haresfur

The Christmas and other December holiday season is very food and very music oriented. December 21 is designated Gravy Day in Australia, after this Paul Kelly song. Sorry I'm late.

My all-time favourite Dad joke is to ask a person at the grocery with a kid in their shopping trolley, "Which aisle are the kids on?" Never gets old

My Ikea single free standing induction does beep, but pretty quietly and slowly, and I don't find it obnoxious.

My small city has a lot of refugees, with a sizable Karen population and others. Yesterday my partner was walking to the bank in the suburb we had just moved away from and saw that a rather ordinary cafe had been turned into a Burmese / Thai restaurant. We are unfamiliar with Burmese / Myanmar food so had to give a go for lunch, eating off the Burmese menu. The person behind the counter explained the food patiently and enthusiastically. It was excellent and quite different from anything I have had before. For some reason my photo preview doesn't have the quality to read. Maybe once it is posted. We opted for the noodle salad and the tea leaf rice salad. The noodle salad was very nice but a bit oily for my taste. The tea leaf rice salad had some really interesting bitter notes and came with an egg, cabbage, cucumber and toasted peanuts. He also brought out some bowls of soup. We of course dug in before remembering to take a photo. We had some Thai Iced Tea - one green, one black, basically Boba tea but we passed on the pearls. In the past when I tried Boba I was underwhelmed but this was really good. Will be going back to work my way through the rest of the menu.

For chicken I have recently gone of leaving the legs untied and even cutting some of the skin next to the breast so they can flop open more. For both, but especially for turkey, the key imo is to cut the tendons at the end of the drumstick so the meat can contract and the tendons soften

I totally agree with this. Fast heating is nice, but the fine control is really important and often lacking.

The lamb lassie hasn't been at my farmers market in ages so I usually get it from Erindale butchers who do a pretty good job. Frankly though I usually get a pack of shaved meat from the Kabab shop and serve it up with Roti from Aldi, lettuce and garlic sauce

Panettone has never appealed to me. But I'm watching a Jamie Oliver Christmas special where he used panettone to make a bread pudding that sounded pretty good

Funny, I dislike Meyer lemons. My neighbour would give them to me and they would sit on the counter until it was time to put them in the green waste I left a lime tree at the old property. Put it in a huge mound of dirt after taking it out of a wine barrel. Right now it has no leaves so it might not survive. I have killed off many fruit trees in that spot. Maybe it is bad feng sui

Some quick googling shows they sell non-alcoholic vanilla "flavoring" in the US and it appears that some of this may be labelled or at least advertized as extract

It would be good if stores didn't thaw the flash frozen fish. I suppose they do it because most people think "fresh" is better

My supply of American rye is dwindling, not to be replaced, but I understand that some Canadian rye, like Alberta Premium are a reasonable substitute. Some distilleries are producing rye in Australia but I have no idea how they would work in Manhattans.

Don't know your particular situation, but you probably should be aware that vanilla extract contains approximately as much alcohol as rum. I believe they do make non-alcoholic vanilla extract, which I think is glycerine-based. As a side note, some people don't mind a few dashes of alcohol-based bitters in mocktails, but others avoid them all together. Fees Brothers make glycerine bitters.

Fwiw, steelhead is called "Ocean Trout" in Australia (not that we have very many Costco stores; nearest is about 2.5 hours from me). It is usually a bit cheaper than salmon - both of which are almost all farm raised, sometimes from Norway. I like it. The best, though was when I had a neighbour who liked to catch them when they were running, but didn't like to eat fish.

Spinach is starting to bolt so I have been harvesting. Is this what they call baby Spinach?