Adam D. Roberts's Blog, page 39

Skip The White Meat, Braise The Dark Meat and Your Turkey Will Never Be Dry

Here’s the thing about turkey. If I were making it for my family, this year, I’d go the Gina DePalma route (click that link for her excellent essay on how to keep it simple): a whole roasted bird, some butter, some stuffing, the end. But, as it happens, I’m not cooking for my family this year (we’re going out! “It’s just easier”) so last week I made a pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving for some friends and threw tradition out the window. The first thing to go? The white meat. Sure, you can monitor the temperature and hope that it doesn’t taste like sandpaper when you roast it in the oven, but why bother when the dark meat–legs and thighs–are so much better? (Note: if you must have white meat, slow-roasting the breast is best.) Best of all, if you braise them, you can do everything the day before and it will only taste better. Let me repeat that. You can have all the turkey cooked the day before and don’t have to stress on Thanksgiving Day. That’s worthy of a parade right there.

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48 Hours in Sydney

After spending a week in Perth, Australia for the Eat Drink Blog conference, I knew I’d be connecting back through Sydney and everyone in my life told me I’d be crazy not to spend some time there. As it happened, I had recently signed up for an American Express Starwood card that came with 25,000 points—or I’d earned them or something—and I could use those points to stay at the Westin in the Central Business District for three nights. So, in other words, I could stay in Sydney for three nights totally for free or just go straight back to America. Duh: I chose to see Sydney.

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Eat Pie, Say Hi

Hey New York, guess what? On December 5th at 7 PM, I’m hosting an event at The Strand bookstore with Emily and Melissa Elsen for the launch of their new cookbook The Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book. Click here to buy tickets (only $15 or a copy of the book); rumor has it, there’ll be pie. Also: we’ll all sign our books at the end.

Sponsored Post: Amarula Rice Pudding with Toasted Almonds

When it comes to food, the holidays–and by holidays, I mean the big three: Thanksgiving, Hanukkah and Christmas–are like rides at Disneyland: you almost always know what you’re going to get. That’s what makes them so comfortingly familiar. Alter the turkey, sub out the latke, or cancel the Christmas cookies and you’re looking for a world of trouble. So accept this holiday dessert despite whatever resistance you might feel; it’s my humble creation based on a bottle of Amarula, a cream liquer from South Africa, that I was sent in the mail. I took one sip and thought: “Rice pudding…with toasted almonds!”

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I Ate Bugs at Billy Kwong

Let me start by saying that the dish you see above is not an actual dish served at Billy Kwong, the Chinese-Australian restaurant in Sydney where I ate my first meal after the five hour flight from Perth. It’s a dish that the manager hastily assembled at the end of an incredible dinner (one shared with my old friend and neighbor, Ameer) to allow us to sample the various bugs used as garnishes and flavor-enhancers for a panoply of dishes we didn’t get to try. Do not, by any means, be scared off by that plate. Instead, let me seduce you with the food we did eat before we get back to the bugs at the end.

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How To Shuck An Oyster

Jerry Fraser of Print Hall in Perth, Australia shucks 5,000 oysters a week. He does it with such finesse, with such ease, he can carry on a meaningful conversation and have a dozen oysters shucked by the time you move on to the next topic. He’s an oyster-shucking master who’s so completely passionate about what he does, people from all over Australia come to Perth just to see him in action. I feel incredibly privileged that I had the opportunity to learn from the master directly; what follows are some pictures and more video of Jerry giving his oyster-shucking master course. Turns out you just need one tool and the rest is skill.

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Farewell To Perth: Hawker Markets, Eat Drink Blog, A Food Truck Party, Aisuru Sushi, Flipside Burgers & Taiwanese Dessert

My sense of time is totally warped. I flew back from Sydney yesterday, leaving Thursday morning and arriving in L.A. on Thursday morning, five hours earlier than when I left. Today might be Friday but it also might not be Friday, I’m really not sure. All I know is that after visiting Fremantle last week, I had a few more days in Perth before going to Sydney on Monday (or was it really Monday?) This is an account of everything that I did in that time.

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The Clean Plate Club, Episode #16: J.J. Goode

What does a cookbook collaborator do? Meet J.J. Goode. He’s become the go-to guy for chefs who want to write cookbooks with panache. He’s collaborated with April Bloomfield on “A Girl and Her Pig,” Morimoto on the Morimoto Cookbook, and–most recently–Andy Ricker on the Pok Pok Cookbook, which is already having quite a debut. A curious fact is that J.J. does all of this with radial aplasia which, for all intents and purposes, means he tests all of these recipes with one arm. How does he do it? And how does one get a career like J.J.’s? Listen in and find out.

Let’s Go To An Australian Supermarket!

All right, class, find your buddy and take them by the hand…we’re going on a class trip to Australia to check out an Australian supermarket!

Surely there are better reasons to go to Australia, like the Sydney Opera House or kangaroos or Olivia Newton John, but as a lover of food and food shopping and grocery stores, I was fascinated to go into a mainstream grocery store today to see how it differed from its American cousins. And the one that I chose, Cole’s, was a perfect choice because it couldn’t have been more conventional. It is to Sydney what D’Agastino’s is to New York and Ralph’s is to California. It’s where normal people go to shop and, because of that, it’s easier to compare the differences. So hop into my cart and let’s see what there is to see.

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Sayers Food, Jerry’s Oysters, Print Hall, An Indigenous Tour, Fremantle Markets & Little Creatures

Let me tell you about Cory Gale. When Eat Drink Blog (the Australian food blog conference) decided they wanted me to be their featured speaker this year in Perth they partnered up with Cory Gale of Experience Perth to help plan my trip. All of these adventures I’ve been sharing with you so far have been dreamed up by Cory and what’s made them all so lovely–even the ones I was dreading (helicopter, speed boat)–has been Cory’s genuine enthusiasm for his city. He loves Perth and, even more, he loves sharing his love for Perth with other people. Here he is at breakfast sharing his enthusiasm for a mushroom omelet with truffles.

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