The Food and Drink Thread

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Anyone else trying to watch their alcohol intake and having trouble deciding on their tipple for the day?

I have a so-so bottle of wine left and the whisky club just discovered the magic of online tastings and now can’t seem to stop doing them… and I have leftover samples from these tastings, in addition to my open bottles of whisky. Also a fridge full of craft beer.

So naturally I reached for my long-neglected, open bottle of cachaça. 45% ABV (relatively high for cachaça standards) and aged in virgin, toasted American oak. A bit of bite undiluted, just perfect diluted to 42-43%. Toffee, dried fruit and that whiff of cane juice… hard to beat on a rainy tropical “winter” night. No regrets.

(This is what it looked like when I bought it. Down to 1/3 now)
View attachment 31982
I like a glass of something to sip on in the evening. I normally stop at one and this is what I drink most nights:
0028748_canadian-club-spiced-whisky-1000ml.jpeg
After experimenting a bit, I find I prefer it neat and room temperature.
 
The other week, they had some meat labeled "London broil" at the butcher section of my local grocery store. I remembered that my grandpa (RIP) liked London broil, and I like things that remind me of my grandpa, so I bought it. Looked up recipes and found one I thought sounded good here. Interestingly, it says that "London broil" refers to the cooking method and not the cut of meat.

I did not make the herb butter, but I did make the marinade and cook the meat as described in the recipe. It came out with a nice flavor! I only needed to add a little more salt and pepper after it was cooked to make it quite enjoyable.

I definitely need to get a better meat thermometer. According to the one I have, the meat was still raw when I took it out of the oven. Fortunately I trusted my eyes rather than the thermometer, because in actual fact, the meat was somewhere between medium-rare and medium.

Also, I've rarely, if ever, used the broiler function on my oven before and the heat warped the pan I was using!

Anyway, it was fun cooking something new, and I ended up with about 5 meals' worth of yummy meat :smile: .
 
You can do most things with a broiler that you could with a gas grill* just upside down. If you have a broiler pan, the juices drip away and get caught, unlike a grill where they drip into the fire.

*I consider gas grills to add no additional flavor beyond quick, direct heating. Charcoal or wood can be a different story. The rare times I cook outside, I cook with wood in the fire pit. The main reason I do this is because we have a bunch of 60 year old trees constantly dropping sticks and branches(mostly fucking silver maples) and I need to get rid or them.
 
Been making a lot of "cheaty toasties" lately-- whole wheat toast, cheese, microwave-- and what I usually do is put mayonnaise on my inside toast (because mayonnaise is the secret to a good toastie) and then two slices of white American cheese to secure a slice of more interesting cheese in place. Havarti, jalapeño pepper jack, smoked gouda.

Today, I used sharp cheddar, and added a little bit of apple butter between the cheese slices. Dee-lightful.
 
I ordered a three-rib roast from a butcher and was very surprised when it turned out to be only 1.5 kg and far too small for what I had in mind. Anyway, I toasted 1.5 Tsp of black peppercorns, 1.5 Tsp of coriander seeds, 0.5 Tsp of allspice berries, and 1 Tsp of rock salt, then ground them up together. Damped the surface of the beef with Worcestershire sauce to make the rub stick, applied the rub, and then put it in a brown-paper bag on a cooling rack in my beer fridge to dry brine and age for eight days. Today I gave it a couple of hours on the bench to come up to a rather chilly room temperature, built a fire in my patio heater, and contrived it as a heap of burning coals surrounded by blocks of smouldering hardwood. When that had settled down I put the smoker-oven attachment on top of the heater and barbecued the beef to an internal temperature of 57 C in a thick plume of smoke. That involved managing the fire to maintain a temperature of 125 C in the smoker for an hour and three quarters. I served it with roasted kumara (a kind of sweet potato), green beans in garlic butter, and sauce that I reduced from a 680-gram brick of frozen beef stock that I had in the freezer.

It was very good.
 
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In pretty much any country in Europe you can walk into a supermarket and there are several dozen different types of decent quality cheese just on the shelves. In New Zealand, home to the second largest dairy company in the world, you might get three grades of Cheddar, and maybe Edam and Camembert.
When's the last time you came home? My local stocks those, plus gouda, swiss, cottage, stilton, three kinds of blue, brie, cow/sheep/goat feta, harvarti, haloumi and a selection that straddles the line between cheese and other dairy products.
 
Haloumi is a breakpoint cheese for me. I find it tends to separate the men from the boys of the cheeae stocking world, so to speak.
 
When's the last time you came home?
2006 and 2013. Having said that, the sample was of supermarkets in Christchurch and various small towns in Southland around Gore. I remember going into a supermarket there and seeing Mild, Tasty, Colby and Edam and thinking "Yep. Back in NZ again ..."

OTOH, we went to a farm shop somewhere outside Gore and found some very nice locally made cheese (somewhere between Cheddar and Wensleydale in texture) and another one that had fabulous strawberries. There's also an outfit just outside Dunedin that makes a decent range and has since at least the 1980s.

It's not that you can't get it in NZ, it's just that every single Tesco or Sainsbury's (or Carrefour or Esselunga or ...) here has dozens of different varieties.
 
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It's not that you can't get it in NZ, it's just that every single Tesco or Sainsbury's (or Carrefour or Esselunga or ...) here has dozens of different varieties.
Hey, do you remember Terry and the Pirates? The adventures of a teenage boy vs a gang of cheese counterfeiters?

I'd ask that question in the Gen X nostalgia thread, but I suspect it would only be you and me who were exposed to it.
 
Hey, do you remember Terry and the Pirates? The adventures of a teenage boy vs a gang of cheese counterfeiters?

I'd ask that question in the Gen X nostalgia thread, but I suspect it would only be you and me who were exposed to it.
I don't think I ever saw it.
 
wife and I just came up with an excellent idea. We have some fajita leftovers, sauce mixed in with the veggies and meat. She suggested philly cheesesteaks. I said it couldn't be philly because too far north and spices, and said Tijuana cheesesteaks with cheddar-jack and cotija. Friend said applebee's has Tijuana philly cheese steaks, and I said that's a burrito because it has a tortilla, and I use real mexican bakery rolls for this.

This is how Real Men of Genius happens. You're welcome.
 
I bought my sister an icecream machine a few weeks ago, and after having got the hang of making actual icecream in it she started thinking about sorbet. I suggested churned frozen daiquiris and (for summertime) churned frozen soup such as gazpacho or vichysoisse.

Has anyone experience of such diversions to share?
 
I have made a new drink. I don’t have a name other than something that will be insulting from one of you. It’s somewhere between a Mai tai, a mojito, and a zombie.


.5oz lime juice, falernum, and almond syrup
1 oz 151
2oz spiced rum, white rum
1 can lime LaCroix
Fair chunk of ice
 
I ordered a three-rib roast from a butcher and was very surprised when it turned out to be only 1.5 kg and far too small for what I had in mind. Anyway, I toasted 1.5 Tsp of black peppercorns, 1.5 Tsp of coriander seeds, 0.5 Tsp of allspice berries, and 1 Tsp of rock salt, then ground them up together. Damped the surface of the beef with Worcestershire sauce to make the rub stick, applied the rub, and then put it in a brown-paper bag on a cooling rack in my beer fridge to dry brine and age for eight days. Today I gave it a couple of hours on the bench to come up to a rather chilly room temperature, built a fire in my patio heater, and contrived it as a heap of burning coals surrounded by blocks of smouldering hardwood. When that had settled down I put the smoker-oven attachment on top of the heater and barbecued the beef to an internal temperature of 57 C in a thick plume of smoke. That involved managing the fire to maintain a temperature of 125 C in the smoker for an hour and three quarters. I served it with roasted kumara (a kind of sweet potato), green beans in garlic butter, and sauce that I reduced from a 680-gram brick of frozen beef stock that I had in the freezer.

It was very good.
So I went to a different butcher and got a three-rib roast of beef that came to 3.6 kg, which is more the sort of thing but was very expensive (it was wagyu). I covered it with the same rub (but made a larger amount), let it age for fifteen days in a brown paper bag on a cooling rack in my beer fridge, and then barbecued it in the patio heater the same way. The larger piece of beef took longer: two and a half hours.

My sister and I started the meal with mushroom quiche accompanied by a salad of lettuce, rocket, shiso, and parsley fresh from the garden and Veuve Cliquot. Then the beef and a reduction sauce accompanied by duckfat potatoes, green beans and garlic butter, a carrot purée with cumin, and a 2012 McLaren Vale shiraz. Finally pears poached with cinnamon in Rutherglen muscat, with a home-made ginger icecream, and accompanied by my homemade cumquat rum liqueur.

Unfortunately three of our intended guests were kept away by illness. This dinner party was cursed.
 
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I found out Henry Hill (the guy portrayed by Ray Liotta in Goodfellas) wrote a cookbook called The Wise Guy Cookbook. I admit I was a little skeptical because it sounded gimmicky but I bought it on the strength of the reviews. After giving it a read I have to say this guy knows his food!
 
For my first experiment with the icecream machine I tried churning my lemon-myrtle bavarois mixture. The results need work, but I have learned several important things.
  1. Set the machine going before you pour the mixture into the ice-bucket, because otherwise frozen miture will solder the paddles to the ice bucket and the machine won't work.
  2. Omit the gelatine from the bavarois. It makes the mixture become semi-solid before it freezes, which halts effective churning.
  3. A little bit more sugar. A little bit less cream. More lemon myrtle leaves or a stronger extraction.
 
Is it just me, or are the leaves on a head of celery the best part? They have a good deal more flavor than the actual stalks, and I really like putting them in a salad. I can't recall ever seeing them in a salad in a restaurant, though.
 
I haven't tried them in salad but I routinely put them and the little center stalks with their leaves into soups and sauces. I'm going to try sneaking them into a salad and see if anyone complains.
 
I was today years old when I tried Turkish delight for the first time. What a let down.

I can't say the rose flavoured variants do a lot for me, but you might get more mileage out of almond or pistachio flavoured Loukoumi.
 
Is it just me, or are the leaves on a head of celery the best part? They have a good deal more flavor than the actual stalks, and I really like putting them in a salad. I can't recall ever seeing them in a salad in a restaurant, though.

Don't know, I've never tried them! One more thing to-try food to add to my list!
 
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