rarerollingobject

I've been thinking about this dish since you posted it, Bruce..it looks SO heart-stoppingly delicious. Question: I've looked up a few chilorio recipes online and most of them just specify 'boneless pork' - what cut did you use? I was thinking of using shoulder/butt, and leaving the fat on. Also, did you cut yours into cubes or chunks and leave them that size? Again, most recipes seem to indicate to shred them into pulled pork, but yours looks quite chunky?

Rhubarb and stem ginger crumble. With buffalo yoghurt on the side.

Cuttlefish noodles! Very interesting, nikkib. And that polenta looks luscious, kayb. I made "sushi roll in a bowl" - seasoned sushi rice, topped with spinach in sesame dressing, sliced avocado, and chunks of grilled salmon belly. That's a stand of toasted nori you see in the background. Sesame seeds sprinkled over, and wasabi and soy to eat.

Looks great, Soba. Chicken looks nice and moist. Kim Shook, incredible dishes! Love that strawberry shortcake. Twyst, those scallops look so juicy. I have a huge weakness for polenta, I'd be in heaven. robirdstx, your duck cracklins are beautiful. That looks SO good, especially for how cold and wintry it is in Sydney at the moment. Dinner here would hardly be impressive to anyone here, but it was kinda a big deal to me..under Dakki's expert tutelage, I made my first quesadillas!! Mexican ingredients are NOT easy to source here (why, I don't know..every other cuisine is damn well represented) but I managed to find white corn tortillas, made a roasted tomato, red onion, garlic and chipotle en adobo salsa, filled with gouda and spinach and doused in habanero sauce. They ain't going to win any competitions, but I was rather pleased with them. I might have eaten six!

Ha! Love it. I once had a woman approach me really cautiously, head cocked to the side and eyes full of sincere sympathy and reassurance, and essentially ask the same; why I 'had' to eat to alone, as if to say "what tragedy has befallen your life to find yourself in a such a woeful situation?". She wasn't kindly asking if I wanted to join her, really was just scoping out this alien life form of the solo diner. I just replied that I'd lost touch with many of my friends since getting out of prison, which made her scurry away quick smart! (I was joking, let me be clear.) Apart from that the only other diners who ever speak to me while I've been dining alone are men, trying to..err..well, you know. While that can sometimes be entertaining too, I'll never forget the guy who tried to hit on me while his female companion had gone to the bathroom, and when I pointed out that I'd already noticed he was there with a woman so "WTF, dude?", he just grinned broadly and said "So for you to notice me and that I was with someone, I'd obviously caught your eye, eh?" and, encouraged, proceeded with the propositioning!! I had to laugh..the endearing eternal optimism of men.

Plus, she doesn't like that sauce requires using so many tomatoes at once. She describes that as 'dismissive', and prefers that we reverentially eke them out over days like they're rare treasures. ETA: Which they are.

I can only imagine that she feels piqued that by pureeing them into a soup or pasta sauce, you are not fully appreciating the lush glossy sweet flesh of her lovingly-tended orbs! Which sounds terribly double entendre-y, no? I think it's unreasonable, but my mother has said similar things before, and she is the bastion of unreasonableness! She would say that she fertilised and tended and watered and kept warm and safe from bugs and proudly saw her tomatoes to a wondrous fulsomeness of corporeal reality and that blitzkreiging them into mush is basically a rejection of her nurturing.. (she really does talk like that.) On the other hand, people seem especially fierce about tomatoes..she does not bat an eyelid if I puree her chillis into sauce, or express any kind of interest in what I do with all the lemons she gives me.

Ohhhh I am so jealous..I have never seen the sauce here in Australia, just the paste, and have to beg friends in Nagoya to send bottles to me. Yours looks a little thicker in consistency than mine; the Japanese at the bottom of your bottle does say "yuzu kosho", which usually refers to the paste, even though that pretty much just means "yuzu and pepper". Anyway, yuzu kosho is great with grilled chicken, but also white fish, as a kind of salsa verde for steak, mixed with oil for salad dressings, or with mayo for a spicy spread. I also really love it mixed with mayo and poached chicken as the centre of an onigiri rice ball, or used in place of wasabi with sashimi. I also like it (or the sauce) on grilled cheese, on avocado and toast, or drizzled over a fried egg on rice! OK, stopping now..

IIRC, I found this recipe very salty too, and added way more sugar to balance it out. Couple of thoughts: * Did you rinse the black beans? Assuming the ones you got were the dryish ones, rinsing the salt off is a usual first step. * Not sure if you got 'sweet wheat paste' or the 'sweet bean paste' alternatives the recipes talk about, but if you happened to get 'brown/yellow bean paste' instead, that is much saltier than the sweet wheaten paste (which itself is already about the saltiness of Vegemite, IMO). Or, more sugar!

I have to eat alone often when I travel for work, or I'm on one of my "leave me alone everybody, I'm jetting off by myself" holidays. I prefer eating with company, don't mind eating alone, but my comfort level with it depends on the restaurant. If it's a very fancy or trendy place, I'd be lying if I didn't admit to feeling a little uneasy, as you say, but then push through it by pondering how if my biggest problem in life at that second is feeling a little shy about eating a delicious meal alone in a beautiful restaurant, then I'm doing pretty well in life. Anyway, I think it's one of the things that defines one as an adult - both the ability and quiet confidence to function as a self-contained unit and enjoy one's own company even in a boisterous crowd, AND the wherewithal (in an attitudanal sense) to push past our ideas of what's easy and difficult, and do whatever we damn well want anyway.

Love the look of that salmon, David Ross. Dinner here was more pork; pork shoulder braised in milk. Served with steamed kale and rice, the curds of the milk sauce were mighty tasty (if not too photogenic).

Packaged - the English label on them (they're a Chinese product) said 'soybeans' but I have been pondering this deeply for the last 10 minutes and I actually think they're broad beans (limas? favas?). Too big to be soybeans. I no longer have the packaging or I'd bully someone into translating properly, but they taste a little like those Indian snack mixes that are coated in chickpea flour and fried.

Warm silken tofu with green onion, chopped mustard tuber, leek flower sauce, black bean chilli oil, Sichuan pepper and crunchy deep fried soybeans. A little soy sauce to finish. And two cups of very strong ginger tea in a seems-to-be-failing attempt to ward off an oncoming cold.

I don't like watermelon either, but I DO like watermelon agua fresca, esp. boozed up with vodka or tequila. And dipping watermelon flesh in ground chilli and salt makes it quite bearable. As for stir frying the rind, I think dcarch suggest microwaving it briefly to soften it up somewhere in that Dinner thread..

I love yuzu anything too..the hot sauce tastes like a liquid version of yuzu kosho, a delicious paste of yuzu zest, salt and green chilli. I dab it onto everything, and this hot sauce just kicks it up a further notch. I've never seen the sauce outside Japan, but the yuzu kosho I can get in Japanese stores here in Australia..if you like yuzu, I highly recommend you look out for it.

Crispy pork belly, sliced and stir fried with greens and sweet soy (snowpeas, beans, broccoli, choy sum). I'm calling this Thai-ish because I used palm sugar and fish sauce, and doused with lime juice at the end.

This is my new favourite hot sauce; yuzu-tabasco. For those unfamiliar, yuzu is a type of Japanese citrus that's sort of a lemon/grapefruit/mandarin cross flavour, very unique. Mixed with green chilli, it's heaven in sauce form.

SobaAddict70, that looks lovely..is Tuscan kale the same as cavolo nero? A much less refined breakfast for me than Soba's plate of beauty; bacon, tomato and HP sauce on a toasted roll. And lots of strong coffee. And a Bloody Mary.

I'll bite. What's a Raja, and what's a longanisa ? Even my eG post spell checker doesn't know them. I am a huge fan of longanisa. here is someone's blog post about them. I actually like the brand shown but in the spicy version. A favorite sandwich with crusty bread and marinated cucumber and onion. Interesting..that blog post suggests cooking them in a frying pan lined with foil to avoid the burnt on sludge on the pan..I cook sweet Thai sausages that kill my pans in a similar way, I can't believe I never thought of pan frying directly on foil! Genius.

It is..I just woke up from a dream that seemed to concern XLB entirely, opened up eG and first thing I saw was this pic again.. now I have a tremendous craving for them, and for that I blame/thank you, dcarch!

So many great things here..SobaAddict70, beautiful food. Dakki! Your meals are amazing, I always look out for them! And heidih, the way you use vegetables really jives with me..just the sort of dishes I'd make. I forgot to take a picture of the meat pre-cooking to show you how beautifully marbled it was, but dinner here was wagyu, asparagus and enoki mushroom rolls, glazed with mirin, sake, soy and honey. Side of green beans in a miso, walnut and ginger dressing.

I read this on a Japanese household tips site and it's surprisingly effective: putting a shelled, hardboiled egg into one of those empty mesh bags onions and oranges come in, gathering the mesh around it and squeezing - gives you perfectly finely diced egg, very quickly. I was a bit sceptical that it wouldn't just all turn to mush, but it works.

It's a variant on the fabled lemonade and cream scone recipe that calls for 1 cup lemonade, 1 cup cream, 3 cups self-raising flour. I had yoghurt and not cream, and sparkling mineral water, not lemonade..so just used those for savoury scones and they turned out great! I now don't make scones any other way. I just add a couple Tbsp of sugar for sweet. I just cut the yoghurt and mineral water (you could use soda water too) into the flour with a knife, turn it out onto a floured surface, pat down to 2cm thick or so, cut into scones, brush with a little milk (or more yoghurt!) and bake for 15 mins on 220C, or until the bottom sounds hollow when tapped (my mother's tip). There's enough fat in the yoghurt to account for the butter, and I think the carbonation of the mineral water reacts with the baking powder in the flour to give rise. This appeals to me because I always have mineral water, I like the tang of Greek yoghurt, and I can avoid that rubbing-butter-into-flour business and thereby reserve my precious thumb strength for something more useful, like texting.

This is a fascinating thread. I've never said religious grace either, as I'm not religious and my family has never been - but I do also like the short moment of contemplation and consciousness..well, almost MARVELLING when you sit down at a meal and think how lucky you are and how thankful you should be. Cheesy though it may be, my boyfriend and I have in fact developed almost a tradition, of sitting down to food, looking at it for a moment, smiling at each other, and gently fist-bumping (what Fox News might call a "terrorist fist-jab"!) before starting to eat. This was borne out of a long-ago conversation talking about a) we're about to enjoy something delicious, and that's not something to be taken lightly, given that b) how fortunate we are to have lives where food is available, varied and abundant, when so many don't and so many of our forebears didn't, and that we should never take that value for granted. And yes, we also do it in restaurants. That's our prayer.

I don't know how I did that, but it's such a huge compliment, I'll take it! Those XLB look great. Were they bursting fat with soup and very gingery by any chance (I love them very gingery!), or am I just projecting my delirious hunger?