Every media source will be discussing the following topics incessantly over the next month:

- New Fad Diets like the Bosnojan Berry Breakfast

- Weight Loss Programs that will guarantee you lose 5 stone if you run a marathon every day

- Exotic sounding health spas that involve Shamans smoking mosquitoes and drinking dandelion bath water

It is all bullshit, sold to us by a beauty regime that prey not only on our day to day insecurities, but on the ones that have been heightened by gorging at Chrimbo. There is a good chance at this point in time that you may have acted the complete maggot during the festive break and you will more than likely be doing the same tonight for New Year’s Eve. You will probably feel dreadful tomorrow as a 2 week, guilt riddled hangover kicks in. Do not be tempted to live off cabbage water or get yourself a coffee colonic. These are only for the feeble minded and weak. All you need to feel better for 2011, is some regular exercise and a shitload of spicy food. Green chillies in your morning eggs and two daily helpings of my Thai Penicillin for the rest of the month and you’ll be sorted for February. This is a variation on my Jewish penicillin, it has the same comforting benefits but with plenty of Thai spices and flavors to give it a new attitude.

THAI PENICILLIN

INGREDIENTS: ANYTHING YOU DON’T IMMEDIATELY RECOGNIZE CAN BE PURCHASED AT AN ASIAN STORE

1 whole cornfed chicken

1 whole  bulb of garlic. Peel all cloves.

6 carrots, sliced

1 tablespoon of freshly grated ginger

2 tablespoons of very finely chopped galangal

10 chopped shallots

2 red chillies, chopped coarsely

1 tablespoon of sugar

2 tablespoons of fish sauce or light soy sauce

1 can of coconut milk

10 Asian baby corns, cut in half

3 cups of bean sprouts

juice of 1 lime

1 fistful of fresh coriander, chopped coarsely

Your choice of noodles. I like Udon for their thickness. Vietnamese or Thai Rice noodles also work well. In terms of amounts, work off one cup of cooked noodles per serving.

METHOD:

As with practically all of my recipes, get yourself a big fuck off pot. One that will hold a whole chicken and all the ingredients in.

Lob the chicken, garlic, carrots, shallots, chillies, ginger and galangal into the pot and fill it water. Bring it to the boil with the lid off and then reduce the heat to a simmer and put the lid on it for an hour.

Remove the chicken carefully and let it sit for ten minutes so that it cools down a little, you can leave the pot on a low heat with the lid off. When the chicken has cooled down enough for you to touch, remove all the skin. Throw the skin into the pot and whiz it all up with one of them soup blenders or put it all into a food processor. Then throw in the coconut milk, fish sauce, sugar and curry paste and stir it all up until these have all combined with the stock.

Remove all the meat from the chicken with your hands and leave them in little bitesize chunks and slivers. When you’ve done all that, lash the meat into the pot with everything else. Let it cook for another twenty minutes so the flavors can really combine.

As that is cooking, you can get your noodles on in a separate pot. When they are done, add them into the chicken. Wash the bean sprouts and Asian baby corn and add them to the soup. Then you lob in the coriander and lime juice and quickly serve.

Finally, if yez are getting stuck into the bubbly tonight then might I suggest you try your hand at making a few Kir Léthales, taken from the second episode in The Sugar Club’s 2 Minute Cocktail series. It’s an exceptionally tasty champagne cocktail, if I do say so meself…

And Happy Bleedin’ New Year!

Manflu has kicked in, I’m as sick as a mangy canine and ready to hibernate for a month. It must be Christmas Eve. Last weekend I stayed off the gargoyle so I would be in good shape for the holidays. What a load of bollix that turned out to be.  Yuletide sobriety and I quite obviously don’t mix. By Monday, my body clearly went into revolt as it craved it’s standard abusive amounts of alcohol. I’ve been sick all week and most likely will be tomorrow too. I’m never not drinking again, ever.

Anyhoop, I have a total of 6 recipes for you to enjoy this week. 5 of which were printed in The Irish Times yesterday and one of which is up on youtube. After stalking and hounding a multitude of editors for a year now, the good people in The Ticket very kindly let The Rock Cook Book into their hallowed doors and published a Christmas Feast article I put together. You can read it all here, it features 5 courses of festive fare with recipes from Andrew Maxwell, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Lisa Hannigan, Camille O’Sullivan and Afro Celt Soundsytem. Many thanks to all of them for sharing their time and culinary wisdom! I would also like to thank the powers that be at The Ticket for not only letting me to bring food to Ireland’s best cultural guide, but for also making it their cover story. Isn’t Andrew’s jumper just lovely?

My 6th recipe this week is for a mixed drink. It is the first part of an online series we are doing for The Sugar Club called 2 Minute Cocktails.  Why bother make en eejit of yourself in front of the camera I hear you ask? Well, we want people at home to make more cocktails so that they can appreciate the ones they have here that bit more and so they hopefully never purchase one of those absolutely minging pre bottled cocktails that are so widely available these days. Like the Smirnoff Mule or Bacardi Mojito. Quite aptly for the mad weather we’ve had of late, the cocktail is called White Christmas.  You can see how it’s made by clicking here. It’s a dessert cocktail, nice way to round off a meal and to get yourself sorted for more garglin’.

So there yez are. Loads of festive food and drink recommendations. Now all you need to do is go and pig out til New Year’s Day and then keel over with gout. Enjoy the holidays!

When I die, I would like to be embalmed in butter. Seeing as it will probably kill me, I can think of nothing more fitting than for my corpse to be placed in animal fat. It would have to be Kerrygold as well. We may make a dog’s mickey of practically everything we do here in Direland, but by fuck we definitely produce the best butter in the world.

I read last Sunday that Brits and Paddies consume about 7,000 calories of grub on Chrimbo.  There are many of you who may be repulsed by that statistic. There will also be others who reckon you could probably squeeze a few more in. If you are that way inclined, then this Stollen Cake gear is yer only man. I’ve been lashing into the wee small ones that they sell over in Liston’s on Camden St. and Magill’s over on Clarendon St.  Ze Germans have been making them for centuries, I reckon they’re much better than Christmas pud, which I still begrudgingly try to eat every year. The money shot with Stollen is the muck load of butter you lash on. There are two ways to handle it. You can brush it on a couple of times or you can leave it to sit in a butter bath. Brushing it on appears to be slightly easier so that’s my chosen method here. I also like it’s loaf like shape, makes it dead easy to cut up.

If you make it this weekend it will definitely keep for the festive season but will be bang on perfect for the 25th.

Finally, for all you lot who like to jump into the 40 foot for Christmas, be sure to get a Playbunny outfit and join myself and a few others while we freeze our genitalia and publicly humiliate oursleves. We have a facebook group called The Christmas Playbunnies, we’ll be down there at around noon. Get your Playbunny outfit in the Joke Shop and join us! Here we are last year, gas craic altogether….

GERMAN STOLLEN CAKE

INGREDIENTS:

• - 175 g of marzipan
• - 750 g of plain flour
• - 175 ml milk
  - 60 g of candied lemon and orange peel
  - Grated zest of 1 lemon and half an orange
• - 1/2 cup of raisins
• - 50 g  butter for the dough
• - 200 g butter to coat on the outside
• - 1 cup of diced  almonds
• - 2 tablespoons of clear rum
• - 2 tablespoons of sugar
• - 1/2 tablespoons of cinnamon
• - 1/2 tablespoons of  nutmeg
• - Crushed seeds from 3 cardamom pods
• - 1 packet dry yeast
• - 1 beaten egg
• - A pinch of salt
• - 50 g of icing sugar