Natho

Hi, not sure if this has been covered in the preceding 12 pages or not (I only read up to page 5...) but has anyone tried adding any of the lemon juice to the limoncello for extra tang? I'm really keen to make some, as soon as one of my friends goes overseas so they can get me duty free booze, seeing as how I don't relish buying $100+ of vodka to make a batch.

On a whim I bought some goraka because I have a weakness for buying things I don't know how to use. So what is the best way to use it? I understand it is a souring ingredient and particularly useful with fish but other then basic recipes, I haven't been able to find much other info. Can it be used as a substitute for tamarind?

My mate and I drank some old brews he had found in a box the other night (old = about a year or a bit over). Some had changed quite dramatically, some hadn't. The ginger beer had not changed, the chocolate porter had developed substantialy more chocolate characteristics, almost a cocoa taste (chocolate was from the malt only) and the honey porter had seemed to meld the flavours together much more cohesively. These were all beers with live cultures. Well, they were live a year ago anyhow.

I once tried a little nibble of amarillo hops we were using. It's not an experience I will soon try again, or forget. The very first second was just a fragrant taste much (obviously) like what the hops smell like. Then it exploded in my mouth, bitter and overpoweringly strong. I haven't tried young hop shoots or whatever, but I would advise eating brewing-ready hops with extreme caution. Science and catalyst molecules aside, they were very bitter.

My friends know me well enough that if I bring my own knives it's no offence. And anyone else, well I couldn't care that much about offending them. But the biggest ones for me are obviously knives, then chopping boards and pans followed by stirring implements. All my friends have cheap plastic stirring things that are all part melted on the end. Where, I ask you, did the rest of that melted plastic go? The worst are glass chopping boards, in conjunction with $2 serated knives, you get this horrid high pitched grateing noise that goes down my spine. I went to cook at a friends house, her parents, who she lived with, were filthy rich. They had an epic kitchen with a walk in, yes, walk in refrigerator. "Oh, thats cool. Where's your vegetable grater? Oh, um, don't have one. Peeler? Yeah don't think we got that either" and so on.

We bought it from a butcher. And the butcher said it was a rabbit so thats all i can go on, as far identifying a particular species by a skinned carcass I'm not that talented. Incidently both myself and my friend got a mild but unpleasant case of food poisoning after eating this dish. I'm blaming it on either the rabbit or the chorizo, as nothing else we put into it would have caused it (well, not likely anyway). We did cook it for 1 and a half hours so it wasn't undercooked. Still keen to try again though. editted for spelling caused by typing on a black keyboard at night

So I got hold of a wild rabbit from a german butcher (I live in australia) whilst looking for something to cook that I hadn't done before. Spying some particularly promising looking chorizo I grabbed a few of those as well. I made a stew of rabbit, chorizo, tomatos, green olives, white wine, mushrooms and thyme. It tasted great however the rabbit was really quite tough and dry, kind of the texture of really dry chicken breast meat. It also seemed to almost have some kind of membrane over the meat, as if it had only been half skinned, which was not apparent before cooking. Although my friend was rather put off of any future rabbit consumption, I am keen to have another crack at it, albeit in a different form. Does anybody have any suggestions as far as cooking rabbit goes? I suppose a farmed rabbit would be a fair bit softer then a wild one due to it not spending it's life running from dingos and wild cats.

After about 50 hours, it's already the color of dark rum. It has a very pronounced vanilla smell but still has a strong vodka aroma. I can only imagine what 6 months will do to it. There is a lot of floaty bits in it, which look like a woody kind of fibre distinctly different from the seeds, which I assume came from the inside of the beans. But I've had these before, when I've shoved a couple of split beans into a bottle of captain morgans spiced rum for flavour and I could never detect them when consuming said rum so not really much of a concern.

Well I just started my first batch. I have a 1 litre bottle of blue label 100 proof smirnoff that my friends got me duty free on their way back from canada at roughly a quarter of the off the shelf price here in australia. So, after taking it out of the deep freezer and *ahem* making room in the bottle for the beans, I added 20 bourbon. The first 5 I split, scraped and chopped into 1" pieces, because I wanted to get a lot of loose seeds. I love the look of the seeds in whatever I cook with real vanilla. The next 12 I split and chopped, then the last 3 I just split, to get that nice "war of the worlds" look if you look in the side if the bottle. After about 2 hours and several good shakes, it's already honey brown, kind of the color of fresh 20w50 motor oil and has a noticeable vanilla smell amongst the vodka aromas. I will keep it wrapped to keep the light out and probably shake it every day till it's good. There is a veritable storm of seeds inside when I give it a good shake. So, after 1 and a half years of this thread, how are the original batches going from the beginning?

This one looks the worst so far. It seriously looks like a piece of lawn with a dog crap on it. Then turned into soup.

Pork medallions coated in sumac, 5 spice, salt and pepper, shallow fried with a blueberry, hoi sin, rice wine and lime dipping sauce, followed by stirfry of pork that had marinated in the rest of the dipping sauce plus more sumac and 5 spice, finely diced lime peel (with pith) fried with garlic, ginger, shallots,soy sauce, bok choi, water chestnuts and hokkien noodles, garnished with whole blueberries. We had an ingredients list of noodles, hoi sin, pork, 5 spice, rice wine, water chestnuts, blueberries, sumac and lime that we had agreed on earlier and had to invent dishes from. It was amazing, every flavour type was covered, bitter from the fried lime peel and pith, sour from the lime juice, sweet from the blueberries, salty from the soy sauce, and hot (a little little bit) from the ginger and pepper, plus the textures where all covered, soft from the pork and berries, firm from the noodles and crunchy from the water chestnuts and bok choi stems.

I'm looking for something interesting to do with melons over the winter months (southern hemisphere and all that) other then just chilling and eating or fruit salad etc. Melons don't need to be the hero ingredient either. Any suggestions? I'm open to any style of cooking or flavours.

WOOOOAAAH there! As a Designer, the most important thing is to read the brief. Carefully. Here it is: Now, where about in the brief does it say that the product must (or even should) address some "gap in the market"? It seems to me that the brief is ALL about designing a *better* mousetrap. Not finding another creature to trap. This competition is ALL about design, not at all about fundamental product function innovation. If you want to appeal to Breville, reference an *existing* Breville product category. (Hey, like the sandwich toaster...) And then design a *better* one - with better being defined specifically in terms of Eco credentials, particularly relating to the headings given, though you might find others to add, like a reduced water requirement... ← I have READ THE BRIEF CAREFULLY I know what the competition entails. And eco design will be the major part of it. But Thats not the only part of designing for a competition. Why submit a better designed existing product when i can submit a new product that is well designed that fits the brief and opens up a new consumer market? This competition will have a thousand redesigned toasters submitted to it, all of which will only get the most cursory of glances by the judges. Originality marks - 0%

The website for it DOES say it's for the patio. Which is generally outdoors unless you have areally weird house.

I just couldn't imagine it ever getting as far as cooking. I would have eaten the whole thing by then. It's possibly my favourite cheese.

I just realised I was referencing the OTHER Invent It thread...

I do want to hear what you think. I'm just telling you what the other side of the angle will be. I'm not interested in kissing brevilles arse, but realistically this is a commercial competition for a commercial company. When breville give us a brief to design something for them, I have to design something that will fit their corporate agenda. Anything else would be a bit pointless.

The pot lid holder sounds interesting. i'll look into it. As far as all in one appliances go, I don't know how kindly breville would look on a design that stopped people from buying 5 of their appliances in favour of just the one. And as for the spiral meast slicer, i'm not sure how much wide market appeal it would have. Breville markets to the general public mostly.

Sounds good. In australia we have plenty of sun. Too much of it in summer for my taste. Anyone have any recipes that work well or cooking tips?

In my research for my current design assignment (which you can help my research for here) I have stumbled across solar cooking. I am really intrigued after reading this discourse on it and really want to try it out. Has anyone here ever done it before? I assume it would be very similar to crockpot cooking and would probably be very good for pouch cooking as well. I think I will build a cookit style cooker and have a dip soon. Any experiences would be gratefully heard.

I am a third year industrial design student and for an assignment I am entering the Breville Young Designer competition . The brief is to design a more eco-friendly kitchen appliance. What I am researching is what kind of gaps there is in the kitchen appliance market. What kinds of machinery do you wish someone would make? Is there a particular thing you do in the kitchen or when cooking that no-one caters for with an appliance? Or do you have an existing appliance that you wish would do more? This kind of research is very important to developing quality designs. So please, help a designer out!

Unless we are cooking rice for a very large group we just microwave it and it turns out fine every time. Is that evil?

Will it affect the dough if I add herbs, sundried tomatoes, olives etc? Can it still be stored for the same length of time?

Unfortunately, I don't do oysters. It seems as though, judging by popular opinion, I am rather missing out. I was thinking it would go lovely with a lychee, lime and ginger sorbet..

Well, I buy smallgoods and cheese if I have never heard of it, or can't pronounce it, but I have so far refrained from buying brightly colored asian packets of stuff. I'm always suspicious it will contain dried prawns.