ChrisTaylor

Had another dinner party last night. Someone else took photos. Maybe of everything, even. Might get to see them, even. I didn't bother. I mean, I had my camera out and everything--the SLR, not just the iPhone--and it decided it just wasn't going to work. I asked nicely. Said please. Made some muttered threats. No dice. No photos from me. Anyway. The theme: classic British and Irish. Meaning I knocked together a playlist with the Stones and the Pogues and Black Sabbath and John Lennon and then, over the course of a week or so, prepared beef and blue cheese pie (recipe from A Girl and Her Pig; beef came in the form of braised and shredded short ribs) game pie (game taking the form of rabbit and quail [not really game, sure, okay] cooked in Trotter Gear; recipe from Nose to Tail Part II) 'roo, stout and mushroom pie ('roo is a lot cheaper and more readily avaliable than venison here, and I didn't really feel like two beef pies, so Skippy it was) slow-roasted pork belly with black pudding crumbs, puy lentils, scrumpy reduction, apple/vanilla chutney (roasted pork belly previous day at ~100C for a few hours, pressed it in fridge overnight under a pink lunch box filled with coins; reduction and chutney both from Andrew Pern's Foie Gras & Black Pudding--the title dish, even; pork belly cut into little cubes and re-heated in pan). haggis and kimchi cheese burgers (the kimchi being a nod to the kimchi burger in Hawksmoor at Home and a practical solution to the need for spiced vegetable crunch with structural integrity; burgers assembled by haresfur: essentially a sandwich of lightly toasted white bread [cut into small squares], haggis w/ melted cheddar on top, kim chi and oven-dried tomatoes [Heston at Home]). colcannon (buttery mashed potato jacked w/ parsley and chives) glazed carrots (also Heston at Home) pea and ham soup Things that came in from elsewhere: rice pudding from Nich, following the Blumenthal recipe but using some rose/vanilla-laden black tea instead of vanilla pods (or in addition to?) banoffee tart berry/white chocolate scones fudge annachan's apple/rhubarb crumble haresfur's whisky macs w/ Dalwhinnie (nice dram, that)

Haven't had the Pilsner. The Sparkling Ale is the pick of the regulars that I've had. The two seasonals I've had--last year's Vintage and this year's Celebration Ale--are both good. If you're still coming down tomorrow I have a few in the fridge.

De La Louisiane. My first cocktail from the book. Very good. Used Punt e Mes instead of Dolin because I have *that* much left in the bottle and don't really use vermouth often enough to keep more than two bottles--one red, one white--open at a time.

Been thinking on this myself lately. From the British butchers I picked up some slices (he sells slices and whole haggis). I want to serve bite-size morsels to people who mostly haven't tried it before--the idea is to make it accessible but not take away from what haggis is. Kicking around the idea of deep-fried haggis as a sort of fast food thing, I eventually settled on a sort of cheeseburger. I'm thinking a little skewer with a cube of toasted bread, a dried tomato (like the ones in Heston at Home--I want to get the ketuchuppy sort of flavour but not have any liquid), a cube of the haggis w/ melted cheddar and ... I want something 'fresh' to cut through that. A little bit of white onion, maybe?

You've confirmed my deepest and darkest suspicions. Given I've reduced basically every other task I have to 'reheat at last minute' or 'throw in oven and forgot about for a while, then serve' I guess I'll just suck it up and make it just before I serve it.

Having spent a bit more time with these books, some revised reviews Eat With Your Hands - great presentation, lots of fun but ... maybe it's the recipes I've chosen, maybe it's bad luck, maybe it's the quality ingredients I'm purchasing and a million other factors, but so far nothing has wowed me. The beef curry was good and I'd maybe revisit it some time, and I want to make the Fatty Duck at some point, but most of it has been just passable. A Girl and Her Pig - this is quickly becoming a book I turn to as often as Momofuku. If I was purchasing a book as a gift, or even just one book out of the ones I've already got access to, it'd be this one.

I want to serve colcannon (if you don't know what it is, for all intents and purposes it behaves like regular mashed potato in every respect) to a group. Thing is, I want to basically be able to just reheat it and maybe spend, at most, a couple of minutes fiddling with it (i.e. serving in the chopped herbs). At the same time, I don't want to lose a lot of quality. As a kid, I remember mum reheating her mashed potato (milk-based) in the microwave. It didn't stand up well to that treatment. My mashed potato is heavy on the butter and I'm ... willing to reheat it using basically anything. As much as I don't want to spend a lot of time messing around with it during 'service', I don't mind having to dump it in a saucepan. Can it be done? At what stage should I stop and hold it? What is the best way to go about reheating it? EDIT And yeah, I get that, obviously, people do this all the time. When I order aligot or regular mashed potato or any other variant, I understand that, out the back, they're not exactly scrubbing and peeling and boiling potatoes to order.

My go-to banh mi place offered both regular crisp pork belly (my favourite--and keep in mind you've got condiments, salad, etc to go in there, so it's not a slice of pork in bread with nothing else) and red-cooked pork. Chicken, too.

Coopers is and has for a long time been the best of the mass market Australian brews. For sure. In all its variants. The new one, the 'celebration ale', is very good. Such a shame that overseas (judging by BeerAdvocate reviews and eGullet posts and etc) that Australian beer means either Fosters or shitty made-for-export-only 'craft' beers such as Barons.

Has anyone cooked much from the book? Tonight I started with the orecchiette w/ fennel sausage (I admit to cheating and just buying good sausages) and Swiss chard. Simple but very good. If you already had the sausages kicking around or cheated like I did, then this could easily be a mid-week meal.

Arbitrary Nature of Time. No WT101 so I opted for Booker's.

The Improved Scotch Cocktail linked earlier in the thread. Used Ardbeg Uigeadail, as it's my favourite Islay that I have at the moment. Went a little short on the lemon juice, purely because I don't like it when whisk(e)y-based cocktails--Ward Eights, et al--are knocked around too much by the sourness of lemons. At the moment I'm sipping on a Trans-European Express. Don't have Macallan so I opted for ... gee, I was looking at what might sound like a sensible choice, say, a Glenfiddich or even the Aberlour but instead I threw caution to the wind and reached for Talisker 10 (which, incidentally, is my go-to scotch for classic scotch-based cocktails such as the Blood and Sand). Nice enough. Better, I think, than the Trans-Atlantic, which was nice enough, too, sure, but maybe wasn't quite that great because of the creme de cacao. I couldn't tell if it was because I bought the Baitz stuff (an Australian liqueur company--their other liqueurs have served me well enough, so I have no reason to be sus about the cacao [of course, you'd think I could buy Marie Brizzard ... and, true, the MB range has started appearing on Australian shelves all over the place, priced on par with Baitz and others, but of course they have like three fucking kinds of curacao and not even one kind of creme de cacao--unless I want to go Nick's and pay literally twice the going rate ... for something I'll probably only use for Trans-Atlantics]) or because creme de cacao just reminds me far too fucking vividly of cheap chocolate, liek all those bad giant-sized Easter eggs you'd get from relatives as a kid and the whole time you're just wishing they'd buy you one small good egg. But. Yeah. This book. So far everything has been a winner. Haven't tried that pineapple/Pernod/whatever lobster and, to be honest, Mr Wondrich seems to have a very similar palate to me. Mostly. So I guess at some point I will try it, when I remember to buy pineapple juice and all, but I won't be too concerned if it's the very last drink I try. And between now and then I need to make/get kummel (which is fine, as it's great) and some South East Asian rotgutrumstuff. So. It'll be a while yet.

Having eaten a stupid quantity of these for breakfast ($3 for a roll of awesome?) some preferences I have: * Roast pork belly as opposed to the cured meats, even tho' I think that roast meat as opposed to cured meat is maybe a riff on the classic and perhaps not honest-to-God banh mi (which I grew up knowing simply as a 'pork roll'). * Easy on the coriander. Or, rather, take care with it. I love coriander. I do. It's just that my go-to banh mi guys basically tear the bunches into long strips, meaning when you're eating the roll you always need to pull out nasty threads of stem from your teeth. * Butter or nothing. No marg or random vegetable fat spread. Proper greasy pork belly kind of butters its own bread, anyway. Pig butter. And I'm pretty sure that some places in Springvale will just go all out and use lard, anyway. * The best soy sauce for the job is that thick, sweet Indonesian stuff. I'm off to buy some pork belly. Will report back. EDIT I have no idea of the ethno-cultural mix of Spokane or your cities/areas, but truly, plant your arse in the car and go find an area with a few Vietnamese/SE Asian retailers. Look for a bakery. In Melbourne, at least, damn near every suburb I've shopped in has at least one Vietnamese bakery. And pretty much all of them will sell you banh mi. It might not be great banh mi, but it will give you an idea of what you're shooting for. I also suspect that it's probably easier to make the pork belly version for you than the cured meats version, as the whole idea is to have a selection of meats (brawn and that sort of thing). Fresh slabs of pork are probably easier to get your hands on. And I assume pate isn't too hard to get (or, in a pinch, make).

http://www.amazingribs.com/recipes/rubs_pastes_marinades_and_brines/meatheads_memphis_dust.html 'Meathead', the Amazing Ribs guy, doesn't bottle/jar/otherwise package and sell his spice rub.

Just set up a modified Ashtray Heart. No regular sweet vermouth, so I used Punt. And no grapefruits kicking around, so a gentle dash of grapefruit bitters (Fee's) sounded like the a good option. Could've gone lemon, I guess. Have a tree and everything. But it's out in this cold. Anyway, the drink itself is verging on being a bit of a beast, altho' it's nothing like the Racketeer or Translantic Giant, which are delicious obscenities. This isn't bad. I like it. Also, because I live in the far east, Inner Circle Green instead of S&C.

I think if you buy it expecting a vegetarian Aliena or Mugaritz or Bras-type book, you'll be let down. To be honest, I think they'd have been better off pitching it along the same lines as the new Ducasse: accessible, few ingredients, mostly short cooking times. Very much a 'famous chef at home on his day off' book rather than an exercise in precise timing, grocery foraging and advanced techniques.

I've seen restaurants solve the problem by turning off the tap. If the group can't get any more alcohol eventually they pay up and move on to somewhere that will serve them.

Heh. Did pulled pork last night, too. Used the 'Memphis Dust' from the Amazing Ribs site (nice page, that). No other marinades, etc. Placed it in the smoker for 3 hours at ~100C. Then wrapped it in foil with a little bit of 50:50 apple juice:cider vinegar and roasted it in the oven at ~100C for 7 hours. Pulled apart nicely. Was especially good when paired with the 'grown-up' mustard sauce from the same page.

Shit. Didn't hear of these down here. Presumably mentioned in The Age's epicure section at some point but maybe I just ignored it. Didn't read it. Shame, really, altho' I guess it's the nature of the business. Maybe on some level it's reflective of the economy and all, but new places are opening all the time and some becoming quite successful. I suppose the market--Australia has a very small population, after all--can only support a certain number of restaurants. Somewhere like Pier, which has lost a fair bit of its reputation, might suffer even more from somewhere new that's got a lot of media attention and hype surrounding it. Maybe. And even for a place that's still held in high regard and has a bit of publicity attached to it--Becasse, say--I guess there's still the issue of a lot of competition. A lot. If you're running on a fairly thin profit margin, it probably doesn't take too many slow weeks to put you in a very difficult position.

An Old Fashioned with Van Winkle rye. Shut the door. Turn off the lights.

Er, I'm assuming at some point I've posted one liner reviews of something like the Smith's Angaston or Hellyer's Road or Sullivan's Cove or the new 100% rye (white spirit only at the moment--the still is only very new). Maybe. But yeah. Australian whiskey exists. Most of it is young due to low demand/low production/real need to get the product to punters asap to make any kind of money at all. It's also often expensive. Some of it's imported or, through some ninjagoogling and the wonders of the postal system, might make its way to Guelph, Ontario. Lark: the original, I think, in the sense it was the first legally operated still and brought about a change in laws that, well, let people make whisky. Sort of trying to be an Islay. I don't like it very much. They also make a gin, a vodka (I think), a liqueur and some other stuff. Sullivan's Cove: only had the double barrel variant, as that's what's avaliable on the site in a 150mL mini (the large bottles are very expensive). It's just okay. Bakery Hill: yet to try that or some other smaller (a couple of them closed) 'stills, such as Nant (meant to be excellent) Hellyer's Road: decent, I guess. The peated and pinot noir finish variants are my favourite. From memory these guys and Bakery Hill sell boxes that contain minis of each variant. I'd recommend this over buying a whole bottle if you're only just curious about this. And even then, the mini price is pretty expensive. Smith's Angaston: very limited run. Product of a monster-sized company that purchased a plot of land and, hey, cool, there's a still here. Made some whiskey, aged it for some time (8, 10, 12 and I think there's an even older variant coming out eventually). Possibly the one Australian whiskey I've had that's not trying to be scotch (more than a few nod to Islay: I guess because, if you have consumed both a bottle of Lark and a bottle of Laphroaig and were travelling blind-folded with a busload of bagpipe-playing Scottish tourists, Tasmania could easily be confused for Scotland) and sold it every so often. Stumbled on it by chance. Very good. The only one I've had that I'd rate up there with the rest of the world's offerings, altho' some locals will frown and say that Hellyer's/Bakery/etc, young as they are, are perfectly fine and really only just need more age on them. I hope at least one of those 'stills has thought to put, say, half of their batch in barrels for 10, 12 years and to start selling that. Altho' if I need to pay ~$100AUD or even more, in some cases, for a three or so year old whisky, I hate to think of what I'd pay for some 10 year old Lark. EDIT Just so you know, New Zealand also makes whisky. At least one of their stills sells their product internationally. In the sense you can find it fairly easily in Australia. I think it's even meant to be okay. Nice, super-tourisity packaging, too, with a big map of Middle Earth the country and everything, so maybe it does go even further afield.

It is. I'm a bit of a rebel that way, posting musings on blends and rye and bourbon and Irish and Australian whiskies in a single malt scotch thread.

Bought a new bottle of Booker's and in a moment of gross stupidity managed to remove the plastic cap from the cork when opening it for the first time. Gee. Well. Luckily I had a dram of Rittenhouse left, so I consumed the Ritt, washed out the bottle and decanted the Booker's into the now empty screw-cap bottle. Tried some cut with water and then made a Manhattan, factoring in my dislike of sweet things: 2 oz Booker's, 1 oz Punt e Mes, 1 subtle dash each Fee's whiskey barrel, Fee's orange and Regan's orange. It probably offends the Manhattan Gods and every right-thinking person everywhere, but this works nicely for me: a combination of bitter and whisk(e)y). And voetsek strong.

Revisited Booker's for the ... third? time. It's grown on me a whole lot.

In Australia you used to be able to (easily) buy kombu. Mostly, mind you, in little packets, like you'd use if you wanted to make dashi, but I guess if you poked around (I never needed to) you'd maybe find large sheets. Anyway. I want to make the vegetarian nigiri in the new Nobu book. Part of the process is placing vegetables (radish, baby carrot, whatever), after salting them, (tightly) in between sheets of kombu in the fridge overnight. Then you follow the usual process of shaping and assembling nigiri. It's mentioned that sometimes this technique is used with bland fish to impart umami. So. Yeah. Only recently was it decided you can't import kombu into Australia any more. Maybe some store, somewhere, is pulling a dodgy. I wouldn't be surprised. What can I use instead of kombu? Will regular nori sheets do the job? I don't need to keep it strictly vegetarian, by the way, so if there's a non-veg solution I'm all ears.