Ok, I could pretend to be all hardcore and say I mix my own spices all the time, but you’d probably see right through that (any of you who know me anyway). When making Chilli, I always just used a packet of Chilli Con Carne seasoning. Laziness, or pragmatism? I’ll let you decide that for yourselves.

Anyway, one day I ran out of the packet spice blend, so I put together my own. I have a press full of herbs and spices, so I had everything I needed at hand. This turned out to be really tasty (better than the packet I reckon), so I’ve been making it in large quantities ever since. It sits in an airtight jar in the press so it’s there whenever I need it.

• 3tsp cumin
• 3tsp oregano
• 2tsp chilli powder (3 tsp if you like it hot)
• 2tsp smoked paprika
• 2tsp coriander (ground)
• 2tsp ground ginger
• 2tsp garlic (use a mill with dry garlic flakes - lasts longer)
• 2tsp cocoa powder
• 1tsp black peppercorns (crushed or milled)
• 1tsp mustard seed (crushed)
• 1tsp Maldon salt
• 1tsp cornflour

Mix all the spices thoroughly and store in an airtight container.

The Chilli

What you need:

• 1 onion, chopped
• 1lb mince (serves 4, or 2 if you’re very very hungry…)
• 1 tin chopped tomatoes
• 1 tin kidney beans (rinsed and drained)
• 200ml beef stock
• 1 tablespoon tomato puree (be generous)
• 3 good teaspoons of spice blend (you can use a packet if you want)

What to do:

1. Add some olive oil to a large saucepan and gently cook the onion till soft.
2. Add the mince and cook till brown all the way through.
3. Add the chopped tomatoes, tomato puree, spices and stock and stir well.
4. Add the kidney beans and gently stir in.
5. When the mixture is bubbling, turn the heat low to simmer gently for 30-45 mins, stirring at regular intervals so it doesn’t burn into the bottom of the pan. The liquid will reduce down to give you a nice thick chilli sauce.
6. Serve and enjoy!

Serving suggestions:

Chilli can be enjoyed in many ways. Here are a few ideas:

• Straight up in a mug or bowl with some grated cheese on top
• With rice (the classic!)
• Tortilla stack (my favourite)- layers as follows: tortilla, chilli, cheese (grated), tortilla, chilli, cheese, tortilla, chilli, cheese, until you run out. Finish with a tortilla on top and some cheese to top it off. Stick it in a moderate oven for 10 mins to melt the cheese. Kind of like a Mexican version of lasagne. So good…

What wine to serve with this? Beer, people, beer….

This is a classic White Sauce. It can be served with Roast Chicken, used in Lasagne, or used as a base for Parsley Sauce.

What you need:

• 300ml Milk
• 1T Butter, softened
• 1T Plain Flour
• Salt, White Pepper, Nutmeg to season

What to do:

1. Stir the butter and flour together over a low heat. This is called a “Roux” and is the thickening agent for the sauce. Cook this Roux for about 5 mins.
2. Add the milk and turn up the heat.
3. Stir gently but continuously till the milk begins to boil.
4. Turn down the heat and let the sauce simmer for about 10 mins, stirring regularly to prevent skin and lumps forming.
5. The sauce should have thickened by now. Use the back of a spoon to see if it has coating consistency.
6. Taste it now to make sure the roux is fully cooked. It will have a very bland, floury, yucky taste if it’s not. If it tastes bland and floury (and yucky), let it simmer for another few minutes. If it becomes too thick, just add a little more milk and stir it in.
7. Season with salt, white pepper, and a little grated nutmeg.
8. Serve immediately.

Parsley Sauce: Simply add some finely chopped parsley to the milk at the final simmering phase. This is excellent over bacon. Who says Bacon & Cabbage has to be boring?

Cheese Sauce:
Add some grated Parmesan cheese to the milk at the final simmering phase. This is a nice addition for White Sauce used in Lasagne. In fact, I’ve used other types of cheese in this too, including cheddar. It all works the finest.

So, last night we arrived home late, tired and starving. I had been intending to make Ho-Fan Beef Noodles, but realised I had no Soy Sauce in the house! This took about 35 minutes to make, and is very tasty and healthy (if you disregard the cheese).

250g round steak

Sunflower Oil

2 peppers

1 onion

1 clove garlic

Mexican Seasoning (we use our own mix)

1 bottle Passata

4 tortillas

80-100g cheddar

Method:

Pre-heat the oven to 150C.

Chop up the onion and garlic and divide between two pans with a little sunflower oil.

Cut the round steak up into bite-sized pieces, season with the mexican mix and throw it into one pan and saute quickly. Add the passata to the other pan and throw about 2 tsp of mexican seasoning onto that.

Chop up the peppers into bite sized pieces and add to the steak, draining off any fat if you wish. Give the round-steak and peppers a few minutes to get happy, and stir the passata.

Grate the cheese while everything else is cooking, and microwave the tortillas on low for 30 seconds to soften them.

Add about 3/4 of the passata mixture to the steak and let it simmer for a couple of minutes.

On a clean chopping board, lay out your first tortilla, and add a few spoons (about a quarter, obviously) of the steak mixture. Tuck the two “ends” in and roll up. Place open side down in a baking pan or pyrex which you have barely oiled. Do this for the other three tortillas, and lay them in the pan as well.

Pour the last 1/4 of the passata mixture over the tortillas in the baking pan, and top with the cheese. (You can put cheese inside the tortillas as well, but this is the quick version.

Whack them into the oven and leave until the cheese is melted. Remember, everything else is already cooked, so no risk of anything happening to you.

Open a few beers and enjoy.

Alright, I know these are not the most authentic burritos in the world, but they’re quick, they’re easy, and can be made in advance up to the final assembly stage. You could (if you’re a fan of spice) add a chopped up chilli to the beef bit before you add the passata, you could do all kinds of stuff to it, but in fairness, it can’t get much easier!

OK, having said all that, I LOVE cooking for Christmas. Last year, JD and I had his parents over for the big day, and it was great, planning what we were going to do and working out the timings and so forth. I would say that the big trick is doing as much as you possibly can on the day before, eg prepare the carrots and parsnips, par-boil the potatoes and boil the ham, etc. Then on the day all you have to do is whack a few things in pots or into the oven and you’re golden. Stress-free Christmas! I’ll be posting in more detail on this in a few weeks, but first I have to make a confession.

I’ve already made my Christmas Cake.

There, I’ve said it.

And, actually, it was dead easy. I used this recipe, and it’s little to no effort. And I’ll be making puddings this weekend, and this is the recipe I use. Again, insanely easy and totally delicious. I’ve made it before and it’ll be a stalwart of my recipes for a long time yet.

However, my absolute favourite Christmas cooking is making foodie gifts for other people. In the past I’ve made Red Onion Marmalade, Mango Chutney, (which I’ve just realised I’ve never posted - oops, anyway, here it is), Chocolate Chip Cookies, Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chip Cookies, or Dark chocolate fudge. I usually top this up with a bottle or two from The Wine Buff and some cheese from the Limerick Market, and maybe a Brown Soda made by himself. People seem to really enjoy it, I enjoy making it, and everyone winds up happy!

Maz has been pushing the “Buy Handmade” pledge, so if you don’t feel like baking all your Christmas gifts, maybe she has some inspiration for you!

So with that in mind, here’s a recipe for Irish brown soda bread. It’s a slight adaptation from the one written by Paul Hollywood in his book 100 Great Breads (which, incidentally, is the only book on bread making you need). Hollywood claims this recipe was given to him by the monks in Roscrea monastery. My mother often visited Roscrea monastery as a child, and she told me that this bread tastes exactly as she remembers it. So it’s not just a marketing gimmick.

What you need:

• 250g Strong White Flour
• 250g Wholemeal Flour (You can use 300g wholemeal to 200g strong white if you want. More flavour, but might be a bit crumbly)
• 300ml Milk (or 270ml milk and 30ml buttermilk)
• 40g Caster Sugar
• 20g Baking Powder
• 75g Butter, Softened (not melted - it has to coat the flour by rubbing in)
• A handful of porridge oats (optional)

What to do:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 200^o C
   
2. Mix all the ingredients in a large bowl. Squeeze the dough between your fingers until all the flour has been picked up. Mix thoroughly to form a soft dough.
3. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and shape into a ball.
4. Flatten the ball of dough to make a disk (about 2 inches thick or thereabouts).
5. Cut a cross in the top with a sharp knife. Stick a fork in each quarter to let the fairies escape. NB: Don’t mock - this is important.
6. Lightly oil or butter a baking tray and place the dough on the tray.
7. Sprinkle some porridge oats on top of the dough to add a bit of flavour, or just lightly flour it.
8. When the oven is up to temperature, bang it in. Bake for 30 minutes.
9. Allow the bread to cool on a wire rack before cutting.

Of course, nobody wants to eat ham sandwiches every day, as that gets a bit boring, and I don’t know anyone who has the energy to assemble lunch before work, so where does that leave you?

Personally, I think the big trick is to have a few things in the freezer ready to grab on your way out the door. I usually have a few soups (delicious with Deb’s Farmhouse Cheddar Muffins) and the remains of a too-big dinner in there, ready to go. If I really thought about it, I could buy a bag of bagels, split them, and stick them in there too, but this goes back to organisation. I’m usually delighted if I manage to have bread in the house.

This leaves time then for you to dream up a few things of an evening when you have nothing else to do and you’ve already seen everything that’s on UKTV food. One of the things I made last week in a fit of industry was a cous-cous dish with stir-fried peppers and a few peas. It was dead easy and very tasty. I’d give you a recipe, but calling it a recipe would be the height of cheek, as it basically involved dicing up half a red pepper and half a yellow pepper and sautéeing them quickly with some salt and black pepper. I also simmered a few peas (about half a cup maybe) while the cous-cous was soaking. Now, I know this sounds terribly bland, but bear with me. The trick with soaking cous-cous is to do stuff to the water. I know that sounds airy-fairy, but there you go. Last week, I soaked it in chicken stock (veggie would also work), with paprika, pepper, a TINY bit of cumin, and a whisper of mustard powder. It made a great side-dish for dinner, and was even better for lunch the next day.

What’s your lunch strategy? Do you bring it? Buy it? Or a mixture? And what are your favourite can’t-fail lunch recipes?

Behold our little bouncing boy called Barley:

Barley is a 10 week old Golden Retriever puppy. He’s very cute and very friendly, and has eyelashes that girls would sell their grannies for. Everyone who meets him falls instantly in love with him - he has our whole neighbourhood charmed. Even Toby the cat can’t help but tolerate him

However, to any of you who now simply must have a puppy, make no mistake - it’s hard work. I’ve already been interrupted 3 times while writing this post. Once to feed him, again to pick up his poo, and again to disentangle his jaws from my ankle. He’s not yet convinced about going for walks (I’m in the process of lead training him), but he still needs to burn off his boundless energy.

Puppies are just like that. He’ll grow out of the insane phase in a few months, and he’ll grow up to be the nicest, most handsomest coolest doggie in the whole wide world

In the meantime, we’ll get the cookzors posts going again (maybe with a couple of Barley progress reports thrown in).

And we’ll be very, very busy….

The beauty of this method is that it helps to minimise the streaming, stinging eyes that usually accompany onion-chopping. I think this is because the onion is pretty much held together in one piece until the final cut. So by the time the majority of the fumes can escape, the job is done, and you can set it aside (or bang it in the pot). The quicker you get at doing this, the less it’ll bother your eyes.

1. Take a whole unpeeled onion, and chop a lump off the stem end with your Chef’s knife.
   
2. Peel the skin off the onion, leaving the root end intact.
3. Cut the onion in half through the root. You now have 2 half pieces of onion, which you will dice individually.
   
4. Lay one half of the onion on the cut side, and make a series of cuts along its length from root to stem. Do not cut through the root.
   
5. With the knife lying horizontal (parallel to the chopping board), make a series of cuts towards the root. Again, do not cut through the root. Keep your hand on top of the onion, so the knife doesn’t slice through to your fingers. This is the most dangerous part for your fingers! Pay attention!
   
6. The onion is now cut in 2 planes,yet it is still pretty much held together in one piece by the root. This helps keep the fumes trapped inside. If you like, you could bring the other half of the onion up to this point.
7. Now cut across the original cuts you made in step 4, using the part between the first and second joint of your fingers to guide the knife blade. Remember to tuck in your fingertips! The onion now falls away, properly diced. Discard the bit at the root end when it becomes to difficult to chop.
   

Your eyes will start stinging when you make the last series of cuts, so get them done as quickly as you can, then get the diced onion away from under your nose.

It’s funny that the co-incidence of me breaking a chef’s knife should coincide with JD’s excellent post on knife technique.

Just to set the scene, lette and I have moved into a new house (full of new things), some nice new things and some not-so-nice. One of the things I’ve neglected to bring from my old house was my old chef’s knife. It was unbranded but it had a straight through tang and always felt spot on to use. So we replaced this knife and other accoutrements with a “Dunnes Home” Premium range of kitchen utensils – big mistake.

Anyway long story short I was just about to halve an onion when the diabolically blunt blade of the “Dunnes Home” Premium chef’s knife decided to dig in and hop, the blade broke at the handle and flew up and slapped my left arm. I can’t believe how close I came to a very very horrible injury. Safe to say that if you have to force your knife through your food then it’s time to seriously consider getting rid of it before you get rid of an arm!

Anyway, heeding JD’s well heeled advice here I decided to go ahead and pick up a dick! An F.Dick 8″ Chef’s Knife, to be more precise, and I have to say that I’ve been very glad since I got it. Cutting is effortless, the blade is very very keen, and well balanced, so the knife really is doing all the work for you. The blade itself is nice and high too, which means plenty of room to move when chopping.

While the knife itself isn’t a particularly classy object to regard it is excellently crafted, it feels solid and precise while you’re using it. You’d most likely find this in a working kitchen rather than a tv chef’s studio, but all in all it’s still has got the seal of approval from me!

On a closing note, please consider your current knife very carefully. If you find you’re having to force your way through what you’re cutting then you’re entering a world of pain. If you’re in Limerick check out Flavin’s butchers, as per JD’s Recommendation and pick yourself up a real knife!

Keith