Cooking, believe it or not, is a big passion of mine.
I’m surprised I don’t blog about it more often actually, maybe I should change that.
The fact of the matter is: I love it.

About a week ago I made this dark chocolate chilli con carne and tonight, I’m doing it again.
This time round, I’m going to share the recipe

So, you will need:

Main Ingredients

• 900g of good quality braising beef
• 1 large white onion
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 2 red chillies
• Olive oil (for frying)

Seasonings

• 1 tsp hot chilli powder
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1/2 tsp ground coriander
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 pinch of dried oregano

Cupboardy Stuff

• 2 x 400g tins of chopped tomatoes
• 2 tbsp tomato purée
• 20g dark chocolate
• Salt & black pepper
• 2 x 400g red kidney beans
• Beef/Vegetable Stock

So first get yourself large oven proof pan of some kind; I used a massive metal saucepan. It needs to be biggish with a tight-fitting lid. Got that? Good.
Next, preheat the oven to 150C/130C with a fan/300F/Gas 2.

Cut the beef into 1cm-2cm chunks. Peel and chop your onion and garlic; deseed and chop the chillies.
In the pan, brown off your beef on the hob in a little olive oil in batches of for 2-3minutes and put it to one side. Add a little more oil to the pan and then gently cook the onion, garlic and chillies for a few minutes, then stir in your chilli powder and cook for a couple of minutes more.

Remember your beef? You should do, you only put it down five minutes ago. Put that back in the pan and coat with the rest of your seasonings. Stir in both tins of chopped tomatoes and your two tablespoons of tomato purée and then heat through. At this point, we come to the part you’ve been waiting for:

Now stir in your chocolate :)

Season to taste; salt, pepper etc, put the lid on your pan and place in the oven for 1 hour. Yep. ONE HOUR.
Hungry yet? I know I am. Right, while that’s cooking nicely, rinse and drain your kidney beans. You need to stir these into your pan after the hour is up (adding stock if you think the consistency is too dry).
Whack it all back into the over for a further hour, yes – another hour – or until the beef is tender.

Once finished, serve on a bed of rice and enjoy!

“This is my shopping list so I can read it later. Vine tomatoes, whole juicy cucumber, iceberg lettuce, two lemons, lots of fresh mince, need some red peppers, some kidney beans, some vegetarian mince I think. And some herbs. Some eggs. Thank you, bye.”


spoken through SpinVox

Today is Friday.

Every Friday there is a little thing that happens in London, just round the corner from Soho (here we go again), above The Coach & Horses Pub on Greek Street
Over there look ———————->

It’s official name of this thing is The Social Media Cafe, but – to it’s regulars – it’s fondly referred to as The Tuttle Club.

It’s a lovely place. Everyone is welcome. People come, people go, and the great thing is everyone is so, for want of a better descriptor, nice .

It’s great – You turn up, have coffee and occasional croissants, chat to like-minded folk, meet interesting people and generally have a bloody good time.

Lloyd Davis, Chief Proprietor and all round nice chap, set the place up as a prototype with a genuine vision to one day soon have a proper space, coffee an’ all, set up and running like a Cafe should. For us geeks innit.

So far it, in my opinion, has been a resounding success. I went along and met OH so many folk that I had been chatting to over Twitter/Seesmic and also a whole bunch of new people too. All of them lovely. I loved it so much that I took my friends along.

I even managed to get SpinVox along one day to sponsor the coffees et al in exchange for a discussion about The Future of Voice (but you can read about that elsewhere)

Anywhoo – The thing is, I’ve been a regular at the SMC now for a good 6-8 weeks – would that be fair to say? Has it been that long? Probably. Time goes so fast these days. Yes. Well. Today I had to miss it and miss it I did.
I’m pretty sure it looked something like this:

Lots of folk chatting around – having a good time – learning from each other – making contacts – developing new ideas  – sharing stories – catching up etc…all of that kind of thing – Top stuff.

Don’t get me wrong – it was good that I spent today in the office. Can’t go into it. I’m just happy I was there.

On the flip side however I really missed the hustle and bustle of my friends at the Coach & Horses.

Boo.

I’ll be back next week, that’s for certain.

And hopefully that will stop Lloyd looking so glum –>

Hehehe…

In the meanwhile however? What else has been going on? Well – I’m still making inroads to getting off my backside and moving this here blog you’re reading.
Got some lovely folk to help me out with the techie stuff. Just waiting for the go ahead and I can start the big move.

Everso excited.

What else?

I think I’ve managed to get through the last list that I wrote – oop, no. Tell a lie.
Still need to cover – SF, T-Shirts , 6mths with SpinVox aaaaaaaaand The BBC. Balls.

Ok – Parking all that for now. First, something MUCH more exciting…

This Sunday I’m taking part in a Blogger Cook-off aka Food 2.0 aka Nom Nom Nom.

Can’t wait.

More to follow very soon – but I did a post about it over here along with a fun slide show, (just go for the pictures)…

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Bye for now…

PS – My friend Roger got an Xbox 360, for free and I am NOT a Happy Bunny.