Tag Archives: chili

The drama of chili

Posted on March 24, 2008 | 3 comments

Fresh red chili looming over dried up dark red chili

The other day I blithely told you to use some chili. As if chili is easy-peasy.

Cooking with chili is always a drama. How hot will your dish be? It all depends on the behaviour of the fiery and unpredictable ones.

The big chili in the picture was fresh. I had never come across it before so I had no previous experience of its performance.

In contrast, the tiny dark red ones (see pic again) were dried, so easily available. They were my mates. Or were they?

Therein lies the drama. A half chili could make a dish. A whole one might ruin it. Friend or foe?

There’s the added uncertainty of how much food you are trying to flavour. Take dried chilis. One could be insignificant in a stew for seven.

But at least dried chilis are constant in their fashion. After a few times of using the wizened but easily-stored ones, you can control the spiciness of your dish.

How did tonight’s drama end?

The half of FRESH chili, sliced in a stir-fry (mushroom, onions and sprouted seeds) was pretty tame. Poor thing. It was a supermarket and non-organic chili so didn’t stand a chance. Bred and sprayed to look good rather than taste real.

As for the half of a DRIED chili (sliced thin), it was mighty hot in some mouthfuls of stir-fry. I tell you, those dried-up devils pack a punch.

3 Comments

Posted in food, vegan

Tagged chili, chili pepper

Haricot beans and pumpkin

Posted on March 18, 2008 | 3 comments

A pan on stove with beans and cut up pumpkin and sweet potato

As a cook, I’d say my forte is ‘gunge’. OK, it’s never going to win a beauty contest but the concoction is reliable and balanced. What more do you want from a lifetime companion?

I had covered the dried organic haricots beans with water, soaking them overnight. The next day, I struck a light under their pan’s bottom and let the beans simmer away in bubbling hot water for a good hour and a half.

I fried a whole onion (sliced) in olive oil and added a dried chili, finely sliced. Wait. Chili is important. I did not discover it until mid-life. If it passed me by, could it have passed you by too? If so, I beg you to experiment with the fiery creature. Let me know how you get on.

I then attacked the half of a butternut pumpkin loitering in a forgotten corner of the fridge and after peeling and de-seeding it, then cutting it in cubes, I hurled it into the frying onions. After that, I felt calmer. After adding more olive oil, I let it slowly braise with the onions (with Neil Basilo’s tips for unctuousness ringing in my ears), stirring it occasionally to stop the mixture sticking.

Typically, I then lost my focus and did something else. Not good for a dish. It feels neglected and doesn’t give its all. Realising the pumpkin had gone too soft, I quickly peeled, cubed and boiled a sweet potato in another pan. This flirtation with another veg produced fresh bright orangeness (although I felt a bit disloyal to the overcooked pumpkin). Then I assembled them all with the drained beans (see above).

When the time came to serve, I heated it all up again extremely hot with brown rice from the night before (always blast cooked-again food with bug-obliterating heat).

Having morphed into a kind of risotto and topped with some fresh organic leaves, the dish didn’t look half bad (see below) and tasted even better.

Voilà – a classic gunge. Everyday fare. Might not get a fanfare. But treats you fair.

3 Comments

Posted in eating well on a budget, food, recipe idea, vegan

Tagged chili, haricot beans, pumpkin, vegan

Fish soup with mussels and chilli prawns

Posted on March 15, 2008 | 2 comments

Fish soup in a bowl with mussels sticking out and tiny prawns

I am an ungrateful girlfriend. Here was Mike slaving at the stove and here was me finding fault: the kale was too big, and (listen to this bitterness) he never praised my cooking as much as he did his own.

He was raving about this dish (above) and I was jealous. He reassured me that a) he saw it as ‘our’ dish (especially as I had sourced the ingredients) and b) he was particularly chuffed because in the past this would have taken him all day to cook, what with making a fish stock from the bones.

And we (I feel I can say ‘we’ now) had rustled it up in half-an-hour.

Let me recap. One onion fried in olive oil, plus half a mug of water. Added snippets of smoked haddock for salty taste, and monkfish cheeks, in chunks. Then the purple kale.

I was detailed to remove the shells from the shrimps (but not obsessively – I was amazed by what Mike said I could leave on, and the remaining shells cooked up well-crispy). I fried the little creatures in a pan (see below) with sliced dried chili and two sliced cloves of garlic in olive oil.

I reflected how cooking makes the raw and free fall under our dominion. What power.

Mike added the scrubbed mussels (shells tightly closed) to the fish soup and kale.

Nigel Slater, who inspired this dish, says the mussels add more flavour at this point than the rest of the fish put together. I agree.

The shrimps fried with chili and garlic added another layer of gutsiness with the shells’ crispy crunchiness adding a spicy ‘wow’ to the final bowl (See top pic – the broth must have lingered at the bottom of the bowl because not visible in pic but most definitely there).

To Mike, Nigel, the mussels, shrimps, haddock and monkfish, a big thank you for one of the tastiest finger-slurping fish soup experiences of my existence.