Tofu and Veggie Stir Fry: Castaway Bar and Restaurant, Dili.

Note to self: Castaways stir fries suck arse.

Tonight I wanted healthy but tasty. I was imagining a really fresh, crunchy, veggie stir fry with golden tofu puffs soaking up all the flavour.

I was sure that I’d ordered one of these before, and my memory of it wasn’t of the “never again” kind. You get to choose what sauce you want from a list: hoisin, oyster, plum or blackbean. I chose oyster. I can’t remember what I chose last time. Probably oyster.

The tofu was completely white – no sticky, marinated, fried surfaces soaking up flavoured goodness. The rice/hokkien noodle combo was a bit of carbo overload. It also had tinned champignons, which always tend to remind me of eyeballs. I must have been really hungry though, because at one stage I caught a glimpse of my fork just before putting it in my mouth and it had about 5 slices of champignons on it, and I thought to myself, “Nooo! I hate champignons!”, but in it went and I chewed those little eyeball slices up and swallowed them down.

Some of the veggies weren’t too bad – the snow peas and carrots did have a nice crunch – but it was generally a disappointing meal. To make matters worse, I had dinner table envy the whole time (don’t you hate that??), watching Wade enjoying his “Cheese and Broccoli Ravioli”, which I really wished I’d ordered, but I’d always been too scared – the unpredictability of food quality in Dili eateries generally, combined with the word “cheese” put me off. But I tasted Wade’s tonight and it was really nice – a rich, garlicky tomato sauce, some sort of white, creamy substance (sour cream?) and a home-made pesto (made with Thai basil, but it tasted really fresh), and lovely fresh shavings of parmesan over the top. I’d recommend that instead. It looked like this:

 
The best part of my meal was my “pineapple and ginger kicker“, which contained orange and pineapple juice with a real hit of ginger. Sensationally zingy. Wade had a fresh orange juice, and these are always good, because of their creamy texture.

There were some really nice tunes playing at Castaways tonight, too. They have live music on a Thursday and Sunday. Tonight there were a couple of young Timorese guitarists/singers playing some cruisey acoustic tunes.  I especially liked the instrumental pieces.

I'm not writing off Castaways by any means, but this was not one of my more memorable meals there.

The Little Oven that Could

Sayonara, soggy sandwiches from sliced bread that’s been squashed into the top of an esky on the overnight ferry! Bonjour, homemade crusty bread dipped into olive oil!!

Adios, cardboardy, supermarket-bought cereal! Aloha, nutty, seedy, wholesome, fresh-from-the-oven toasted muesli!!
Catch-ya later, boiled potata! Hello, roast veggie cous cous salad!!

Ovens open up a whole world of possibilities to the remote-living cooking experience. It is no exaggeration to say that this little contraption has changed my life. The photo above, which really shows how versatile it is, was taken on a day when we had run out of gas, half-way through cooking a cake, so we thought we’d whack it over a fire. It was a little difficult to control the temperature so the cake was inedible, but it got a good smoking! But usually it sits on top of the gas hob in the kitchen and is big enough to fit a loaf tin (with sides miraculously bent down by Wade so that it could fit through the door), a small cake tin or a small roasting tray.

I spend most weekends baking bread, cakes and/or biscuits, toasting muesli, roasting veggies. Not even the heat can stop me. I really like experimenting with different ingredients for our bread - olive and rosemary bread and focaccia (see the photos below), walnut bread, wholemeal fruit bread with dried cranberries, sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds, and a high-top style ciabatta loaf with crunchy semolina on the crust. I’ve also made a lemon and poppy seed afternoon tea cake as well as chocolate hazelnut cookies and passionfruit and macadamia shortbread. This last attempt ended up a dismal failure because instead of adding 3 teaspoons of baking power to the plain flour to make it “self-raising” I accidentally added bicarb soda. I ended up with these strange, puffy yellow globs, and the only way I can describe the taste is “chemical”.

There’ll be more photos of baked goods coming soon, straight from the oven, but in the meantime, here are a couple of loaves of bread that I’ve baked so far.

Olive and rosemary bread. EVOO, salt and pepper for dipping.

The dough was a mixture of wholemeal and white flour, and I also used some semolina and olive oil in the dough (as well as the standard yeast, salt and water).

I’d like to take this opportunity to throw all modesty aside and say that this is the best loaf of bread I’ve ever baked. Thank you.

Olive and rosemary focaccia.

This is basically the same recipe as above, minus the semolina, and proved only once before baking.

Little Labne Salad

I made this dish for lunch one day when I wanted something light but flavoursome. The rocket and basil were straight from our garden and the potatoes were leftovers, boiled the night before, so I just fried them up in some olive oil until they were nice and crispy.

The labne was actually a yoghurt-making exercise gone wrong. I was too impatient to wait for the milk to cool down before adding the culture, and so it curdled like cottage cheese. I continued with the process, leaving it overnight to “yoghurtise”. In the morning everything smelt and tasted right, but the consistency was still a curdled mess, so I decided to make labne instead. I added a teaspoon of salt, gave it a stir and tipped it into a muslin-lined strainer to separate the whey, letting it drain for a day in the fridge. I then rolled it up into balls, put it in a plastic container, along with some garlic cloves, rosemary and pepper corns and covered it with olive oil. After a couple of days the yoghurt balls had taken on the garlicky-rosemary flavour and became very addictive.

The first thing you might have noticed in this salad is the tomato. That wouldn’t surprise me. They are very red. Oecusse has the most wonderfully fresh and sweet tomatoes, as good as you would find in the most organic, gourmet, greengrocers (and, may I also add, about ten times better than the ones you get in Dili). And they are interesting: we can find pea-sized cherries as well as large heirlooms in all sorts of strange shapes, as well as traditional romas (which I used in this salad). And they are plentiful on a Saturday morning at the market. And they are cheap – around US$1 for a pile, which you can see in the photo, which is a picture of the market where I buy them from:

Chicken Caesar Salad, Castaway Bar and Restaurant, Dili

So, this dish was a bit of a gamble: Was Castaways going to be able to pull off the chicken Caesar? In my opinion, the Caesar salad can be a wonderful adventure in both flavour and texture, combining the smoky, salty flavours of bacon and anchovy, the crunch of lettuce and croutons and the creamy eggs and dressing. Or it can be really, really crap. (We’ve all been there.)

Despite the fact that this was the second meal of my day that involved bacon, I enjoyed it immensely. The lettuce and bacon were crispy, there was a mere suggestion of anchovy every few mouthfuls and the chicken was pretty darn succulent. The dressing was nice and creamy with a good hit of zing. My only complaint about it was the croutons. They were quite stale and a bit difficult to chew. Oh, and I think perhaps a nice soft-boiled egg would have rounded out all that salt nicely. But I won’t get too fussy on the balancing of flavours thing. I got the entree size, which was enough for me, given I’d gorged myself on French toast with bacon and maple syrup just a few short hours beforehand.

Afterwards, I was close to shrivelling up with all the salty pig I’d eaten, so luckily my beverage was rehydrating. I asked for a soda water with lime, and my goodness, did they take the lime seriously!! My ice-filled glass came with a shot of fresh lime juice in the bottom to make a delightful, citrus refreshment on a sultry Dili afternoon. It was fantastic! It looked like this:

Wade ordered a Napolitana pizza, which looked like this...

...and tasted pretty darn good too. Simple yet effective: black olives, capers, anchovies and mushrooms. Nice.

His drink was a “Banana Macadamia”, taken off the Castaways’ fun and exotic juice and smoothie menu (items on which often aren’t available due to missing ingredients). It tasted as good as it looked:

Yoghurtie, banana-ie, nuttie, smoothie. Yum-ie.

Castaway Bar and Restaurant, Dili

The whopper Oecusse crayfish!!

I’m always complaining that we never get any fish in Oecusse. In Dili, you can walk along the beachfront road and be knocked unconscious by the wafting bouquet of hundreds of wet, limp fish of all different sizes. In Oecusse, I wait eagerly at my home, hoping to one day hear the distant voice of a young man bearing a bamboo stick across his shoulders with fish tied to either end like balancing scales, calling out, “ikan!” (“fish!”) – usually to no avail. If by chance I do hear him, as I have done on one or two occasions, the fish are generally either sardines (which we have bought and enjoyed) or the type of colourful, tropical fish you would prefer to see in an aquarium, rather than on your dinner plate (bright blue or red with yellow tails, angelfish, etc).

So I was positively gobsmacked when early one August morning we were lured outside by the sound of our very excited security guard exclaiming loudly to a young man on a bike. And tied to the handlebars of his bike was this:

I was intimidated by its size. So intimidated in fact, that I turned down the offer to buy it for the ridiculously reasonable price of US$15 (market price in Australia is around $50 per kilo).

The conversation went a little bit like this:

Wade:  Do you want to buy it?
Me:  Er... um... my GOD it’s HUGE!
Wade:  Do you want to buy it?
Me:  Yes, but I wouldn’t have any idea how to kill it.
Wade:  Do you want to buy it?
Me:  Yes, but I wouldn’t know how to cook it.
Wade:  Do you want to buy it?
Me:  No. It’s too big! I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

The man on the bike shrugged his shoulders and rode off.

It just so happened that Wade’s mum was staying with us at the time. She came outside and said:

“I think I’d know what to do. I’d give it a go.”

Her taste for adventure put me to shame, but golly, I was glad for it.

With that, we called the man back and made our purchase. And our day of killing and cooking a mammoth crayfish began!

Step one: Keep it alive!

We walked across the road to the beach and filled up some buckets with sea water, and then came home and emptied them into a bigger bucket, along with the crayfish.

Step two: Solve logistical problems

Problem 1: We don’t have a pot big enough to hold it.

Solution: Thankfully, Wade’s office has a kitchen designed for feeding masses of people, so we borrowed a big pot.

Problem 2: There is no way the pot is going to fit over our stove in the kitchen (it may not even fit through the kitchen door).

Solution: Light a fire and cook it outside.

Step three: Kill it (humanely) and cook it!

In her Cook’s Companion, Stephanie Alexander says that the best way to cook a rock lobster (and in this case, a crayfish) is to put it in cold sea water and then bring the temperature slowly up to boiling. You can also put it in the freezer, but our freezer is about half the size of this thing, so that was no option.

We lifted the empty pot onto the fire, filled it with cold, fresh sea water and dropped the crayfish inside.

This photo is a bit blurry, but it gives you an idea of the sheer scale of the activity.

Unfortunately it took a REALLY long time for the water to come to the boil (not sure if this is a good or a bad thing for the crayfish), so we went through a lot of wood. But in the end, it looked like it was supposed to:

Now, this was the part where Ronda (Wade’s mum) played the starring role:

She was an expert with the knife, cracking the crayfish along its back to loosen the tail from the head.

... and she wasn’t afraid of getting her hands dirty, extracting all the meat.

The chickens got a good feed with the remnants from the head and other bits of shell.

Step 4: Eat it!

The crayfish turned out perfectly. The meat was so sweet and there was plenty to feed four people.  Cracking open the legs at the end of the meal, up to our elbows in shell and fishy juices was so much more satisfying than eating, say, a crab. The bits of meat we were pulling out of those babies were as big as a finger. 

I made an aioli as a dipping sauce to go with it. I also made cassava chips, which I think make superior chips to potatoes, for they are golden crunchy on the outside and really fluffy (but not squashy) inside. For those that don’t know, cassava is similar to a potato, but starchier and sweeter. Have a look at this for more information. My Brazilian friend Regis once showed me how to make cassava chips, which you do by quartering lengthways, then par-boiling, stripping the woody fibre from the centre and then deep frying.

I also made a green papaya salad (using papayas from our tree), adapted from a David Thompson recipe I found in a magazine. You can find the recipe here. I also added grated carrot and green apple, just because I had them on hand.

It was an all-round great day: a new cooking experience, a proud moment for the Oecusse fishing industry and a fine meal to top it off.

We’ve done some big things to (quite possibly) the smallest kitchen in the world

Arriving in our little beach shack just over a year ago, I was excited at the prospect of living right on the beach, and the house itself was very cute, so I was generally quite excited. But one look at my new kitchen and my reaction was a smidgen less than pleased. It was TINY. The bench space was about the length of a single snake bean. And it was not very nice. To be fair, on this first day there were still many men busily finishing off the house renovations, for which I am now most grateful, but you can imagine my shock when I arrived and I saw that this was the room that I would be spending approximately 50% of my waking hours for the next two years:

Please note that all those HP sauce bottles were leftovers from another era.

Once we moved in and got everything cleaned up, things began to improve... slowly:

This is the cooking area, complete with plastic tubs for storing food, due to the fact that we have only one cupboard. Notice the rocks on top of the right gas hob? They were there because THEY NEEDED TO BE (i.e. there was nothing to sit the pots and pans on).

After a crafty paint job, some much-needed new shelving (thanks to the ever-ingenious Wade), a new sink/drain (ditto), some handy hooks (ditto again), a new gas stove (with a little grill to make toast or kebabs), as well as a whole lot of glass jars, tea canisters, crockery, home-made preserves, herbs, spices, utensils and plastic containers, I can now say that I have grown to love my tiny kitchen. I have everything at my fingertips, and I need only pivot a foot or reach an arm to have exactly what I need. The bench space is still only the length of a snake bean, but I have learnt to work with that. Wash-up-as-you-go is the key.

Photo: thanks to Ronda Freeman.