ChrisTaylor

Yeah. I've done that. A few times. You made the right choice going with paper plates and such. I figured that one out a while ago. Because sure as shit you'll get left with basically all of the dishes to deal with the next morning. For more recent efforts I've gone with things easily prepared for a large number of people: things like pulled pork shoulder, smoked turkey, slow roasted lamb shoulder and sous vide pork belly. Boneless or nearly boneless meats--i.e. the kind where you can run a knife down here, just like so, and pull away the bones are good. Easier to serve. Easier to handball the serving to someone else while you're busy with other tasks. You're right: sous vide is a wonder. Slow-roasted and smoked foods, which can be held for a little while in a warm oven if need be, are good, too. A big tray of mixed roasted vegetables is easy. A lot of salads can be prepared either in advance and then dressed at the last minute or assembled very quickly within a couple of minutes, particularly if you can recruit an assistant that knows which end of a pan goes on a stove. The platter of cheeses and cured pork goods is a good idea, too. Surely someone can be recruited to, you know, unwrap slices of this and slices of that and arrange them in some vaguely artistic fashion on a wooden board. Of course, I've had mixed success with these. I find people stop eating the stuff once 'real food' appears. There's also something to be said for food that can be assembled by diners. Essentially, I aim, to get last minute tasks for dishes, down to no more than 5-10 minutes. Bonus points if the last minute task involves a brief swim in a water bath (if you only have one water bath and a few things to reheat, a pot of water on a low setting with an induction stove will do the trick) and a quick session in a frypan. True 'madness in the kitchen' is assembling everything, from scratch, on the day itself with a view to it all being ready pretty much by the time people will be sitting down, ready to eat. Done that a couple of times and, you know what? Forget it. It's rubbish. By the time you have finished and everyone is eating, it's not like you'll have the energy reserves to deal with people. EDIT That's when you really just love getting a request to, oh, make someone's friend a cocktail about now. Right when you've served all that food and dropped the eggs.

Is this his one from Bouchon or his wacky sous vide one? Judging by the classic presentation I assume it's the former. How do you rate his recipe compared to, say, Bourdain's?

Made a Rosemary's Baby, too, with the same improvement suggested in the comments section of the cocktail virgin slut post. It's ... man, this drink fast forwards you to autumn. Winter, even. Makes me think of the probably mythical image of people aging barrels of applejack in a forest. In snow. When the rosemary is probably dead from frost or something. And yeah, it does burn for a good long while and heat up the glass nicely (with your experience in mind I did that part in a little glass dish). You'd have a real good time making these after knocking back a few drinks.

Brisket and lightly grilled vegetables. The brisket was cooked using my go-to method but I was dissatisfied with it. My brisket came from another source. I guess it serves me right for being disloyal. The one time I wish I'd bothered making Meathead's mop sauce. Other times, the brisket has been juicy enough that any kind of additional liquid is excess for the sake of excess. Having no option but whatever was in my fridge, I ended up serving a little bit of the Modernist Cuisine mushroom ketchup on the side. Someone from Texas will now probably shoot me. The vegetables were more successful: baby dutch creams (pre-boiled), corn (given a brief stint in the microwave prior to hitting the grill), Dutch carrots, spring onions and red capsicum. I scattered some wood chips (a blend of mesquite, apple wood and cherry wood) over the coals before cooking the vegetables. They were served with the remoulade from John Currence's Pickles, Pigs and Whisky.

Do you, er, distribute small quantities of your gin?

Listen to the boss. The garlic thing is only ever unpleasant if you're doing a low and slow roast. And if you are there's nothing stopping you from, say, roasting the garlic and stuffing little nuggets of mushed up roast garlic into crevices in the meat. Just don't poke holes in a slab of meat you're going to slow roast and then stuff them with garlic or you'll wind up the rather unpleasant result of a nicely cooked piece of meat with some nicely raw pieces of garlic popping up in every few mouthfuls to say hello.

Apologies for the shite photograph but here's tonight's dinner: fish and chips. The fish is Murray cod, an Australian freshwater species. Considering the size of the fillets once I removed them from the carcass, the fact that it seemed impossible to pin bone it without making a mess and my unfamiliarity with the species I stuck to pan-frying it. The skin was removed before we ate it: not for bullshit health reasons but because it's not a particularly pleasant thing to eat, apparently. Well, at least according to some website sponsored by a very nasty beer. The fish itself wasn't bad. A bit sweet in flavour but not in the way of, say, King George Whiting. Inoffensive without being bland. Might stand up to something like a salad (i.e. dressing) or curry. In fact, that might be a more appropriate treatment than what I did. The frites--triple-cooked--were a mix of Dutch Creams and sweet potatoes. Having never cooked sweet potatoes in fry form before and finding most of the recipes available online to be weirdly complicated (i.e. a four stage cooking process plus a reheating stage) or too health-centric (i.e. steam in organic kale juice while you're at yoga class). The sauce was the New Orleans-style remoulade from John Currence's Pickles, Pigs and Whisky.

Another beer from the Burleigh Brewing Company. This one's a little more conventional, I guess, than the coffee one as it comes in the form of a hoppy pale ale. It's named--amusingly, if you're silly like me--Hasslehop. It's accessible. Fruity. Almost ... pineapple-y. Summer beer. A bit different to most of the other beers marketed on the basis of their hop content. I've only had, as best I can recall, two of the Burleigh beers and already they stand out as a brewery that's trying to make a product that's approachable but still complex enough for a snobby alcoholic seasoned drinker responsible person with a bit of experience responsibly sampling small amounts of many different beers . I think it's a good drop. And it goes nicely with this:

How did you make the batter?

Kept it simple tonight. Pork tenderloin bagged with a couple of sage leaves and a few juniper berries cooked at 60C for a touch over a hour. Seared with my new propane torch. Served with roast kipflers and coleslaw. I didn't even bother making mayonnaise and etc. I just used Duke's.

I use a Glencairn for rum unless I'm serving it in cocktail form.

I don't use tea towels for lifting hot things. I use welding gloves. Just make sure you don't buy safety gloves without first checking that, you know, they're the kind you can use for high heat work rather than the kind that just makes it a bit more difficult for you to slice off your fingers or get bitten by spiders.

I'm cooking dinner tonight. Keeping it simple: burgers made using elements from the Modernist Cuisine and Hawksmoor at Home recipes.

While we're at it, permit me to add another gripe. I will never again come across as so accommodating to the fruity dietary preferences of guests. No. I mean, leaving out a particular element that's a second tier element (say, the lettuce in a burger)? That's fine. No problem. I won't make you pick it out. But deciding, a few hours before, that you'd like to come to an event ... when two of the main elements of the dish contain trace amount of an ingredient you must never not ever consume for a somewhat irrational (but heart-string-tugging) reason? Fuck it. I'm not making something extra. I'm not buying something else. Bring your own ketchup, man. Sorry. I'll stop being a bad person.

Really? I use bleach on stainless steel fairly regularly (we have a stainless sink). Never had any problems. Was there some coating on your mincer that caused the issue maybe? Maybe. But there's also boat loads of people online banging on about how you should wash your sink with CLR, vinegar, baking soda, dish washing detergent, the tears of babies and basically anything but chlorine-based bleach. I'm not sure if it's real or some kind of old wives' tale derived from the experience someone had long ago with, say, all the critical bits of an 800W Tefal mincer.

This one was on the shelf with all the Rogue stuff at my local bottleshop and I grabbed it, I admit, without even looking at the bottle properly. I saw the word COFFEE. All the rest was irrelevant. I even thought it was a Rogue--same cap--until I looked closely at the bottle and realised it's not even American. It's another skip beer. Which, considering the run of success I've had with local brewskis, isn't such a bad thing. This one is Burleigh Brewing Company's Black Giraffe Black Coffee Lager. Now that's a name. It's like the Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace of Titles With Colons in Them of beers. Except rather than being shit it's actually rather good. It manages to be a novelty beer--a novelty beer being a beer that's really trying to taste of something other than just beer--that I actually like, which in the words of some nameless Guy Ritchie character played Jason Statham is quite a fucking thing. The maple bacon doughnut bullshit that Rogue served up? Devilry. Those sweet fake lambics that are like some mildly booze version of raspberry soft drink? Communism. This, though, it's got a nice coffee kick to it while still being unmistakably beery. A boilermaker of this plus some, I don't know, El Dorado 15 or Ron Zacapa 23 would, in the words of the Great Stath, by quite a fucking thing.

I'd use the pasta + tomato sauce thing as a base. You can sex it up with, say, the addition of canned tuna. Or sauteed eggplant. Or a handful each of anchovy fillets, capers and olives. I guess nothing's stopping you from working in some chunks of roasted vegetables, nodding in the direction of something like ratatouille, either. It's only economical so long as you don't get tired of it.

I will never not ever no matter what repeat this chemistry lesson I just experienced. So, you know how some sausage making literature advises you to sterilise your mincer with (diluted) bleach? Do not do this. Boil it. Steam it. Park it in the oven. Use that shit they sell at the home brew store. Do. Not. Bleach. It. No matter what. Take food poisoning and possible death over the combination of bleach and stainless steel. Beaucoup bad shit. Too beaucoup. Had a real good time cleaning off the shitty residue.

This sounds interesting, but a search didn't help me find more details unfortunately. Could someone point me in the right direction please?That's because I invented it So far everyone whom i've served it to seems to want to know the recipe, which is a good sign! I'm pleased to say my guests last night liked it.

I just made a batch of the mushroom ketchup. It's interesting. Quite different to the Blumenthal one. I think I prefer it, although it's hard to fairly review this sort of thing without some meat. The lack of, er, chunky bits is a positive, though.

Anyone know the refrigerated shelf life of the restructured Emmental slices (5.14)?

This sounds interesting, but a search didn't help me find more details unfortunately. Could someone point me in the right direction please? 4 corn on the cob, microwave 90 sec each, shaved1 red onion, diced2 tomatos, deseeded and dicedpickled Jalapeno, diced1 avocado, diced (at the last minute)juice of 1-2 limes (squeezed and added at the last minute)salt and pepper to tastecoriander leaves to tastepopcorn, about 50g, added at the last minute

I bought a bullshit free range organic turkey on Boxing Day--significantly cheaper than what you'd pay for one prior to Christmas--and hit it with a wet rub under and on top of the skin. I parked it in my gas smoker w/ a mixture of apple wood, cherry wood and mesquite and took it to 71C. I was very happy with it. I served it with a gravy (pressure cooked turkey/chicken stock reduced to 200mL and thickened with Ultrasperse M), Keith_W's popcorn salad, the freekah salad from Cumulus Inc and some leafy greens.

Another Australian brew: Feral's Hop Hog. This my idea of a hoppy beer. There's enough maltiness and fruitiness going on that it doesn't taste like you're sucking on one of those hop tea bags you can buy at the home brew shop. In fact, this beer is really good. It gets a big fat stamp of approval.

Well, I've made my gravy. Ultrasperse M seems to work. Having never used it before, I went with the book's 8 grams of thickener to 200 grams of heavily reduced stock ratio. This plus a couple grams of sage, a good grind of black pepper and a little bit of salt has made for a nice gravy with a good consistency. We'll see how it sits with the turkey I'm smoking. The gravy has a clean flavour: it tastes no different (well, aside from the sage and seasoning) to the heavily reduced, pressure cooked chicken and turkey stock I started with.