ChrisTaylor

A recent non-scotch tasting (continuing to fight the power, etc): Dickel 12, which only recently came to be available locally at a reasonable price. This is really good. Not exciting or contemplative or whatever: just damn good whiskey.

My first experiment in 'barrel'-aging a cocktail. Equal parts Negroni (about 3/4 cup of each component plus a few dashes of Scrappy's/Regan's orange bitters) with 13 grams of barrel chips.

Probably. Anyway. The Julio makes a workable Marg. Reckon I might make the next one 3:1 with the 1 representing some Ilegal, tho'.

Ho. When it comes to normal pruchases, our exchange rate works something like this: one Australian dollar gets you eightysomething US cents. When it comes to booze, our exchange rate works something like this: $1USD = $100AUD. Enter the $90 bottle of Rittenhouse. $85 if you score big bargains. Anyway. I ended up going with the Julio reposado. It's warm and steamy outside and it seems like a good reason to knock together a Margarita.

I have access to a limited (but growing) range of tequila. A fair bit of it is priced beyond what I'd like to play. My experience with agave-based beverages is also limited: a couple mezcals (smoked rocket fuel and a beautiful Ilegal reposado) and Espolon (reposado), Herradurra (anejo) and Patron (all variants--not a fan of any of them, really, too boring). I mostly drink it in simple cocktails but I have been known to take it straight, too. I'm about finished my Herradurra and while I like it, I'm leaning towards getting something different for my replacement bottle. For reference, Herradura anejo and its younger siblings are all in the price range. So. Here's a list of things I can get at prices I am prepared to pay: Tapatio blanco/reposado/anejoCalle 23 blanco/reposado/anejoLeyenda del Milgaro silver/reposadoDon Julio silver/reposadoTequila Blu reposado1800 silver/anejoCabo Wabo silver/reposadoOf these, what's my best bet? Any stand outs?

Supposedly the US Postal Service won't handle booze. I discovered this recently.

Beef short rib. A nicely marbled slab of Cape Grim grass fed. Dry rub mostly comprised of salt and three different kinds of pepper (black, green and the not-really-pepper Sichuan peppercorn) with just a little bit of garlic and chipotle to add some depth to the arrangement. Smoked low and slow with hickory until it hit 80C as per the advice of the credibly-named Meathead. I am very fond of his website. The end result was a slab of meat that was smoky and peppery and juicy--oh man, that marbling in the raw product--and beefy as hell. Early on I was contemplating making a sort of gravy with some pressure cooked mince and bones, thickened with some Ultrasperse, but I reckon that would've detracted from the dish.

You can also portion it in advance and store it under vacuum.

I'm not entirely sure where 'roo fillet comes from, biologically-speaking. It's lean but so is the entire beast. Not particularly tender unless you hit that perfect medium rare sweet spot and even then you'll want a steak knife. It's game. One of the few 'game' meats in Australia that is actual game. Shot in the bush. Too, there's no part of 'roo I've had you could describe as lacking in flavour. I guess the closest thing you've probably had, comparison-wise, is venison. The venison I've had was farmed, tho', so it was quite mild. Yet to gain access to the wild shot stuff. Altho' if you've had game from southern Africa before maybe kudu is also in the same territory. Intense.

Kangaroo fillet. Went the 'steak and eggs' route. Hit it with some of the Modernist Cuisine mushroom ketchup. Too lazy to think of or prepare anything more complicated. Been meaning to find the happy point, time- and temperature-wise, for 'roo fillets. The problem with grilling them exclusive was evident with this pieces: the middle was nicely cooked but the ends were overdone. Overdone 'roo is like overdone impala/venison/etc: not at all something you want to have.

I am already in the world of sous vide, altho' this monster won't quite fit in my ghetto setup.

Sierra Nevada's Celebration Fresh Hop Ale (2012). Billed as a brew suited to the holidays--which means something a little different to me than it does to most of you people. It's hoppy and malty without one of those qualities really beating the other into submission. I've had a so-so experience with Sierra Nevada so far--I really enjoyed their rye beer but think most of the readily available ones are overrated--but I like this one. It's working nicely with a platter of cheeses: particularly the aged French cheddar which has an outside so nasty it looks like it's about to jump up, run over my desk and steal my beer. Afternoon tea of champions.

I bought a nice lump of short rib this morning. One solid piece. About one and a half kilos. Heavily marbled. Grass fed. A really nice piece of beef that demands a bit more than a careless drowning with red wine. I'm open to suggestions. I'd like to cook it whole. I don't want to portion it into a dozen pieces. I'm leaning away from a braise and more towards some kind of slow roast or maybe a session in the smoker (with a very light touch on the smoke), although I could have my arm twisted to a moister cooking method if it was something special. Suggestions?

A Flor de Cana 4-powered Hemingway Daiquiri. Lovely drink. I mistrust anyone that feels the need to add simple to this. EDIT And now an Arbitrary Nature of Time from beta cocktails. I used Elmer Lee in place of Wild Turkey as it is the booziest bourbon I have on hand.

Drum roll, please. I just cracked open the first bottle of my first attempt at home brew. It's been aging for three weeks. The guys at the shop recommended aging it for at least two months before tasting it but a friend experienced in the ways of home brew said that, given the heat we've had recently, a couple weeks should be enough to get an idea of what the finished (i.e. aged) product will be like. So here goes. Appearance: placed the glass against a piece of paper so you can get a sense of the colour, I guess. When it was in the bottle--hard to tell, given the dark glass--it looked a whole lot paler than I would've wanted. Looks fine in the glass, though. Cloudy. A little bit of sediment. Suspect I won't have any of that in the second batch as a friend is giving me another container into which I can decant my brew and then let it settle before bottling. Nose: yeasty, initially. This disappears once it is poured into a glass at which point the nose reminds me of ... well, beer. Not being a smart arse. But you know that generic beer smell of a lot of mass produced beers? Not so much something like Heineken, which has a smell all of its own, but one of those beers that you'd struggle to tell apart from a dozen other, similarly-marketed beers in a blind tasting. Taste: what strikes me, first up, is the carbonation. It's not like a glass of cola or anything but it's a bit more heavily carbonated than what I normally drink. I suspect this is due to using those 'carbonation drops'. The idea is you put one drop into a 375 mL bottle. I mostly used 330 mL bottles. The drops were also of uneven size. Some had chunks missing. Some were demented, Tetsuoooooooo-style monsters. It's kind of ... bland. I mean, I mostly used a kit and additions suggested by the guys at the shop (some sort of finishing hop that I can't recall the details of and an English yeast) so I suspect this is a product of that. You know, the goal being an easy-drinking, inoffensive pale ale. Crisp. Clean. For a first attempt at, well, dumping a few packets worth of stuff into a container and walking away for a while I'm happy enough.

Oh, the Sullivan's double. That's the one I'e had/own a 200mL mini of. Keen to hear your thoughts on it. I think it's forgettable.

You've made me want to stock up again on orgeat. Genius.

A Bitter Elder modified as per EvergreenDan's sage advice: a 2 bitter to 1 boozy junipery booze to .75 citrus to .5 elderflower deal. 2 oz Campari 1 oz Botanist .75 oz lime .5 oz St Germain Shaken. Up. Pretty fucking good, Dan. I like that it looks and smells like a girly drink.

Same here up north in the Bay Area, Heidih. I'm holding off on any new planting until the weather normalizes. For now, I'm cutting back on some plants because of the drought. In the fall I ditched my sage plant, a biergarten sage with extra big leaves that are great for frying. It was too prone to mildew. The basils died off, which is normal. I'll replace the genovese basil, but possibly not the purple basil (I didn't use it much). My other herbs are hanging in there. I forgot to water my lavender plants for a couple weeks, so maybe I knocked off some of them. When lavender is dormant, it's hard for me to tell if the plant is dead or alive. These are all culinary lavenders (lavandula angustifolia), unusual varieties from the Stonegate nursery in Oregon. Since the nursery closed for mail order last year, I wanted to be sure to preserve these cultivars--they would be hard to replace. Oh well. Meanwhile, an own-root heirloom rose I acquired last fall, Jeanne Corboeuf, shocked me by revealing a bud when I watered it yesterday. My Duchesse de Parme violets are in full bloom, about 3 weeks ahead of time. Their scent is intoxicating. This burgeoning garden doesn't make me as happy as you might think, because we need our normal winter weather and rain. WinterGarden_3302.jpg A pic of my winter garden on my front deck (part of it, anyway). From the left corner, clockwise: za-atar, or Syrian oregano; lemon verbena, looking sorrier than ever; marjoram; sorrel with a fistful of new leaves; a couple culinary lavenders (Melissa, Folgate); chives showing signs of life; some pots of Duchesse de Parme violets; an overachieving heirloom rose, Jeanne Corboeuf; Moroccan mint, which grows steadily regardless of cold or warm temps--this one was a surprise. W‌interGarden_3304.jpg The book is my bedside reading these days, Vita Sackville-West's Garden Book. The tony English prose of yesteryear can get on my nerves, but I do like what Sackville-West says about plants. I'm enjoying this book in small bites. Chris Taylor, how does your midsummer garden grow? Rather well. We've had a string of 40C+ days in Melbourne that most things haven't responded to favourably. Bye bye, struggling chervil. That said, most of my tomato plants--especially the San Marzanos--and the tomatillo plant are doing well. I have a few tomatoes slowly working their way towards redness. Some chillies of various kinds coming into being, too. And most of my herbs are doing okay. Particularly the things like rosemary and savory that seem built to withstand the kind of punishment Australian summers can deliver. I think mulch and nightly watering during the hot spell helped a lot. I've had very limited success with coriander, of all things. I figured, like mint, that it would spread like a goddamned weed. It doesn't. It hasn't. I've tried various spots in the garden, too. Granted, it took me a while to find just the right spot for mint, too. I might move a coriander plant there and see what happens. I thought my kaffir limes would bear fruit this year but those flower buds disappeared and were replaced with more leaves. Oh well. Can't hurt for the plant to grow larger before it fruits, I guess.

Lamb ribs. Rubbed w/ a paste of olive oil, garlic powder, salt, mustard powder, black pepper, smoked paprika and mixed dried herbs. Hit with a bit of lemon juice on the grill. They were cooked for just a few minutes: enough to render the fat, enough to take the meat to medium rare. They were a little salty, meaty and the right kind of greasy. I served them with a potato salad and some grilled corn.

Mixed some Bernheim wheat whiskey with some iced chai that I made. Squeezed in a bit of lemon juice just because. This works.

Another day of terrible weather (44C), another dinner cooked mostly on the grill. Had to use gas today. Total fire ban. No solid fuel allowed. Grilled garfish. Light dry rub of salt, pepper, garlic powder, parsley and thyme. Grilled for about 3 minutes on each side and then hit with a bit of octo vin. Served with some (par-boiled) grilled potatoes and a tomato salad (tomatoes, bocconcini, red onion w/ a balsamic/ev olive oil/shallot/black pepper dressing). The fish was nice but suffered from the problem associated with most small fish: so many goddamned bones. I didn't have the ninja skills (or, really, desire considering how hot the kitchen was today) to painstakingly remove the five million rib bones (per side/per fish) prior to cooking them.

I'll chalk up your reaction to the Taketsuru to personal preference. You can also stumble across individual bottles that are duds. A friend of mine once had a bottle of Oban that was undrinkable. Not at all like the normal Oban. Not even in the way of 'well, I guess if it'd been left to oxidise for a while this is what it would taste like'. There's a whole mess of reasons why this can happen, apparently. To do with both the cork and the process of taking the stuff from the casks and bottling it in the first place.

A Last Word using clear bottle Bols Genever. Rocking. And now, because I couldn't quite decide what to make, a Dark n Stormy using Gingerbeard and aged Cruzan. And, lastly, a peaty Roy made with Ardbeg Uigeadail. A monster. The big Japanese kind that comes out of some radioactive cave, all bombarded by atomic bombs and woe, that attacks a fishing boat in the first scene and then fucks up a whole city. Given I've been matching booze with songs lately, let's pair that one with the Gamera song from the movie in which a couple of kids wind up on a space ship and go to a strange planet and Gamera defends them from an alien beast. A Rob Roy with a barbaric Islay as opposed to a Speyside or Highland is something else, hey? I mean, compare a Blood and Sand made with a boring blend and one made with something like Talisker.

Beef short ribs as per the Amazing Ribs recipe. Used the suggested rub and took them to the suggested temperature of 80C. No sauce. Served them with coleslaw and a store-bought garlic bread. The ribs were quite fatty but I was happy to buy them like that. Mostly, the butchers around here cut them small and thin and trim all the fat because the assumption is you're braising them.