YISCHEF: Chilli Non Carne & Orange Polenta Cake

A new segment on the YISBLOG, Bronwyn's recipes... Vegan too!

Chilli Non Carne

Okay, so after being inspired by a conversation with Block, last night I devised a recipe for a rather splendid ''chilli non carne'', which is possibly one of the most delicious culinary creations I have ever concocted.

It involved vegan mince*, a can of organic bean mix, a bottle of tomato passata, one carrot, a stick of celery, one large red onion, four cloves of garlic, enough vegetable stock to cover, a teaspoon each of ground cumin, coriander and smoked parpika, fresh and dried chillies to taste, two tablespoons of ground almonds and a heaped teaspoon of cocoa. Sweat onions, add finely diced vegetables, chillies and garlic, sweat more, add mince, beans, coriander and cumin, fry for a couple of minutes, add passata, ground almonds, cocoa, paprika and cover with stock, bring to boil, lower heat, simmer for 20 minutes, adjust seasoning and devour. Preferably with homemade cornbread. Fucken tasty as!

*Use the Sanitarium brand in the tin, NOT in the fridge. The latter is full of preservatives and other gross shit.

Orange Polenta Cake

INGREDIENTS:

(PLEASE NOTE THAT ALL MEASUREMENTS ARE APPROXIMATE.)

125ml rice bran oil, plus extra for greasing tin

1 cup polenta

1 cup ground almonds

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1 1/4 cups golden caster sugar

two organic oranges, boiled whole in their skins for about an hour

For the orange syrup:

3/4 cup caster sugar

1 cup orange juice

3 sprigs of fresh rosemary

DO THIS:

Preheat the oven to 180°C or fan-forced 160°C. Grease the base and sides of a 20cm springform tin and line the base with greaseproof paper, or if you're using a friand or muffin tin, omit the paper. Put the polenta, ground almonds and baking powder in a bowl and mix together. Puree the cooled, boiled oranges with the sugar and rice bran oil. Add the polenta mixture to oranges a little at a time to make a batter. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for about 50-55 minutes or until firm to the touch and golden on top. Cool for 15 minutes then transfer from the tin to a wire rack to cool.

To make the syrup, put the sugar in a pan with the juice and rosemary. Allow the sugar to dissolve over a low heat, then boil it to a thin syrup, which takes about 5 minutes. Discard the rosemary and serve the syrup warm, drizzled over the cake.

- B.L.

Art: "Eddy Cuz"

Eddy Current Suppression Ring

Photos: New Bass Day! 29/09/09

Cover Song: "Sex Beat"

YIS - Sex Beat (The Gun Club)

Photos: Makin' Posters, 28/09/09

Cover Song: "Sweet Young Thing Ain't Sweet No More"

(photo by Flick Smith)

YIS - Sweet Young Thing Ain't Sweet No More

As a special preview for our Live Mixtape gig on Saturday the 31st of October at the Tote Hotel Front Bar at Five O'Clock in the evening, here's our take on a Mudhoney favourite whipped up today in the dungeon. Of rock. Apologies for the clipping

We'll also be playing choice ('ey bro) tracks from The Stooges, The Gun Club, The Buzzcocks, and whoever else you want us to play. Just drop us a comment here, or email yis@aanet.com.au. You can pick up a whole CD of covers (mixed better than this) at the gig fo' free.

Art: "The Scientist Sees The Light" by Andre Fazio

(click for full size)

Photos: Recordin' Drums, 27/09/09

(click to listen in)

Photos: YIS Rehersal 26/09/09 (Grand Final Edition)

Friends: T.J. Honeysuckle & Last Tram Home

(Left: Simon Fazio. Right: Trevor Block. Middle : an eternal struggle. Photo by Elizabeth Clark.)

YIS met Block about four years ago. He makes a mean rice salad. He has a Google top search term. He's the inspiration behind one of our tracks "Trevor Block Rockin' Beats" (which'll be posted here as soon as we record it).

He also runs a blog; Last Tram Home. Check it out.

Gear: Simon's Crap pt. 1

For anyone who is interested, here's the crap I'll be using when we're playing in YIS.

Up the back is a early 2000s VOX AC30tbx with the Celestion Blues. These were the last of the Voxes made in England before they went off to Asia and started making the CC range and beyond. It's heavy. I retubed it with a full new set of JJs from Eurotubes and it sounds pretty great. I also use a Mesa/Boogie Studio .22 amp when I can't be bothered lugging around this behemoth... which is often.

The cool looking thing in front of it is a Roland PK-5 Midi Foot Controller, which gives you a full octave keyboard you can play with your feed. I guess it's modeled from the old Moog Taurus synth which has just been reissued, except it doesn't have any sounds of it's own. It's linked up to a Korg MS2000 (which is the bigger brother of the popular Korg Microsynth that everyone loves) at the moment via MIDI, but I'll hopefully get something that's a bit more portable as I don't think I'll have to use the keyboard on it.

The big beefy pedalboard serves two purposes; it has my guitar pedals and it also has the Line 6 DL-4 delay I run my vocals through. It's also controlled by the big silver Roland expression pedal on the right, which allows me to morph between two patches if I want to add some repeats/oscillation/modulation/freakiness onto it. This is very useful for disguising the fact that I can't sing AT ALL.

Pedals change often, but on the board at the moment is... a Lovepedal BBB07 fuzz (half fuzz-face, half rangemaster with a blend control) + a COT50 overdrive (one knob, a heap of sounds), a Electro-Harmonix POG2 octave pedal (which I'm still getting the hang of), a Cusack Tap-A-Whirl trem pedal (which has tap-tempo; analog signal path with a digital brain), a Freakshow Digilog delay (which replaced my beloved Boss DM-3 analog delay - R.I.P.), and finally a Electro Harmonix Holy Grail Plus reverb. This changes often.

I'll shoot some guitar porn later and upload at some stage.

Video: "Happy Bears Forever" : YIS go viral!

Inspired by this clip from Funny People featuring Jonah Hill and kitties.

The track is "Happy Bears Forever" by YIS. I predict 70,000 hits by supper, 100,000 hits by breakfast tomorrow, and Ken West ringing me up around lunch to ask us to open the main stage at Big Day Out, a la The Sick Puppies.

Old Song: "Thirteenth of the Ninth"

"...you were going to go college next year, you'll get into Godspeed You Black Emperor, and The fucking Shins, and you'll blow a bunch of dudes and become a lesbian..."

- Dale Denton (Seth Rogan), Pineapple Express

Here's the first song I ever recorded. I was eighteen years old, in my first year of Uni, and probably had been listening to a lot of Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emperor... maybe not The Shins. Enjoy.

Simon Fazio Singers - Thirteenth of the Ninth (09/2002) (.mp3)

Friends: The Strange Attractions

(click for full sized image)

Here's an illustration of our friends The Strange Attractions by the multi-talented Andre Fazio, full-time drummer and occasional bassist with YIS. They've been kicking around for a couple of years now and have been getting better every time I've seen them. Check out their stuff on Myspace.

Apart from our Live Mixtape gig at the Tote on Sat Oct. 31st, you can catch them at The Royal Derby on Thurs Oct. 8th.

The Strange Attractions - Light & Dark (.mp3)

New Song: "Message"

The first track to kick-start this blog is a song called "Message" which came out rehearsals for our Live Mixtape Series gig happening at the Tote in October. It was thrown together pretty quickly. We jammed on it for about five minutes the other day, and then we just played through it once to record it... so, here it is.

It was recorded with just one cheap condenser in the middle of the room, and then we added some bass and extra guitar later. We're not really sure what direction the band is gonna take yet, so, I'm just throwing things up and seeing what sticks, really.

I do guitar and vocals on this track, Andre played drums and then chucked the bass in later.

YIS - Message (09/2009) (.mp3)