ChrisTaylor

Well into the prep of tonight's dinner. Ticking away in the slow cooker right now are some black-eyed peas (Donald Link's recipe). I've just finished the meez for the chicken and sausage gumbo and red beans (both from John Besh's book). Over the next couple hours I'll be finishing a blueberry tart (Besh), a coffee and garlic crusted beef chuck roast and some 'competition' chicken (Adam Perry Lang in both cases). I will also be preparing another batch of the popcorn crocodile. From elsewhere I'm getting chilli con carne (a friend is following the Blumenthal recipe for 'perfect' chilli) and a corn salad (thanks, Keith_W). I am also getting lots and lots of cake. Sometimes eGuleteer Nich is bringing a few cakes--I know about a chocolate/rum/chicory tart and crack pie. There's a bourbon and pecan tart of some kind. Molasses cookies. Fudge.

Surely old Karly would feel it right and proper and such that every person could enjoy food made with fresh ingredients after toiling away in the factory all day. I mean, fresh vegetables plus meat plus etc cooked in a slow cooker is surely better for his well-being--and that of his family--than McDonald's or KFC or some other Big Evil (doubtlessly American) Multinational, right? We keep coming back to the point of snobbishness. And I'm not singling you out. Not at all. You're not the only one to mention the slow cooker and, honest to God, it's not like the slow cooker is the snobbiest example mentioned in this thread. If people are cooking at home in any way, shape or form--even if they're using slow cookers or pressure cookers, even if they're taking a few shortcuts such as just buying the bread or purchasing their meat from a supermarket--then I think that's a good thing. I think it's a better thing than ready-meals from the freezer section. Better than takeaway. It's not exactly three courses plus an amuse from Heston at Home or, perhaps, a realisation of the food pyramid on a single plate, but maybe that's just a reality and not at all a cop-out.

I've just finished my first batch of chicken stock using a slow cooker. Other than the change on equipment (I previously prepared my stock on the stove or in the oven) I kept the recipe the same: a whole pile of wings and carcasses (when I can get them, I replace the carcasses with boiler chickens), a couple carrots, a few onions and a couple sticks of celery. Aside from a little pinch of pepper and a couple bay leaves, I use no herbs or spices: my stock might be used for something that'd be benefit from the thyme/parsley/etc, but maybe I'll end up using it for something that can do without the thyme.

Re: Cocchi. If Nick's don't have it, and they don't, I doubt anyone would.

'Shackleton's whisky'--Mackinlay's Rare Old Highland Malt. It's really quite mediocre. It might even verge on 'shit', but maybe I'm doing some statistical bullshitingaround given the price tag. The $200AUD asking price? It's for the story, not the dram. For that I could buy a 25 year old Glenfarclas (beautiful stuff ... and I'd have change) or some Laphroaig, Oban and something else.

To drag Lillet 2012, kicking and screaming and everything else, back to the realm of the somewhat bitter apertif, I jacked it with a couple drops of orange bitters. I'll attempt this Fashionably Lillet cocktail tonight.

I'd rather keep my slow cooker ticking away during the day, making stock, say, then leave the (gas) stove running.

Some new acquisitions open up a lot of options. I'm sampling my new bottle of Sazerac rye in a Sazerac. Very nice dram, that. Too, I reckon I'll check out the Lillet I finally got around to buying. Maybe a Vesper.

Rum and raisin icecream Americano (Campari and vermouth) icecream Lemon olive oil "" Lemongrass and Domaine de Canton "" Bittersweet chocolate and ancho chilli "" Spiced "" Fennel ""

Average price in the US $70. I paid a fair bit more than that to get some Rittenhouse. Which, too, was hard to find. The only readily avaliable ryes in Australia--and only larger bottle shops stock these--are Wild Turkey and Jim Beam. The range of American whiskies avaliable to us has increased dramatically in recent years (i.e. a lot of the Jim Beam and Jack Daniels small batch stuff, like Basil Hayden and Booker's and etc), but it's one of those situtions where you have (ignoring the fact that Booker's will set you back $90) lots of options but little choice. I can go into Dan Murphy's and find only two ryes but lots and lots of bourbon: almost all of which are bottom to medium shelf. I can go to the rum section and despite there being easily over a dozen bottles (ignoring the cans of pre-mixed rum and Coke/rum and ginger ale), there are maybe two styles of rum represented. Three if you count cheap spiced rum. And even then, your entry-level Captain Morgan-type stuff will set you back the best part of $40 (possibly even a little more in some other suburuban bottle-os). Incidentally, if anyone is flying to Melbourne in the next few months as part of a holiday, well, you and I, I think we can do business.

An Old Fashioned with Thomas Handy rye. If you can find it here, the stuff is 300AUD. Which is basically 300USD. Good but not $300 worth of good. I hate being pillaged due to geography.

I was using tail fillet. In the case of crocodile, at least, I believe that this is the 'best' cut in the sense that it's tender. The flavour and texture? Mild fish notes, more than a hint of lean supermarket (as opposed to, say, some fatty rare breed stuff) pork and/or chicken. Texture of well-done chicken breast with the odd bit of what I guess is connective tissue. Very, very, very easy to turn into inedible leather. I haven't tasted alligator, but from what I've read it's much the same.

Not dinner as such. More of a trial for next week's dinner party. Popcorn crocodile using Jamie Oliver's recipe for alligator. It works.

Decided to check out the Leap Year. It's okay. Nothing special. My girlfriend seems to think it's too bitter.

Punt e Mes Manhattan w/ Wild Turkey rye. Now I get this drink.

White Russian ... nut liqueur ... Nutty Russian?

Just put my first two lots of Heston Blumenthal-style 'whisky gums' in the fridge. I have one lot of Maker's Mark and another of Sazerac.

Shochu Old-Fashioned: a shiso-laced shochu I found at a Japanese deli, orange bitters and lemon twist. The citrus works really, really, really well with the shochu.

Let's make this very clear: I don't do sweet things. I don't make them and I generally don't eat them. With very, very, very rare exception. I can't remember the last time I attempted to tackle a cake or tart. So when a friend told me to make chocolate and chilli icecream, just as a throwaway thing on Facebook, within three days I owned a Cuisinart icecream machine and had some milk and cream in the fridge infusing with a handful of anchos. These things happen. The icecream is churning right now. I followed the New York Times' recipe for bittersweet chocolate icecream, only I infused the cream with some ancho chilli and a little bit of nutmeg and clove. This will be the first time I've made icecream. I hope it's not shit. I'm also candying some jalapeno, as my friend's 'plated dessert' idea also had a bit of that going on. Jalapeno might be too hot for this application: I'll test the pieces out and maybe duck down to the supermarket to 'downgrade' to some standard 'green'/'red' chillies. EDIT I just tasted the icecream before putting it in the freezer. The chocolate flavour is very good and for a minute there I thought it totally dominated the flavour of the ancho chilli: I wanted that, to a point, but I also wanted to be able to tell the chilli is there. But you can. Just when you think, oh, it's not there, how sad, you a nice warming after taste. Reasonably happy with it for a first attempt.

Because every decision you make about the food you eat has consequences. There are environmental consequences. And health consequences. And cultural consequences. I would think that for some people, the work of those whose job it is to grow or raise food is important enough to care about, because the issues that affect our farmers, growers and food producers will affect us all eventually. It's "amazing" that we're even having this kind of discussion. Amazing? I don't think so. "Amazing" is the phrasing I'm using in this forum in the diplomatic sense. The exact choice of verbiage I would use is something else altogether. Settle, pettle. You misunderstand my point. It's a good thing being able to know that--through a system of labelling, regulation, informed salespeople, etc--that my chicken came from some farm that cares for animal welfare. That the chickens aren't pumped full of God-knows-what and then packed into a shed, Tetris-style, until no more chickens will fit. Literally. That's a good thing. I don't want to devalue that. I do not question the worth of that. I do not question knowing whether my steak came from a grass-fed or grain-fed steer is a good thing or not. I get that. I like that. It helps me make informed choices about the products I buy. What I do question is--and what I am a touch cynical about--is the obsession with it. The MasterChef and Jamie Oliver thing of TV chefs telling regular punters to ask their butcher/fishmonger/grocer/etc where their everything came from. People are told to ask this question but not until I opened Hawksmoor at Home did I see a single one of these chefs follow it up with a summary what you wanted to hear more in-depth than 'oh yeah, everything is organic and free-range: even the carrots.' It's like telling someone, when they're about to buy a car, to ask lots of really technical questions about the car's performance/the construction process/etc. If you're uninformed enough to have to be told to ask such questions by an expert, there's a fair chance you're uninformed to not understand what counts as a good/bad answer. I also question whether, for a lot of these TV chefs, if it has much to do at all with the environment/sustainability. Perry's Rockpool is a steakhouse. The star of the show is aged beef. And that's great. I love beef. But I am under no illusions that it is good for the environment. Even if your steak came from rare breed raised on a diet of organic grains and was then finished on grass, it's still really bad for the environment to eat it. It's bad for the environment--really bad--to grill great quantities of it over coal/timber in a restaurant inside Melbourne's largest gambling venue. I argue that concern for the environment/sustainable farming is, for at least some of these cooks--and I don't want to single out Neil Perry here, as I reckon he's a great businessman and writes excellent books--is nowhere near as important as profitability is. There's a lot of money in charging $60-20 for a 'honestly' grilled steak with a dab of horseradish sauce and a drizzle of olive oil. That steak, be it from a farm in Tasmania that specialises in awesome grass fed beef or some nasty industrial place that supplies the likes of McDonald's, is terrible for the environment. Terrible. And as was mentioned up-thread, there's the whole foraging thing. Oh yeah, I know where this came from, my sous chef and I hand-picked it (mushroom/seaweed/ramp/etc) this morning. That's all well and good, but let's not pretend that's always good for the environment. It, like saying you're selling something dry-aged/honestly cooked/etc, is, I think, in most cases about marketing. It's not about informing the public at all. Except maybe in rare instances. Forgive me for questioning a sacred cow's right to be sacred.

Keller's pork hock recipe from Bouchon w/ Israeli couscous, 'slaw and an English mustard vinaigrette.

How would you go about tenderising the 'gator meat if you wanted to make, say, deep-fried nuggets?

They talk about "honest food" then they make a faux egg with mango puree for the yolk and vanilla ice cream for the white, like this. So do you define 'honesty' as serving simple food? Simple in the way, say, a grilled steak is simple? Where do you draw the line on that? From memory, Rockpool serves triple-cooked chips. I don't know if they go all 'molecular' when drying them out (i.e. like Heston Blumenthal's triple-cooked chips), but surely that process is getting to be as complex as making some icecream and a fruit puree and serving these two items inside an egg shell. Is the dessert you mention dishonest because it's a bit complex (although hardly as complex as some of the desserts from Noma, et al) or because it's presented in a way that plays with your expectations (granted, it's not like you go into a cafe for breakfast, order a boiled egg and find yourself spooning icecream into your mouth)? Is it dishonest because rather than, say, scooping a ball of icecream onto a puddle of puree they've attempted a 'clever' (and oft-copied--not that these guys, whoever they are, invented it) presentation?

How is a grocery store chicken 'laden with antibiotics and hormones' any more honest than a Chicken McNugget? I mean, in Australia, at laest, the chicken nuggets contain chicken. It might not be top quality, free-range, corn-fed organic chicken. But it is still chicken. I'd suspect it'd be on par with the frozen whole chickens you can buy in the supermarkets. I mean, McDonald's and these stores use the same suppliers. So in short, I have as much of an idea where my tub of McNuggets comes from as I do a supermarket chicken. I fail to see how the McNuggets, for all their other failings, are dishonest by that measure. How is the guy in charge of ordering ingredients for McDonald's Australian head office any more/less dishonest than the person, presumably the chef himself, who orders ingredients for Marque/French Laundry/Noma/el Bulli? I can read the ingredients on a side of a box of Pop Tarts. It gives me a fairly solid understanding of what the Pop Tarts contain. And too, and I know I'm playing with fire with this one and touching on another issue altogether, what's the big deal about knowing what your food comes from? I mean, okay, with steak things like the animal's diet, etc determine the quality and flavour of the end product. I get that. But knowing exactly where it was raised? Knowing where my sweet potatoes come from? How many people who ask these questions or hear from TV chefs, et al that these are important questions know what the 'correct' answers are? Unless it's purely a matter of food miles/fresness, why should it matter whether my potatoes come from 20 kilometres down the road as opposed to 200 or 2000? If it's more than that, if it's a lack of trust of mass-produced/battery-farmed goods and perhaps even organic/free-range/etc labelling systems (and fair enough on that, I mean, free range in actuality isn't necessarily free range as you imagine it), then I refuse to accept that McDonald's and Woolworths are less trustworthy than, I don't know, some guy with a stall at the market selling tomatoes for $20/kilogram. Surely the only way I'll truly be able to know with 100% certainty that my fruit, vegetables and meats were 'raised right' (i.e. free of whatever 'chemicals' I deem to be unacceptable) is if I raise them myself.

Any chef that isn't personally heading out to the forest with a ute and an axe (chainsaws being molecular tree chopping devices) is a hack.