ChrisTaylor

Why not use a pressure cooker if you don't want to spend ten hours doing things? Then you're not limited by the size of the bag.

Early days, yeah--it's only the first of December--but I assume I'm not the only one already preparing food for Christmas dinner. In my case, it's not that far off. Have the family coming over in two weeks so I want to get as much out the way as I can. At the moment my menu is very close to complete. I'd prefer to be cooking goose or even pork but my mother thinks Christmas isn't Christmas unless there's turkey involved. And ham, too. There has to be ham. Not content with just roasting a turkey I'm opting for the following ... Sous vide breast. Yet to settle on a time and temp. Was unhappy with 60C/3 hours. Have a breast brining at the moment I'll try at a different temperature. The brine is essentially the same one Thomas Keller uses for his roast chicken in the Bouchon book. Turkey and pork boerwors. A nod to my partner's heritage and, with the speck content, a way of kind of sort of almost ticking off the ham requirement. Too, sausage ... stuffing ... yeah. I finished these only a few minutes ago. I'm keeping some in the fridge but I'll obviously be freezing the batch that's intended to be served at the dinner. Tempted to sous vide them and then freeze them. Fried turkey. Going to scrape the meat down the length of a wingette (forming a little drumstick--kind of), sous vide it and then deep fry it. The various bones, off-cuts and etc I've collected along the way are currently sitting in the pressure cooker. The stock will be reduced to serve as a gravy. I've already made the Christmas pudding. It'll be supported by a creme anglaise jacked w/ brandy and some rum and raisin icecream. Tempted to fuck around with agar and make a date gel. Mostly as an excuse to use agar. We'll see. Won't be doing anything terribly exciting with the vegetables, I'm afraid. Roast potatoes and sous vide carrots are a must but beyond that? I guess it'll depend on the weather. What is everyone else doing/prepping this year?

Too, Keith, I've eaten your food. The meals have always been exceptional.

Simple dry rub and hot smoke.

If you wanted to crisp the skin on a sv turkey breast, would you chill and (briefly) deep fry or park it in the oven for a while? Any other suggestions? Would air drying in the fridge for a few hours make my turkey skin crisp up more effectively, no matter the method I chose?

Milk and bananas. Kidneys, too, unless they're tempered with gravy in a pie. The smell of kidneys in the pan makes me think of things I really don't want to consume.

A lot of 'steak and salad'-type things. Often with bread as the starch as I can't be fucked boiling potatoes or even washing rice. I will admit that an sv rig has been a life saver here. I mean, I come home and one of the big time sinks of prepping a meal is ready to go. EDIT There are also a lot of really basic pasta dishes that serve this. Pasta w/ eggplant that's been browned and then simmered w/ canned tomatoes. Pasta con sarde. Or with tuna, even. Simple.

Nothing but good things to say about the Sous Vide at Home people. The unit started displaying crazy temperatures. An email later and I was offered a full refund or repair. I opted for the latter and what appears to be a new unit was sent out within a couple of days of them receiving my faulty temperature controller.

Lose the simple. You'd get enough sweetness, surely, from the pimento dram. Or maybe a funkier rum. IC? Smith & Cross?

If you can't fit the thing in your mouth and get a bit of each element--without, you know, unhinging your jaw, all python-like--then it's not a burger. It's a tower of food someone has decided to cap with a bread roll.

Thanks for clearing that up. Wondered, in all serious, about what the difference was. Here we have apple juice, which is exactly what it sounds like and ranges from stuff that's pretty much just juice to concentrate that's cut with a lot of sugar and other ingredients. Cider is something else. It's alcoholic. And it ranges from the dry English- and French-style stuff to really sweet, artifically flavoured ... things often jacked with real fake lime, raspberry, kiwi and a hundred other fruit flavours. Rekorderlig, et al. The latter style of cider is more readily avaliable than the former. When I speak of adding pimento dram or whatever else to cider, I'm thinking of the drier stuff.

Hard cider as opposed to ... apple juice? I'm assuming that's what soft cider is, I mean, as I thought cider was alcoholic by default. I've only tried using it as a sub, kind of, for ginger ale in Dark-n-Stormy-type things. Purely because a friend that often brings cider also likes to try jacking random things w/ rum, ginger liqueur, et al. I suspect that's the best approach, actually. It's not particularly creative but I find a small quantity of pimento dram gets along nicely w/ cider, so long as it's really dry and actually has an apple flavour. I suspect some of the 'pie spice' amari might work, too.

Negroni w/ genever in place of London dry. Standard 1:1:1 formula, otherwise, plus a couple of dashes of orange bitters (Fee's and Regan's). This works.

Made a martini w/ a 5:1 ratio using Junipero and Noilly Pratt. Some orange bitters, too, just for fun. Altho' I enjoyed it more than any other martini I've made, purely because I know both of the key ingredients are good, this certainly isn't going to become a go-to cocktail any time soon for me.

Just kicking this out there, but all the Wild Turkey rye I've seen for sale locally is still the 101 stuff. Get shopping, haresfur. Also, I found the Van Winkle 13 year old Old Fashioned Rye for sale in Australia quite a while ago. A store was importing them directly. Bottle is almost done. Wonder if I'll be lucky enough to find a replacement: he only for a couple of bottles in every now and then.

Tom Collins w/ Junipero. 2 oz Junipero, ~3 oz soda water, .5 oz simple, a shy .75 oz of lime juice.

Junipero Laird's apple brandy

Cointreau doesn't have an especially pronounced orange flavour. I'd steer towards Grand Marnier, perhaps, or maybe something else in that family. Mandarine Napoloean, say. A stronger bitter orange peel flavour w/ the sweetness of a brandy-based liqueur. Altho' I'm no fan of the orange/chocolate thing, so I wouldn't do that at all. I do like the idea of matching it with sherry, tho'. You could also match it with a nice rum. Something along the lines of Ron Zacapa 23. Aged rum and chocolate get along nicely. EDIT And yes, the cake is incredible. I'm v much a savoury-inclined person--desserts are almost always the least enjoyable part of a degustation for me--but this cake was amazing. It was probably the best dish on Quay's degustation when I went there. In part because of what it was but also because it was the first chocolate cake I'd had that was actually a chocolate cake. Most things passed off as chocolate cakes don't taste a whole lot of chocolate. Or maybe some elements do, but not the entire thing. Pete Gilmore doesn't fuck around. This is by far the best chocolate cake--so complex in execution but so single-minded in intent (no distractions of, say, fruity flavours here or coffee-infused stuff there)--I've ever had.

Have you eaten the cake before? At the restaurant they serve it nude. Not so much as a quenelle of cream. It doesn't need anything. In fact, finishing it is a fair achievement.

The green papaya salad, while having about ten thousand ingredients, is very good. Even when you're cooking while semi-intoxicated and figure maybe going for a full on julienne is a shit idea so mostly you just make thin slices.

Beef massaman. Simple recipe. Fairly quick, too, if you use a pressure cooker rather than a long simmer. I used short ribs instead of the recommended flank steak.

Montenegro is sweet and reminds me of musk stick lollies. It's no sibling to Aperol, altho' I suspect they'd get along. I'd put del Capo in with the Averna and Nonino.

Camel t-bones. Served w/ tomato, red onion, pickled red cabbage, tzatziki and fried egg in some lightly toasted pide.

Why not supply for own bag? As in hand them a cloth bag or something and ask them to put the loaf in that.

More Red Duck. This time the amber ale. Very good.