Shalmanese

So how did this go?

You cannot get kosher salt in Australia (at least, I've never seen it). Flaked sea salt would be way to expensive to use in that manner, just get normal, non-iodised table salt.

Try ethnic butchers. Wegmans is likely getting the meat pre-cut and cryovaced from the plant wheras ethnic butchers are probably getting whole carcasses and disassembling themselves which means they have lots of funny stuff they'll give away practically free. Alternatively, what I like to do is to buy a nice fatty roast and then trim off all the surface fat and render it myself.

Charred Cherry Tomato Sauce with Lemon Pepper Marinated Chicken Breasts and Basil on Penne Pasta. I had heard about this a while back and wanted to have a try. Basically, you cut cherry tomatos in half and slather the cut side with some oil, get a cast iron skillet smoking hot and sear all the tomatos on the cut side until they are charred and crisp. Then, just deglaze with some water or wine, toss in some S&P, a few red pepper flakes and some basil and blend in a belnder or food mill. I added some chicken breasts I had lying around as well which I just seared quickly. You get the deep, rich roasted char flavour from the underside of the tomatos and the fresh sweetness of the barely cooked top side and it tastes wonderfully complex and tomatoey. It's great. But you pretty much have to use cast iron and you have to get it smoking hot and keep it there, otherwise the top will overcook.

Have you ever tried warheads? Man, those things were sour. When I was a kid, the bus driver used to drop us off at a candy store on the way home from school and I always got 1 dozen warheads to suck on the ride back. I used to shit like a firehose when I got back because it was a mild laxative but it was so worth it.

Hrmm... interesting, I've never heard of disassembling a crab raw before. Usually, I will steam them, then rip them apart. Do you find it's easier/harder to do it raw?

If you prefer saving time to maximising yield, you can just squeeze pomegranates by hand. Cut off about 1/3 of the pomegranite in one piece and just squeeze like a lemon over a strainer. probably about 80% of the juice will come out this way and it's very fast and nearly no mess.

Roasted Duck & Noodle Soup with Bok Choy & Basil

Why do you care about the ice crystals? It's just water from the stock thats sublimated then refroze. It's not going to affect the taste of the stock one bit once it's fully thawed.

Kangaroo Loin with a Red Wine & Shallot Reduction, Roasted Fingerling Potatos and a Garden Salad

The lecithin in the butter is an emulsifier as is, I suspect a couple of other things that would typically go into gumbos/curries. I suspect a large part of seperation has to do with the mechanics of how you are making a dish. Perhaps if there is already a large oil slick on top of the soup, it can act as a "seed stock" for smaller oil droplets to attach onto which would increase the rate of seperation.

The long strip of Chinese, Indonesian & Malaysian restuarants on Anzac parade just past UNSW has some decent, authentic and very cheap eats to feed the hordes of ravenous students.

Not really. For the proportions of alcohol, it's likely very little will actually evaporate. And if it's for religious reasons, then I assume that even 1 drop of alcohol is one too many.

What took them so long?

Any butcher will give it away. Apart from that, buy some ribs and trim all the fat off that and render your own. You don't have to be too careful about the trimming, a bit of meat with your fat just means yummier cracklings.

as long as the juices go into the fridge sterile and the fat layer is never broken, it should be fine.

Apple sauce? Possibly with ginger or cinnamon I've been having great fun playing around with verjus reductions. Possibly not the thing for pork but it's worth a try. Fry some bacon up until crisp, whisk in some flour then add some milk to make a milk gravy, add some mushrooms/onions.

What I particularly like about mandelbrots is that you can serve a smaller portion and nobody can tell the difference

I remember visibly wincing when reading a news article about restaurants selling Wagyu (Kobe) steaks and how some people would order theirs well done.

Yeah, thats normal. When making a souffle, the diners wait for the dish, not the other way around. Even 10 or 15 minutes after taking out of the oven can mean significant deflation. This presents some tricky logistical challenges if your plan on doing elegant plating.

Veblen goods.

How much vinegar do you add and at what stage? Do you taste the vinegar in the end stock? I can't imagine any reasonable amount of vinegar could boost the pH enough to matter about unless you added it very early and then only later added the bulk of the water. However, I imagine the low slow simmer would evaporate all the acetic acid which would mean your left with just a pleasant sweetness at the end.

This is not going to really be a cooking class in the conventional sense. A couple of things to keep in mind: We will be eating what we cook, therefore, it's not really possible to do a systematic progression from easy to hard. I pretty much expect to throw him into the deep end. We're both fairly nerdy, academic types. As much as I can, I'll rely on merely describing something to him rather than going through the hands on since our time is limited. For example, I don't see anything particularly hard about deep frying that needed demonstration. I might touch briefly on breading, how to keep foods crisp and timing/safety issues. I'm more interested in teaching him a philosophy of cooking. How to taste, how to think and how to learn more. A good stock is more about patience than anything else. Half the joy of bread baking comes from the manipulation of this almost alive piece of dough. Sometimes flavours can surprise you with their intensity if you just treat them simply and with respect. That sort of stuff. Perhaps I've understated his competence a bit, he does know how to simmer, saute and deglaze (and probably conceptually knows how to fry and roast even if he's never done them).

Degreased the sauce? Did you use a gravy strainer.. ← No, I'm not Thomas Keller like in my dislike of all impurities in sauces. I just periodically skimmed any surface fat off the braise every hour or so, chilled it in the fridge to harden the fat and returned the sauce portion back to the pot. By the end, the sauce was relatively grease free and I just had to spoon out a couple of visible blobs.

I have an old high school friend who I've been keeping in sporadic contact with over the years and I regularly send him tantalising photographs of my cooking. He's expressed interest in learning how to cook "properly" and I've been giving him hints and tips about a few basic things. This year, I've convinced him to come hang out with my over the Christmas break and we're going to catch up, see some of the sights and cook up a storm. He's coming down on the 23rd of December and leaving on the 4th of January so that gives me about 13 days to teach him everything I know about food. It's going to be pretty intense, I want at least a soup, salad, main and dessert every night, maybe an appetiser. As well as at least a single light course for breakfast and lunch. I think the emphasis is going to be mainly on things he has a realistic chance of preparing when he gets back home but I'm not going to dumb anything down for his sake. The food I want him to get cooking in the end is going to be complex, multi-component, and with an eye towards presentation. Even though he might rarely ever produce a meal like that again, I think the lessons learnt are valuable ones for much simpler foods. In the end, IMHO at least, probably the most valuable thing I can teach him is to develop his palate; how to season and spice, what good and mediocre food tastes like, how to tell when something is done, underdone or overdone and how to combine flavours in your head and figure out if something works or not. However, 13 days is not long and I want to maximise the things I can teach him in such a short period of time. Right now, he has some basic knife skills, can make a roux, some simple sauces, can cook pasta, steak and could probably follow a relatively simple recipe. My plan so far is this: Day 1: Go shopping, teach him how to select produce, teach him what some of the more obscure vegtables smell and taste like and how to prepare them. Buy supplies for the next 2 weeks. Make a chicken stock, brown beef bones in the oven for a beef stock, make some "base" ingredients for the coming days like onion confit, roasted bell peppers, roasted garlic, garlic oil, basil/herb oil, onion confit, duxelles, simple syrup etc. Make a simple garden salad with standard vinagrette, a soup that's light and straight from that days stock & chicken parts, something simple for a main and probably just fresh fruit for dessert. Day 2: Make beef stock, start cooking proper Day 3: Take him to the farmers market, buy yet more food. start winging it from there. Stuff that I've thought of that I want him to make include: soups Seafood Bisque Clam Chowder Vichysoisse Pea Soup Asparagus Soup Miso Soup Salads Ceaser An Asian inspired salad ??? Mains Risotto Fresh Pasta Ravioli gnocci Some sort of roast Seared Fish of some sort A Braise (osso buco?) Pork belly A ceviche Slow cooked bolognese duck confit Something to do with duck breasts Curry? offal? Misc Fresh Bread Roast vegtables Lemonade mashed potatos rice Chicken/Beef stock Dessert: Sorbet Poached fruit Chocolate Mousse Flan/Custard Pie Truffles Cookies Does anyone else have any ideas? I'm really trying to cover as many bases at once here. Keep in mind that it's summer over here and theres a lot of fantastic produce in the markets that I want to take advantage of. My god, it's going to be a lot of hard work but we'll eat like kings!