Frying in Air

 We have an early Christmas present here which is the all thinking, all blinking control panel air fryer.  We placed a whole chook in it last night and 50 mins later wer have cooked fowl.  There was also the whole potato chipper, which diced potatoes into chips in one stroke.  The alarm that goes off part way so that you can give the food tray a good shake, was unexpected.  It's just like the guy in the fish shop who gets the chip basket out of the fat, gives it a good rake, rattle and roll and sticks it back in, except here there is only air not fat. This thing will take some experimenting.

Double Batch

 We are having a prebirthday gathering at Willie so there has been some cutting,trimming and sweeping out the back.  Also some quiet smuggling of a huge tree trunk into the communal green bin was a successful operation although on my second trip, a neighbour was guarding the bin suspiciously so I waited for him to report back that no one could be seen. There is a pub lunch today but be warned that there is a huge number of home made sausage rolls to be had later in the afternoon.

Rolls marching two by two

Beer Fish

 There are some days when you can't count the number of fishing boats across the way as there are so many out there.  Our neighbour, who does occasional boat fishing, scores enough fish to deep freeze batches of them, however the neighbours have been stuck in NSW for the last 5 months.  We have been given a dozen filleted whiting from their freezer that have been caught just over there.  Debbie looked up the beer batter recipe on the internet and it was a much better job than that thick gloopy stuff the pubs do.  It is the first time we have tried the home grown fish and it was very tasty with the beer batter.

Paul Stork brought beer on a bush walk a few times to make damper. 

More Olives

We got the word around 3:00pm that the Oliverians were coming today. So I had time to spend an hour in the tree grabbing another bucket of Olives, amounting to around three to four kilos. The juice from this lot was running down my fingers, so these are ripe.  We used Heidi's taco mix sausage roll secret recipe at lunch time. Very tasty.  The last thing I did was prepare the billiard table for use again. I noticed the brand new puzzle pieces had left a fine blue powder over the cloth. At least it is not on the green felt.

Taco Rolls

2 weeks to put together two minutes to destroy

bucket of olives

Oliverians

PS Anyone who works with olives is an Oliverian.

Olive Ripe

It was one year ago that I climbed into the olive tree for a bit of picking and plucking.  I have started the job again but so far concentrated on the ripe berries only which have yielded just under 2 kilos.  I have had to delay getting the rest while my head regains some skin. Although I could try using a helmet but there's not a lot of room in the tree.  I have never been a fan of olives but when you are growing your own it seems to make a difference.  James and Heide cooked up jars of olives and the one we had also waited a year before I opened it.  They fizzed and sizzled but the taste is better than I remembered.  We are having just a couple with cheese and with some salad.

From this

into this

Vanilla Slice

Nothing like baking with alcoholic ingredients.  I tried a go at vanilla slices today. The recipe says these are eggnog vanilla slices. I think that flavour mainly comes from the Kraken Black Rum bottle we bought. YoHoHo.  I spent an hour or so buying ingredients and another hour on the baking for my 12 slices.  How many kinds of sugar are there? I used icing, caster and demerara sugar. There were three issues I had. The butter was not unsalted. I had trouble separating yoke from white and thirdly the main custard ingredients all went into the pot together when I was supposed to fold in at certain times.  Despite this, 12 tasty slices emerged from the fridge.  The pastry is crispy but the volume of custard seems to be a bit light on however they do the job.  Last tip use a serrated knife to cut into slices.

Blank canvas

Hot for now

Cold for later

Authentic Pizzeria

None of this buying pizza bases. Anna is the home made pizza chef.  We were lacking the pizza oven and the proper trays but it still tasted very authentic not to forget that distinctive smell of the real pizza base.  I must say the pastry twirling skills were a bit lacking. I did not see any swirling, twirling dervish pastry flying up to the roof and being caught one handed on descent.  The next day serving tip about using the wax paper in a sandwich press is a winner, even yielding a crunchy base.

base preparation

plate preparation

Extra large with no toppings

Travel Notes

We make notes as we go and one of them was to try some of the food we found along the way when we got back home.  We had our fair share of pizza as they were easily shared.  We tried to get shareable meals every day. There were some days when we did not eat any evening meal. We did that four or five times after a particularly large lunch.  Debbie made a pizza with three eggs balanced on top.  She has never tried this before but it worked.

Lunch in Toulon France

Professional Pizza with eggs