h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Duncan's Chicken Balti (VERY HOT)
============================


Ingredients:
Vegetable oil
Fresh corriander
Chicken breast cut into 1inch cubes
Mushrooms
Green chillies
Paprika
Tomato puree
2 cans lager

Method:
First you need to make the marinade/oil thing. To do this put half a cup of vegetable oil in a blender with a load of green chillies (topped and pipped) and blend until the chillies are mush. Now add 2 tablespoons of paprika and blend again until you have a runny red oil.
Put the chicken bits in a bowl and mix in the oil all round it and put in the fridge to marinate for as long as you can manage without being overcome with hunger.
Open the first can of lager and pour down gullet.
Now make the balti sauce by finely chopping a slack handful of fresh corriander leaf and putting it in a mixer with another teaspoon of parika and a small tim of tomato puree. Mix thoroughly.
Open second can of lager and pour down gullet.
Now put a frying pan on and get it good and hot. Sling the marinated chicken in and seal the flavour in then turn the heat down and add the sauce. Then add sliced chilli and mushroom and simmer for 15 minutes making sure it doesn't burn to your mums best frying pan whilst you make enough rice to feed an army.
Serve with a lot of chilled beers. For best effect do not tell your friends that the chicken was marinated and laugh heartily when they taste the sauce, declare it to be not very hot at all and then bite into a piece of chicken. Magic!

(Note: Keep away from children and animals - they aren't equiped for this )

Not a secret any more though is it.

true - but I got tired of being the only one doing the cooking .

P.S. For our metric friends, a "slack handful" is 10 cubic cm, a small tim is a typo altogether (should be tin) and a tin of lager is 500ml - not one of these ghastly budweiser stumpy cans.

Now that's getting away from any traditional Irish measurements I know. A hnadful of this, a splattering of that, and enough of something else to turn the colour a nice shade of pinky russet.

I was at Uni in the Midlands and I have to say that the best Baltis ared definitely to be found in Birmingham. Oh I get hungry just thinking about them!

As was I, and the secret of the recipe comes from the Royal Naim restaurant (posts passim).

I don't know DJ - is there no end to your talents?

hmm - my fish recipes are *very* scant, and I don't do veggie (except maybe a decent veggie broth...) - and my recent efforts at Gaelic football have shown a distinct skill vacuum in that area

Oh that is alright then!

Well veggie repetroire is right up my street I can start with over 100 soup recipes without a bit of animal in sight.

Does that mean you do it with a blindfold on?

DJ what do you do if you had a nasty experience with a mushroom as a child and cannot eat them any more?

My advice Abi is make sure you don't allow them to come pecking at your legs ever again.

Substitute eggplant/aubergine or courgette /zucchini and if I were you I'd cut down a bit on the heat. Dunx has been eating raw chillie since he was six and mistook one for a green pepper.

So *sidles up to Wandrin'star conspiratorily* anything else you would like to tell us about Dunx

When he was 7 he hired horses for me from tribesmen in Lesotho who wouldn't deal with a woman. When he was 11 he travelled round Cameroon with an American anthropologist as her interpreter. When he was 12 he fixed the computer at the Ministry of Plan so that for a few weeks he and president Biya were the only people in the country who knew what was in the 5 year plan.In his upper sixth year he lived alone in our house in England and the neighbours were still speaking to me when I got home. I've only ever known him not to clear his plate twice and one of those times it was because it contained a live cockroach. When I last cleared his bedroom there was over 40 quid in small change scattered among the papers and dirty socks. I would rather spend an hour in his company than any other man's now living.(He can't sing or dance, but nobody's perfect) Proud isn't the word.

*wipes a tear from her eye* Oh Wandrin'star that is so so lovely! I am quite touched. He sounds like a very special person! Oh and his bedroom sounds as bad as mine!!!

£40 in small change in your bedroom Abi?
Lend us a fiver.

I had about IR£15 in coppers in my desk - which went into the telethon appeal box during my recent desk move.....the bloke who had to carry it off to the bank was not impressed however

She's over in Dublin again this weekend and guess what - there's another 20 or so quids worth of five and ten pence coins in my bedroom...do I have some sort of syndrome here?