haresfur

I haven't been drinking a lot but my go-to bourbons are Russel's Reserve, Buffalo Trace, Wild Turkey/WT-101. I have a couple of others that I'm not as fond of so I should really drink them up. Bourbon is expensive here.

Frankly, I have found their food pretty shocking. The company would probably do better serving food so good that people looked forward to their time in the camp.

I will never again lose both of the steamer inserts for pots. Certainly true if I never find them.

Armed with a printout of @Liuzhou's message (thanks!), I went to Johnny's for Doubanjiang and he recommended this for eggplant so I could adjust the spice upward, rather than the spicy Doubanjiang he had in stock. I have no idea if that was good advice but judging from the wicked Sichuan peppers, I posted above, I think some caution might be a good idea.

Lobster! (or scallops)

I like to use red lentils as a thickener in stews or tagines. Add them to the pot and cook the heck out of them (they cook quickly).

I'm saying that eggs here certainly seem washed and they aren't refrigerated in stores or usually in people's homes. So maybe the washed vs unwashed thing is a myth and Americans are overly cautious.

Seems logical because most commercial salad dressing tastes full of sugar to me anyway

Happy April Fool's Day!

For some strange reason the birds here seem to leave them alone. The parrots will strip all the pears from the pear tree but maybe blueberries are too small to bother.

Won't they kick you out of New Jersey if you can't grow blueberries? I actually got a few handfuls from my bush this year. Feeding it some chelated iron made a big difference. After the berries were done I fed it some fertiliser for acid-loving plants and got enough new growth I'm planning on repotting it.

Interesting. Kaolinite has been used for this in the past. I would think montmorillonite would swell too much.

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.