My backlog of unprocessed memory cards goes back until just before Easter, when we took a slightly-too-early break to Northumberland. Amongst the shots of that holiday were this one, of a lifejacket station on Alnwick beach.
For the last 15 years, I have hosted a Halloween gathering. The format has changed ever so slightly over the years, but two ingredients have remained constant: horror movies, and chili.
It is looking likely that this year may be the year I break my run, but I am amused and excited that Chiloween is going transatlantic, with a West Coast franchise courtesy of Dave. I’ve spent the last 15 years honing my Halloween Chili recipe, and it’s time to let it free into the world.
Please note: I make no claims that this chili is ‘authentic’ or ‘proper’. I’ve visited chili cook-off forums as a part of my research and am fully aware of how many cardinal sins are committed herein. It has beans. It has tomatoes. It has marmite. It is my Halloween Chili. I’d also like to recognise the Serious Eats Best Chili Ever, to which my recipe bears a resemblance, mostly by coincidence. I have them to thank for the addition of Marmite or anchovies in the base paste, and star anise in the spice mix - the rest I arrived at through many years of trial and error.
Halloween Chili
Ingredients (serves 12, or more if you serve with rice / potato skins etc)
1kg chuck steak, in slices rather than cubed
2 dried Ancho chili peppers
6-10 dried Habanero peppers (depending on preferred heat)
4 dried chipotle peppers
4 large cloves garlic
250ml bourbon whiskey
2 tbspn cumin seeds
1 tbspn coriander seeds
1 star anise
1 tbspn Marmite, or 6/7 tinned anchovies chopped very finely (or half and half, if you like)
500g dried pinto beans
3 large onions
4 tins of tomatoes
250ml full-bodied red wine
50g good quality dark chocolate
A day ahead of serving
Soak the pinto beans according to instructions.
De-seed the chili peppers, and slice open so they lay flat, then slice again into half-inch pieces. Lightly toast them in a dry frying pan, then add the bourbon. Simmer for a few minutes, then set aside.
Again with the dry frying pan, lightly toast your cumin, coriander and star anise, then crush in a pestle and mortar.
In a blender, blitz the bourbon chili mix with the toasted spices, the garlic and the marmite/anchovies until you have a smooth paste. Make sure you have a lid on your blender, otherwise you may inadvertently pepper-spray yourself with your now-weaponised aerosol dinner.
Take the steaks and sear them well on all sides in a hot pan. Leave them to rest, then dice into chunks of your preferred size. I like smallish cubes, personally. Mix the meat into the base paste and leave to marinate for an hour or so.
Chop the onions and sweat them in some butter and oil in the bottom of a large pot. Add the marinated meat (with its marinade), the tomatoes and the wine. Bring to a good strong simmer to cook off the alcohol, then reduce the heat to the lowest you can manage and cook with the lid on for 2-3 hours, stirring occasionally. Allow to cool, then leave in the fridge overnight.
Two hours before serving
Drain and rinse the pinto beans, and add to the chili pot. Mix thoroughly, and put on a low heat.
Taste it. At this point you may decide it needs a bit more heat - I use chili flakes, usually, but if you have a favoured hot sauce then knock yourself out. Season with salt and pepper.
Allow to heat through, uncovered, on a slow simmer, with occasional stirring. It will now start to reduce, so keep an eye on it to ensure it doesn’t cook down too far. If you like, throw in a few whole chili peppers - they won’t add any heat to the dish, but they’ll be a tasty treat for one or two lucky guests.
Ten minutes before serving, take off the heat and add the dark chocolate. Stir, cover and allow to sit. Serve with your preferred accompaniments.
The Leamington and Warwick Sikh temple is an imposing building, made all the more so by being in the middle of a retail and business park; surrounded by supermarkets, office buildings and a bowling alley, the architecture looks that much more impressive, and it dominates the horizon beyond my office window.
I happened to have my camera with me in work on Friday, so was able to capture this amazing view, as the late afternoon sun found a chink in the clouds.
Today was Arthur’s first birthday. We had a little party for him and discovered he has tonsillitis. Unsurprisingly, I’ve learnt a lot of things this year. Here are the two most important lessons The Boy has taught me
1 The birth is only the beginning
Midwives, antenatal classes and parenting books all talk about the importance of having a birth plan. This is so that, in the midst of the tiredness and pain and confusion of labour, the mother and her birth partner have a record of the way that not-tired-and-confused them would prefer the birth to unfold. It generally refers to things like pain relief and intervention, but also things like music to make the experience more comfortable.
We had a birth plan. It wasn’t very detailed and we weren’t 100% committed to it, if I’m honest. What I really wish we’d had, though, was a first-three-months plan.
Nothing prepared me for the utter insanity of the first three months of being a parent. We thought we were totally on top of it; in retrospect, we were running on little sleep and much emotion. Parenting is up there with religion and politics as a subject to avoid in polite conversation. Parenting decisions are driven by many factors and the Internet is as full of judgment and misinformation as it is helpful or factual advice.
We made a couple of decisions in these early days that were influenced by the well-meaning agenda of midwives, health visitors, and others. At the time they made sense, but on later examination we realised that they weren’t our values, and weren’t things that we felt strongly enough about to add stress or expense to our days at that point.
I wish we’d taken the time to write down the things that were important to us (as well as the things that weren’t) before Artie was born, so that in the midst of the tiredness and euphoria and confusion of new-parenthood, we’d had a record of the way that not-tired-and-confused us would prefer our lives to unfold.
2 To stay present, plan to not be
The life-adjustment that none of the classes or books prepared me for was the complete lack of downtime. I was prepared to not sleep at night and I knew that my priorities would change, but I hadn’t got my head around how that would impact the countless little jobs that I used to ‘squeeze in’ when I had five or ten minutes. Email, news, photo processing, general tinkering - all things I took for granted that I’d find a bit of time to do.
Of course, that absolutely didn’t happen. Instead, I’d find myself trying to fit in a quick email reply while The Boy entertained himself on his playmat. Or I’d spend all of a sunny hour in the park trying to get a nice photo rather than pushing the swing.
After too long, the penny dropped. Although I was spending lots of time with Arthur, I was often distracted or, at least, he wasn’t always my primary focus.
I’d already made commitments with myself (and agreements with my wife) to ensure I continued trumpet practice and exercise and other activities that require protracted periods of focus. I decided if these little jobs were worth doing (a question that itself required some attention) then they deserved their own chunk of time carved out to get them done, without them impinging on my attention the rest of the time.
And, on that note, if you’ll excuse me, it’s bathtime.
My birthday present from The Wife this year was a Curing and Smoking course at Seasoned Cookery School in Derbyshire. The rather wonderfully-named Turan T Turan took us through the processes of curing, brining, air-drying, hot-smoking and cold-smoking, and I left with various paraphernalia for food-smoking at home. Although I’ve done less with it than I hoped, I’m determined to nail smoked salmon by Christmas, and I have a couple of stupid ideas I’d like to try out. I also managed a passable slow-smoked pork shoulder on my barbecue.
Ingredients
- 5kg boned & rolled pork shoulder
- 250g soft brown sugar
- Sea salt (flakes, preferably)
Equipment
- A largish barbecue with a lid
- Apple wood chips
- a deep foil tray, or a deep baking tray you don’t mind getting all gross, filled with water
- slow-burning charcoal briquettes
The pork needs preparing at least 24 hours ahead of cooking. Unroll it, and generously cover in the salt and brown sugar. Re-roll, cover, and put in the fridge, basting at regular intervals.
Lay your coals on one side of the barbecue - you need to leave enough space without coals for the water tray. Light them and, while they’re getting up to temperature, soak a handful of the wood chips in a bowl of water. You don’t need a lot of chips to get a reasonable amount of smoke, and it’s easy to over-smoke, so be restrained.
Once the coals are up to temperature, put the water tray in the space beside them and put the pork on the grill above them. Then throw the wood chips onto the coals and shut the lid for 5 hours.
Before the lid went down
I made a simple dipping / mopping sauce by reducing 250ml of white wine vinegar with 2 tablespoons of brown sugar and some chopped chiles by about two-thirds so it was sticky but not syrupy.
I took a few notes for improvement next time:
- The charcoal I was using was a bit rubbish, and needed topping up several times, which I think raised the temperature too high. Any recommendations for long-, slow-burning charcoal gratefully received
- I put the pork on the grill skin-side-down, in theory to protect the meat, but in retrospect I might have been better off with the skin and fat on top so the pork self-basted
- I don’t have a very efficient process for the actual pulling of the pork. I used two standard forks, and it took quite a while to do the whole shoulder. Again, if anyone has a better method I’d be keen to hear it.
NB: this week’s post was delayed by lack of Internet, which in turn led to unforeseen DropBox shenanigans.
In three weeks time, The Boy will be a year old, which is - frankly - bonkers. In that time, I have taken literally hundreds of pictures of him, lovingly curated into a growing set of Arthur, Daily books; got just-under-halfway through a stalled alphabet project; and posted here only twice (neither time in 2014). I have been on courses to learn how to cure and smoke food, brew beer, and butcher meat and done very little with any of the knowledge I gleaned, apart from make myself feel bad about that fact.
Maybe it’s just the constant tiredness that comes with a small child, but but idly browsing websites reading about doing things has subsumed the actual doing of them. Leafing through Kickstarter projects for new camera straps has replaced actually doing anything with any of the stack of unprocessed memory cards sitting on my desk, and buying a new pen to capture tasks has apparently become a serviceable substitute for doing them.
Worst, I spend what time I do have stuck in a loop of distraction. I won’t watch a film or read a book, because that’s committing that chunk of time. Far better to fritter away the same amount of time, longer, under the illusion that I’ll go and do something less boring instead as soon as I finish looking at these t-shirts.
So today I’m declaring bankruptcy. I’m abandoning the guilt of the unfinished A-Z projects, unopened Kickstarter rewards and the unread items in my RSS feeds. I’m going to stop berating myself about the not-doing, and just do, in the hope that somewhere a rhythm will find itself and I’ll be making stuff again. But I do need structure, so I’m going to set myself a really low, uncomplicated bar. Every week, from this week, I’ll post something here. It might be a photo, some kind of kitcheny experiment or something else. I will try and make it interesting. It will very likely be imperfect, if not horribly, dreadfully flawed. But it’ll be something that didn’t exist before I touched it.