Chaos reigns here in the Blackthorn kitchen on this most sacred of nights.  Whilst rain
​swept any soliciting children back to their homes, we macerated our intellects
with Resident Evil and stuffed our gullets with unsightly profiteroles laden
​with home made ganache and passionfruit cream.  I am lactose intolerant and not too
good with grain starch either but life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.
These are the ghosts of profiteroles past now.

Halloween is our anniversary.  26 fucking years in close proximity is a long time not be
stabbing each ​other with whatever comes to hand.  I have learned a few important
things about relationships: there are no soul mates, just the people you choose to
be with.  Good will is everything.  Apathy will sour empathy.  No one really emphasises
boring shit like this, but they are the pillars of enduring regard.
Just thought I should pass that on.

Have a good time tonight or whenever you're celebrating.  It's the start of summer for us
so there are no fucking pumpkins.  Only flowers.

We picked three kg of gooseberries and got a shittonne of jam from that, then R decided to go crazy and pick the other currants, which we usually leave for the birds because laziness.  The hot month before xmas has turned them into something worth bothering about so we rounded up every remaining Ribes for committal to jars.

​Thought you might like to see them since they are so beautiful.

I think of it as a restorative tonic, really; there's nothing better when you're cold, low, sick or run down.
​
The foundational vegetables make this stew both nourishing and relatively easy to digest, so it's a great relief for the bloated and liverish.  We have mixed vegetable fortunes here in New Zealand; our zucchinis, onions, garlic, lemons and cauliflower are great, generally speaking; the eggplants are m'kay but our commercial maincrop tomatoes are usually shite.  So while this dish might look hopelessly seasonal, we end up making it for most of the year thanks to the cheaty magic of tinned tomatoes and home-grown frozen zucchinis.  I love the superior and persistent texture of the old ribbed varieties like Costata Romansesco; after four months sliced in the freezer they're still a thousand times better than the overpriced winter supermarket version.  If you really can't get hold of some decent firm zucchini you could perhaps try one of the blander dry pumpkins as a replacement.  

If you're too fucking lazy to make your own harissa either substitute a commercial version or just throw in a teaspoon each of the following: whole cumin, whole coriander, salt, chopped/mashed garlic with fresh or dried chili to taste.  While we personally find the lemon indispensable we have been caught short and forced to continue on without it; the results were perfectly edible, so you can theoretically eliminate this flavour if you're not a fan.
​
This stew makes the most of cheaper fish species like Monkfish, Moki, Red Cod or any similar MOR white variety; Mackerel is great too.  We've got Gurnard today since it was on special.  It's also delicious with chunks of leftover roast lamb or mutton (add some lamb fat if you've got it), leftover meatballs or either plain or Moroccan-style sausages.  Make sure you add the cooked meat at the end and allow sufficient time for it to heat through in the stew.  

The recipe serves two adults.  By a handful of the chopped vegetables, I mean roughly one cup, but precision isn't really important.  Cube the veg into largish chunks rather than thin slices.  Poach a couple of eggs in the stew in lieu of meat for a vegetarian version.  You could even toss in a couple of shelled hard boiled eggs at the end for a protein hit.

Once they're softened up, throw in the cauliflower, then the zucchini and chickpeas.  (Just chuck the cauli and zuc in together if you're using fresh vegetables, but save the chickpeas til last if they're canned).  Break up any frozen clumps and keep it all moving over a brisk high heat to prevent the watery sogs setting in.  Once it's starting to lose that raw virgin crispness, add the rest of the harissa and stir well.

Bring to the boil and let it go for about 2 minutes. Watch it closely; you just want everything acquainted at this point rather than disintegrating into an indistinguishable Brundlefly mash.

You can chop the fish into chunks if it's gobby (i.e. Monkfish) rather than flaky, but Gurnard will come apart nicely so we place the fillets in poaching position on top of the stew and spoon some over them.  Keep the heat high very briefly (about a minute) then turn it off (in the case of ceramic tops) or go low (for gas) and let the whole lot simmer with the lid on.  Don't be tempted to poke or fuck around with it; leave the damn fish alone.  If you're using leftover cooked meat, you just want to bring it up to a safe temperature- don't boil the shit out of it.  Vegetarians: keep the heat a little bit higher and drop a couple of eggs into wells in the stew at this point- poach them to your desired texture.

I had the butcher bone this piece, which I highly recommend as it reduces the weight considerably and bones are a pain in the arse.  The slightly creepy pale substance you can see on the right there is the skin of the pig, singed of hair; this sort of marinated pork belly doesn't really rely on crispy skin although you can achieve it if you wish, so feel free to trim it away (being careful to retain the underlying fat) if you're not keen.  It softens and becomes delicious in the pan anyway.

Not every piece of belly is going to be meltingly tender and there's not a tremendous amount you can do about that.  Marinade usually helps but I think its ability to break down gnarly meat grain is vastly overstated.  Lower your oven temp and extend the initial cooking time if you've got a bit of home-kill that you think will need extra attention.

Okay so it's the next day and we're cooking.  Set the oven to about 180-200 ºC of conventional, non-fan heat.  Find yourself a relatively flattish baking dish that won't be affected by the acidic marinade i.e. not aluminium la la la.  Lay the pork strips out on their sides, pour the marinade over, add around a tablespoon of butter or oil and cover with foil or a lid but don't hermetically seal the shit out of it; you want some steam to be able to escape.

​When the oven's up to heat, put the pork on the lowest shelf and turn down to between 150-180 ºC depending on how mad your elements tend to be.  You want medium-high heat for around 45 mins for this amount of meat, a little less for a smaller batch.  You know the drill.

The opposite of England ​leaving the European union is cooking ginger and orange pork belly at home.  That has been scientifically quantilionified, so that's what I'll be posting this week.  

I'm all out of thoughts about the Brexit, except that it's a fucking ugly portmanteau.  On one hand, I know the dipshits who voted leave are a bunch of hooting xenophobic throwbacks and angry couch humpers who frankly stunned me by eschewing Sky Sport en mass, admittedly to vote for something they didn't understand which must have made them feel at home, I suppose.  On Team Remain we have the feckless dumbarses who base their favouring of international overlordship on St Vincent tweets and wanting to spend six months taking drugs and fucking hot foreigners on the Continent with minimal documentation, man.  

​We live in New Zealand and have enough problems of our own, so it was nice to sit this one out and just enjoy the fuckery while it's still a distant abstract.  On a personal level I hate most people, so part of me wants to sever all relations, deport everyone and lock the gate.  The other part wants Germans to pay for urban renewal projects, to enjoy liberal narcotic legislation and inexpensive cheese and fuck Spanish guys too; the conflict is real.  But we're all doomed either way so I don't worry too much about the deckchair shuffling.  

On a completely unrelated note we were in our favourite Indian grocery the other day.  It’s Ramadan and every observant date fancier in a 20km radius is freaking out about supply. We’re not observant but we were freaking out when the shop owner explained that the date boat was held up in bloody Wellington. ​ Fuck that lazy date boat right in the arse!

While I grew up cooking both Indian specifically and Asian food in general, I'd never done black rice at home.  Perhaps because I've tried almost every other variety known to man and found they generally don't live up to the hype, because they're all just... rice, really; Oryza sativa, that ancient friend.  An exception to this blanket dictum is a good montane basmati, which is truly distinct in both flavour and texture from your long/medium-grain standard commercial varieties.  

Today I'm using an organic Thai black rice.  Some black rice is glutinous but I did not find this one particularly sticky even though I overcooked it, so I'm assuming it was one of the less gluggy varieties.  I don't personally consume much cereal any more; when we do, we eat wholegrain (non-hulled or brown) out of a (probably half-superstitious) belief that less processed = better.  According to Wikipedia, black rice is fucking loaded with anthocyanin, iron and vitamin E, however the page sort of reads like something issued by the Black Rice Hurrah Ambitious Growers Association, so my critical faculties are toning that shit down by half.  Whatever.  If you're going to eat rice, black wholegrain is probably the way to go.

Whole rice of all persuasions is the shitty and distracted cook's friend, retaining an acceptable texture waaaay beyond the point when white rice collapses into blown-out pasty mush because you forgot about it in your narcissistic self-absorption.  I soaked this rice overnight as per recommendations and found it fast-cooking and tender, to the point where a wholegrainphobe would possibly overlook the fact that they were actually consuming fibre and nutrients.  It's also very beautiful, retaining all those inky ochre copper eggplant tones through the cooking process and lending even boring bumfuck not-again dishes its undisputed aesthetic advantages.

I can report that all that rhapsodical flavour hyperbole around black rice is exactly that- confabulated hipster bullshit.  It's not going to take your tongue on a magic carpet ride as-is so forget any notions of lingual psychedelia.  It just tastes like a mild high-quality brown, with maybe a five-percent swing toward bland, slightly smoky sweetness á la basmati, rather than hitting you with those hard, grassy notes sometimes present in coarser wholegrain varieties.  But this laid-back, neither/nor aspect is what makes it such an eminent vehicle for other flavours; it really did come out swinging as a fantastic absorber and projector of condiments and sauces.

The meal to the left there might look like something that was struck by an improvised explosive device, and it is fair to say it's not exactly photogenic.  But it's like sex in that respect; you can kill the hotness by trying to make it look good and commercial porn is proof of that particular pudding.  We make this dish once a week and I can honestly report that this is possibly the most spectacularly ugly version I can remember, I think because we skimped on the eggs this time round.  Never mind.  

I call this Half-Basque Eggs in honour of a friend (the semi-Iberian/Euskal element) who returned from a trip to his maternally ancestral Navarre mumbling fervently about... this local traditional thing, with um eggs, and all this other good shit that was fucking delicious... without being able to specify much else because hrmmmph no cook just eat: manbrain.  He was trapped in the memory of that goodness and could not articulate its particulars.

​Luckily I knew that good shit in this instance meant fried/roasted/protein; I have incorporated those and the rest is highly expedient experimental appropriation resulting in this cobbled-together inauthentic rendition of something I have never really experienced in its true form.  But don't let that put you off.  It is fucking delicious.

The really great thing about this Basque Eggs is its endlessly accommodating nature.  All you need are 5-6 eggs and whatever you've got lying around.  It can be fancy and full of expensive impressiveness i.e. exotic mushrooms and awesome charcuterie, and you could cook it in those egg ring things to attain discrete, presentable portions.  It can also be a dumping ground for 3-day old leftovers you wouldn't eat any other way.  Today we are taking the middle Way.

Another attraction of egg things like these are their omnichoronological appropriateness.  Any given sliver of the day or night is Half-Basque Eggs time.  The meat-free version, especially with roasted vegetables, is perfectly satisfying and delicious.  It can be as unprocessed, Paleo and low carb as you like.  All that and it reheats without prejudice when you make too much.

(I buy all my own review items @ full retail and have no association with any of the suppliers mentioned.
This is more gratuitous oversharing than a review anyway lol.)

This week I think the Lovely R is writing something about photography on a budget; which gear and why, where to start etc.  He knows what he's talking about and he's cheaper than a cold pie so I'll just let him get on with it.

If you're a bean-friendly phenotype or a regular consumer of legumes you probably won't suffer too much toot factor, and adding a bit of asafoetida is supposed to tame the methane.  I've never tried.  Still keen?  Let's get down to it.

Please be aware that this recipe is also extremely elastic and you can expand the relative quantities almost infinitely.  Those listed will feed two peeps with leftovers. I'm adding a little more to my batch today so don't worry if it looks more than you expect.  Nor do you need to stick religiously to what I've listed here; the pea/spice base is delicious without anything else thrown in (and is traditionally simple), so by all means get shit-happy with the additions.

If you don't keep an eye on it, the lentils will stick like bloody hell to the bottom of the pan and create a burnt black mess you'll need either industrial acids or a very submissive partner to remove.  Taste the liquor.  It should be really resinous and turmeric-y as this is the whole point of the dish.  Add more spices at any stage if you think it needs it.

Here in New Zealand, feral rabbits are an ongoing environmental and agricultural disaster, munching crops, degrading natural ecosystems and supporting a range of terrible introduced predators of our native wildlife.  If you're going to eat meat, wild-caught pest species are probably the most ethical choice you could make and we have no qualms about consuming them, one furry little apocalypse at a time.  Dick the hunter down the road thins out the rabbit plague on Otago peninsula on a regular basis and he dropped a few off for us the other day.  You rule, Dick.

In regard to public acceptance, rabbit meat has disappeared down a bit of an intergenerational rabbit hole; once widely appreciated, these days it tends to be spurned by a lot of older baby boomers who equate it with growing up poor and having little else while most younger folks are just completely unfamiliar with its inoffensive versatility.  A single bunny costs $20-30 each in the supermarkets here (when it's available at all) which is just fucking ridiculous and hardly encourages converts.  

So don't feel bad if you've never had the pleasure.  And don't worry that your more conservative associates will turn their nose up at its gamey exoticism.  As far as flavour and texture are concerned, even wild rabbit is virtually indistinguishable from a mature free-range chicken; look at the fresh cuts below and ask yourself how many neurotic neophobes would be able to spot the anatomical differences.  Lol.  Just lie and they'll love every freaking bite.  

The usual free-range culinary caveats apply- slow cooking is best, and one-pot recipes do it all the favours.  The one I've used here is a version of my universal free-range/game tomato summer casserole with ingredients easily culled from the garden or purchased cheaply in season.  Stuck in winter?  Just replace the zucs with canned red or white beans, celeriac, carrots and spuds and serve with some steamed brassicas.  

This dish is nutritious, relatively economical, ethical, paleo-adjacent and virtually free of sloppy carbs.

W H A T   Y O U ' L L   N E E D
These measures and ingredients are meant as a rough guide; don't fret if you're short or overflowing.  Being of course skinless, rabbit is bland and lean and tends toward dryness so I pump up the fatty/savoury factor with a few spicy sausages, but you could use a good dry bacon if you're short on meat. You can throw in wine or stock if you have it lying around.  We try to limit our refined starch intake (because that shit works) and use boiled potatoes as a foil here; quinoa, pasta, couscous and brown rice are perfect too.

Transfer everything to the casserole dish as you go, frying up the remaining vegetables.  If you're adding pulses, throw them in with the rabbit now.  If it's not too burnt, deglaze the frying pan with water or stock (up to about one and a half cups) and pour into the dish along with the tinned tomato, tomato paste, herbs and maybe another dash of paprika, salt and pepper.  Add your relish or quince paste; a nice bit of jam or wine will stand in for the latter.  Mix thoroughly.

Ka Pai!   Put some spuds on to boil 20 mins out from your ETA and serve on warm plates with some fresh bread if desired or whatever starch or grain you prefer.  It's always better the next day, so make it ahead of time if possible.  

This casserole provides a stream of delicious leftovers; just keep in mind that wild rabbit can toughen if reheated too briskly and removing the meat from the bone for your second round is probably optimal (if you're fussy about that sort of thing.)  The mix can be used in a pie or pastie-type situation, tossed through some stir-fried green vegtables (I like a kale and broccoli mix) or piled on toast with hunks of cheese grilled over the top.  I've used parmesan over this lot >

Though it may seem counterintuitive, eating these kinds of meals has helped me lose a shit-tonne of weight and get fitter and stronger than I thought possible.  I've detailed the theory and practice here if you're interested; I'll post more about the continuing process soon.

Technically, this tuna casserole is more of a pasta sauce really, but it's eminently bakeable so I'm going with that designation.  It's certainly not fancy and could even be accused of crossing over into that blasted commestible heath on which tin-based fails and student food wander like orphaned mooncalves, unloved and unlooked for.  But that's just pointless snobbery; like all the best meals it is delicious, healthful, economical and flexible.  You can have it on toast or in a panini.  Or if, like me, you're largely eschewing starch and doing a Paleo type thing, it's yummy plopped over some stir fried veg.  You can bake it under some cheese and breadcrumbs (Homer face) or over potatoes.  I've yet to meet someone who couldn't stomach it and you might even tempt a few vegetarians.

It also has the advantage of being simple enough to kick the bullshit excuses out from under your favourite/adjacent Noncook.  This cosmopolitan creature presents two variants; those who have genuinely never had the time or opportunity to learn (I still judge you, but I also accept that you might have a reasonable excuse), and those who simper that they don't know the first thing about food and ooze out of the kitchen like they've just left you enchanted with the prospect of doing everything yourself while they're cruising porn on their laptop.  If we were to be a bit more fucking charitable, we could go with the idea that recipes like this cater to the culinary agnostic; to those who admit that cooking may well exist without conceding they will ever possess knowledge of it.  Whatever.  Consider this casserole a kryptonite buttplug for the domestic shirker.  Eggplant is the most exotic component so they can even shop for it unsupervised.

Okay!  We're halfway there.  Once everything's thoroughly browned, pour in the tinned tomatoes and the tomato paste and combine carefully, especially if you've used a too-small pot like me.  Reduce the heat a wee bit; this mixture will start sticking to the bottom pretty fucking smartly if you're not careful.  Add about half a tomato can of water, depending on the consistency of its previous contents.  You don't want it too runny, but too thick is no good either.

^ This is 500g of spiral pasta.  You don't really need this much; I just went a bit crazy and threw in the whole bag.  You can use macaroni or fettucini etc if you prefer and possibly stuff some tube pasta with it too.

This is a totally unglamorous and  yawn-inducing post to anyone neither interested in gardening nor food, so philistines falling laxly into either category are excused and can go back to fondling their piercings (noticed how many fresh lip hoops there are lately?  Is there a 1994 wormhole out there?) and sending nudie selfies to randoms.  

We've been growing our own garlic for about 6 years now, favouring a local heritage Printanor-type pink skinned variety, yes in part because of the wank value but mostly because of its superior taste and resistance to things like rust, since we don't spray or much bother with strenuous shit like active cultivation.  These plants will have to pretty much look after themselves once we've done them the tremendous favour of sticking them in dirt, so if you're lazy or organically inclined, we advise you ask around about tried and true varieties in your area.  Don't rule out modern strains if you've heard good things, though.  

Growing garlic can be both stupidly simple and frustratingly arcane.  In a good year (whatever that means- we're still scratching our heads) you'll get masses of great fist-sized bulbs with little to no effort; in less propitious seasons you'll end up with pissy little plants that expend what energy they've stored cheating you with their sneaky, snaky flower stalks.  Up til now I've always planted in autumn, following the advice of several online garlic gardens, but that's gotten me two years of early flowering and diminishing returns, so this time we're going with tradition and setting out the cloves in the end of June, just after the (southern hemisphere) winter solstice.  Garlic is easy to grow but primo bulbs are apparently dependent on all kinds of temperature and moisture constraints.  From what I can gather, a good fat set seems to require a cool winter and spring and a hot, dry summer, especially around harvest.  In our zone 9 maritime conditions, one season can extend a long way into another and rain is guaranteed, so we're probably suboptimal; my onions are often mediocre too.  Oh well- the Allium family is fundamental to our food chain and the commercial crop tends to be quite heavily sprayed, so ho-hum home-grown is better than nothing. 

Anyways.  What you're seeing to the right here are examples of the garlic I'm about to plant (L 2 R) nice big Printanor clove from my mother's garden, a robust brownish-papered variety from a friend's crop (thanks Jared)  and one of my own crappy little cloves from the last harvest.  Choose the fattest cloves from the outside of your bulbs, avoiding any that are fungal, holed, budding weirdly or bruised.  Some peeps peel theirs but I don't think this makes a difference to strike or yield.  I've often wondered if clove size really does matter, so I'll be keeping an eye on this crop with that in mind.

ABOVE   I know it's boring, but do dig it over well before you plant.  The garlic will get a much better start.  I'm not adding fertiliser at this point since this is nice dirt and I prefer to wait till the plants are in active growth before feeding them.  I'll use a few handfuls of sheep poo and some blood and bone, scattered between the plants as soon as the green tops start showing.  Don't let the fert touch the sides of the new plants or the stalks might burn/rot out.

This version is adapted from a never-fail lemon curd recipe I found... somewhere... maybe online?  I dunno.  I think it'd work with any citrus fruit, possibly even grapefruit, if you're not into limes or can't obtain them.

A small word of warning to the susceptible (you know who you are)- this stuff is like crack and once you've had your first bump, it's allllll over.  Forget calorie restriction, forget social responsibility, forget your firstborn... you can try to hide it at the back of the freezer, but it never sets deterrent-hard and is always cooing to your lizard brain about that time you guddled the last bit out of the jar with your hands naked at midnight and how fucking good that was (I regret nothing).

Then add the eggs, roughly one at a time, to the butter and sugar, mixing thoroughly in between.  Cut the limes in half and squeeze them hard until you have your two-thirds of a cup of juice.  Try to exclude any pips.

The quince, perhaps more striking than handsome, is one of our most ancient fruity companions, originating in the Middle East slash Sou-west Asia and providing us with a number of highly delicious dishes since a long time before it featured in the Song of Solomon.  Quince to me sounds like something vaguely soggy and sort of citrus but no, they're a hard, plain apple-like fruit that smells... hmmm... like hallucinogenic roses, really; like a nice pomander with a touch of that awesome glue you definitely never huffed in the 7th grade.  As anyone who's ever bitten into a fresh quince knows, they're best cooked, and that's what we're doing today- making quince jelly, which is a dense, fragrant, wobbly-type jam, bright sunburnt pink and shyly translucent.  Once you've had it on toast and added it to your everyday cooking you won't know how you did without it all this time.  

I get my quinces posted to me since the local fruiter insists on charging $2 a piece and that is bullshit, my friends.  We have our own tree but it's still jailbait as far as production is concerned.  They're increasingly easy to come by so just ask around until you secure your own source.

There are two parts to this procedure, and the second stage can be deferred for a few days, which makes it pretty convenient even if you're pinched for time.  We're going to boil up and extract the juice from the fruit first, then cook that up with the sugar to form jelly.  First things first; fruit prep.

The purpose of this procedure is to extract the juice from the pulp without any junk getting in to cloud up the jelly, if you know what I mean.  Hence the straining.  Process the entire contents of the pot in batches.

Below right- the jelly liquor in all its glory.  It goes a milky colour with all the sugar but that will dissolve.

Thoroughly wash your jars and lids and put them on a tray  in the oven at 100 or so degrees C to sterilize.

Below left- Slowly your liquor will start to visibly thicken in the pot, becoming deep candy pink, molten-glassy and heavy against the spoon.  Keep cooking past the point where you would stop for regular jam, or it won't set and go stiff like jello (US) or jelly (Rest of the World).  Below right- after about 40 mins boiling a sample poured onto the plate will bunch up like this as though it has gelatin in it, feeling stodgy, sticky, holding its shape and thickening further as it cools.  If it doesn't, be disciplined and keep reducing it- you'll get there eventually and it's vital to do so.  Skim the white foam as well as you can from the top of the jelly and discard, then get out your jars.

I've been making a curry almost every week for the past twenty years of my life.  That's well over a thousand of the darn things.  I freely bastardise and refuckulate, smerging Tamil, Malay, Mughal and misc. into some very fetching concoctions and a few spectacular failures, just like a million kitchen bitches before me.  It's just a spicy stew after all, endlessly mutable and a friend to the pedant, the freeballing innovator and the simpering dufus alike.  In fact I am so fucking blasé about curry that I'll confess to you, complete stranger, that I use packet spice paste on the regular.  As a basis for your creations they're usually more accessible than the individual raw ingredients, as well as being considerably more economical.  Ask around for the best pastes in your region and maybe make an effort to eschew those containing palm oil, even if the cynic in me tends to believe we're eating it anyway, no matter how hard we try to avoid it.

Goat is both elusive and expensive in New Zealand; this kilo leg came in at $25 which is a lot of money, so feel free to call me an elitist hoebag and substitute whatever takes your fancy.  We're not usually this extravagant with meat either but tend to concentrate on quality rather than quantity these days.



It's best to reconcile yourself in advance to the idea that quadruped curry is a slow-mo meal, so if convenience is a concern for you, opt for chicken or fish.  Make this a day in advance or at least the morning before you need it, if at all possible.  Cheap, tough meat like blade steak or gravy beef will be transformed by 12 hours in the fridge and end up gobsmackingly and even unrecognisably delicious.

One more thing... I use a tonne of dry and fresh spices to supplement the spice paste, for two reasons.  Pastes, while providing the spine and direction of each particular curry, almost always lose the 'headspace' aromatics and these volatile notes are far more likely to persist in whole spices.  And I grew up with a Tamil aunt who acculturated us to what many might consider extreme flavours.  Don't worry, I've turned down the heat for this recipe; if you're only just getting into Indian food or need to accommodate conservative guests, you can cut the additions right back or leave them out altogether.  Except the ginger and garlic- you just can't do without those.  Depending on your spice paste, you'll end up with a 'softer', more generic-tasting result, probably with very little in the way of heat.

Brown the meat in batches including the bone, dividing it into thirds and then reserving it on a clean plate once it's coloured up.  The bone adds valuable flavour- you can remove it before serving, or let your freakier guests gnaw on it.

This recipe is an old hybrid based on that used by my great grandmother and is a trad colonial (possibly Raj-influenced) flavour.  It's a loose beast, perfectly delicious in the form presented here but eminently upgradable via fancier vinegars, posh sugars (try Demerara or cut some ordinary brown with Muscovado- oooh!) and spice amendments according to your personal taste.  The only thing I would absolutely not leave out is the curry power; it might sound whack, even budget, and you don't end up with something tasting specifically of it, but it really is the warm, throbbing pulse in the throat of this recipe.  

Don't worry too much about relative quantities- close enough is really fine.  I'm doing double the stated amount today so your volumes won't look like mine.  The recipe is fairly extrapolatable but doubling them as I'm doing is probably best left to someone who's made preserves before, just because you need a bit of experience to judge the cooking time and consistency etc.  And I wouldn't suggest trying to triple a batch unless you have gigantic commercial-style pots and utensils.  It's bulky and will spit like a bitch all over your kitchen once it's on the boil.

Start your Interstellar Relish in the morning or before lunch so you can give the salted tomatoes time to macerate.  This is a slow cooking gig.  Bring a book, put on a long-arse mix tape or reserve someone to talk to.

^ This is how it looked when just brought to the boil: to the right is what you're looking for towards completion.  Thicker (but not gelled like jam, just 'reduced'), darker, syrupy, softer and stickier.  If you drip it on a cool surface it should stick and sort of condense as it cools.  You can go further than the result you see to the right and really reduce the crap out of it if you're interested in extreme savour; it turns into something quite brownish and sort of balsamic if you know what I mean- very piquant and gourmet.  We personally use this relish for so many things (and the Lovely R is such a fucking relish-glutton) that we need a bit of volume to tide us over, so I'm calling time at this point.

Try to get a good even ratio of the solid and liquid in every jar as you're filling them.  I like to make sure the vegetables are 'submerged' before I screw on the lid but that's probably just magical thinking as far as preservation is concerned.  I've never had a jar of this stuff go bad, even after a full year.  It's very stable stored dark and cool in a cupboard somewhere.  Do keep it in the fridge once opened, though.

We've eaten home-grown eggs after two weeks with no ill effects, but then life's pretty cheap to our sort.  If yours are store-bought they've probably been washed, which reduces their shelf life, so aim to eat them in a week; as soon as possible is best.  Store them in a cool, dark place, out of reach of pets and children.  We never refrigerate ours but if you're somewhere hot and humid you might like to do so.  Quail eggs can seem like a dauntingly exotic delicacy but don't be intimidated.  They're gastronomic gimmickry, really, tasting exactly the same as a regular chicken egg @ ten times the price and hassle, but who cares?  They're cute.  And luxe.  So let's do this.

T O   B O I L -  For 12 eggs, bring about half a finger's depth of water to the boil in a pot and then remove it from heat, spooning the eggs carefully into the hot water.  You don't want to crack the shells at this stage so a fast boil is not ideal- turn the ring right down when you put them back on the heat and just simmer for about 8 minutes.  This should get you a hard-boiled egg.  You can leave it longer so don't panic.  3-5 minutes will yield something sloppier, yolk-wise, but we don't care for this ourselves.  

T O   F R Y - exactly as you would a chicken egg, with a thought for scale- obviously they will cook more quickly.  We like to use a mix of butter and rice bran oil in the pan; this is both tasty and has a high smoke point.  Bring the pan to a good medium heat, remove from the ring, crack the eggs carefully over the fat, switch off the element and leave the pan to sit on it with the lid closed for about 6 minutes.  This will render the yolks solid if not totally opaque so if you like them runny, cut down the time.  The fresher the egg, the more cohesive the white will be; I didn't get the pan warm enough while we were fucking around with the camera, so these ones spread a bit.

The steam trapped inside the pan should sweat the finished eggs off the bottom.  Be patient and lift them gently with a fish slice.  We served these on a cracker with farmhouse brie and Interstellar Relish (recipe coming soon).

Gooseberries are possibly my favourite berry of all, from a lazy ho's horticultural POV.  They will fruit happily in a shady, rubbishy spot (along with blackcurrants) and don't need to be sprayed or even really netted, unless you have some very determined avian bandits in your vicinity.  My own long-suffering bushes have been unceremoniously relocated for the umpteenth time and we've had one of the driest Novembers on record- I still get enough fruit to make a good batch of jam.  So yeah.  If you have room for them (a big m2 for each bush), look into gooseberries.  Particularly the 'Invicta' variety; they have proved entirely resistant to the mildew that has wiped every other kind I've tried to introduce in this high-humidity garden.

I know it's getting into winter in the northern hemi, but this stuff's pretty quissmassy- go buy some frozen gooseberries if necessary.  And aren't they draping Spain in polythene specifically so you can buy shit out of season?  Tuh! 

Below are the very weedy and completely neglected bushes from which we will wrest today's materials.  Note the horrible fucking thorns.  I'm wearing gloves, but there will be blood.
If you're in a hurry/already know how to make jam, scroll past the pastoral shiz for the recipe.

Gooseberries are high in both acid and pectin and are thusly the jam queen's friend.  You don't really need to acidulate with lemon juice but I find it supports the tartness of the fresh fruits' flavour, especially if your berries are all at the raw-eating/dessert stage and have lost their green bite.  My fruit are a mix of ripeness.  Some are hard and very green, some are turning golden and easily compressable.  Before you do anything else, wash the jars and lids thoroughly (and the funnel if you have one), in the sink or dishwasher, set your oven to around 100˚C and set them up in there on an ovenproof tray to dry and sterilize.

Keeping it off the heat, stir the mixture until you're sure the sugar's dissolved, otherwise it might stick and burn.  Return to the heat and bring it back to the boil, keeping it stirred and skimming off the white foam that rises to the top now and then.  If you've added currants, the liquor will start to turn pink.  Otherwise, you'll have a nice kiwifruit-green/gold baby jam happening at this point.

E D I T : This has been a really dry year and both my neighbour and myself have found that our gooseberry jam has set like a mofo so if you're using a lot of unripe fruit or it's been hot and arid, add a bit more water or cut back your cooking time if you'd like to avoid a rock-hard set.

Seal jars while still hot, set aside to cool.  Twist the lids on hard to make sure you've got a good seal.  I got three big jars and two small from this amount of fruit.  This jam is delicious in so many contexts; everything from trad toast and muffins to flavouring gravy and sauces and pouring on icecream.  Its pretty colour (pink or green) tends to impress the hell out of the culinarily-declined, so dress up the jars and you've got some presents to pass around.
S T I L L   B O R E D ?   M O R E   K I T C H E N   B I T C H   R E C I P E S   HERE

You don't have to be embarrassed about not knowing how to roast a chicken well.  It's really not something you can learn overnight or from a single demonstration.  It's a trial and error thing, heavily dependent on your raw materials and that fickle jade Chance.  Maybe you've only had access to crappy dishcloth-tasting industrial cripple chickens up til now.  We still have to hunt for a good bird in a country heaving with meat animals and the wide open spaces for raising them properly.  A nice chicken is bloody expensive, too.  At $25 NZ frozen, this chicken (pictured above and below) is a massive extravagance for us, representing our average meat budget for about two weeks.  But you get what you pay for; it is a demonstrably superior bird, broad-beamed, fully formed, heavily-muscled.  It looks like an animal instead of something extruded from a mold and that is always reassuring. 

This is a medium sized chicken.  I've found they all take around the same time to cook so don't freak about the kilos unless you have some weeny little pullet or hulking mutant on your hands.  In that case, just go up or down 20 minutes on either end of the time scale.  It's done when it's done.

Another thing you should know is that free-range birds are probably not going to be as 'tender' as you might expect after eating greasy tween chickens that were too fat to stand up, especially when frozen.  FR birds can move around and have a life, and really, that's the only kind of animal we should ever be eating.  (More about that in my responsible carnivore post.)  But they are tastier, leaner, less pathological and much better karma, so we should just quit our whining and be grateful we have access to meat at all.  We usually cook them 'wet' in a curry or sauce but, properly handled, they are still perfectly delicious on their lonesome.

Today we'll do a solo roast chicken with home made pan gravy.  Nothing terribly exotic but a universal pleasure none the less.

WHAT YOU NEED
1 free range chicken
Good smoked paprika
Small head of spray-free garlic
Freshly ground pepper
Fresh rosemary sprig (you can substitute dried)
Fresh bay spring (ditto)
Ordinary onion
Jam (I use my own quince jelly and elderberry ink but anything mellow and fruity like apricot, cranberry or blackberry is perfect.)
Stock (we usually have our own stock made from the frames of our previous roast chickens but it's supermarket shiz today.)
Wine.  Use whatever you like best, red or white.  Cheap stuff is fine, but if you really wouldn't drink it from a glass, don't expect stellar results.
You'll also need the cooking oil of your choice; today we'll be using a half-half olive and rice oil mix, but you can throw in some fat left over from your last roast or butter.

Set your oven to around 180-200 degrees C, depending on the idiosyncracies of your particular range, and put one rack toward the bottom and another halfway up.  Our oven is ancient with no fanbake option, so if you're going to get fancy like that you'll have to figure it out for yourself.  Our conventionally-roasted chickens come out just fine.

Make sure you rinse the chicken thoroughly under cold water.  Be particularly assiduous about rinsing and examining both the neck scrag and inside the carcass through the vent; sometimes suppliers provide you with giblets (usually the liver, neck, heart and gizzard) and these can be tucked away inside the cavity, where they go unnoticed until the plastic bag they're packed in starts oozing in a molten fashion from your chicken as you go to carve the little sucker.  Suboptimal.  Don't be afraid of giblets.  They're not weird or gross; we all have them.  They can be fried and used to make a superlative stock for the gravy; sadly, we have none to show you today.

Have a ferret around inside the cavity just to make sure there's nothing hiding in there.  Stick your hand right in there.  (Is it Friday night already?  Lol, yes I stole that from The Usual Suspects).  If you find your chicken is still a little stiff and frozen inside, run some cool or just-warm water into the cavity and let stand for five mins; if there's still detectably frozen flesh, you'll just have to thaw it for longer.  Try to resist the temptation to microfuck it unless you're really running out of time.  Wash your hands with soap after handling raw chicken and thoroughly wash down the taps, sink and benches.

(If you suspect you have a really elderly, stringy old chook on your hands, do not despair.  There is a way to salvage that beast that hasn't failed me yet and I use it regularly with Christmas turkeys; subcutaneous basting.  Cut yourself some four thin pats of cold butter.  Take a tablespoon, turn it upside down and ease it under the skin of the breast, starting from the vent and then heading sideways over each drumstick.  You'll see how this works once you've begun.  Into this loosened, 'tented' skin, push the pats of butter until you've situated two over the breast and one each over the legs.  They will melt as cooking proceeds.)

Dust the chicken with smoked paprika (not too much- it gets bitter if charred), freshly ground pepper and a good whack of salt to crisp the skin.  Pour oil over the bird and the split onion.  Note that I don't add green herbs at this stage; they'll just burn if you do, so wait til at least halfway through the cooking to put them in the pan.  You can hide the herb of your choice or some garlic inside the chicken where it will subtly perfume the flesh.

I'm not sure if it makes perfect thermodynamic sense, but the water seems to prevent the bird from drying out too much; that may just be superstition on my part.  I'm more convinced that a moist roast is dependent on the condition of the bird before it died and how it was treated post-mortem, but who the hell knows?  Just don't add too much liquid or you'll get chicken soup.  If you're really concerned about your own chicken-munting propensities, there is a way to cheat and cut the cooking time by about a third- cut the chicken all the way along the backbone with kitchen scissors and spread it out flat in the pan.  Arranged this way it will cook thoroughly in about an hour but won't really look as pretty or traditional.  

Mmokay, so put the dish on the lowest rack of the oven and let it cook at 180 degrees C for about ten minutes, then turn it down toward 160-150 C for around an hour and 15 mins for an unstuffed bird like this.  Wait til some of the water has evaporated before basting from the dish or you'll just end up washing the seasonings off the skin.

Gravy time.  Put the roasting dish on an element.  Squeeze the garlic from the skins and squish it over the bottom of the pan along with the chicken fat/juices and the onion that you've mushed up with the fish slice.  Not enough fat?  Throw in a pat of butter.  Scrape up all the caramelized goodness off the bottom of the pan but dispose of anything too black or burnt.  Add a great heaped tablespoon of plain white flour, fresh herbs, pepper and salt to taste.  This is the roux that will form the base of the sauce.  Brown this up over a medium heat, stirring briskly.  I never get lumpy gravy this way but if you're worried, yoink out the onions and return them to the mix later.

After about five minutes of this, pour in two or three cups of stock and stir again, turning the heat up to high.  Add as much wine as you like, or not- it's not vital for a good gravy.  Just keep the liquid moving and taste all the time, seasoning as you go.  Next, drop in a big tablespoon of the jam or jelly.  If you're not tasting an improvement, dump some more into the pan until you're getting that smooth, phat flavour, but don't overdo things or it'll end up like Snow White's bathwater.  When you're happy with it, take it off the heat . 

If it's a little dry, never mind; that's what gravy's for.  And remember to always either chill or reheat chicken thoroughly.  As you can see, it's completely feasible to get a nice chook on your plate at home, even if you're not too familiar with the process.  We didn't use any colouring agents or boost settings in these pics, just natural light and flash; we think this looks pretty appetizing and can assure you that it was.  If we can do it, so can you.