You call that breakfast? This is breakfast.

I don't know who I am saying that too. At no point has someone ever said to me "THIS IS BREAKFAST" in a Spartan type way. But I like to think that this and not that is breakfast.

Firstly the healthy one. Blueberry pancakes. Made with buttermilk and served with lemon and golden syrup. And icing sugar. So not that healthy then.

And now for a daily calorific meal in one sitting. This was after a very long day. So it is a 3 egg/2 cheese omelette with 4 slices of bacon. 4 is a good number of bacon in a sandwich. 3 is the minimum, 5 is greedy but 4 is just right. I ate this as a sandwich but if you wanted to cut out the carbs I'm sure you could eat it with a knife and fork.

I'm pretty sure it has enough calories to keep you going for the day. I had it as a breakfast/lunch. Then had a nap, then went for a cross country run and it kept me going for 90 minutes. Wasn't even that hungry after the run either. You could conquer the world with cheese and bacon.

Update: This sandwich also works with sausages and sweet chilli sauce. The omelette is essential:

To finish up on the meatfest

So to the sandwiches.

First here is a close up on the prastrami. It looks deceptively gross. Like a chewed carpet. I think If I had added prague powder it would have been more appealing.

And here is the salted beef. It is overcooked and just fell apart when I tried to slice it. So I shredded it instead.

And the bread;

The salted beef goes onto rye bread with thousand Island dressing and saurkraut.

Sauerkraut does look weird. But most importantly in date.

These sandwiches then look like this.

Lets take a closer look.

And with the ubiquitous pickle. Pickles should be mandatorily ubiquitous.

The prastrami was just a free for all. This was one of mine pictured with an almighty Coopers.

This is my hand mid sandwich. I almost lost a finger eating this one.

The sandwiches also go well with a new world chiraz. This one was from Oz. I don't know if Oz is the new world. Is everything apart from French, Italian or Californian new world? Maybe twitter knows...

And the final remains of my 05th sandwich of the day. At which stage it all became a bit of a blur.

In the interest of privacy I've left photos of all people who attended the meat festival off the blog. (pffft..... in reality it was all consumed by me).

Boiling, smoking, steaming, cutting eating.

OK so part 2 of the meat fest continues. Once again this recipe is from Tim Hayward at the Guardian. I highly reccomend it for a great day / event. We got lunch and dinner out of it for 6 people. And 6 greedy people too. Well no I have to admit that I was the hungriest hippo of the lot and had a total of 5 sandwiches before the day was out.

First photo look at the brining. You have to rotate the meat every 24 hours. I just like how a clove of garlic got mashed into the meat.

Where to next. Here is a photo of the oak chips. I was fortunate enough to get them from a guy who smokes all year long. Otherwise its impossible to get wood chips at this time of year.

Here is the spice mix for the prastrami. I added cumin seeds because I like cumin seeds.

Now this photo is called trying to light a bbq in the rain, at night, in 100 km winds. It was chaos. I decide to go inside and make it in the morning.

So this evening will be the evening of the salted beef. I wash it and pat dry. Then it goes into a pot with carrots onions and bay leaves. What I never realised was raw carrots sink and raw onions float.

And then after 4 hours on a rolling boil the cooked onions sink and the cooked carrots float. It like they've got an inverse relationship.

While this is going on I make my dinner tonight of John Dory with scallops. And this is what that looked like. I think I may have a photo addiction.

But who cares about floating onions and sinking carrots. Its about the beef. Here it is. Again.

And here is a close up.

I don't know how long blog pages normally are. Maybe the prastrami should be another post. But I'm already typing so I'll continue. I'll keep writing until I reach the limit. So Saturday morning I light up the chips. I think this may have been a mistake as they burn really fast. I turn on the gas underneath to keep it smoking and I add more chips.

Here is the prastrami covered in the spice rub. It gets smoked until it has an internal temperature of 70 degrees. It looks like the original but without the prague powder neither of them have that pink colour. After the smoking I place it on a wire rack and then fill a roasting tin underneath with water. Then wrap the whole lot in tin foil and then it goes into the oven for 3-4 hours.

But here are some slices of it. My hands are shaking in anticipation and also covered in spice so thats why this ain't so clear.

Ok I think the sandwiches need a page on their own. And I need to do some editing. Maybe rotate a photo once in a while. Or hold my camera the other way.

And to think I used to be a vegetarian.

And 13 years as a vegetarian. But thats for a different post. This one is about meat.

This is a photo record of my attempt to make salted beef and prastrami from scratch. This recipe is from Tim Hayward at the Guardian whose an awesome food writer. This is the spice mix.

And this is a load of salt. Well I guess you can't make salted beef without salt.

Wheres the beef? (I don't even know what that means, but now thanks to Graham in the comments section I do). And this is free range beef. None of that caged beef here;

And here is the water. What a pot of water it is. I should have rotated these photos before uploading them...

So I roasted and ground down the spices. Don't know if I was supposed to do that but its what I always do;

Then add to said pot of water boil and then wait for it to cool;

Smells like mulled wine and I'm tempted to taste it but I don't.

Now is where it got messy. It is supposed to be put in ziplock bags and put in the fridge. It was carnage in the kitchen with the brine going everywhere. So I put the meat in 2 containers and wrapped in cling film and left them out in the utility. It was also recommended to add prague powder but it was optional and sounds mental so I left it out. Its supposed to give the meat the pink colour so lets see what happens. The next stage is cooking it in 5 days time. Have to find wood chips for the smoking.

Update: 2 Days in and I'm flipping the beef every day as instructed. It smells amazing. These sure are some weird sentences I'm writing.

Dugdogsblogdog

Well its not my dog but it is a photo of a dog eating a curly wurly. Still in the wrapper. And for that it needs to be shared.

I really don't know what I'm doing with this. Should I be writing about recipes or something?

Maybe I should be tweeting. But that doesn't make any sense to me.

Or I can try and make this funny. Yep funny is the way to do it.

I just want to know. When can I get a book deal and some t-shirts. Maybe even a poster.

New things

So I'm going to start writing about what I like. I'm going to call it dugdogsblogdigs. 

I'm also going to add a feature dog of the month being dugdogsblogdog. Although I don't know that many dogs or people who have them. 

Finally there is Duggy's theories. My ramblings on how things work. So far I have 100% track record in getting these proved wrong.