Autumn Break

For the autumn break I headed down to Marlo, Cape Conran and Lakes entrance.  Marlo is just over 4 hours drive East of Melbourne and is most known for being the town that sees the snowy river meet the ocean.  I stayed at the Marlo Ocean Views camping ground and I won't be going back.  I found the campsite to be overcrowded and the staff generally unfriendly.  The town itself is not particularly close to anything exciting with most of the highlights being to the east.  I spent an uneventful afternoon fishing at Point Ricardo where the only thing I was catching was a nasty headache.

I've been wanting to start reading the book On Food and Cooking for a while and the trip provided plenty of quality reading time.  The book is written by Harold McGee and its purpose is to bring a touch of science into the kitchen.  Given I studied organic chemistry at Uni I was looking forward to seeing how I could resurrect some lost knowledge.  It's all been good timing as I've recently started watching Heston Blumenthal's amazing cooking adventures.

Then it was off to Cape Conran which turned out to be much more interesting and exciting.  My headache had gotten a lot worse so I wasn't really in the mood for a lot of walking which is a shame because the walks in that area would be amazing.  So back to some fishing it was and this time a lot more eventful.  I managed to land a 47cm, 2kg Australian Salmon which was pretty cool.  Its the biggest fish I've ever caught and probably the best tasting.  More on that later.

After gutting the fish and putting it on ice I headed to Lakes Entrance where I stayed the night in a beautiful Bed and Breakfast called the Goat and Goose.  I was very warmly welcomed by the host Joy and had a good chat over a cup of tea.  I highly recommend a stay and I'm in no doubts that I will be back there in the future.  All in all a very enjoyable and relaxing break.

Monthly Dinner Report - Peruvian Feast

Last weekend was the second of my monthly dinner parties.  The night was inspired by my trip to South America in 2009 where I visited Peru and Bolivia.  One of the things I remember most about the trip was the food safari's that a few of my travelling buddies and I undertook.  We took particular interest in the local bakeries where I was pleasantly surprised to find a high quality of pastries.  One of the delicious cookies that we found was called alfajores.  Each Alfajores contains two shortbread like cookies put together with dulce de leche in the middle.  Dulce de leche is a form of caramelised condensed milk.  The other pastry of choice was empanadas.  See my recent post on empanadas.  The final inspiration came from the meal I had in the little town of Puno which is right on lake Titicaca.  For dinner I had a fresh water trout with ceviche as an entree.  So for dinner I prepared ceviche and the empanadas as entrees, rainbow trout escabeche as the main and alfajores as the dessert.

I was really happy with how the food turned out.  Surprisingly the highlight for me was the fish.  I made the ceviche with sea perch, lime juice, chilli, garlic, salt, pepper, onion and coriander.  The rainbow trout was marinated in lime juice, salt and pepper then lightly battered.  I was most impressed with my judgement on how long to cook the trout for, 2 mins on either side and that was it.  The trout was garnished with a peruvian salsa and accompanied with potatoes and corn.  For info on the actual recipes click here.

The trickiest part to the dinner was going to be the alfajores.  Making the biscuits was relatively straight forward with the only odd ingredient being corn flour.  I'm assuming that because corn is so abundant in Peru it was favoured over wheat based flour.  Dulce de leche can be made in roughly three different ways. One of those ways is to put a can of condensed milk into the oven at low temperature for around 5 hours.  This may seem like the easiest way but if the temperature gets a little high then BANG you get condensed milk everywhere.  I opted for the "reduce on the stove" technique which requires continuous stirring for 45 mins.  I did manage to slightly burn the mixture but overall it came out pretty well.

All in all it was a very enjoyable meal with good company.  Now to decide on what to cook next month.