Categories
Food Inane Banter

My Name Isn’t Earl

I was out buying some lemonade at the shop at lunchtime. There was a bit of a queue but it didn’t take long for me to get to the front. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a doddery old man form a breakaway queue. This wasn’t the work of some queue jumping genius, this was the work of a man whose brain shuffled around the bottom of his skull like a handful of desicated coconut in a goldfish bowl. As luck would have it somebody opened a new checkout and the woman asked who was next clearly looking at me ignoring the breakaway republic of Spar. This didn’t matter to the old guy who hadn’t even noticed the existence of a queue next to him with six people in it. He shuffled forwards towards the till while the woman serving was giving me a look that suggested I should make a break for it and get there before him.

I decided to top up my karma and let him go anyway. He seemed to be struggling with a couple of largish boxes. He got to the counter and the conversation went something like this:

Shop Staff: Where did you get this box?
Little Old Man: Yes?
SS: This box has 36 kit-kats in.
LOM: Yes
SS: Do you want one…
LOM: Yes
SS: …or do you want 36?
LOM: Yes
SS: Shall I price the box for you?
LOM: Yes
SS: It’ll be quite expensive
LOM: That’s OK
SS: It’ll be £19
LOM: That’s way too much!
SS: How many kit-kats can you afford?
LOM: Six

Sadly I got served at the other till by this point so I never did find out what was in his second box. What would he have done with 36 kit-kats? One of those 8 packs of two-stick kit-kats would last a pensioner two years.

I wish he had made it home with his box of kit-kats but I fear he would have been striken with grief when he discovered the box didn’t in fact contain one massive kit-kat. It can’t have helped the poor worker who was trying to stack the kit-kats in the first place either.

If Nestlé want to send me a load of kit-kats for mentioning their product it’s kit-kat chunky that I like thanks.

Categories
Food

Is it a biscuit or is it a cake? Neither, it’s meat!

About a month ago somebody on b3ta designed a new snack combining the joy of Jaffa Cakes with the meat and eggy goodness of scotch eggs. The result, that you can see an image of on b3ta’s forum, is the Jaffegg. At the time several people thought it was a marvellous idea and vowed to actually make a jaffegg cake. As far as I can tell nobody did. We now somebody has. Me.

Ingredients

To make jaffeggs you will need.

  • Sausage meat
  • Eggs
  • Breadcrumbs
  • Oil
  • Flour

Making a Jaffegg

First you need to make the sausage base. Put a bit of flour on a board and your hands so the sausage doesn’t stick. Roll the meat into a ball and then flatten it quite a bit. Finally use your thumbs to make a dent that will hold the egg yolk. I used normal sausages skinned rather than a packet of meat and one sausage made one jaffegg.

A made four in total. My plan was to make two with the yolks in and two that I added the yolks to near the end so the yolk was only partially cooked. I then brushed the top outer ring of each base with oil so the breadcrumbs would stick.

I then separated the egg yolks to add to the base to make the “smashing yellow eggy bit™.” This went relatively well and only one yolk out of four was sacrificed to the kitchen sink. I then carefully slid the yolk onto two of the bases.

Breadcrumbs were then sprinkled onto the top of the complete jaffeggs. The two that were having the yolks added to later I just sprinkled the breadcrumbs round the outside. I added some extra crumbs to the tray to sprinkle on afterwards. If you want to cheer up Gordon Brown you can use stale bread to make the breadcrumbs. I don’t think anything could put a smile on his face so I used the unnatural orange breadcrumbs that are used for scotch eggs.

They were then ready to bake. I shoved them in for 30 minutes at 180°c. I took them out five minutes from the end to add the yolks to the other jaffeggs before shoving them in again. That was the plan however the one’s without the yolks had shrivelled to half the size so the yolk just balanced on top and the spare crumbs had burnt. I had to sprinkle fresh crumbs on top and hope they cooked in five minutes. You have been warned.

When cooked I took them out of the oven and discovered they’d lost a lot of the jaffa cake shape and had become little round sausage UFOs* instead. *Unidentified frying object. Deep fat frying the cakes may well stop this happening but I don’t have one despite living in Leeds for a while when I was younger.

Time to cut the eggy bad-boy open to see if the basic shape was preserved.

Not bad at all. You can make out all the parts and they are roughly in the right place. The one’s I added the yolk to later looked all wrong. Like pac-man in a meat canoe with his mouth shut and cocaine all over his face.

I can report that both where lovely, like scotch eggs without the boring egg-white. Many thanks to Thor_sonofodin for the original idea.

Categories
Food Inane Banter

Pancake 24

Did you enjoy having a little toss the other day? I’m talking pancakes of course.

We all know the story behind Shrove Tuesday even if we’re not entirely sure what a shrove is. Many, many years ago the baby Jesus wanted to get away from it all with a nice break and decided to make sandcastles in the desert.

Before he went the locals decided he’d need feeding up before going out there.
“Would you like a nice plate of fatted calf?” they asked.
“No thank you,” replied Jesus.
“What about a nice bit of steak? Scotch egg? Findus crispy pancake? Artic roll? An Easter egg?”
“No, what I want is some really thin fried batter with a bit of sugar and lemon on it,” replied Jesus.
“We’re out of lemons Jesus. All we’ve got is this old plastic lemon with juice in that we haven’t used for a year.”
“That will be fine as long as I get to squirt it myself. Oh and you’re not allowed to turn the pancake with a spatula, you’ll have to flip it.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m the son of God and I say so.”

That is why we still eat pancakes to this day. This year I decided to have a complete meal with two savoury cheese and ham pancakes and then two sweet ones with sugar and lemon. To make it interesting I added a Jack Bauer sense of pressure. Once the first pancake was ready I slid it onto the plate and immediately poured the next load of batter into the pan. I now had the time it took for the next pancake to cook to eat the first one. I did this through all four pancakes whilst imagining being shouted at by a terrorist.

Terrorism lost that day, indigestion had a minor victory.

Categories
Food

More Meat-based Fun

As promised last week here’s the second recipe for making meat equivalent snacks of sweets. This week it’s a meat dip. Sounds delicious already doesn’t it? This recipe is even easier than last weeks.

Ingredients

Ingredients

A carton of choc dips
A peperami
Tomato Ketchup

Preperation

Eat the choc dip. I chose to go om nom nom whist eating it. You can use any sound effects you like.

No more choc dip

Refill

Now it’s time to make the meaty version.

Fill the choc container part with tomato ketchup. You can wash that bit first if you can be bothered. I couldn’t so I took the gamble of a tomato / chocolate mish-mash. It was fine in the end. Squirty ketchup bottles would be far easy than the glass ones. Who uses glass ketchup bottles these days. Get with the plastic program Grandad, no you don’t even need a knife to get the stuff out!

Tommy K is the best of all red sauces

Now we need the meaty dips. Using a spare bready stick thing from the choc dip I cut the peperami to length. You get about 3 bits from a peperami if you’ve accidentally eaten all the sticks and are having to guess.

You’ll have noticed the meat is thicker than the stick so you’ll have to cut each bit in half lengthways. Warning – Wild peperami can be tricky creatures. They like to dive out of the way at the last second so you cut through your finger instead. If in doubt ask an adult. What do you mean you are an adult?

Dangerous meat, tamed.

Now you can pop them in the pot and your meaty snack is complete.

Mmmmmm

All that remains left to do now is enjoy!

Freakshow

No I don’t know what’s going on with my eyes. I mustn’t have slept well.
No idea what’s going on with my face either. I’m sure it doesn’t look like that normally.
Yes I am wearing the same t-shirt as last week. That’s because I did them at the same time. The weeks gap is a man-made delay in a desperate attempt to create tension. That and I know I’ll probably be too busy to do anything for a while again. I’m nothing if not inconsistent.

Feel free to suggest other fun food / drink ideas and maybe I’ll do them for you. Normal moaning service will resume soon.

Categories
Food

Meaty Double Dips

This recipe is sadly nothing to do with the pornographic practice of double dipping, not that I would know anything about such a practice and even if I did, which I don’t, I wouldn’t advertise such a fact on the internet.

No, this recipe is for people who love kiddie sweets but who love the great taste of meat more.

Ingredients

ingredients you will need

Peanuts
Peperami or other thin salami type snack
A packet of Double Dip (possibly two in case of mistakes)
Cayenne pepper or chilli flakes
A craft knife or scissors

Preperation

Carefully open the packet of Double Dip. I sliced one side of the top with a craft knife. Empty the contents out. These won’t be used again so I tried to make a nice zen garden.

swizzle zen

I then made a new label based on the existing one. In reality I just stuck the Meat Fairy from the wondrous Beaver and Steve onto the packet and changed the wording slightly. If you want to do this at home but can’t be bother with the packet here’s a copy of the label. Here it is in all it’s glory.

packet

The Fillings

To create the first filling I emptied the peanuts into a bowl.

you must be nuts

Then I carefully put the nuts back leaving the dry roasted dust behind. It’s this dust we want. If you wanted to make it super meaty you could use pork scratching dust instead. Some nuts leave more dust than others. It’s a nut lottery but supermarket home brands seem to be better. This packet was useless.

Nut dust city

Then we carefully insert the powder into one of the slots in our packet.

get in!

For the second slot I used cayenne pepper and inserted it in the same way. It’s nice to get two different flavours.

To make the meat swizzle stick I took a peperami and cut it to the same length as the original swizzle stick.

chop chop

Then I stuffed it into the packet. This can be a bit tight. Anyone who has seen Richard Herring’s ménage à un will know what I’m talking about. Check out clip two (and then buy the DVD.) You may chose to slice the peperami in half to make it easier. As a found out for next weeks recipe slicing a peperami in half is actually quite tricky if you don’t want to lose a lot of blood. I’m such a tease, mentioning next week’s recipe before I’ve even finished this one.

not at all like gay sex

Enjoy

All that’s left to do is kick back, relax and enjoy the meaty taste. Or if you’re me you could also try having a shave instead of looking like a fucking tramp.

where's me special brew?

More meaty fun next week!

Categories
Food

If Variety is the Spice of Life…

…our work vending machine is like buying scampi and chips at a curry house.

Here is the crisp section of our vending machine.

Mmmm tasty

The camera on my phone isn’t great so I’ll describe it for you.
The top row consists of bags of cheese and onion crisps. The sort that have ridges.
The next row consists of a bag of ordinary cheese and onion crisps, a sneaky bag of salt ‘n’ shake crisps hiding another bag of cheese and onion crisps, spring onion crisps which taste identical to the first bag of cheese and onion crisps and then a bag of cheese and onion crisps by a different company.
The last row is a packet of “low fat” cheese and onion crisps and prawn cocktail.

The empty slot you see probably contained another nasty flavour like beef but at least it wasn’t fucking cheese and wanking onion so it was snapped up like it was made of Keeley Hazell.

I went for the prawn cocktail and pretended that Keeley just hadn’t washed for a while.

Categories
Food

Irn Bru Update

To make amends for my Diet Irn Bru shame in a previous post I bring you great news for hungover people who can’t be bothered to make egg butties.

Irn Bru Sausages. I’m not sure if it’s genius or disgusting but then I’m the guy who made a Cheese and Pineapple Smoothie so what do I know? If anyone has tried them then let me know if they are tasty or not.

Categories
Food

Eggstreme Hangover Cure

Poor Mrs Fatuous is off at a conference over the weekend so yet again I made myself the promise I always make when she’s away.

I will not get absolutely ratted and stay up to a stupid hour in the morning playing online poker effectively throwing away most of Saturday.

As always the promise was broken. As I sat downstairs looking at the empty bottle of vodka with 4am proudly flashing at me from the clock I needed a solution. I had even run out of soft drink so the hangover was going to be strong. I could have drank water but water always seems like a throwback to medieval times. There are many wonderful flavoured drinks around so why settle for the basic, taste free, water. Actually our water tastes of fluoride. Look in the shops for fluoride flavoured food, can’t find it can you? The reason being fluoride tastes awful.

Anyway I needed a plan and I needed it for tomorrow morning. Bless my alcohol soaked brain, it didn’t let me down. All I had to do was remember the plan in the morning. For somebody who spends a large percentage of his time standing in rooms wondering why he’s in that room it’s not a forgone conclusion.

Morning came and, as you may have guessed by the fact I’m writing about it, I did remember the plan. But first I’d need to go to the shops. I decided to walk as my eyes felt like they were actually vibrating. I also thought the fresh air might do me good. The air might have been good but walking up the steep hill with armfuls of shopping was not. I was sweating like a pig, shaking like a shitting dog and wheezing like Vanessa Feltz attempting to climb the European butter mountain.

At last I was ready to start with my cunning plan, a plan I intend to share with you. You’ve done well to stick with it so far so who am I to let you down. Ladies, gentlemen, sweaty pigs, shitting dogs and buttery Vanessas I give you

The Yolktastic Egg Butty Hangover Cure!

As the woman off the M & S adverts would say, “this is no ordinary egg butty.” A hangover cure needs several key features, this butty provides most of them.

  • Grease
  • Bacon
  • Egg
  • Chilli sauce

The only thing it lacks is more alcohol. The more adventurous cook may attempt to add alcohol but I had none left. The key to this recipe is egg yolks. Eggs are nice, eggs contain hangover busting chemical chains but, as every child will tell you, eggs have two distinct parts, well three if you include the shell but nobody eats that. The yolk which is the yellow, tasty bit that also happens to be packed with the chemical chains we wish to ingest and the white which is the frankly the pointless, hanger on which just gets in the way of the yolky joy. If it helps, the white is Pete Doherty to a yolky Kate Moss. The recipe has oodles of Kate with just enough Pete to stop the whole thing going off the rails in a heroin fueled rampage. Hang on I haven’t thought this analogy through have I.

You Will Need

4 eggs
Parma ham (you could use bacon but this is much lighter and makes you look a bit posher than the drunk you really are)
Tabasco sauce (wimps have no place in my kitchen)
A roll (or any other bread based product)
Tommy K (or brown sauce if you prefer, fuck it, use both if you like)
A bottle of Irn Bru

Ingredients

Step 1 – Swig the Irn Bru

Irn Bru

If there’s one thing the Scots know how to do it’s drink. If you lived in a cold, wet, miserable country and went round with a chip on your shoulder bigger than your actual town you’d drink too. Their magical orange coloured wonder-drink should give you the strength to finish the cooking.

Step 2 – Heat some oil in a pan and fry the parma ham.

Mmmmm fatty goodness

That’s your fat right there. Embrace it’s lipid love. When they’re done pop them in a warmish oven to crisp up a little. Keep the frying pan hot for stage 5.

Step 3 – Separate the yolks from the the whites. I use the moving the yolk from one half shell to another method. Do whatever your shaking hands can cope with. The key part is to keep the yolks intact.

Yolks as Scooby Doo might say

Step 4 – Add tabasco and a little salt and pepper to the egg whites. We don’t need much of the whites, just enough to stop the yolks from burning. If you wanted to add alcohol you would add it to the whites here. Whisk them with a fork a little.

Our whites lemonade

Step 5 – This part is the tricky part. Pour a little of the egg whites into the pan and let them fry for a few seconds to slightly firm up. You want enough white to support the 4 yolks but not much more.

Step 6 – Gently slide the yolks out of the half shells on top of the white. Try to get low so as to not break the yolks, you’ll kick yourself if you place three perfectly then screw up the forth. I recommend a childhood spent playing operation and buckaroo for the skills required. If you’ve done that (placing the yolks not spending your childhood playing buckaroo) it should look like this

Ain't she a beauty

Step 7 – Squirt your desired sauce on your bread and place the parma rashers on top. When the eggs are cooked (white firm, yolks still runny) place them on top of the parma ham. It’s now ready to eat.

The finished product

You’ll probably need to eat this with a knife and fork as the yolk runs everywhere.

Does it work? Well my eyes have stopped vibrating and there’s a beer in the fridge calling me.

Categories
Food Inane Banter

Egg, why do you mock me?

Is it funny how different things embarrass you throughout life. Things that would make me cringe years ago don’t bother me at all now and things I wouldn’t have thought about at all as a 5 year old now rise up to smite me.

When you’re at school there’s a whole sea of potential embarrassment waiting to wash over you. You might wet yourself, get an answer wrong in front of the class or be forced to sing hymns even if you have a voice so bad it practically proves the flaws in God’s great design. Heaven help you if you look a bit funny or buy the wrong trainers. You’re looking at months of pricey psychotherapy in later life if you turned up to school wearing rip-off adidas that only had two stripes.

Even if you never actually did anything embarrassing that wouldn’t stop school kids just making something up and it was usually far worse than anything you might actually have done. So instead of “Dave walks funny” you’d more likely get something like “Dave shags dogs, it’s true, he has bonios down his pants and everything.” Fortunately for me I was a spotty, slightly overweight boy who couldn’t talk to girls and had hair that, despite having enough hairspray in it to globally warm a cup of tea, became a bowl cut before I’d even got to the end of the road. Nobody had to make anything up about me.

Then you get that bit older and discover alcohol and the opposite sex. You don’t need anybody else to embarrass you then. You’re more than capable of making a tit of yourself without anybody else’s help. If I didn’t wake on a Sunday in a fuggy haze of self loathing based on something I’d done the night before then I’d figured the pub must have watered the beer down.

Now I’ve reached that age where it takes a lot to embarrass me. If I do something stupid I can easily think of 10 things far more idiotic I’ve done in the past with no long term damage. So now once again outside forces have to raise their heads to embarrass me.

Now I’m not a messy eater, I can quite happily eat all sorts of sloppy food without it getting all over me. Curry, spaghetti, beetroot all no problem. However egg mayonnaise has taken it upon itself to become my nemesis. I like eggs, I like mayonnaise, they hate me. Today, as so many time before, I was eating my egg mayonnaise sandwich. As usual a bit of egg mayonnaise escaped it’s bready confines and with laser-like precision it yet again aimed straight for the crotch area of my trousers. So begins another afternoon trying not to walk around like I’ve just spunked all over my trousers.

Ironically when I was young I used to get this strange panicked feeling that I’d gone to school without putting my trousers on. I’ve no idea where this strange paranoia came from. I’m pretty sure I’ve never actually done it or even come close but I used to get small panic attacks about it. All I had to do was glance down to confirm that, yes, I was wearing trousers and all would be well with the world. However if today I had forgotten to wear trousers at least they wouldn’t look like I’d just creamed on them.

Categories
Food

Nectar of the Gods!

Tiny triangular sandwiches with no crusts, mini sausage rolls, weak squash of indeterminate fruit origin, jelly and squirty cream. All tasty and some would say essential ingredients of any party (adults can swap the weak squash for an alcohol punch of equal indeterminate origin.)

All fine and upstanding but all must bow beneath the king of party food. Sometimes presented in hedgehog form, sometimes plainly on a stick, always delicious…

The original and best

THE CHEESE AND PINEAPPLE ON A STICK!

How does one improve on perfection? Where to start? How would I turn gold into platinum and not lead?

How about sticking it into a smoothie maker and making a drink?