Hasselback chorizo

Everyone has their special, messy, usually very unhealthy dish that only they can prepare correctly, mostly around midnight, post-night out or on a weekend at home on your own. You KNOW what I mean. For some it will be ice cream dolloped with a soup-size spoon into hot chocolate; others will make an odds-and-sods potato salad and eat it with their fingers; it could be a fried egg sandwich with half a tub of ketchup squeezed in; and I know at least one person who’ll cook porridge on double cream with half a bar of chocolate melted on top.

It’s not the same as a craving which can be satisfied by opening a cupboard or fridge and grabbing a biscuit or pickled jalapeños. The thing I’m talking about involves cooking, albeit to a very limited extent. It’s the liberated rootling around the kitchen with the blissful purpose of satisfying our own needs solely, in the way only we can (ahem - FOOD needs). Sometimes it’s a total fail – ‘I thought a tinned tuna soup would be a THING’ – but often it’s what we have made time and time again and the best or only recipe we would ever need if stranded on a desert island with a reasonably equipped larder.

Mine is this: a bog-standard frankfurter sausage (yes – the rubbery no-meat thing that kids love) cut lengthwise with as much cheese stuffed into the slit as possible. Plus a sprinkling of hot paprika over the cheese. Plus some crispy fried onions if I’m lucky. That goes in the oven for as long as it takes to melt the cheese into oozy, lacy, overspilt bubbles while a plate with pickles and a blob of ketchup awaits. Voilà.

Nothing more than a deconstructed hot dog, eh? Fine, whatever. Wait till you try the version of it I’m presenting below, poshed-up and zinged, with noble chorizo taking place of my regular frank and halloumi instead of No-Name Sliced. On top of that it gets hasselbacked to look pretty and hey, there’s a snack your folk will be fighting over, or even a main if it comes with a crunchy cabbage salad and a nest of chips on the side.