Sunday 22nd November

I know I was a few days early with Birthday wishes, I’m never sure if I’m going to be online, especially with us being in the office in town. Better early than miss entirely though.

My chilli and pepper trader at Kukum Fish Market was back again this week, I have to go look for him, he hides over the back off the main part, he’d bought more Thai birdseye chillies, so I bought most of what he had, $20 worth, he gets a laugh from me because I always try one or two first, and I really have to struggle not to gasp and breathe fire with them. Think of a lit match being put on your tongue. I’ve got another couple of jars salted down, with ginger as well this time, in a few months I’ll have a really spicy hot chilli sauce to use. They’re small, barely ½ an inch long, but my hands are still tingling from handling them over 10 hours ago. Meant to be good for arthritis, I’ll find out if my finger knuckles work better tomorrow. Also found out, well, just once more, never touch your face, or other body parts after handling chillies, you have to really like stinging pain to do it repeatedly.


My steamer died on Friday night, another thing to put on the list of things to bring back, as well as a steamer, a voltage rectifier. I found out at work that SIEA voltage can vary from 250v to 220v at any time, depending on how many generators are working and what the load is. So it does play havoc with electrical equipment. Which explains why the laptop transformer can run really hot at times. I’ve decided to get a dehydrator as well, there is just too much cheap fruit to eat, I waste a bit, bananas, pawpaw, sometimes pineapple, it all gets too much for me to eat in a week, even when I cut down on the amount of fruit I buy. The size of the banana hands is always a trap, 15 – 25 bananas in a hand, for $10- $15, even the $10 pineapples I buy are enough to last a week made into fruit salad with pawpaw and banana.

I was asked the other day if I missed having meat, I could be all virtuous and holistic, lentil munching looney left wing bleeding heart cuddling kittens and puppies and say no, but truthfully I wake up dreaming about leg of lamb roasts, thick cuts of steak marinated in soy sauce and covered with black pepper cooked almost rare on a hot plate, chilli stir fried squid, so I guess being a vegetarian isn’t something I’m meant to be. Roast pork with apple and clove sauce, crackling, venison quick fried with garlic, liver and bacon for breakfast with mushrooms, oh stop it.

There are local chicken producers, but looking at the cuts or whole chickens in the shop is a bit of a let down, it is probably perfectly good, but it always looks scrawny, and at $30 for a 1kg bag of soup cuts, neck/ribs/bones I don’t think so. Whole chickens are between $85 and $130, which is more than I spend on food a week anyway. Leg of lamb is $450, sausages $50 (pkt of 6), beef mince (hamburger) $50 for 500gm (1 lb), 4n’20 Australian frozen meat pies are $18 each, whole duck $380, it’s no wonder the locals don’t eat meat often. Or have their own pig that never seems to grow old. And the chickens that run loose everywhere but never seem to overrun the place.

I’m still wary of the fish, even if it hasn’t killed anyone here, well, not that the newspapers have reported anyway. There was some really nice red snapper at Kukum today, but after the last episode with buying fish I gave it a miss.

I’ll plug my favourite blog site again, www.joepastry.com, I use a lot of Joes bread recipes, and ideas, as anyone reading this should know by now. The latest batch of bread from the weekend is probably the best I’ve made so far, for plain bread anyway, the garlic and black pepper loaves I made a couple of weeks back are going to be hard to beat. I made a sponge up Friday night, 2 teaspoons yeast, 1 cup flour, 1 tablespoon salt and 1 ½ cups water, and left it to work till Saturday night, then poured it into 8 cups of flour, a bit more salt, and ½ cup of oil, a couple of cups more water and mixed, then left till Sunday morning to shape and bake.



Pic is of one of the loaves, it has a strong sourdough aroma when opened, slightly vinegary, but with a strong yeast aroma that comes through. I’ll find out tomorrow morning how it tastes as toast. I’ve got a copy of Elizabeth Davids Bread Book back in NZ, one of the things she constantly reiterates is how the flavour of bread is enhanced by long proving times, and less yeast. I know Joe is more commercially orientated, and even when I was working in the bakery in Schull we never gave a long proving time, the bread still tasted better than the commercial mechanical loaves though. I worked for Donaghues Bakery in Tullamore for a few months, that was a real contrast to Schull, all machines, it was just tip 10 bags of flour in, turn the tap on for water, throw a couple of packets of yeast into the vat, and set the blades going. Even the shaping was done by machines. It tasted ok in a fashion, but nowhere as good as small batch made product.

I got rid of all the left over bananas as well, and baked 2 banana cakes, with 8 bananas in each. The first one was a bit of a disaster, I forgot to turn the oven down when I put the tin in, so it formed a crust before the centre had a chance to rise, then split open along one side as the centre burst out. The second one is a lot more presentable, I need deeper tins though, another thing to go on the list, the tin I have is only 40mm high, so everything tends to rise in the centre and spill sideways without keeping a nice even shape.


Another pic of dinner, well, dinner ingredients, the bowl has pineapple, onion, garlic, chillies, grated ginger, a bowl of chopped up green stuff, I never know what it is, but it tastes good, egg noodles, also on show, the bread, unchopped habanero and birdseye chillies. It all got tossed into the ever faithful wok, tossed around over high heat for a few minutes, a splash of fish sauce, and dinner was ready. And yes, the chillies were still hot.