ChrisTaylor

A true local: Temple's Bicycle Beer, which is brewed in one of Melbourne's inner 'burbs. Very light. Citrusy. Jacked with a little salt, according to the label. I guess this is the beer in hipster cred. Brewed in Brunswick. And the old label, back when I first tried this a couple years ago, went on about some component of the beer--presumably not the finished product, given that it's not that hard to find this stuff--being delivered to ... somewhere ... by bicycle. Whatever. It's alright. I reckon if I had a 24-pack of the stuff it'd take a good while to get through them without assistance, though.

A Negroni and then a Rob Roy using Glenfarclas 15 and Punt e Mes.

Today it was 43 degrees. Celsius. This is not at all a pleasant time to be piss farting around in a kitchen. Enter salad Nicoise. It's a bit snobby to make it with fresh tuna--I usually used the canned stuff--but there you have it.

Two things. One finer than the other, Margarita following a 2:scant 1:scant 1:mere dash of agave syrup format using Ilegal's reposado mezcal. Pretty flash. I made a Paper Plane/Aeroplane/Aircraft/Flying Machine from Kindred. 1:1:1:1 with bourbon (Buffalo), Aperol, Amaro Nonino and lemon juice. Should've realised that in Anglais 'accessible introduction to amari' means 'too fucking sweet, like some kind of lolly'. Have attacked it with some orange bitters (Regan's and Angostura).

It was a hot start to a very hot week today. I had no desire to cook inside. Satay chicken as per the recipe in Cradle of Flavour. Accompanied by the recommended sweet and sour sauce (basically a 4:1 combination of kecap manis and lime juice sexed up with some sliced chilli) and the papaya/mango/bean/chilli/cucumber/etc salad from Zak Pelaccio's Eat With Your Hands.

Bruichladdich 10, Lagavulin 16 and Ardbeg (the 10 year old standard or, if you can get it, Uigeadail).

I used plain old every day ribs and it worked fine. I reckoned if you got some of those meaty ones from Costco you'd really be in business. Still, if you can only get the ones butchers primarily sell for soup-related tasks, I reckon they'll do just fine. And I don't use those at all for barbecue.

One of those three--well, four--ingredient dishes that involve a bare minimum of effort. A recipe popped up on my Facespace feed that looked kind of fun. I wanted it today, tho'. Not in five or six days when the homemade pepper paste, which is apparently too salty anyway, is ready. The stuff just contains peppers and salt so I figured I'd find a workable substitute locally, if not the real deal. A local grocery store stocked a 'pepper sauce' that was really just red capsicums and salt and was, I suspect, the exact stuff the recipe called for minus the Portuguese name. I added a little bit of harissa to this, just for fun, and vac-marinated the pork ribs for a couple of hours. The ribs themselves were pretty good. Maybe the Portuguese stuff is a different product from what I got--like what polenta is to grits or sadza--but I reckon it worked. Might even up the quantity of harrisa next time. And hit them with some minced parsley at the last minute. The ribs, tho', were winners. The potatoes not so much. I reckon next time I'd ignore the recipe and boil them and basically just make roast potatoes underneath the ribs. Too, the pork I used was pretty lean. I'd be inclined to use a bit of rendered bacon fat or some plain old lard next time. Just to help the tatters along.

From a recipe inspired by a killer line from one of my favourite Tom Waits songs. Smoke My Friends Down to the Filter 1:1:1 mezcal (Ilegal), Punt e Mes and Campari stirred with .25 oz lemon juice. Strained over a single, particularly robust ice spheroid. I like it a whole lot. At first I thought the mezcal monstered the Punt e Mes and Campari out of the way and that maybe something more assertive like Cynar might be welcome but having had a few sips, now, I think they're there but this is just a more spirit-forward version of a Negroni than I'm familiar with (I always, always, always use the 1:1:1 ratio and distrust people that basically pour gin into a glass and say the word 'Campari' over it). A winner.

It works nicely in a Last Word. Do not under any circumstances--even the sort of apocalypse Cormac McCarthy might write about--use that shit with tonic water, tho'. No matter what. Never ever.

This here, kids, is a person that cannot be trusted. It's on par with disliking kittens. Or disliking deformed bald kittens. EDIT Just made a daiquiri using Rhum JM 50. 2 rum to 1 lime to 0.5 simple.

Are you new to scotch? I'd be leaning the other way and recommending the very drinkable Dalwhinnie for one of them. For the other I'd go for something more interesting. I'm inclined to go with Lagavulin over Talisker. Or treat yourself to 2 * tastings and hit: Dalwhinnie Lagavulin Auchentoshan 3 or Oban Springbank That'll cover a nice spectrum of drams. As much as Oban and Dalwhinnie are from the same region I think they're quite different. If you've hit just enough whisky to know you really like peat then there's always a combo like this: Laphroaig (at the end: hit this one last) Lagavulin Talisker Springbank (probably my starting point)

Thoughts on two new additions to the collection: Smith's Angaston 12: an Australian single malt whisky. Not the amazing surprise that the 8 year old variant was but still good. It's lost a bit of the warmth and now has this brandyish, oakish thing going on. I like it for the same reason I liked the younger model: it's not trying to be scotch, especially Islay scotch, or bourbon or anything else. It's Australian whisky. Accessible. A nice sipper. Suitable for summer.Bruichladdich The Laddie 10: holy shit amazing whisky. Picked it up based on vague recommendations and someone's recent post in the bottle shop thread. A winner.

I've only had it in a mojito so far--a fairly robust mojito, mind, with both the lime and simple scaled back a bit--and thought it was good. Assertive enough to make its slightly musty, grassy presence known. I'll try it in a daiq next, I think.

Bought some JM Rhum and made a mojito: about .75 oz worth of demerara syrup to 2 oz r(h)um shaken with some muddled mint and half a lime. Poured over fresh ice and topped up with soda water and garnished with more mint and more lime. Workable.

I was feeling a little bit patriotic. I bought two bottles as I'm going to experiment with alchemy and see if I can magically turn one into a bottle of high end rye. Stay tuned, kids. As for the Rhum I'm still figuring on what'll replace my Banks 5 once I finish it off. It's a bit too hard for me to get in Australia (I imported a bottle from Whisky Exchange and had someone bring me another on the way back from London) and while I like it I don't know if it's quite special enough to justify the expense of importing it.

Chilled seafood salad. The prawns, scallops and fish (rock ling) were poached with a little bit of garlic in a mixture of water and fino sherry (well, fino apera--real fake Australian sherry that can't be called sherry ever since we signed up to some free trade agreement or treaty or something). The mussels were steamed in a little apera, too. The seafood was chilled and combined with tomato, capsicum, cucumber, parsley and red onion. The dressing was made with extra virgin olive oil, chardonnay vinegar (eyeballed to equal parts) and the strained mussel cooking liquid. I think it was good although when I scaled the quantities of the ingredients down from the recipe (Frank Camorra's second book, MoVida Rustica) I kept the amount of mussels the same. The mussels somewhat dominated the seafood mix. I guess next time I'd half the quantity and add in the squid that I left out from the original dish. EDIT Stabbing holes in the meat is an idea I might look into. I guess I didn't consider that as I've never felt the need to that with brisket or pork shoulder, altho' I guess in the case of those the depth of penetration isn't a big deal: slices of flat aren't terribly think while the outer layers of pork get mixed with the inner bits during the pulling process. Unless you're taking it into meat paste territory, it's a bit harder to overcome the problem with lamb shoulder (unless you bone it out first, I guess, sacrificing the structural integrity the shoulder blade provides).

I'm probably not the only one guilty of consuming chips and driving. Will be pulled over one day. Probably charged. Driving under the influence of frites.

I'm going to guess it isn't a local. >_>

An experiment in smoked lamb shoulder. I worked from Zak Pelaccio's recipe for smoked goat shoulder in Eat With Your Hands. I've attempted the recipe before, using actual goat, with limited success. Goat just wasn't right for this dish. Or, rather, I'm sure lovely, expensive baby goat would be. I'm sure it would be grand. I'm a big fan of goat. But the stuff I can get locally ... well, after much experimentation I just don't bother any more. It's not very good. In this or in any other application. I guess next time I see expensive baby goat I'll keep an eye out for a slightly-not-so-expensive shoulder or something. Anyway, the dish in its original form has a rub comprised of extra virgin olive oil, chilli (a few mild ones with a couple of birds thrown in), parsley, ginger, garlic and salt. I retained that, essentially, using generic supermarket red chillies for the mild component and a lone bird's eye. I thought I had ginger on hand but I didn't so I ended up going with the dried stuff. Pelaccio recommends marinating the shoulder for a full day but it's not like the marinade is going to penetrate the meat a whole lot so I only gave it about five hours. It was smoked at my gas-powered smoker's lowest setting, over hickory, for a little more than seven hours. I served it with a simple 'dressing' made from Greek yoghurt, fresh mint and lemon juice. Thoughts: The meat itself was pleasant enough. I didn't use crazy expensive lamb as this was an experiment but, hey, I reckon it'd be real nice if you cooked nice lamb this way. The meat itself wasn't the issue. Maybe it could have done with an extra thirty to sixty minutes but I didn't want it to hit pull apart stage: pulled meat, such as pork shoulder, shouldn't reach the point of being meat paste, so far as I'm concerned. We're not making rillettes, here.Flavour penetration was poor. The skin was paper thin and pleasant enough in the greasy way slow cooked lamb skin is but ... I don't know. I'm not sold on the idea of mostly fresh ingredients in the rub. I'd be tempted to use dry chilli, dry garlic and dry ginger next time. Maybe with some paprika or even cumin thrown in. Alternatively, a vinaigrette containing some of the core ingredients--some minced chilli, garlic and ginger with, say, some sherry vin--might do the job. Something to cut through the inherent fattiness of this cut of meat and give it a shot in the arm, flavour-wise. I mean, the lamb taste was definitely there but lamb is a meat strong enough to stand up to chilli, garlic and other flavours making their presence known. I'm almost thinking of something that might pop up in a David Chang recipe. You know, like his octo vin or the fish sauce vin. Heck, octo vin might be a good place to start.The yoghurt thing was a last minute thought and while it didn't clash with the meat it ... it was that dinner party guest that never brings so much as a bargain basement bottle of almost-vinegar cleanskin wine. Not the one that careens around your place drunkenly and downs a bottle of your Talisker from the bottle and gropes female guests but the one that's just ... there. You know the one. That guy ... that guy is the yoghurt dressing I thought of at the last minute.Rather than serving this as roast lamb I reckon it could work nicely in a sandwich sort of deal. Maybe with some sort of crunchy salad thing going on. Nothing fancy pants. Maybe some tomatoes and red onions and cabbage or spinach leaves. An acidic dressing. Sort of a nod to a pulled pork roll without going so far as to slather everything in sticky sweet barbecue sauce.

No video clips this time round. Another Feral. This one is their Sly Fox Summer Ale. Highly carbonated. Maybe a little too carbonated. It does what's on the label, I guess: an easy-drinking ale that isn't too boring. Has a crispness to it that makes me want barbecued pork and prawns and things like that. Maybe this would go nicely with fish and chips.

They sold out of the 220V model a week or two ago. Word is it'll be 'about a month' before it's back in stock.

Really pretty.. is that bucatini? looks a lot thicker than your normal spaghetti No, it's just spaghetti. I mean, assuming the guys I bought it from differentiate between spaghetti and spaghettoni.

My take on pasta con sarde. I started, a while ago, with the recipe in Zak Pelaccio's Eat With Your Hands and over time I've modified it enough that I guess I can call it my own. I use good quality canned sardines in place of fresh ones. I use ~250g roughly chopped cherry tomatoes in place of the two chopped tomatoes Pelaccio calls for. The sofrito contains some diced fennel bulb and a shallot in addition to the garlic and anchovy fillets (Ortiz) he calls for. I keep the Pernod-soaked raisins (the Pernod, which he says you can drink if you're feeling frisky, is pictured in the background) and pine nuts whole rather than chopping them. Finally, I leave out the fennel pollen. It's hard to get and really quite expensive. I've even stopped bothering adding in a few toasted and chopped fennel seeds like I used to: I find the leafy bits and diced fennel bulb and pastis give me enough of a fennel/aniseed kick.

What's in the stock? Why not make a mushroom-based broth jacked with a bit of Marmite? I mean, look at Heston Blumenthal's Marmite consomme. He has a pared back version in his at Home book if you're not up for tackling any Fat Duck madness. I reckon you'll have more success creating a meaty non-meaty result by tinkering with the base of the dish than you will with adjusting any of the ingredients that go in at the end. EDIT I'm assuming that Marmite is vegan and not merely vegetarian. Altho' I guess if tofu jacked with fish sauce is kosher then yeast spread probably gets a pass.