cooking prawns...

i love cooking prawns...

its a thing that i have only recently discovered... but yeaman - bwoi like that right about there!

its like a mini-magic event in your pan...

prawn goes in blue...

uncooked peeled king prawns (blue)... mine came sans citron

 throw in some crazy business...

"tonight matthew i will be adding a whole pile of garlic and juice and gubbins of a single lime to my prawns-in-a-pan..."

prawn comes out pink...

cooked peeled king prawns... levitating

magic... in a pan  

right about there...

even better than a global hypercolour t-shirt...

and the thing with the limes involved the addition of cherry tomatoes, more limes, sweet chilli sauce, spring onions... and noodles! served on (get me) a bed of baby spinach leaves...

it was lovely 8)

caffeine maple bacon (in no particular order)

i love bacon...

i love maple (the syrup, the word and the tree...)

let's face it, ya can't beat a thick-sliced maple-cured bacon sandwich... its almost as if the humble pig should have been born with maple syrup for blood (like the aliens in that film, i forget what its called :P ...but a darn site more useful)

and my relationship with caffeine is a well documented one... you gotta love the coffee, and there's always the relentless... (caffeine-based life-form? moi? yeah quite probably...)

obviously, a traditional way to combine these three favourites of mine would be one of 'those' sandwiches washed down with a lovely (orange) mug of peruvian coffee... that's a perfect breakfast/lunch/dinner/brunch/snack/munch right about there...

but not really that portable... exacerbated by the fact that the bacon sandwich purchased whilst out and about is generally an item of extremely variable quality (with a definite trend towards the low), and generally nowhere near as lovely as the one i envisage when i think of maple bacon (although special mention must be made... the sandwiches i used to get everyday from the van on the trading estate in wednesbury, sausage bacon and chilli sauce on a french stick, were sandwiches par excellence...)

but now some quite-blatant genii came up with not only the (obvious) idea of combining all three of these magic foodstuffs together, but also making it super-portable...

ladies and gentlemen i present...

the caffeinated maple bacon lollipop

hell yes... 8)

that''s some goodness right about there... and apparently, its made with bacon salt, which means that its not only kosher, but also vegetarian friendly!! this may or may not be worrying...

i do find the insistence on marketing the lollipop on pieces of american stylee bacon a bit worrying though... i'd much prefer it on a thick-cut freshly sizzled rasher of maple-cured... nice

but i did the maff... and there's more caffeine in two of these bad boy's than there is in a can of relentless, meaning they have to win some kind of prize for portable caffeine-ness-ness (or something)

the site i found them on won't ship outside the US, but like the ostrich burger... i feel it will only be a small amount of time before i get my hands on these yummy caffeine-y morsels... (and i'm fairly sure when i do, there won't be enough)

but then i did find this...

zombie jerky 

(its teriyaki flavoured too!!)

once more... hell yes

fed up of watching your brethren get munched by the seemingly endless zombie hordes? bite back without gettin' bitten back... that's right, you can now do you part without ever leaving the safety of our heavilly fortified and geographically protected base at ***censored (cos some information you just can't share)***... by munching on some zombie jerky...

right on!!

got to be honest, never been much of a jerky fan... but i'd be willing to give this one a swing...

not sure about the green though?!

as a matter of fact, i didn't buy any creme fraiche (pH 4.5) today...

...and that's why it smells just a little bit like a swimming pool.

i didn't actually buy any creme fraiche (pH 4.5) this week, or last week for that matter. but i probably do buy a lot more of it than you would expect from the look of me... which is weird, because this time last year it was just a funny name in a shop, that usually gave me an opportunity to have a lil' giggle somewhere between the ham and the cheese... (end of the aisle smartbwoi!!)

why i know the approximate pH of creme fraiche, without a single piece of litmus paper to my name, is quite beyond me...

i'm not even completely sure what it "does"... is it 'calci-yummy' like the cheese slice, or more 'just a bit weird'?!

ok that was a bit of a lie, i know something it does...

its the creamy (creme-y) thing in that spaghetti, spinach and bacon dish i've been makin'...

that's not the bacon dish, that's a cake (not to be confused with tea), which should, i believe, be served with creme fraiche... just putting it out there...

but the spinach thing... well first off, why the hell didn't the spinach 'bullets' unravel like i expected them too?! i certainly wasn't expectin' forest-floor-leaf-shit when i put them in the pan...

in all honesty the recipe has morphed quite considerably over time... it started out with four ingredients (i forgot the tomatoes) and a name which approximated the ratio of the ingredients to each other (the tomatoes weren't even mentioned hence forgetting them)...

now it generally contains whatever sh*t i have in my fridge (peppers mainly... i like peppers) and so much bacon that it needs to be renamed 'bacon and...' (i really like bacon)

it works really well with maple bacon, but the slices are thinner and you don't get so much in a pack (ideally you want 10-12 thick rashers)...

mushrooms have been thrown in a few times lately, although this is mainly 'cos my scientific observations taught me that they're good for soaking up the bacon juice, and if possible i'd rather avoid the whole 'sieving bacon' thing again... if that's ok

but the creme fraiche (remember that?!)... well i guess its there to perform some kind of binding action... or maybe just to reduce the sheer 'green' of it all... but you'd think that the sloppiness would help with the 'mixing-everything-up-with-the-spaghetti'-ness of it all...

wrong answer

cannot seem to get a handle on that bit... (go on, you can tell me, there's some kind of 'tool' isn't there?!)

there's a lot of similarities between this recipe and the way i make my music... there's definitely an element of mashing together whatever's 'to hand'... although i'm fairly sure my head is warmer than the fridge...

its curious, i think that's why i don't fit neatly into any of the boxes...

there's bits of, and starting points, and everyone's like "well he's a... oh sure, with the... uhm... of... something something..." and they're probably right.

all i know is that i'm just a bwoi busting moves, and as a matter of fact, i didn't buy any creme fraiche (ph 4.5) today...

peace-out y'all

fb

the cooling power of sugar (brown)

lime is pretty good for cooling down chilli...

(brown) sugar's also pretty good for helping to tame the feeling that what you are eating is not just stripping your insides with its insanely spicy content, but its actually cooking it too...

and when you've used both, and the chilli is pretty damned incendiary... you know that
a:) that's a f**kin' (read "proper") hot chilli right about there
b:) your job is done, not just done, but well done

of course, it probably stopped being a chilli round about the time you start wailing cajun spices (exact constitution unknown, but it comes in a sweet lil' bottle and looks kinda orange) in with everything... nevermind that minor mis-measurement issue earlier on... the paprika probably only helps in moderation...

i'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that the jamacian jerk mix doesn't feature in most people's "top ten things what i done put in a chilli list"...

so its become a special dish all in its own right, somekinda special non-chilli chilli, not to be confused with vegetarian chilli, which is of course chilli-non-carne... and your inability to cook (properly) has been proven to your peers, it tastes good, but isn't exactly what it says on the tin...

yep, that's a bwoi-chilli right there... (it would appear that my approach to cooking, is much like my approach to song-writing)

...i'll make ya one if ya want! 8)