Week ending Thursday 20th March 2025

(Apologies to subscribers who have received this twice – formatting issues now corrected)

I’m on the holiday countdown. ✈️

For me, planning and looking forward to a holiday is every bit as good as the holiday itself. When I was a kid and my sister and I would play at my grandparents’ apartment on visits, we used to pretend we were travel agents. Katrina was usually the customer, and I was the agent. I’d type up itineraries on a make-believe typewriter (it was the late 70s, I wasn’t even pretending it was keyboard😜). My grandparents travelled quite a bit, so there were always holiday brochures lying around that I could display in my shop. I think the need to plan holidays is pretty deep seated!

This past week has mostly been about all the last-minute activities before a big holiday… checking all the details against our ‘trip plan’; printing off accommodation booking details (in case internet is an issue); putting money in local currencies on our travel card; prerecording for ABC and cleaning the house ready for the house-sitters. We’ve also had new carpet installed in the bedrooms this week, just to add to the list of things to do🙄. In preparation we had to remove things from each room including clearing out the floor in the built-in wardrobes. I’ve had lots of fun throwing things out and sorting all the bits-and-pieces that accumulate in bedroom cupboards. Dave has not had so much fun. While not technically a hoarder, he is not one to chuck things out and was giving me a stern frown every time I suggested that’s what we do. He has agreed when we get home from holidays to have an e-bay sale, so that’s a start 😉

Last Saturday, my lovely friend Claire hosted a dozen or so for a birthday party for a family friend and had asked if I could help with cooking the lunch. Never one to say no to cooking for other people, I jumped at the chance. Also, never one to underdo things, I went all out, cooking two main courses and two side dishes, plus a mezze platter for them to start.

Apparently, everything was a hit, but my favourite (when tasting while preparing) was the warm smoked trout, baby potato, beetroot and caperberry salad that I served on baby spinach with a dill aioli. The Highfield Farm lamb leg for the second main was brined overnight and then slow cooked with lots of rosemary and finished by brushing with a little honey to get the skin crispy under a quick blast of high heat. I made a garlicy hummus (peeled the chickpeas) for the lamb to sit on, then drizzled it all with Salsa Verde – adjusting the usual recipe by adding extra mint from my garden. A chickpea, parsley, tomato and cucumber salad sat alongside to counter the richness. I could have brined the lamb for a little less time (it was a touch salty) but otherwise this is such a fabulous dish, adapted from an autographed Matt Moran cookbook my friend Sandy gave me a couple of years ago. The char-grilled vegetables as a side dish used in-season zucchini, sweet potato and eggplant, and a platter of roasted carrots with haloumi and pinenuts rounded the menu out. As I am prone to, I avoided dessert making. Claire organised a cake for that part 😋

While Will’s team didn’t make the cricket grand final, the second-grade team from our club (RSL Bulldogs) did. The game was played on Saturday afternoon so after dropping the food to Claire’s, I headed out to North Wagga with my sister Bek and my niece Emilia to watch. Matt, from the UK, (who has been living with Will and Emma for the last 16 months) was playing and bowled really well getting three wickets off his eight overs for very few runs. They didn’t get the win, unfortunately, and it was close to 40C (isn’t it supposed to be autumn!) but it was lovely to watch one last game before it turns to football season. The lunch was also pretty good… I used the leftovers of the smoked trout, caperberries and potatoes, added some avocado, cucumber and a soft-boiled egg to make us a very tasty salad to enjoy while watching.

Sunday, while mostly allocated to travel planning and carpet laying preparation, also included some batch cooking. A kilo of sausage mince was turned into sausage rolls (including a dozen for my niece), a bag of limes from my sister’s tree became jars of marmalade and my usual batch of granola was prepared, cooked and bagged ready for gifting. I’m having the OzHarvest volunteer team here today for an afternoon tea, so this will be a little something for each of them to takeaway.

I promised in last week’s blog that I would give you a run-down of our upcoming trip to South America, so here it is.

Basically, the holiday is broken into six parts of reasonably equal duration:

1. Chilean Patagonia (Punta Arenas and Puerto Natales) via Santiago.
2. Buenos Aires including hopefully popping over to Uraguay for a night.
3. Iguazu Falls – both the Argentinian and Brazilian sides, plus pop over the border into Paraguay
4. Rio De Janeiro with a Brazilian food tour
5. Cusco including catching the Panorama train to Matchu Pitchu.
6. Six days of a fly-by-the-seat-of-our pants approach!

I won’t go into all the details now, but I will blog for each of the holiday’s six parts. That won’t necessarily be on a Thursday (as I usually do), but I will definitely write something about each element. I’m not sure which one I’m most excited about, but we have booked some fabulous things to do including food walking tours, treks, train trips, and of course I have researched and booked at some well-reviewed restaurants. One is claiming to be the best steak restaurant in the world, and given it’s in Argentina it might well be. Time will tell!

I hope that you will all join in on our holiday with me (virtually), and please also comment if you want to. It’s so nice to know people are reading along and feel free to include suggestions if you have any travel tips for South America. Don’t forget you can register to have it sent to you each week by email. You can always unsubscribe if it’s annoying or boring! I’ll post on FB and Instagram when I have published each time, but as many of you will know, that doesn’t always show up in peoples feeds. I assume that’s because Meta doesn’t like me directing people away from FB to my website. All advice on what to do about that (other than recommending people subscribe directly) gratefully received!