I wanted to brag about the pizza I just ate but I don't have a photo cos my phone is a bag of shit.

But you know what food looks like, right? Imagine that. Or yo could imagine my smug, smug face after eating pizza in my freezing office today.

When I got up this morning I realised I'd forgotten to sort out anything for lunch (usually it's left overs, but last night I had leftover soup so, no leftovers). For mere mortals this might have been a crisis, but as I am a demi-god genius-type I completely took it in my stride. There happened to be one of those part-bake baguettes lying around. That sucker got sliced down the middle, tomato puree spread across it with mixed herbs on top. What's more is the other day I bought some of those Tofutti mozerella slices for the first time in years. A couple of those on top, sliced up a pepper, chucked that stuff in the oven and went for a shower.

I totally cooked my lunch whilst bathing.

I also had an orange pepper and an apple for lunch cos fruit is good and tasty an' shit.

Butternut Squash Soup

It's true, if you want to make a perfect soup you will need to to be careful, you can use ingredients in such a nuanced, and in such combinations that will impress guests and make all the effort worthwhile. However, it;s super-mega easy to make a reasonable soup, and I am nothing if not reasonable, right?

I paid pretty much no attention whatsoever to what I was doing when making this soup, the ingredients are from my vague memory, but it was only last night so I think I'm pretty much right. It's not like I used much stuff.

Soup is pretty hard to fuck up. My one piece of soup advice would be don;t blend beans (unless you like vomit-texture in yr soup).

[MOTHERFUCK! My phone refused to tweet the photo then cold deleted it! I've written this now so yr getting the post. DEAL WITH IT]

2 small butternut squash
1 small onion
3 cloves garlic
Paprika
Oregano
Parsley

Hella buttload black pepper

Some salt

You can use stock if you want, just leave out the salt.

Normally I would recommend frying off the onion/garlic but I didn't do that last night cos I am WELL MENTAL, me. Lazy, I meant lazy.

Heat some water in a pan, but in yr peeled & chopped butternut squash, let it simmer away.
Dice yr onion, slice yr garlic, they go in too.
Also yr herbs and seasoning.
Let it simmer away for a while, then turn the heat off.

Once it's cooled you can blend* it nice & smooth, add more water/stock if needed.

After that you will need a sofa and a spoon. If yr swanky use a bowl too, if not you can eat straight out of the pan. Some bread is probably more important than a bowl, though. If you have to pick one, go for bread.


*I use a blender similar to this one. I prefer the stick-type ones to the jug ones cos you can blend pretty much as little or as much as you need with the sticks, you can't blend a massive pan with a 1.5 litre jug, eh?
PS
Didja look at the photo? I garnished that shit. Yeah, I did.

Perpetually Underwhelming

Got rice?

Got any kind of veg whatsoever?

Got a pan?

Got oil?

You got a stiry fry, motherfucker.

Pretty much every time I cook rice I make at least one extra portion so I can keep it in the fridge and use it a day or two later. It's pretty good cos it means when yr hungry and lazy you have something available in the same amount of time it takes to make toast that isn't toast. Yeah!

And yes, I AM about to tell you how to make a stir fry as if you didn't already know. I'll let you in to a secret: Many, many years ago (but when I was old enough to really have known better) I genuinely did not know how to fry rice. I'm not sure, but I may even have attempted it without boiling the rice first. Seriously.

Nowdays we all have the internet hardwired into our medulla oblongatas, so we just need to have a vague awareness of what fried rice might be and the information could be explained a thousand different ways through fibre optics, but back then people were still dicking about with Napster and Yahoo Groups (And worse, people were still Asking Jeeves).

It's my opinion that a wok really will help with this kind of thing. Woks are good, buy a wok.

Heat yr wok, put some oil in, no one cares what kind.

Slice or dice an onion, chuck it in.

Slice or mince some garlic, chuck it.

Peel some root ginger, bash it with the flat side of a large-ish knife (always use larger rather than smaller knifes, you've got more control with a larger knife and you can still use it to cut small shit, okay?)

Slice a chilli, keep the seeds if you like things hot.

Stir everything up in yr pan. Heat is good.

What veg do you have? I had carrots, green peppers & tomatoes, so that's what went in. Cut it up however you damn well like. Things that also work well are mushrooms, water chestnuts, cucumber, beansprouts, leafy things, courgettes, broccoli, mange tout, peas.. you get the idea.

Throw yr chopped veg in, stir shit some more.

Throw some soya sauce about. It's fun.

There are all sorts of exciting things you can add to stir fries to make them more interesting, but if you had the kind of forethought to buy plum sauce or mangoes or red bean paste or black bean sauce you wouldn't be reading this, would you?

That picture up there also has fake chicken in it cos that's what's in the freezer. Tofu obviously works very well, peanuts, cashews, mock duck/beef... or just veg is cool.

I had some pre-cooked brown basmati so that shit got thrown in too. Just make sure everything is heated up properly and yr golden.

Throw it in a bowl, mayb introduce it to some sweet chilli sauce if you happen to find some in th eback of the cupboard.

Eat with yr face.

Now aren't you glad you had that rice in the fridge? Stir fried veg on toast is just weird, guy.

Beetroot Burgers

So, I have been eyeing up this recipe on the Post Punk Kitchen for what seems like forever. Beetroot is something I am always kinda confused by, I just don't know what to do with it so it either gets thrown in a stew or grated into a salad and that's about it.

I wound up with some beetroot, I had some brown rice, so I was all "yeah, fuck'n DO IT!" But, being the feckless wonder that I am, I didn't print off the recipe, and didn't bother fannying about on my not-very-smart phone. I guess I went commando on that shit.

And guess what? I forgot half the ingredients and fucked it all up. So take this for what it is, a cautionary tale. The result was edible, but just LOOK at how awesome that recipe looks. Follow the actual recipe, knobhead.

It looked alright, though:

I'm not even going to tell you what I actually put in the burgers because a) you'll know exactly how badly I fucked up, and b) You might for some idiot reason attempt to recreate my recipe and that would be [i]bad[/i], okay? Just follow the original.

Even though it's winter I had my burgers with salad (as you can see). this is partly because I am super lazy and couldn't be bothered to oven* anything after I'd sort-of concentrated on screwing up this recipe, and partly because I had already inhaled an entire packet of Choccie Dodgers when I got in from work. Incidentally, don't buy Choccie Dodgers, they are just shit, extra dry bourbons and you will feel even more gluttonous, hollow, and pathetic after eating a whole pack of those in one sitting than you would with the bourbons. And bourbons are cheaper, anyway. And you get more in a pack.

Oh, and if yr interested, the salady bits are:

Grated carrot

Diced tomatoes

Diced green pepper

Sliced avodaco

Generic cheapo dressing

*Yeah, that's right, I used 'oven' as a verb. Go shit yrself, dicksplash.

Stuff w/ salad


So Monday was another fucking Monday with the crushing realisation that every day this week will be another Monday. When I finally got home after an abortive trip to the library (I'd forgotten my card, their system was down so they couldn't find me details) I wanted something very simple to put in my face, to fill the void where my screams echo through my stupid body. Shut up, insides! I am going to numb you with STUFF! Go away!

Normally on a day like this I would make the most garlic bread you have ever SEEN and keep eating til breathing is virtually impossible. Unfortunately I had no bread (or even flour) or margarine. So I actually had to make something.

A while ago I was feeling a bit optimistic and ordered all this organic veg from a local scheme. It's mostly sitting in one of those flimsy sort-of-wooden crates on the kitchen table mocking me. "Hey, Ray you fuck-knuckle!" It taunts "thought could keep yr shit together long enough to make something nutritious and delicious with this shit, didja." I want to leave the room, but I know the burning embarrassment I will feel when I have to surreptitiously re-enter the kitchen later, that I won't be able to make it to the cupboard to sneak out a tin of something, anything (I think there are some jelly beans in there) to eat without that fucking flimsy sort-of-wooden crate noticing and calling me out once more. "Oh, it's you again, dicktard! Back with your tail between you legs, are you? You BADGER TWAT!" as I feel the tiny little fires under my skin and the lump in my throat I get when I am so mortally flustered.

I had no choice. I called that motherfucking flimsy sort-of-wooden crate out on its shit! FUCK YOU, flimsy sort-of-wooden crate! I am calling you on your shit! I will fuck up your contents REAL FUCKING BAD.

So on Monday 3rd December 2012, when it was maybe just above freezing point in Birmingham, in my cold flat with woefully inefficient heating, I decided to make a salad.

I chopped up some kale, (not curly kale, other kale, it;s nice) and sliced up half an avocado, sliced up a tomato, considered onion but just could quite push myself that far, then I tossed it with some ancient dressing I found in the fridge.

But even I thought to myself that salad on a fucking freezing Monday is no good at all. That is in no way a substitute for half a ton of garlic bread. SO I pocked about in the freezer and found some sad looking very-much-leftover Asda's own oven chips. Straight in the oven with those bastards. I also found some posh fake chicken that I had completely forgotten I'd bought on pay day.

In absolute desperation I searched for absolutely anything to go with it. I found something. Sort of. I threw some soya milk in a pan, added salt & pepper, then threw in a large handful of yeast flakes. Yeast flakes make everything better. I tried to cook it down in to a sauce, but I didn't have (or at least didn't have the inclination to search for and hence discover that I didn't have) anything to thicken it up with, just a little cornflour would have saved me at that point. If I had some mustard to put in there too, I reckon I'd have had a pretty decent oh-my-god-I-just-need-food-fuck-off-world sauce. But I didn't, so I didn't.

I threw the fake chicken in the pan, wit til it was cooked through and spooned a runny-as-fuck savoury chicken something sauce on to my plate, with the I-DARE-YOU salad and some sad Asda oven chips. I ate it, it was never going to win any prizes, but I didn't vom one bit.

Here's what it looked like:

Now either bring me all the garlic bread or leave me alone.

Beans and stuff.

So, I completely fucked up my finances this month. Mostly because I booked a trip to Madrid for Xmas. So yeah, it is entirely my fault but for some reason I didn't figure I would be quite this broke. Pay day is still 11 days away.

If it weren't for the fact that I haven't posted in AGES I wouldn't even entertain the idea of making this public. It's suspiciously similar to the chilli post, hence pretty much soul-destroying. The major difference is that I was expecting this to be rubbish but it is GODDAMNED tasty.

I actually made a couple of decent meals over the weekend. I forgot to take a photo of one (Sweet & sour mock duck) and seem to have lost the photo of the other (baked tofu w/ sweet potato wedges, asparagus & salsa) so yeah, tits to that.

I was looking through my cupboard last night after getting home from a loooooong Monday, and there wasn't much in there that I thought I could turn in to anything exciting. So I resigned my self to brown rice with *something*. A tin of black beans got chosen for no real reason, I picked out some tomato puree and figured we were heading in the chilli direction again. I went to the fridge to get an onion and Lo! for there was still some salsa that needed using.

So yeah, I sautéed the onion, threw in a chopped green pepper, a chopped chilli & some tomato purée. I added a little bit of water & simmered, then threw in the salsa. It looked like this:

So I guess you wanna know what was in the salsa? You won't be surprised to learn I wasn't really paying attention when I made it, but it was something along these lines:

1x onion
1x green pepper
1x red chilli
2x medium tomatoes
Some fresh coriander
Bit of salt
Fresh black pepper
Slug of rice wine vinegar (I didn't have any lime or anything)

Yup. Just chop shit up and yr done! I stuck mine in a jug and gave it a couple of seconds with the hand blender. I probably put a little bit of water in too. This salsa was pretty tasty, but not very hot. Obviously you need to beware of how hot yr chillies are, and remember, you can put more in, but you can't take it out.

So this is what it all looked like at work today:

It looks really rubbish, but I PROMISE you it is was so super-tasty!

I realise this post is devoid of usual incisive humour and elegant profanity. I am not some sort of perfoming monkey, shitbag, deal with it.

(Seriously though, I'll try to be more usual, pricktard self for the next post, k?)

Even I am Embarrassed by This One

Looks shit, dunnit? It tasted alright though. If you can;t tell, this is a bowl of chilli with corn bread muffins. It actually tasted pretty good (and didn't look so bad in the flesh) but I was too hungry at the time to give a shit about how badly this photo might turn out.

I feel stupid typing up how to make a chilli, but I have been so rubbish at updating this week that I will force myself to do this as punishment.

What's in it?

Chilli

1x tin Back eye beans

1x tin Cannellini beans

1x tin Chopped tomatoes

150g Mushrooms

1x Llarge-ish onion

2x Large cloves garlic

1x Green Pepper

1x tsp Chilli Powder (more is okay, but if yr sharing w/ other don't be a dick)

1x tsp Oregano

1x hella buttload Cumin

1x tblsp tomato puree (optional)

Some stock ( I used Vecon)

Black Pepper

oil

I would also have maybe put in sweet potato if I had some. And peas cos peas are rad.

How to

I feel stupid typing up how to make a chilli, but I have been so rubbish at updating this week that I will force myself to do this as punishment.

-Oil/pan heat - use a big pan, the pan is never too big, okay?

- Add chopped onion & crushed garlic, stir til onion is translucent

- Add chopped tomatoes & stock (I just put the stock straight in and add extra water as/when needed), and powdered things.

-Simmer this for as long as you can be arsed, put in some tomato puree if you think you need it

- Add beans & mushrooms for a few mins, then pepper a few mins before yr ready to eat.

Corn Bread

150g Corn meal

1/2-1 tsp Baking powder

I dunno how much water, enough to make it kinda batter-y, yeah?

Seasoning 

- Put yr oven on about 200C, grease a muffin tray

- Make a batter with corn meal, water, seasoning . you can put pretty much anything you like in there. If you add some kinda fat it will probably be tastier.

- Stir baking powder in at the last minute.

- cook til they're done, maybe 15, 20 mins?

Put all the stuff on some kinda bowl so shit doesn't go all over the fucking floor, then sit down and eat it all with your face.

I made enough chilli to feed about 3 household, I made enough corn bread for about 3 people. Chilli freezes, and even if you can't be arsed to freeze it stays goof for 3 days or so.

I am gonna eat some left over chilli pretty much right now, but not with cornbread, oh no, I am gonna eat chilli with rice & peas. Get the fuck in.

Hopefully the recipe next time will something funner/tastier/less fucking obvious. We shall see.

(The photo will be just as shit though, obviously)

And this is what it looked like w/ rice for lunch today