rarerollingobject

Tonight, I forgot to adult, so this was the entirety of my dinner: Two weeks ago, in Melbourne, I bought a jar of Luxardo maraschino cherries. When I got home, I promptly drained all the syrup out of the jar and replaced it with kirsch. Tonight I made a chocolate ganache, flavoured it with some of the kirsch, spooned out dollops of it, pressed a highly boozy cherry into each one and then coated them in tempered dark chocolate. And decided they looked shambolic as hell, so got out the rarely-used edible gold leaf to bring a little bling.

Today from the greengrocers; 2kg of strawberries because they were on sale (I'll think of what to do with them later), green onions, gai lan, cavolo nero, smoked streaky bacon, eggplants, zucchini flowers, a good chunk of fresh horseradish, fresh raw pistachios, Australian native finger limes, a handful of sugarplums and some fresh shiitakes. Not shown: a half dozen oysters, and some Tasmanian brandy gravlax.

And what you have there is also the normal cut for short rib braised Korean style, galbi jjim. http://www.koreanbapsang.com/2011/10/galbijjim-korean-braised-beef-short.html

Ooh, lovely! Please post back with how it turns out! It's a very forgiving dish, hard to get wrong. You can jazz it up with garlic and soy sauce etc, but you really don't have to..as long as you have gochujang, you're good to go. Btw, you can also use the gochujang and ramen for one of my other favourite Korean dishes, dak galbi - posted it in the Dinner thread. Good with chicken or pork, or fish cakes!

Went to the Sydney Fish Markets this morning and while what I REALLY wanted to eat (on the spot) was one of these beautiful fresh sea urchin: Decorum prevailed and I just bought some (comparatively boring) Tasmanian gravlax. And at the greengrocer on the way home, some native Australian finger limes; these are so intensely sour, and the little 'caviar' pop in your mouth and explode in citrus on your tongue. So, sourdough, butter, gravlax and finger lime for breakfast.

I'll tell you what I like to do with them; ddeokgalbi. You cut between the bones and then take the meat OFF the bones, and mince it. Then you marinate it with chopped onion and green onion, soy, honey, sesame oil and black pepper and then sort of reshape it onto the bones. Then I grill it (or what Americans call broil) for only 15 mins in a cast iron pan, and then put it on the stovetop for another ten minutes, tilting the pan and spooning the caramelising marinade back over the top. Short rib this way doesn't need a long slow braise (nothing wrong with that, just a different style) and it's SO juicy and tender and good - and you still get to chew the bone. Here's a recipe: http://www.maangchi.com/recipe/tteokgalbi

Of course..thank you for your kind words! I don't really follow a recipe for ddeokbokki, so my vague approximations are: Soak rice cakes in warm water for half an hour to thaw (they usually come frozen and I use about 500g/1 pound of them at a time, but if you get them in refrigerated or room temperature packs, I'd still soak them for 5 mins or so in warm water to loosen them up a bit) and then drain them. They should be a little pliable but not mushy. In a pan, heat a bit of oil and tip in the rice cakes. I like to leave them undisturbed for a minute or so to let them develop a bit of a caramelly crust, but that's quite unorthodox. Stir them around with some lengths of green onion (the white parts) for about 2 minutes. Then tip in about 3 Tbsp or so of gochujang chilli paste, some extra chilli flakes if you like them, and a few tsp of sugar. Let that fry for a minute or so, and then add some slices of fish cake or sausage or whatever protein you have (optional), pour in a cup and a half of water and simmer until the sauce thickens, the rices cakes swell and it becomes unctuous. That's it. Garnish with chopped green onion ends. Sometimes I stir blanched ramen in. Sometimes I add cheese. I'm a devil that way. Here's a good link, though I never bother with the anchovy/kelp stock part, and I'd never use that much water: http://www.maangchi.com/recipe/ddukbokkie

You are most kind.

Sick today and working from home, so I made pure carb coma comfort food; ddeokbokki. Chewy, sticky Korean rice cakes simmered with sliced fish cakes in LIQUID FIRE (which is to say gochujang chilli paste, gochugaru chilli flakes, sugar, garlic, soy sauce and sour green plum syrup until thickened). And lots of green onion and roasted sesame seeds. SO hot that I've temporarily stopped being light in the head from sickness, and am now light in the head from gochujang buuuuuuuuurn.

Yukhoe on hot white rice; yukhoe is Korean beef tartare marinated in garlic, honey, black pepper, soy sauce and sesame oil, with a raw egg yolk. And I added a few of my other favourite ingredients; chopped blanched octopus, tiny cubes of crunchy, juicy nashi pear, Korean chilli flakes, and crispy garlic. And drizzled with ginger oil, and Korean plum syrup (maesil). With a little sprinkle of this beautiful Cypriot black salt:

Beautiful as usual, @dcarch. Here, I'm still on the New Zealand storm clams..so big, can barely hold them in my hands. Clams in general are a bit unfamiliar to me - we don't get that many in Australia, our waters are too warm. Which meant that I spent a fair bit of time chopping them open and then Googling 'clam anatomy'...not recommended. Made something vaguely European (or at least Italian-American) for a change, which was minced clams sauteed in butter, garlic and panko breadcrumbs, mixed with chopped parsley and stuffed back into the shells and baked with parmesan. I think they're called..Stuffed Clams.

I make ginger butter quite a bit. I use it to caramelise prawns or chicken (usually adding fish sauce and white pepper to the pan) or spread it on scones and smeared with honey. I also put some on steak just after it's cooked, and let it melt into a gingery puddle (usually with fish sauce, again.) I also make a green onion/ginger butter that you can see here, smeared on the tops of Chinese meat pies I made, and sprinkled with ground red chilli.

I realise that for a lot of people this would be a big pile of Nope, and especially for breakfast, but Esoteric Seafood Spelunking is kind of my happy place, so...look at these storm clams! Bigger than the palm of my hand. From Cloudy Bay in NZ. So beautiful. Chopped up with raw oysters, prawns, octopus, calamari and spring onions, mixed into a rice-flour based pancake batter and fried in duck fat, into haemul pajeon - crispy Korean seafood pancakes, with a soy/sesame oil and pear juice dipping sauce.

Warm umami-bomb prawns, caramelised in miso butter, with sautéed kimchi, about 100 twists of the black pepper grinder, and buttery toasted bread.

Never thought of skewering a wedge of cabbage to roast it. Not a bad idea! Here; Taiwanese pork belly (lu rou fan), braised with soy, star anise, cinnamon, brown sugar, lots of ginger and crispy shallots, on egg noodles, with chopped green onion, fried crispy garlic, shredded toasted seaweed, roast sesame seeds, leek flower sauce, and two kinds of chilli; lao gan ma crispy chilli oil and a fresh chilli garlic sauce I blitzed together in the food processor. The noodles were all wrong for it, but I had some vermicelli to use up, and I'm too dazed and confused in general to be a purist. And dessert was two intense truffle-pops; the salted caramel and feuilletine, and cookies and cream, rolled in bitter chocolate cookie crumbs.

@Duvel, that's really it. I just crack and separate egg yolks into a small bowl, and pour over 1 Tbsp of soy and 1 Tbsp of mirin per egg yolk. Cover and leave in the fridge for three days. The only trick is using a small enough bowl that the yolk stays at least partially submerged. Sometimes I get a bit Korean and whisk some gochujang chilli paste into the mirin and soy before adding the egg yolk.

All those meals look delicious, @gfweb. Great shakshuka. All I could muster the energy for tonight was an egg; or, more specifically, kimi no shoyuzuke - it's a Japanese way to marinate raw egg yolks for three days in soy and mirin. The marinating cures the yolk and changes the texture to something unctuous, luscious and almost chewy. Not cooked, not raw - something in between. Perfect on hot rice. Perfect for a tired and hungry girl.

Um, 'sweaty man reminiscent' is totally the best part! I'll look out for the Chaource, thanks for the recommendation.. We tend to be a bit lacking in Northern Hemisphere cheese in Australia.

Breakfast this morning was a nutritional powerhouse of half a pork pie, and then I stopped at a winery I'm staying nearby while on holiday and had, uh, a Moscato slushie. As you do. Ahem.

Not sure this entirely counts as cooking, but it WAS my dinner, and I did do a lot of unwrapping and plating! Travelling interstate at the moment, through the Yarra Valley, just outside the Victorian capital of Melbourne. So I stopped at the excellent cheese room of the Richmond Hill Cafe and Larder before driving out of Melbourne, and then at Mandala Estate Winery for a wonderful chardonnay (and I don't normally like chardonnay, but this one was extraordinary), so had a lovely dinner of 24 month aged Comté, a highly stinky Epoisses that smells and tastes just like a very sweaty man, a Monte Enebro ashed goats' cheese, a fresh chèvre and a very good pork pie. Eaten in this beautiful garden, I'm pretty happy with this dinner.

I recently read a book about Victorian cooking techniques, and was highly intrigued by the larding needle. It’s an implement they used to thread small pieces of fat or butter throughout dry meat. I couldn’t find a single contemporary photo of this being done to a chicken (I did find one of quail.) But anyway, so determined was I to try this out on some desiccated protein that I tracked down a larding needle online, ordered it from America, and created a fat-infused Coronary Chicken; one half of it threaded with pancetta, the other with butter. And roasted with fennel, apples, carrots, garlic and thyme. It looks a bit unappealing in the before and after, to be sure, but MAN was that a juicy, tasty, delicious roast chicken.

Never seen them this big before myself, but I flirt very shamelessly with my fish shop guy, so he always keeps interesting things to the side for me and texts me when he has something splendid in, like these. Will Flirt For Fish.

That chocolate sandwich is SPECTACULAR, @blue_dolphin! I love it. And beautiful rolls, @Kim Shook. Dan dan mian for breakfast; Sichuanese wheat noodles with crispy minced pork, lashings of chilli oil, Sichuan pepper oil, Tianjin preserved vegetables, Chinkiang black vinegar, dark and light soy sauces, leek flower sauce, crispy peanuts and a thousand chopped green onions.

Giant, giant prawns. The biggest I've ever seen, nearly as long as my forearm, end to end - photographed next to my massive cleaver and my old iPhone 5 for scale. Split open and simply grilled with butter and a miso/mirin/ginger glaze, sprinkled with toasted nori and eaten on lamb's lettuce.

Thank you, @robie! I make it. I buy a big batch of plain, thinly sliced pork belly from a Korean butcher (ssamgyeopsal) and then divide it into freezer bags and make the marinade straight into the bags and freeze them. It marinates while it's freezing. I make a bunch of different flavours, but this one is Vietnamese caramel-style, with lemongrass, caramel sauce, blitzed purple shallots, black pepper, fish sauce, garlic etc. Then in the morning before work, I just take a bag out of the freezer and by the time I get home, it's defrosted. I usually grill it in this copper mesh thing you can see here, straight under the broiler and flip the whole thing once by its handles (because that's easier than individually flipping the pieces with a pair of tongs), and it's all done in 10 minutes.