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Natho

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Everything posted by Natho

  1. I am by no means complaining of the convenience of it, just the quality. Maybe it's just australian bagged salad.
  2. I really love the Effen Vodka bottles. The glass comes in about 1 mm at the label and the label itself is a thick rubber sleeve. The graphic design is a great example of "less is more". The black cherry (black label) is particularly striking to me.
  3. The one I mostly buy and yet cringe when I do is pre packed salads. I buy them because someone at church or whatever decides to throw a spur-of-the-monent barbeque and says "come round in half an hour. BYO everything" so it's off to the supermarket. I then stand there and go through all the packs (I worked in fruit and vege for 5 years so I know what the quality is going to be like ) trying to find the one with the least amount of brown slimy leaves in the bottom of it. It's either that or just eat all meat for lunch. Not an entirely unattractive prospect for me but i try to at least pretend to think about my health..
  4. I just got my first half pound of madagascar from the afore mentioned ebay store. I feel like a drug dealer as I have been counting them out and onselling to my friends "Hey.. I got my "package". 50c a hit. How much do your people want?" "Woah that's the cheapest I've seen on the street. I'll take 10" "Sure. I'll arange delivery.." Although I guess according to this site it kind of is..
  5. Funny you should mention that... I just started on my rissotto phase
  6. I love on this show how when he is cooking outside he just chucks stuff on the floor and drains liquids right onto the benchtop or the ground. I wish I could cook like that at home and just hose the kitchen down after...
  7. One thing I bought for my friend who uses it all the time and I wish I had myself was a stick/imersion blender that came with the small processor attachment. You just pop off the end of the stick blender and clip it on the processor. It does a great job and is really small, great for 1 or 2 peoples worth of blending. I would get glass mixing bowls personally because the metal ones can react with acidic ingredients if you want to use them to marinade something in.
  8. So I have been converted to white. In particular the sauvignon blanc from malborough in new zealand. It is definitley the best wine experience of my less than thorough wine drinking. And being in australia, we get mountains of it for relatively cheap. So my question is, what would be the best foods to match it with?
  9. I don't know how many of you carry your mobile (cel) phone around on your person but the last 3 I have had have all had a converter built into the application menu which I use whenever I need to convert. it does temperature and weight which is what I mostly need to ever swap.
  10. I don't often drink straight (but I am working to it) but I fequently have coffee laced with grand marnier, creme de cacao, frangelico or Cpt Morgans original spiced gold rum (or a combination of the above)
  11. Natho

    Licorice

    I have to say, in my idle dreaming I have thought of many flavor combinations (many that have not impressed my less adventurous friends..) but licorice and cumin wasn't one of them. Sounds interesting.
  12. Natho

    Alcoholic Ginger Beer

    Ok here's the brewing notes for my GB batch size = 23 litres Ingredients - 1 kg Light Dry Extract 250 gm crystal malt 10 cm cinnamon scroll 1.5 kg raw ginger root, peeled (it was 1.5 kg before we peeled it) Juice of 2 lemons 8 cloves 1 kg light brown sugar 600 gm fairly nondescript ordinary honey 250gm lactose We blended up the ginger with some water and put it on the stove and boiled it for at least half an hour with the spices, then we added the lemon, sugar, honey and lactose along with the liquid from the grain which had been sparging. We strained it into the fermenter and aded the dry extract, then topped it up to 23 litres, waited till it cooled down and pitched the yeast. It was racked off into a secondary fermenter after a week and then bottled with bulk priming after another week. Can't remember the final gravity. We had our first taste last night after it being in bottles for about 12 days or something (we were a little impatient plus hey, it was saturday night) and it was good! A bit odd at first because like i said there is always that previous association with ginger beer softdrink to get over but after that it was nice. Good ginger flavour in the mouth, but not much going on in the aftertaste. Very subtle honey flavour, i would personally like to use all honey next time and a stronger one to boot, as well as doubling the cinnamon. The acidity was just right from the two lemons, definitley wouldn't want any more. I would maybe add powdered ginger as well to intensify the flavour. And maybe some more lactose. But other than that, for our first time i am pretty happy with it and look forward to trying again.
  13. Natho

    Making Cheese

    has anyone tried to make a halloumi?
  14. oo I hate vegemite and all the other imitators there are. I have been told that makes me unaustralian. Having said that I recently brewed a rather strong dark ale that tasted like vegemite which wasn't too bad. I guess as far as dessert goes the only thing I can think of is maybe in a guiness and chocolate cake instead of the guiness.
  15. On boxing day my friend and i picked up some interesting looking beers we had never tried and had a crack Montieths doppelbok winter ale - Not bad, but not great either Macs Sassy Red - See previous judgement James Boags Wizard Smith - Again, see previous judgement Harviestoun Old Engine Oil - Great! Will definitely buy it again. That was the experimentals, we also drank bucket loads of tooheys old and plenty of homebrew
  16. Natho

    Alcoholic Ginger Beer

    What kind of ginger did you put in? Fresh or dried/powdered? I love porters and this sound interesting. And how much and when did it go in?
  17. I learned that licorice doesn't melt as easily as i was hoping for making icecream. I learnt how easy it is to make baklava and how to cook a chicken in a microwave (thanks mum) Next year when it cools down to winter i WILL learn to temper chocolate.
  18. Natho

    Crackers

    Cracked pepper water crackers. I prefer a fairly neutral tasting base for my cheese to await it's doom upon. However the other day i placed a chunk of boursin on a slice of brie instead of a cracker and it was amazing.. By the way, why are they called water crackers?
  19. Natho

    Alcoholic Ginger Beer

    My mate has the recipe at his place where we did the brewing i'll see if I can get a hold of it. We couldn't leave any sugar in the brew because we carbonate in the bottle via the yeast so if we left any sugar in it we would have exploding bottles on hand. I'm not saying that it tastes bad by any means, it is just different to the commercial GB that we get in australia which is carbonated with gas and so can retain some sugar. But i won't know for sure for a few weeks anyway, after it has been in the bottle for at least 3 weeks then we will try it.
  20. My friends used to ask me for recipes now they don't bother they just ask me to make the same bloody things over and over. The main one is a french chocolate cake that i have had requested for birthday parties at least 6 times and am now getting offered money for it. I refuse to make it anymore, unless of course they are offering me the money..
  21. Aaah as someone with a mother who is also a product of the post war years i have many times had (typewritten) recipes for cake and/or biscuit crumb truffles thrust in my direction when i have mentioned the word "truffle" too loud. Although my solitary contribution so far to the world of truffles has been my so-called "man-truffles" (dark dark chocolate with black pepper and cinnamon - a rather good combination if I do say so) which also resembled the fungus, in a manly way, I have learnt many worthy things from idley browsing the pages of this forum.
  22. Natho

    Alcoholic Ginger Beer

    We added 1 kg of dry light malt extract and 250gm of crystal grain. We DID want an alcoholic ginger beer. It's been bottled now and will be left for a few weeks to carbonate and develope. The taste of the bottle ready stuff was quite different then what i was expecting, although i guess i knew it wouldn't be sweet at all it was still a bit of a surprise when it wasn't seeing as how i'm used to commercial ginger beer which is always sweet. I tasted it after a week and a lot of the ginger flavour seemed to have disappeared but it had come back by the second week in the fermenter. Next time maybe we will add some powdered ginger to intensify the flavor. I think i will try make a sugar or honey syrup to add when i drink it to sweeten it a bit. but I will see how i like it when it's ready.
  23. Natho

    Licorice

    Currently a spoon and my mouth I actually have given half of it away. When I told my friends I was making it they all demanded a sample. I have that problem all the time. I should stop voicing my ideas to people...
  24. Natho

    Licorice

    I'm not sure how i would describe it if i had to. Certainly the commercial licorice is often sweet, and maybe a little bitter. The glycyrrhizic acid is used as a sweetener so I wonder what type of licorice he was using as his example.
  25. Natho

    Licorice

    Well I ran it through the machine and now it's icecream. It's pretty good. Maybe i would sweeten it a bit more and put one less eggyolk in it but it's definitely not bad. I don't know why but it tastes way better after freezing then before. Great texture, very smooth.
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