Cold beer, cold bubblegum fizzy pop in 2l bottles, 2 of those.
Two fillet steaks, big thick juicy fillet steaks I'm saving in the freezer until it rains for a couple of days, so I can then go out mushroom-hunting and bring me back something nice to fry up just before the steaks are ready to be served, in some nice salty butter, and poured all over my steaks.
I at least do have two kinds of dried mushrooms I need to doing steak. Chalciporus piperatus, the peppery boletus, which as it sounds like it might just be, has a delightful burning, fiery savour, quite peppy and zingy, but with a heat all of it's own, unique and different from other hot spices, just as how black pepper and chili pepper are different, or water pepper and tabasco sauce. Its all unto itself, a special fireyness and flavour, unlike any other spice. Got that and got fly agaric, dried and heat-cured to render it suitable for use as a condiment, cooking ingredient, intoxicant, herbal medicine and all manner of other wonderful uses this special mushroom has.
I make it into a spice blend for beef or lamb, as follows if anyone wants to try it:
Fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), dried and heat cured of course (instructions for that at the end of the recipe)
Peppery bolete, Chalciporus piperatus, again dried, so it can be powdered, and which conveniently is a parasitic species which parasitizes fly agaric mycelium so where you find IT, you find fly agaric, and where you find fly agaric, you are likely as not, going to find peppery boletus too. They grow with the fly Amanita, although only under silver birch trees not pines (fly agaric can grow in symbiosis with either silver birch trees, or pines, although silver birch is by far and away the more common of it's two host types)
Cubeb (Piper cubeba, a relative of black pepper) seeds, just a few , a couple of pinches is enough, 2-3 pinches for enough spice blend to make 2 steaks from lovely steaks into steaks you'd kill and eat the babies of your best friend in all the world just to have the privilege of SMELLING the steaks!.
Pink peppercorns (quite a goodly amount, a teaspoon and a half or so)
Black pepper, from whole black peppercorns not powder or freshly ground pepper, it has to be whole!
Water pepper (Polygonum hydropiper, a relative of the bistort plant, grows in boggy marshy areas at the edge of rivers which adjoin grassland or pasture, this cannot, like the peppery bolete, be bought, it MUST be hunted down and picked yourself), the blend can do without it if you can't get any, the leaves, 3-4 leaves dried.
Salt (use sea salt)
Szechuan pepper (no idea of the species binomial taxonomic name), but szechuan pepper, its the hulls, seeds absent of some sort of bush or tree, sold as szechuan pepper, and like the cubeb and pink peppercorns, they moderate the fiery searing heat of the blend, szechuan pepper has a weird, not hot effect, but cooling and anaesthetizing sensation if applied to mucus membranes such as those of the mouth and tongue, while pink pepper is..well...its pink pepper, but it isn't hot, has a cooling sort of aromatic flavour, and cubeb has a cooling, camphoraceous taste. Not too much to be used or it can overpower the flavours of the rest.
Also, chili pepper, something really hot, like scotch-bonnet, red savina habanero, or birds-eyes. They should be smoked peppers, for best results. These are to be gutted of the internal ribs and of the seeds, which carry much of the capsaicin, using gloves and washing hands thoroughly with detergent and water, VERY thoroughly. And before use, they need to be dry-fried. Heating up a frying pan without oil to really hot temperature and then searing the chili peppers each side on the pan (you want to wear a gas mask whilst doing this with an organic vapor cartridge or cartridges) and have ALL the windows and door of the kitchen wide open, extractor fan on full blast, because the fumes from the chili peppers dry-frying is lethal stuff, choking asphyxiating virulent teargas basically. You don't want to get close without a mask and goggles. And keep animals out of the room, if you are asthmatic, then get someone else to do the dry-fry and wait a little bit before reentry to the kitchen.
And then make a marinade, consisting of:
Worcestershire sauce
Dark soy sauce
Tabasco sauce (the habanero kind, extra hot variety)
If you can get any, some mushroom sauce.
A little of that, and a little bit of teriyaki sauce
And finally, some brown sauce. Ideally 'devils brown sauce', a hot spicy kind of brown sauce. If unavailable, then Daddie's sauce or HP sauce. Use enough of this to make the marinade thick enough to adhere easily to the steaks once rubbed in. Somewhat thick, but still liquid and mobile to a degree.
The black pepper and pink peppercorns, are set aside, whilst all the other solid ingredients are whizzed up in a spice grinder to fine powder for sprinkling or for adding to a stew or curry or chili con carne. The black and pink peppers, they are pounded in a mortar, pink peppercorns first, because they are full of oil, and it needs squashing out of them and pounding like a 14yo hooker on her living room table when her parents are away on business
Then the black pepper is added to the mortar and cracked, pounded to a rough smashed up mixture, mixed up intimately with the pounded, cracked pink pepper. This gives the steak a nice surface texture, and pound ye also the sea salt, nice and fine but still grainy.
The rest, whizzed up to dust, fine as icing sugar, and then the two combined and shaken together to finely mix.
Slash crosscuts on both sides of the steaks, and stick 'em in the marinade of liquid ingredients. Let them soak it up, and when thats done, sprinkle my special spice blend all over them, both sides, don't be stingy with it, don't cover it in a mountain either, just generously spice it to fuck and back. Then you give it a thin brushing of olive oil (healthiest sort of oil easily available, doesn't taste iffy when its cooked either)
Heat up the frying pan, without the steaks in it, until very hot, and sear on both sides, then turn the heat down and slow fry them, until they are lovely and juicy and tender, browned all the way through them and they melt in the mouth.
The result, will be DELICIOUS. Serve with shiitake mushrooms, fried in salted butter. If you have the skills to take from nature what she provides, then wild mushrooms too, freshly harvested so they are as good as a mushroom can possibly be, lovely and fresh and juicy and tasty as they ever will be.
Then go out there to the woods and the forests, and pick yourself some good tasty species, nice premium specimens of the very best kinds to be had on the outing you go on.
All mushrooms, shiitake at a minimum, then these need to be fried in butter, not when the steaks are started, but shortly before they are to be served. Fry 'em up, and have them ready exactly when you serve the steaks so both are hot and cooked and perfect, put them on your plate, and tuck in.
Maybe think of the inventor of the special spice blend for meatyness while you munch away and enjoy yourself with the best steak or chili con carne you will EVER taste
Oh, forgot one ingredient, 4-5 pods of cardamom, the leathery casings slit open so the seeds can be gouged out with a knife tip and added to the mortar, before pink and black peppercorns, you want the cardamom finely ground but not as ultrafine dust, more as little grains.
You'll have some spice left over actually, if you just do two steaks, so you can keep the remainder until you next have steak, or chili, or anything else with red meat.
Lastly, how to prepare fly agaric (Amanita muscaria):
Whilst most if not all guidebooks list it as poisonous, it is only a member of a genus which does contain deadly mushrooms, although it looks NOTHING like the deadly kinds, nothing at all, even to the most greenhorn amateur mushroom-picker. Even easier, far easier than to identify the only wild mushroom many brits are brave enough to eat, Agaricus campestris, the common field mushroom (quite a lot like shop bought mushrooms, Agaricus bitorquis). Very distinctive red cap with white warts, and the rest of the fruitbody pure white, as are the spores. Unlike many Amanita, there is no volva, this being reduced to, not the sack-like volva of the deadly kinds, which are in a separate clade within Amanita, the stirps Phalloideae, whilst A.muscaria is located within the stirps Amanita.
The 'volva' of the fly agaric is reduced to a basal bulb, with a few irregular slight ring-ish protuberances or lines of warts above a slightly swollen stem base. It does have the large ring typical of Amanita mushrooms of all sorts (save for those in the stirps Vaginatae) which have neither ring, nor volva. (A volva is a structure ALMOST unique to the genus Amanita, its a large, usually, sack-like cup of tissue that the bottom of the stem appears to sprout out of. Near unique to the family, although the unrelated genera Volvariella, and also Battarea (quite coincidentally, the species Battarea also has the species epithet 'phalloides' as with Amanita phalloides, the death-cap, a single bite of which can kill a man. Although Battarea phalloides, is not poisonous. However it is woody, and the cap covered in spore powder, and presents absolutely zero redeeming features such as would commend it for the table. Totally inedible, and if it were not, it is unappetizing. But not, however, poisonous. Just nothing you want to eat because it has nothing about it that means you should. Including the fact that it is incredibly, vanishingly rare.
Volvariellas have a volva too, but not a ring. Many species, IF you can identify them correctly as a mushroom expert, are good eating. But given the volva and thus similarity to Amanita, if you choose wrong, you die horribly. Thankfully, Amanitacea are exclusively mycorrhizal mushrooms, growing in association with trees, and cannot grow without this symbiosis.
Volvariella, can grow without anything to do with trees, in treeless fields, I've seen V.speciosa do so in massive profusion, hundreds or thousands of them in a farmer's field. There are those that grow with trees, but not WITH them, not around the base and for a distance around them, they grow as parasites, ON trees, right up there in some cases, such as with Volvariella bombycina, which can be found, rarely, if you are lucky, growing up in the top of apple trees, or anywhere else the trees be wounded and a spore can gain entrance.
Amanita on the other hand are mycorrhizal. Growing in symbiosis WITH trees, not parasitically. And they NEVER grow ON wood. Only in association with the tree types the species of the genus favour, but never, ever, ever actually OUT OF the tree. So if it has a volva and grows OUT of a tree, you can be certain it isn't a deadly amanita, and is a Volvariella. Probably the rare and tasty V.bombycina)
I'm about to go on a chemical shopping spree with over a hundred quid to spend, and glassware spree. Got quite a few things in mind, although I might well end up spending more than I'd like to have to on a new vacuum pump.
