Best beef stew you will ever fucking have.

 So many hundreds of years ago I used to work for this chain of Belgian pubs. On the menu there was this crazy fucking delicious Belgian beef stew thing that is cooked for days in beer and all sorts of mind-numbing deliciousness. It lives in my dreams. I wake up at 4am wanting it. I think about it when I'm in the shower. It will always be with me, this stew. I ate it on mashed potatoes, great gleaming, lumpen piles of it cascading down a mountain of fries, in sandwiches, off the chests of exquisite boys after a million beers, it was incredible. A thing worthy of going to great trouble for. But in actuality, it is not a great trouble. It is a great joy. Time consuming, yes, but taking some care and being mindful of each step of this journey towards fucken greatness is a privilege in and of itself. This is good food. This is not impressive food or complicated food. This is really simple peasant food. This is letting good ingredients speak for themselves. And oh jesus, you get some good things together and sling them into a casserole and let it cook for a day and them bitches will sing.

Here.

Get a couple of cups of flour. I had 1.5kg/about 3 pounds for you American fuckwits of beef. I got chuck. That's what we call it here. I don't know what the hell else you'd call it. Anyway, your problem, not mine.

Cut your beef into 1cm slices. Doesn't really matter how long they are, but you don't want them too thick at all is the thing.

Get your flour, stick it in a biggish bowl, and season it well with salt and pepper.

Oil and butter. Remember the thing? Go for a ratio of 1/3 oil to 2/3 butter. You want quite a bit here, enough to cover the bottom of the pan almost 1cm deep. When the butter foam subsides, give it another minute or so to make sure, and then it will definitely be hot enough to use. A bit higher than a flat-out medium heat is required here. Medium and a bit.

Dip the beef strips in the seasoned flour a few at a time. Do this as you go. Don't do them all at the start or they'll go sticky.

Put a few beef strips in in a well-spaced single layer and give them a good searing, about a minute or two on the first side before flipping them and doing it again on the other.

This is the colour you want.

You do *not* want to overcrowd the pan. The temperature will drop, the water will come out of the beef, they will stew and go soggy, and you may as well dump everything you've just bought for this in the bin and go cry in your bedroom for a while as you eat the shameful 2$ a box discount chocolates you keep in your sock drawer because you an impatient bitch who cannot read. This step took me almost an hour and a half. I had a lot of beef to sear. Though, look. It was an entirely pleasurable experience. I didn't have anywhere to be, I was listening to some pimp-ass music, I had Facebook open on the bench, and I just took my sweet time doing what had to be done. The house smelled amazing, I was just floating around in the kitchen browning my beefs like a bawss and it was actually pretty awesome. The experience does not have to be unpleasant. Time consuming does not have to be a pain in your ass. If your attitude is good, then you can actually have a bit of fun while you're doing it. Life is not that bad, so shut the fuck up and enjoy yourself.

As each batch browns, remove them to a plate, again in a single layer. They'll be hot, right, so they'll be steaming. If you just dump them into a bowl like a gauche cunt then they'll steam all over each other and become soggy and back to your shameful sock-chocolate for you.

If you need to replenish your fats, do so. If the heat is at the proper setting, it will not burn, but the flours and meat juices will caramelise into a pan full of dizzy-making flavour. So you want to keep all of it in there. Just add more butter and oil as you need to, keeping that ratio the same.

By the time each layer cooks, the previous layer will have cooled, so you can then dump them into some kind of vessel as you go along.

When they are all done, move on to the bacon. Also scrape all that delicious caramelised buttery goodness the beef was searing in into the vessel.

 There are six slices here that I just cut up.

Just until all they colour a bit.

When the bacon is done, you don't have to wash the pan, just dump in some butter-oil and do your mushrooms. Slice them thinly and do them in a single layer also. Make sure the butter is hot. If it is not, then they will drink that shit up faster than Elizabeth Taylor and you'll just have to add more. If it is hot enough, they will actually cook in it. Until they brown a bit. Then into the vessel with them. I just used a couple of handfuls here. The thing about this is that quantities are absolutely unnecessary. 

Onions. There are one and a half onions in this pan. The other half I didn't feel like using and it is currently languishing on the windowsill curling up and going dry while I pretend I will use it later. Same butter/oil ratio. Don't put any salt in the pan because these are good if they colour a bit and go ever so slightly golden and crispy. Put plenty of black pepper in them at the end. Julia Child taught my dad to do onions in this way when they somehow knew each other in the sixties or seventies. I know, right. My dad was legendary, sorry bout it.

Dump the beef, onions, and bacon back into the pan and give it a good stir around so everything combines sexily.

Then shove it back in the casserole and dump about 600mls of hot beef stock over the whole thing with a whole 400ml or whatever can of Guinness

Give a stir.

Strew a fucktonne of fresh thyme over it, bang on a lid, and let that sit in the oven at about 150 for a good 4 or 5 hours.

Then it will look like this.

Eat it however you want. On anything. In anything. I crammed it into pies.

Just call me Mrs fucking Lovett.

Churr

Roasted duck legs and potatoes

Was craving this shit HARD last night, so on my way home this morning after doing a thing, I went past Sabato (the amazing shop I got that sweet chilli sauce from ages ago) and got some duck legs. This is a piece of piss and almost makes me want to weep with joy. You don't have to do *anything* to this at all and it will make you shed tears of greedy happiness. Another one I pinched from Nadge <3

Turn the oven onto 200 degrees, no fan.

Potatoes.

Duck legs.

Put the roasting tin (use one with sides) directly onto the element with the heat on medium high with no fat in it and slam the legs skin side down on it for a couple of minutes. You don't want it to colour too much, just get it crisping a little bit and get a teeny bit of that fat rendered out. Maybe two minutes.

Meanwhile, slice your potatoes. Thick slices, then quarter/halve them so they're about the same size, depending on how big they are. Eh. It's not a science. Just roll with it. Though if they're too small they'll dehydrate as you roast them. You'll figure it out. About that big. How many? Enough to fill the tray.

Meanwhile flip the bird. Some fat will have leaked out by now. This is the fabulous thing about rakiraki.

Shove the potatoes in the tray next to the legs and salt the whole thing fucking well. Like *fucking* well. This is how everything is going to crisp up, so don't be a heart foundation bitch.

Shove it in the oven at 200 for an hour and a half to two hours depending on how crunchy you like your potatoes. The fat will keep the duck utterly fucking luscious and crisp up the potatoes gloriously. Don't touch it. You don't have to do a god damn thing. No turning, no nothing.

That's it. Now you can just drag those chips through some mayo and eat it all with your fingers.

churrr

Lemon Cadbury Desserts inspired cheesecake.

Sorry this is a bit later than I expected to write it tonight. There was laser tag. And then there was Thai food. I maintain that I've had some of my best eating standing up in the kitchen, and that is how we did it. Om nom nom.

So I dunno how many of you guise may know what the fuck I'm talking about here, but Cadbury chocolate came up with a range of chocolate bars a while ago called Desserts. In this range, there is/was a Lemon Meringue Pie flavour and it is fucking delicious. It has this amazing dense yellow lemony filling in it, and I was thinking about it somehow when I was roasting myself in the tanning bed the other day and was like 'HOLY FUCK WHAT ABOUT MAKING A CHEESECAKE VERSION'. I wanted a really dense, creamy texture, so it necessitated a baked cheesecake as opposed to a set one. I wanted it to be fucking scarily bright yellow, and luckily I had some saffron left over from whoever the amazing bitch was who sent me some saffron on the Secret Santa sly over Christmas. And I wanted it to be extremely chocolatey, which would require a thick, thick layer of ganache over the top and also an unnecessarily chocolatey base.

And oh my god, it worked. So well. You gotta try this shit. So. You will need.

Base:

A packet of Double Coat Tim Tams or 200gms of whatever chocolate covered chocolate biscuit geography allows you.
40gm butter

Filling:

750gm of cream cheese
200gm sugar
4 eggs
2 egg yolks
120ml lemon juice
300gm milk chocolate
250ml sour cream

Get your bickies and and blitz them to fuck in the processor. Alternately, if you don't have one, put them in a freezer bag and pound them with a rolling pin until they are dust. Then combine the resulting moist crumbs (cuz the bickies have the creme filling in them, see) in the processor/mixing bowl with the butter which you will have melted, until it is all sort of like wet sand. Don't eat it or you won't have enough base. Fatty.

Tip it out unto a 20cm tin.

 Knuckle that shit down and put it in ze fridge.

Get your cream cheese which you will have previously brought to room temperature with the time-honoured KF method of soaking that shit (still in its packet, don't be a dick) in some hottish water for about an hour in a mixing bowl. By the time it cools down to tepid it should be at the right temperature to work with.

Shove it in your processor or whatever and give it a whir to soften it up.

Throw 200gm of sugar at it. I am trying to teach myself how much things weigh in cup measurements so, 200gm of sugar is actually a cup. So dump that in.

Stirry stir

A fucktonne of eggs are required for this cheesecake due to the amount of lemon juice you're going to put in it to flavour it, so don't balk. It might seem like a lot, and it is, but it's necessary, so shut up and do what you're told because there's a fucking reason. As you make more cheesecakes yourself you will begin to get a feel to what sort of ratio of cream cheese/eggs/sour cream if you're going to use it/flavouring liquid components to use. This is hugely satisfying to attain, actually, and after I think maybe a year of fairly solid cheesecake making I've finally gotten there. This may sound like a self-satisfied boast, and it is, but it is fucking awesome to be able to go 'I'mma make a cheesecake' and not really have to look at a recipe any more. The only vehicle I've used to get to this place, meanwhile, is repetition, so though I may go on about that shit a lot, here it is, case in point. If I can do it, fuck, so can you.

ANNNNNNNYWAY. Eggs. Just separate your extra yolks out by breaking the eggs into your hand. If you want to save the whites for pavlova or something for later just break them into a mug lined with a freezer bag and freeze it for laters.

Or else you can just do it over the sink like a whore like I do.

Eggs.

Blend.

Now juice your lemons into it, I used.. four little lemons on the premise that each lemon would have about 30ml of juice in them. Give it another whir.

Now this is optional and you don't have to do it, but I soaked a fat pinch of saffron in about 30ml of hot water for about ten minutes.

After straining it, drizzle it in to the processor as it's on. It's actually revoltingly sexy to do.

Now cover the bottom of the tin with a layer of clingfilm or gladwrap or saran wrap or whatever you call it. This is a new trick in my water bathing repertoire. Just a layer, and then bunch it up the sides. Then do the same with a single layer of tin foil being careful not to tear it. This is the simplest way I've ever tried to waterproof a tin, and it's actually given me the best result. Who the fuck knew.

Pour your fucking science-fiction yellow cheesecake filling into the tin.

And then fill the tin to almost but not quite close to the top of your tin-foil lining of your cake tin with hot water. This is where your brain should kick in. If it's too full, it'll get in, and your cheesecake will be fucking wet, won't it? Think, please. 

Anyway chuck it in the middle rack of the oven at 170 for about 45 minutes, then start checking it. 

Meanwhile, saffron also stains the fuck out of your fingers. Let it touch NOTHING.

You want it to look set, but still sort of jiggly underneath. Key word is 'set' here, not 'cooked'. A bit of sexy wobble here is infinitely desirable.

Now. Chocolate.

Sling it into a pot with your sour cream and have that shit on low. Stir it constantly. Put the heat on 3 o'clock.

Stop eating it.

When it's melted, spread it over the top of your cheesecake.

Also unwrap it.

Now put it in the fridge for maybe four hours. You could get away with slicing it after 2 or 3, but it will still be quite soft you greedy fuck. Leave it alone.

Then you can de-tin it.

Actually the best motherfucking cheesecake I've ever made. So happy with it.

Chur.

Chocolate tart from hell.

So pastry at its most basic is pretty much a quantity of flour with half its weight in butter bound by a liquid. You can play with this. Like, sweet pastry will have sugar as part of that weight. You can use juice as the liquid. Savoury pastry can have herbs or cheese or chilli or whatever in it. It's actually a glorious thing, pastry. It's a pity I HATE MAKING IT SO FFFFFFFFFFFFUCKING MUCH.

Ohh god, pastry. I procrastinate so hard when it comes to making pastry. Which is bullshit, because I own a food processor. It's the rolling I can't handle. It sticks to my bench. It sticks to my hands. No flouring of bench or bowl of iced water for plunging of hands is ever enough. It goes everywhere. It gets on my clothes. It breaks into pieces. It is ridiculous, because it is so fucking easy to make. It is actually one of the simplest things ever to do. This is nothing to do with anyone's ability. It is just that the pastry god hates me. My hands are too warm. My bench is too sticky (after repeated sprays, wipes, drying with various cloths, dusting with a million, a lot, a little, or no flour). I have tried all the things, and concluded that this is something that is only going to get easier for me through plain old hair-tearing, ball-siezing, taint-throbbing, anus-twitching, jaw-clenching, hyphen-using repetition. Through this, and this alone, will I develop the feeling for it, and develop my own intuition. So I do it as often as I can. Which, admittedly, lately, is hardly ever. But if something is hard for you it just means you have to do it moar until it just becomes another thing that you do, like making custard and hollandaise is for me already.

SO TO YOU, PASTRY GODS, I THUMB MY NOSE. YOU WILL NEED -

-300gm flour

-120gm icing sugar

-175gm butter

-1 egg

-1tsp lemon juice (or more, depending on fate)

Now this is actually a food processor method for making pastry which I am doing by hand instead, so this is why it looks a bit fucked up. Purists, once again, can piss off. My food processor currently still has busted coffee beans in it from that attempt I made a few weeks ago at grinding my own coffee cuz it was either whole beans or shitty ground stuff from the dairy, and I am still too angry at the whole situation to have looked at the thing since then. So by hand it is.

Meanwhile, measure out your sugar with your sexy new Nigella Lawson measuring cups.

Dice the butter in.

And cream that shit together with a stout wooden spoon. This is the simplest but most effective kitchen toy you will ever have so make sure you have one. All the toys in the world actually can't compete with a decent mixing bowl and a grunty motherfucker wooden spoon that won't snap as you beat a dough/child with it.

This is about right. I belong to the 'Two Fat Ladies' school of creaming. As soon as you feel you need to sit down and have a drink and a cigarette, you've done enough.

Crack the egg in.

And spritz in your juice. As you can see I am using plastic lemon because my actual lemons had somehow disappeared and I cbf walking over to the dairy.

Sift in your flour.

And stir it, pressing it against the sides of the bowl until it just starts to come together in big clumps. Some people would wrap it in plastic here and put it in the fridge for half an hour. That can and does help. With *this specific pastry* though, it makes utterly fuck-all difference so please don't write in.

This is where every single thing you've ever done in your negative Karmic record comes back to bite you gloriously in the scrotum/flaps. This moment here. This is where you will either throw your head back and howl raw and bloody at the sky, or have no problem at all, purely dependent on how much the pastry gods feel like fucking with you at the minute.

Flour the fuck out of your bench. Like. Flour the *fuck*. Out. Of. Your. Bench. You'll think it's too much. It's not. It's never, ever too much.

Thud.

Flour the fucking rolling pin. Seriously. Or the pastry will try to make love to it and your day will be utterly fucked. 

Roll it out to about half a centimetre thick. Have your oven at 180c.

If you are a bawss here, you can do that fucking amazing trick where you roll it over your rolling pin and then drape it, lovingly, over and into your tart tin. Here is where it stuck to the bench so irrevocably and irreparably that what I actually did (and lets face it, always have done) is peel it off the bench in strips, quickly, so my hands don't melt the butter, and press it into my tart case in bits because fuck it.

When you have the pastry in the tin whichever way the fuck life dictates to you, stick some baking paper in it, put a layer of dried lentils or split peas or rice or something in it. Doesn't matter what it is. You just want it to be dry and slightly heavy. Just a thin layer. This just weights it down as it bakes. The correct term is 'blind baking' for some reason. About 15-20 minutes? Maybe less. Maybe more. Depends on your oven. Just keep checking it.

After the edges start to colour, take it out, remove the paper and the peas, and then stick it back in for 5 minutes or so to dry it out a bit more. And there! Tart case! Boom!

Turn your oven down to 110c.

Now go cry in the shower for a while while it cools a little and then you can get on with the filling. Now this is the shit I know how to do. It's pretty much a sexy, dark, soft-set chocolate custard/ganache hybrid. I don't think there's anything I can improve about that at all.

You will need!

600gm dark, dark chocolate. 72% pl0x. I use Whittaker's. You should too if you can get it.
900ml of cream
100gm of sugar
good vanilla
2 eggs

This part, thankfully, is a piece of absolute piss and makes the previous pastry-hell all worthwhile.

Cream. Pot. Medium heat.

Sugar.

Vanilla. As much as you want. I actually put about a tablespoon here. You are dealing with gutsy flavours.

 Chop up your chocolate and have it in a large bowl waiting. When the creamy goodness is hot but not at all boiling, just pour it over the chocolate, go take a slash or something, then come back and start stirring. Then you will have a bowl of Isaac Hayes tinted sex.

Shaft.

 Beat the eggs a little just to addle the whites and the yolks and chuck them in, whisking as you go.

I don't have words for this step. Just follow the photograph. Feel free to rub one out.

fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

Now bake it for about 40 minutes at 110. It should be still quite wobbly when you take it out. You'll think it won't be done, but it will be. When you jiggle it, it will almost bounce back and forth in the dish, like an enormous boob, or so I imagine. Who knows what boobs actually look like?

Then just take it out and fridge it for about 3 or 4 hours. Then you're good to go. You will need to eat this with some cream or all the skin will peel off the inside of your mouth from the incredible chocolatey intensity of this bitch. She will actually melt your fucking face.

Meanwhile, this was so hard to photograph, the final product. No matter how I tried, it all just ended up looking like various kinds of turd.

Turd.

 Turd.

Turd.

Skidmark.

But I don't care at all because I have 3 happy fags in the house with me all squealing about how fucking delicious this tart is so FUCK YOU PASTRY GODS

churrrr