Bell X1’s Dave Geraghty. Multi instrumentalist extraordinaire, acclaimed solo artist, vegetarian and like my good self, ex student of Ballyfermot Senior College or Ballyfermeaux,  as estate agents still like to call it. Invariably, he would had to have taken the infamous 78a bus in or out of campus. I’m sure it’s a lot safer now but that was always a rough ride for any hippie looking student in the 90’s. You’d hop on board and be greeted by a loud cry of, “Jaysus, the state of the bleedin’ head on this geebag! Where are you from, ya sap ya???” Obviously CIE customer relations have come a long way since then, coz most bus drivers would be sacked these days for comments like that.

So then you’d scope out the passengers and find the least dodgy looking one, ie  whoever wasn’t shooting up or chasing the dragon at the time, and take a seat. After 45 minutes of abuse from practically everyone on board, you’d finally get to your first lecture. Of course, it would be virtually impossible to concentrate for the rest of the day. Your mind would be caught up with the looming journey back into town, which was always twice as bad as the one in.

I’m guessing Dave suffered as much as I did on those 78A bus rides, so I thought it would be inappropriate to dig up any of those memories for him. Especially after he has shared such a wicked recipe with me this week, his take on the Malay/Indonesian classic, Nasi Goreng. It is clearly obvious that Dave knows his way round the kitchen and has cooked this one before. Every tip that he gives is spot on and I did not have to edit one single word of his recipe. Many thanks for your contribution this week Dave!

Dave and the rest of the Bellies as they are often referred to, will be on tour again soon.  Catch them in a venue near you in November, if you’re lucky enough to have a ticket as most of the shows are sold out! I have a lot of time for Dave’s solo recordings, be sure to give them a whirl if you haven’t already.

Dave Geraghty’s Nasi Goreng  (as stated earlier, everything from here on in was written by Dave himself. What a legend!)

N.B – Every time I make this, it’s slightly different, so stick yer finger in and taste as you go…with a dash of common sense.

If you can exercise foresight here, the best way to prepare your basmati rice for this sensational dish (suitable for any hour of the day, although it is traditionally an Indonesian breakfast dish), is to cook the rice in advance and leave it in the fridge to cool and separate.This allows you to add the rice to the wok full of cooking ingredients as instructed below….

INGREDIENTS:

* 400g (2 cups) long-grain white rice

(btw – don’t bother trying to be healthy here by using wholegrain rice. It doesn’t have the same soakage as basmati so it fucks with the overall texture of the dish.)

* Chickpeas (add accordingly, I generally throw in half a tin.)

* 1 tbs peanut oil

* 8 shallots, thinly sliced

* 2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced

* 1 carrot, finely diced

* 1 celery stick, trimmed, finely diced

* 3/4 cup loosely packed finely shredded Chinese cabbage(Asian Food Store on George’s St)

* 2 cups of bean sprouts

* 1 tbs soy sauce

* 4 eggs

* Cashew nuts

* 1 Teaspoon of Chinese 5 spice is the secret ingredient here. It gives a nice aromatic finish.

* Fresh coriander, a good handful, chopped coarsely

METHOD:

- 1. Cook rice in a large saucepan of salted boiling water.

- 2. Add oil to a wok and heat until just smoking. Take half the shallots and fry quickly until they crisp, then remove with slotted spoon and put aside. Add the remaining shallots and garlic, and stir-fry for 2 minutes or until shallots are soft. Add the carrot and celery, and stir-fry for 3 minutes or until carrot is tender.

- 3. Throw in your chickpeas and Cashews. Add cooled rice, bean sprouts, half the fried shallots, and soy sauce. Stir-fry for 2 minutes or until heated through. Transfer to a large bowl. Cover with foil to keep warm. This is your nasi goreng.

-  4. Heat a large non-stick frying pan over medium-high heat. Crack 2 eggs into the pan and cook, uncovered, for 2 minutes or until the white sets and the yolk is almost set (although it is generally better with a soft yolk).

- 5. Spoon nasi goreng into shallow serving bowls. Top each with your fried egg and sprinkle over with remaining fried shallots and chopped fresh coriander.

Serve immediately.

* Note: The cooked rice for this dish needs to be cold before stir-frying otherwise its texture will change.

SERVE WITH:

Throw into the equation, a nice cool Tiger beer.

Enjoy!

Dave

Just because you sell meat, doesn’t mean you’re a butcher.  That professional title can only be warranted, when you get handed a dead animal, carve it up into a million pieces and flog the whole fucking lot. Most  meat vendors today can’t do that. They don’t receive big carcasses any more, just deliveries of vacuum sealed fillets, chops and mince. This is a real shame because you can miss out on the more interesting cuts.  Like the shoulder.

If you cook a shoulder of pork or beef in something like a stew, the fat dissolves into the sauce and you’re left with a soft, stringy meat. But being able to find a shoulder of pork or beef in Dublin is a pain in the gicker . Thankfully FXB’s on Moore St stock them and they can cut it up for you properly too. Here you will find trained butchers who know what they are doing and funnily enough most of their customers aren’t even Irish.  That’s because too many of us are either buying French sounding fillet cuts from places like Fallon & Byrne  or frozen lumps of  deep fried salt nuggets from Tesco.

Ireland may have complete muppet politicians decimating our economy and making mockeries of us abroad,  but we can’t blame Bertie et al for our poor eating habits and boring palettes. If you need some gastronomic inspiration, check out the non nationals who shop down in FXB’s.  They don’t need to have their food pre packaged or branded exotically.  And they make wicked dishes like…

A BIG FUCK OFF POT OF HUNGARIAN PORK SHOULDER GOULASH WITH SMOKED CHILLIES

INGREDIENTS:

- Half a shoulder of pork (FXB’s Butchers on Moore St. Get them to de-rind it and de-bone it. It’s €12 for the whole shoulder,
freeze the other half if you want)
- 3 Red peppers, chopped
- 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil or peanut oil
- Half a jar of roasted red peppers (get these in a Polish store for half nothing)
- 3 red onions, chopped
- 2 Yellow peppers and 2 green peppers (cut them across and leave in a circular shape but take out the seeds)
- 1 tin of tomatoes
- 1 Kallo Beef Stock Cube dissolved into 500ml of boiling water(Liston’s on Camden St)
- 3 Tablespoons of sweet paprika and 3 tablespoons of smoked Paprika (Magill’s on Clarendon St or Liston’s Camden St.)
- 2 smoked chillies, chopped (Mexican Food Stand at the Temple Bar Food Market or Taco Taco at The Epicurean Food Hall on Liffey Street)
- 5 tablespoons of Red Wine Vinegar
- 3 tablespoons of caraway seeds
- 2 tablespoons of marjoram
- 1 teaspoon of pepper

METHOD:
- Preheat your oven to 180 degrees.
- Cut the pork into strips that are 2 – 3 inches thick and run the lengthof the shoulder. There will be a good bit of fat but that will
eventually dissolve, however feel free to get rid of any really big bits if you need to be a wuss about it.
- Heat the oil in a big fuck off pot and then brown the pork in batches. As you cook it put it aside.
- In the big fuck off pot fry the onions for a couple of minutes on their own, then throw in the red peppers and for fry for five minutes.
- Then you throw in everything else except for the yellow and green peppers and bring it all to a boil whilst stirring carefully.
- When it’s all boiling put the lid on and bang it in the oven for 2.5 hours. It’s a good idea to take out the pot after 1.5 hours though
to give it a quick stir and then throw it back in again.
- After 2.5 hours take out the pot and put the sliced yellow peppers
in. Let it cook in the oven for another 30 minutes.

SERVE WITH:
- Rice or boiled and buttered baby spuds and some steamed carrots on the side.  Hungarians and Austrians would serve Goulash with Spatzle, a pasta like dough that you boil. Google that if you want, but I’ll be featuring it in another recipe soon.
- Throw a good dollop of creme fraiche or sour cream onto each plate of the goulash as you serve it. It chills out the spice a little.
- If you want some extra acidity, heat a little jarred sauerkraut  which you can get in any Polish store or Polish section of your local Spar or Centra.

After a week of unreturned phone calls and emails, one of my suppliers finally gets back to me.  He was away at a wedding apparently.

“Anywhere nice?”, I ask.

“Poland”, says he.

“Jaysus, a Polish wedding! You must have had loads of Vodka eh?”

“Ah no, I didn’t have any.”

“Then you must have hit some of those wicked beers they have?”

“No, never touched them.”

“Right,…..ok. I had no idea you didn’t drink?”

“Ah Jaysus no. I drink alright…But I only drink Guinness.”

“So you mean you were all the way over in Poland at a wedding and you didn’t have one single drink because they didn’t serve stout?”

“Ah yeah,  I only drink Guinness.”

At this point, I want to smack him one. Not only was he gone for over a week without turning his auto-reply on or changing his voicemail(use the bleedin’ technology you muppet) but the guy would make Karl Pilkington look like a modern day Marco Polo explorer of the unknown.  How can anyone only have just the one drink that they imbibe? That goes beyond being just small minded. It’s retarded. It’s an insult to milennia of humans getting shit faced.

As you can safely guess, I absolutely adore alcohol and pretty much all the liquid forms it comes in (but I draw the line at blue WKD). So much so, that I have begun dabbling in making my own. A few weeks ago my mate Hag says that he’s got a bottle of Grappa and wants to know what to do with it.  Only one word came to mind, Limoncello. A southern Italian alcoholic staple made with really strong gargoyle, lemon zest and sugar. That’s all you need.  Hag’s Grappa was 50% vol and kicked like a mule with p.m.t. Lovely jubbly. He gave it to me and  about a month later I was sampling my first batch of Limoncello.  If you wanna give it a go yourself, read on.

This is the bottle I kept for myself. Not quite sure what I was trying to convey with the chestnuts.

HOME MADE LIMONCELLO

INGREDIENTS:
- The peel of 12 lemons.  It is possible to get non waxed ones in the organic market in Temple Bar on a Saturday. If you can’t get them you need to scrub the lemons a little to get rid of that shite wax on them.
- 1 litre bottle of Everclear or Grain Alcohol/or Grappa or even a bottle of Vodka.
- Sugar syrup (recipe follows)

METHOD:

Get a potato peeler and carefully remove the peel from all the lemons. Be careful not to get any of the white pith in with the peels as this is really sour.

Take a container that has a good lid on it (like one of those very big glass jars) and put the lemon peels in. Then you lash in the alcohol.

Store this in a cool, dark place for 1 month.

After this thirty day period you need to strain the mixture into a bowl with a cheesecloth so that nothing solid gets through. At this
point you make your syrup.

Get 3 cups of water and 1.5  cups of sugar. Put them both into a pot. Stir and bring to the boil. Then you lower the flame and let it simmerfor about 15 minutes.

When it cools off add the syrup to your lemon alcohol.  Don’t add it all in at once, as you may not like it that sweet. Start with a small amount and add more if you want after you taste it. I only used half that amount for this batch, it’s just a matter of how you like it. Stir it all up when you’re happy with how it tastes and bingo, you’ve got some wicked Limoncello.

This is Hag’s share of the bounty.  I ran out of bottles so had to put his in a jar, which makes it look  like a urine sample. I wouldn’t be able to drink something that looks like wee, but he probably could. That’s why he got the jar.

SERVE WITH:

This is a digestif served after Dessert. But it’s also nice drink to get you back on the gargle when you’ve got a mauldy hangover. Limoncello should be kept real cold in the freezer and you should sip it. Don’t shoot it like a Jagerbomb or something. It can also be used in desserts or as an extra ingredient in a sauce.

P.S.

Many thanks to all you of you for the warm wishes after I was crowned “The Chili King of Ireland” on Tom Dunne’s Newstalk show last week.  Needless to say I have taken my newly found royalty with a complete lack of humilty. The world and his uncle know about my glory at this stage. And if they don’t know now, they certainly will after the Billboard posters and bus shelter ads go up on Monday morning.

Anyhoo, Tom very kindly posted my recipe on his site which you can see here. Of course, many of you will have recognised the original uncensored version that I put a couple of weeks ago, namely my Big Fuck Off Pot Of Chili With Beef And Pork.

Many thanks to Tom and all his crew for staging Ireland’s first radio cook off. It was actually deadly craic and I won a massive amount of prizes from Nordmende.