Soooooooooo, I had some ripe chillis and a bunch of veg and I *love* poppers ever since I found out about them, but I didn't have enough to make a full meal so I decided to make them the entrée ( or however you spell that flash french word that means "starter" ) to a main course.
Introducing : Prawn poppers and chicken burgers ... damn I love growing my own :-D
First off let me apologise for the quality of the pics, my camera was determined to use flash, even in daylight :-S, and I'm a crap photographer :-D
Don't ask me why, but, I had a hankering for some prawn poppers, part of which was due to the fact that the only stufffable chillis I had were ... urm ... racks brain ... err ... hungarian hot wax, and they're pretty mild so I didn't want to over power them. So, I chopped up some cheap prawns that were on offer at one the supermarkets and threw them in a bowl with some chopped up cherry bomb, I only had one ripe one :-(, baby leeks ( planted the rest of them, but didn't have space for these ... waste not want not), and some garlic that I grew this year and some parmesan cheese :
Ignore the courgette, that was for the burgers
Continuing my cheap b@st@rd lifestyle I grabbed some bacon offcuts to wrap the poppers in, lobbed all the rest of the ingredients, except the courgette, into a bowl and stirred furiously ... for a few seconds ... then took 5 minutes off to get my breath back, and drink some beer :
I then proceeded to stuff the peppers and wrap them in bacon ... not the easiest of things to do with cheap offcuts, but god loves a trier and all that
Once that was done I grabbed some spuds out of my garage and chopped them into roundels, which is a posh way of sayin' slices :
And slapped a couple of bits of chicken, some more baby leeks, some more garlic and some piri-piri hot lemon sauce into a bowl to marinade. I _was_ going to use the Holy Cow Garlic sauce that Kat turned me on to, but the Mighty V (*bows*) had used all of it already, but the piri-piri had a good kick so all was not lost! :
Several beers later I remembered to turn the oven on and slapped the poppers in. I then proceeded to destroy the kitchen making the burgers. When the fire alarm went off I took the poppers out of the oven, and this is what the looked like :
If I was any good with a camera, or even slightly less drunk, then this would be "The Money Shot", as it is it's just an over exposed badly focused close up :
The photo of the chicken burgers came out faaaar better, but still glad it tasted better than it looks :
Like I said at the start, I *love* growing my own stuff. the only bought ingredients in all those shots were :
- The cheese, parmesan on the poppers and mozerlla on the burgers
- The chicken ... although I'm hoping to start keeping my own soon :-D
- The ciabatta ... mainly because I drank to much to bother making bread :-P
- The bacon ... much as I'd like I don't have the space to keep pigs
- The prawns ... pretty sure Barry would be pi$$ed off if I raided his shop for live prawns :-P
- The plates, worktop, chopping board, bowls ... I know, hard to believe huh? :roll:
Whilst the poppers tasted great I think I was a smidge to over cautious about over powering the chillis and the prawns, they really would have suited a gooey cheese, like camembert, being added as they were a tad dry ... still tasted great though, and there's always next time ;-)
So, if yer thinking of making poppers I have some words of wisdom for you :
- If I can do it you can
- You'd be *really* hard pushed to take cr@per pictures than me
- It doesn't matter what they look like
- They _always_ taste awesome
As Nike would say "just do it" ;-)
¥