rarerollingobject

percyn, Maggi Chilli Garlic sauce is my Waterloo! It looks a darker red than the MCGS I get here. Your bottle says it was made in India, do you think it's been modified for local palates at all? If so, I'm going to try and track some down and compare. Breakfast for me was a pan fried mackerel fillet on crisp bread, topped with a very strong freshly-grated horseradish and Greek yoghurt sauce.

percyn, those meals are pure food porn! Love the nduja especially, I bought some myself from Boccolone in SF Ferry Plaza last year. Dejah, great looking lamb..it's the sort of cold weather braise I should be embracing in chilly winter Sydney, but instead, at the fish shop today I fell in love with these: salmon belly strips. Hello, sailor: And not the nicest picture ever, but simply grilled with salt and pepper, lemon on the side and random assorted vegetables (ginger sesame broccoli, Sichuanese pickle cucumber) that I totally forgot to take a photo of in my haste to get to that luscious salmon.

wow. do you have a recipe for this? Posted a recipe (of sorts) here on the Thai Cooking at Home thread.

Thai crispy pork belly with garlic, chilli, and basil. I boiled pork belly for 20 mins or so, patted dry and rubbed white vinegar into the skin. Refrigerated for an hour to dry out and then cubed and deep fried into 'croutons'. In a clean wok, I gently fried ALOT of garlic, some chopped ginger and red chillis, and then melted quite a bit of palm sugar and fish sauce into that to make a thick syrup. Stirred the pork cubes back in to coat, added Thai basil, and served over egg noodles, as I (GASP!) had no rice in the house..! I felt shaken to my very core by that discovery.

Crispy Thai pork belly..slathered in garlic, red chilli and Thai basil.

Incredible meal, Jenni! Particularly like the sound of bittergourd in darkly-toasted coconut gravy..mm. Here, twas curry laksa, with prawns, tofu puffs, chicken and egg noodles. Apart from the spice paste, the best part was a base of very prawn-y concentrated prawn stock I've been stashing in the freezer for weeks, just waiting for the dish that will make the most of it.

dcarch - your food is just so beautiful..architectural AND straight up delicious-looking. That duck! And your lamb rack from a couple of days before..astounding. ChrisTaylor - nice chicken. Very good crust. robirdstx - I can just imagine how silky that carbonara must've been.. Soba - sorry, but hehehe..nice to know I'm not the only one that sort of thing happens to! Dinner for me was fennel sausages and roasted grapes: Roast cauliflower with sharp cheddar: And a simple green salad:

Eton Mess would be nice. Macerated strawberries or raspberries folded into softly whipped cream, and stirred up with broken crumbled meringues (store-bought ones are fine for this purpose). I also like crumbling amaretti cookies on top before saving. Or cranachan, a Scottish dessert of raspberries, cream, honey, whisky and oats.

A couple of breakfasts from the last few days: Egg noodles with shredded duck, lup cheong, green onions, shiitakes and ginger. Drizzled afterwards with my chilli sauce of choice, as seen lurking in the background. And this morning's zucchini, radish and mint fritters, with ginger sweet chilli sauce for dunking.

Well, I WOULD stack the dishwasher incrementally as I go except it's usually still full of clean dishes I've studiously been avoiding UNSTACKING - it is, after all, the least favourite kitchen task of so many of us as per recent thread on same! Actually, who am I kidding - the boyfriend does all the dishes and cleanup and unstacking, and I just eye the dishwasher begrudgingly on my way past. But I imagine he experiences the unstacking ennui noted above, tis only human.

Japanese shops usually carry yuzu salt, basically dehydrated yuzu blended into salt. Maybe a little hard to get where you are. It's generally either in little shake bottles, or sachets sold in combination packages of green tea salt, sour plum salt, and yuzu salt. Jamie Oliver has a 'recipe' for lemon salt here.

Love the photos..random walks through Shinjuku is one of my favourite things to do in Tokyo. Some great memories of thing I've glimpsed, some things to look out for on my next trip there (that is one damn good value for money 'lady's set'!). Thanks for posting, Blether!

One that keeps me up at night: why do some baking recipes instruct you to grease a pan, line and then grease the lining? What's the point of the first greasing, other than to (maybe?) keep the baking paper firmly stuck in place? If that's why, then why does the whole pan need greasing, versus a few strategically-placed splotches?

SO many good meals here..I wouldn't kick any of them out of bed. As they say. Love it all, just looking at this thread makes me remember why I love food, and food people, so much. As for me, it was more stuffing around with pomelo, this time with prawns, vermicelli noodles, mint, cashews, fried crispy shallots and garlic, the requisite lime/fish sauce/chilli and palm sugar dressing, and thinly sliced roast duck that I crisped up again under the grill just before 'garnishing' the salad with it.

Beautiful, innit? I just grated and mixed with cream, Greek yoghurt to thicken (or lighten, depending how you look at it!), and tarragon vinegar to sharpen.

All this talk of beetroot and horseradish over on heidih's foodblog got me hankering to do something with this little beauty, a fresh horseradish root: I couldn't decide whether I wanted to do something with beef or beetroot first, so I did both! Beef carpaccio, with roasted beetroots, rocket, parmesan and horseradish cream.

Heidi, I've just checked back into your blog after a week of being mostly offline, and am blown away by the sheer deliciousness of the things you make! I really love your cooking style; it speaks to me. Esp. because I'm constantly buying food (mostly vegetables) and enjoying THEN thinking of what I can make with them..I hope I haven't mischaracterised your cooking but I really love seeing how the produce around you inspires you to cook!

OH MY. That looks amazing, and I'm not even a pastrami-ite (never like the texture) but that..is a work of art. Dinner for me was actually the first thing I've cooked all week; garam masala grilled chicken and scorched butter broccoli. Need to get my cooking mojo back and this isn't really the dish to do it.

Yes, and soak a bit of paper towel in vanilla essence and leave it on a fridge shelf after you've wiped it out. This really does help.

Also: shelling large quantities of pistachios.

I hate grating ginger, peeling shallots, peeling apples and skinning roasted hazelnuts. I hate trying to remove the silverskin from a rack of ribs, or skin fish, or neatly cut the rind off pork. Hmm, so it seems that apart from the ginger, it's denuding things that I really don't like..

Come on. I daresay Honkman meant, and I agree, that the world's most controversial food figure might well be a North American, but should be at least be someone known to a goodly chunk of the global population, whether that population is interested in food culture or not. And as big/notorious as they are in the US, people like Guy Fieri, Rachael Ray, Sandra Lee and even Alice Waters just aren't that well-known outside it. I'd hazard a guess that even many non-food interested Americans would be 100% confident as to who Alice Waters is. Maybe if the topic title was reordered to "the food world's most controversial figure.." Maybe that's more what weinoo meant? Very few people in Australia anyway, into food or not, would have heard of ANY of those or some of the others mentioned in this thread. I consider myself into food culture in a big way and I've never heard of Nadia G, and only know who Guy Fieri is from watching US food TV when I'm over there for business. Rightly or not, I actually think Jamie Oliver would be up there. Many, many people in the Western world (including much of non-English speaking Europe) at least know who he is, at the minimum think he's a bit of a tosser or not, and have even some preliminary idea of the kind of hackles he's raised in Britain AND the US with his better eating 'crusades'. In terms of the food world's (Western paradigm thereof) most controversial figure..then yep, I'm right back at Alice Waters.

So funny you say this! I leapt upon a fresh horseradish root when I saw it in a shop yesterday and have been pondering ever since what I'm going to do with it. Beef is obvious, but I was actually thinking in bed last night about using it with beetroots, either grated fresh over a beetroot carpaccio type thing, or as some kind of sauce..can't wait to see what you do with yours. I've never microwaved a beetroot, how long do you reckon you blast it, and at what temp?

Lovely kitchen and garden, Heidi! And I didn't miss the tub of gochujang in your fridge either. Looking forward to your blog very much.

Fruit, strangely enough. As in, I love nearly all fruit but I CANNOT stand different fruits mixed together, i.e. in a fruit salad. As endlessly creative as I love to get with vegetable salad combinations, or vegetable AND fruit combinations, I really hate the taste of, say, a sweet orange bleeding into the tart crispness of an apple in a fruit salad bowl, and then suddenly happening upon a wayward grape or something..yech. Monofruitarian all the way - will happily eat an orange or an apple on its own. Mixing lemon with lime is about as promiscuous as I get.