ChrisTaylor

This is changing, slowly, of course, and it depends on where you go. Wine is generally my go-to drink and I work in the industry, but I think the idea of pairing meals with all sorts of beverages (including non-alcoholic) is very exciting. I'm sure I'm not the only one. True. I thought it was cool when I saw Noma would pair the various courses in their degustation with juices (there's also a wine option, of course). All non-alcoholic, probably, but I'd try it for the sheer novelty of it.

As I kid I grew up eating very plain food, lots of overcooked red meat and poultry and vegetables. I didn't enjoy food. I mean, there were one or two things I really liked, but mostly I didn't enjoy anything to do with consumption. I was a fussy eater. I wouldn't eat many vegetables as they were plain. They had disgusting, mushy textures. I'm not sure what turned me around. Maybe it was cooking class in secondary school. That, I guess, broadened my horizons a little, but I was never allowed in the kitchen at home and I wouldn't say the class inspired me to go out and try new things to any great extent. Maybe it was me maturing, maybe it was me stumbling somehow on Bourdain's Confidential and then, of course, Les Halles, but somehow I reached a point where I'd try basically anything and grew to really enjoy vegetables prepared with care and skill. I'm now at the point where I prefer degustations to be 80% vegetable--I'm fast losing interest in the ones that have as much, if not more, protein content as they have plant matter. I guess it was a collection of little steps. That first medium rare steak. That first perfectly cooked and seasoned carrot. Oysters. Realising that all of these things could be good. Could be fun. Naturally enjoying the food developed alongside and interest in--and ability to--cook it. My attitude to food is totally different. When I go to a restaurant, I'm happy to go on whatever journey the chef wants to take me on. With my family, even my sister to a point, it's still a case of, 'I won't eat x or y or z, I won't eat a or b or c if they're prepared in this way or that way or some other way, I wouldn't go to m or n or o.' I didn't pick up skills or technique or tradition from home. It's all self-taught, uncovered from friends and books and restaurants and television.

Not a great deal bothers me, really. Little things will irk me. You know, it's a quiet night but it's still impossible to get served. Or hearing, every five minutes, 'Is everything okay?' Little things. Or the 'I don't know anything about that dish/We've sold out of that dish/I can't recommend you anything because I don't even know what cuisine they serve here' response. These are rare when you're paying nice restaurant prices, tho', so whatever. Get what you pay for and all that. You can't expect an indifferent overseas student being paid stuff all per hour, working in the restaurant because he can't get anything else or because his visa says he can't work more than x hours in an on-the-books jobs, to be up there with fine dining waitstaff. Enjoy your $10 curry and naan for what they are. One that gets me at fine dining restaurants, tho', probably sounds odd and maybe even uncultured to a lot of you wine lovers--and it's a lack of a serious beer list. The other week a friend and I went to a restaurant with a nice list of local and imported beers. Not a mediocre mass produced beer in sight. It was all good quality stuff that'd been carefully and lovingly made. Thought had been put into whether it would work well with the kind of food this restaurant served. The waiter knew a lot about good beer and basically set me up with a menu of matching beers for the degustation. He--and obviously his employer--understood that beer is a complex drink. It's not all cheap lager from a can. It's equally as valid as wine as a drink for people who like nice things (and I'll say the same about spirits and everything else). This is very, very, very rare. Sure, most nice restaurants will have one or two truly nice local or imported beers, but mostly they stock the same old shit--probably in response to customer demand, but given the growing appreciation for beer and the fact these are restaurants for people who like nice things, I'm not sure if the restaurants are keeping pace with consumer demand or if they're a couple of years behind it. I hate it when the website or drinks list only shows wine. I think that there's a certain elitism when it comes to wine. This notion that it's a superior product, somehow, to a nice beer (or cider or whisky or whatever). I think restaurants take that in, to a certain extent, from the community, but also fuel it and perpetuate it. And I'm sure, about here, them's fighting words and I'll be howled down because beer/cider/etc aren't anywhere near as valid a drink for matching with a nice meal as wine.

Somehow the 'Lentil as Anything' chain have kept going in Melbourne for a few years. I suspect it's largely because they're tied to some charity that saves ... someone, somewhere and a lot of their staff are volunteers. And that, too, I hear tell that starving students who live off their food for years come back later on and donate a considerable amount. I admit I haven't been to any of the branches, even tho' Lentil as Anything is something of an institution and, so far as I know, the only restaurant (well, chain of restaurants) in the city that has such a pricing model. What turns me off, actually, is that I keep hearing of people who go there and get given the, er, subtle hint that $x is really not enough. If $x really isn't enough--and I can see why it might not be, in the practical sense--why not charge a fixed amount? Keep it cheap and maybe continue to help out the local homeless or whatever, but you have no grounds for people not paying more than $whatever if you advertise that people can 'pay whatever they feel like.' Maybe set the price at, I don't know, $7 for the lentil curry--enough to cover overheads and maybe put a couple of dollars into the collection plate--and encourage diners to drop spare coins into a collection plate. I'd visit a restaurant like that. I like to go to nice restaurants and pay nice restaurant prices. I wouldn't have an issue putting down, say, $20 on a couple of vegetarian curries and throwing some coins into a box--that's about what I'd pay at one of the local curry joints--but what I do have an issue with is this attitude of, 'You can pay whatever you feel like ... so long as we feel like it too, right? We're busy saving hungry homeless African whales in the isolated jungles of Brazil, you know. We do charitable shit.' Maybe spending too much time dodging the Socialist Alliance types at university hardened me to that sort of thing, turned me into a twisted cynic. I get the hippy, save-the-world-with-your-hair-in-dreadlocks-and-a-vegan-diet appeal. I get that. I can see a pay-as-you-feel restaurant surviving off that if the restaurant runs as a not-for-profit organisation, donating cash to homeless people or whales. I don't see it working as an actual for-profit business model. Not at all. I haven't encountered restaurants like this aside from LaA, but I suspect most of the restaurants have a charitable hippy bent.

http://www.atablefortwo.com.au/2009/04/27/vegemite-cheesecake/ My friend made this. Turned out alright, I'm told. Must have: he sold it, as a malt cheesecake mind, through work and people responded well.

I added it at the start because I figured the very strong flavour would take a while to mellow out--and because Blumenthal adds his signature star anise pod at the start, when he's caramelising the onions.

I've tried his method. I think that Vegemite has a more noticeable impact on the flavours. Possibly not what you want if you're aiming for a subtle flavour, tho', but to me bolognese is all about boldness.

As a kid my all time and forever favourite thing was my dad's spaghetti bolognese. My dad would use however much beef mince my mum had leftover from making rissoles (translation into non-Australian English: meatballs in instant gravy), 'some' onion, 'some' jarred garlic, 'some' curry powder, 'some' tomato paste and 'some' Vegemite. Vegemite is an Australian product but it is, for the purposes I'm looking at, basically the same thing as Promite and Marmite. Over the years I've cooked many variations of bolognese but none of them, no matter how many different ingredients go in, taste as good as my dad's version. The sauce, no matter whether I use mince (fresh or supermarket-grade), diced meat or a combination thereof, is never as 'meaty' as what his sauce was. And he wasn't using organic free range whatever from the back paddock: it was really cheap butcher's mince or supermarket mince. The other day I finally worked up the nerve to spoon Vegemite into my bolognese. And, you know what? I finally cracked the recipe. It was the Vegemite, odd as it sounds, that gave my dad's bolognese sauce that real meaty quality. You can't taste it in the end product. It's not like what you imagine buttering a steak all over with Vegemite to be like. After a hour or so simmering away, it just makes the meat part of the sauce's flavour taste meatier. Has anyone else experimented with the various *mite products avaliable? I'm meaning to get around to experimenting with other dishes--I see potential in other braises (say, pie fillings, short ribs, lamb shanks) and, possibly--and maybe more controversially, things like pepper sauce for steak.

I ended up following the '70 degrees, oven for 7' hours method, although I covered the shoulder in foil. It was nice but I think I can ratchet it up a bit next time. Some things I'd like to experiment with: really cutting back on the amount of time the shoulder is at, say, 150*--I want the skin a bit crisp but I don't want to lose all the moisture maybe raising the temp a little bit and, instead of truly roasting, gently steaming the lamb shoulder with white wine or stock exactly what I did ... with some brining, just like 31knots'

I took it to be mean fresh as opposed to preserved (either by drying, canned, bottling, freezing or whatever).

Fair point. I mean, before I got my own rosemary bush, I never used the dried stuff even then 'cos I could steal it as needed from the nuns down the street. >_>

Out of all the herbs in common usage in western kitchens, I'd reckon rosemary stands up the best to the drying process (or even being stored for > couple of days). It loses something, yeah--a lot, even--but it takes a lot for it to develop the 'dried grass clippings' quality of, say, parsley or coriander (and we're talking about the leaves and stems here, right? The seeds are fine dried).

A lot of Australians would say lemon juice as a lemon trees are a standard fixture of our backyards. The stuff in a plastic bottle just doesn't cut it.

Just buy online from Book Depository or Amazon.co.uk. Free shipping.

I've thought of other things ... That first piece of good quality raw salmon, all buttery and everything else--made me realise raw fish was okay, was good, even Top quality ham imported from Spain and Italy, a few slivers cost as much as a fast food meal on my student body ... but holy shit The first time I had a vegetarian curry at an Indian restaurant: meals without meat could be interesting Vegetables at Embrasse in Melbourne: the Indians (literally) introduced me to beans and such that existed beyond the supermarket 'green bean' I'd grown up on--Embrasse made all the other vegetables, from mini turnips to carrots to polenta-encrusted asparagus--exciting duck confit the first time I nailed the roast potato format (and, for that matter, mash--both when I got it at home and when I ate it in some nice restaurants)--suddenly that milky mash of my childhood and greasy, soggy roast potatoes just disappeared from my mental food dictionary and I 'got' these two humble preparations steak tartare--I had visions of something really disgusting but what I ended up having was better than any cooked steak I'd had at that point good quality meat in general: the first time I roasted a very good quality chicken, the first good quality steak I had in a restaurant, the first time I had horse, rabbit, duck, venison and many others

Partly: Treme Bourdain is sticking his finger in that pie come season two.

The Japanese joint is cheap yet the staff actually care. I live around so many places that are staffed by indifferent students indifferently serving indifferent food. No one cares. At this little Japanese cafe, tho', everyone is polite. Most of the dishes on the menu are nice. Everything is very clean. Embrasse, on the other hand, just nails it for me. It manages to walk that line between fine dining and casual. To me, at least, it offers the perfect balance of sophistication in its dishes while still evoking lost childhood memories. I get excited about even very humble vegetables when I eat at Embrasse.

I could list so many things. So many. That perfectly cooked duck breast with duck confit. The veal at Embrasse. The gateway for me, tho', was the oyster. For me, oysters were a taboo as a kid. All the time, my parents, they'd say how seafood that wasn't fish and chips, frozen Birdseye fish fingers, etc was bad, bad, bad. You'd get food poisoning, every time. And then one time, as a young adult, I thought 'why not?' and walked up to a fishmonger at a suburban market one morning and downed my first (raw) oyster with lemon juice. After that, everything was okay.

A local el cheapo Japanese place and, perhaps, http://www.embrasserestaurant.com.au/

Near school we have an excellent (in its speciality area, at least--not so much the general bakery-type stuff) Vietnamese bakery, so I make like a lot of my students and eat pork rolls. Can't say no to a $4 sandwich of crispy pork belly, chilli, coriander and various salad vegetables. Can get pate in there too, but I'm not so big on their pate.

In Australia I haven't noticed a decline in quality but the prices have shot up faster than those of any other fruit or vegetable (ignoring those temporarily impacted by floods/hurricanes/fires/et al). In the past couple of years the price per kilo for onions has damn near doubled in the major supermarkets.

Poule au pot. Roast chicken, roast duck, roast lamb, roast pork belly, et al--plain and simple. There's something great about how it's possible to be blown away after taking a piece of animal, seasoning it and sliding it in the oven for a hour or two.

Gin: Tanqueray is my summer drink of choice. Cognacs: yet to settle on one--I tend to buy something different each time. Whisky: I like a few, but my go-to whisky is Talisker 10

You don't cover it at all?

One of my favourite things is dumpling a lamb shoulder into a pot with a splash of white wine, some herbs and maybe some pearl onions and garlic, covering it and sitting it in a slow oven for a few hours (think that classic seven hour leg of lamb recipe, just using a different cut). I've just moved house and now have access to an oven that goes as long as 50*C without me having to prop open the door. This weekend coming, a friend is coming over and I've promised to cook them roast lamb. I'm wondering what the best way to cook a ~1kg piece of lamb shoulder is. Should I leave it uncovered in, say, a 65* oven for a long time? Would I be best to drop it into a pot with/without some kind of liquid (stock or wine or just a smear of olive oil) and cover it? Would it be best to set the oven to, say, 65* and use an oven bag? Thoughts? Should I bother brining it? This works really well, in my experience, with chicken but I've never tried it with red meat. I'm not looking at marinading it. The flavouring is going to be no more than maybe garlic, rosemary, salt, pepper and, at the very end, a little bit of lemon juice (to cut through the fattiness of the meat).