Mouth water chicken - yummy but dangerous

After my movie trip I went to Sichuan House and ate the spiciest food I've eaten for some time. I came home and ate ice cream in the vain hope that that will neutralise some of the spicy before it makes its way out again. On the menu as "口水鸡 - steamed chicken in chili sauce" (first in the list of salads if you're looking for it), it literally translates as "mouth water chicken". It's a half a cold chicken, drenched in spicy, oily sauce with peanuts, sugar, spring onions and other stuff. It smells exactly like the smell you get in a real Sichuan restaurant - it's nice to know what I was smelling way back when. It's damn tasty and I brought half of it home on the back of the bike! Not sure if I'll eat it myself. I'm going to a BBQ tomorrow, I might bring it along for others to sample. In the meantime, I think I'll go put a pack of wet-wipes in the fridge...

P.S. Ow! Jesus! I rubbed my eye! Chili, chili, chili! Ow!

Recipe: Penne ala Irish Breakfast

I hesitate to call this a recipe, it's just something I did for the first time today without much thought for what would be "right" but it was pretty cool. I probably would have added a rasher if I'd had one.

Ingredients:

• pasta (I used penne because that's what I had).
• 4 sausages - 160g (Dunnes' Simply Better or whatever you like yourself).
• white pudding 50g (again Simply Better)
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 2 dried chillies with the seeds removed (I might use 1 next time)
• 1 tin of chopped tomatoes (Lidl I think, not that it matters very much)

Method:

• Start the pasta cooking.
• Fry the sausages in some oil (I used olive oil for no particular reason) until they are mostly browned. You don't have to worry too much because they're going to cook some more later.
• Take them out and slice them into circles about .5cm long - maybe 10 or 12 slices per sausage.
• Slice the garlic and fry it and the chillies in the pan for about 30s or a minute. I just let them fry in the little bit of oil that was in the pan from cooking the sausages.
• Put in the tin of tomatoes and stir it up.
• Put back in the sausages and stir it up.
• Mash in the white pudding - you want it to break up into little grains and be spread all through the sauce.
• Leave it cook some more, stirring now and then to make sure it's not sticking to the bottom of the pan. About 5 minutes of cooking seemed to do the trick for me.
• Pour it on the pasta and eat it.

That's a nice spicy, tomatoey way of getting all the vitamins and goodness contained in an Irish breakfast. Maybe it should have a fried egg on top but I was never one for fancy presentation.