Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler What yummy thing are you eating tonight?

Wow, 8 months and not a single post in this thread.

Several months ago I discovered a local shop that sells nothing but olive oil and aged balsamic vinegars.

They have a huge variety of flavoured balsamic's using ingredients like chocolate (really good) coffee (meh) blood orange, fig (fantastic!!) coconut ...

The fig balsamic has an incredible aroma and tasted just as good. I used it in a spinach salad with walnuts, pear and goat cheese. amazing!

I had to try the coconut balsamic. I used it in an asian inspired coleslaw. I added toasted sesame seeds and a dash of sesame oil and sliced oranges to counter balance the sweet coconut flavour of the balsamic.

The plain balsamic is excellent on a tomato mozzarella salad with basil.

The tomato basil salad left me with a boatload of left over basil, so a cast about for a recipe to use it up. I found Jamie Oliver recipe that was a variation of basil pasta. It included green beans as a vegetable (and spinach, but I left that out opting for portabello mushroom instead). Where Mr. Olver made a basil pesto I got lazy and just chopped my boatload of basil putting some on the chicken while it sauted and adding the rest before serving.

So the ingredients are pasta, lots of basil, beans (heated for 4 minutes at the end of the pasta cooking cycle), lots of olive oil, portabello mushrooms, lots of Parmesan cheese.

On the smoker front, on a particularly cold day in early June, I tried cold smoking cheddar cheese. While it worked very well, if I want to continue to experiment with cold smoking, I'm going to have to build myself an external smoke box to keep the heat out of the smoker.

Today I decided to try doing a roast chicken on the smoker again. Last time did not turn out so well because the skin did not crisp up. This time I started the smoker at 550 to 'braise' the chicken before slow cooking it on the smoker. That worked out very well.

The chicken was stuffed with lemon rind and garlic (two whole bunches). After the chicken was done, I used the garlic for mashed potatoes. Really, really garlicy mashed potatoes.

That is all.

Carry on watching your crickets...