ChrisTaylor

Another whisky sour: this time with Ballantine's/less simple/Jerry Thomas' decanter bitters. Was gifted the Ballantine's. Never had it before. Makes for a workable sour.

I hope it's at least kosher ham glaze. >_>

J-whisky sour. See: 2 oz Nikka from the barrel, .75 oz lemon juice, .5 -- too much -- simple and a dash of Angostura.

Sail & Anchor Changing Tides Barleywine Ale 2013. Overly long name. Not doing much for me: the brew, that is, not the name. It's brown and cold, at least. Can only go so wrong there.

How clean is your glassware? Any detergent residue?

Peri peri chicken. I started with Keith_W's recipe for the marinade although changed a few things, ending up with 1 roast capsicum, diced juice of 2 lemons 2 tsp cayenne powder 2 tsp chipotle powder 1 tsp onion powder 4 tbs crushed-chilli-from-a-jar-that-really-was-about-as-potent-as-cotton-wool 3 cloves of garlic 0.5 cup extra virgin olive oil 1 tbs salt All of that was mixed together with a blender. I liked the result enough to make it again but next time I'd make a few changes: More heat. Lose that shit from the jar and replace it (or maybe combine it) with some habanero paste. Or just some minced bird's eyes.More acid. Maybe combine the lemon juice with some vinegar--malt or white wine or maybe cider.After an initial (or maybe prior to a post-) sear transfer the meat to an oven/smoker (with a little bit of mesquite)/water bath/etc. Cooking all the way on the grill ... the marinade burns very quickly. And it's not like I was cooking over actual flames.

Non-scotch again! Thomas H Handy Saz. Oh man. Lovely, lovely, lovely. Definitely needs the water--at 66% it doesn't fuck around--but, yeah, lovely dram. I've had this in Old Fashioneds and Sazeracs in the past but now that I actually own a bottle I couldn't bring myself to mix with it. And I say that about almost nothing else in my collection.

Ideally, it shouldn't go to the point of flaking apart. If you're interested in catching some we could always head down to Brighton one time.

No, that makes sense. Common enough with the butchers around me, too. Particularly when the meat is off the bone. Most butchers around here 'cut' it that way too. The advantage of cooking it without the skin is you can prep the meat a day or two before you plan to serve it and press it under the weight of a few can or a plastic tub filled with coins.

That looks like something I want for my breakfast about now. EDIT: It's hard to tell through the packaging and all but it looks okay to me.

Oh. The good old glass art work. Boring, plausible and more specific than just 'glass container' or 'fragile non-suspicious item--nothing to see here!' And I assume the packaging didn't scream WINE MAILING BOX!. Shame to see most of the packages go astray. I hear tell FedEx--not that I've ever ponied up for them--are good for this sort of thing. I think, Stateside, they can ship booze legally. Could be wrong, tho'. I mean, you guys have funny laws about moving things between states, right?

Since I was a wee lad it's been cannoli. The one with the real fake chocolate cream. Oh yeah.

It's nice and simple for the first few times around. After a while I'd strongly encourage you to cook the meat and skin separately, though.

Thanks for the tips Chris, I'm a perfectionist, so at 171F 12 hours MOST of the meat is meltingly tender. What I'm talking about is the meat at the bottom part. Usually there is 3 or 4 layers of meat, and I'm talking about the very bottom layer that is dark colored. That's the part that is dry and stringy. Have you had issues with this bottom part? A couple times, yeah. Hence my initial comment about maybe buying your meat somewhere else. Assuming you have a choice and all. Me, I can buy it from the supermarkets and most of the local butchers (basically any butcher that isn't, say, halal). So there's a fair bit of choice. I understand that pork belly isn't so readily available in other places. If you have no choice at all, not without ordering online/driving crazy distances, see if 12 hours or so in a brine helps.

It's something we catch a lot of locally that has, in the past few years, become commercial in a big way (and is bullshit expensive if you just buy the fillets). I don't think you'd get it anywhere else. I wouldn't imagine we export it.

This. And, too, so long as you're using a gentle flame, it's fairly forgiving. You can visually keep track of what's going on with a fillet, particularly when it's not coated in crumbs or a marinade.

I'd be inclined to go with David Chang's recipe for pork buns. The recipe is readily available online, assuming you don't have his book. He roasts a little hot for my taste, though. I'd roast a little lower and slower. Of course, you could half-roast/half-braise (i.e. low temperature, a few hours immersed alligator-in-the-swamp-style with some stock) the meat and cook the skin separately. See this post from earlier today for my go-to method--thanks Heston--for treating the skin.

Acquired some St George dry rye gin. Looked to the official website for suggestions. Settled on the Hanky Pant: equal parts (1.5 oz) sweet vermouth (I used Punt e Mes) to gin plus a couple dashes of Fernet Branca. I thought that there would be too much vermouth but this is lovely. Have to get my hands on a larger bottle of this gin. EDIT The rye gin is a bit of a monster. I've seen it in various places compared to a genever. Now, maybe I haven't had enough genever--I've had the stone bottle Bols and the clear bottle stuff--but I don't know about that. I mean, yeah, it's got more in common with a genever than it does with, say, a London Dry, but there's something very robust about it. I mean, genever has that fuck-you-maltiness--it's no wallflower--but this is something else. I really like it. Might even be my new favourite gin. Bye, West Winds Cutlass.

I've used it in fish tacos. Works nicely. Skin and fillet it. Watch out for those spikes--assuming the fishmonger hasn't snipped them off. Cook the fillets gently with some butter for a couple minutes: just enough for the flesh to change colour and take on the appearance of being cooked. Cook the fillets before portioning them. As for the taco filling, I like to use a mix of red onion, tomato, cucumber, jalapeno, lime juice and coriander. Diced and mixed together with a little bit of olive oil and black pepper. EDIT Pin bone it using blunt-end tweezers. I just use a $2 pair I bought in the 'beauty' section of the supermarket.

Oh mystery of mysteries. Amazing what lands on one's door step through the postal service. Because the iPhone camera loves producing photos that have that washed out/Vaseline-on-the-camera quality of old fashioned porn/television's NCIS the St George gin pictured is the dry rye.

Damn. I'd have happily paid or organised an exchange of something impossible-to-get-outside-of-Australia for a box of assorteds. Japanese whisky is crrraaaazzzzy expensive in Australia.

Are you in Japan at the moment, FrogPrincesse? Do you have access to many of these small bottles of Japanese whisky?

When you sent it and all, you didn't ... declare it as booze, right?

First of all, I'd look into the quality of the meat you're purchasing. Maybe buy it from somewhere else just to see if that makes a difference. Anyway, like KennT I'm a fan of Modernist Cuisine, altho' I've come to settle on the method prescribed in the 'Sunday pork belly recipe'. That is, to say, brined and then (after a good rinse and dry) 62C/40 hours without the skin. As for the skin, I scrape off as much of the fat as possible (you don't need to get it all--don't stress over the fat that smears like poop on a blanket rather than comes off cleanly) then salt it a little with coarsely ground salt and then park it, in little chunks, on a rack in a 70C oven for 5 hours. Remove it. Crank the temperature to a blistering 220C. Park the rack and a pot of water in the oven for 10-15 minutes until the skin is crisp. See my Christmas dinner from last year. The meat wasn't stringy at all. To get it 'perfect' it's also important to trim off any excess lumps of fat. If you were slow-roasting, say, a thick layer of fat in between the skin and meat would be acceptable. When you cook it sous vide that stuff isn't going to render off and will just be a jelly. Lose that.

I just made the Talent Scout using Glenfarclas 15 in place of the Japanese whisky. It's okay. Drinkable but wouldn't make it again. I suspect the cocktail's dissatisfaction with itself, its internal struggle between whisky and curacao, isn't just something you find with Glenfarclas or the Japanese dram you used. Curacao and Scottish-style whisky--and I could Japanese whisky as mostly following in the Scottish tradition--merely tolerate each other.