haresfur

Here are some photos of the blessing of the take-away, just up the street from my primary coffee place.

The Koreans have established a beach head. In contrast to my previous post, where the focus was on selling meat, especially pork and duck, without a lot of effort on the rest of the food, we now can get cook-it-yourself on the table grill Korean BBQ at the somewhat dodgy looking Cambrian Hotel, aptly named for a gold rush town. It was a bit expensive but plenty of food including a variety of marinated and non-marinated beef, pork, and lamb. I forgot to take pictures of the dipping sauces and sides but the homemade kimchi was very good. Nice selection of microbrews, too.

Hmm, here the lions eat heads of lettuce then spit it out into the onlookers

One of my coffee places along with many other businesses makes a donation to our lion teams to come around and bless the store for the New Year. Haven't seen them this year but a nice tradition. There are celebrations in the Dai Gum precinct and out at the Great Stupa but it looks like the Stupa is featuring Indian food. I'll see if I can talk the cat into catching another rabbit.

Obligatory rant from Victoria, "They are called potato cakes!!!"😉

I'm not a big potato fan but have grown to want to eat them now and then since I was a kid and hated anything but chips/fries. I generally go for crispy. But today I made a decent German potato salad that I think will be better when I get proportions right - the main recipe I more or less followed had way too little vinegar but I ended up with a bit much. I also used beef bacon which was nice. Ate it warm and it will be interesting to see how it is cold.

I'd say pavlova if your oven can manage. Otherwise lots and lots of cocktails like whiskey sour and Ramos gin fizz

Summer has hit with a vengeance in southeastern Australia, after our insanely wet winter and spring. At least I don't feel as guilty pouring the water on when the reservoirs are full. The predictions are still for higher than average rainfall this summer but I'm not so sure. Here is a view of part of the garden bed along our west fence. This area is mostly watered by a spray hose that is upside down under some mulch. I hope that keeps the tomatoes from turning brown with whatever gets them just when they are looking good. One of the little raised beds is a wicking bed and the other is not. The butternut pumpkin is doing much better in the non-wicking one, maybe because there is more soil for the roots. I got my zucchini and another pumpkin covered with shade cloth in the back bed and harvested my first small zuke so not all the effort is going to waste. My pole beans are looking ok - at least the ones that survived the earwigs when they were small. I'm not a great gardener and I find the clay soil and weather here really difficult to manage.

Friend in Gillette posted this article about the pizza place they took me when I was passing through. Not all traditional pizza but seriously among the best I've had. I mean Gillette? Really? Always inspiring to see good food off the beaten track. Worth a visit if you are anywhere within a few hours.

I got a nice petty for Christmas but haven't photographed it yet. So here is the Kiwi I bought myself for around $8.00 in with the every day knives (4th from left).

The Fee's/Regan's combo was very popular for a while

Ah, but which orange bitters? Edit: Oh I see in the previous post. Maybe try Regans or a dash of Regans and a dash of Fees.

Having gone through about a year where my oven would throw an error code requiring a service call every time there was a power blip, I can relate to this.

I really dislike the sound of hard food like nuts getting chopped in a food processor or blender. Especially if someone else is doing it because I can't brace myself for the jarring sound. On the other hand the sound of a KitchenAid paddle mixer going wop, wop, wop is pretty awesome. Anyone else have things that bother them or are special?

I've used the ISI for fish batter with a little success. It's hard to get just the right consistency but it is fluffy

Lots of uses for turbo-infusing drinks. Here is a raspberry-rosemary smash I posted a long time ago

I also have a Schinus Molle peppercorn tree which is an invasive here but so well established that there is nothing to be done about them. Throws great shade but I'm always struggling to keep it from dropping branches on the shed and hacked back to some semblance of order. I haven't bothered harvesting any berries, in part from reading that they can have gastric effects. Do you just dry the berries and put in the grinder?

Elsewhere on the internet there was a discussion about white pepper where the claim was that white pepper oxidizes after grinding and develops that distinctive flavour I associate with Chinese cooking. I believe that the person said white pepper was usually sold ground in the Chinese grocery stores (forget if that was in China or elsewhere). I did buy a white pepper grinder, if only for western cooking where it is about colour more than a different flavour from black. But I haven't bothered to buy ground white pepper to compare. What do you do with Sichuan pepper? Grind or use whole?

It is electric as was the one it replaced. We have a gas cooktop, although there is a strong push by the environmentalists and government to move away from gas. I wouldn't have much problem with that if we got rid of all the coal-fired electric. By the way the oven racks and ceramic-coated trays from the old oven are about 3 mm wider so aren't really usable. One really weird thing I find with European ovens is that they have plated metal vertical bits to hold the racks rather than the molded indents on N American ovens. They don't seem to be as sturdy. The oven comes with one set of rollers like a file cabinet so at least one tray slides in and out easily.

The Asko oven that we put in 4 years ago started throwing an error code related to the pyrolytic cleaning function whenever our power went out (which happens reasonably often). The service guy was out several times saying magic incantations, mucking about with the locking mechanism and cycling the breaker, etc. The final time he got it working he basically said that we should ask for a replacement if it happens again. He left it with the self-cleaning running and when that finished it wouldn't unlock the door. A month or so of drama with the company and they decided to refund us for the oven. We had pretty much lost confidence in the service since this guy said he wanted to drop them. I'm so glad we bought through the local appliance store rather than a box store because they were good about getting involved and calling their sales rep. So may I introduce our new Miele that amazingly arrived and was installed before Christmas.

Yeah, a fair bit of sugar and a fair bit of fat on the meat. I think my mistake was closing the lid and not cleaning the old grease out of the drip pan. Didn't take long for it to go from a few flair-ups to billowing flames.

I will never again torch the barbie grilling Korean ribs. I think they're done...

I would read that as "noodles used to make ramen" (although of course there is nothing stopping you from using them to make something else). So, no, these are not ramen - they are a particular type of noodle. Here, at least, if I wanted someone to pick up a pack of these, I would never say, "Go to the store and get some ramen."

Given the amount of avocados grown in Australia, it is strange that avocado oil is expensive and only sold in small bottles as a health food so I haven't tried it for high-smoke-point cooking. Interesting about the flavour though. I get the grape seed oil from my crappy local grocery who seems to deal with smaller producers. Lord knows we grow enough grapes. Maybe someone could start marketing the oil by variety and vintage.

Grape seed oil or rice bran oil do well for me. If things aren't going to get blazing hot I use virgin olive oil.