Australia has a pretty variable climate too. The best wines are often from years that the vines were stressed, so yields are lower but the resulting wine has more character. There also seems to be an odd year/even year variation here.

Another way stressed vines make more interesting wines is if they are infected with Botrytis fungus. This reduces the yield, and as it tends to kill yeast it makes wine making harder, but the result is a more intensely flavoured sweet dessert wine.

The ease of cleaning is what makes or breaks a device in my kitchen. Garlic presses are just a messy inconvenience to me (I prefer hand-washing to dishwashers). You don't have to use the flat of your blade; any heavy flat object will do, but only if i don't have time to slice it paper-thin. More pieces with a larger amount of surface area produce the best flavour.
Of course, if you're cooking for a larger group of people than a single family, this all goes out the window in favor of mass-production.

That's the problem right there: most Christians don't read their own fucking book. If they'd took it as seriously as the claim, as they tell gay people they do, we would hunt them down with drone strikes. Just like any other religious extremist. Same bullshit, different flavour.

I think everyone agrees that searing/browning creates more flavour - but it is incorrect to use to phrase 'sealing in the juices'.
I like my steak blue which means high heat on the outside for just a few seconds for a crust and then only just warm i the middle.
I've never head sous vide steak but i'd be interested to compare the flavour

I drink coffee because I like the flavour, not because I need caffeine. So yeah, reasonably confident I'm doing it OK.

Allerto's off of Brookhurst. That's the shiiiiiit. Best American Mexican food made by American Mexicans, which unless you're dumb and white, is all Mexicans with citizenship. Yer American now make us think you're making us Mexican food. We. Don't. Care. We are a grey race of capitalist alphas. Even the women. We'll fucking kill you, man. For a stick of dorittos flavoured gum.

Unfortunatly, it's not just Merkel and her cabinet. It's the press, it's the economics departments at universities, it's politicians at all levels. Call it an economic nationalism, hell-bent to defend what they know to be the moral way of doing business. Everything left of this special flavour of market fundamentalism has been systematically attacked and suppressed for at least 30 years.

For instance, our socialist party, still referred to as the fringe of what is acceptable, runs on what is basically a carbon-copy of social-democrat programmes from the '70s. Similar to the British Green Party and Labour. Krugman, Stiglitz, Baker, Wolff, DeLong -- they'd all be on the fringe in Germany. Even the likes of Simon Johnson (IMF) or Willem Buiters (City Group).

If you speak out in favour of higher inflation (wage growth) to ease the pressure on our brothers and sisters in southern Europe, you'll be charged with waging a war against German saver. "You want to devalue what little savings a nurse can accrue? Don't you support blue collar workers?"

The same blue collar workers have been stripped of their savings by 15 years of wage suppression, the same blue collar workers are looking at poverty when they retire, because the PAYGO pension system was turned into a capital-based system that only works to your benefit if you never lose your job, always pay your dues and reach at least age 95. The previous system survived two world wars without a problem, yet was deemed flawed when they realized how much money could be channeled into the financial system – only to disappear at the first sight of a crisis, eg every five to ten years.

Similarly, you could point out that a focus on trade surpluses might not be the greatest of ideas, given the dependence it creates on foreign demand, a weak currency and restricted wage growth domestically. But they'll call you a looney. "The trade surplus is a result of just how industrious our workers, how creative our scientists and how skilled our engineers are. It's all innovation, mate! Are you saying we force the others to buy our stuff? That's madness."

You simply cannot have an open discussion about macroeconomics in Germany. Do I have to mention how schizophrenic it makes me feel to read contradictory descriptions of reality every day? It's bonkers and everyone's better off NOT reading both German and international sources on these matters.


Any compromise would have to work with this in mind. They'd have to package in a way that doesn't smell like debt relief of any kind. People know that stretching the payment out over 100 years equals debt relief, but it might just be enough of a lie to get beyond the level of self-deception that is simply part of politics. If they manage to paint Varoufakis' idea of growth-based levels of payment as the best way to get German funds back, people might go for it. Not sure if our government would, but you could sell it to the public. And with enough pressure from Greece, Spain, Italy, and France most of all, maybe Merkel could be "persuaded" to agree to a deal.

As for Syriza's domestic problems: it's a one-way ticket to hell. Undoing decades of nepotism under external pressure, with insolvency knocking on your door? Best of luck.

Italy is hard on Greece's heels in terms of institutional corruption. Southern Italy, in particular, is an absolute mess. Given the size of the Italian economy, Syriza better succeed, so their work can be used as a blueprint. Otherwise we're going to need a whole lot of popcorn in the next decade...


Edit: Case in point, German position paper, as described by Reuters. As if the elections in Greece never took place.

@enoch,

I'm afraid you are the one misunderstanding. Hijacking and redefining anarchy to mean support for essentially a different flavour of grassroots democracy isn't clever or insightful. It's an abuse of the language. That is merely a semantic complaint though. The deeper problem is that it's an effort to build an argument atop a contradiction. Namely, anarchy with some form of overall governing structure. Starting from such a contradiction allows you defend or tie anything and everything back to your core statement. That's why I declared it intellectually dishonest.

You advocate your position as 'anarchy' but then proceed to describe a government of the people, by the people and for the people. You've described democracy, not anarchy. You advocate absolute freedom of the people from the tyranny of rulers. You declare no more wars of aggression, but who's rule is that except your own? I'm afraid that history shows that a large portion of your free people will most assuredly gather together and agree on waging a war of aggression, and the only stricture holding that back is the rule made by the ruler against it, in this case the ruler being yourself.

In short anarchy only fares as well as human nature can be trusted, which is not far at all. Redefining it as democracy light isn't honest, it's just rejecting the burden of defending the specific changes and improvements one would propose. It's an ancient trick used endlessly throughout history and one I refuse to accept.

...Eats pop corn...
Im'a gonna sit this one out..., I'll be right over here, munching on my popped corn smothered in butter flavoured topping!

So basically any time I have vanilla ice cream with 'natural flavouring' there's a good chance I'm eating beaver arse milk?!

If you just want to cool a drink without diluting it or changing the flavour, you want whiskey stones.

You should never put ice in good whiskey. The cold traps actually "closes the nose" (i.e. you can't smell it as well). Conversely, a drop or two of water in whiskey "opens the nose" (improves the aroma).

Depends on what you're into. In terms of tenderness, Filet Mignon basically trumps because it's insanely soft, even when cooked up to well-done.

If you want a flavourful steak, go for anything with a "Bone In". That would be a rib-eye, bone in rib steak, T-bone, etc. Typically they're more flavourful steaks because they tend to be "fattier", and fat = taste.

The "baseball" and "coulotte" steaks are typically beef for the sake of beef, usually not going to be the focus of your dish, it'll be something that gets topped off with blue cheese or garlic butter as another type of flavour.

Flank, Skirt, "hanger" and most other types of steaks are also not typically the focus of your meal, but will usually be cooked up for other parts of it. (Order steak fajitas at a restaurant? 90% chance it's one of these three steaks.)

The key factor to almost all of them though is marbleization, which refers to the amount of good fat that's weaved its way through the cut. It may look gross when raw because it's honestly like a buncha white shit on your steak but once that's cooked up that's where the flavour comes from.

My personal choice for a steak is the Bone-in wing steak. It's effectively a giant slice of prime rib roast that's been cooked up like a steak. Very tender, lots of flavour, and at the end, as long as you don't mind looking like a neanderthal, you can actually just chew the meat off the bone for some of the most tender / tasty steak you'll ever have.

I know this is a running world joke due to the popular mass production American beers.

But a lot of people dismiss America as a whole because of this joke and I feel it's important to point out that America actually has a thriving and amazing microbrewery culture that produces beers equal to any in the world.

The problem is when microbreweries get to a certain size, they almost always sell out to a larger company and the product deteriorates in to the "perfect always same taste" precision of the mass production beer, losing any charm or personality the beer used to have. As it now needs to be consistently marketable.

The other factor is once these beers do get sold off, you often lose the original brew anyway, you just end up buying a locally made brew with "expert consultants ensuring the same taste", except it never is the same taste because they use local ingredients which inherently have a different flavour, missing the whole point of world beer in the fucking first place.

Basically a few giant beer corps rule the world and wreck everything, turning a beverage that should be on par with wine in to something very misunderstood and generally accepted as a low classing alcoholic drink.

If you want good beer in any country, not just America, the situation is the same, you need to go the micros who still employ the passion and respect the skill takes. Hence I declare the joke no longer relevant.

I thought this was another 4chan mass-troll when i first heard of it. Perhaps it will be this year's "Kony 2012." I've never heard anyone called bossy that wasn't striding around demanding things, telling people what they should be doing without consideration for the situation, etc. I've never heard anyone called a leader that wasn't a problem-solver with a good ability to express themselves. Part of me wants to believe this is some sort of inter-Atlantic difference because i've been so isolated from any evidence of it being a problem.

I've got three points and i'll try to make them succinct. If anyone wants to pull me up on them, i'll go further.

1. The word bossy is not inherently sexist. Sometimes people are bossy. Calling a girl bossy doesn't make you sexist. This campaign can make villains out of people in the same way that a girl getting called bossy can unfairly stereotype a strong willed woman. At best it trades one form of unfairness for another.

2. Human beings come in two flavours. One of them is man, another is woman. Man and woman are different. They will never in the foreseeable future be equal in all things, and it is not sexist a) to say that or b) for that to be the norm. This is the way of the animal kingdom - we see it in animals, and we are animals. Because of our different chemical composition, we will have a natural role diversity that is is absolutely unavoidable and has nothing to do with fairness. In lieu of this, any study that says "gender A is less represented in field B because sexism," has a hell of a lot of factors to take into account, some of which i'm not even sure can be accounted for. I am in no way stating that all of one particular gender are better than all of the other gender at any given thing; i am saying that on average, testosterone and oestrogen will soften or harden the heart in different ways (to simplify the argument) which will lead on average to gender weighting. It is going to take a lot more than a few poems and forceful statements to convince me. Where are the sources and the studies, and what authority do they have? Furthermore where are the studies about word-prohibition in the grand scheme of solving problems? i.e. How do we know this is a good idea even if there is a problem?

3. "Banning" a word empowers that word for those who would use it for harm. Or people will find a new way of expressing the same idea. In Britain people thought that UKIP (*spit*) should be kept off TV because giving them political air-time legitimised them. In actual fact, the better idea (and eventual decision) was to put them on TV and allow them to make idiots of themselves with their inherent stupidity. I suggest a similar thing is true of banning the word bossy. Let it be said, and make it abundantly clear how wrong it is when it gets said.

This was a really bad idea that stems from a great intention. And for the record, i love bossy girls - it would benefit me to see more empowered woman in the world. It's not easy finding them.