haresfur

The lamb cooked for about 10 hours, the last one uncovered, which seems to have been a mistake. It got more dry than brown. The root vegetables were nice and soft when I got home from lunch - they just tasted uncooked. So I put them on the stove with wine and simmered for quite a while. To make a long story short, they were still pretty bad. The lamb was cooked but not exactly melting away. Maybe another half day would have helped. It tasted pretty good to me. We ate one shank's worth and have leftovers for something. I also served it with mashed sweet potato, ginger and a bit of sour cream. A bit too much sour cream but it turned out pretty well. Opened my last bottle of Davenlore merlot from Prosser Washington. Made me realize how much I miss Washington merlot. Good thing I have a few bottles of their Cabernet, though. Eileen used to work with one of the owners and we really like their wine. Much better than knowing someone who's wine you aren't fond of.

My friends just built a house in Trentham, a small town on the Great Dividing Range - "great" as in "long", not "high" In central Victoria, you'd be hard pressed to figure out there is a continental divide there without looking at a map of the streams. Trentham is a bit over an hour south of Bendigo. We were joined by other friends who live in Bendigo & Kyneton. Lunch was at the Cosmopolitan Hotel. Well, not actually at the hotel, which had a fire several years ago. The new owners have been working to restore it and in the mean-time serve meals in the old stables in the back. The kitchen is in a caravan. I had roast duck with duck & juniper pie and lentils. The duck was pretty good, the "pie" wonderful and the lentils were very good, too. Here are a few of other meals: It was a beautiful autumn day and the locals were out at the bar, watching the world go by:

Ok, no safety net: Time for the lamb. I got up early fed and walked dogs (saw a wallaby). Then cobbled together advice from here and Alice Waters and a few guesses along the way. First I salt&peppered the lamb and browned it in olive oil. I took the lamb out and browned the root vegetables a little. Took that out and put in a separate casserole. Then I cooked up a mixture of chopped leek, onion, and shallot in the pot. Took that out, added some white wine and deglazed the sides a little. The leek mixture went back in, along with a couple of chopped tomatoes and rosemary. Put the lamb on top, covered and put both dishes in an oven heated to 150 C and immediately dropped the temperature as low as it could go. I put the meat thermometer on the shelf and the temperature ranged from about 75 to 84. I haven't really figured my oven out yet. It has a convection element at the back instead of the N American Norm bottom element. The grill is separate, below the oven. Then with fingers crossed I left for lunch with friends.

LOL. Correct he is after tuna - only spring water, not oil. The purple packages are pet mince (no not minced pets!). I try to buy the stuff that doesn't make a point of advertising that it contains kidney because Dalmatians can get crystal problems in their urine, similar to gout (different from the common cat crystals) so purines are better avoided. The brown bottle with the yellow pull-ring cap is Bundaberg ginger beer. Aussies do like their ginger beer and I can't complain about that.

Time for the ugly: Here are some refrigerator photos:

Had to make a trip to Geelong today, over 5 hours driving for a 2 hour meeting. So the day started with an egg McMuffin, hash browns and a large mocha. I didn't bother taking a photo. I drove around looking for a lunch spot in Geelong but found myself in the outskirts and ended up eating some unexciting udon soup in a shopping mall. The good news is I made it back to the office in time for beer club. The James Squire Porter was rated highly by most members. When I made it home, I was pretty tired so an easy meal of butter chicken was in order. My routine is to chop an onion and fry it up in olive oil along with a cup of brown rice (medium grain is sold in the supermarkets) until the rice is toasty and the onion translucent. I threw in some Hungarian yellow peppers from the garden because I needed to use them up. Then add 2 cups water. I also added about an ice cube size chunk of frozen turkey stock. After about 1/2 hour of simmer place chicken on top and dump a jar of butter chicken sauce over. Cook another 15 minutes or so until the chicken is done. Bone-in chicken takes longer. While the chicken was cooking, I made a small French 75 but replaced the champagne with Duck and Bull cider. Yummy. 1 oz Tanqueray gin 1/2 oz lemon juice Shake with ice, strain into a champagne flute, top with sparkling cider. Garnish with lemon twist. My champagne flutes came from my grandfather and they are a bit small for even this reduced volume so I added more cider after the first few sips.

I had a really nice meal at the restaurant once. BTW her father is a potter . I need to look through the book and see if there is anything inspiring. Apparently I "heart" cholesterol, or at least it "hearts" me and likes to stick around. You have to go to huge extremes for diet to make a big difference. Still I try to avoid the worst offenders except bacon, and cheese, and...

I thought all wine was healing . I never made anything from the beer book but it is fun to read. I do brew, but don't drink enough beer to get really good at it.

Thanks for the tips. I think you are right, Skippy is a meat that will really show the cooks skill or lack thereof.

Hmm, favourite pottery... On second thought, that's sort of like favourite wine, can I only have just one? Seriously, the cup shown is probably near the top. It is so small and simple but has so much going on with the shape and the way the cross-hatching changes part way down, the rough texture on the unglazed foot, and the luscious sparkling saturated iron glaze that flows down just to the bottom. Aside from that I have some wonderful small bottles, glazed only by the ash of the kiln, by a friend Jack Troy who literally wrote the book on wood fired pottery. And another bottle by Otto Heino, who recreated a prized ancient Chinese glaze when he was in his 70s and found himself selling pots for up to $100,000. All are beautiful but also feel wonderful in your hands. That's the trouble with museum pots - you miss out on the tactile aspects. Then there are all the Japanese pottery areas/styles. I'm drawn to Tamba, Shigaraki, and Oribe ware. I'd love to go explore them sometime.

That is a controversial lobster dish on haresfur's cover. And for the record it's Peter THE eater. My apologies, no double entendre intended. I must be getting old, apparently a dirty mind is the second thing to go...

I think I have time for a quick update before I go off for an information meeting about solar panels for the house. I got up a bit late but figured I had time to go grab some bread from the Good Loaf sourdough bakery hidden behind the Bendigo Bank headquarters. I got a cappuccino too. I don't know what they put in it but I got into the zone at work and didn't even grab a slice of the bread, much less lunch. Needless to say I was pretty hungry when I got home and a simple meal was in order after the deep fried excess of yesterday. Let's see, the pumkin soup is from Aldi. I can make better but it's not bad. The "brie" is from Tasmania, the dip from Wholefoods and is quite tasty. The olive oil is local and sold from a small shop located at Bendigo Pottery, the oldest operating pottery in Oz. I'll try to find some photos of the shop, or at least the pottery.

I forgot to post the picture of the Shiraz-Vigonier. It's in my all time favourite piece of pottery, a tea cup made by an elderly Chinese man in Pennsylvania. I think he was a retired engineering professor but I forget his name. Anyway the cup is absolutely perfect IMO but a little small for wine. Better for scotch or bourbon. You may have figured out that I use ceramic more than glass and a mug of wine isn't unheard of (less need of refilling). While I'm at it here are the cookbooks, such as they are. Here's one for Peter Eater And for your amusement

I'll have to swing by Woolies and get some rosemary. I need to plant some, too.

I keep forgetting to look for malt vinegar so I used some cider vinegar and (shame) ketchup (Heinz) for the chips. It's been ages since I had venison, but kangaroo and deer seem to occupy the same ecological niche as browsers fond of leaping in front of cars. Edited to correct miss-matched parentheses for the other geeks out there.

Hi! Thanks for the comments. I'm amazed at the size fish portions you get here. My usual fish and a dollar's chips costs $5.50. With the scallops etc. it still only cost $10.00. Do you put vinegar or anything on your fish or chips? Here, it seems like they only put salt or seasoned salt on.

Kangaroo is still a minor meat here but the consumption is increasing. Until recently it was pretty much only used for pet food. I had someone comment to me that country blokes who wouldn't have anything to do with a few years ago are getting serious about grilling roo. It is very lean and doesn't really taste gammy to me. I'm not sure what the right word is, "rich" maybe. I bought one of those pre-marinated roast things (that's what they had in the store - kangaroo is almost always available but the choice is limited) and it was pretty good although it was way too raw even after cooking longer than the instructions said. I ate around the edges and the rest made a really good chili. Maybe some other Australians will chime in. The kangaroo topic is here. Pet mince smells pretty disgusting but the dogs and Wattle love it, even though it makes Wattle puke if he eats more than a tablespoon full. Pinot has better taste and won't touch it.

First off, here's the wine haul from earlier. To continue my day of eating Aussie, dinner was fish & chips. I ordered far more food than I needed, in the interests of exploration and entertainment. Eaglehawk has 3 fish & chips shops in 2 blocks, along with a chook shop, a pizza place, the bakery, and a few hotels that serve meals. I usually go to Sea Shells. Today I got snapper, 2 scallops, a couple of potato cakes (Thought I ordered only one) and a dollar's chips. Hope my heart doesn't explode. The scallops were good but not like Nova Scotia. Deep frying them does seem a waste. Oh, and what to drink with fish & chips? How about a 2010 Cock + Bull shiraz-vigonier? . Quite nice.

Beef and Guinness does make a good pie, though . The pies are single serving - although I had 3 halves for lunch!. I'm pretty sure the pastie is one filling but won't know for sure 'til I reach the other end! I hadn't heard about the double filling before.

Well, I think it's time for some real Aussie food. I headed over to the Eaglehawk Bakehouse for a late lunch of take away pies. And since Eaglehawk is where Mulga Bill was from: And the score. Clockwise from upper left we have beef&onion pie, wholemeal veggie packet, and Cornish pastie. Where you have mines, you have Cornish immigrants. And the tomato relish I picked up at a market outside Horesham: I saved some for tomorrow, honest.

How about "Very Secure"? I like Man Enough to Drink Pink and Very Secure I like them both too. Very Secure describes the feeling in your tummy after having one, but that can apply to lots of cocktails. I've really fallen in love with the genever. It has such a subtle taste that is fun to sip and contemplate.

There was a Co-op in the basement of a church when I was in college but my first health food store was in Saskatoon Saskatchewan. It was a tiny place, also a coop if I remember and the single mom who worked there was getting a welfare subsidy. When I first went in her hair was wild, her face and arms bruised, and she was cheerfully describing in great detail to a person checking out how her ex came by and beat the snot out of her and the look on the neighbors face when she escaped and showed up on the doorstep buck naked with hair yanked into a tangled mess. I wandered around the other side of the one free-standing display waiting to ask if I had to be a member to shop there but not wanting to interrupt. It became more and more absurd as the tale went on and on with my obvious eavesdropping trapped in the store (I wasn't suave enough to just head out saying "It's cool I'll come back."). I pretty much fell in love with her.

I've been thinking about a name for the genever Sazarac. How about "Man Enough to Drink Pink"? Or maybe "Drink Enough to Go Pink, Man"?

Going to grocery stores is an important travel activity for me. And to get to know a place, check out the pre-packaged and junk food as cultural research (that's my story and I'm sticking to it).

I picked Eileen and a visiting scientist from Spain up at the train station this evening and we headed to the Malayan Orchid. We split a nice bottle of local Pinot (local as in the winery, the grapes are from Yarra Valley. We had prawns in red curry, my favourite aubergine in sweet chili (better than average chili sauce and crispy fried egg plant), and lamb in something or other. I wasn't fond of the lamb. All of it was pretty mild. Our visitor was a good sport about my taking photos. He said he was pleased to get to an interesting restaurant because in Córdoba, aside from some Italian and Chinese, it's all Spanish food. Unfortunately, no Spanish around here that I know of.