So here it is. The Papo Seco, or white roll, is the family staple of Portuguese bread. It is breakfast to the suburbs and not called dry throat for nothing. It is ordinary. And stale the next day. I prefer the smaller, cuter, Bico, or beak. Straight from the oven with butter and vegemite. Yum.

The bread truck’s horn is our alarm clock. I’ve given strict instructions to Bruno the Bread Man to start honking as soon as the village is in sight as waking up, getting up, pulling on coat, finding money, finding shoes and running down to the road takes much longer than the brief window of opportunity he normally allows on a stop. If I was organised then I’d hang out a bag with the next day’s order but I have an ingrained habit of breakfast spontaneity. I can’t decide the night before what I’ll want the next morning. And unlike the bread truck at our previous village, this one has more than the usual to choose from. It has cakes.

After the white rolls, the next most popular bread in our village is the Cacete. It too is white and no different in recipe than the rolls, but that’s like saying there’s no difference between spaghetti and spirale. They have different functions. The Cacete’s job is to make a good sandwich. The One is a sandwich enthusiast and he rates the Cacete for this purpose. It’s light and fluffy with a crunchy crust. Excellent with just tuna or ham, also good with jam. But rubbish as toast.

Other whites include the baguette, which can be the same shape as the French but not the same, and pão forma – a square loaf, sometimes twice as long as a loaf of sliced white death. It’s used in cafes for tosta mista, (ham and cheese toasted sandwich) and torradas (toast) cut an inch thick with lashings of butter. Bring your own home made jam and order up a galão and breakfast bliss is yours.

Moving on to where there are more variables and opportunity for baker’s creativity. The Mistura is the Portuguese light brown bread, it also comes in rolls and loaves. At about 37% wholemeal, it is as I say, light brown, not brown. Pão de Mistura is mostly ordinary, but if you shop around you can find exceptional loaves in this class. Anyone near Vila Facaia (Pedrogão Grande territory) should try their mistura, now available from the small supermarket rather than from a bearded woman in a shoe in the wall shop with “depósito de pão” handwritten above the door. I always wondered if she was the baker too and I suspect so, if only to drawn a line between a curious old woman and a curiously delicious kind of bread. Ultra spongey, moist and elastic. I have been known to eat an entire loaf in one sitting. And it seems bakers around here have started copying the Vila Facaia style… I suspect it’s doubling the yeast or something. The bread truck’s mistura is pretty good.

Better though is the Pão de Agua. Note the irregular shape of the loaf, signalling its slightly rustic and artesenal character. I think it’s made with white flour but it’s not especially white in colour. The best way to describe the flavour is watery. I’ve no idea why it’s better than the mistura but it is. The bread’s texture however can be very holey and therefore renders it unacceptable for sandwiches according to The One (who goes a little overboard with mayonnaise). I don’t mind a bit of oozing with toast, and toasted, the Pão de Agua is unreal.

The same can be said for a Pão da Avó, which has a similarly rustic and home made personality: grandmother-style to be sure. It’s made from a stronger dough with more wholemeal flour. Then there’s something called Pão Rustico, which I’d say is the name given to something that is not a Mistura, Agua or Avó.

This here is a Broa de Milho. I suppose one might say this is the traditional Portuguese bread. Very dense, with a tightly woven texture, quite dry. Has a much longer shelf life than the others. Makes excellent toast. It is not corn bread as the name suggests, but half cornflour (maizena, cornstarch) and half wheat flour. Always keep your eye our for a real Broa de Milho which looks just the same except yellow because it’s made with corn meal. Quite special.

That’s it for the basic range, all you can expect really from a bread truck. Next stop is your local pastelaria or dedicated padaria where you’ll find more interesting shapes and flavours, of infinite regional variety. My favourite regional bread is Pão de Alentejana, a cojoined-twin looking white loaf that a local café makes even though we are not in the Alentejo. Portuguese will argue it’s not authentic – if you want to be sure it’s the genuine article, you’ll have to go to the very region to find out. I’m not so pendantic about the names, just grateful that the baker is doing something slightly different.

Darker wholewheat and black breads are hard to find in Portugal. Try organic markets where expat Germans and Dutch supply genuine home made artesanal breads, made with love and good health.

Surprisingly a good place to look for bread is in the freshly baked bread bread department of chain supermarkets. Maybe high turnover raises the quality, but perhaps breakmaking is an art and it’s all up to the individual baker and their oven. In Lousã, if you’re passing, the Lidl has great fresh bread and the baguettes and croissants at the Intermarché are an excellent imitation of the real thing. Really, nothing much beats the white stick of France, or for that matter, the black breads of Germany. And who doesn’t miss sourdough? If you have major longing for the bread of your origin you can of course, bake your own, or even buy a breadmaker and bread mixes from better supermarkets.

There are many sweet breads too if we are not being too precious about what is bread and what is not. Pão de Leite is like brioche. Pão de Deus is not like anything but is good with ham and cheese. Pão de Ló is like a sponge cake, so, not bread. Broainhos cannot be found on the internet so maybe they are an invention of Figueiró Dos Vinhos. They appear at Christmas and Easter and are small dark fruit breads which I insist on being toasted and buttered despite it being against Portuguese law. Broa Doce is a generic name given to another sweet bread but not Little Sweet Corn Bread.

Also to consider is this. The Bolo de Berlim. Not a bread. A cake. But not to be ignored.

Thus somehow we arrived at Coimbra train station with 60 kilos of luggage and The One desperate for a pee. Train arrives, train departs, husband returns from men’s room. We buy new tickets for the next train which might get us to the check-in in the nick of time, with the kind cooperation of a taxi driver on speed. Once this feat was accomplished, Emma discovers she has no passport. Of the hundreds and hundreds of flights I have caught in my little life and it has to be this one: a great gorgeously generous gift from my sister-in-law to surprise my brother on his 50th birthday. This flight could not be missed. This could not be happening.

I’ll spare you the next half hour of head exploding panic in its gruesome detail. The passport was located, a new seat found for me on the next flight (lucky, lucky) and husband sent forward to Frankfurt on the existing ticket. Good friends, who will drive your passport to you two and a half hours away, are the most important thing in the world. And yes, I am your slave for life. Anyway, a couple of valium and several hundred kilometres later and The One and I were boarding our Qantas flight for Sydney only to discover we’d been downgraded.

Two more valium later and we arrived in Old Sydney Town and to husband’s delight we were picked up in a caramel butter-coloured Maserati. Even I had to restrain myself from licking the upholstery. It set the tone really for what would be three weeks of luxy decadent bliss, oh except for the sanding painting cleaning & repairing part. Let’s skip that story for now and start with the champagne-museum-of-contemporary-art-party-overlooking-sydneyharbourbridge-and-opera-house… in full jetlag, it was quite surreal.

The first thing The One did on his holiday was get a new girlfriend. Every time I turned my back they were in bed together. It got a bit embarrassing when our dear hostess would wonder where the hell her cat was and would search all the usual hiding places like sock drawers, lumps of washing and inside the hi-fi speakers, only to find that the guest was bed-hogging her, like, again. The thing with the Burmese is they have a supersonic sense of who is most likely to get horizontal regularly, and The One smells like an immanent lie-down.

So then we spent a week of surveying the damage to my other property asset abroad. Tenants, mate. Can’t pay mortgage without them, can’t kill ‘em. Broken leg on coffee table, sofa, and dining table, filth smeared from aft to fore, damage to this and that and a charming hole punched into a wardrobe door. So we filled sanded painted repaired and cleaned in sensational 37º heat, when we should have been at the beach, hanging out with friends, visiting mom, or lying around with the cat. Sorry darling. Nice holiday. Not.

Fortunately our hosts (oh let’s be frank. You remember tinyartdirector? Well she’s my sister and we are staying with her) had some sense and whisked us away for an enviable long weekend which looked like this:

Some whales dropped by for our appreciation. And hung around for three days smashing their tails on the water and mucking about. Priceless. I know it sounds coy but whales really are something special. They are so damn big and out of our league, you can’t help but gobblesmacked by them. We certainly were. Better than tele.

The One insisted on seeing kangaroos in the wild. We got dressed, packed our hats and sunscreen and even locked the door of the timber shack holiday house such was the anticipation of the hunt. An extremely short drive later, there were half a dozen roos posing for our photos, racing the Volvo and just staring us out as if to say yeah, take the pictures and bugger off, would ya?

There’s no doubt about it, kangaroos are funny animals. Firstly they look funny. And like camels, they have attitude. A sort of, what do you want, yeah come as close as you want I couldn’t give a toss and now I’m bored of you, type attitude. They are one of those rare animals who is firmly in control of the situation. Piss me off and I’ll kick your arse. They are cool.

So. Whales, tick. Kangaroos, tick. Savage sunburn on pommy skin, tick. Prawns on the barbie, naturally.

But then as some people have to work, we returned to Sydney and yet another week of culinary sensations. Thai, Japanese, quality beef, real lamb, Pacific Ocean fish and even bacon and eggs on damper breakfast at 3pm. My superfluous sister-in-law had also remembered our wedding anniversary (who is this woman and why can’t we all marry her) and sent us off to The Best Restaurant in The World, Tetsuyas. Extraordinary. Unforgettable. Quite difficult to find the words for its awesomeness, other than, say, perfect.

Somewhat staggered by everyone’s generosity towards us we loaded up our trunks and headed, sadly, for the airport. We did not want to come home, not one little bit. Not to winter, not to house building, not to the pressing need to make a living out of an oily rag.

And we wouldn’t be flying if they wasn’t some sort of industrial action impeding our trip. Qantas on the way over (CEO of which is a dipshit) and now a Portuguese general strike on the return trip. I am a card carrying socialist but I reckon the strike cost me way more than it cost Paulo Passos Coelho. Not to mention my sister-in-law. I’m sure the general strike in Portugal really changed her mind on a few policies.

Thus a day or two were endured in the most boring city on Earth, Frankfurt. And jetlag and minus 1º centigrade do not agree with me. Christmas Markets still do not charm me. The German language does not charm me. Sausages and Gluhwein make me puke. Just get me home, oh god, where there are some little fur-people waiting for me.

We have been showered with plums lately.

The first ones came from of our hard working woofer Samuel. They were blood plums and I just scoffed them straight up. Fabulous with yoghurt and a bit of muesli for breakfast.

Next a small bag of the same type arrived on the doorstep so I made those into jam, and very nice it is. My jam recipe is like this: I don’t bother removing the stones (who has the time?). Wash them, chuck them in with half (or less) the quantity of fruit of white sugar, one finely chopped apple and a third of a cup of water. Let it rage on boiling point and then cool slightly so you don’t need a trip to hospital after mashing them with a potato masher. Cool some more then pour into sterilised jars. To sterilise them I boil the kettle and fill them all up and then dry them in a low oven.

yellow plum jam on the outside and blood plum in the middle

Again, not only good on toast but mixed with yoghurt for dessert or breakfast and I even get into the Portuguese thing of fresh cheese and jam as a snack.

Then the neighbours brought a massive bag of yellow plums around. A whole shopping bag bursting at the seams, about 5 kilos. Drastic action had to taken.

I can’t seem to find Hoi Sin Sauce in the country. It’s a very handy chinese plum sauce – its primary function being to make pork less boring.

Hoi Sin (sort of… I made this up.)

Wash plums and stick them in a pan along with:

a motherload of garlic

half cup white wine vinegar (or rice wine vinegar if you are not in Cú de Judas)

few good splashes of soy

finely chopped red chilli as you like

half cup sugar – you could use a golden or white

As with jam, boil it up relentlessly (20 minutes say) and then mash with potato masher. Then I strain the mush through a colander and into a sauce bottle. By this stage it might be cool enough to taste. Think to yourself HOT SOUR SALTY SWEET as you taste it and if you think you can taste all four (and still it tastes like plums) then you’ve got it right. Keep in mind that it can be very strong, but because you use it as a marinade the flavour will be diluted somewhat.

Slap it on any type of pork cut before baking, grilling, BBQing. My mother grilled entremeadas this way in the days before cholesterol, delicious!

So that sorted out a bag or so, and if wasn’t so busy I could actually see some friends and share my jam/sauce/overflowing fridge abundance. The obvious thing of course is to give the stuff back in sauce form to the people who gave us the plums, but I did that already with the jam and the dear neighbour said  ”I don’t eat sweet stuff”… and now I’m a bit shy on foisting any more wacky foreign jars her way. She appreciated the lettuce, though.

But then another bag of plums arrives. These ones are green – unripe yellows. This time I turn to my one and only cookbook, Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion. It was a mighty tough choice picking just one cookbook to take to Portugal, them books being so heavy `n all… but Stephanie Alexander’s bible is like a desert island item. It’s the only cookbook you need. So go off to amazon or dymocks or wherever and buy it now (this should cover the following copyright issue).

Directly from page 551:

And would you believe, there’s still another bag of plums in the fridge…

IS DOCE DA CASA REALLY “THE HOUSE SPECIALTY” OR IS IT, ACTUALLY, A RECIPE?

Exhibit One

When I first came to Portugal I ate in restaurants for three months for breakfast lunch and tea and during this time became fully acquainted with the dessert menus of Portugal. Invariably they contain an item named Doce da Casa which as any self respecting phrase book will tell you means, in the literal sense, Sweet of the House, i.e., vis-à-vis, chef’s specialty. Anyone who has worked in a restaurant or not worked in a restaurant knows that this is also code for whatever we need to get rid of tonight because it’s going in the bin tomorrow. At least where I come from. You’ll never get a bad dessert in Portugal. I’ve certainly never had a bad Doce da Casa, whatever a Doce da Casa really is.

I was in those days, innocent. I never thought that the whole Doce da Casa name might be a cover-up for a hotly guarded secret. Like the secret Lucia had to keep after the visions at Fatima. Something worth hiding from the people for their own safety.

Exhibit One: Detail

The second time I came to Portugal I ate in restaurants for breakfast lunch and tea for five months and it was during this time that I began to suspect Doce da Casa was in fact the name of a recipe with defined ingredients, with which a cook may be creative, resulting in variations on-a-theme.

Over the last few years I have further intensified my belief that Doce das Casas, or Doces da Casa or Doces das Casas ARE BASICALLY ALL THE SAME.

The One, however, thinks otherwise. He says he’s been given chocolate things and even baked apple things when ordering Doce da Casa. I say it’s just because he’s English that the restaurant seizes the opportunity to give him the sell it now before anyone sees the maggots dessert. No one would try that on an Australian. We have dangerous spiders and snakes.

So then: we tested the question on google. Just 9 and-a-half million hits of recipes all containing the essential ingredients of Doce da Casa: condensed milk, maria biscuits, chocolate and cream. Emma: one, The One: zero.

Left, Exhibit Two. Right, Exhibit Three.

Next I email Elvira of Elvira’s Bistro. It’s obviously a subject too controversial to comment upon because I receive no response. Or maybe she’s busy running a restaurant.

So I ring Isabel, she of Encyclopaedia of Portugal fame. She said,

“Excellent question. Important, relevant, pressing. It’s something we’ve all been asking ourselves but need the leadership of someone brave and unflinching to investigate and resolve for us”.

Actually I made that up. What she really said was that traditionally, Doce da Casa would mean ‘specialty of the house’, but has in recent times has become bastardised into this thing with condensed milk and cream. Shit. Emma: one, The One: one.

Not content to leave it at that, I took the question onto the streets and into the kitchens. Nothing proves a point better than pure, creamy evidence. Let me present Exhibit One, if it pleases Your Honour.

Exhibit One is a perfect example of what I have come to expect from ordering Doce da Casa. Biscuit at the bottom, custardy condensed milk layer next, chocolate layer and then lashings of cream on top.

Exhibit Four

A closer inspection reveals a layer of intact biscuits between one of the layers. This evidence was found at our local churrasqueira and is under copyright control by the cook, Anabella who was very suspicious of my enquiry. Understandably she doesn’t want her recipe stolen, because it was I must say, a very superior Doce da Casa.

Which leads us to speak of Exhibit Two. Some fishy restaurant in Cantanhede served this up after we had demolished an enormous pile of assorted crustaceans. Very elegantly presented and while the omission of biscuit should be noted, it has nonetheless the regulation chocolate, custard and cream layers.

Exhibit Three was from a humble Lousanense establishment called Adega Vila. Biscuit, certainly, cream, absolutely and more than a whiff of condensed milk. But no chocolate and no layering. This, while delicious, fails to satisfy the requirements of a Doce da Casa. One might surmise that it is the specialty of the house. Someone clever reading this will know what its real name is, I’m sure.

Exhibit Five

Exhibit Four shows an interesting variation in that the crushed biscuit and chocolate layers have been mixed together. The condensed milk/custard layer is there and the cream is there, although the cream was not exactly of bovine origin.

With Exhibit Five, from the local pizzeria, we return to the text book style of the Doce da Casa, dessert flute and all. Let’s not quibble about the absence of chocolate. It is what it is.

And there I rest my case. Doce da Casa is mostly a recipe and more rarely a house specialty. Where have all the specialties of the house gone?

If your local restaurant is serving a true house specialty then, please, we need to know. It’s in the public service.

One might be forgiven for mistaking the cafés on the roadside of the N111 at Tentúgal for ordinary truckie stops. There are about 5 or 6 altogether on a strip of about 500m. A few are plain ordinary looking cafés and the others have slightly fancier facades. All sell the famous Pastéis de Tentúgal but there are two that offer rather more than just that.

For a start, the first one, A Pousadinha, has 5 different flavours of empada. Wha? An empada is a little pie, and we of Australian-Kiwi-English ancestry love pies. Normally empadas come in chicken flavour only, so to find a variety is really something in itself. None of the flavours is beef, or beef and kidney, or beef and onion, or beef onion bacon and cheese, but let’s not quibble. Let’s be happy there are duck pies, and piglet pies, and seafood pies. Tentúgal discovery number one.

O Afonso

A bit further up the road towards Coimbra there’s a fancier sign with a large parking area for O Afonso, and this place is a revelation. Are we in Greenwich Village? Covent Garden? Double Bay? There is gourmet stuff everywhere: teas, cheeses, local wines, sweet exotica in nice bags with gold labels. The displays, photographic wallpaper and furniture are like, groovy and expensive. Lo and behold, interior design, right here, in the middle of nowhere.

And then, OMG look what’s on offer to eat. I myself am obliged to a Pastel de Tentúgal, but The One has to pace up and down the counter several times umming and ahhing as everything here seems new and original and extraordinarily delicious. Our yummies are served with a proper tea pot and a gorgeous coffee cup and saucer á la Caldas da Rainha.

And THEN the empresaria, Dona Margarida, invites me back-stage, to the kitchen. Ya. For the uninitiated, doces conventuais are pastries invented and created by nuns (and brothers) in convents (or monastries), often centuries-old recipes (the Tentúgals come originally from a closed Carmelite convent of the 16th Century). Frequently these recipes are kept secret (in this case because the convent is not open to outsiders, the nuns speak with no one) and they were given as welcoming gifts in honour of visiting bishopry or benefactors, as well as being stashed in the secret cavity of the nun’s bibles for midnight snackage.

The Tentúgals came to prominence in the 19th century, as the convent was running out of money they sold their goodies at the convent gates. They became popular with students at nearby Coimbra university, and I suppose, as the convent closed, the sweets then became commercialised. Pastéis de Tentúgal can be found around the country at the more serious fabrico proprio pastelarias, but for the real experience you have to come here.

The village of Tentúgal is a turn off the N111, and what a little treasure it is. It’s so cute that it made The One angry. “I want to live here” he said, tearfully. It’s the way little villages should be. What makes it so is that it’s really old, first referred to in print in 980 but then taken under the wing and developed in the 11th century by a dude named Dom Sesnando. A lot of old buildings have stayed. This Sesnando Davides, by the way, built castles at Coimbra, Lousã, Montemor-o-Velho, Penacova and Penela. He’s a guy that got things happening.

I was trying to find the 16th century Carmelite convent – which is tucked away in a little square and distinguishable by a checked hat on its roof. (If you do want to see inside the convent, hot tip, the Dona of Casa Armenio is good to call upon, or else start with Margarida at O Afonso, or even there’s an office opposite the Igreja Misericórdia. Actually it’s hard to find someone who will not want to oblige in Tentúgal). But en route to the convent there are a few very impressive little churches worth looking in at. The first is the Igreja da Misericórdia, built in 1583. The Casa da Misericórdia in Tentúgal, I was told by the local historian, was the second to be established after Lisbon. The Casa is one of the longest running charitable institutions in the world, establish by Queen Leonor in 1498 who recognised the need for someone to look after Lisbon’s orphans, widows, druggies and useless. And they also run Portugal’s national lottery and have a special place in our hearts for the hope they give to all of us.

The church is very simple and the reredos is carved from wood – the figures are quite unsophisticated but still hold some colour: each scene depicts a story from the bible for the illiterate masses.

Similarly simple and decorated in wood is the Capela Nossa Senhora dos Olivais. It is very cute indeed with naïve and humble statuary.

Now it’s time for dinner. Casa Armenio has something of a reputation for its roast duck and I’m not sure that anyone orders anything else when they come here. The One, who is something of a connoisseur of rissóis de leitão (piglet rissoles, mate) was almost in tears again because Casa Armenio’s are that good. This is a damn fine restaurant. It has atmosphere and conviviality, it’s not pretentious but it feels a bit special, the food is excellent and we had to have three desserts. I’m tempted to say it’s my second favourite restaurant in Portugal (for the first favourite, see Braga). Tentúgal discovery number five.

leite creme at casa armenio

But where’s the gorgeous guesthouse? Anyone?

with thanks to emma and loz for making it all possible

For them, the increasingly unreliable weather conditions brutally translates into harder living conditions. With already a ridiculously paltry cash income, no olives on their trees means another €15 euros a month spent at the supermarket: oil of a poorer quality, not organic and less healthy. For a community where health really is everything.

Generations of accumulated knowledge about their environment and how to prosper from it (or just simply survive), is going to ruin in this little village while bureaucrats, politicians and sceptics negotiate themselves into a bottomless intray of bullshit. And my neighbours still bring home their flour and rice in plastic bags from a supermarket which encourages them to do so, and they don’t recycle a thing. And it occurs to me that for farmers and peasants the world over it’s a similar story: the first to feel the earth’s slow but irreparable immolation, and the last to understand it or have the power to control it. Capitalist democracy, isn’t it great?

Meanwhile we of the adopted rural life can still rejoice in the treasures that the land and our hard work have brought for us this year. In my case, my fantasy of being a still sexy woman in an apron making sauce in a foreign language from my very own tomatoes has been indulged somewhat relentlessly this summer, to the extent that The One has said he doesn’t want to see another tomato on the table until Christmas. (What cold revenge! That mediocre nothing in a tomato skin impostor of mid winter – how he will mourn for the sweet fruit of my summer!). And exotic herbs we have had in wasteful quantities. There has been the odd beetroot surprise (spontaneous beetroots are a lesser known Portuguese miracle), prompting much Aussie style hamburger happiness. But everything else -  the couve, potatoes, onions, strawberries, carrots, garlic, leeks, capsicum – very little results if anything at all. The lettuce and rocket lasted about a month, a bitter disappointment to someone who must have been a rabbit in a past life.

I have brought over the mountain a few bags of grapes, (for juicing and drying rather than wine-ing this time) a box of figs and small stash of blackberries, for my favourite jam.

Over hill, over dale the results of the harvest are fortunately different, which is why our villages are joined in parishes and our parishes into councils who raise rooves over marketplaces. Other expaters to the north and south report not only splendid tomatoes but riches of onions, potatoes, carrots, garlic, marrows of all manner. While strawberries are a disaster in one corner they flourish in another. And herein lies the lesson: diversify or die. Build communities and live with them in peace. Globalisation is going too far, but the League of Nations were once on the right scale. Think Participatory Economics. Communication. Cooperation. We have the technology, but the power cable is not in the right hands.

Diversify and flourish. It bothers me how my neighbours don’t trade with their neighbours to vary their diet. Following their old school academy they grow the same things year after year while the world’s weather changes around them. Thank god as usual for the Asians and Italians who brought their weird foods to Australian plates, and now thank the Anglo-Saxon migrants here who grow pak choi, Japanese tomatoes, artichokes, dill and asparagus peas. May climate change makes us change. Adapt. Accept. Harvest and feast.

Thanks to theantikid, shelby, ronie, trubby, susankewn and lizzieh for sharing the plenty.

The origins of the sauce come from Angola and Mozambique, who both have ancient versions of chilli sauce and who customarily use chillies in their cooking. You could almost say that chilli occurs no where else in Portuguese cooking, at least only as an exotic ingredient and certainly not in any other national, fundamental dish.

In trying to crack the recipe par excellence I’ve gone to neighbours, to friends, their parents and grandparents, to restaurants and to the internet. All recipes for Molho Piri Piri have as their basis malagueta chillies, olive oil and whisky. The most common variations are using a different alcohol or vinegar, and adding lemon, garlic, bay and other spices.

I’ve tried a few now and I was happy with my own lemony brew which I shared before. But now I have turned to the master (or mistress if you prefer), Elvira, and it is her recipe which I will declare the perfect piri piri sauce.

It is just goddam delish. Not too hot, thick enough to stick, and mighty tasty. Note however that Elvira refers to her chillies as piri-piris, and most other recipes refer to malaguetas as the variety to use for this sauce, so here I have specified malaguetas too. I’ve had too many different explanations about whether malaguetas are piri piris and whether or not piri piri is just the correct translation of the english word chilli, which we spell in a variety of ways further illustrating the elasticity of language. Blah-de-blah-blah. Maybe Elvira herself will drop by and give us the final word on this piri piri / malagueta lingistic phenomenon. Ditto Isabel.

8 red malaguetas (about 8-10 cms long, finger width, but not sweet like Thai chillies)
3 green malaguetas
teaspoon of sweet paprika
zest of one lemon
clove of garlic
200ml extra virgin olive oil
pinch of rock salt
wine glass of either balsamic vinegar, port, brandy or scotch.

Even in this situation I will still only use recipes as a guide. Not because I don’t think Elvira’s is perfect, but because I know how I like it. I can never see the point in only one clove of garlic, for example. I used three. My lemon zest seemed a bit skimpy so I added some more, and I chose a nice bottle of scotch for the punch,  giving a small glass to the sauce and the rest to me. But one day I will try the balsamic version. Balsamic & chicken sounds wild and amazing.

You put all the ingredients into a blender or a food processor or a bamix thingy and grind it up until it looks good. I marinated my chicken in it for a few hours before barbequing.

Super seriously yummo, and it also makes a boring pork chop very worthy.

We also have a frozen-things truck that comes on Fridays and a fish truck that comes on Wednesdays. Some villages have more – maybe also a veggie truck. Where I was houseminding the fish truck came three times a week, which really meant you never had to leave the house. And that’s of course why they exist. With the villages of Portugal mostly populated by old people, many of whom don’t drive, these deliveries are more like a necessity. Sure, many of them are also living out of their gardens and chicken coops, but who has sardines in their fish ponds?

It’s one of things my dad would have liked about Portugal had he been alive long enough to visit. My dad loved fish. And while he also liked to make that special, private trip to the fish shop on a Friday evening, I’m sure he would’ve been tickled pink at the sound of the truck’s horn right at his door.

I am, in any case. I love it most when I’ve forgotten it’s Wednesday, and then suddenly there are all these choices for dinner. Will it be sardines, fish soup or grilled salmon? Fish and chips? Vietnamese salt and pepper squid? Fish is so great, my dad reckoned, because you can get away with so few other ingredients. Lemon, butter, salt and pepper, bit of parsley… anything else might be superfluous for a nice piece of fish. I’m sure the Portuguese are of the same school. My neighbours almost always only buy sardines, and they are always just grilled with some garlic, salt and olive oil. They don’t even bother scaling, gutting or chopping off the head! Rustic as hell, and honestly, the way they taste straight off the coals, I wonder why I go to all the fuss I that I do.

Still, I like the versatility of fish. I like making it Asian or Italian or even Cajun. And even though the squid is only about €6 kilo, and the sardines about €3 kilo, it always feels like a bit of mid-week luxury. And the pets love it too. Once while preparing dinner, Mao and I scoffed down a whole steak of salmon, sashimi style, before it could make it into the pan. The neighbours were in shock when I told them – Raw fish?!? Vais morrer! Even The Wookie gets in on the fish guts and heads, provided I’ve fried them up with a bit of garlic and oil, bien sur.

Stuffed Squid

The inspiration for this comes from a great little Italian restaurant called La Locanda, in Clovelly in Sydney. It’s the kind of place everyone would like at the end of their street, a not-too-up-itself but good & authentic Italian bistro.

In winter (and I’m sure this is some culinary faux pas, but I don’t care, it works both ways) I swap the white wine for red, which stains the squid in a nice way when it’s cooking.

2 or 3 squid tubes per person, but it really depends on the size of them…
stuffing:
half cup rice, cooked
an onion
garlic
a carrot, finely diced
lemon zest
red capsicum, finely diced

sauce:
half tin tomatoes
cup white wine
some parsley and lemon to serve.

To clean the squid, remove the tentacles and bits from inside the body and peel off the fine skin. Cut off the head at the beak, remove the beak, being careful not to disturb the ink sac, and rinse well in cold water, but don’t leave the squid in the water or they’ll soak it up like a sponge. Chop up the tentacles and mix with all the stuffing ingredients.

I have a trick for stuffing both squid and cannelloni tubes, and it goes like this. Stick the end of a funnel into the tube, put the stuffing in the funnel and poke it through with a chopstick. Be careful when filling squid not to fill them much more than half way, as the tubes shrink as they are cooking and they’ll squeeze out their filling like they’ve vomited into the cooking pan. Not a good look.

Plop the filled tubes and any leftover stuffing into a frypan or a small oven dish and throw on the tomatoes and wine and some salt and pepper. The idea with squid (and their friends octopus and cuttlefish) is to either cook them very fast or very slowly. So, on high on the cooktop for 10 minutes, or on low in the oven (or fireplace as I do) for about 40 minutes to an hour. I prefer the slow method for the flavour.

You could serve it with a salad, but I usually have it as is. Yum.

Pan fried sardines with parmesan crust.

Tia Maria once asked me how I’d cooked my sardines the night before. Once I’d shared this slightly fiddly recipe, she just shook her head in wonder. Sardines and cheese?

First I gently scale the little fish with a steak knife, then chop off their heads and gut them. Then I flatten them out on a chopping board, sometimes removing the spine, sometimes not, depending on how big they are and how chunky the bones. Then I wash them and leave them on a tea towel to drain. I make a 50/50 mix of toasted breadcrumbs and grated parmesan (actually the powdery fine stuff is good for this because it’s dry). I rub in a crushed garlic or two, some parsley, and season it well. Then I dunk the fillets in milk or egg, or if they are still damp, nothing at all, and then dredge them in the breadcrumbs mixture. Then you pan fry them in about a centimetre of hot olive oil (or a mix of olive and vegetable oil to get the oil hot enough for a cleaner, faster fry) and serve them with a salad and lemon wedges.

If they are small sardines, they’d be great for finger food at a party as all the little bones are perfectly edible and very good for you. They are also excellent the next day in a fresh crusty roll from the bread truck.

Fish Phở.

Apparently my fish soup is all right. I like it for it’s simplicity: just a steamy bowl of broth and some clean fresh fish. This is another recipe in the Saudades for Yens category; when I´m missing the food of a great Vietnamese restaurant in Sydney. So this fish soup, while not a true Phở, has been Vietnam-ised.

for the stock:
2 leeks
a big onion
garlic a carrot and/or stick of celery, finely diced
whole black peppercorns
chopped parsley
half cup white wine or sherry (or jerupiga)

A mix of filleted fish – as in a calderada sold by the fishmonger. A mix of pink and white fleshed fish is good, and even better if there are some bones and skin still attached to the pieces.

for finishing the soup:
half an onion, finely sliced in half rounds
150g per person of rice noodles
bean sprouts
a big handful of Vietnamese mint or Thai basil, if you can get it, or instead I use a mix of coriander & mint
cut limes
a shot of fish sauce or nuoc nam

Fry up the onion, sliced leek and garlic. Throw in the rinsed fish, the carrot and peppercorns and a litre of water. Let the stock simmer gently for a hour or so. Drain off the solids, rescuing the fish pieces. Separate the flesh from the bones and return these to the pot with the drained stock and the sliced onion. Cover the noodles in boiling water and then stack the bowls with hot noodles and sprouts. Pour on the stock and fish, and serve with the lime quarter, nuoc nam and a pile of the herb greens. Yum.

For some people, palm trees are the symbol of holiday and escape, but for me, olive trees are the sign that I’m deep in foreign lands, far away from home. So when I first saw my house, with its view of an olive grove, I was well persuaded. It pushed my magic button, so to speak.

Although I’m not so passionate about eating olives, last year I was still pretty happy about picking my own fruit, and then preparing and marinating my very own olives. Especially as this variety isn’t usually for the table, it’s for making oil for cooking.

This year I got into the process of making olive oil. It’s a perfectly simple and unadulterated process. You pick the olives at the same time as pruning of the vertical and central branches of the trees. With these fruit-yielding branches on the ground, they are stripped or beaten of fruit, which collect on a massive tarp.

The olives are separated from the leaf refuse and bagged – the bags are a standard size which are bought beforehand from the lagar, the co-op olive press or factory. At the lagar, your consignment is counted and given a place in the queue. At some lagars you can immediately exchange your crop for the fixed rate of exchange for oil. You can reserve a time for your crop to be put through the press exclusively and not mixed with anyone’s else’s olives. Ideal if you’d like to keep your olives away from chemicals, different varieties or olives of lesser quality. At this lagar, exclusive pressing is the standard procedure. Everyone receives the oil from their own olives.

washing

The olives are first washed then mashed. The mashed mix is then heated to about 32-35 degrees, and the warm pulp is spread over circular mats which are stacked onto the press’ bobbin. The bobbin is put into the press, where it is raised, and pressed. The oil/water mix that is released from the olives is then siphoned through a gravity separator and filtered through a centrifuge which separates the oil from the water. The oil is poured out into jugs, then poured into drums that you’ve provided. Our crop of 524 kilos of olives was converted to 59 litres of pure, chemical free, extra virgin, cold pressed, liquid gold. (Yes, punters, it is organic – my neighbours don’t waste any more labour or cash spraying chemicals around.)

pressing mats

59 litres should last Tia Maria a year, feeding her crew of nine. Sounds ok, so long as you don’t put a cash value on the family’s labour: it took 3 people about 2 weeks to bring in this amount. At minimum wage that’s about €675 in labour: and even at the lager retail price of €5 per litre, it’s a poor peasant’s business.

the separation process

However, because this oil is the real deal, a true premium product, direct, micro-production and cloudy – this type of oil is currently at the forefront of a wave and is sold to quality produce-oriented London restaurants for £16/litre or more, and that’s where things start to make sense. If only Australia wasn’t so far away…

the real deal

marinated fresh black olives

There are a thousand variations for preparing olives. Here’s what I did last year, and they were delicious! The preparation recipe is from stephanie alexander’s the cook’s companion, and the marinade is my own.

Put the fresh olives in a covered bucket of water for 40 days, changing the water every two days. Drain the olives and then completely cover them in rock salt for two days. Rinse and then pack into sterilised jars. I made a variety of different flavours using balsamic vinegar, red wine vinegar, garlic, chilli, lemon, dried oregano, herbs de provence and olive oil, using half/half oil/vinegar mix. I left them in the marinade for a least a month before eating them.

This year, I put the olives in a 1/3 salt water (brine) solution for 5 weeks, changing the brine once a week. It helps to use a lot of solution so the olives are well covered and to weigh them down with a plate so they are always under the water. I stored them in the dark, covered. Then I rinsed them for two days, changing the water a few times each day. I made two batches, one with red wine vinegar and garlic and the other with balsamic and piri-piri, with half olive oil.

my final product

You can make aguardente from sugar cane, fruit, potatoes, grains and even honey. In that case we would call it rum (sugar cane), vodka (sometimes potatoes), whisky (grains), or gin (juniper berries). A wide variety of herbs and spices are often added as flavourings, and the distilled spirit may be aged in wood which alters its colour and flavour, but essentially all spirits start life in the same way. In my region aguardente is specifically made from the crushed grapes and juice of the morangueiro vine.

If you are lucky, you’ve inherited or bought a house with a still, or alambique in Portuguese. If I’ve learnt something from the wine making experience, if you have an old set-up, then you’ve got the technology; keep it. And use it! My neighbour’s alambique is more than 100 years old which indicates it’s been thoroughly tried and tested and it still works. My neighbour’s son has heard stories from his grandfather about his grandfather using this very still. He was the master. But it could have gone much further back than that. Nobody knows.

.

The still is made up of 4 parts. First below, the fireplace at floor level, and above it the copper still. From the top of the still, a copper pipe descends through a cooling bath, and out the other side carrying the condensation of the heated wine, into a bottle. This clear liquid has about 20-25% alcohol and can be drunk now ‘raw’ or aged either in bottles or in oak barrels. As it ages, the spirit gradually changes from clear to honey-brown, and its flavour and alcohol content will develop. Some aguardentes have an alcoholic potency of 60 or 70%.

Getting to that is a very simple process. Pick your grapes. Squash them and leave to to ferment for a week. Pour off some of the wine.

Clean out your still by lighting the fire and running vinegar & water solution through the system. Then you gather the leaves of a shrub called carquejo and line the bottom of the still with it – this is to stop the wine/grapes from burning the bottom of the copper pot.

Next, in his 80 litre still, my neighbour first puts in 10 litres of wine, or the first juice from the pressed grapes. Then 60 litres of pomace and then 10 more litres of wine.

Then he sits and watches it until the condensation starts trickling out the spout, at that point it’s important to watch the level of the fire, not to raise it, but not to let the temperature drop so that the distilling is interrupted. During this period many neighbours will drop by for a chinwag, to share a roasted sausage or chestnut and sample a drop of the goodstuff. It will take all weekend to make about 8 litres of aguardente. And then it will take all year to drink it.

The preferred Portuguese way to drink aguardente is to add it to an espresso. In some areas it’s traditional for breakfast, which makes me wonder what they’ll have for lunch. Throughout Portugal it’s a winter warmer, but me myself when I’m at home, I like it on crepes suzette.