Adventures in holiday house cooking

What is it about holiday houses?  Why do they never have vegetable peelers?  I understand them lacking other things I find essential, like coffee plungers (Darwin Beach House has one now) and decent knives.  But vegetable peelers? And how come no tongs?  Or a colander?

So, Easter in Darwin to meet up with the male part of the family.  Sunset over the ocean, termite mounds, crocodiles, swimming in waterfalls, all the things one would expect to do in the Top End.  And very nice it was too.  But this post is about the cooking of one particular meal.

The house came equipped with a big BBQ.  Half my bank account and a chat with the butcher later, (plus a foray into Woolies for vegetable peelers and a few other essentials), I had the fixings of a meal.

Want to see what $40 worth of steak looks like?

Two pieces of scotch fillet on the bone, a good five centimetres thick.

So, back to the kitchen.  To balance out the red meat there was some snapper to cook as well.  Fish needs foil on a BBQ, I think.  No foil to be had.  However the resourceful holiday house cook recalls that the quiche she made for lunch was sitting in an aluminium pie dish.  Flatten it out and there is the holiday house equivalent of foil, once you squash the little holes closed.

Cooking is thirsty work.  Important not to get dehydrated in the tropics.

On to the BBQ.  I bought four cents worth of ginger at Woolworths to go on the fish.  Woolies would have been better off if I stole it, I think it cost them more to pay the man to weigh it.

No tongs, as mentioned before.  Lucky the steak came with handles.  Pie plate cooking worked quite well on the fish.

Ta dah!!! Meal on the table!!!


And if you are wondering how to cook my steak when you invite me over to dinner, see below.  Pretty damned near perfect.

The search for the perfect portuguese custard tart

I've been making PCTs for a while now, courtesy of Bill Granger's quite achievable recipe.

Speaking as someone who has never had an affinity with custard, either cooking or eating it (dating back to a traumatic experience in primary school involving bananas, packet custard and a boy named Karl) I'm quite proud of my custard tarts.

I'm also becoming more fussy about the quality of the tarts I eat that are made by others.

So when I had an event recently at Parliament House, I took the opportunity to have PCTs on the menu for morning tea, knowing that the pastry chef at Parliament House is a pretty talented individual.

Firstly, a custard tart at 10.30am when you have been up since 4.30am, already run one event and are a good way into the second tastes pretty good.

The custard was good - a bit softer than mine with a nice flavour. A lovely dusting of powdered sugar and a little bit caramalised around the edges. The pastry wasn't very crisp. My kind banquets person on the day gave me a take home pack for the children and they loyally said they preferred mine. Time to compare.

A weekend batch of custard tarts resulted. I made the custard a bit looser than I usually do and infused a bit of mandarin peel in the custard. They came out of the oven looking pretty good and we took them around to share with Bronwen and Claire M.

Bronwen, not having tasted the Parliament House version was unable to compare. The girls and Claire M could compare. We seem to prefer my pastry and the Parliament House custard.

I'm going to keep working on this, since a good PCT is a fabulous thing. And with new chickens on the scene at Bronwen's place (welcome to Twitter and FaceChook) eggs are not something we are short of. I'll keep you posted on how I go.