ChrisTaylor

Bear Republic Red Rocket Ale. Very good. Easier drinking than the label suggests. Altho' given I spent this afternoon restraining from seven year old from kicking her friends in the face I suspect anything with alcohol qualifies as easy drinking.

Harviestoun's Bitter & Twisted Blond Beer. Lovely beer, this one. Not as bitter as I want it to be, not as bitter as the name suggests it should be, but it's nonetheless very nice. I should stop trying to Sibiliarise everything.

Norwegian Wood. Recipe here. An excellent drink. French Pearl. Recipe here. Also excellent, even if it's more heavily Pernoddy than anything else I've ever enjoyed.

One that I think is maybe possibly probably new. Or at least has just started to be marketed by one of the larger booze retail chains. Steamrail 'Gold Digger' Golden Ale. Avaliable also in the range is an Amber Ale and something else. An IPA? A Pils? Can't recall. Was going to buy a single bottle of the others but that'd involve wrestling bottles from packaging and that didn't seem like a lot of fun given the week I've had--too much effort, like trekking to a pub in Inner Mongolia (from, say, Melbourne or LA--technically it's possible from the latter, so maybe LA is a better choice) just for a pint. But, yeah, it's okay. Not interesting or compelling or avant garde or anything but goes down easily enough.

Cooked: flathead (an Australian variety) altho' I am very fond also of rock ling, snapper, gummy shark and sardines. All for different reasons. I think the meatiness of snapper is quite a thing. The sweetness of flathead and gummy shark is wonderful. The sardines have a fishy-meatiness and come in an ideal compact form. Cured/processed: high quality anchovies or sardines. Raw: salmon, tuna, kingfish. Flavour plus texture in the case of the former.

Just made the Last Mech Art. A monster.

Now that my Baitz (an Australian brand) maraschino is gone I bought some of the Luxardo stuff people keep banging on about on eG. It was a little hard to find but didn't involve going to quite the same lengths I had to to get Whistlepig rye, Banks Five Island rum, Smith & Cross rum and Batavia Arrack (if you're interested, haresfur, you can get it at Nick's). I've tried it in a Hemingway Daiquiri and, tonight, in a Junipero-based Last Word. Really takes both cocktails to another level. The Baitz isn't bad at all and in the event my retailer stopped stocking Luxardo I'd go back, yeah, but the Luxardo is in a class of its own. It's the Cointreau of cherry booze.

Probably a Sazerac. Or maybe a Hemingway Daiquiri.

Gummy shark, often sold as 'flake' in the state of Victoria, has the nicest meat of any shark. It's the only shark you'll find easily at a fishmongers. That said, you'll sometimes spot the flesh of other kinds of sharks: school sharks, elephant fish. Typically those are inexpensive compared to gummy shark as they are vastly inferior. Unless you specifically ask for something else, gummy shark is what you'll get when you buy fish and chips in Victoria (in other states I think they use something else). It's a white-fleshed fish with a sweet, mild flavour.

Paella w/ prawns and gummy shark. The rice didn't quite absorb all the stock. It wasn't soupy but at the same time it didn't end up with that nice crust you associate w/ paella. Next time I'll use my over enthusiastic gas stove again. I used my portable induction cooktop this time and found that the liquid evaporated in the centre of the pan but not around the edges. I'm also thinking I'll cook the prawns some other way (grill them, sous vide them, whatever seems like a good idea at the time) and add them later on. With such a small pan it's easy for a fairly small quantity of ingredients to crowd the pan.

Thirding Adam George's comment. I find some of the recipes on my shelves too sweet and will cut down the simple by maybe half. It's supposed to be a refreshing drink. To my mind, 'refreshing' suggests 'a little bit sour' and not 'overtly sweet'.

Nice. Keen to see the photos if you eventually find a way of posting them. Are you staying in Western Cape for the duration of the trip or eventually moving on? When I was over in Zimbabwe I tried a few South African roses and found that they were consistently a better product than, well, anything else I could find. That said, I never got the chance to buy anything more expensive than $15USD (the supermarkets didn't stock anything else).

Another Hemingway Daiq. Even tho' it's cold. Fuck I love this drink.

Lamb shoulder. 24 hours/64C then hit w/ a dry rub (salt, pepper, herbs de prov, dried onion) and browned quickly in the oven. Apologies for the shitty iPhone photo: actually rocked out the SLR but it decided it wasn't in the mood for photography.

Really? Shit. The website mentions they're replacing Der Raum Melbourne with another, differently-targetted cocktail bar. To be honest, as much as I enjoyed their cocktails I disliked the bar itself. The decor was kind of cool but the place was way too fucking loud for somewhere that took the craft of mixology seriously. Incidentally, have you been to Black Pearl yet? Worth a visit?

Agreed. I think it reflects the target audience/cultural perception of cocktails here. That said, there are places like Der Raum that fly in the face of this.

Thanks to you, I went out and bought this book. What I like about it - every dish is approachable. It does not call for modernist ingredients (no Xanthan, or Carageenans, or transglutaminase) like The Fat Duck Cookbook or Alinea. It rarely calls for extremely local produce - which is why dishes like those in NOMA is impossible to reproduce outside the home country. The cooking methods suggested are available in most home kitchens - it does not call for a centrifuge (I am looking at you, Modernist Cuisine).Sold. I was holding off as I expected another NOMA/Mugaritz.

Whatever mum likes. My mother really likes lemon tart. She dislikes chocolate. I'd make lemon tart for her. I would not make chocolate anything.

I did consider this but by this stage I figured I'd bought enough meat.

Northern Hemisphere-centric. Eww. I feel like fighting the power by writing lots of words with needless 'u's and talking about prawns and the metric system and Autumn.

This morning I hit a couple of stores that usually stock canned duck confit. No luck. I ended up buying a whole duck. The breasts are in the fridge for another ducktask and the legs are now, as I type these very words, sitting in casserole dish with the various pork products (stewed shoulder and hock, roast belly). I roasted the duck and included numerous fattymeatydelicious off-cuts from the carcass. I had a suspicion that confit made today (I could have vac-cured the legs and cooked them the old way today) would be no better than, say, duck legs that were simply roasted. I notice that, according to one of the old eG blogs (that quotes Paula Wolfert, no less) that I am not alone in thinking this. It's not like you're filling ravioli or enjoying a confit leg of duck with Puy lentils and salad. We're talking about duck mixed in with very rich cuts of pork, beans and pork/bean stock. I suppose Anthony Bourdain would call this 'System D'. Or maybe he'd just punch me. Still, at this point the dish looks like it's shaping up nicely. I ended up cutting the sausages altogether. In my travels I passed butchers that made generic pork sausages w/ the fake skins I despise and supermarket sausages. If I had foresight I'd have picked up, say, some nice plain-but-high-quality English or Irish-style pork sausages in advance or even just seasoned (according to Toulouse specifications) some fatty pork mince. I know of a couple of butchers that sell the real deal but travelling across the city to buy two sausages seems to go against the peasant origins of this classic dish.

In answer to Keith's earlier post, w/ his 3 day/62c ribs (any reason why you opted for this time/temp combo?) I did some sv/smoking of my own with some beef short ribs. 58c/48 hours. A dry rub comprised of salt, pepper, a bit of sugar, chipotle, garlic, onion and powdered mustard (the 'Big Bad Beef Rub' from AmazingRibs). Smoked for just shy of 2 hours. I was happy with them altho' next time I think I'd cut the chilli powder altogether and use more pepper and maybe add some herbal element. Rosemary, perhaps.

I bought, on impulse, some haricot beans. Naturally, this purchase--along with the shit weather--got me to craving cassoulet. I don't have any duck confit on hand and, frankly, don't really feel like making some. Don't get me wrong: even tho' the (affordable) commercially-avaliable ducks don't make a brilliant confit (this is battery farmed meat so it's very mild in flavour), I still like the stuff. I love duck in all its forms. Rare duck and 'overcooked' greasy Peking duck and duckeverything. Love it. But, yeah, making confit is expensive, even if I can stuff the two breasts in the freezer for some other ducktask. So ... I propose a duck-free cassoulet. Well, not totally duck free ... I do have some duck fat in the fridge. I'm not thinking anything outright barbaric like, say, chicken breasts (no, really, I've seen it done) or goddamn turkey bacon but a combination of pork products. Hock/trotter. Belly. Perhaps neck. Some sausage. Pork and beans. And, because it's not like belly and neck contain enough fat or anything, a bit of duck fat for good measure. Do you think I'll regret this? That my resulting plate of pork and beans will be pleasing, yes, but ultimately unsatisfying--sort of like a great book with the last chapter torn out by a vandal? Is the confit, even if it's not matured and made from a dishonourable battery-farmed duck, actually that important if you have everything else? Looking at the various books I have around that contain recipes for cassoulet, among them Anthony Bourdain/Guillaume Brahimi/Paula Wolfert/Larousse Gastronomique/Joel Robuchon/Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (an excessively double-barreled surname if there ever was one), it's oft-mentioned that cassoulet 'usually' contains duck/goose confit and yet no one dares to provide a recipe for a duck/goose/bird-less cassoulet. Mutton may/may not appear. The cuts of pork may vary. And yet the only duck-free recipe that's on my shelf of a couple hundred books is, to my knowledge, the one in Pork & Sons. That recipe is basically a casserole of sausages and beans. That doesn't scream cassoulet to me. EDIT At the very least, before I'm hauled off and summarily executed by purists, I argue that I am not as savage as the monsters that create recipes like this one.

Ostrich biltong is lekker.

Beautiful, Keith.