I can't cook steak. There. I said it. But it's true. Even though I'm a medium rare guy, I always end burning the crap of my choice cuts. I blame the unreasonable demands of the 'well done' brigade to be served up a plate with nary a drop of the red stuff on it.

Really hoping that this Steakmate app I put on my phone today helps. It's from the Meat and Livestock Corporation, so you'd hope they knew what they were doing.

It seems to have a pretty simple interface. You choose your steak, enter some data like thickness and how well done (or not) you want it, and it sets a timer on your phone and/or watch telling you when to turn and when to remove and rest.

You can set multiple timers for people who want their meat done differently. Thomas and I are both medium rare men. The ladies, not so much.

It only does steak for the moment, but presumably it could be further developed to handle lamb, pork and so on.

Now all I need is a new barbecue to test it out on. My old four burner has not weathered the latest of its ten winters all that well.

I can't believe I missed the first three! Why was I not told? WHY!?!

There are 24 little whisky windows to open, of course, and according to the website "highlights among this year’s 24 drams include a rare 50-year-old Scotch, an award-winning Japanese whisky and the World’s Best Blended Whisky (World Whiskies Awards 2014). Each handmade, wax-sealed dram allows whisky fans to sample a new whisky, tasting everything from single grain whisky to rare Scotch worth up to £350 a bottle..."

I mean it this time. I stumbled across this Teeling Irish Whiskey at a tasting in the bottle shop at Gasworks, with which Mr Monsteryuppy will be all too familiar.

I don't normally get suckered into these things, but I was led astray by my good lady wife who encouraged me to have just a wee dram.

Oh. My. Fucking. God.

This shit is insane. I tried the 20 year old, which is aged in six different types of barrel. It compared very favourably with the 25yo Highland Park I'm currently sipping my way through. Hell, it more than compared. It kicked arse. I bought the eighty dollar bottle, but would have paid more than double for it. Probably shouldn't tell the bottle shop that though.

My irregular commute, a morning run across the city just ahead of peak hour, takes me within striking distance of The Brown Dog Cafe in the back streets of the Gabba.

It was a place which intriuged me for a long time. An old, anonymous corner lot, out of the way, and yet the footpath outside always seemed crowded. Eventually I checked it out, as is my want, and discovered one of the local secrets of the southside.

The Lazy Dog Roll.

Like the cafe from which it draws its name, the roll is simple. A white bun, fresh sliced ham, cheese, a fried egg and BBQ – or possibly HP – sauce. If I had to nominate a breakfast to eat every day for the rest of my life, I think this would be it. I never tire of this bloody thing, and find myself thinking about as I'm racing ahead of the peak hour wave to drop Thomas to school.

There are heaps of other breakfast options at the Dog, some of them remarkable value, but I can never get past this roll and a flat white in a large mug. I'd post a picture, but I've never known one to last long enough on the plate to capture an image.

STRAUSS.

189 Elizabeth St, Brisbane QLD

open 6.30am - 3pm | Monday - Friday 07 3236 5232.

It's a trap for young players, breakfast in the city. Especially this city in winter. Hobart, Melbourne, even Sydney, they know it's going to be unpleasantly cold sometime in the year. Brisbane, not so much. Oh, it gets cold enough. But nobody likes to acknowledge that, especially not in the way we live. Because of this there are some lovely places to have breakfast in the city, but you can't go there in winter because all of the seating is outside, often in the middle of a wind tunnel.

Strauss does not seem well located. Tucked away at the end of a long, lonely alleyway, which seems more of an afterthought than a design tweak in a city which is desperately trying to reclaim its backstreets, Strauss has plenty of outdoor seating, but you can bustle on past that and grab yourself a warm and cosy spot inside. Indoors, the cafe is all exposed brick, brushed steel, and hardwood. It's very Manhattan loft space. The clientele are city workers, of course, but they seem to be the sort who assiduously seek after the secrets of the city that most punters, happy with an egg McMuffin and a Styrofoam cup of Ronald McDonald's finest Java, never find.

The coffee at Strauss is of a kind that coffee nerds will seek out, travelling an extra three or four blocks if necessary. They will make all the classics, naturally, but you are doing yourself a disservice if you don't allow them to make you a filtered brew.

Whoa! Back off. Put down those pitchforks right now.

By filtered coffee I don't mean the astringent liquid tar beloved of America's roadside diners. I mean fresh, individually made glasses of superfine premium Arabica. The only place I drink black coffee is at Strauss, and I drink it every time I go there. Served in large, delicate stemless wine glasses (well fuck off, that's what they look like) the filter coffees are a revelation. I don't know whether it's the glass, but the flavour profile is so gently complex it always reminds me of drinking wine. And who doesn't want to drink hot wine on a cold morning?

That's not enough of course. We must eat too, and the thing I like about Strauss is the minimal, stripped back menu. Nothing complicated, but everything made from fresh, top shelf ingredients. It was crowded when I had breakfast yesterday, and I took a seat at the bench running the length of the open kitchen area, allowing me to watch the young woman preparing the meals work her magic. The crowds kept coming, the meal dockets rolled in, and she never stopped moving; sawing through great thick logs of freshly baked sourdough, juggling dozens of perfectly poached eggs, sprinkling fresh raspberries on steaming hot bowls of porridge. It was inspiring and not a little intimidating to watch her work.

I had a simple ham-n-eggs combo, that arrived as two pink slices of prosciutto on thick slabs of buttery toast topped by a couple of golden googs. I rarely get past this menu item, but if I did it would probably be to sample the sweet treats which look devastating.

I meant to take Professor Boylan to breakfast here while he was out, but I failed him in that regard. I let the Prof down, I let myself down, I let Australia down.

Because Harvard is on the case and they've invented a cheap, foolproof smoker. And apparently paying a couple of thousand dollars for your cheap, foolproof smoker designed by Harvard engineering grads is a good deal.

The New York Times has the story, but I got the hero pars right here:

Mr. Parker came up with the idea for the smoker project at a cooking contest in a Memphis parking lot before a college football game. He was stunned by the smokers he saw. “I mean, just piles of metal junk,” is how he described them. “Trash cans with smokestacks. It was offensive to an engineer.”

When the semester began, only two of the 16 students in the class had smoked meat before, two were vegetarians and five were from abroad and did not know what American-style barbecue was.

They began by analyzing smokers on the market, focusing on Big Green Egg, a popular one with a ceramic cooking chamber. They evaluated the extra-large version, which costs $1,200. “We went through the patent of the Big Green Egg and just completely dissected it,” Mr. Parker said. “Where’s the opportunity here? Where’s the weakness here?”

They built computer models of Big Green Egg, of the brisket and, eventually, of their own smoker. They ran hundreds of computer simulations, and they learned that maintaining a precise, steady cooking temperature is crucial to evenly breaking down the meat’s collagen, tenderizing it. Several students spent their spring break taking a crash course in ceramics at the Harvard Ceramic Studio to build two prototypes of the smoker.

I don't know of anybody in Australia who goes to the sorts of lengths for a barbecue fix. I did know a bloke in Canberra used to marinate his prawns for an hour or so before burning them on the grill, and there's always some idiot who insists on upending his beer all over the meat while it's on the flame. But I don't know of anybody who's commissioned research and development like this.

I just don't know that we have the patience. This idea that you stand by the barbecue, or the smoker I guess, and lovingly tend the meat for 12 to 14 hours seems… excessive. Don't get me wrong, I accept that the final product is undeniably superior, but by the time I've got four or five beers under my belt I really just want a burned snag, a slice of white bread and another four or five beers.