pots & vans

After dinner tonight, Maria cleverly suggested we  make some stock from the left over loin chop bones. We sat in the van tonight with it simmering away for a couple of hours with some onion, carrot, garlic, bayleaf, herbs and pepper and salt. Can't wait to use it to enhance a dish sometime soon.

Earlier today I say, "Babe, how about we do that chickpea and spinach curry?" "I feel like roast chicken" she says. When we did a roast (yeah I know, 2 roasts in a week) last time I just threw everything in the roasting dish. Today, because we were in the shops in Lismore, I decided to look for a roasting rack. Two major problems, (i) size and weight: its gotta fit in the smallish roasting dish we've got in the van, and (ii) they don't sell them separately.  After poking around for a while I started looking for things I could use instead of the real thing, and found myself pondering the utility of a vegetable steamer. We gave it a crack and it worked great. Nice and light (for the van) and fitted nicely in our square oven dish. Not perfect, I'd say, but it did what I wanted, lifted the food above the base and the juices in the dish.

Maria doesn't drink hot drinks very often, so the coffee and tea caper in our van is usually a 1 person affair; hence the small plunger and tea pot. Coffee taken on our first ever caravan excursion from a few years ago from the deck at Clark's Beach This morning overlooking Simpson's Creek   Coffee tastes better when you grind it yourself. I've had this coffee grinder since we had our first caravan, when my habit was to get up early and do some work before others started the day. Maria and Johanna joke that whenever I grind my coffee (most mornings in the caravan unless we buy one from a cafe) it reminds them of those early years laying in bed trying to sleep while I sat outside and ground away. Some friends and I visited Marvel Street Coffee for some tasting mornings and Nico kindly gave me one of his cups, just the right size for my morning brew. Tea I've recently become a convert to rooibos tea, a red tea from South Africa that has the qualities of green tea but...

Until I got one of these, my attempts at paella with good socarrat were always foiled. I couldn't get our gas stove to go low enough to stop it burning rice in the thin paella dish. I could give up on the authentic paella pan, or keep trying. We could have got the gas flow adjusted to the stove, but that would have created other problems.  I went into Chef's Essential in Geelong looking for something I could use to lift the pot above the flame, a wok frame or something. When I explained what I was trying to do, the helpful women said, "I think you need one of these!". As well as the one we have in the van, we now have three at home for when we are doing paella for a crowd, and Maria uses them regularly for reheating etc. We even stack a couple on top of each other if we want an even slower burn.