haresfur

I'm not much of a Fever Tree fan. Or at least I haven't found a gin that goes well with it. My preference here is usually Cascade, although I have some Luxardo gin that surprisingly goes well with Schweppes, which is usually too sweet in a G&T. Overall, I lean to cutting the vermouth down to 0, and having a Campari and soda.

I've tried an Americano using tonic water and found it too sweet for my taste. Then again, I find Campari somewhat too sweet.

The plastic bags of roast chook served up by grocery stores are known as "batchelor's handbags" here. Emma Buswell was the winner of the City of Joondalup 2022 Invitation Art Prize for her work, ‘The sometimes luxury handbag and other suburban fables.’

I would never have thought of using a spring form for upside down cake. Always used a cast iron fry pan. We have a family debate about using crushed pineapple (me) or rings (her). Both work. Cherries are only if you are making it with kids. Is there anything unusual about the cake recipe? It looks quite dark inside.

That all looks great. Did the cilantro taste come through after grilling? I've taken to smashed cucumber salad. It really seems to integrate the dressing into the cuke and the cuke into the dressing.

No photos, but I think I did a pretty good stir-fry prawns and veg. I'd say I'm getting it down, but I like the fact that it is never quite the same. Fried the prawns in my Korean chili oil, which gave a light snap, which suits my aging upper digestive system. Pulled them out and added red capsicum and zucchini chunks, along with some rice bran oil to char. Then onion, garlic, ginger, and a few mushrooms that needed to be used up. Oyster sauce (not a great variety but needs to be used up, and vegan fysch sauce, which frankly I like better than fish sauce, so shoot me. I was going to post about it in the fish sauce topic but didn't want people coming at me with pitchforks for being off topic. Finally prawns went back in with some sesame oil. I think the key is to try to get the zuke charred on the outside but creamy soft inside.

Well, according to google 1 US tsp = 4.9 ml 1 Imperial tsp = 5.9 ml According to the ones in my drawer with tsp and ml marked, I think both from the US and Australia, but at this point I'm not always sure 1 tsp = 5 ml According to what I pull up on google, 1 tsp fine salt or table salt is 5.7 g and 1 tsp unspecified salt is 6 g. My guess would be that these are 5 ml tsp, but that is just an assumption Epicurious has a weight conversion chart that shows it is all over the place but unfortunately goes from g to volume, and I am more interested in the other direction since I will use weight if it is given and my brain doesn't want to do the work to calculate volume to weight.

Yes, I'd call that a schnitzel, or in the vernacular of my country, "a schnitty"

Wanted comfort food and made meatloaf with sauerbraten gravy* and spaetzle. * gravy is used loosely because I didn't have pan dripping from cooking the roast so used beef stock and because I way over thickened it. The meatloaf recipe said to grate the onions for a moister result. I used a mini food processor attachment for my stick blender and they were right. Probably overblended. Oh and panko instead of bread crumbs, which is good because I never have bread crumbs around The spaetzle were more successful than my previous attempts but I ended up with paste stuck to many utensils and countertops. Turns out the reason I thought this sauerbraten and meatloaf would be a good combination. My partner pointed out that a restaurant we used to go to decades ago served it.

So his rant is really more of a troll. If it was a chemistry lab, with someone who actually understands analytical chemistry, you would put in decimal places to show the required precision. The last decimal place would be uncertain. So 1.0 kg could be 1.1 kg or 9.9 kg and 1 kg is a wild-ass guess. In this case, it is still easier to use weight, which negates his argument.

That is crazy to take out the original measures. I'd go further and say the recipe writers should test the recipe using the volume measurements that they calculate rather than trusting some table of conversions. In particular, going to the US, I would want to be sure that the conversion is correct since a cup is not always a cup.

Why does he think that using weight rather than volume somehow means you have to be as precise as your scale can be? Go buy a 1 kg bag of onion and that is how close you have to be. Ok, I know you don't get 1 kg bags so go buy 2.2 pounds or as close as you can get in the store. Maybe throw in another if it is spring and the onions are old so you will have to censor out a fair bit of the outer layer. Still easier than packing diced onions into a measuring cup. Sure, it would be more precise to say the weight of diced onion rather than the weight of onion before dicing, but like he says, it doesn't really matter that much.

IMO if your sausage rolls end up just ok, you are doing well

Early in the Australia & New Zealand forum fish and chips topic, barramundi was compared to eating a dishcloth. I have heard that wild barra is much better than farmed.

Baked Chicken katsu curry and smashed cucumber salad. I made chili oil for the salad using Korean-style flakes (from China) so it was not very spicy but the flavour is decent. Salad was on a bed of lettuce that needed to be used up. The curry was from a previous meal and rescued from the freezer. Manageable but better not frozen and thawed. Served on brown rice. Sorry about the messy counter top.

I do quinoa in my Sanyo rice cooker using the basic white rice setting. It turns out perfect

Convection ovens are ubiquitous here so almost all pre-pack food comes with conventional and fan-forced temperatures listed. Also our ovens have a heating element at the fan, are you saying yours do not? So there is a difference between fan-forced which uses that element and the fan and a different setting for just the lower element and a third for lower element plus fan but not the convection element. Gets very confusing what works best for various things. Also my Bosch oven manual encourages not preheating for many things as energy saving, just start timing when it reaches temperature. I find that works pretty well, except for baking. For my brownie baking project, I found that I had to reduce the temperature about 15 degrees C but that could be due to other differences.

I grew up eating it year round. I mean not eating a lot of it but we had it in the house and my memory is shaving off thin slices of cold butter to eat with it. I wasn't brought up Jewish, we just ate a lot of Jewish food. I mean why else would they sell matzo that isn't kosher for Passover? It's really just big square Carr's Table Water Biscuits.

Pasta con Costco, originally created to use up those huge jars of stuff you buy there. I'm not a member anymore so unfortunately no 4 bean salad, but the name lives on. Semi-dried tomatoes, semi-dried olives in oil, roasted red pepper and artichoke hearts. Served with unexpected food gift tomatoes, bocconcini, and basil.

Boxing day is the start of hot cross bun season

As if pizza flavoured Shapes biscuits aren't a bad enough idea

Decided to make another attempt at learning to sharpen with stones. I have a Spyderco Sharpmaker which is ok for some things. I realised I needed to start over when the 1000 grit stone I had been using to learn was incredibly dished but the knives weren't exactly sharp. I had shelved that for a while. Anyone running a sharpening service where I live seems to be in the tool destroying business. Except maybe for the people sharpening sheep-shears, but that's a whole other ball game. So I bought a 500 grit Shapton glass and a 1000 grit Shapton Rockstar and realised, in for a penny, in for a pound, I needed an Atoma diamond flattening plate. Then spent a few days watching videos, which of course don't agree with each other so you have to figure out who seems to make the most sense. Haven't tackled the good knives yet but some of the cheap ones turned out much better than they were, although not what I would consider really good. One of the things I learned is that starting with a relatively coarse stone is a good idea. Much easier to figure out if you are screwing up the angle or haven't apexed yet. Feeling a burr is much more obvious to me. Once that is right, it doesn't take too much with the 1000 to get an ok edge. I feel like I'm a long way from wanting to attempt my carbon steel petty, though. I can see how people get into sharpening as a hobby but frankly, I just want to be able to do a decent job slicing a tomato.

Absolutely. On the show, the guest chef put it into the mushroom risotto he made.

A family favourite, "turkey slop". Normally, I wouldn't post such an ordinary meal but I decided to give the technique of microwaving mushrooms before frying a shot. A relatively challenging test since I started by browning the turkey mince then adding the microwaved mushrooms when the mince was partly cooked. Had to cook off some moisture but the shrooms browned up surprisingly well. Would work really well doing the mushrooms alone. Some onions, garlic, a load of paprika, and chopped parsley then sour cream at the end. Served over pasta. The main problem was that the Aldi turkey mince is shockingly bad.

If I recall, Teeling's Irish whiskey has done whiskey aged in stout casks and their whiskey barrels are sent to a brewery to age stout. Kind of a closed-loop goodness.