicken stock cube
Rice Vinegar (a teaspoon, no more, if in doubt, err on the side of caution)
Sesame Oil

Method

Chop chicken. Mix cornflour and salt and sprinkle on chopped chicken. Heat quite a thick layer of oil in a wok, or saucepan, add the chicken in batches with a slotted spoon, try to shake off the spare cornflour that hasn't adhered to the chicken, it doesn't matter if you don't get all of it.

Chicken should turn golden brown, remove from heat with slotted spoon and put either on a paper towel, or in a sieve balanced over a bowl or saucepan (this is to get rid of all the oil left on the chicken.

Chop up ginger and garlic and chillies (if you're cooking for people who don't like spice, you might want to leave the chillies really chunky, so just slice them down the middle, that way they can fish them out). Fry this mush in a tiny bit of oil. Add chopped shallots.

Then add basil, 2 or 3 tablespoons of soy sauce, the bouillon or stock mixed into the coconut milk, a few tablespoons of rice wine, a drop of vinegar, the sugar and a teaspoon of sesame oil. Add the chicken, and you're done. Badda Bing.

Ingredients

Some nice white fish, either fillets or steaks, cut into boneless chunks. I used king fish, but cod or haddock or whatever are great as well.
Some green chillies
Some dried red chillies
Two stems of lemon grass (leave whole, I bruised them, but then I was constantly fishing bits out of the curry)
Lime leaves (ideally fresh, but dried is fine)
Coconut milk
Coconut cream (this makes the sauce even thicker and more luxurious, not vital, but recommended)
Brown sugar
Garlic, chopped
Ginger, chopped
Juice of a lime
Soy
Noodles
Sesame Oil

Method

Heat a wok (with no oil, just the wok) and throw the chillies in. Waggle around until chillies are going brown. Remove the green chillies, but not the dried red ones. Chop the green chillies. Throw in the lemon grass and lime leaves and waggle around for a bit, then add the coconut milk and coconut cream (it should make a satisfying sizzle). When it is boiling, add the brown sugar, garlic, ginger and the fish. Reduce heat and simmer for 5-10 minutes (however long it takes the fish to cook, not long). Meanwhile put the noodles in a separate pan, add a dash of sesame oil, and pour boiling water on top, then heat until boiling, and keep boiling until soft. Fish out the noodles (or strain, whatever) and add the noodles to the curry. At the very end, add the soy and lime juice and serve. Badda bing.

Ingredients

Polenta (100g say)
Flour (100g say)
Eggs (3, beaten))
Salt (a teaspoon)
Baking Powder (a tablespoon)
Butter (a knob)
Milk (However much is needed)
Fresh Corn on the Cob, all the kernels cut off and retained, the cob thrown away.
Spring Onions (three or four)

Method

Mix up polenta, flour, eggs, salt, baking powder and butter. Add enough milk to make a soft sticky dough. Fry up some spring onions and the corn kernels in some olive oil, when the kernels have softened add it all to the dough and stir in. Bake in an oven for about a quarter of an hour, or until dough looks done. I made mine in muffin tins, as this will make an interesting substitute for rolls at a meal (for instance a Thanksgiving meal).

Ingredients

It is vital when cooking this recipe that you refer to it in comedy Trinidad accents. Not because we're racist, you understand. Quite the reverse. In fact it's because Pete's a racist.

2 Onions
Lots of garlic
Lots of ginger
1 Scotch Bonnet chilli (more if you're suicidal), if you're serving to normal people, you'll probably want to take the seeds out.
Some spring onions
Large bunch parsley
Large bunch coriander (or culantro, if you can get it)
Medium bunch thyme
Stewing beef
More garlic
Charlie's Famous Curry Masala
Charlie's Famous Amchoor Masala
Salt
Brown Sugar
One and a half pints of beef stock

Method

Puree the onions, garlic, ginger, chilli, spring onions, parsley, coriander (or culantro) and thyme. Add a small amount of water to make it gloopy. Chop up the beef, and mix it with the marinade you just made. Leave for a few hours. After these hours have passed, fry up the other garlic, then add the two masalas then the beef, then the salt, sugar and stock. Cover and cook gently for an hour and a half. In the last half an hour cook uncovered and turn the heat up to thicken the sauce as much as possible. Badda bing.

Ingredients

1 Cucumber, peeled and finely chopped
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
2 cloves garlic, peeled, mashed with a knife, and then pressed between the blade of the knife and the chopping board while moving the blade backwards and forwards over the garlic so that it's really just pulp, there are no lumps at all.
1 large handful of mint, finely chopped
Tub of thick Greek Yoghurt

Method

Take the chopped cucumber, sprinkle with the salt and the vinegar, stir around, then put in a sieve over a bowl and leave for an hour. This dries the cucumber out, making the tzatziki richer, and giving more texture to the cucumber. A disgusting salty green liquid should have dripped into the bowl by the end of the hour. Bin this. Throw all the rest of the ingredients (except for the yoghurt) in a bowl with the cucumber. Then slowly add yoghurt until you're happy with the consistency (I like a bare minimum of yoghurt, but some people like more).

Ingredients

500g pork fillet, cut into thin slice (the thinner the better, but there's a limit to how thin you can get with pork fillet)
Marinade:
1 tablespoon chinese light soy sauce
1 teaspoon cornflour
2 sticks lemon grass with the rough outer layers removed, and the tender inner bits, topped, tailed, and finely chopped
3 tablespoons finely chopped shallots
3 green chillies, chopped
1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon oil
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1 teaspoon Charlie's famous curry powder

Base:
Even more shallots, but this time finely sliced, not chopped. You'll need quite a few, maybe 100g.
5 tablespoons coriander leaves

Method

Mix the meat up with all the marinade ingredients and marinade for at least an hour, ideally overnight.

Heat some oil and throw in the sliced shallots. Fry until browned. Then add the meat and marinade and stir fry for about ten minutes or longer (until the pork is cooked through, basically). Throw in the coriander leaves just before serving. Don't stir. Badda bing.

Ingredients

Beef, doesn't have to be that lean, as you'll stew it for ages, but the nicer it is the nicer the stew will be, obviously.
Onions
Garlic (not much, but obviously you have to have some)
Flour
Olive Oil
Guinness Original
Beef Stock
Salt
Pepper
Marjoram
Rosemary
Chives
Thyme
Bay Leaves

Method

Cut up beef into bite-size cubes. Heat oil in wok, and in small sections, brown the meat and leave aside. In remaining juices fry onions and garlic, add some flour to mop up juices and beat it into a roue. Add the stock, guinness (go easy, too much can make it bitter), seasonings and herbs. Put in a moderate oven for an hour or so, keep topping up with guinness and stock to stop it burning. Serve with Charlie's Famous Colcannon.

Ingredients

There's not much to this recipe, but it's so nice, I wanted to put it down anyway. If you've got a good barbecue and too much money this is a great meal.

Fillet Steak (as much as you can afford)
Kikkoman Soy Sauce
Ginger
Sesame Seeds
Sesame Oil

Method

Chop the steak into large chunks. Chop the ginger and stir all together, leave for as long as you can stand it. Heat up a barbecue to incendiary level. Throw bits of the steak onto the barbecue for about a minute each side. Stuff straight into your mouth. Trust me, it's the nicest thing in the world.

Ingredients

For the pastry:
Four egg yolks
A handful of flour
About quarter of a standard butter chunk
Caster Sugar (about half the volume of the flour)

For the Filling
The egg whites of the eggs you used for the pastry
2 More eggs
Some more caster sugar
Golden Syrup
A dash of Rum
Handful of Walnuts
Punnet of strawberries, hulled and chopped in half.

Method

I first used this recipe the night John Kerry was destroyed by Dubya in the 2004 election. I blame this pie for that fateful day, but it's so sweet and delicious, I can't bear a grudge for long.

Right, you need a blender, so if you don't have one, buy one, also, pre-heat the oven to a medium temperature. Blend up the ingredients for the pastry. If it doesn't look very doughy, add more butter and keep blending. If possible, lay it aside for an hour to "settle". Then dump it into a cake tin, and smear it out over the base, and up the sides, to form a case. In a separate bowl whisk the egg whites until a bit fluffy (you don't need to go to town on this one, you just want to get a bit of froth there. Add the sugar and beat in. Then pour in the rest of the ingredients and stir up. Pour the filling into the case. Whack it into the oven, and check regularly (you need it not to be burning on top, but the filling will take a long time to stop being liquid. Use judgement. Our oven's so goddamn sucky we had to blitz it, then switch the oven off and leave the pie in the oven overnight. Pie for breakfast was good though. Badda Bing.

Ingredients

Lamb (Leg is easiest, but if you've got time, then a shoulder is doable)
Garam Masala (1 tablespoon)
Fenugreek Leaves (1 tablespoon)
Cumin Seeds, roasted if poss. (two teaspns)
Black Peppercorns (two teaspoons)
Cardamom Pods (4, split)
Black Mustard Seeds (1 teaspn)
Fenugreek Seeds (1 teaspn)
Tamarind (if you buy it dry, you have to mush it up in boiling water and then strain off all the gristle, otherwise you can buy tamarind sauce, which is really tasty on its own eaten with a spoon)
Onions, finely chopped
Garlic
Ginger
Chillies (as many as are good, I suggest 5 birds eyes)
1 Capsicum Pepper (red or green, whichever you like, I think green looks best)
Paprika (1 tablespoon)
Turmeric (2 teaspoons)
Coriander seeds, lightly ground
Tiny bit of cinnamon, ground to a powder
Ground almonds (a few tablespoons)
Dark brown sugar (1 tablespoon)

Method

This isn't really a "traditional" vindaloo, it's just a mixture of all my favourite bits of the hot, sour curries. The amount of sugar you put in at the end depends on how pungent you like it, and whether you used sweet tamarind sauce or actual tamarind.

Firstly, with lamb curries, the most important thing is to have ridiculously tender meat. The cut of the meat makes a difference, but there's absolutely no substitute at all for stewing time. You want to get the meat in the oven at least two hours before serving. To do this, chop up the meat into bite-size chunks, trying to get rid of as much fat as possible. Shove the meat in a casserole dish and cover with water, then throw in the garam masala and fenugreek leaves, this will make sure the meat actually tastes aromatic, rather than just stewed. Put this in the oven on a medium to high heat. You literally want to do this before preparing any food, I really can't stress enough that it doesn't matter if the meat's been in too long (it'll just fall apart easier, but I quite like that), but if it hasn't been in the oven for long enough it'll be tough and horrible.

Next get some oil in your wok, and heat it until it's about to catch fire, throw in the whole spices with a flourish and stir-fry for about ten seconds, then add the chopped garlic and ginger (these need a bit longer than the onion and pepper, and need to be just a little burnt to get the flavour out, so they need to go direct into the oil, rather than the pepper and onion and chillies which can sort of mooch in when the other stuff's taken the temperature down a bit), carry on stirring and frying furiously, add the tamarind, onion, peppers and chillies. Keep stirring like a maniac, eventually the peppers and onions will look like they're getting away from rawness. Throw in the ground spices and stir fry until they're smelling good. Take the lamb out of the oven and take it out of the water with a slotted spoon and throw it in the wok. Stir fry a bit more. DON'T throw the water that the lamb was in away! You then want to add some of it to the wok to make it more liquidy, and add enough ground almonds to the liquid to thicken it. You want to end up with something that's a bit more liquidy than your normal curry. Then throw in the sugar, and put the contents of the wok in another casserole and return to the oven. I find it easiest to keep hold of the leftover stock water and then top up the curry with water if I find it's getting too dry. Overall, your lamb wants to be cooking for at least two hours, but this will vary depending on how much there is, and how chunky you cut it, basically check it quite regularly.

Serve with rice, sliced bananas, poppadums, Charlie's Famous Naan Bread (coming soon), chopped cucumber and onion in lemon juice, chopped chillies, chilli sauce, and mango chutney.

Ingredients

Lots of baby aubergines
Garam Masala
Paprika
Ground Almonds
Dried Chilles
Cotton (yes, seriously, to tie the aubergines together)

Method

Mix up the garam masala, paprika and ground almonds, add some water so it's a thick paste. Cut the aubergines from bulbous base, almost to the stem, but not all the way, do this twice, crossways. This way, when you hold the aubergine by the stem, you should have it breaking off into four bits from the stem, but the whole thing should still stay together. Shove these in some water for a bit so that they splay a bit (about ten minutes). Smear the spicey paste between the "prongs" of the aubergine, and then tie some cotton around the thick end to hold the aubergines together. Heat up some oil, chuck in a few dried chillies for flavouring, and then fry the stuffed and tied aubergines in batches until they get soft. I don't normally like aubergines, but this dish makes them so damn tasty I like them.

Ingredients

Picadillo's a kind of ground beef hash. It's reeeeal tasty. Treat it like a chilli con carne, or you could use it as the basis for a pastry pie or shepherd's pie (I've got a recipe that suggests a cottage pie using sweet potatoes and allspice instead of normal potatoes, and picadillo as the filling), if you like. Normally it's made with beef, but I prefer it with lamb.

500g Coarse Ground Lamb Mince
2 Onions, chopped
1 Scotch Bonnet Pepper, seeded (this is important: I love chilli, but these things need to be handled with care. They have an incredibly strong flavour as well, so one is definitely enough)
1/2 Bulb Garlic, peeled and chopped
1 Red Pepper, chopped
4 Tomatoes, chopped
1 Bunch parsley, chopped
2 teaspoons Oregano
1 teaspoon cloves, ground
1 teaspoon cumin, ground
2 tablespoons raisins
Loads of chopped olives (4 tablespoonfuls if you want to be accurate, but don't be afraid to use more)
Salt and Pepper

Method

Heat a wok with no oil, and chuck in the mince, cook through it may stick, but be patient and it should eventually come off if you keep stirring. Once the meat has broken into granules and greyed up, you should cook it until you think no more fat is being melted off. Then strain the meat to get rid of the fat. Throw the meat back in the pan with some olive oil and the onions, chilli and garlic. Stir fry until your eyes stop stinging (this should signify that the onions have softened). Then add the rest of the ingredients. Cook for twenty minutes or so. If it gets too dry, add some water or red wine.

Ingredients

OK, you can add cheese if you want to. But as I don't like cheese, I give instructions here for preparation of a pizza without cheese, as I only recently discovered that a cheeseless pizza, if made right, is actually quite nice. Ideally you'd need a pizza stone (a flat ovenproof non-stick ceramic slab), but a baking tray with a dab of olive oil to prevent sticking will do. Whichever one you use, put a bit of cornmeal on the slab/tray to help prevent sticking and get some air to the dough underneath.

For the Dough:
2 teaspoons dried active yeast
2 tablespoons warm (shouldn't be hot to the touch, but warmer than body temperature, yeast is most productive at 50C if you want to be ludicrously accurate)
Flour
Olive Oil
Water
Honey
Sea Salt
Peppercorns, roughly ground
Garlic, chopped and briefly fried (optional)
Olives, chopped (optional)
Chillies, chopped (optional)

Some cornmeal for sprinkling on the pizza stone / baking tray

For the topping:
Tomato passata
Dried Oregano
Salt
Pepper
Whatever else you like: I used chopped red onion, capers, anchovies, thinly sliced chorizo, thick chunks of ham, chopped chillies, olives. But basically anything goes.

Method

To make the dough, mix the yeast and the water together, and leave on top of a radiator for ten minutes, take a few cups of flour, and sieve it into a bowl, add several glugs of olive oil, two large heaped, dripping tablespoons of honey, the yeast mixture (which should by now have developed a froth at the top, stir this up) and enough water to make it doughy (add it slowly, to get it right). Once it's about the right consistency (soft, yielding, elasticy) throw in the rest of the ingredients, and knead it all around with your hands, until you're satisfied that it's all mixed up nicely. Put it back in the bowl and leave this on a radiator for an hour or more, if possible. When it's ready it should have risen appreciably.

Once you've got the dough, heat the oven to 200C (400F) and, if using a pizza stone, stick that in too. On a dry, clean table, sprinkle some flour, and grab a handful of dough (the amount you've made should make three or four pizza bases, I would have thought. It depends how big you make the bases), bash it around a bit and then try to press it out into a nice circle. I don't have the dexterity to make anything even close to a circle, maybe you'llhave better luck, but it doesn't really matter, just get it as flat as you can. Now, I want you to pay attention here: you need to get whatever it is that you're baking the pizza on out of the oven first (the tray won't necessarily be in the oven yet, but as you'll be doing more than one of these, it'll be in the oven after the first go, remember to sprinkle the cornmeal on the stone before you put the dough on it each time) and put the dough on this tray/stone BEFORE you put the toppings on the dough. It's easy to get the dough on the stone without toppings. It's basically impossible if you've naively put the toppings on first like I did the first time I tried this. Once you've got your dough on spoon some tomato passata on so and smoosh it around so it covers all the dough, no matter how thinly. Watch out for burning your hands on any exposed stone ./ tray. Then add any toppings that you feel like. If you're one of those weird people who likes cheese, you can add some of this as well. When you're satisfied with how your pizza looks (I like to make shapes in the pizza with olives, sometime they say "C" for "Charlie") shove it in the oven for twenty minutes or so (until the pizza appears to be done). Eat it as soon as it comes out of the oven, and then if you're doing this with someone else, they can have the fun of making their pizza on the recently vacated pizza stone or baking tray (or I suppose you could be sophisticated and have two trays) while you chow down on yours.

Ingredients

Now, normally I'm not a fan of Kormas. Certainly the Korma's I've tasted in restaurants have often been soured, and end up just tasting cheesy. However, I do very occasionally cook mild food, and I think a good, thick Chicken Korma can be really nice. The main thing to remember is just to make sure you cook it real slowly, and to check it regularly to avoid overcooking.

You'll need:
Chicken Breasts, chopped
Large, mild onions
Garlic
Ginger
Cashew Nuts
Coriander leaves
Salt
Paprika
Turmeric
Coriander seeds, roasted and ground
Cummin seeds roasted and ground
Cardamom pods, roasted and ground
Cinnamon stick
A couple of mint leaves.
Yoghurt
Single Cream
Saffron
Milk (a couple of tablespoonsful)

Method

First, blend onions, garlic, ginger, coriander leaves and salt to form a paste. Stir fry this until the onions lose their raw taste (this may take a while, and you're best off doing it on medium heat rather than scorching, as it could burn). Add the spices and slowly cook for about ten minutes. Add Chicken pieces, and continue cooking slowly. Warm the milk, and add the saffron to it. Leave for a bit until the milk has turned a good, yellow colour. Add the saffron milk, the yoghurt and cream. Place in a moderate to cool oven. Check very regularly. Serve when chicken no longer pink on inside. Badda bing.

Ingredients

I've been getting into Ayurvedic cookery recently. It sounds very faddy, but it's basically just a large branch of vegetarian Indian cookery. It's probably the nicest vegetarian food I've ever tasted, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to the most committed carnivore.

2 cup Basmati Rice
Ghee (half and half oil and butter if you can't find any ghee)
1/2 cup sliced almonds
salt
Potato (cut into very thin sticks)
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 dried red chilli
1 red pepper
1 courgette, diced
2.5 cups water (basically double the volume of rice plus a bit)
1/2 cup ground almonds
salt and pepper
1 teaspoon garam masala
2 diced carrots
handful green beans, topped, tailed and cut into smaller pieces
handful frozen peas
roughly chopped coriander for garnish

Method

Put the rice in a sieve and soak in water for twenty minutes or so. Take the sieve and the rice out of the water, and drain for a bit. It doesn't matter that the rice will still be wet when it gets added to the pan. Heat the ghee in a wok and fry the sliced almonds until they go a nice brown colour. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside. Chuck in the potato and briskly stir fry until soft. Remove and put with the sliced almonds (they'll get added at the end together). If necessary add some more ghee if the potatoes soaked up all of the ghee in the pan. heat the ghee, then throw in the cumin seeds and chilli, cook for a bit until you can smell the cumin, then add the courgette, pepper, and the rice, fry until the rice looks a bit shiny (maybe two minutes). Add the water, ground almonds, garam masala and bring to the boil. Add the salt, pepper, carrots and beans. Reduce the heat right down, stir then cover and slow cook for about half and hour. Check periodically to check that the rice hasn't dried out and add more water if necessary. At the end of this, get the frozen peas, and run some hot water through them in a sieve to get the chill off them, and add them, together with the reserved potatoes and almonds to the rice, stir, and heat for a few more minutes before throwing the coriander over the rice and serving. Badda bing.

Ingredients

For the Chicken:
Chicken Breasts
Soy Sauce
Honey
Sesame Oil
Garam Masala
Turmeric

For the dipping sauce:
Sesame oil
Spring onions, chopped
Garlic, chopped
Ginger, chopped
Chillies, chopped
Soy Sauce
Coconut cream
Crunchy peanut butter (lots)

Method

Mix chicken ingredients, leave for hours.
Fry spring onions, ginger, garlic, and chillies in sesame oil, then add rest of ingredients.
Cook chicken, preferably over the barbecue, otherwise in the oven.

Badda Bing

Ingredients

Oil and ghee, if possible
4 Green Chillies, chopped
Ginger, chopped
Garlic, chopped
Onion (half, chopped)
Tomato (chopped)
Yellow lentils (masoor dhal), soaked in twice dry volume of water, retain water
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon turmeric

Method

Heat oil and ghee until hot, add chillies, ginger and garlic, fry until aromatic, add onions, and add salt and turmeric, then reduce heat, when onions are soft, add the chopped tomato. Cook until sloppy, then add lentils. Cook slowly for ten minutes and serve. Badda bing.

Ingredients

This gluttonous recipe is named after my gluttonous cooking partner, MANT. Inspired by the even-richer Steak Rossini, its secret lies in the fact that everyone thinks tuna wouldn't stand up to fillet steak on the same plate, but as usual, everyone else is wrong, and I am right.

Small piece beef fillet, the rounder and softer, the better
A paper-thin slice of tuna steak (this is tricky, you'll need an unbelievably sharp knife)
Ginger, chopped
Soy
Brown sugar
Shaosing rice wine

Method

Press, but don't bash, the steak so it's a bit flatter. In two separate bowls, marinade the steak and the tuna in the rest of the ingredients. The tuna will not need cooking. The steak will need to be shown a griddle or barbecue for about 10 seconds before being deposited on a plate and left to cool. Once cool, put the tuna slice on and serve. Badda bing, incredibly expensive, bloody, gluttonous heaven.