As I was telling you, the gay community are calling to my house this evening because one of the lads is having a Eurovision party and he wanted a recipe. I thought it would be better to do a cookery demonstration instead, so here we go. On top of which, we can drink gallons of beer and talk shit while we sample the food.

I thought we might do a chicken rogan josh, and maybe some seekh kebabs using minced beef. I’ve picked up the ingredients and I think we have enough spices to go with it. I’ll probably make some chapatis, some poppadoms and some raitha to go with it. Plus lots of beer.

The only thing is, now that I’m a well-known homophobe, in addition to being a misogynist, they might beat me up.

I’ll update this later if I’m still alive. Obviously, if I’m dead, it’ll take me a little more time to write it.

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UPDATE

It didn’t work out too bad. I’m not dead or in a wheelchair.

Everybody cooked, everybody learned a few things. We made a delicious chicken rogan josh, we made seekh kebabs and we made some chapatis. We also had some nibbles using poppadoms, lime pickle, chickpeas and hot mango chutney.

I’ve discovered a dark side to myself though. When in charge of a kitchen, I found a level of impatience I didn’t know existed, and I begin to understand a little why these television chefs are so domineering. It’s not that I’d be like that, but certainly there is an impulse to make sure that everyone is listening and learning. Not to mention doing things instead of just leaning against a counter drinking beer. (You know who you are).

Would you like to know what we did with the chicken?

All right then.

We took some peppercorns, a few cloves, some green and black cardamoms, some dried red chillis, a couple of cinnamon sticks and some fennel seeds and we cooked them gently in ghee until they became aromatic. THen we fried some onions, finely chopped. Into that we put a good amount of tomatoes, and being lazy, I cheat by using canned tomatoes for this. We threw in the fillets of chicken and let the whole thing cook for a while. Then we threw in some ground coriander, ground cumin and garam masala.

We pricked, but didn’t chop up, some chilli peppers, and threw them in.

Incidentally, be careful with chillis. if I’m chopping them,I always discard the seeds because they’ll burn the mouth off you. The point of chilli is to give a bit of a kick, not cause pain. People who demand a roasting hot curry don’t know what they’re talking about. Also, be very careful when you chop up chillis. The oil sticks to your fingers and doesn’t wash off properly. If you touch your eye area hours later, you can get a very nasty stinging sensation. I’ve found that it’s best to wipe around your eyes with a dry tissue instead of trying to wash the chilli away. But I digress. Back to cooking.

Meanwhile, someone peeled a few inches of ginger and a bulb of garlic. It’s easy to get the skin off garlic if you smash it with a mortar and pestle or bang the cloves with your fist against the side of a broad knife. Throw the garlic and ginger into a container with a little youghurt and whizz the whole lot to a paste using a stick blender. Then fling it into the pot.

We threw a lot more yoghurt into the food and shoved the whole thing in the oven for about an hour.

It was fucking gorgeous.

Meanwhile, I lit a brazier full of coal on the patio, put on some music, and everyone drank large amounts of beer, or in my case, wine.

We all got drunk, ate the food, and sang a few songs. Some of the people I wanted to invite were at the Munster-Ospreys match, as I would have been myself if I wasn’t doing my bit to support our gay brethren in their Eurovision celebrations, but at least I saw the match on the TV. You can’t have everything.

After a while, they all fucked off home, leaving me speechless with alcohol and the fire dying late into the dark of the night.

There you go. That’s your recipe for chicken rogan josh, having a nice evening with friends and not ending up in a wheelchair. They’re eating the rest of the chicken tonight, while watching the Eurovision.

Christ. You can leave that bit out of the recipe.