ChrisTaylor

I don't know what prices are like over your way, but down here the price for a packet of seeds is basically the same as a seedling. I wouldn't bother with seeds unless I wanted to grow something I couldn't find as a seedling. I'd do the same with chilli if I wanted to grow spices. Presumably you could buy mature rosemary plants and bay trees (which can grow very large, mind you, so if you have severe space restrictions you'll want to keep an eye on them). EDIT Just realised that seeds may be your only option if you want to avoid exorbitant shipping fees.

Okay, I have to own up to liking Alton's character on Good Eats...but then I'm a sciency kind of guy with an active nerd gene. Even so, he and virtually all TV chefs/cooks/posers do something that drives me to distraction: mispronounce Spätzle. I've heard spāt-zəl, spăt-zəl, and maybe even a half-gargled spatulas...but rarely the proper shpātz-ləh. Maybe it irks me because I lived in Germany for a few years or maybe it's my persnickety nature. I just happen to think that we should make a decent effort to pronounce such foreign words correctly...at least until they are completely co-opted into our native language. People try but for most people it's too difficult. If all you speak is English (and/or other languages without letter patterns like 'zl' in common usage') then you--well, most of you--will be hard-pressed to even hear the distinction between spatzel and spatzle, let along pronouncing it. It's like that Japanese 'r' thing. Most Japanese would find hearing the distinction between our 'l' and 'r', let alone saying them, near impossible. Or the speakers of many European languages, they'd struggle to pick up on the subtleties of tonal languages such as Mandarin. Initially, at least. If you were immersed in the environment in which this language was spoken (like, say, if you travelled to Germany for a while ...) then probably you'd gradually pick it up (but plenty of people still don't--just listen to the English of some migrants). There are people who are exceptionally good at this sort of thing. You may be one of them. A lot of people are not. It's not some fault of character. I'm going to get off my high horse before I start ranting about waitstaff--and self-appointed language tutors--who correct customer's mispronouncations of menu items.

Quail. Rubbed generously with a herb butter and given a quick blast in the oven. Salty. Greasy. The irony note of the meat. The herb and garlic notes. Could eat those all day.

I can smell them on my hands for a whole day afterwards, no matter how hard or often I scrub my hands with anti-bacterial, lemon juice, water or anything else.

Peeling really small onions and potatioes. A pain.

Kitchen appliances are stupidly expensive here. Just wait until you see how much they want to sting you for a KitchenAid mixer. EDIT Oh and books (i.e. cookbooks). Never buy locally. Even when I worked in a bookshop and had (well, I still have it) a 30% discount card at two of the major book retailers, it was still almost always cheaper--often by a fair amount--to buy from Book Depository or sometimes Amazon (depending on the exchange rate).

'Homemaker' is, I think, Kmart's home brand. For future reference: cheap rubbish. You can get a Cuisinart for a touch over $100 from KitchenwareDirect. They're supposed to be good.

Chicken breast: brined overnight and then gently pan-fried. The spinach and chickpeas are from the first MoVida (a Spanish restaurant in Melbourne) cookbook: spinach simmered with chickpeas and flavoured with garlic, vinegar (the recipe called for sherry vinegar but I used white wine vinegar), paprika and cumin and thickened with bread picada.

I'll try both of those ideas. Keep them coming.

If you're making wedges or oven fries, spray olive oil gives a more even coating and thus a crisper result. Possibly the one redeeming feature of such products.

My favourite drink over summer (altho', really, is there a bad time for it?) is a gin and tonic. I'm only fairly new to it, tho'. Still trying different gins to see what I like. When you go out and ask for a g & t you usually end up with something garnished with wedges of lemon or lime. At the moment, it's 40* (C--so over 100-ish for you F people, I think) and I don't feel like driving off to get citrus, so I'm taking my g & t nude. And, sans citrus garnish, it's fine. It's different: the citrus flavour is altogether gone, obviously, and the true flavour of the gin, that medicinal juniper note, is smack bang front and centre. Which I like. Why is the garnish added? Is it to cut that medicinal flavour, which I can see people not liking (same with all those flavoured vodkas, right?), or is it for looks or for both? Is the drink 'meant' to have a solid citrus note? Aside from lemon and lime and cucumber (seen it done with Hendrick's gin) what else could I (or rather, what else would be a good idea) to experiment with in my g & t?

K. That's weird. I Wikipediaed it and it said nothing of the sort. Indeed, the stuff is cultivated in the US and Australia (even tho' my Ethiopian grocer doesn't have it). I'm 100% sure I heard that it wasn't allowed--either from the grocer or a cookbook I have here or both. Indeed ... http://www.ethiopianreview.com/content/718 (old article, so maybe the law has changed)

iirc the Ethiopian government doesn't allow the exportation of teff. So no matter how good your local Ethiopian restaurant's injera is, it's being made with something else. You could coax a recipe out of them, maybe, but down here at least most Ethiopian restaurants seem to get their injera from central bakeries (which sell direct-to-the-public, too), so they might not know. I suspect it's just regular wheat flour tho' (not sure how strong or anything) given you can get wholemeal injera.

Bistro-style French cooking. As in coq au vin, duck a l'orange, beef bourguignon and steak au poivre. Rack of lamb. All of this done the old way, with everything loaded up with good butter and the cooking liquids and sauces thickened with starch. Bacon in damn near everything. Rooster in the coq au vin--none of this half-arsed business using a young roasting chicken. Desserts such as baked apple tart, lemon tart and clafoutis. I'm super excited about going to France and hitting up all these flash restaurants in Paris, but I'm just as excited about visiting old-fashioned bistros and the like. Honourable mentions to ... Proper Mexican (as in, not the Americanised/Australianised stuff, which I hate) Italian Indian Sichuan Ethiopian Spanish Good quality, as opposed to mediocre shit (see: food court sushi), Japanese Creole/Cajun

At least you can say you've achieved something significant in life, right?

Just the other day I heard someone on an Australian cooking show say how throwing your steak on a really hot barbecue 'seals in all the juices.' I can't believe that shit is still floating around.

Reminded of it by the picadillo thread, I figured I'd dig up my go-to recipe for tacos--cobbled together based on a bunch of stuff I found online and wherever else. I take a rump steak (skirt also works--I guess you could use an expensive cut like sirloin, too) and season it with salt, pepper, ground cumin and oregano. I then fry or barbecue it to rare or medium rare and rest it. Meanwhile, I may the 'salad' (the recipe for this was actually cobbled together from reading a blog post about a culinary tour of Mexico, if I recall correctly--can't remember the Spanish name of the preparation that inspired this) using diced tomato, diced red onion, diced cucumber, minced garlic, coriander leaves and jalapeno. The 'salad' is dressed with lime juice and extra virgin olive oil. Stuff tortillas with some of the steak (sliced) and the 'salad'.

I normally follow Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's recipe, mostly because it's the only one I have (in hard copy, anyway) and his recipes are reliable. He may not offer the best picadillo/bolognese/steak and kidney pie/etc but he'll always point you in the right direction. I followed his recipe tonight, bar one or two points I picked up elsewhere. I started by frying 500 grams of pork mince (if I was making a larger quantity I'd have done equal parts pork and beef). I put it aside once it was browned up nicely and fried some diced onion and garlic with a star anise pod (see also: Heston Blumenthal). Once the onion was softened and browned I added 800 grams canned (diced) tomatoes, the spices (cloves, cumin, cinnamon, a little bit of chilli powder, black pepper), sultanas (I know all the recipes say to use raisins--but I can buy bundles of single serve packs of sultanas designed for school lunches, which give me the perfect quantity for dishes like this and don't require me to waste any or find some excuse to use them up), a good handful of slivered almonds and a generous splash of white wine vinegar (all out of apple cider vinegar). Added, too, some sliced jalapenos from a jar--I can't easily get chipotles here (the only chipotle product I recall seeing is the Tabasco chiptole sauce, which you can only buy at specialist retailer 'USA Foods'--supermarkets just carry the red one)--purely because I like them more than the fresh options readily avaliable to me. I simmered it for maybe a hour. I've found that things like this are always, always, always better when cooked for a long time (i.e. a hour as opposed to ten minutes). Didn't include olives as one of the recipes above--the Rick Whoever one--didn't include them and, too, I've found olives, unless of good quality (which I can't afford at the moment) or added at the last minute, aren't so nice in dishes like this. I moved away from Mexico altogether when serving it--didn't feel like making tortillas and didn't want to pay for them (about $5 for half a dozen low quality tortillas) so I used little pita breads. Hey, it works ... I'm very happy with the picadillo. In fact, I'd rate this version, with the preserved jalapenos, above the versions I've made with fresh chillies--the preserved chillies just add something I really like. Can't quite identify it. If anything, I'd say this needs sour cream, which I'd happily drive off and get if I hadn't consumed so much gin.

Bloody hell. For that sort of money you could eat at a fine dining restaurant 2-3 times per week in Melbourne and still eat normally (and I mean eGullet normal, not a jar of pasta sauce) for the rest of the week. I need that kind of money.

Can you describe the flavour? I'd be curious to know how it compares to, say, beef or buffalo or venison.

Wouldn't you be cooking the sauce (say, a ragu) in the slow-cooker as opposed to the actual pasta? I threw the term into Google and all I saw (granted, I didn't look too far down the page) was that. I'd never heard of Outback Steakhouse until recently, when some Americans told me about this Australian steakhouse that's all over the place. Turns out they have a couple of branches here, even, somewhere. The menu screams Australian, what with all the ranch dressing and strip steaks ...

When is it you think corn showed up? Silly argument to have, I suppose, Eastgate, and this probably isn't the thread to have it. But... I've read that it's generally accepted by folks that care about and study these things that corn was being grown in the Americas as early as 3000 BC. Yes. With a caveat, tho': the wild corn they started to domesticate produced tiny cobs, roughly 1 cm in length. It took farmers 1500 years worth of artificial selection to develop six inch cobs. The sizes you're used of now, that you'd want to be farming to produce any kind of decent amount of raw cornmeal, are fairly modern. No idea when the production of tortillas started but it's doubtful those tiny corn cobs of 3000BC would've provided the bulk of the diet.

White bread

Gin (Tanqueray) and tonic.

Not until the cookies themselves are topped with cheese and pepperoni.