A few weeks before Christmas a bunch of our Chief Engineers had an off-site day. We got ourselves right out of the office and hired a small community hall out on the nearby peninsula. It’s set by the water at Hoopers inlet and is surrounded by small farms and bushed areas. It was a really good day of thinking big thoughts and looking at big plans without the normal distractions of the office. I think the sum total of traffic we heard all day was about 3 cars. We figured it made sense to take our cooking seriously too, so we threw one of the big 48” grills on the back of the truck and rolled it straight off onto the porch at the hall. Sorted.
My job was dinner. We made a big coleslaw, some green salad, and cooked some flat-bread on the grill, but the star performances were from the three joints of meat – lamb, beef and pork. All three were seared on a high heat in the afternoon then put into aluminium trays and left to cook slowly. So we finished the day with a beverage in hand, sitting outside on classic old wooden benches, looking out over the estuary, with bellbirds hanging out in flax bushes all around us, tucking into some properly good eats. The (food) highlight for me was this pork with smokey paprika.
When we re-created this back in our kitchen at the office, we served it up as a delicious cold meat for a sandwich with Kate’s fennel salad posted last week. All this goodness layered up inside a crusty baguette with a little hot and smoky paprika yogurt sauce. Yum (again).
