ChrisTaylor

Is it possible that water somehow got into the bag during shipment/storage?

To the people that figure the Hemingway is too sour: do you use ruby or white grapefruits? I use rubies as, summertime and all, they're the most readily avaliable to me. I don't find the drink too sour.

Beautiful treatment of the duck, huiray.

If you froze it: yes. Fridge? Sink that shit.

There are some very good new drinks. I mean, to dismiss new drinks outright and wholesale, it's like dismissing any new innovation in cooking or any other form of creating. Some of these are just restrained twists on a classic and popular formula. Others, like a few standouts in the beta cocktails book, are a few steps away from the Martini/Old Fashioned-level of simplicity (i.e. two or three readily avaliable ingredients). It's just that, like with cooking, I guess it's really hard to make something that's new and good without first having a solid grasp of the basics. I suspect having a base of simple recipes and using those to develop something of a palate, a sense of what has long-lasting appeal to a wide audience (or at least to people that have a palate similar to yours), gives you a solid point of reference when you set out to 'invent' something new. If you want to make some sort of Thai-inspired fusion dish, for instance, then you'll be served well by experience cooking the big classics and knowing the importance of acknowledging and socialising the core flavours of the cuisine (saltiness, sweetness, heat, et al).

Last night I made (another) Pegu w/ 2 oz Junipero (first time I've made it with that particular gin), the juice of a lime, a generous .5oz of Grand Marnier and a dash each of Fee's whiskey aged bitters, Fee's orange bitters and Regan's orange bitters. It was pretty good.

I'd go about taming it through my choice of vegetable side. Some sort of salad, perhaps involving cabbage, with a fairly acidic dressing.

I start the day with coffee. The afternoon and evening are for tea.

The packaging states the harvest date. The store is also very cool inside, to the point it reminded me of a high end wine store. I'm confident in how they store their products.

Rooibos and lapsang sochung from Lupicia, a nice store I stumbled across semi-locally. Want to order some sencha from them but I've never had any sencha before. Any recommendations on varieties? I've also been enjoying, much to my surprise, a flavoured black tea from T2. It's jacked with cinnamon and chilli. I thought it would be horrible, as many chilli gimmick products are, but it's actually pretty good.

I'm not a fan either. Then again, I'm usually not big on gin-based drinks that mostly taste like gin.

Nice choice. The dram and the brew both.

Made it with Punt e Mes too. I guess I expected something along the lines of a rum-based Negroni. It's not that at all. It seems to ramp up the bitterness a bit. It works.

Never eaten one? Shit, when I went up to Sydney and ... ate a fair bit I couldn't avoid the things. Seemed like, June or July or whenever it was, everyone, everywhere wanted to sell you a family-sized passionfruit souffle or, maybe, chocolate. But usually passionfruit. I found the sweet ones were moister than the savoury ones I had, such as the cheese-based ones (I guess something loaded up with cheddar or whatever is naturally going to be drier and heavier than something flavoured with passionfruit syrup). It may also depend on what you're using to flavour the souffle more than the sweetness/savouriness in itself. To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the format. But I suppose the moister, sweeter kind is superior. The savoury ones I've had were also noticeably more eggy than the sweet ones, altho' neither version truly denied being an egg product in its flavour profile.

I don't think M&R works as well as Dolin or Punt e Mes (which, granted, offers the audience something else altogether) in an otherwise standard, equal parts Negroni. To me M&R is a little too sweet, a little too heavy.

That's some erotic pork.

Another Matilda Bay: Alpha Pale Ale. Of the Matilda beers I've had/can vaguelly remember this one, I think, is the best. It's by no means a challenging ale but especially in the midst of summer (see also 36C) it's pretty good. Superior, yeah, to the newer Minimum Chips. Check this one out, haresfur.

I use 100g each of flour and butter to 1L of milk when making bechamel.

It's even more inappropriate in a fine dining restaurant, because they're one of the very last places where some sort of vestigial decorum is expected to hold. I don't care if someone rarely has the chance to attend fine dining; having to see him photographing every item makes the whole thing declasse for other diners like having to watch him licked the jus from his knife with relish, just to make sure that he was extracting every last atom of value from the precious experience. Maybe. I mean, culturally and all, Australians are laid back. Even at a fine dining level--and I've been to a few places in Sydney and Melbourne--I've only encountered maybe two? three? places that are truly formal (Vue de Monde and est., for locals). Photography doesn't seem barbaric in, say, even a place as well-regarded as Attica or Quay or Marque (all on the San Pellegrino list, for context). I can see how it might be inappropriate in other contexts but I've never felt that it was a sign of behaving badly in these restaurants in the same way, say, being really noisy always is.

Also, I'd suspect even having an eG membership, especially as a non-professional, is a higher level of food geekery than anything involving a smartphone's camera function.

I don't think it's specifically an American thing. It's also very common in Australia. That said, I've rarely seen people use an actual flash. Even when the lighting is dimmed down, giving you a sort of third-world-caveman-in-a-mine-after-10pm-during-the-apocalypse dining experience, people I've known and seen tend to just accept the lighting and make do with a dull, hazy shot. I've heard a couple of Australian chefs talk about the evils of photography to the media but I've never heard of anyone, anywhere actually doing anthing about it. I mean, the one chef that seems most outspoken about it, he's also outspoken about basically any issue to do with anything related to the restaurant business and is also one of the hosts of maybe our most popular cooking show, so he seems to come across as less of a kitchen person and more as a media person.

No flash and all that, yeah. Altho' I can understand why a restaurant mightn't want people to take photos (of the food, at least) at all. Still, I can't help but wonder if strongarming a guest out the door, Changstyle, is really the best way to do it. Maybe it'd come across better if you offered/gave customers a CD-R (come on, they cost a few cents per unit) with chef-approved photos of every dish from the menu/season/whatever. Only if they persisted with the photographu would you then be a bit more forceful, pointing out that it's not allowed. I know that Chang's supposedly a bit of a rock star chef--and don't get me wrong, I love his book and want to visit his restaurants in Sydney and New York--but still, dude, tact is a beautiful thing. I suspect that the desire to photograph one's dinner is a response to a few things. Firstly, there's the obvious social media influence. You can very easily share any and all aspects of your life with your friends, family, random people via imgur/deviantart/et al. There's that. Secondly, if celebrity chefs acquire (well, some of them) 'rock star' status, again, it's natural. Thirdly, especially if it's a fine dining restaurant, a lot of effort has (hopefully) gone into how the food is presented: not just how it's plated but also it's probably interesting in terms of ingredients/techniques/et al. I can see how people would want to take a photo of that. And, too, a fine dining experience isn't inexpensive. It's kind of a big deal for many people. Also, digital cameras, smartphones and accessible editing software (often in-built into these very devices) allow people to pretend for maybe a moment that they're taking that close-up wank-shot from the frontcover of last month's Gourmet Traveller/delicious/Saveur, just like blogging lets some people make believe that they're honest to gawd journalists.

Matilda Bay's 'Minimum Chips', a new but generic-ish (which is not to say unpleasant) golden ale. You'd have to be Australian to 'get' the name, right?

I found some Boulder chips in Australia. USA Foods, a store very close to me, sells some US brands of chips that we otherwise can't buy here. I picked up Boulder's cheddar/jalapeno and sea salt/black pepper. The salt and pepper ones, which I'm eating right now, are pretty good. The jalapeno ones weren't: too much cheddar, not enough chilli. I have no intention of making shopping at USA Foods a habit, despite the excellent chips, as they happily charge $10AUD (which is within a few cents of $10USD) for a box of Cap'n Crunch.

I worked out what the two unnamed ingredients were by looking up their website. The 'signature' cocktail is, unsurprisingly, on the menu. Sadly, I couldn't find a text version of the recipe, making that third of the (beautifully shot, as you say) video rather useless. Which is a shame, as that's the drink that most appeals.