Snadra

Have you tried Simon Johnson? Yup! I emailed them and they got back to me a couple of days ago. They don't carry it, although they kindly told me they carry many other European cheeses...

I have one, and this thread reminds me I should add it to the 'most useless kitchen items I have bought' thread... I bought a Nigella Lawson branded one on sale a few years ago and have used it precisely once. Maybe if I had a different kitchen set up I'd use it more, but I generally find that if I'm chopping herbs I've got the knife out and being used already, so why get another thing dirty? The only good thing is that I've kept it in its box, so it doesn't bite me everytime I rummage around in the drawer looking for some other little-used gadget.... Might be time to eBay it away! Although on second thought, the nature of the blade might reduce my finger injury incident rate (I have yet to learn to reliable curl my fingers when using a knife).

I've occasionally seen them for sale here, although usually pre-marinated.

If you must roll out in advance, I think a partial pre-cook is your best bet. Unless you plan on having each pizza base contained in its own pan, you risk ending up with an unlovely conglomerate of dough, paper and cornmeal. On the plus side this should speed up your production of the pizzas and transport will be easier. The other option would be to have single-sized balls of dough prepared and stored separately (ie in greased takeaway containers) and have a helper roll/stretch them out on site (should that miraculously become an option!).

Interesting - I love my v-slicer. I picked it up for $2 at a garage sale, so it's only got the large 'julienne' and the reversible slicing plate. It's perfect for large quantities of onions (french onion soup, confit), and for coleslaw, for pressed cucumbers and for potato gratin. I hate one of my microplanes. It's a wide one that has a plastic suround and there's no strength in it. It buckles when I press ever so slightly hard and the plastic is all cracked. The original one is fantastic though. And I've got one of those pull-through knife sharpeners as well. Now my knives all have nicks in them and I need to take them in to get properly done.

This is something we try to do a fair bit as well. Some vegetable-focused things we enjoy: Salad Plate In summer I frequently keep a variety of salads in the fridge: potato, coleslaw, macaroni, quinoa, lentil, carrot, beetroot, pressed cucumber, etc. Usually we have 3-4 in the fridge at any time. Then supper is just a matter of a spoonful of each onto a plate, maybe accompanied by a boiled egg or some ham (especially just after Christmas when we are eating the eternity ham) and some sliced/raw veggies or salad greens. Hummus & Tzatziki plate Grilled veggies (zucchini, peppers/capsicum & eggplant) with boiled potatoes (or, if they're very small, boiled in their jackets, then thrown on the grill for a few minutes), served with homemade hummus and tzatziki. grilled pita is nice, but optional. Turkish Zucchini Pancakes I make these often, with whatever fresh herbs are available, generally omitting the nuts and cheese. We eat them as a main with greek yoghurt (with or without a bit of garlic stirred in) and sprinkled with sumac with sliced tomatoes (roasted tomatoes in winter) on the side. Green Pancakes with Lime Butter We've made this three times now, and in some ways I prefer them to the Turkish Pancakes as they don't need quite so much oil to fry up well. I mentioned these in another thread and noted that I omit the tablespoon of baking powder and add another couple beaten egg whites instead. Good with a green salad (sense a theme here?) and the leftover butter really is delicious with roasted cubes or wedges of sweet potato. Next time I make them I may add a grated & squeezed zucchini as well. Potato Pancakes I make them with shredded raw potato that squeezed out, a grated onion (one small-medium onion per two large potatoes), egg, a tablespoon or two of flour and some chopped parsely and/or dill when we have it. We always eat them with homemade applesauce rather than sourcream. And you can eat the rest of the applesauce for dessert with a bit of sugar added! Roasted Pumpkin Salad Toss 2cm cubes of butternut pumpkin with salt, pepper and olive oil and roast at 180C for 20 minutes or so. For the last 5 minutes add croutons made of ripped slightly stale italian loaf (this is a great dish if you had bruschetta the night before) and a handful of pinenuts, almonds or other nuts. Plate up with loads of parsley leaves (or rocket/arugula or spinach) and drizzle with some additional olive oil and a few drops of balsamic. We like some shavings of parmesan over this as well. The jagged egdes of the croutons get lots of nice crisp on them and it makes a good contrast to the softness of the pumpkin. Colcannon (or some variation thereof). Homemade perogies topped with fried onion and greek yoghurt (bacon an optional extra) The ones I make have potato in the dough and are soft enough that they don't need frying, so we just eat them boiled. If we don't have onion, or I don't feel like making the house smell of fried onion, we top them with those asian fried shallots that you often get on top of laksa. Pomme de Terre a la Pierogi (or it could be called Kartoffel nach Perogiart) Hot boiled potatoes with perogi toppings. Nice with a bit of sauteed green cabbage. For when the freezer has no perogies... There's a lot of potato action going on there! When I was growing up my father was very potato focussed and we rarely ate rice and noodles, so when I moved out I barely ate potatoes for years. Now I'm becoming more and more obsessed with them.

Welcome to eGullet Miranda and great finds!

So many upsides.... but I could think of at least one major downside: the likelihood of a house full of grease drift that smells like a chip truck (or frite wagon). You'd have to get a commercial exhuast to match!

Thanks lesliec! Which reminds me of this NZ site. Tastes from Around NZ: http://www.tastesfromaroundnz.co.nz/ I came across them when I was searching for the georgian cheese sulguni, but have not used them (not being in NZ!).

I'm not sure what you mean by "medium-sized", but plenty of folks barbecue successfully on the 22.5" kettles. Putting a pan of water (or a few big rocks) on the lower grate helps hold the temp in the range you'll want it in. Ah, they come in limited sizes here. There's a 'Smokey Joe', which I believe is more of a picnic grill, the 'Ranch Kettle' which is 93cm and costs A$2,300 and various arrangments of the standard kettle which are all 57cm. But hopefully it will be a stepping stone to a BGE or similar and I'll be able to do all the exciting things I'm seeing on this thread!

This article appeared in The Age yesterday, and I've seen recipes using it on Australian websites (ie The Cook & The Chef, etc) so it must be available *somewhere* in Aus. The SMH has a 'Need to Know' column where readers ask for sources of ingredients and products. Does The Age have a similar one you could write into?

Thanks Nick. I'm on the mailing list for Feather and Bone, but haven't ordered from them. I could get deliveries to my office in the city, but the logistics of then getting it home on a 1hour train trip has put me off ordering. Glad to hear it's worthwhile though! My single experience with Fireworks Foods was great, and I will definately be ordering from them again. Here's a couple more: Pariya Foods: http://www.pariyafood.com/ For specialty iranian ingredients. Rather pricey, but nice if you're after persian fairy floss. Santos Trading: http://www.santostrading.com.au/ For bulk organic and natural foods (I've had great experience with grains and pulses). Pine Tea & Coffee: http://www.pineteacoffee.com.au/ I haven't purchased online from them, but have purchased tea from their shop in Castle Hill (Sydney). Froz Berries: http://www.frozberries.com.au/ I haven't ordered/purcased from them, so they're not necessarily recommended. Their range is not huge, but given their prices and available products (they have frozen rhubarb, sour cherries, cranberries and asparagus which I haven't generally seen at the shops) I thought they were worth including.

This thread is killing me! Those food pictures are making me drool.... We have been looking at getting a charcoal grill/smoker and the prices are outrageous here. A Big Green Egg (and so far as I know there is only one size available here) is A$1,150. A Weber Smokey Mountain is A$600. A Kamado is $1,500...Our plan is to start by experimenting with a Weber Kettle, but even they're expensive. New they start at A$200 for the compact, and go up by $100 increments (the performer is A$800). Whatever will we do if we like it and start lusting after a BGE or similar?! Must stop reading...

So, I thought I was rather good at google searches, until today when a newspaper article mentioned an online store for organic products, and I realised I'd never come across them, despite recently searching for a few of the ingredients they sell. Aaargh! So, I thought it might be useful if there was a running list of food websites that do online sales. Here's a few to kick us off, I hope you'll keep adding to the list: Totally Local: http://www.totallylocal.com.au/ Sells products from the Orange, NSW district, including wines, cider and spirits, venison, goat, nuts and preserves. Honest to Goodness: http://www.goodness.com.au/ Organic & Natural products. Herbies Spices: http://www.herbies.com.au The online face of Ian Hemphill's spice store in Rozelle.

I was just going through the Good Living section from the Sydney Morning Herald, and this store, Honest to Goodness, was mentioned as a source of quinoa. I checked them out, and they do have Bakers Flour. I've never used them, but if 5kg is more useful to you than 12 or 25, it might come in handy. Actually, I've never come across them on my searches for organic food - and I thought I was rather good at web searches!

Yeah, not an ingredient, but I am with you on triscuits at least (and I would add stoned wheat crackers and graham crackers)! Every once in a while I think I'd like to order some, but the prices drive it out of my mind. But I like the orange juice here (it beats the frozen concentrate I grew up on), and good cheese is more widely available than it was 15 years ago. For blue corn tortillas/chips, check out the mexican ingredients in oz thread. Fireworks Foods carries them. And I'm not sure what kind of swiss you are after, but you might check out Fromart. And Heidi Gruyere is meant to be very good. Now, can anyone tell me if it's possible to get sulguni cheese here? I know that it's being made in New Zealand, but I haven't come across it here. I would love to make a couple of recipes using it from Darra Goldstein's Georgian Feast.

Thanks for the tip. I STILL haven't gone to Macquarie Centre, or Hunter Street Arcade for that matter...life got in the way. Must do better!

Printing to one label in a sheet of labels is easy to do in MSWord, however, I have always been told that you risk causing damage to your laser printer if you put through a sheet with some labels removed.

Like others, I generally add double vanilla and an extra bit of salt to cookies (especially chocolate chip). Salted/unsalted butter isn't an issue in our house. We only keep unsalted butter (or ocassionally cultured unsalted). Never had any problems with freshness/quality. I always add the garlic after the onion is nearly ready, and I may start adding the carrots and celery later as well after reading some of these posts... If a recipe calls for cooking anything that doesn't need constant stirring over a bowl of hot water, I use the microwave instead. And I always make hollandaise and sabayon in the pot straight on the burner (not that I make these things on a daily basis). I generally adjust recipes that seem to call for excess amounts of chemical leavening. I HATE the greasy metallic taste of too much baking powder/soda. For example, last night I made these green pancakes with lime butter, but I left out the additional 1 tablespoon of baking powder (really, for 110 grams of self-raising flour?) and used 3 whipped eggwhites instead of 1. They were delicious. In pancake/muffin recipes I sometimes swap baking powder for bicarb soda and add an acid, or use buttermilk instead of sweet milk. If a recipe calls for what seems like an excess of egg yolks in a custard, I will sometimes swap out two yolks for 1 whole egg. And my go-to icecream base recipe uses two whole eggs to 3 cups of milk/cream, no additional yolks. It still beats anything at the shops, but I should try one of the yolks-only ones sometime.

I always thought they were lava cakes (or molten chocolate cakes) under a pseudonym. I saw recipes for those in the late 90s in Gourmet, I think. They're the reason I acquired dariole moulds, which still haven't been used for anything else. WRT the name, the relationship to melting makes sense to me. And not that they aren't wonderful, but I was a bit disappointed to seemthem on masterchef's masterclass. Surely amateur cooks of this calibre are familiar with them? And there's nothing that surprising about the technique. Still it was better than that 'hamburger' travesty!

To label this cheese tasty is an absolute travesty. I think they missed the "Not" And that's why I buy 'extra tasty'! Actually, when I first moved here I remember standing in the cheese section at the grocery stores seeing all this white cheese that was labelled 'Tasty'. I'd never had much experience of non-orange cheese and combined with the 'tasty' label I kept thinking it must be processed cheese (which I loathe). It was a relief to find it was just cheddar (and not terribly tasty...). Then I tasted the insult to cows known as 'lite white' milk. Blech. Other than the usual issues related to living in the suburbs I don't have fresh ingredient problems, although I miss being able to find decent raspberries and blueberries in anything other than miniscule amounts for often ludicrous prices. Hence the 4 blueberry bushes I planted last year (and the raspberry canes that are hopefully in my future). Of course, now I get pretty much all the tropical fruit I can handle to make up for that! What I do miss is certain baking ingredients, like decent lard for pastry, corn syrup and unsweetened chocolate. Thankfully the last few years it's easier to get some things like cake flour. And I finally discovered a decent source of lard at a deli (now I just need to improve my pie crust skills to match). Mostly I just adapt the recipe or I simply don't make it.

I love breakfast for dinner on a weeknight for many reasons, starting with the daily commute that has me getting home at 7pm on a good day (and my husband even later), and ending with the fact that I simply love breakfast foods. I mean, what's not to love about getting home at 7.30 and knowing that you can have toast and scrambled eggs on your plate inside of 10 minutes? Of course, my version of breakfast for dinner may vary from yours: I prefer savoury foods in the morning, and I'm not above having a cucumber or tomato sandwich for breakfast on a hot summer morning (or cretons if I've made a batch!). Pancakes, either buckwheat & buttermilk or crepes, and french toast are enhanced by the stash of maple syrup my mother brought us on her last trip here, but when that runs out we like a topping of frozen raspberries or blueberries quickly cooked with a little sugar and water and served warm. I love a fried egg on the side, and bacon if it's in the house...it scandalises the locals to mix bacon, eggs and maple syrup, but I've brought my Aussie husband over to the dark side! For a more savoury BFD scrambled eggs and sliced tomatoes with toast go down a treat and if I have time before the hungry Snadra-beast comes out I like to boil a potato to go with it (although I wouldn't boil a potato for breakfast unless I was desperate, I do love a buttered one with scrambled eggs). And there's little that can beat asparagus in season with a fried or poached egg for breakfast or dinner. I lived on a farm in Schleswig-Holstein for a little while as a teenager: in my experience Fruhstuck is little different to Abendbrot. We do a similar meal at least once a month. There's an amazing polish deli I sometimes go to on Thursday evenings if I can time my trains right - we have rye bread and butter with some cheese, hams, sausages, cucumber and tomato, all washed down with tea. Lecker! Plus then I get to have polish ham on bread for my breakfast all weekend... And on really desperate nights (when there's not even bread in the house to make a toastie) we've been known to have a big bowl of oatmeal with sultanas in it.

I'm under the weather today and had a craving for a cup of soothing lemon tea, but no lemons in the house. A pinch of citric acid gave it the bit of tartness that I was craving. I see there's a couple of cordial recipes in recipe gullet that use it (I think they're Darrienne's) - looking forward to trying them this summer.

Anna del Conte: I have 'Entertaining all'Italiana' and can definately recommend it. The copy I have has no photos, but the descriptions are fantastic. Elisabeth Luard: Nobody mentioned European Peasant Cookery?!? This is a great book, and I love leafing through it despite the lack of pictures. I've cooked a few things out of it and never had any problems. Darina Allen: The Forgotten Skills of Cooking I have purchased and drooled over this, but not yet cooked anything out of it (the shame!). Lovely pictures, a few unusual (to me) treatments and recipes and some really good explanations and descriptions. I know that I will be going back to this book again and again. And maybe one day I'll even make it to the cooking school... I also second the Stephanie Alexander and Charmaine Solomon cookbooks. I have Charmaine Solomon's vegetarian cookbook. The recipes on the 'western influences' side of the book are a bit dated, but the 'eastern influences' recipes are excellent. I see no-one's mentioned Bill Granger. I put him into the same category as Donna Hay and the Marie Claire books: great pictures and styling, simple recipes. The Marie Claire books are quite good, but it's the Bill Granger ones that I send overseas because they seem a bit more 'Aussie'. I don't like Donna Hay as I find the instructions too vauge and the proportions a bit off. Savory dishes are okay-ish, but baking recipes drive me mad: as far as I'm concerned a recipe for donuts needs to have clearer cooking instructions than 'fry in hot oil'. But then I have to admit that I'm generally disgruntled when it comes to Aussie home baking recipes - must be my North American background! And I've never warmed to Margaret Fulton's books either - a victim of changing tastes. As far as Canadian stuff goes, what about Madame Benoit? My mother had all of her cookbooks, and I have a couple now but don't use them. Again, changing tastes. But I should try her tourtiere recipe (add it to the list...). Finally, I think someone upthread mentioned NZ's Cuisine magazine. It is is hands-down my favourite food mag, when I can find it (really should get a subscription).

In north-west Sydney I like Flour: Last year I ordered 25kg of flour from Santos Trading - it's not bad, but it's not the bakers' flour you're after. This morning I did a web search and after some poking I found: Plateau Foods. They carry Manildra and Allied Mills bakers' flour in 12.5kg AND although they're a wholesaler you don't need an ABN to buy from them. I've never used them, but their Silverwater warehouse is open on Saturdays, so you could at least get a sense of the place. I also understand there's a place in Artarmon called Oriental and Continental Foods that might carry what you're after. I haven't been there myself, but I think I've seen it mentioned elsewhere on eGullet. Oriental and Continental Foods, 41-43 Carlotta Street, Artarmon, 9906 8990 Bits and pieces: Dijon Foods - Unit 6, 8 Gladstone Road Castle Hill (they also have a shop in Carringbah) They also do restaurant supply, so it's a mix of huges tins of sliced beetroot and other more 'gourmet' products. They also have some refrigerated/frozen stuff. I find their prices for nuts are really good (no flour supplies so far as I can recall). Martelli's Fruit Market Rouse Hill - next to Coles They have a pretty amazing range of products (across several ethnicities) and I love having a wander. They're also generally got really good fruit & veg.