Week 65. Botswana. Chicken In A Hole.

When I grow up I want to be a pickpocket/ urban thief. When people are on trains with their young families I want to sneak up to them and steal their most important things. I don’t care about the fact that it will leave them moneyless and with no phone to call people to help. I don’t care that they look like nice people and that their children are with them and dependent on them. I just love stealing. When I do steal I love the fact that I get about a twentieth of what the goods are worth and that I will accept that money readily as I have a drug habit I need to keep fuelled. I love the idea that the people I steal from will be about to go for Tapas in Barcelona, excited about it being their last night away and I revel in the thought that I am about to ruin their night and tarnish their whole trip which was before I came along incredible. I love what a great bloke I am.

So – last weekend we got done.

We were having such a great time and then it all got ripped away from us. Our last day which we planned to spend shopping and on the beach was filled with Police station visits. It was crappy and it was something which hundreds of people experience every day in Barcelona. I love the city but they need to address this problem. We were prepared and guarded the bag and the phones and money was in a zipped pocket, but they were better. I think they leant a bag against us and they had their hands through a hole in the bottom of the bag and into our bag. I think they used a cute baby in a pram as a ploy and I hate them for putting a bad spin on a great break. Fortunately, being the glass-half-full people we are in a crisis (most of the time) we managed to have a great night after, and drunk more Sangria than we would have and put more Tapas away than I thought we would. We laughed it off until we got back and I wrote a list of what we needed to do to sort things out. It’s a pain, but we didn’t get hurt and on that basis we need to get over ourselves a bit and move on.

We got back to the UK early this week and the weather came back with us. It’s been amazing and as a result the BBQ has been used – albeit after an experience I had yesterday. Listen carefully, as this might happen to you someday and this information will be useful. When I turned on the BBQ yesterday I could hear the gas (we are posh) coming out and the ignition was clearly lighting, but they wouldn’t combine. I couldn’t understand why. Eventually I decided to dissect the underneath and take out the gas pipes. As I did I was sprayed with fat and oil (cold). The pipes which take the gas from the canister to the grill were full of fat from previous barbeques and therefore the gas couldn’t travel up to the top. It was rank, it ruined a shirt and a pair of shorts I was wearing but I fixed it like a mechanic and I was proud and I deserved the nod of the head my wife gave me when I returned in, covered in oil, to say the BBQ was back working!

Botswana was chosen this week and they have a dish called Chicken In A Hole. It is supposed to be placed into a pit dug in the sand and placed on burning coals, and would be used in a community which had no cooking machinery….but I had nowhere to dig a hole so I used the newly mended barbeque as an oven.

 

The premise is a whole chicken, filled with onion and garlic (also shoved under the skin) and the covered in spices and wrapped in cabbage and then foil before baking. I read different opinions as to what the spice mix should be, but settled on it being largely paprika and coriander based  with Cumin.

I can only assume the cabbage is used to moisten the chicken throughout the baking as it softens and seeps liquid into the chicken. The result was utterly delicious. The chicken tasted poached and was moist all the way through, It was so simple and should I live in a desert or not have an oven I would make it all the time. We had it with salad as it’s hot outside, but it would be equally as nice with cous cous or rice.

Make it, and vary the flavour with things you love. It’s fun and delicious.

Right – I’m off to phone my phone carrier and ask why I still don’t have one back!

Week 58. Syria. Ros Bhaleeb.

I stood over the tee at the 10^th hole and prepared to take my shot. It was a warm March day and I was in shirt sleeves. The course was beautiful and I was being paid to be there, as it was, technically, a work day. I wanted to draw the ball from left to right and bring it down onto the green and I swung the club well. My impact was solid and the ball soared towards the green, through the blue sky and I stood back and admired it. Seconds later I glumly realized I had very slightly misjudged the shot and the ball plummeted, landing 15 feet short of the green and in the lake. My mood turned in an instant and I swore, loudly, and crashed my club into the turf with anger.  I had messed up and I was raging.

At that moment I was annoyed with myself and now I am even more annoyed with myself, but now I am annoyed with myself for being annoyed with myself for something so pathetic. The reason I say this is because I am now writing about Syria and what is happening in Homs is worth being annoyed about – not my game of golf.

What is happening in the world today is beyond disgusting. Whilst world leaders have phone calls and meetings and think about what the best thing to do with the escalating situation in Syria, the situation is indeed escalating and innocent people are being executed. It’s not good enough. Let me put this into context. Imagine the reaction in the UK if one person walked out of work today and as they did someone walked up to them and shot them in the head. Would we be appalled? Would we do everything we can to punish the perpetrator and hold them to account that day? Of course we would, but this is happening today over and over again in Syria and the world is responding far too slowly. As a result we have the blood of the people dying on our hands. The rest of the world didn’t initiate murder but we are now responsible for it as we should be in there and stopping it.  This is a food blog and always will be and this is why my ranting will stop here, but this is worth being angry about and not bloody golf. Life must go on in other parts of the world, but when you get annoyed by those little things, remember how some people in this small planet of ours are frightened today and many people will have today as their last and tomorrow their families will be destroyed. All because we have done nothing so far.

I decided to make a dessert this week and I was intrigued by Ros Bhaleeb. In the UK we eat Rice Pudding but I would imagine 90% of it’s consumption is with the over 70′s and under 5′s. It’s baby food or old fashioned stodge.  It has a reputation for being heavy, tasteless and sickly rich. High end restaurants have attempted to bring it back to popularity by grating some nutmeg through it but it is yet to really take a hold. If people could taste Ros Bhaleeb it would change opinions in an instant. Rose Water is a distillation of rose petals and is used across the middle east to add a floral lift to many dishes. It absolutely does in this dish. We usually eat Rice Pudding hot but this is served very cold and the rose and orange make it feel incredibly light and almost refreshing. Not often do I make something and be utterly surprised at the flavour outcome. With this dish is was a huge shock and in a very good way. We are off to our first BBQ of the year today and I am taking a batch of Ros Bhaleeb with me. I am looking forward to seeing the shock on the faces of my friends.

I used this recipe as this lady is from Syria and very much knows what she is doing! 
http://www.syriancooking.com/other-desserts/roz-bhaleeb-rice-pudding

Let’s not forgot what is happening in Syria right now.

Week 42. Morocco. Deep lentil soup w/ Merguez

I have tried to work out how many Merguez sausages I have eaten in my life. We have always eaten them in the South of France and I think I have been there 15 times. On average we have spent two weeks a visit and if you total the number of days it is 210. We ate Merguez every single night on the BBQ and as they are thin sausages I would estimate I ate 5 a night. I’m up to 1050. In addition I have probably bought Merguez in the UK 20 times and eaten 5 on each occasion – so I believe I have eaten 1150. If each sausage was 20 cm long that means if all the merguez I have ever eaten were laid out in a line we would be reaching 210 metres. Put that into context. If laid on a running track it would go half the way round and Usain Bolt would take 20 seconds to run the length of my sausage line! No wonder my stomach is a washboard covered in a layer of sausage fat!

I’ve eaten so many of the  beef (sometimes lamb) sausages as they are wonderfully spiced. I love how they drip with chilli oil as you cut into them and whoever makes them rarely holds back on the spice. Bloody brilliant they are.

I wasn’t aware until recently that Merguez weren’t actually French (I just assumed) and were actually North African, so when I drew Morocco this week I had to get them into the dish somehow.

The national dish of Morocco is Tagine in a dish like this:

I don’t have a Tagine though, and time-frames meant I wouldn’t be able to get one, so I looked past the obviously traditional and found that they are used less often than you would think and instead good wholesome soups are popular. I would usually make a wholesome soup in Winter in the UK and Morocco doesn’t have a winter as we would know it (their winter is about the same temperature of our summer) but it didn’t seem too strange eating it in the warm. The addition of the Merguez on the top was all mine, but it worked and turned it into more of a stew. It’s a great dish.

I need to say Happy Birthday this week to my wee man. Henry Jones was 2 yesterday and we took him to Hardrock to give him a Guitar overload which worked a treat (despite the aggressive Norwegian Bar “Lady”). It might be a glorified fast-food joint, but there is no denying it is a lot of fun and Henry loved it – especially as he was up until 11pm.

Before the recipe, I have done the draw for the next country and I will be cooking……Tanzania.

Recipe:

• 2 Chopped Onions
• 2 Cups Red Lentils
• 3 Sticks Celery
• 2 Cups Lentils
• 4 Garlic Cloves
• 2 Chillies (I got hot ones)
• TBSP Paprika
• TBSP Tumeric
• TSP Cinnamon
• TBSP Salt
• TBSP Cumin
• 6 Tomatoes
• Large bunch fresh Coriander

Sweat the onions for 10 minutes and then add the cored and diced tomatoes, chopped chillies and garlic. Cook for a few minutes and then add the spices for 3 minutes. Add the lentils until you are stilling what seems to a glutinous blob. Add 4 cups of water and the coriander. Set it on a low heat and keep adding water if it needs it. The lentils will be ready in about 20 minutes. I added 4 cooked and chopped Merguez sausages on top.

Week 32. Jamaica. Jerk Chicken.

Creating Jerk Chicken was a bloody nightmare and that has nothing to do with the recipe. I only had one night free this week to cook and it happened to be the same night that my wife had her mobile hairdresser round. You would imagine that this would be a result, as they could tuck themselves away somewhere and let me get on with it, but the reality was far more annoying. Instead they decided that the best light in the house was in the kitchen and that is where they would be based – no discussion. We have a galley kitchen so, if you will, picture a galley kitchen with a wife on a seat in the middle of it and a hairdresser behind her (with all her bleaches and crap all over the place). Now picture me, with a meal to cook and imagine my face – am I smiling? I was, but probably due to the fumes from the hair and the large gin I nailed when I realised what my cooking environment for the night was to be!

I had looked forward to drawing Jamaica since the very beginning as I absolutely love Jerk Chicken but had no clue how to make the complex marinade.  I decided that I wouldn’t find out until I got to Jamaica and crossed everything that it wasn’t one of the last countries drawn in a few years! When I was at Uni in Bradford all those years ago there was a guy who used to park up at the end of our road and sell Jerk Chicken in Aluminium Trays from his boot. In retrospect (and being more cynical in my advanced years) I feel a little sick at the thought of eating out of a strangers boot, but at the time it was very normal – and very delicious. I think he charged about £1.50 and you got a lot of chicken. I would imagine he bought the out of date chicken from the local Bangladeshi Restaurants, but it never made me ill, although that was probably as my stomach was pickled with cheap student booze.  I loved the roar of the spice as you first bit into the chicken and then the sweet undertones which cooled you down.

Week 1. Georgia. Khinkali.

The journey (or whatever it ends up being) begins. On Sunday, whilst enjoying a boozy BBQ at our new place, I called to the room and demanded silence. Only my brother paid me any attention, so he and I scuttled off the to the corner of the room to make the first draw. I had put all the countries in the world into an excel list and re-ordered them so they were no longer alphabetical. I asked my brother to pick a number, and he called “78″. 78 corresponded to Georgia and, as a result, Georgia became country one.