Good Evening.

So nice to finish work today and get home to the kitchen.

Chilli Con Carne on the menu and I do like it hot. The vast amounts of hot chilli powder the 5 green finger chillies and the 2 scotch bonnets saw to that. Got a right old sweat on !!!

I like making a nice big pot of chilli and it's pretty similar to the way I make Spaghetti Bolognaise (or Spaghetti alla Ragu as it should be called but I'll get onto that a bit later) in that I don't think I've ever made it the same way twice.

The only constant ingredients are couple of chopped onions, a few cloves of chopped garlic, about 500g minced beef, 200ml stock, tbsp paprika, 3 tbsp of cumin, tin of red kidney beans, tin of chopped tomatoes and copious hot chillies, as many as you dare.

Basically that lot bunged in a saucepan and pretty much in that order will give even the inexperienced cook and a few chums a tasty treat after about 45 minutes of simmering.......make sure you wash your hands after chopping the chillies though.......a stray wipe of a sensitive area can cause immense discomfort. Serve it up with plain boiled rice and an ice cold lager.

If your worried about the heat whatever you do don't go drinking water to calm it down. It's the capsaicin in chillies that give off the heat and it's an oily chemical. Water will just was over it, it's best to have something dairy to hand, perhaps some yoghurt or a glass of milk, these will help break the chemical down and give you your throat back.

It's wonderful stuff really and teh link will take you to it's wikipedia entry where you can learn more about it.

Back to Bolognaise....or Ragu. No not the stuff you get out of a jar. Stuff you can make easily at home. I hate it when I see the words Spaghetti Bolognaise of a menu it should always be Spaghetti alla Ragu. I was shocked to see it listed a Spaghetti Bologanise on the menu at Jamies Italian.

The word Ragu just means a meat based sauce for pasta. In Bologna itself every family probably has it's own version and that's just how these dishes should be made so don't be afraid to experiment.

For the Chilli con Carne rather than using minced beef why not use stewing steak and let it cook for a few hours to soften the meat down like hearty casserole. Try red onions instead of white to give a deeper colour and a sweeter taste, try smoked garlic instead of fresh to give a completely different complexity of flavour. Got a odd carrot in the cupboard then chop it up and bung it in too, it'll add texture.

This is proper home cooking. Yeah it's nice to follow recipes and make it look like the picture in the book but in my opinion they should just be guidelines. It's all about making them your own and it's certainly not about dolloping a load of reheated gunk onto a plate of sticky, tasteless pasta and calling it home-made.

One other thing I've got used to using quite a lot in cooking, especially in spicy dishes is vinegar. Adding a bit of that can really enhance the heat and flavour, you have to add just a bit at a time because it can get overpowering and should you add too much you can soften it off with a bit of sugar to re-address the balance. I used Balsamic vinegar today and it worked very well.

So anyway until tomorrow mon cheries.