ChrisTaylor

The chicken cacciatore recipe in Collards & Carbonara is probably their least restauranty dish, although it does exclude a couple of things commonly found in cacciatore recipes (olives, for example). I liked it. Would make again.

I bought some High West Double Rye today so an Old Fashioned seemed like a solid starting point. 2 oz rye, a couple dashes each of Angostura bitters and Fee's Whiskey Barrel Aged bitters and a lonesome sugar cube. Plus a lemon twist.

High West Double Rye and refills of Cynar, Punt e Mes, Fernet Branca and Green Chartruese.

Cook in the fat of cured porkgoods.

A ragu? Maybe combined with some pork shoulder, even.

The white pork ragu is very good.

Are you using freshly-squeezed orange juice or a bottled juice?

Hehehe. How much chicken are you putting into the oil at once? What temperature is the oil before the bird takes its plunge? I wonder if you're letting the oil cool down too much, something that maybe doesn't let the crust firm up as nicely as it should. I'd also recommend the flour/water batter someone mentioned earlier.

Uncut. Or diagonally, ensuring as-close-to-accurate-halves-as-you-can-get-unless-you-measure-to-the-nearest-millimetre-and-account-for-sandwich-shrinkage-as-a-result-of-pressure-from-your-hands. Too, I teach little kids. There's this whole other answer no one else has mentioned that's totally valid: any way that removes the crusts.

Our final list: lemon juiceorange juiceWorcestershire saucebalsamic vinegartomato sauceVegemiterocketchinottowhite chocolatedark chocolate (70%)molassesmaple syruppretzels (the dry snack food kind, not the baked foodstuffSome amusing reactions to chinotto, dark chocolate and Worcestershire sauce. >_>

My immediate though was some kind of Sazerac variation with a Raki rinse. Strond brown (brandy?) plus bitters plus raki wouldn't get along with caviar, though. Unless you serve the cocktail after the food. Could always go for a simple Collins, too. Maybe experiment with a scant barspoon of the anise beast to see if it works.

Raki has a damn strong favour. I mean, it's different, but you wouldn't serve Pernod, right?

I'm a grade one teacher and, at present, my class is learning about senses. When we looked at our sense of smell the children described the smells of various spices, herbs and other foodstuffs I brought into the classroom (ranging from coffee to lavender to beetroot powder). Tomorrow we're looking at taste. My idea is to create a simple flavour map and offer a variety of 'tastings': some of which slot neatly into, say, 'salty' (i.e. plain potato crisps) along with some that'll slot into more than one category (balsamic vinegar or chinotto). None of my treasures have any allergies, so that's not something I need to think about at all. I do need to think about avoiding crazily intense and very foreign taste sensations (i.e. straight fish sauce) as, really, they're 6-8 years old and only one or two of them (out of 23) would've eaten anything like fish sauce before. I want to avoid things I need to cook or otherwise spend time preparing. I'm looking for more ideas to flesh out my list. As it stands I have: lemon juicemandarinbalsamic vinegarWorcestershire saucemolassesmaple syrupVegemiterocket/arugula (I'd like to use radicchio but it's not readily available anywhere near work)chinottodark chocolatewhite chocolatecrisps or pretzels

It's maybe a little impressive to see that maybe one dash too many of Peychaud's bitters is enough to dominate Tennessee whiskey, cynar and smoked maple syrup that's only marginally less smoky than a bottle of liquid smoke.

42, although I've seen a variant sold in a bottle that looks like something you could, in a pinch, use to store any genies you happened to have floating around. Unsure if it's some aged, overproof edition or simply home to a drunk djinn.

Is Pusser's something I want to be posting about in this thread? Or, rather, is there anything Pusser's can do for a drink that, say, Smith & Cross or Inner Circle can't do? I can easily get Pusser's but can't easiy access S&C.

I tried making that one. Goddamn. You know what I'm like with genever unless it's well-hidden ... I thought you were trying to poison me.

Shit picture but Christmas puddings 2013. Just enough flour, bread crumbs and eggs to give the booze and fruit some structural integrity.

A somewhat modified version of the Smoke & Choke cocktail detailed here. 2 oz Gentleman Jack 0.5 oz smoked maple syrup (whoever smoked this wasn't fucking around--I suspect the final drink is about as smoky as the one made with an actual smoked bourbon) 0.25 oz Cynar 4 dashes Peychaud's bitters 1 dash Scrappy's orange bitters Stirred and then strained into an Old Fashioned glass w/ a lonesome, robust cube. It works, I reckon. I couldn't imagine knocking back more than, well, one of these ... but I'd make it again, yeah. And I'd make it for people that I suspect might potentially enjoy this. Remind me, haresfur.

Holy shit. John Currence's cola-brined fried chicken. Am now packing backs for Memphis. So fucking good.

I've been gifted some smoked maple syrup. Now, that little handwritten label that says 'smoked maple syrup'? The person that penned that wasn't fucking around. This stuff is smoky. You wouldn't want this on your pancakes unless you're the kind of person that would buy, say, the bacon-scented cosmetics and bacon-flavoured mints and etc sold on ThinkGeek. I don't see much potential for this in a breakfast context. Indeed, the reason I'm posting this in the cocktail section is because I think it could be used well in the cocktail world. My first thought is some sort of Old Fashioned variation (think the Benton's bacon Old Fashioned put out by PDT). Although I'm also wondering if it could get along with Perique if both were used sparingly. Perhaps it might enjoy associating with a funky rum such as Smith & Cross or Inner Circle. Any suggestions on where to start? If you have some smoked maple syrup you can play at home and maybe win the trip to Fiji.

The Black Daiquiri detailed on the packaging of a multipack of Scrappy's bitters, albeit with Appleton 12 instead of blackstrap rum. The drink: 1 oz each of blackstrap and white rums (I used Banks 5), 0.5 oz each simple and lime juice, .25 oz Fernet and 3 dashes of lime bitters. I might make a second one with Smith & Cross or Inner Circle in place of the Appleton. EDIT I think it was good with the Appleton but it's an excellent drink when made with Smith & Cross. You don't encounter too many drinks in which Fernet Branca is truly a background flavour unless you're messing around with things like Cynar.

Just made my first dish from Collards & Carbonara: the pork ragu. The sauce is very good but the recipe was a little vague/had a couple of printing errors. I do hope the entire book isn't like this. EDIT Er, detail-wise, for the recipe and all, it's a ragu that's challenged my ideas of what a ragu should be. I mean, I usually put some kind of cured meat into a ragu but mostly the meat is fresh meat. So a pork ragu would have shredded or minced pork. All of the meat in this, though, is cured. It uses a mix of pancetta, bacon, prosciutto, salami and soppressa. It's blended to a point that it attains a texture similar to a jarred pasta sauce.

Salt. You must add salt. And you must add a fair amount. Adding oil to the water is a waste of oil.

Very sad news.