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rarerollingobject

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Everything posted by rarerollingobject

  1. I like eggs, especially when fried in oil. I like paprika. I think I'd like paprika eggs! Do you just make paprika oil and then fry the egg in it? Pretty much. Just fry paprika in oil or butter, slide the egg in and sprinkle with a little more paprika. It's sort of a riff on this idea.
  2. Oh! I would have posted this yesterday, but I got distracted by all my broccoli! I'm also intrigued by this super simple Heston Blumenthal recipe/method for, yeah, broccoli: linkety link.
  3. Yes, thanks Nick - have loved your blog and seeing how you cook, shop and eat. Wonderful!
  4. Two recipes that rock for me this year both involve broccoli, funnily enough. (Actually, it's not a coincidence: I made the mistake of once telling a farmer friend her broccoli was unusually tasty, and now she gifts me boxes and boxes of it with each visit..) The first recipe can hardly be called a recipe at all, but futzing around the web looking for broccoli inspriration, I struck upon Gordon Ramsay's Broccoli Soup, The recipe? Boil broccoli florets in salted water for 4 mins. Remove florets to blender with a ladle or two of the cooking water. Blend. Season. Voila! Surely a joke, I thought! Satirical commentary on the gullibility and blind slavishness of the food porn-addicted! Broccoli, water and S&P? What, no sweating onions and garlic in butter? No mirepoix? No herbs? No deeply flavoured and of course homemade chicken or vegetable stock?? Deeply skeptical, I tried it as directed, and WOW. Really, really good - clean, fresh and deeply vegetal, in a good way. Course I couldn't help gussying up the serving dishes with gorgonzola and bacon but it didn't really need it. Shocked that it rocked. Gordon, I shall never doubt you again. The other one that rocked for me is the soup recipe's diametrical opposite..broccoli cooked so long and slowly it turns positively caramelly and sweet, if a little unsightly in appearance. The recipe I followed is here.
  5. Yes, I should have added that my supermarket had about five brands - I just chose the most expensive of them (at something like AUD$3), usually a pretty good indicator of quality with bottled Chinese ingredients. Though none of them actually said 'Sichuan pepper' in English, just 'pepper oil' or 'fagara oil'.
  6. percyn - crispy duck skin?! For breakfast? Awesome. My breakfast was smoked trout "kedgeree". Quotation marks because I subbed grated cauliflower for the traditional rice, which I'd run out of. Kedgeree, if you're not familiar with it, is an old-fashioned English breakfast dish harking straight back to the time of colonial India; very Anglified-Indian. Main components being smoked fish, curry powder, boiled eggs and rice. It's one of the dishes my mother makes best so it's got all sorts of nostalgic associations. Here, I sautéed an onion, garlic and some grated ginger till soft, added mustard seeds, garam masala, green cardamom pods, cinnamon sticks and turmeric, added the cauliflower, folded in some smoked trout chunks, and garnished with boiled eggs, red chilli and way too much dill.
  7. The brand I have has 'Every Aroma' printed on it in English, made by the Chuchuxiang Condiment Factory, Chengdu. Here, I just took photos of the label, and the colour of the oil:
  8. I'm also obsessed at the moment with Sichuan pepper oil. That is, a clear green oil I found in small bottles in a Chinese supermarket that is INTENSE with the cold numbing heat of Sichuan peppercorns/prickly ash. Looking for excuses to put it on everything, from salads to drizzled over fish or tofu, to using a very light splash to bolster one of my favourite 'weird desserts' of vanilla bean ice cream with crushed Sichuan peppercorns on top.
  9. Sorry if I didn't phrase it clearly - the one where you start with caramel IS from Revolutionary Cooking. The Land of Plenty recipe is just chuck it all in the pot and you're good. I didn't think they tasted that much different, to be honest, so if I'm looking at two recipes that taste basically the same, and one involves faffing around with a caramel and one doesn't, I'll take the latter! I also have a slight (irrational) bias against the Revolutionary Cooking recipe because the accompanying photo just isn't all that appetising to me..even though the two recipes turn out similarly, the sauce in the RCC photo looks thin and watery, not the luscious, syrupy, treacly and sticky reduction I'm usually looking for with red braised pork.
  10. You must have got there very early...? I've never seen it that empty..of both people in the market and cars in the carpark!
  11. Posted this pic in the Dinner thread a couple of days ago, but this is the Red Braised Pork dish from Land of Plenty. I prefer to the recipe for the same in her Hunanese book, since you don't make a caramel at the beginning but basically just throw everything in together. I usually double the ginger and green onions though, because I love chewing on the spent bits of both along with the pork.
  12. A Thai salad of sliced rare steak, shredded chilli, pickled ginger, mint, greens, raw shallot, pomegranate and crispy shallots and garlic, dressed in a lime/pomegranate juice/molasses sugar and fish sauce dressing. Well, Thai except for the pomegranate and mesclun greens.
  13. Further adventures with radish..radish and parsley hash browns, with a paprika'd fried egg.
  14. I've been playing around with freekeh, which is grains of wheat roasted while still green. You have to boil or steam it like a grain and it's a little chewy, a little nutty. So far been serving it as a salad with preserved lemon, minced green onions, dried sour cherries and labneh yoghurt cheese.
  15. I usually put them on a chopping board and bash them with the bottom side of my mortar (not the pestle, the actual underside of the mortar bowl), which, with practice, I can generally wield with enough force to crack them but not enough to shatter them to smithereens. Have also used pliers with great effect.
  16. It all looks damn good but this looks DELICIOUS.
  17. As you say, the controller and rice cooker makes much more sense in a small kitchen, especially with other gadgets competing for cupboard space. Take off the controller and you also have a rice cooker! Some people use the controllers to turn it into a slow cooker as well. I use the Sous Vide Magic. Once it's calibrated to your cooker, it holds steady as a rock on the target temperature. My practice is to fill it with water a few degrees above the target temperature. When you add the cold (or frozen) food, the temperature drops to around the target. The PID then just maintains the temperature rather than having to push it up. On Blackp's suggestion I bought an Eheim aquarium air pump 100, which circulates the water to keep the temperature stable throughout the cooker. This is so silent if the rice cooker is closed, you need to put your hand on it to feel the vibration to check that it is working. Frank Hsu, who owns the company that produces the SVM, is based in Toronto but used to live, study, and cook in Sydney. He is sure to look after you. Make sure that the rice cooker you have is not one of those fancy electronically controlled one that does your rice, your washing, etc. The controller in those does funny things when it is turned on and off as happens with a PID controller. Thanks so mucn for that! Just bought one (despite the irritating fact that their shopping page only allows the titles of Mr, Mrs, Dr, Prof or None - this unmarried chick says 'wtf??')
  18. Wow - my kitchen is virtually identical to yours..! Spookily so. You turn out some amazing creations from yours, I need to step up my game! Anyway, how do you find the sous vide rice cooker rig? Works well? I'm just about to pull the trigger on buying a controller, it makes much more sense both space and $ wise than the otherwise very tempting Sous Vide Supreme.
  19. What area are you staying in? The CBD can be a bit of a wasteland for interesting and well-priced food, but do I like Ash St Cellars and Fix St. James for lunch, although they're not terribly cheap. Ichi Ban Boshi in the Galeries Victoria is great for tonkotsu ramen (an ode to pork fat and collagen). Tonkotsu's only available after 2pm though, before that all the standard ramen variations apply. Chinatown is a better bet for cheap but good food, of the Asian persuasion, naturally. I work in Chinatown and think I have eaten just about everywhere, literally. Recommendations: Thai - for fiery, complex Thai, beyond sweet chilli and cashews: Chat Thai on Campbell St Spice I Am on Wentworth Ave Thanon Khao San on Pitt St Thainatown on Goulburn St Japanese/Sushi: Miso (for tonkatsu crumbed pork) in World Square, which runs between George and Pitt Sts Musashi (bento box lunch specials) on Pitt St Makoto (sushi train) on Liverpool St Umi Kaiten Zushi on Thomas St Gumshara Ramen (in the Eating World foodcourt at the Darling Harbour end of the Chinatown mall) Menya (ramen) in the complex on Quay St Northern Chinese/Uighur: Sea Bay Handmade Noodle (closer to the CBD, on Pitt St) Uighur Cuisine that Snadra has recommended above, for cumin and chilli lamb Anything in the complex on Quay St (the same one Menya is in, above) Sichuanese: Red Chilli on Dixon St Golden Sichuan on Goulburn St Cantonese: Harder to find cheap sit down, other than yum cha (recs: Zilver on Pitt St, Palace on Castlereagh St in the CBD, and Marigold on George St) and food courts (try the top level of the Market City mall, it's all reasonably good, but I recommend the BBQ stall, with hanging ducks - or Dixon St Foodcourt, in a basement on the Chinatown mall). Vietnamese: Pho Pasteur on George St Xic Lo on Thomas St Malaysian: Mamak on Goulburn St (beware queues) Cafe Katsuri on George St MC Lucksa (Indonesian/Malaysian variety) in the Market City foodcourt All these are well within walking distance of each other. There's also En Casa for Spanish on Pitt St, and there is also LOTS of Korean on Pitt St towards the CBD, but they mostly rev up at dinner, and plus for some reason Korean in Sydney is rarely cheap, even the non-meat centric dishes.
  20. Salmon, poached in pear cider and then lightly browned. Fairly boring. But more interesting: a side of samphire! Aka 'sea asparagus', or I once saw it sold in San Francisco as 'sea beans', it's a coastal succulent that tastes both, well, succulent and like the ocean. Boiled for a couple of minutes to take down the saltiness somewhat, and topped with a little butter and lemon (post photo).
  21. Oh! And Kewpie mayo. Full of preservatives and MSG and all the more DELICIOUS for it.
  22. Yes, I have a strong meat-tooth from time to time..like at the moment. Bought 8 lamb cutlets last night and grilled 'em, just to have something meaty in the fridge for snacks over the next couple of days, with a bone to gnaw on too. And, um..some sausages, to do the same thing. My own personal meat-henge! Other times I veer totally vegetarian for awhile, so, you know, it pans out.
  23. Maggi Seasoning. I'm not sure why I consider it so much more ghetto than normal soy sauce, but I love the stuff.
  24. Bread puddings, both savoury and sweet, definitely. Zuni Cafe has an amazing chard, gruyere and caramelised onion panade recipe, for when you're not feeling so eggy, demo'd here. Other than that, I've recently discovered that bread crumbs make an amazing soup thickener, a handful or two sprinkled into the cooked soup and softened a little before blitzing. I also love pan frying an egg in seasoned bread crumbs and thyme, another Zuni idea.
  25. I've seen things packaged as Tianjin PV that ended up being, variously, mustard greens, mustard tuber, or cabbage. I consider the cabbage the 'proper' TPV. I've seen them in both vacuum packs (not to be confused with the 'normal' preserved mustard greens) or more commonly, earthenware pots. I always go for the earthenware pot kind, like shown in the top row here.
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