haresfur

I forgot, the sweet soy bean paste was because it was on sale, not for the eggplant. But I still got the chili paste wrong.

Not too exciting. Sauce from 10 kg roma tomatoes. They were probably a touch under-ripe. I really should get a food mill or chinois. Made a real mess getting rid of the skin and left the seeds in. Last time I just blitzed skins and everything in the blender, which was a lot easier. The texture of this was better, though.

Here are my latest purchases from the Asian grocery store. I'm aiming to make Szechuan eggplant and these seemed to be approximately what the recipe called for. Luckily these included English translations, but it is not always clear what to look for. The recipe called for Chinkiang black vinegar and Sichuan chili broad bean paste(Doubanjiang) so I guess I didn't get close to the Doubanjiang but I'll muddle through. There were several types of vinegar so I just went with the darkest, most expensive one. Guess I should have actually written the ingredients down before I went to the store ☺️. Following advice from @liuzhou I avoided Lee Kum Kee.

Grocery stores here don't refrigerate eggs and we just keep them on the counter at home. Fridge space is too precious. I have heard that there is some difference if they are washed or not but the eggs here seem like they might be cleaned since even the free-range ones in the grocery store don't have any muck on them.

That's irrational😎

I liken it more to other industries like oil refineries spewing out (apparently the scientific term for releasing 😉) air pollution, in which case filters are totally appropriate.

A strange thing about Australia is that they don't drink American style lemonade and if you order a lemonade you will get something like Sprite. Unfortunately I have been unsuccessful at growing a lemon tree and in this work from home covid world, I can't just pick them up when someone leaves produce in the tea room.

On the bright side they do credit EG so maybe it will bring in new members. Love you all but some fresh faces would be nice.

It is sad that the menu is nearly identical at every shop I've been to, with some variation on the type of fish available. The pumpkin cakes were an innovation at the Borough Fish shop (Chinese) and have since been taken up by Sea Shells (Turkish). But potato cakes (potato scallops in NSW) are ubiquitous. If you don't want fish, Souvlaki and burgers are also on the menu as are Chiko Rolls, which are basically the dodgiest egg rolls you can imagine. Bendigo is one of the places that claims to have originated Chiko Rolls. I have to say that it is brilliant that they sponsor our roller-derby team. The souvlaki is only edible at the Turkish shop. And I don't know how drunk you need to be to eat the dim-sims.

Not Catholic but these dinners don't seem to be a thing here (although historically Bendigo was a catholic town - we have a quite nice cathedral). Everyone seems to just go down to their local fish and chip shop - The Borough of Eaglehawk, formerly its own town, has three of them. I usually go to the Chinese one and sometimes the Turkish one. The third just changed hands so maybe I should give it a try again.

Hire Dabbawallas!

Things have been pretty quiet on this thread so it's time for another tale from mineral exploration. There's a certain established routine of things in bush camps and your food flights are pretty much central to existence. In a small short-term camp you needed to consider how much stuff you were going to have to move back out as well as move in. One year, two of us were sent from our well-established camp to a reconnaissance operation in the mountains. We were sent ahead to set up camp at the first location, where we would meet two others including the "party chief" from down south. Then we would move to the second location. We knew what to do. Place a food order to go in with you and file a second one to be flown out the next week. When that comes in, send the next one back in the plane and repeat until you get to go home. No problem. However, the party chief decided not to check that we had our act together and, when he flew in a couple of days behind, proceeded to bring in more food and file a second food order for the next week. So double food to waste. To make matters worse, there was a trophy hunter camp on the same lake as our second camp (We didn't know that until we flew over. Otherwise maybe we could have advocated to pay them to put us up in nicer accommodations and cook for us.) The hunting guide and client came by to say hi (always check in on others when you are in the middle of nowhere) and kindly gave us 1/4 of a Dall sheep. Made some pretty good chili and some overly salty jerky, dried over the wood stove. Made friends in the bar back in town handing around sheep jerky like some kind of grizzled fur trappers.

That's for roasting. I like SV to med-rare for many things but my problem is when you have gobs of non-rendered fat left behind in some cuts. I can see this is where SV lamb leg could be ideal because there isn't much marbling. Then it's just figuring out the time for tender but not mushy.

I usually roast leg of lamb to medium rare but I see Keller prefers medium in Ad Hoc at Home because he says it is more tender. It just seemed to me that there isn't much fat in a leg but there is a lot in the shoulder.

Thanks. I would have thought that shoulder needs higher temperature/longer time than leg.

I have some boneless lamb shoulder roast left over from a tagine of the other half. Trying to decide how to cook it since there is a fair bit of fat etc. so I want to cook long enough to get it tender. Am thinking of sous vide then sear but am unsure of a good time/temp. My other thought is to unroll it and do on the gas grill to be sure the fat renders at the expense of overcooking.

Castlemaine is getting pretty twee, which is not a bad thing. We had the Dalmatians and it was raining(!) so sitting under the covered verandah out front of Saffs Cafe worked well. The coffee was excellent, the burger bun very good, the burgers themselves ok, but the "ruben" was pretty ordinary - made with something like grocery store corned-silverside.

Turn your kid's bento box into a nightmare (good album tho)

New Yorker 1928

I prefer the punchline, "The bartender says, 'There seems to have been a clerical error.'"

Haven't been a member for over 5 years because the one in Melbourne is 2 1/2 hours away and not as good as N American Costco. But I'm almost out of their trash bags so maybe I'll see if they do the annual guest membership thing.

My dad always filleted them like any other fish and we just spat the Y bones out. So a story that could go in the Mining Meals thread, but it was an archaeology crew - my first time working in the bush when I was in high school. The cook was also in high school but did a decent job, especially considering it was a low budget operation and food flights only came in every 2 weeks. The one thing he could cook really well was fish. One evening I was hanging out in my tent and heard a faint, "Help! Help!" from out on the lake. We all went out and one of the crew was out in our leaky aluminum canoe. His fishing rod was completely bent over and he was being towed slowly along. He'd managed to get a 7 kg northern pike alongside the canoe but there was no way he could land it without capsizing. Someone went out in another boat and hauled it in. The cook cleaned it and made steaks which he soaked in flour & water for a couple of hours and fried it up with salt and pepper over the wood stove. Surprisingly good eating for a fish that size. BTW do other Canadians call them Jackfish?

Oh yeah. In winter you walk into the wind by facing backwards so you don't freeze your face.

The Pony Corral looks vaguely familiar but I don't really remember it. What came immediately to mind for me from my childhood was the Paddlewheel Restaurant in the Hudson Bay Company Store and it's lemon meringue pie. Credit and more photos here.