edit: This recipe has now featured on boards.ie’s cooking club!

“Igor? Igor! IGOR!”

“Yeth mather?”

“Bring forth the beef. Bring forth the unsmoked bacon. Bring forth the onions, the spices, the fresh chillies and the holy smoked new mexico reds. Bring froth the salt and the cumin seed, the paprika and the uncouth star anise. Make ready the Grand Pot, heat the Great Iron Skillet, and put the beer in the fridge, for Tonight! TONIGHT, IGOR!”

“Yeth mather?”

“TONIGHT WE MAKE CHILLI!”

Every so often, you just have to fire up the pot and make a batch of chilli. There’s no other way around it.

The ingredients. Back row, left to right: spice grind (more on that in a second), chopped fresh chillis, rehydrated dried new mexico red chillis, chopped onions, chopped sirloin tossed in olive oil and sea salt. Front row, left to right: smashed and chopped garlic, diced choritzo, diced garlic, trimmed and cubed unsmoked back bacon, rib steak mince.

More ingredients. Back row, left to right: Worcestershire sauce, ordinary beer, Nam Pla. Front Row, left to right: tomato puree, dried thyme, paprika, jalapeno chilli flakes, chipotle chillies in adobo sauce, star anise.

And the spices. Cumin seeds, fennel seeds, black peppercorns, sea salt, chilli powder, all ground in the mortar.

And the Great Chilli Pot, also known as a pressure cooker. This one’s a wee bit old, inherited from family, but modern ones are even better. Since it’s so heavy, we can sear in this as well as braise.

Step one: trim the sirloin, cube it, toss in salt and olive oil, then brown in batches in the Great Chilli Pot on very high heat, with one teaspoon of adobo sauce added to each batch as it finishes … Read the rest

So I turned 33 the other day and for a birthday gift, my parents bought me one of these:

A DeLonghi Lattissima 660 Nespresso coffee machine.
For those who are not coffee purists, these are usually catalogued under “Evil” or “Wrong”
….but when you’re bleary-eyed in the morning….kindof convienent….

In fact, they’re pretty much designed for use by the bleary-eyed early in the morning. Take a coffee pod, lift the machine’s lever, drop in the pod, close the lever, push the button, get coffee. Want Cappachino or Latte? Stick on the foamer attachement, filled with milk, and press a different button. All automatic. And while it’s not as good as the hand-made stuff in a decent coffee shop, it’s not horrible, and it’s better than you’d get in a bad coffee shop. And early in the morning, you don’t care so much

However, there’s a major, major drawback. Specifically, it’s a Nestle product. Now their (rather heinous) ethical record aside, they’re fairly much dead set against the idea that they’d sell you the machine and then you’d buy the coffee elsewhere; so if you want pods for this thing, you can only buy them via Nespresso. This isn’t a major hassle if you find you adore the taste of one of the nespresso coffee blends, but to be honest, I don’t particularly find any of them incredibly good (“pretty okay” seems to be as far as the tastemeter goes with them) — and more, I don’t like the idea that if they decide the pods aren’t profitable anymore, I get stuck with a machine I can’t use.

So I was rather happy when I noticed a post in the Boards.ie coffee forum describing the NexPod, which is a third party pod for the Nespresso machines:

for those who like their

… Read the rest