ChrisTaylor

I'll second the glass of milk.

You shouldn't need to waste anything, really. With the head you could make brawn, a couple of different cured meats, slow-roasted cheeks or several other things. The neck is a very versatile cut: use it in braises or slow roast it. Fergus Henderson has a lovely--and much-copied--recipe for mustard-crumbed pig tails, so you can even use that. On one of the River Cottage DVDs there's a hour-long video called 'a pig in a tail'--that has all sorts of handy information.

Housemate has a dedicated hot dog 'maker'. Worthwhile, I guess, if you eat lots of hot dogs and are incapable of the highly complex process of tipping the things into a saucepan full of water. What makes it especially stupid is how he uses it: to store hot dogs, on the counter for hours or days (at typical Australian room temperatures), until he feels like eating them. Actually, I'll just expand that to include my housemate as the dumbest kitchen item. He'll boil up some pasta and make bolognese sauce (re: jar of sauce and mince) and let it sit in the stove for a day or two before putting it in the fridge. Or he'll go out, leaving one of those little Italian coffee pots on the stove. You find out when the house smells of melted plastic and burnt coffee.

This isn't necessrily the parents' fault. My brother and his wife have three kids, are extremely adventuresome eaters and cooks and have always encouraged their kids to eat whatever they were making. They have three kids; two will eat anything but the oldest is very much like your sis-in-law's kid. She's eleven and they've been frustrated about this for years. Some kids with Asperger's exhibit this. In addition to the their internal sensibilities being disturbed by changes in routine and hypersensitivity to touch, some need an extraordinarily plain diet to function. Plus one from experience. Certain aromas and textures hit me really hard as a kid. The texture of soft carrots? The smell of pumpkin, of cauliflower? I'd dry-retch instantly. Even brining the tiniest amount to my lips was enough. What I would do, as a little kid, to get out of it, was sneak tiny pinches of vegetable matter and jam them into the little crevices on the underside of the table. Or jam stuff into my pockets and drop it into the toilet, bundled in toilet paper so it'd flush, after dinner. I mean, if the food didn't disappear from my plate I couldn't leave the table. Boy did my parents go nuts when they found dried lumps of mushed up peas wedged in all sorts of odd places ... I wasn't diagnosed at the time. As an adult I forced myself to get over it, pretty much. I don't know what it was--some combination of reading Bourdain's stuff, which was really compelling, and rebelling after years of being told oh, no sensible person eats oysters/rare steak/shellfish in general. Even now, when I'm in a nice restaurant, some textures will just kill me. That little Aspie kid who dry-retched at everything will rear his head, altho' nowhere near as strong. I can ignore it and press on and find that, 99 times out of 100, I actually enjoy whatever it is. Some smells, tho', still kill me. That urge--to reject stuff before you've even tasted it--is common among kids in general, yeah, but with Asperger's (and some other conditions) it's really strong. I've no idea how you'd fight it at all. Don't think you can, really, altho' I reckon that yelling and screaming and pressing the point would not help at all. You could just expect to dig out a few lumps of 'freeze dried' vegetables one day when cleaning the dining room ... No idea how you'd do it, but if you can rig it so your little kid's 'thing' becomes cooking, they'll eat damn near anything if Jamie Oliver or whoever's on TV says it's good.

As I kid I used to eat massive amounts of stuff in the morning. Hit my mid to late teens or so and then I just ... couldn't. For about the first hour or so, anything I ate I'd want to, er, recycle. Feel the same way now, generally. I don't want to eat for a hour or so (meaning I don't get to eat before leaving the house). Have to work on that as I know it's bad.

'<sauce name> with your choice of pasta: spaghetti, fettuccine, tortellini, ravioli, gnocchi.' A sure indicator of utility-grade 'Italian' food prepared by people who don't give a shit. Too, a menu with 150+ dishes. Oh. And 'fish'. As in 'fish fillet' as opposed to 'trout' or 'salmon' or 'snapper' or something specific. When it's just fish, unless they've obviously got some sort of 'we buy whatever looks good in the market--ask us what we have today' setup it's an indicator of cheapness/nastiness.

Oh. Steak tartare in a food processor. Anyone up for beef paste?

My spice encyclopaedia suggests looking to Indonesia for recipes. There are a few decent Indonesian books around, I think. Heard many good things about Sri Owen's book. Seen it avaliable cheap, too.

If you put them on a rack under a broiler/griller they'll crisp up real nice.

Beautiful food, Prawncrackers. All of it. Still drawing from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Meat cookbook, I've just knocked together a jerk chicken marinade. Have a kilo-ish of wings sitting in it for tomorrow's dinner.

Hot today down south, too, so it was barbecue weather (of course, if I had a carport and a gas-lit barbecue, every day would be a barbecue day, almost). Marinated some pork spare ribs in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's 'Indonesian' marinade--sugar, sweet soy sauce, chilli powder, garlic, ginger, coriander seeds and lime juice. Served with some corn (boiled then grilled) and steamed rice. No photos: nasty greasy hands and D-SLRs aren't good friends.

I think that's the foot, yeah. Not entirely sure. It's the bit you eat.

I seem to recall a recipe that tells you to spoon some water into hot oil before deep frying.

Great looking. I have not seen goat meat here in NY. Just lamb. Any difference? Sounds delicious. Very complicated (complex?). You need a new plate dcarch Yeah. Still in the last couple of weeks of my poor student phase. Still doing 90% of my photography on two vessels. That white plate and white bowl you see in most of the photos? They're one-of-a-kind. The rest of my stuff is a mishmash of forever-old, chipped crap that belongs to the landlord. I can't wait to be able to afford a decent dinner set and live in a house that, you know, doesn't have a stove that leans slightly back (meaning when you drop an egg or some pancake batter into a frypan, it sort of rolls downhill and you have to work quickly with a spatula to catch it). Granted, the stove is only on a lean because the whole house is on a lean ... That's the most attractive of the plates, by the way. Goat meat. Well. The quality and taste vary dramatically. Baby goat is pale and sweet and lovely and expensive and hard to find. It's veal to beef, I guess. Perhaps more 'good veal to mediocre, sometimes even bad, beef'. Dust some baby goat cutlets, which are tiny things, in a bit of salt and pepper, pan-fry them to medium rare and you're eating very well. A lot of goat in the Arab and Indian butchers here, all I can easily find and afford, is older. They'll say it's baby goat but, like a lot of cheap butchers and supermarkets here, they're full of lies (kind of like how a lot of veal here looks and tastes of yearling). Older goat is ... probably more mutton than lamb but even then, it's a bit of a stretch. The flavour is kind of similar but the big difference is fattiness. Lamb and its sister products are very fatty. Goat is very lean.

Reposted sans image: Bailer shell. It comes sans shall and bloody massive. Google it for some idea of what it looks like. I thawed one up and, having access to no more than a barbecue and portable electric stove, thinly sliced and stir-fried it. The smell ... oh God. The smell. I can handle smell when it comes to cheese. I'm fine with that. But there are some smells--some kinds of offal, some kinds of seafood (the stockpot that has been used to steam crabs, for example)--that I just can't handle. I don't know if it's an Aspie thing or what, but some smells can bring about a physical reaction in me. I damn near hurled. One of the kids I was cooking with ate it and said it was okay but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Never again. Too scared to head back into that seafood shop to pick up sea cucumber or any of the other interesting-looking stuff. I'm afraid of how that stuff will smell when I heat it up. edit I hope a link is okay. http://www.wildsingapore.com.sg/wildfilms/blog/blogfotos/0606bb/060625bbd3342m6.jpg

I've come to realise that only on eGullet would people attempt to impress the masses (and the masses be impressed ... and me left feeling a strong sense of cutlery insecurity) with their forks (not ornamental antique-type stuff, but the forks you actually use) or not brand someone a bit odd for even considering fermenting garlic in a jar in the oven for 40 days. Love it. The fork bird is super cool, by the way.

A Parsee chicken curry from Camellia Panjabi's book, 50 Great Curries of India. Spiced with black pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, coriander, cloves, cumin, garlic, ginger, Kashmiri chilli and my own garam masala (star anise, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom and fresh bay). Some homemade chapatis, too (1 cup wholemeal flour, 65 mL warm water, tablespoon of oil, pinch of salt--mix then rest for a hour then roll into really thin 'pancakes').

Twice cooked pork, no?

The Australian version of two buck chuck. Utility-grade schnapps, port, sherry, etc. Basically anything cheap and sweet and alcoholic.

Stumbled on an episode of Jamie Oliver's new shop, 30 Minute Meals. He's making a 30 minute version of jerk chicken and, when he gets to the habanero chillies, scoops the seeds out, holding the chilli in his hand, with the tip of a cook's knife. For a show aimed at people who don't cook normally, who wouldn't handle a knife all that often, and given the amount of children who love and watch and learn from Oliver, this is a terrible lesson.

My girlfriend stirs in a great lump of peanut butter. Supposedly it was the done thing in Zimbabwean boarding schools. Doesn't really work for me.

It's pretty much a coarse meat loaf, yeah. Tastes pretty much like that, too. Not bad ... but nothing to get too excited about. Probably worth hunting some down at a gourmet butcher or something rather than making it unless you already know you like it--it's a lot of effort to go to, sourcing all the ingredients and such.

Could try a blue cheese, too.

If all salts are the same and they're so concerned about the well-being of consumers, why do they sell multiple kinds of salt still? I mean, if it's 'all the same', and you know this and openly admit it, aren't you ripping people off--and therefore not being kind and caring?

Perfect chicken paste with fatty liver?