Nando’s wild herb Peri-peri sauce is like crack for food
Posted on February 13th, 2009 by Richard Catto 1,549 views
One of my favourite quick simple meals is smoked peppered chicken fillets and cheese on a fresh bun and to make it interesting, adding an exciting sauce really makes the meal.
The other day, as I was browsing the sauce racks at my local SPAR supermarket, I noticed that they carried the full range of Nando’s Peri-peri sauces and I decided to get their wild herb variant and try it out.
Well, it’s a total hit. It’s so good, it’s like eating Nando’s takeout except at home for a fraction of the cost.
To make this meal yourself, here’s how you prepare it:
Ingredients
A fresh bun (or roll as we call them here in South Africa). I usually buy a french roll or a portuguese roll, but an ordinary hamburger roll will also work.
Real butter
Cheese. I use Gouda.
Smoked peppered chicken fillets
Nando’s wild herb Peri-peri sauce
Method
Slice open the roll. Slice some butter and layer it on the bottom half of the roll. Slice a smoked peppered chicken fillet and layer it over the butter slices, so that the chicken pieces overlap each other. Liberally pour on the Nando’s Peri-peri sauce. Top with cheese. Microwave it to melt the cheese.
Enjoy!
It’s a magic meal and really filling. You’ll probably want to make more than one roll at a time, because you’ll definitely want more. I love this snack so much, I could eat myself into a coma!
Tags: Nando's, Peri-peri, snack
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Simple Onion and Bean soup recipe
Posted on December 3rd, 2008 by Richard Catto 1,343 views
Looking to make a quick and simple nutritious soup?
Here’s one I threw together last night with some odds and ends you might already have in your pantry.
Ingredients
3 onions (chopped)
1 can of baked beans
1 packet of Cream of Chicken soup powder or Brown onion soup (or whatever flavour you want)
4 slices of bread
Method
Fry the onions in butter, in your soup pot, until they are translucent. Add the can of baked beans and mix in well. Toss in the packet of soup powder and mix in well. Add boiling water a little at a time, stirring it in well until you have the desired consistency. Stir well and let that simmer.
Soak the slices of bread in milk. You can get this going beforehand, if you like, but it doesn’t take long for bread to absorb milk. Break the bread up with your hands and add to the soup. This gives the soup more body and adds interest to your meal. Stir the bread in well and simmer your soup until its done.
This makes a delicious soup with lots of interesting bits in it!
Tags: baked beans, onion, soup
Filed under Food, Recipes | 5 Comments »
September 2008 Food Inflation 18.3%!
Posted on November 13th, 2008 by Richard Catto 758 views
However at Spar Supermarkets it is more like 24% because they have become outrageously expensive when compared to Checkers, which is the cheapest store to buy from.
The Spar I buy from now routinely charges much more on everyday items such as milk, cheese, eggs, baked beans, coffee, sugar, flour. Not only that, but their latest scam is to charge more for items at the till than is marked on the shelves.
This is becoming endemic now. Unless I thoroughly check my receipt, Spar will take as much from me as they can get away with.
Also leftover bread which they bake in house is sold the following day at the same price as freshly baked bread.
Tags: Food inflation, Spar
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The tastiest meatloaf recipe ever
Posted on August 5th, 2008 by Richard Catto 6,530 views
This meatloaf recipe is so tasty and delicious and so addictive, you’ll swear there’s crack in it, but it’s all good.
The measurements are given in metric, but if you’re an American, you can use Josh Madison’s convert utility and substitute South African brand name ingredients with your own.
You need a large mixing bowl and a large wooden spoon plus two meatloaf dishes.
This meal fixes quickly and easily with little mess or fuss, so if you’re an impatient bachelor like me, you can rest assured you’ll be eating this meal about 60 minutes after it goes into the oven.
I got the original basic recipe from a female friend of mine, but I’ve adapted it by trial and error to this rare state of perfection. Honestly, there is no better recipe for meatloaf than the one I am about to share with you.
You need the following ingredients:
- Roughly 1 kilogram of lean beef mince
- 2 cups of Jungle Oats
- 4 Weetbix biscuits, crumbled
- 1 packet of brown onion soup
- 15 gram packet of Robertson’s spices – cumin and coriander casserole mix
- 4 eggs
- 1 cup of milk
- 1 can of hot and spicy Chakalaka (you might not be able to obtain this easily outside of South Africa)
- 1 packet of streaky bacon (optional)
- some Mrs Balls chutney if you like, original recipe or extra hot, as you like it
- some sweet chili sauce from WoolWorths (optional)
Before you start mixing this up, preheat your oven to 200C, so it’s at that temperature when you put the meatloaf dishes in.
Preparation
Crumble the 4 Weetbix biscuits into the mixing bowl. Add the 2 cups of Jungle Oats. Add the brown onion soup and the cumin and coriander mix. Mix this up. Add some sweet chili sauce and chutney. Dump in the can of Chakalaka. Mix thoroughly. You should have a very dry paste. Add in the cup of milk. Stir it well until it is thoroughly mixed in. Add the 4 eggs – this is to bind the mixture. Mix thoroughly again. Add in 500 grams of beef mince and mix it thoroughly in. Add the other 500 grams of mince and mix it thoroughly in. The reason you don’t add all the mince in at once, is because it’s easier to mix in a smaller quantity at a time, especially if you are doing this by hand. Your hand will probably get a bit tired and sore because it is a bit of hard graft, so take a short break if necessary.
Now prepare your dishes. You can smear them with butter or spray them with Spray ‘n Cook. Line the dishes with the bacon strips. This is optional, but it adds flavour.
Now spoon the meatloaf mixture into both dishes equally and smooth the tops out.
Put the dishes into the oven for 60 minutes on 200C.
When they come out, the tops will be nice and crispy and the edges should have pulled away from the dish.
Under no circumstances should you try experimenting with this mixture by adding in tomato. If you do, the meatloaf will fall apart – the tomato causes it to not bind properly. I’ve tried it, and it doesn’t work, okay.
That’s it. This is the best meatloaf mixture you will ever eat! You can eat it hot or cold, it doesn’t matter. You can eat it plain or you can smother it in a pepper sauce gravy. You don’t need vegetables or carbohydrates like pasta or rice with this, because all of that stuff is baked right in. This is a complete meal and you’re getting your fibre with it too – a totally balanced, healthy meal.
This will serve one bachelor for about one day. Theoretically, it could last longer, but once you start eating it, you will not want to eat anything else, so in practice both dishes last about 6 hours tops.
Bon Appétit, or whatever they say in your neck of the woods.
Tags: meatloaf
Filed under Food | 10 Comments »
How to pack on the pounds for under $10 a day
Posted on June 6th, 2008 by Richard Catto 1,186 views
Since we all have this Global Food Crisis and all, I thought I would contribute to the war effort by giving all you skinny malinks the secret to becoming really really fat on under $10 a day.
The secret is simple: Eat more pasta!
Pasta is a really forgiving meal and it’s really hard to fuck it up, but even so, listen carefully and follow these directions closely for a mouth watering dish fit for a royal hound.
There are 3 basic parts to this pasta dish:
- The Pasta
- The Meat Sauce
- The White Sauce (optional, but worth the small additional effort)
The pasta is easy. Grab a 500 gram bag of macaroni and boil the hell out of it until it’s nice and soft and juicy and good to eat. The secret to making great pasta is to dump the macaroni into the pot first, pour on some sunflower oil (so it doesn’t stick to itself) and season it liberally with a lot of salt before you cover it with boiling water.
Cooking pasta is pretty low maintenance. It needs to be stirred maybe once or twice, so it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pot, and it may need to be topped up with extra boiling water only once before its ready.
Don’t undercook pasta and don’t overcook it. After a couple of hundred tries, you’ll still be trying to figure out what ‘al dente’ is. If you ever work it out, let me know. I believe it is one of those occult Italian cookery terms that is deliberately obscure so that no matter what you do to your pasta, someone who wants to appear more knowledgeable than you can cluck their teeth, shake their head and make sad eyes at you. Fuck ‘em. If you like it, it’s done right.
The meat sauce is where you can get really creative. There’s so many different things you can do here. I’m going to describe a meat sauce variant that has been giving me a lot of culinary joy of late.
It’s comprised of 3 basic ingredients:
- Chopped onions
- Tuna
- Baked beans
I made this for myself last night. I started off by frying 2 chopped onions in extra virgin olive oil, until they were translucent (which means you can sort of see through them). Then I added in some chopped garlic paste and some crap my brother left behind called ‘choppy choppy’. It didn’t look too terrible, so I just chucked that in. The whole thing. All of it. Mixed that around a bit. Noticed that the ‘choppy choppy’ contained some feta cheese. Ah well.
Next I dumped in about a half bottle of soya sauce. Okay, I think it was about 100 ml, but I don’t measure anything I chuck into my meat sauce. Then I added the baked beans and stirred that in good. Don’t be afraid to add some boiling water if the mixture gets too thick and starts sticking to the pan. I added a whole lot of Mrs Ball’s original chutney. I also like the extra hot variant, but I had some WoolWorths sweet chili sauce and I didn’t want to overdo it with the hot stuff – it quickly reaches volcanic heat if you put too much hot stuff in. I also dumped in some chili bovril mixed in with boiling water and a beef stock cube. Finally I added 2 cans of tuna and sprinkled on various Robertson’s herbs and spices.
Just one thing about the tuna. Some people get all huffy and complain that dolphins get caught up in tuna nets and stuff, and so it’s environmentally unfriendly to consume tuna, unless of course, it’s 100% PETA certified dolphin free tuna. Well, in my experience that PETA certified tuna is crap, probably because they’ve taken all the best parts out. Mmmmm, crunchy dolphin.
So in the background, whilst stirring and experimenting with your meat sauce, you’ve taken the pasta off the stove, drained it and poured it into a deep dish to wait for the addition of the meat sauce and the white sauce.
If your meat sauce is a bit thin and needs thickening up, use some Bisto. Just put 1 or 2 teaspoons of bisto in a cup and pour in a small quantity of water. Mix the bisto in and then pour into your meat sauce. Stir until it thickens.
The meat sauce is done when you feel its done. I basically go through my cupboards and see what interesting stuff I can add to it to spice it up and when I’m done experimenting and it looks and tastes right, I take it off the stove and pour it over the pasta and mix it thoroughly in.
The white sauce part is where a lot of people’s (mostly men’s) eyes glaze over and they want to hit the skip button or whatever because they feel it’s way too complicated. Well, here’s a terribly easy white sauce that you really can make and it will turn out well.
The thing to remember about white sauce is that it’s not something you can do on the side while you also attend to other things. White sauce demands your full and constant attention.
White sauce needs three basic ingredients:
- Real butter
- Flour
- Milk
Melt about 3 – 4 tablespoons of butter in a frying pan. Dump two heaped tablespoons of flour into the melted butter and stir it in. Keep stirring. Making white sauce is all about stirring – you never stop stirring.
The initial mixture should not be thick and clump together. If it is, add more butter. Keep stirring over a medium heat and you’ll soon see that the mixture starts to bubble. The bubbles have white edges. Don’t let the yellow mixture turn brown. It will thicken slightly. When it starts to thicken, it’s time to add milk.
Pour in a quarter cup of milk and stir it in. The mixture should immediately thicken and clump together. Add another half a cup of milk and stir that in. The mixture will be thin at first but quickly thicken. When it starts to thicken again, pour in a full cup of milk. The milky white mixture will be quite thin at first, but after about a minute or two of constant stirring, it will achieve a smooth thicker consistency.
The time to take it off the heat is a judgement call. The longer you keep it on the heat, the thicker it will become. You can add more milk if it gets too thick and then stir it until it reaches the desired consistency, but if you judge it correctly, you won’t need to add more milk.
As soon as you take it off the heat, pour it immediately over your meat and pasta mixture. The white sauce will start to set as soon as it is off the heat. The last bits of it in the pan will set and become stiff.
Use a wooden spoon to blend the white sauce in with the meat and pasta mixture. The white sauce is optional, but it does make the meal much more enjoyable.
And that is it. You can serve your pasta dish with grated cheese on top if you like or just as it is. This dish will feed one adult male for 2 – 3 days, depending on how good it is. The better it tastes, the shorter the time it will last.
Bon appétit!
Tags: baked beans, Pasta dish recipe, tuna, white sauce
Filed under Food | 6 Comments »
