doctortim

In Australia here, as a customer rather than a business owner. I was chatting with the guy I buy cheese from and his view is that things aren't too bad yet. He was expecting to do quite well this Mother's Day as people avoid the increasing expense of eating out and decide to cook for themselves, but most restaurants are booked out and he hasn't seen as many customers as he expected.

For Mother's Day lunch here, I tried to use as much seasonal produce as I could (it's Autumn here). Not pictured, some simple appetisers on toasted sourdough: Pickled wild muchrooms; Goat's cheese, beetroot, dill vinaigrette; Bacon, sweet potato, sage creme fraiche (this one was really good). I also made some carraway seed sourdough to snack on: For a starter, butternut squash risotto with brown butter and sage (the sage flavour came mostly from some leftover sage creme fraiche I stirred in): Main course: Mushroom and spinach-stuffed saddle of lamb with a mint and parsley warm potato salad: And tarte tatin for dessert, with vanilla creme fraiche: For the tarte I used the Bouchon recipe, and my first attempt was a spectacular failure. The recipe recommends waiting 30 minutes before turning it out, but I found that was far too long. Thankfully the recipe makes 2 pastry portions and calls for what I found to be twice the necessary amoutn of apples, so I had the materials to make a second. This time I turned it out 5 minutes after cooking. Other than that, the recipe is simple and tastes terrific. I'm certainly not above eating from the pile of failed tarte for weekday desserts

The first thing I thought of was carbonara as well. Pasta is great for that, and there are endless pasta dishes that are both delicious and use few ingredients. Garlic, tomatoes and basil make a great pasta sauce that is perfect with grated pecorino. The fewer the ingredients, the more you have to depend on the quality of each. Steak and potatoes with a simple sauce is good: steak, potatoes, red wine, stock.

Percyn, you may want to take a look at this recipe for chilli crab, with an accompanying video of a the chef making it in his restaurant. I've been meaning to post a link to that site for a while. It accompanies a terrific TV show we have down here that follows the host around Australia talking to people of various cultures preparing their own regional cuisines. I should warn you, you can watch a lot of time disappear on that site.

I browsed it in a book shop the other day and I'm quite keen to take a closer look at the Press Club cookbook. I've never tasted his food myself, but I've heard nothing but good things about George Calombaris' cooking.

I'm also having a hard time figuring out how you're burning only small parts of the roux. How's your stirring technique? I always use a wooden spoon or spatula to stir because it lets me get right into the corners of the pot, while with a whisk they're easy to miss.

Dad had to fast from midnight the other day for a knee replacement, so I visited and cooked him his favourite food: steak. I don't have a lot of experience cooking steak, but I was very happy with how this one turned out. I can't take too much credit though -- it would have been hard to mess up such a great quality piece of meat (this was strip steak). And topped with mushroom sauce: Yesterday, thai green fish curry.

I bought some whitebait the other day, and cooked them in the style that I normally cook salt & pepper squid. The flavour was great, but the heads of the whitebait had a very unpleasant gritty texture, almost like sand. Is this normal for whitebait?

Chris, I use kalamata olives. It took me a few tries to find the right place -- I find most of the kalamatas around too bitter.

Spaghetti puttanesca, one of my favourite pasta dishes.

Percyn that looks great. I'm jealous of the size of the scallops you guys get over there. How do you incorporate the porcini into your risotto? I recently was given a bag of dried porcini mushrooms and I'm curious as to the best way use their flavour in a risotto.

For Valentine's Day yesterday: Baked fish with roast kipfler potatoes and a dijon & creme fraiche sauce. On the side was some freshly baked bread and a rocket & pecorino salad. I was really happy with how it turned out, although I wish for the life of me I could remember what variety of fish I bought. We don't really go for much of the song and dance around Valentine's Day, but I like it as an excuse to splash out on more expensive ingredients than I'd usually buy. Don't get me wrong, I love turning chuck beef and chick peas into a lovely curry, but it's fun to have a fantastic piece of meat/fish that needs nothing more than to be cooked properly. Ready to go in the oven, on top of some sliced leeks and more butter: The spread: The main event:

That doesn't suck AmritaBala, they look great!

Since I got my new gas cooktop installed, every meal I've cooked has been made in a scorching hot wok. The beef noodles from last night:

Slate published an article rebutting the Times piece, which refers to this scientific article studying the effects of diets high in fish on mercury levels and related problems in adults and children. If you can it's worth reading the original article, although the Slate piece does a good job of accurately representing it. Their finding? Over the 27 years studied, diets high in fish were not associated with negative outcomes. These studies used standardised scales and such to determine 'normality' rather than controls (subjects whose intake of fish was low or normal), but they're long term and very interesting. I'm not an expert in mercury, fish, or nutrition, nor have I done a review of all of the literature in this area. I do have experience in evaluating how substances (particularly drugs) affect humans in practice. How substances affect us is dependent on their interaction with countless other chemicals and processes, and often it's not as predictable as we would like. I know how it feels to know that a chemical affects a certain biological pathway (from one experiment), know that triggering that pathways causes a certain result (from another experiment), but when you give that chemical to a human in a drug trial you don't get the anticipated result. Just because fish contains mercury and mercury causes health problems, it doesn't necessarily mean that consuming fish causes health problems. I would be interested in reading a paper that did show this, though (although to be honest, I love fish so that would be pretty disappointing).

I delved into the depths of my freezer today and discovered that I have a whole container of pork confit, completely immersed in lard and frozen for almost a year. It would be a shame to throw out -- any opinions on whether it would be safe to eat?

Oh I'm all over that one Prawncrackers. The cooktop I bought was chosen because among other perks, its large burner left all but one of the competitors in the dust in terms of power. And last week I bought a beautiful, large, sturdy carbon steel wok from Chinatown (only $14!), which I've started to season in the oven. Needless to say, the first meal will be something asian. Probably noodles.

There have been some fantastic meals here in the last few days. Ann_T, yours especially have caught my eye. I'm without a stovetop until next week (although then I'll finally have gas to replace the electric cooktop), so I made cheese pizza. Not that I need a reason to make pizza. (Pictured before I added some basil from the garden)

Thanks Shelby. There was some ricotta cheese between two of the lower layers, but the rest was on top (also on top is a thick bechamel sauce, that's not all melted cheese!).

I came across a seller in the market who was charging next to nothing for fresh, juicy golden-colored tomatoes. I decided to buy 2kg, use some in a salad and make a sauce out of the rest. Unfortunately this photo doesn't capture how brilliantly yellow the sauce was. More pasta, the other night I made lasagna. I was so pleased with how it turned out, I could have eaten the whole thing. (edited a typo)

I used agalarneau's recipe, and it worked perfectly. At least I think it did. I've only ever had falafel made by others from those dried mixes you can buy, and needless to say these far exceeded that. I forgot to take a picture until they were almost all gone. This photo shows the great colour and crust they got, but since it had been sitting, broken in half on the plate for a while it doesn't capture how perfectly moist they were in side. Great recipe, agalarneau!

Simply amazing, biskuit. The preparation, the food, the setting, the leftovers (I look forward to the day when I can sit outside eating leftover truffle ragout for lunch), your wife and guests are all very lucky. Well done! Were you able to participate much in the dinner itself, or did you stay behind the scenes cooking for a lot of it?

Several dinners from the last week: Pork noodles These were fresh rice noodles with char siu pork, shredded carrot, bean sprouts, egg, and spring onions. Maximum credit should go to hzrt8w for this excellent Chinese cooking tutorials. Although the method of cooking was not traditional (Cast iron frying pan on an electric stove), by heating the pan until smoking I was able to achieve the heat necessary to get some of those caramelized, smoky flavours I was after. I was really pleased with how it turned out, and the next night I finished the noodles by following hzrt8w's recipe for beef noodles. Beef and chickpea curry. Although I really should be using up the stocks occupying space in the freezer, I had an urge to cook a curry. Macaroni and cheese. I'm the only one in the house who likes any form of macaroni and cheese, so while home alone I made this recipe from Cooking for Engineers. Very creamy, although next time I'll mess with the flavours a little to suit my tastes.

I'm looking in to buying an electric oven to replace my existing electric oven, and I've narrowed it down to 2 possible models from the same product line. The only difference between the two that I care about is that one has the option to go non-fan-forced, while the other is fan-forced all the time. The former oven is quite a bit more expensive. To help me make the decision, are there any things that would require an oven that isn't fan-forced? Are there any other compelling reasons to buy the oven that will let me turn the fan off should I need to?

A recipe and photo please I didn't get a photo I'm afraid, but the recipe is quite straightforward. I diced the chili and sautéed it in hot olive oil, then added a few tablespoons of Mario Batali's Basic Tomato Sauce, mixed with spaghetti, and grated a generous amount of pecorino over the top. The Batali recipe is pretty good. I don't normally follow pasta sauce recipes too fastidiously, but since I doubt I will eat at Babbo any time soon I decided to follow it to the letter to get even a small idea of the kinds of flavours Mario Batali uses in his famous pasta dishes. I liked it, although I'd probably add a bit of finely diced celery next time.