a weekend away

"Sydney," he said, while swilling a glass of
red around and around, "is a beautiful city to live in. But you know what? It's an even better place to get out of." I plopped a piece of lamb in my mouth and nodded. "So what are you doing for the weekend?" he asked, as a grin spread across my face.

For those of you not in the know, we had a public holiday around here on Monday. And a public holiday monday just screams for an annual leave Friday. So on annual-leave Friday, Miss Shiny, SuperDanny & I piled ourselves into Rolli the Corolla, cranked up the tunes, pit-stopped at KFC Lindfield after all of 10 minutes driving, and eventually arrived at Chittaway Point.

The plan was to stop. To rest. To eat, drink and make merry. To soak in whatever sunshine we could get, and lie like lazy lizards on the deck. To play a game or two of tennis, or table tennis, or cards, or finding-Scott (we never did find him), and to wait impatiently for Mak to arrive late Friday night.

And in the mornings, there was bacon. Crispy fried middle rashers. Enough for us and a couple more besides. And on the first day, the bacon came with toast. And scrambled eggs. And mushrooms cooked in bacon fat.

And on the second day, there was no bacon (which, I agree, is a direct contradiction in terms to what I'd said just previously). Our excuse? We ran out. Which is semi-unbelievale considering the size of the grocery trip we'd made at Aldi. That, and there were pancakes to be made. Maple syrup pancakes with spiced ricotta and tinned-strawberry compote and butterscotch pears. "It is" said Miss Shiny, a half-munched mouthful of pancake later "a sign of a good day ahead when one manages to eat dessert for breakfast".

And on that third and final morning, the bacon reappeared. And it reappeared with a thick-sliced french toast and ricotta and morello cherry jam vengance. Sans coffee, for I am not a coffee drinker. And also sans coffee for the rest, because apparently having in excess of 10 hours' sleep in a day negates the need for caffeine.

And then there were dinners. Dinners aplenty, in fact. Mostly to make up for the fact that by the time breakfast was done and dusted, no-one had time nor room for lunch. A girly movie night (plus SuperDanny, sans Mak) was served up with a side of creamy chicken, bacon & mushroom penne.

The next night saw a progressive dinner that lasted from half-past-five until the late hours of the evening. First up, individual terracotta pots of prawns cooked in garlic oil. A quick how to: tip about 1/4 C olive oil into a terracotta pot or ramekin that can be oven-baked. Next, mince some garlic, about two cloves per pot and plop that in the oil. Stick them in the oven at 180C until you can smell the garlic and it's gone a litle bit brown. Not dark brown, just tanned. Plop your shelled and gutted prawns in and back in the oven for about 5 mins or until they're opaque. Serve with crusty bread. Brilliant!

SuperDanny put his roti-chef hat on and made us some roti while I whipped up a chicken curry. It was fun, though possibly needing some tweaking and a gas stovetop instead of the electric one we had. Oh, and a rolling-pin. Which we didn't have. So a bottle was gladwrapped and stood in its place. And that bottle was dubbed the "Heine-Pin". Which sounds a lot worse said than it looks typed.

And in between the many courses of our increasingly progressive dinners, there was cheese. Sweet cheese. Salty cheese. Savory cheese. Sometimes accompanied by crakers or bread or nothing at all. And when two blocks of haloumi resulted in a significantly smaller yield, we all looked at Mak, who grinned that not-quite-innocent grin before banning himself from the rest of the dish and sitting in a corner so as not to be tempted further.

And where there is dinner, there must be dessert. One night, a fudgy spicy chocolate cookie and ice cream sundae. And the next, this beauty. A morello cherry and Frangelico bread & butter pudding. Using fruity, spicy raisin toast for the bread part and a stomach-warming mixed spice and frangelico custard for the pudding part. It was a touch large for the four of us, and we resorted to eating it out of the baking dish, a quick mouthful of pudding followed by an accompanying scoop of raspberry ripple ice cream, straight from the tub.

And that is what a foodblogger eats when on holidays. Well, what this one ate at least. And because I didn't take extensive photos of the processes for making each of course of each meal, and because I will have to reproduce any recipe that appears on this here blog, I'm wondering: which recipe would you like to see?