Rastachef: Nachos El Grande

Every kiwi flatter worth their salt has their own special nachos recipe. Here's mine. It has been crafted to be not only well-balanced nutritionally with all the food groups, but also taking best advantage of the drug compass too. Damn fine Batchelor Chow too, as the hard yards of the dish can be frozen. 4th placegetter at the Turanga Leela Batchelor Batch Cooking Awards 3013.

Health & Lawyer Warning: May cause/cure constipation, asthma, night terrors, insomnia, irritable bowel syndrome and a range of other side effects/benefits. May not be suitable for all enterotypes. Please consult with your intestinal bacteria before ingesting.


Zippy's Nachos El Grande

Makes 2 man portions or 4 woman portions.
Prep time: 10 minutes. Cooking time: 2-3 hours, including cigarette breaks.

What you need (in order of appearance):

Lemon, salt  and pepper not pictured

All Your Base:

The largest onion in the pantry
The largest carrot in the fridge
1 Tbs cooking oil
3 cloves garlic / 1 Tbs crushed garlic

Spice Bomb: 1 Tbs chili powder, 1 Tbs cumin, 1 tsp ground coriander, 1 tsp paprika

200 grams cheap beef mince
Juice from one lemon
Half a punnet / 2 generous Tbs tomato paste
2/3 cup dry red kidney beans, soaked in water at least overnight (preferably a day) and rinsed
A cup or two of water
1 tsp beef stock / 1 beef Oxo cube
Salt and pepper
2 tsp minced chili

For each serving:

1/4 bag / 80 gramsish unseasoned corn chips
10 grates / 1/4 cup cheese
1/2 punnet / 2 generous Tbs sour cream
A few lettuce leaves
2 Tbs Coriander leaf
If it was summer, one tomato

Mis and Method

Put a large heavy-based pot on medium-low heat. While that's warming up, slice the onion and dice the carrot finely. Prepare the spice bomb by mixing together the chili, cumin, ground coriander and paprika in a small bowl.

The pot should be warm enough to put the oil in now. Throw in the sliced onion and diced carrots while you're at it. Stir until the veggies are coated with the oil, then leave it alone and uncovered, and go and have a cigarette break.

After ten minutes of laxing, go and stir the carrots and onions. Stir every minute or so until all the green spines in the onions have disappeared (about another 20 minutes. Maybe longer. Browning onions takes time but it's worth it).

Once the onions are nice and soft, throw in the spice bomb. Be careful not to inhale the fumes, and keep pets and small children out of the vicinity.



After a minute of stirring the spices through the veggies, throw in the beef mince and spend the next five minutes browning the mince, breaking lumps of it up with a wooden spoon. Once the mince is browned, add the garlic and stir a minute. Then add the lemon juice and tomato paste and stir, before then adding the red kidney beans.



Add just enough water to cover the beans and meat, and stir the crumbled beef stock into the mix. Crack some pepper into the mix, and a dash of salt (the stock has already got heaps). Turn down heat to low, put the lid on the pot and go roll up a spliff.

Stir every 20 minutes or so. After an hour, take the lid off the pot and reduce the mixture until most of the liquid has gone. Check how cooked the beans are by trying to squish one with a fork. Once the beans are readily mushable, add the crushed chili, mash the mixture a couple of times and stir. Turn the grill on.

Mis Part II.

Grate the cheese, roughly chop the lettuce, finely chop the coriander leaf. Dice the hypothetical tomato. I'm cooking for one, with the other chow for tomorrow night, so the rest of the prep is for one serving.

Place half the bean mince mix in the middle of a plate and surround it with corn chips. Top mince and beans with cheese and grill for a minute, or until cheese has just melted. Top with sour cream and put back under grill until corn chips begin to turn golden.



Remove from the grill and top with the chopped lettuce. This adds a much-needed dose of natural narcotics to aid digestion. Add imaginary diced tomato and sprinkle the chopped coriander to garnish. Et voila! Zippy's Nachos El Grande with bonus tucker. Bon appetit.

Mexican Radio

Funny thing about governments; they're all keen on prohibition right up until the moment they aren't. Take, for example, the US appetite for Mexican food:

As long as Mexican food has existed in this country, government has tried to legislate it out of existence. This is partly because of stereotypes but mostly because government is government. The resulting underground Mexican food economy, meanwhile, has birthed some of the cuisine’s most innovative trends. 

It's this same US racist leanings that first saw cannabis prohibition in the 1920's, seeing how the blacks and Hispanics preferred reefer madness to whiskey tremens. Ironic really, considering that you will never find the perfect taco in a franchise store. Only that Yank diet of orange gloop they call cheese, and unfeasibly large cups of lolly water.

Recipe for Zippy's Nachos El Grandes soon ( a la Che Tibby). It's mouth-wateringly good and eye-wateringly bad, but it's more work putting a RastaChef post together than you might think. The lens keeps fogging up and the lighting budget is Lilliputian. But the Slow Cooking movement is like the civil service. In the fullness of time and all.

Jam

I never knew jam poisoning was such a big deal in NZ, but the safety nazis have struck again on the home-made preserves racket. Radio NZ reports that the Kapiti district council is clamping down on unlicensed kitchen condiments:

The council's manager for assets and services, Gary Simpson, says all others must have registered kitchens, no matter what their size. This, he says, is to guard against outbreaks of illness. But the market's convenor Sherryl Gray, who describes the new decree as a kick in the guts, says the cost of setting up a commercial kitchen is prohibitive. She says the cooks are furious because their food, such as cakes and preserves, has never generated a complaint. She also says the market has given $63,000 to community causes since 1996.

This is just nutty red tape. I take stuff like this pretty personally. It's crap like this that keeps rooting my business ideas. Last time it was Labour's school tuck shop ideas that ran over my cunning plan before fruition. Now it's the bloody cake and jam banners.
 
The rigours of setting up a commercial kitchen to match the high standards of the certifiable cardy clipboard carriers puts a few start-ups right off. We can't all be like Cookie Time, who started off lucky enough to borrow some else's commercial kitchen on the downtime. Or maybe that's a new use for off-peak restaurants. It has happened before, after all. Wishbone keeps fluking it too.

But there really should be an exclusion for advertised home-sellers, such as at markets or stalls. Maybe insist home-bakers stamp their goods with a big green "U" for unlicensed to give due notice that it's buyer beware. None of this "charity cooking only business" either.

You want to kick start the economy on the cheap, here's an idea. Short lease out all those CBD For Lease gaps on the street to the home-cookers. I'd be keen to start some kind of Mexican food joint myself, serving nachos to the suits for lunch; just a fridge, sink and stove for basic kit. But oh, no. There'd have to be much more gleaming stainless steel and sealed linoleum before the boxed are all ticked.



Speaking of jam of another kind, here's the story behind the YouTube caching clusterfuck at TelstraClear. Two thumbs up to Geekzone for the information, as TC weren't exactly updating their customers on the obvious problem. I've had a gutsful for six months, YouTube vids taking three times longer to load than the length of the clip.

Between Telecom and TelstraClear, it's like choosing between the last two girls on the dance floor at closing time. Both lonely and sad and a bit desperate, but at least getting rooted by TelstraClear is still not as painful as the Telecom *.

Adiós CC's

Food manufacturers continue to consolidate their supply lines. The latest casualty in this right-sizing is Bluebird's CC's and Aztec Corn Chips. They have been replaced by a locally-made version of the Americana trash Doritos. As a fond nacho lover (you should try my Nacho Grando el Gonzo plate), Zippy Gonzales is not amused. Fortunately, there's still Mexican Supplies. Just as Whitaker's chocolate is to Cadbury, Mexicano Corn Chips is now my preferred supplier.

 
Kiss my kidney beans, Big Food!

Bits and bobs

# Wellington's Carter Observatory has finished refurbishment and will be celebrating with an Open Day this Saturday.

# Victoria University alumni might be interested in acquiring a piece of Grant Buist's Quad mural:

As part of the Quad redevelopment, I learnt today that my mural is being “decommissioned”, which is a military euphemism for ‘binned”. This mural, which took me four years to paint, is made up of 18 panels, each of which is 1.2 metres wide by 1.6 metres tall, painted on hardboard which varies in weight from damn unwieldy to OMG this thing is heavy. It’s one of the projects of which I’m proudest.

Now, I could bung the entire thing on TradeMe, but I think I’d prefer to give it away panel by panel to people who have fond memories of staring at it in the Quad during lunch. The only condition is that you’d probably have to turn up at Vic and haul the thing away yourself.

So, hover your mouse over your favourite panel, note the title and number, contact me here, and reserve it.

# Peter at Dub dot dash points to this smoking version of I Put A Spell On You, a collaboration between Nick Cave, Chrissie Hynde, Mick Jones, Johnny Depp and others to raise funds for the Haiti quake survivors:



# The Wellington nights are getting colder and the heating bill for the Hobbit Hole is sure to rise. One way to keep warm and stay fed is to bake your own bread. Lifehack gives a quick and easy way to make One Minute Prep Ciabatta bread. Nothing is better than a very low oven proving dough to warm up the room as well as the smells of baking bread to lift the spirits.

# The Story of Bottled Water, brought to you by the same team who gave us the Story of Stuff:

The Rose of the River Café

Last week, I was hunting through the larder for some dinner. While not quite Mother Hubbard's cupboard, a substantial part of the back wall was showing, which is never a good sign. Happiness is a full pantry, after all. Luckily, there were enough ingredients to make one of my favourite dishes.

A dribble of Balsamic vinegar, a dash of olive oil, a couple of handfuls of penne pasta, a can of tomatoes, the last of the basil leaves from the window sill which the sun barely reaches these last days of summer. A large dollop of butter from the fridge, some garlic, a handful of parmesan. It should be Pecorino but close enough damnit. All the right ingredients for a cheap feast.

The real recipe is in the River Café Cookbook. Where else does the book like to fall open? Ah, the Risotto al Amarone di Valpolicella, another filling meal which requires stuff all in the larder. Excellent student food. Ah, Chocolate Nemesis, you unmakeable blob! The ultimate in chocolate porn and just as unattainable. And yet, a revised recipe released in 2004 might do the trick.

I was never much chop in restaurant kitchens, but left to my own devices and the right book at home, all was good. Three books, to be precise. The Edmonds, the River Café Cook Book, and my exercise book of gleaned gems from around about (The Alison Holst and Sauces books have gone walkabouts).

One of the founding chefs at River Café, Rose Gray, has passed on. So long, and thanks for all the simple meals.

BZP less dangerous than vitamin supplements

Evidence has finally surfaced on something I have long suspected. TV One Sport with Weather and News featured a "Danish study" showing that increased used of Vitamin A led to a 16 percent incidence of death compared with non-pill poppers. My suspicions were first raised after one too many Beroccas in the nineties. Haven't touched the vitamin industry since.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but at no stage during Lorilei Mason's piece about the story is the actual study named. A quick Google shows it was at the Center for Clinical Intervention Research at Denmark's Copenhagen University Hospital. Thank you Reuters. If the reporting at TVNZ is this bad now, what will it be like after the witch hunt?

I follow a rather simple recipe for good health. Eat food. Exercise. Breathe in. Breathe out. An answer on why eating food is preferable to anything touched by a processing plant is offered by Michael Pollan at the NYT.

I suppose I was fortunate to be the son of a poacher man. I learnt early on and accepted where food came from. To this day, I can eat a medium-rare slab of Bambi without all that guilt that the chicks seem to be flagellating themselves with. One chick I know used to eat bacon, shrimp, cow, you name it. Then red meat went. Then chicken. Then fish and all those lusty crustaceans. Guilt. Loads of guilt.

Thing is, being veggie is a lot of work. Meal preparation time goes through the roof. You can't go mental with lentils in less than ten minutes, which seems to be the median cooking time these days for people in a hurry. You've got to boil the fuck out them for anything over an hour. Same goes with any pulse. Why not grab a can of instant beans instead?

Well, the food in a can has been processed somehow. It's not just beans. While it's possible you grabbed the beans in brine at the supermarket, chances are you grabbed the chilli beans with ten percent more shit in it than other leading brands. Food has become too statistically focused for its own good. Food is not just a bunch of Recommended Daily Intakes. It's holistic baby.