A Curry Odyssey Episode 10: Mum's Tangy Sweet Curry

I love it when I can combine two themes into one post: In this case, we have the latest installment in the Great Curry Odyssey, as well as another fast, healthy meal for you crazy NaNoWriMo participants.

By fast, I mean quick to prepare. So long as you can get this ready and leave it to stew for a couple of hours, then it won't take you away from your frantic writing pace for long.

This is the one that started it all; my Mum's famous Tangy Sweet Curry. It's by and large more of a British dish than an Indian one, but if you can get your hands on a good pre-mixed curry powder then there's no reason why this shouldn't stand in for a regular Indian feast. Takes about 15 minutes to prepare. Serve it up with bread rolls and you don't even have to spend time cooking rice.

Tangy Sweet Curry
(Serves 4)Ingredients
500g Stewing Steak, tenderised and cubed
Olive Oil for frying
8 Garlic cloves, minced
2 Onions, sliced
Freshly Ground Pepper and Salt
1T Flour (Use Potato Flour to make this Gluten-Free)
150g Tomato Paste
1/3 Cup Water
1 C Beef Stock
2t Curry Powder
2t Honey
1 Apple, cored and chopped
1 Kumara, peeled and diced
Heat the oil in a large pan. Soften the garlic and onions. Add the meat, season with the salt and pepper and flour and brown. Add the tomato paste and water.
Into your beef stock mix the curry powder and honey, then add to the pot.
Add the chopped apple and kumara. Bring to the boil, then simmer for 2 hours, stirring occasionally.
Boil up some peas, steam a few carrots and some broccoli, and serve with buttered bread rolls.

Tropical Beef Stew

Has it really been a week since I blogged here? Where does the time go? My sincerest apologies. I shall try my best not to leave you all alone for so long again.

Just when we thought it was getting all summery again, the southerly has come back through, so the fire is going and the wintry food keeps rolling out of our kitchen.

This one comes from the Recipe Book of the Weird and Wonderful - that's not a real recipe book, mind you, but an excuse for me to make up strange combinations and cook them just because I can.

This particular meal came about because we happened to have a whole fresh pineapple in the house. We'd sliced up about half of it and eaten it off a platter during the day, but as anyone who's ever kept pineapple will know, you really should eat it the day you slice it open or it goes bad.

I really don't like it when things go bad.

So, no matter that I had taken stewing steak out of the freezer to cook for dinner that night. The pineapple was going in with it too, somehow.

Thus was born the Tropical Beef Stew. Think of it as a Summer-Winter fusion if you must, as Spring in Wellington so often is.

Tropical Beef Stew
(Serves 4)Ingredients:
400g Stewing Steak, cubed and seasoned with freshly ground pepper and salt
1 Large Lemon
1/2 Fresh Pineapple, cubed, or 1 200g Can of Pineapple Pieces
Whole Nutmeg for grating
2C Hot Beef Stock
Grate the zest of the lemon and a few gratings of nutmeg over the beef and toss well. Batch fry the meat, draining the cooking liquid into a large pot as you go.
Transfer the cooked meat into this pot. Heat the pan again and add the pineapple, squeezing over the juice of the lemon. Heat briefly, tossing to deglaze the pan, then add to the pot along with the beef stock.

Bring to a rapid boil for 20 minutes, then reduce to a simmer for 1 1/2hrs.
Dish over rice boiled in beef stock, with sour cream and fresh steamed veges.

(The odd shape on the left in this photo is a dumpling. I had some dough that I had frozen, but here's my advice: dumpling dough doesn't unfreeze and cook very well. Don't bother, or, if you know a trick that makes them not come out like shrivelled little piles of rubber, leave me a comment so I know better for next time.)

I'll be honest: This dish got a mixed reception. I liked it, but not everyone at the table thought it was something I should add to our regular menu. But if you like beef and pineapple, it's a pretty good combination.

Bacon Bolognaise

Just when I think that it's getting all summery, it turns cold again. Luckily, I've got a whole swag of warm winter stewy-type meals sitting here in the drafts folder waiting to tickle your saliva glands, but this one ought to go down just as well for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere who have started to feel autumn biting around your ankles.

This recipe was inspired by my friend Jenni's trip to Rarotonga, where she had a dish that sounded so good I just had to try it out myself.

Fortuitously, the same day I read that post we had somehow ended up with two lots of meat defrosted, which is not like us at all, and both had to be used up or one would have to be thrown out. The Stephano's Spaghetti Bolognaise with Bacon was obviously just meant to be.

Of course, not having been there myself, all I really had to go off was the name, and the rest I just made up. The cherry tomatoes, for example, were only in the fridge because a certain 2-year-old had got hold of the packet in the supermarket and started eating them, forcing Dessert Chef to buy them. As it turns out, they might have been the best bit.

So thanks to Jenni for the inspiration, and to my boy for the odd choice of unsanctioned supermarket snacks.

Bacon Bolognaise

(Serves 4)

Ingredients

300g Beef Mince
Freshly Ground Pepper and Salt
1T Balsamic Vinegar
1T Worcester Sauce
1/2t Freshly Grated Nutmeg
1t Dried Thyme or 1T Fresh Thyme Leaves
4T Tomato Paste
Olive Oil for Frying
1 400g Tin Chopped Tomatoes
4 Rashers Bacon, chopped
4 Garlic Cloves, Minced
150g Mushrooms, peeled and sliced
1 Punnet Cherry Tomatoes
Heat oil in a pan, add the mince and brown. Season with salt and pepper, vinegar, worcester, nutmeg, and thyme. Cook these flavours into the meat, then add the tomato paste and reduce. Cook until the moisture is absorbed, then add the tinned tomatoes. Mix the bacon and garlic, then fry until crispy. Put your pasta in to cook at this point.
Add the mushrooms to the mince to heat through.
Rinse a handful of cherry tomatoes.
Add the cherry tomatoes to the bacon pan for just a couple of minutes at the end, enough time to soften and warm a little. Toss well in the garlicky salty goodness of the bacon.
Mix the bacon and tomatoes into the mince at the end, then dish over long pasta, dressed with freshly grated parmesan cheese, freshly ground black pepper, and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.

Then tell me if it tastes like Rarotonga.

Burgundy Beef Stew (Mine, I tell you)

There's an irony here, and it's not just the cast-iron pan (although in some ways, it is).

Inspired by all the Slow Cooker recipes I've posted here at Freshly Ground, my Mum bought me the Slow Cooker recipe book pictured above. Thanks, Mum.

She also asked me to try a few recipes from it and post them here, so that was, by all means, my intention.

The trouble was that on the day Aunty L came to visit and I was going to do just as Mum had asked, we ran out of hours in the day, and therein lies the irony.

I sort of had to adapt the Slow-cooked Burgundy Beef Stew with Horseradish Dumplings - which I had planned to make - into something that I didn't need to, well, Slow-cook. Also, I just made normal dumplings. Not a big horseradish fan.

So, Mum, here's what might be a version of that recipe, but done in the oven, the old-fashioned way. Anyway, I had to change the recipe somewhat so as not to be in some sort of copyright breach, so I'm going to call this...

Dan's Burgundy Beef Stew

(Serves 6)

Ingredients

750g Stewing Steak, cubed
1t dried thyme or 1T fresh thyme
Whole nutmeg, for grating
1 Onion, sliced
3-4 Cloves Garlic, chopped
2T Flour or Potato Flour
300ml Red Wine
300ml Beef Stock
1T Tomato Puree
2 Bay Leaves
3 Carrots, peeled and sliced
1 Leek, trimmed and sliced into rings
100g Mushrooms, cleaned and sliced
Oil for frying
Freshly Ground Pepper and Salt

Season the meat with salt and pepper and a splash of wine. Heat the oil in a pan, then brown the meat in batches. While frying, add thyme and a few grates of nutmeg. Add the onion, stir in and fry for a few minutes. Add the garlic and flour, then mix in the wine and stock.
Add the tomato puree, bay leaves and salt and pepper. Bring to the boil, then transfer to an oven dish.
Mix in the mushrooms and leeks, make sure there is enough liquid in the dish to almost cover the stew (add more hot water if necessary), and place in the oven at 180c for 2 hours.

Prepare your dumplings when the stew goes in the oven, and add to the oven dish for the last 20 minutes of cooking.Dish up with rice (boiled in beef stock, of course) and a nice glass of red wine.

The slow-cooker version is to shift the meat from the pan to the slow-cooker on low for 7 hours, then adding the leeks and mushrooms, turning the slow-cooker up to high, and then 45 minutes later adding the dumplings for a further 45 minutes. Certainly not something you can start into at 3pm, but here's the quick version. And as you can see, it turned out pretty well.

Bohemian Goulash

Here at the bottom of the South Pacific the days are getting longer and the nights are feeling warmer. But I'm not fooled: it's still winter.

Nonetheless, my opportunities this winter for posting lovely hearty stews are running short, so here's one of my all-time favourites: Goulash.

Whether your Goulash is simply hearty or truly fiery all comes down to how much spice you add, so if you like a good hit of tongue-burning heat, just double the quantities of paprika and carraway.

Otherwise, this meal follows the template of most of my stew dishes: Sealing the flavours into the meat in a hot pan, deglazing the cooking pan with wine and stock, and cooking for a couple of hours, adding dumplings at the end. What better way to wrap up a Sunday night?

Bohemian Goulash
(Serves 4)

Ingredients:
400g stewing steak, cubed
1 large onion, chopped
4 garlic cloves, crushed and chopped
2t carraway seeds
2t dried thyme or 1T fresh thyme leaves
2T paprika
2t flour (or potato flour to make this recipe Gluten Free)
2 carrots, sliced
3 small potatoes, diced
1 kumera, diced
1/2C red wine
1 1/2C beef stock
1/4C sour cream

Dumplings

Heat some olive oil in a pan, fry the onion and garlic until soft, then add the meat and brown quickly. Add herbs, spices, flour, and freshly ground pepper and salt. Sear thoroughly without burning.
Place the carrots, potatoes and kumera into an oven dish and scoop the browned meat and onions into it. Mix well.
Return the pan to a moderate heat, then add the red wine, scraping the bottom of the pan to bring up all the cooking flavour. Add the stock, not too quickly, ensuring the reduction doesn't cool too far. Allow to thicken slightly.

Pour the reduction over the meat and veges in the pan, top up with a little water if required to stop the meat from drying out.

Cover and place into a preheated oven at 200C, and cook for 1 1/2 hours. Then add your dumplings, and cook for a further 20-30 minutes.
When the stew is done, dish up the dumplings, then mix the sour cream through before serving. If, like me, you sometimes forget to do this, it's also fine to just spoon it up on top of the stew.

Great with mashed potato and fresh steamed greens, plus a nice big glass of bold red wine.

Steak Stew

This is from a recipe I heard on the radio a few weeks back and decided that I had to try.

Since I'm a big fan of steak, and I'm a big fan of stew, the idea of Steak Stew just seemed like a match made in heaven.

Officially this was called Slow-Cooked Steak in Red Wine with Gremolata Dumplings, but Steak Stew was easier to remember.

To quote this particular rendition of the European classic's progenitor, Meillier Ouvrier chef Mark Gregory,

"In these recessionary times, it’s good to remind ourselves that simple food, slowly cooked is cost-effective, comforting and absolutely delicious. Our grandmothers used dumplings to pad out the more expensive ingredients like meat, and it’s a great house-keeping tip which is more relevant than ever right now!"

Never was a truer word spoken. If you're not making the most of cheaper cuts of meat cooked long and slow in the oven, then now is the time to get into it. And this one is actually pretty darned easy.

Just imagine: You've had a "stew" ticking away in the oven for a couple of hours, and when you come to dish it up, it's not stew but steak that slaps down on the plate, tender and melting and drowning in delicious red wine gravy.

With dumplings, of course.

I followed the recipe pretty much to the letter, only reducing the quantities by half. I have copied most of the recipe direct from the Radio NZ website, indented for clarity.

Beef steak
4 x 300 - 400g beef blade or chuck steaks
plain flour to dust steaks
¼ cup olive oil – or use other if not available
2 medium onions – finely chopped
3 cloves garlic – finely chopped
300ml red wine
1 cup tinned chopped tomatoes
½ cup chicken stock
pinch dried chilli
3 sprigs rosemary – from the garden if you have it
6 pieces anchovy - optional

"First choose a casserole dish large enough to hold the steaks.

Heat a frying pan, add three tablespoons of olive oil then sweat the onions and garlic for 5 minutes until soft and sweet. Scrape all into the casserole saucepan."

"Re-heat frying pan, add 2 tablespoons of olive oil, lightly dust steaks with flour then pan fry until golden – you may have to do this in batches depending upon size of fry pan. Place the coloured steaks on top of the onions."

"Add red wine to the frying pan and reduce down for several minutes until it’s nearly all evaporated, add the tomatoes, stock and chili, rosemary and anchovies if using. Stir well before scraping everything over the steaks. Cover with a lid and place in oven at 325F/160°C for one-and-a-half hours."

Don't forget the dumplings:

Gremolata dumplings
2 cups plain flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 clove garlic – crushed
1 lemon, zested
½ cup parsley - chopped
1 cup grated butter – place in freezer for 1 hour first before grating
¾+ cup milk

"After 1 hour make the gremolata dumplings – sift flour into a large mixing bowl, gently mix in all other ingredients except milk. Now mix in sufficient milk to make a moist dough (similar to scones).

With wet hands, roll dumpling dough into golf ball-sized pieces and place on floured bench top. Remove steaks from oven, take off the lid and place gremolata dumplings evenly around the surface, be sure to leave one inch between each – if there’s too much dumpling mix do not use the extra.

Recover steaks with the lid and place back into the oven a further 20 minutes to cook the dumplings."

This was pretty yummy, but I think they should've cooked for even longer to really get down to that melt-in-your-mouth stage. The Gremolata Dumplings were different, and a curious change from my usual herbed dumplings, but I think we'll stick with the original for a while yet.

So there you have it, a bit of a recipe review. I just keep moving into new, exciting fields of endeavour, don't I?

A Curry Odyssey Episode 7: Beef Rendang

It's been a little while since I updated The Great Curry Odyssey, and there is a very good reason for this; specifically, because I haven't had a chance to spend the afternoon making curry.

The more I go down this track, the more I like the idea of Curry Paste.

But a couple of weeks ago, at the Hutt Riverbank Market, my eagle eyes picked out a tiny stall where a man and his son were selling ingredients for real, authentic, make-it-from-scratch curry, including galangal, kaffir limes and leaves and, what really caught my eye:

Lemongrass.

My Nana has a lemongrass plant in Coromandel, where the stuff grows wild. Down here it's a delicacy, and more importantly, it's the key ingredient in one of my favourite curries, Rendang.

If you're in Wellington and you want to know why Rendang is my favourite curry ever, head down to Satay Village on Ghuznee St, and order the Chicken Rendang, with a side order of Roti. If you're not a curry person, order it in mild, and I guarantee you will still be impressed.

So, with grand delusions in my head that I might have even a ghost of a chance of creating a rendang to rival the best in Wellington, I bought a bunch of lemongrass and started scheming out dinner for the night.

For once (as is the way with the Great Curry Odyssey) I did a bit of research, trawled through several rendang recipes online, cross-referenced these with what I actually had on hand, and composed the following hybrid recipe.

For a first time, it came out pretty well, though it didn't have a bar on Satay Village. Being beef, not chicken, and not having lovely oily rotis to go with it probably didn't help. It was hotter than I anticipated, but we took it to a shared dinner, and thankfully Uncle Ian and Liz E Bear, who both like spicy food, gave it the thumbs up.

The curious thing is that that man and his son have not been at the market again since. I wish I was a travelling curry ingredient salesman, bringing galagnal to a new farmers market every week. That would be the life for me, indeed.

Of course, I'd need to a) grow galangal first, and b) know what galangal was, and what to use it for. That would help, I imagine.

Beef Rendang
(Serves 4)

Ingredients

500g Skirt Steak, diced
4 cloves of Garlic
2 small Onions
3 small dried Chillis
2t crushed Ginger
5 stalks of Lemongrass
1/4t Fennel seeds
1/4t Coriander seeds
1 whole Nutmeg
2T Brown Sugar
3 whole Cloves
1/4 Cinnamon stick
400ml can of Coconut Milk

Chop and fry the garlic and onions until just soft (You might not need to fry these. Between the market and dinner time I had forgotten I had lemongrass for rendang, and I had started making goulash. But hey, I'm just relaying what I did to get here). In a bowl, mix up the garlic and onion with the chillis, ginger, and lemongrass, chopped. Blend to a paste by whatever means is most practical. I would've liked more of a paste than what I got here, but I was rushed (what with having set out to cook a goulash, and now trying to throw together my rendang research on the fly).
I decided to use the Jamie Oliver Ball Thingy to mix up my masala, using it to pulverise the fennel, coriander, and nutmeg (which I think I grated in).
In a pot, heat the paste, then add the masala. Heat for a minute to bring out the flavours, then add the beef and brown, tossing in the curry mix to coat it.
Add the sugar, cloves, cinnamon, and coconut milk. Bring to the boil, reduce to a simmer, and leave to cook down for a couple of hours. The rendang should come out almost dry, but with lovely tender, spicy chunks of meat.
Serve over rice (preferably rice boiled in beef stock), with nice hot, oily rotis if you can get them.

Previous Posts in the Great Curry Odyssey:
Butter Chicken
Naan Bread (For Comedic Value Only)
Curried Lemon Chicken
Lamb Korma
Raita
Roti Bread

Don't Call Me Pastie

I'll be the first to admit that I'm struggling with the witty, pithy Blog Titles right now. Please refrain from filling the comments section with this observation. I got there first.

Today I'd just like to write a post about why I love my Dessert Chef so very much. As far as this particular post goes, it's because even though she hates cooking, she still pulls things like this out of her hat:
Mince (Ground Beef) with carrot, tomato, onion,and fresh spinach.
Savoury pastry, rolled out and cut into circles...
...like so.
Mince layered with three cheeses and sealed off with a little milk.
Baked for about 20 minutes at 200C.
Served up with sour cream, and not a naughty vegetable in sight.

Who wouldn't love coming home to a treat like that?

Thanks, my lovely Dessert Chef. Now, what's for pudding?

Olive(r) Stew

I've made noises here about celebrity chefs before, and a little while ago I posted a meal I cooked out of a Gordon Ramsay Cookbook that I picked up at the Food Show.

Now, the guys at Kamikaze Cookery (Link junkies: Language may offend. You've been warned) have taken it upon themselves to expose the glaring discrepancies between what most people are capable of cooking compared with what the Ramsays and Olivers of the world think we can manage, so I won't try to outdo them on that count.

Instead, I thought it worthwhile documenting my own attempt to pull off a recipe for Peposo - famous hunter's peppery beef stew - out of Jamie Oliver's book, Jamie's Italy. I like to think of myself as a slightly more accomplished home gourmandiser than the average kiwi bloke, so I was not daunted by the challenge.

Perhaps I should've been.

Admittedly I was trying to cook about 600g of beef rather than the 2.5kg in the recipe (I mean, who really cooks 2.5kg of stewing steak at a time? There are only 2 1/2 of us, after all!), and I was using normal stewing steak rather than beef shin on the bone, but you work with what you've got, right? I made the effort to use real french red wine, at least. And anyway, the first thing you do according to the recipe is take the meat off the bone, so why not just use deboned meat to start with?
Simple enough. Meat, onions, rosemary, garlic, bay leaves, salt and pepper.
Layer it all up in an oven dish and cover in wine, topping with water to cover the meat if necessary. Then bring to a boil and place in the oven at 150c for 6 hours. Yes, I did all this. Sounds simple enough, doesn't it?
Then at the bottom of the recipe (not at the top, not at the "when you're layering the dish" part) it says to skim off the fat and remove the bone. Aah. I see. So the bone was meant to go in? That bone I don't have? Right. Well, I didn't. Not only that but my dish didn't have any fat to skim off. It had virtually no moisture at all. Apparently it should have.
Yes, this was quite intensely flavoured as Jamie promised, and the meat was falling apart, if a little over-dry. I wonder if I had a small army to feed rather than my modest family, and I had cooked this in the five-fold quantity suggested by JO if this might have come out better. I can only guess so.

I dished it up on buttered slabs of fresh bread (also Jamie's recipe from his first book - I tried it once and have made it that way ever since), and we agreed that it was good that we had some nice bread for dinner.

So it's worrying that if even I, with my extraordinary powers of making stuff up on the fly and trusting my instincts to salvage the various disasters that arise from my untutored approach to cooking, can be derailed by a Jamie Oliver recipe that seems so straightforward, then how much paper is being wasted in this world in the printing of celebrity chef recipe books that people will simply never use? Or if they do, they'll be disappointed, and thus the book will sit on the shelf forever gathering dust?

I make an effort to make something from one of my many cookbooks every month or so, trying to learn new things and bring a dash of variety to our meals. But if the people who sell the most cookbooks on the planet - I'm looking at you, Jamie, Gordon and Nigella - can't come to terms with what average folk are really looking for in a recipe and capable of achieving in the kitchen, then I worry that even more innocent trees will die as a result.

Please, celebrity chefs. Take a moment to consider the trees. Then pull your heads our of your @rses and give us recipes that we can cook, damn it.

Ultimate Home-Made Beef Burgers

Things seem to have been a bit slow around here lately, and if you suspected that was because I had been abducted by aliens, you'd be wrong. *Phew!*

I've had my hands pretty full over the past few weeks, particularly with prepping and shooting another two days of The Winding City (which I've previously posted about here). We shot over the last two Sundays, and that doesn't leave much time on the weekend for the important stuff like hanging out with the family or posting to my blog.

I've also been making more of an effort to spend time writing fiction, which has meant that I haven't been allocating so much time to Freshly Ground. But the camera keeps coming out in both our kitchen and in the kitchens of unsuspecting friends and relatives. I have PILES of photos and recipes to get through, so hang in there.

We're also going to be away for a couple of weeks very soon, but I'll future-post a few items to cover that time, just for you.

Moving right along, we often have the discussion that it's just not worth buying takeout burgers because even the Big Guys (Like BK, McDs, and even Burger Fuel) can't make as good a burger as the ones we make at home. Then we sometimes have the discussion that even though we make great burgers at home, occasionally we don't have three hours to bake bread and half an hour to make fresh meat patties, fry them and grill them. But when we do, Oh Boy!!

World's Best Homemade Burgers

Firstly, put on some bread dough, using the same failsafe recipe that I use for my pizza bases and loaves of bread (it looks like I might've added some dried herbs to these ones too). Shape these into buns about half the size of your fist, set to rise for an hour and bake at 200C for 18 minutes.
For the patties, mix up the following:
200g Beef Mince
Freshly Ground Salt and Pepper
1 Large Free Range Egg
1 T Worcester Sauce
1/2 t Paprika
1/2 t Dried Mixed Herbs
1 t Mustard Powder
2 T Potato Starch
(To make these Gluten Free, just leave out the Worcester Sauce)

Shape into patties using a couple of spoons drenched in flour, and lay on a floured plate until you're ready to start cooking (for Gluten Free, use a GF baking mix for this step).
Fry the patties for about 10 mins on each side in hot rice bran oil, with a chopped onion cooking around the sides of the pan.

Place a slice of cheese on top of each patty for the last 8 mins of cooking, to melt.
Slice the buns, butter and dress with mayonnaise, sauce, relish, sour cream, aioli, or whatever you prefer, and layer in lettuce, tomato slices, a beef patty, cucumber slices, and beetroot. And when you're done with that lot, ask yourself why you would ever want a Big Mac again.

Wanganui Road Trip

What would the holidays be without a road trip?

Well, a nice boat trip can be just as good if not better, but we had a road trip instead.

Just before Christmas we took Isaac up to visit his Great-Gramps and Gran in Wanganui. We must have missed all the traffic, because it was a quick trip up the country. We stayed in Foxton on the Friday night, with Isaac's Nana Beth.

Great-Gramps is one of my revered cooking mentors, and Gran has been responsible for pointing out all sorts of interesting and helpful little things in the kitchen over the past few years. I was very much looking forward to having dinner with them on Saturday, and I was not to be disappointed.
Beef fillet, wrapped in bacon and smothered in butter.
I'm not going to mention how healthy this may or may not have been, but it was delicious.
I can't pass on the secrets of cooking this fine dish, as Great-Gramps and I were very busy drinking gin and wine respectively, and immersing ourselves in a very engaging discussion about politics and the environment. I haven't had so much fun in a long while. Ah yes, there were mushrooms involved, too.
I know I've already used this shot, but to be fair it was Gran who had prepared these raspberries and strawberries for us for dessert,
with a delicious amaretto cream to match. They were also good enough to make us breakfast on Sunday morning, with hot coffee, to give us the strength for the drive home.

We stopped again on the way down in Foxton, and had lunch with Dessert Chef's whanau, before making it home at a leisurely pace.

Yip. Road trips aren't what they were when I was 18 anymore.

*sigh*