Happy Little Post

I decided to make Half Man Half Beer's Outstandingly Fabulous Chilli Con Carne for today's dinner. This benefits from a good long cook (I mean being cooked for a long time, nothing to do with the height of the person making it), and it improves with time.

So I hit the supermarket early. So early in fact that the produce guy hadn't had time to suffocate the fresh herbs in clingfilm, and the butcher hadn't got any minced beef. I was glad about the clingfilmed herbs because when they do that, stuff like coriander and parsley immediately begin to sweat and rot and if you buy it late in the day half of the stuff is unusable.

I asked the butcher for a kilo of fatty minced beef. They normally do lean minced steak and something they call 'minced beef', which is a bit cheaper. 'Minced beef' was what I wanted (HBHB's recipe specifies some fat in the mince to add flavour: BetterArf thinks this is a typically bloke-ish thing). This is one of the great things about living here - minced beef or steak is usually just that. No sawdust, lips, ears or toenails are added to bulk it up and increase the butcher's profits.

There's a slight problem though: he has no fat kicking around - all of the beef they have has been well-trimmed. I have to accept some lean chunks of steak. He puts it through the mincer and lo and behold, a kilo of steak worth Dhs 29 becomes a kilo of steak mince at Dhs 19. Insane!