ChrisTaylor

I was reading an article just now about how, right now in Australia, Neil Perry and a few other chefs are getting a lot of mileage out of using wood-fired grills to, er, grill stuff. Now mostly this article was being used to promote the upcoming food and wine festival, but that's an irrelevancy. The point came up a couple of times: food cooked over fire is somehow more 'honest' than food that's, say, prepared using a vacuum chamber, plastic pouch and a water bath. It's a term you hear in Australia a lot. 'Honest', that is. If you ever watch MasterChef, whenever they drag out some chef to go toe-to-toe with one of the competitors, you'll hear him or her say, 'my food is all about honesty ...'. They may or may not grill food. They may or may not use vacuum chambers. They may or may not make foams. They may or may not regard 'molecular gastronomy' as a bad thing and may indeed understand that, really, at its core it's just about understanding exactly what happens when you honestly place that honest cut of honest beef on your honest grill (set over an honest fire built honestly from some honest timber from honest trees). Now. The other day Mark Best's cookbook landed on my doorstep. I flipped through it and, somewhere in Rene Redzepi's spiel about the wonders of Marque (the restaurant), he mentioned the word 'honest'. Marque is a beautiful restaurant. One of my favourites in Australia. And yet what it serves is miles away from Neil Perry's 'honest' Rockpool Bar & Grill (a high end steakhouse): it could be described, really, as art on a plate. Think the Noma, Quay, Alinea, Fat Duck, etc books--they're pretty much at the same level as this book. Mark Best and Rene Redzepi aren't the only chefs of this sort to use the term. Honest. What exactly does it mean? The only thing I can think of as being 'dishonest' is, perhaps, some of that elBulli stuff. Not that it's 'molecular' (and therefore evil), but that you can pick up, I don't know, something that looks like a kalamata olive, only it tastes of strawberry. It's a trick. It is, I guess, a little dishonest. But I get the impression that Neil Perry and Rene Redzepi and all those other guys, they're not talking about one ingredient slyly pretending it's something else. Am I correct in figuring that, when it comes to food, 'honest' means basically nothing?

My latest experiments with non-rye/bourbon Old Fashioneds has taken me in the direction of tequila. I'm using Espolon Reposado. I understand a tequila with a couple more years under its belt might be better for this sort of thing, but the Espolon seems nice enough. I tried two variants: both made in exactly the same way, aside from the choice of bitters. For one I used orange bitters. This worked very well. I'm keen to get some other citrus bitters eventually, as I find I'm using orange bitters almost as often as Angostura and Peychaud's. Anyway, for the second one I tried using the Fee's Aztec Chocolate bitters. It wasn't shit--no--it just didn't really work for me. Maybe I needed a gutsier tequila or, perhaps, to pair the chocolate bitters with a rum or bourbon instead of tequila. Maybe. Or cut the chocolate bitters with, say, Angostura.

That's some sexy squid. Too, if David Chang's allowed to love Chicken McNuggets and Mark Best can get away with salt and vinegar crisps, I think you can enjoy Ikea's lumps of mystery meat. Steak frites. The fries are, yes, supermarket-grade fries. And I didn't even try Keith W's technique of deep-frying them in beef or duck fat (but I'll get around to that at some point). Low. Low. Low. But the sauce. Yeah. It was meant to be sauce porto, just like the one in the Les Halles Cookbook, but I didn't have shallots or any more homemade beef stock (it all went into the demi last week). The solution? A bit of garlic, a splash of port, a nice lump of frozen demi, a splash of decent (but store-bought) stock, a bay leaf and a couple of dried mushrooms. It worked.

Dubonnet cocktail--equal parts Dubonnet Rouge and gin with a twist of orange. I could see this drink being a nice entry point to the world of bitter beverages for someone who finds, say, Cynar or Camapri or Fernat Branca (all awesome, awesome, awesome from my pov) too bitter to access.

Heh. This is something I run into in Australia all the time, too. The supermarkets and grocers often stock imported garlic--usually from China, but sometimes from Spain and Mexico and South America too. Sometimes you'll find Australian garlic. It's perhaps even common for the imported stuff (and, sadly, sometimes even the local stuff) to be at least partly fucked. A clove or two. Sometimes the entire bulb. It's really, really, really, really, really, really, really annoying to buy a bulb with the intent of using the whole thing/most of it in a particular dish, only to find that you can't because the whole thing/most of it has gone to God. I always carefully inspect the bulbs of garlic I buy in the shops and avoid, if possible, the little mesh sacks containing 3-5 bulbs (I tend to buy garlic and all other fresh ingredients at most a day before I want to use them) ... but still, sometimes I get burnt.

First off, a margarita following the 2:1:1 format. Nice. And now what I think is an original by David Wondrich--a Husker mule, which contains aquavit, lime juice, ginger ale and Angostura bitters. This is very good.

It's a layered pie-type thing of quail breasts, a stuffing mixture (onion, carrot, cabbage and bacon) and pheasant pate (it's meant to be foie gras, but my budget doesn't really allow for that). It's sitting atop a slice of bread and wrapped, as you can see, in a blanched cabbage leaf. The sauce is pretty much a heavily reduced chicken stock jacked with some of the deli glace I made last week and flavoured with some roast onions and carrots, parsley, bay, thyme and port (in place of Madeira). The sauteed Swiss Browns were my addition.

Chartreuse of quail from Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook.

Coctel Algeria - pisco, Cointreau, apricot liqueur, orange juice and lime

A sweet pie with no lid is a dirty, dirty tart.

I've tried many of those jellies over the years and I've yet to find one that tastes of, well, anything, really.

This is one matter in which I'll join Public Enemy and fight the power. A pie involves a pastry lid and braised meat (or, if you're so inclined, stewed fruit). A pizza is ... pizza. One of these things is not like the other. I do not understand people--and there are many here--who deem a baked disk of bread topped with cheese, tomato, et al to be pie.

Right as I type this, I've just placed two bottles worth of pimento dram--my first batch of a liqueur I've never even tasted before--into the cupboard to 'age'. I too used Inner Circle Green, which is 57.something% APV. The price jump to Inner Circle Black, their proper overproof expression, was significant enough to matter. I followed Chris A's advice and used nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and a little bit of black pepper in addition to the allspice. I used less of the extras than he did, tho', as I wanted to be sure they were background notes. I used demerar sugar in the simple syrup and, just for the shit of it, a few drops of orange bitters. A few. I'm hoping they'll appear as a very subtle, quiet background note and not just get lost altogether.

I just used stock. Possibly the quantity has something to do with it.

I made hash with some leftover spiced, coffee-crusted barbecue chuck. Added onions, birds eye chilli and potatoes. Crisped up the top in the oven.

Adam Perry Lang's 'garlic powder and instant coffee-crusted chuck roast'. After smoking. All that oil and parsley? That's to do with his technique of 'seasoning' the chopping board. I have to try this with, say, some thyme leaves and such next time I grill a steak. Some cos lettuce and tomatoes. Sauteed kipflers, too.

The Ardbeg Uigeadail is one of my favourite Islays. If not the favourite (which is not to say there's anything wrong with standard Ardbeg, Lagavulin, Laphroaig, Coal Ila, et al). Ardbeg's products are consistently good.

Freshly made salmon and tuna nigiri, black coffee. Breakfast for a fragile educator on a Friday.

An example of a typical breakfast. Unsweetened black coffee, nice goat's cheese (Holy Goat La Luna), olives and spelling tests.

Debonair w/ Domaine de Canton & Lagavulin.

We export loads and loads of wine from the big companies like Yalumba. I think this person is American. I mean, Google that 'Fage' yoghurt ...

The 'Dr Henderson' from Nose to Tail: 30 mL Fernet Branca and 15 mL creme de menthe stirred over ice.

I was right the Bitterly Twisted being something I'd want to drink. It's very good. Thanks for the link.

So long as you're still using non-oily fish I can't foresee a problem. Thinking about the (lack of) salt?

I've never cooked them but have a lot of ear recipes in books. Too, I've had them at restaurants a few times. Braised, breaded and deep-fried seems the standard method of preparing them. Once you've done that you have a snack or part of a salad or larger dish, possibly something involving a cut of pork with a different flavour or texture. I have also had them braised in a Sichuanese restaurant and served in a pool of chilli grease.