Category: Food & Drink

Hot Stuff

Food & Drink, Morons & Idiots

No, not some totty flashing her whatsits. Apparently, Dave’s has come to London:

Famously, Dave’s offers a notoriously spicy ‘Reaper’ burger, covered in red-hot batter, said to reduce even the most hardened of chilli lovers to tears.  Although the batter recipe is a closely-guarded secret, the key ingredient is powdered Carolina Reaper, the second-hottest chilli pepper in the world. Carolina Reaper registers a whopping 1.6 million on the Scoville scale, the internationally-accepted system used to measure the heat of chillis. 

So it’s little surprise that customers can only order the Reaper if they are 18 or over and sign a legal waiver. According to the waiver, Reaper can cause ‘sweating, indigestion, shortness of breath, allergic reactions, vomiting and diarrhoea’, but in extreme cases, it can even lead to ‘chest pain, heart palpitations, heart attack and stroke’.

…with dolorous outcomes, because that’s what intrepid reporters do — stupid stuff:

For the first seven seconds after taking a big bite, it feels like the hype around the Reaper has been exaggerated – but the intense burn suddenly takes off like a bullet.  As Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire’ starts playing on the loudspeakers, the heat-sensitive pain receptors in my mouth are triggered – and I soon turn into a total, sticky mess. Sweat flows from every pore of my face and snot dribbles from my nose, and I can’t wipe the tears from my eyes because I don’t want to touch them with my messy gloved hands.  Struggling somewhat with my coordination, I slosh milkshake over my trousers and the floor. Reaper is ludicrously, idiotically hot.

The only idiot is you, dummy.

Let it be known that I’m not afraid of stuff like Madras curry, for example.  I remember going to a restaurant in Bangalore, and ordering a Madras chicken dish.

The waiter looked at me a little dubiously.  “You know the Madras is very spicy”, he murmured to me.  (“Spicy” being how Indians describe something that’s going to set fire to your mouth.)

“Nah, I’m from South Africa,” I said to him.  “I grew up eating hot curry ” (Which is true.)

And yes it was quite hot, but also very savory.  I could have eaten two dishes of it.  (Madras is actually classed as a “medium” hot curry.)  I have no problem with Vindaloo — the next level up, and you have to hold me back when it comes to Lamb Vindaloo — but I draw the line very firmly at that point, because after Vindaloo, bad things start happening to you.

And for the record:  Vindaloo curry measures about 15,000 to 20,000 Scoville units.

So 1.6 million Scovilles?  You must be kidding.

And I’m calling bullshit on this whole “hot pepper” nonsense.  It’s not manly or macho or any of that crap when it comes to handling peppery heat.  25,000 Scovilles is like rubbing Deep Heating cream on your skin;  1.6 million is pouring gasoline on yourself and setting it on fire.  And I’m not really exaggerating, either.

Guys who brag about how much heat they can handle are vainglorious idiots, and quite frankly, they deserve every perforation they get in their stomachs or intestines.

As our  flipping idiot  brave reporter Jonathan Chadwick describes it:

Reaper is a 24-hour experiment on your body. As it travels, it inflicts different types of pain – burning numbness in the mouth, aching stomach, and, perhaps worst of all, the morning-after sensation of a red hot poker in the worst place imaginable.

A doctor buddy of mine back in Johannesburg told me once of a patient who actually had small lesions and blisters on their anus following a drunken night out feasting on super-hot food.  The patient was female.

But hey:  be my guest, but please don’t come to me for help because I’m just going to laugh at you.

So Much For That

Food & Drink, Health

For a while now — about five months — I’ve not been taking Ozempic because I cannot in all conscience afford the (rip-off) price of $250 a month for the rest of my life.  As my old buddy Patterson puts it so succinctly:  “Fuck that for a tale.”

And he’s right.

Anyway, I had my semi-annual physical yesterday, and got weighed with a certain degree of trepidation because there are all sorts of stories extant that say categorically that if you quit taking your weekly stomach-jab, the weight comes screaming back on.  To recap (for those unfamiliar with my tale of woe):  I weighed about 275 lbs. before I started taking Ozempic;  several months later I was down to 230 lbs. (n.b. my Army weight after boot camp was 225 lbs.), and at my annual checkup last November I was back up slightly (still on Ozempic), to 235 lbs.

So I got weighed yesterday, fearing for the worst:  236 lbs.

When I told the doctor that I had quit taking Ozempic, therefore, he just shrugged and said, “No big deal.  Your weight seems to have stabilized.”

Then he said that I was one of his healthiest patients, and for my 70 years of decrepitude, the healthiest he’d seen in years.  Then (as usual), he told me to fuck off and stop wasting his time because he had sick people to look after.

The interesting thing that happened to me with Ozempic was that my appetite disappeared completely:  three meals a day plus much snacking dwindled away to one meal a day, with maybe a snack every few days.  And what’s still more interesting is that the smaller food intake has become habitual;  I haven’t gone back to gorging myself on a daily basis. (The day before yesterday, for instance, I had a couple pieces of biltong at lunchtime followed by an egg and bacon sandwich for dinner — that’s one egg and two strips of bacon on a piece of French baguette.)

And if I feel really hungry during the day, the biltong (with maybe a piece of Jarlsberg cheese) takes care of it.

As to why I have my main meal in the evening:  I seldom feel like food first thing in the morning at the best of times;  I take my meds at night (because they work better that way) and it’s best if I take them on a full stomach than an empty one;  and finally, I enjoy having dinner with New Wife because marriage.

Sorry about all that personal stuff, I know: “TMI shuddup Kim.”  But the takeaway from all this is that for some people — for me, at any rate — taking Ozempic doesn’t have to be a life sentence as they warn it will be.

So fukkem all:  the drug company who makes Ozempic (apparently from diamond dust and gold flakes), and the doomsayers and all the worrywarts who infest our lives.

I’m doing fine, thank you, and that’s all there is to say about it.

And now, if you’ll excuse me… I’m off to a happy place.

Made To Taste

Food & Drink

From Longtime Reader and Friend Mark S. comes this episode from the Bearded Ones about making biltong, and it’s good.  (Warning:  contains a Seffrican.)

It is almost exactly the way I make it, except that I don’t have a fancy drying room.  And the overnight “cook” in the brine (prior to the drying thereof) I do in a sealed Baggie overnight, turning it over halfway through, as does the Seffrican guy in the video.

Also, if you cannot regulate the drying temperature (as most can’t — I dry my biltong in our garage, for instance), then you can’t really dry it for six days, because then it’ll come out like driftwood.  I go for three days — tops — and New Wife’s piece sometimes only two-and-a-half days.

Note however that our Seffrican star of the show doesn’t actually give any secrets away in terms of the quantities of the spices in the mix that he uses (other than the Bearded Butcher spice, that is), which is kinda cheating y’all out of the refinement of the process.  Dosage, as Doc Russia always says, matters.

Just as a reminder, then, let me list the quantities I use, per 1lb of raw beef:

  • 8 tbsp red wine vinegar OR brown apple cider vinegar
  • 2 tbsp coarse (kosher) salt
  • 2 tsp coarse ground black pepper
  • 3 tbsp whole coriander seeds, roasted dry then finely ground

…and the process is described here.

Of late I’ve been adding about a teaspoonful of Lawry’s Seasoning Salt to the mix — in case you don’t want to go through the hassle of ordering seasoning from Bearded Butchers and just want to grab it at the supermarket.  New Wife, who is more a connoisseur of biltong than even I am, pronounces the new mix “delicious”, so be my guest.  (Oh, and she likes the fatty, moist biltong, whereas I prefer the leaner, drier variety.)

Also, don’t forget to try Reader Sean’s Biltong Recipe, which is excellent.

Finally, let me issue a word of warning about this lovely stuff, as always:  it is highly addictive, so don’t come crying to me when your butcher’s bill escalates.

It’s bad enough that I’m blamed for causing UGPI (Uncontrollable Gun Purchase Impulse) without having a biltong addiction tossed, so to speak, into the mix.

Meal Planning

Food & Drink

This article got me thinking:

Two-time Masters winner Scottie Scheffler is taking the opportunity to plan a Texas-style menu for this year’s Masters Tournament dinner, according to reports.  Scheffler has the honor of arranging the menu for the “Masters Club” dinner, which was first held in 1952 in honor of golf legend Ben Hogan.

The tradition has carried over to today, when the current Green Jacket winner is given the task of planning next year’s dinner.

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to set your menu for such an event. Assume that you’d have excellent chefs (like they have at Augusta National) who could create pretty much anything you specified.  You should have four courses:   a soup and/or starter, antipasto/fish, main course and dessert.

Mine is below the fold, to give you an idea.

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