Blether

jfresch, you specify a carving knife. What will you be carving ? How often ? For how many people ?

Gorgeous.

Sorry. Yes, take the fillet off both sides (you can leave the skin on, then eat it or leave it on the plate according to taste).

Nice (though from this angle only the middle one looks like a Rainbow). This one ?

You're close to inventing the Fijian staple kokoda (pr. kokonda).

Hey again, Kim. Nothing suspicious about cumin, paprika & cardamom. Are you using fresh ginger, too ? How do you get on with that usually ? And how are they having you use the garam masala (early, cooked (how ?), or late, before serving) ? Did you buy ready-made ? Fenugreek's not normal in it, but when you buy ready-made you never know what's being used. Dejah, I want to see those Scotch Pies !

You can pretty much use the roe along with the tail meat - eat both raw; grill and eat; use in pasta sauce, stir fry etc.. It can be hell of a fiddly to separate from the legs, and lately I've used it along with the discarded carcasses - as I've said often enough, to infuse into oil or butter (rather than in a fumet). As I've said before, good for prawn mayo. I suspect you could do the kind of things that are done with cod roe or mullet roe, should you ever have enough of it. Over here there's a chap who's squeezed the tomalley out of the heads and mixed it with the roe - bitter flavour adjusted with small amounts of mirin, soy & salt - as a dressing for the meat.

I can't speak from experience about pickling it, but raw okra is fine, if somewhat slimy. It's quite popular in Japan. ETA: serving suggestions

Caw canny there, RRO. If it's seafood and the Japanese don't eat it raw, there tends to be a good reason. Shime-saba because mackerel pests migrate from gut to flesh upon death; katsuo tataki because katsuo pests go the other way (I hope I've got these the right way round).

Or put another way, if it's raw milk, you need to scald it. If it's pasteurised, you need to scald it. But if it's UHT-treated, long-shelf-life milk you can just get straight on with culturing it. (Shouldn't we take this whole ghee discussion over to the other thread ?)

It looks good. What's LCBO ? As for bitter, is there fenugreek (methi) seed in the ingredients ?

Thanks for the link to that thread, which I hadn't read before. I too appreciate v. gautam's insights, though I think it's over-doing it to call ghee from sweet butter flavourless. I'll have to try the genuine cultured-butter kind. In the meantime, in the same way as I can still enjoy good country ham when I don't have the parma, bayonne or serrano variety, I'll be carrying on with the easy-peasy ghee, whose flavour & richness I really enjoy, and I'll remain thankful that I'm avoiding the cheaper brands of commercdial ghee that have cottonseed oil and the like in them. The main difference around here between ghee and clarified butter seems to be the frequency with which I overcook the ghee and end up with, umm, noisette ghee.

From Aidells & Kelly's Meat book, to paraphrase, "always pre-salt meat" - and they're right, IMO. Or this again: "... try simplifying a recipe which calls for rather a lot of ingredients down to the barest essentials. You may well find that the dish is more pleasing in its primitive form, and then you will know that your recipe was too fanciful. If, on the other hand, the dish seems to lack savour, to be a little bleak or insipid, start building it up again. By the end of this process, you will have discovered what is essential to that dish, what are the extras which enhance it, and at what point it is spoilt by over-elaboration. This system is also useful in teaching one how to judge a recipe for oneself, instead of following it blindly from a cookery book". .. and the related "Let's just have an omelette and a glass of wine" and the originator's explanation of the phrase.

You can see the butchering process here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl826IL2k4g ... but you will be familiar enough with the meat itself to recognise the paler, more opaque fatty belly meat (the sea's answer to crack cocaine). I'd be tempted to tandoori some of it (the fish in general, not the belly meat). Marinade: 1/3 cup vinega, or better, lemon juice 1 tbsp chopped fresh ginger 4 garlic cloves Salt to taste 1 tbsp ground coriander seeds 1 tbsp ground cumin seeds minced fresh chilli pepper to taste 1/2 cup oil For 30 minutes - 4 hours. Roast on a rack as quickly as you can (10 - 15 minutes ?) in a very hot oven, turning once - use the meat cut into equal-size chunks of 1-2 inches on each side, or in a piece of fairly uniform thickness. I'm hoping Dakki will say something about his seafood ceviche.

It makes a nice carpaccio too, of course - and there's always simple sashimi It's hard to see - is it from the shoulder area ? Or shoulder and the adjacent part of the belly ?

And doesn't Creelers (? - Edinburgh again) the restaurant have a separate line in direct produce sales ?

Keep going. What's the name of the seafood place just to the south of The Meadows in Edinburgh - on the east side of Marchmont Road ? That has a great reputation, doesn't it ? Two years ago I dropped in when I stayed at a B&B just down the road.

kayb, I'll take a punt myself and guess.. the wonderful Helen. It does look like a Narita-direction train.

When my girlfriend was teaching snowboard over the winter seasons in the Nagano mountains, I'd fold down the seats, lay out some futons and tool up there in the minivan. We spent lots of happy snowsport weekends coming back to 'base' for lunch & dinner prepped over a single-burner, portable butane stove or 'konro' as they're called here. Cook the rice in one pot, warm up the curry / stew / whatever in the other with the rice sat over it to keep warm. You get those gas canisters in convenience stores all over the country, here.

Can you please explain a bit more what olive oil you like ? For me, sauteeing (sparkling fresh fish, just floured to reduce spattering) in ordinary-grade olive oil is one of the joys of Italian family-style cooking. What makes Canola an industril "motor oil" where such oilve oil isn't ? Or did I mis-read you ? For maintaining my cutting board, I like edible mineral oil, which *is* getting close to motor oil... and patrickamory, do you have more detail on ? (I meah other than the fact that many commercial ghee brands contain ingredients that don't come from butter - or cows - in the first place and so to me are less authentically ghee than what's traditional ?)

If I read it right, Fishbase has Thunnus Alalunga (Albacore) at max length 140cm, common length 100cm, and Katsuwonus Pelamis (Katsuo) at 110cm/80cm. I think of the others I listed, Yellowfin is the in-between size, with the Big-eye and Bluefins in the Juggernaut class. Size linked to mercury concentration sounds about right.

Broadly, Albacore / Bonito is the same as Japan's Katsuo; also called skipjack tuna. Hie thee to Fishbase's search page. As with a lot of fish, the common / market names overlap and cover a bewildering variety of species. Here is the page for Thunnus Alalunga and here are its common names round the world (clicking the common names link towards the bottom of the species page). True Katsuo is the Katsuwonus Pelamis that also appears in the common mames list above. It looks different but is similar eating - its own common names page is here and you can see it appears widely in the English-speaking world as Bonito. If the link works out, here's a search for fish with a common name including tuna. 13 pages. Yikes. Katie Meadow, both "a small type of tuna" and "a small fish like tuna" seem right to me. In the markets you don't typically see katsuo much bigger than 40cm or 50cm, a foot and a half or so. Bigeye, yellowfin and of course (true maguro) bluefin tuna are the big ones, or some of them at least.

Sounds good, and bachelor cuisine is its own art, eh ? I've usually either tossed the spinach raw with the bacon & drippings, or cooked it (the spinach) without bacon, but you're tempting me.

'Course it also depends what's in the salad. And in certain climates, an emulsion with bacon fat isn't a practical proposition in the first place... When it's a simple green salad (a single variety of lettuce) with a classic vinaigrette, my taste falls in at the "very little vinegar" end of the spectrum, relative to either 1:3 or 1:5. I think people who quote ratios are aiming at scientifically pure emulsions, but in the kitchen I want to eat my food, not paint it.

There's always the option of finding a local supplier with beans that work for you and a proper grinder on-site - buy the beans, grind 'em up and take 'em home. I love the coffee I get, and I'm sceptical that the investment in equipment & time to specialise to the extent some suggest, would improve my coffee-drinking experience enough to be worth it. shyskyh's talking about better-cost/performance-than-the-likes-of-Starbucks, FFS, and that at least I can do trial-and-error, shopping blindfold for ready-ground stuff, never mind even buying a blade grinder.