ChrisTaylor

Offal. Near where I work, there are a lot of butchers that sell a wide variety of offal. Maybe it's the turn over or lack thereof, maybe it's the fact there's just so much of it, maybe the cleaning practices leave a lot to be desired ... but a lot of those butcher shops stink. It's a disgusting smell. It smells like wet dog times a hundred. Nothing about it makes me want to, oh, buy some liver steaks to fry up for dinner, even tho' I don't have a problem with being served the cooked product. Tripe has a pretty dodgy smell although it was nowhere near as bad as I expected it to be--I guess all those shops in Springvale desensitised me to the smell of one lonely lump of animal gut in a stockpot. I hate the smell of some canned fish products. That canned mackeral stuff, for example. Indeed, seafood in general is something I have a problem with. Now that I've found a purveyor of good quality, fresh fish it's okay, but the odd time I've been shopping in Springvale (where those butchers are too, incidentally) the smell can be overpowering. Of course, even fresh seafood--fresh as in I caught it myself--can be a bit much at times. The couple times I went prawning, I came back and cleaned the prawns within 12 hours to make prawn cutlets or whatever. And the smell on my hands. Goddamn. You can wash your hands again and again with soap and hot water, even rub a lemon half over them, and it's always there. Takes a good couple days for it to go away.

Yeah, if you can--even if it means surviving for a while with that shitty old bar fridge in the garage--trundle that sucker outside, somewhere under shelter obviously, and let it air out. And too, if you can get replacement shelves of the right size--I'm assuming your shelves are plastic--I'd ditch the old ones and buy new ones.

Korean Table - Debra Samuels, Taekyung Chung Seven Fires - Fracis Mallman Catalan Cuisine - Coleman Andrews Serendip: My Sri Lankan Kitchen - Peter Kuravita Culinaria Germany - Christine Metzger Essential Cuisines of Mexico - Diana Kennedy, because I loved Art so much New Book of Middle Eastern - Claudia Roden Pier - Greg Doyle and others Made in Italy - Giorgio Locatelli Momofuku - David Chang Becasse - Justin North Dashi and Umami - various (the cover lists Blumenthal and Nobu and such but I'm pretty sure they just wrote forewards and introductions and prefaces and prologues)

I season it with pepper and cumin, cook it to rare, slice it and serve it in tortillas with cucumber, tomato, jalapeno, coriander and lime juice.

Can you get eucalyptus oil where you are? When I worked in a book store we used it to remove labels.

Depends on what you count as controversy, I guess. And amomg whom. I mean, Ramsay's managed to upset a lot of people with his antics on television: giving people a hard time on Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, swearing a lot. Marco Pierre White rocked the boat too. Both of them presented themselves as egomaniacs overdosing on testosterone. This may or may not appeal to you. You could throw Jamie Oliver in with those two, I guess. He mightn't be presenting himself as some Wusthoff-wielding hard arse but I'm sure a lot of people out there reckon he shouldn't be sticking his nose into our pantries and fridges. In terms of stuff to do with food, tho', which to me is what really matters--I don't care if someone is a prat on television, I'll happily eat their steak frites and stuffed pork trotters if the restaurant is nice--I'd probably agree with the people saying Adria. People discuss(ed) Adria worldover. He was and, I guess, remains the face of 'molecular gastronomy'. I'm not really familiar with Sandra Lee, Rachel Ray, et al. Heard of them but in Australia they may as well not exist. Too, I'm surprised no one mentioned, say, Fergus Henderson.

Heh. On the matter of Bras, I was poking around Amazon.uk the other day and saw, for 44 pounds, one new copy of the English edition. 44 pounds. That's, what, half--at least--what it goes for normally. There was just one copy. Sold. And this was through Amazon itself. Not through the marketplace. Maybe they stumbled on it in a warehouse somewhere. It's in the mail as we speak. The page said it was the English edition but I'm terrified I'll rip open the packaging to find I was sent the French edition--which, I guess, I'd rather live with than return.

Vegan versions of things. You know, vegan cheesecake. Vegan icecream. That sort of thing. No. Sorry. Cheesecake is made from cheese. Icecream contains dairy and probably eggs. Animal products are part of what cheesecake and icecream are. You can flavour them with chocolate or egg and bacon or strawberry or whatever you like and I'm okay with that -- just so long as you don't turn them into some sad animal product-free slop.

I bought Bentley as well. And, too, Pier. And too many others. I think in the book--or maybe it was some Gourmet Traveller article or something--Gilmore mentioned that he makes the snow egg year round with different fruits, so rather than waiting for guavas you could use something else. Pretty sure that wherever I read this mentioned at least some of the different fruits he uses throughout the year.

Roast chicken c/o Thomas Keller's Bouchon book. Easily the best roast chicken I've ever had. The chicken itself wasn't some organic bullshit bird of noble birth--it was a fairly cheap, 'humanely raised' bird from the supermarket. Will have to try this method with one of Saskia Beer's expensive (but very good) chickens. To accompany: sauteed potatoes with onion confit (also from the book) and mushroom ragout (also from the book).

It just arrived. It's so beautiful. I'm now even more excited to visit the restaurant in July.

In most instances nowadays: bacon. Bacon this. Bacon that. The notion that bacon--in the cheap, heavily processed supermarket product sense of the word--is the finest product ever, let alone finest pork product, has really caught on with the geek community (and others, too) and it drives me crazy. Anyone caught buying ThinkGeek's bacon mints should be shot.

I stumbled onto something about the royal wedding on television last night. One of the palace's chefs was talking about how pretty much, a lot of what he serves the royal family is straight from Escoffier. Fish quenelles (forget what species he used--something along the lines of turbot) served with a lobster and asparagus garnish and a lobster sauce. I'm sure you can rustle up a kilo of cockscombs and kidneys between now and then. And, too, make some espagnole.

Slow-cooked lamb shoulder--half steamed, half roasted it for six hours then finished it off in a hot oven for 20 minutes to crisp up the skin.

Ayam Kapitan Used cashews instead of candlenuts. The paste was made from cashews, galagnal, ginger, turmeric, fresh chilli, shallots, lemongrass, shrimp paste and garlic.

A couple more Ducasse's Flavours of France, Kennedy's Art of Mexican Cooking and, the one I'm most excited about, Bras' Essential.

Really bad photo. Shit presentation. I blame the Shiraz. Tasted fine--but not amazing--tho', so I guess that's all that counts. Rack of lamb with a mustard crumb coating, potato gratin and sauteed Dutch carrots.

I was walking down the street earlier today and saw that my neighbours were cooking a whole lamb (and a large joint of pork, too) on a spit. And it got me thinking. At this stage we have about 20 people coming. The number could creep up to around 30. I'd realised I'd be buying and cooking a lot of lamb (be it mince, neck or whatever) and would probably, to make my life easier, be buying a cheap BBQ to do a lot of the work. I'm now entertaining the idea of buying a whole lamb (which I think I can get for about $8-9 per kilogram) and hiring a spit. Thoughts? Anyone done this before?

I'm no DIY guy or anything, but depending on the nature of the 'serious abrasion' I'd be asking someone in the know if they could help me restain the table or clean it up some other way. If there are just a few scratches you should be able to do a reasonable job of making the table presentable again.

Not sure, really. I was happy with the three savoury courses, even tho' I could rattle off numerous ways to improve the flavour and presentation both. Little things here and there. Using pork stock instead of water in the raisin and onion sauce, for instance (the recipe calls for water, mind you). I really need to get that sous vide setup. The pork would've been better. And, too, next time I'd track down cheeks or at least use thick strips of boneless pork belly as opposed to the thin, BBQ-style spare ribs. The dessert was the difficult one for me. The ganache looked terrible but tasted fine. The shortbread base, too, worked as intended ... but I really needed the avocado puree (as opposed to the shitty $9 oil, which I'll struggle to find other uses for), lime zest and proper licorice powder. Even if I couldn't have got the latter, at the very least I should've tried dicing the licorice lollies. Then I would've ended up with texture and more flavour.

My Alinea-inspired dinner. I tried to stay true to the flavour profiles and intent of the dishes. I'd like to build up a small collection of texture-enhancing agents to do the recipes properly. Apologies for the qualities of the photos. Most of the photos I upload, I take with my DSLR. These were taken with an old camera with a, er, 'handy' automatic focus feature. The sour cream component of the dish. The sour cream was partly frozen and laced with salt and sumac (to provide the sourness the sorrel lends to Alinea's version). I used dill because, you know, dill ... seafood ... sour cream. And, too, the pink peppercorns. A sliver of room temperature smoked salmon sits atop the sour cream. The recipe says to use grated, frozen smoked salmon. I tried this the first time I made the dish and it was nice, but I wanted a contrast of temperatures. Too, cleaning paste-like smoked salmon from a fine grater is easily one of the worst jobs in the world. Particularly when you're doing it a few hours after the event. I'm rubbish at presenting things. Just don't have the eye or hand/eye co-ordination skills for it. The dish contains beef (in the form of a rump steak--I cooked it on a grill pan as I don't have a sous vide setup at the moment). The sauce is Indonesian sweet soy sauce. The salad underneath the slices of beef is made of cucumber, honeydew melon, coriander leaves and pink peppercorns. It's dressed with lime juice (as is the beef). Aside from the sous vide/pan-frying thing, the only thing I changed from the book was the use of lime. Without a dehydrator I couldn't make the lime sugar. I figured the sweet soy (as opposed to the regular soy sauce the book specifies) would provide the sweetness of the lime sugar. The main course and the worst of the photos. This was the most elaborate dish--something the photo doesn't really highlight. Instead of the cheek I specified in the recipe I used spare ribs. I've tried a couple times to get the local butchers to order in a pig's head but I hit dead ends. The ribs were marinated in a mixture of white wine, Worcestershire sauce, garlic, onion, carrot, leek and various spices: bay leaves, allspice, caraway seeds, cloves and black pepper. I cooked them at 75 degrees for a couple of hours and then put them aside. They were finished in the grill pan. The sauce was based largely on Worcestershire sauce and was flavoured with caramelised onion, garlic and sultanas (the recipe said raisins--when I was at the shop I remembered (incorrectly, it seems) that I already had raisins and, given today was Good Friday, I couldn't just walk to the supermarket and correct my mistake). The brown stuff is a mixture of toasted rye bread and grated gruyere. The pork sat on a bed of caramelised onion laced with caraway seeds and, too, some of the sultanas from the sauce--in the book they use a dehydrator to make a caramelised onion and caraway salt, but again, I don't have such awesome toys on hand. Instead of the pickled ramps I made some pickled spring onions. The dessert: chocolate and avocado. This is where I moved away from the recipe altogether. I struggle with basic desserts--pliable ganache is a leap too far for me. There's the first quenelle (of ganache or anything else) I ever made sitting atop a chocolate shortbread (which is meant to represent, I guess, the cruncy chocolate component of the recipe). There's also a mint leaf, licorice powder (which I made by grating a licorice lolly--if you ever do this for some daft reason, don't do it hours beforehand and store it in the fridge, as it just clumps together again) and lime juice (I'd have used the zest if I wasn't using waxed supermarket limes). The goo you see is avocado oil. The recipe calls for a puree of avocado--and that would've been a piece of piss if I still had my food processor. If I was to do the dessert again, and I probably will at some point, I'd suck it up and make a rough avocado puree with a mortar and pestle.

Last time I bought a duck, I rendered enough fat from the bird--and this was just a regular supermarket bird--to confit both legs. I took the breasts off and used them for something else. I then hacked at the bird with a knife, peeling away all the skin and fat (there's a lot in the tail). This I rendered in water (someone posted a recipe for rendering duck fat on eGullet--I think I stumbled across it in the cassoulet cook-off thread). This fat, plus the fat that oozed sexily out of the legs when I started to confit them, was enough to pretty much cover the legs. No need to buy an expensive tub of duck grease. The confit legs then ended up in cassoulet but given it's summer up your way you could do something a bit more seasonally appropriate: a pasta, a salad, whatever.

If you want to put something under the skin maybe go for a herb butter.

The candy was all I could find. I went for the tough, unsweetened kind.

Could look to for inspiration.