Lots of photos, so it is
| Every year, a whole bunch of us gather at a mate’s place just outside Carmarthen, and spend a few days drinking and talking (mostly) bollox. It’s been traditionally held over the August Bank Holiday, but Geoff decided to give it a try in May this year, and it worked – I have returned sunburned and insect-bitten!It’s hard to explain what it is, really – this was the 11th year, I think; it’s possibly my favourite weekend of the year, catching up with old friends, drinking whisky round the table till the early hours then stumbling back to the tent to sleep, watching some of the guys completely wreck a piece of automotive machinery … I suspect that pictures will give a far better idea than words, so take a look at the Team Waste Flickr group for more edification, should you be interested.
I provide dinner on Friday nights, cooking up a huge gammon (5 kgs this year), using Nigella’s poor white trash method of cooking it in full fat coke. The rest of the time we eat mostly barbecued stuff, and I fancied a change, so this year I packed a huge cast iron pan and a travelling larder of Stuff, together with chopping board, knife, wooden spatula and slotted spoon, and stopped at a butcher in Monmouth for things to cook. So, on Sunday afternoon, armed with lots of chicken breast, and fortified by quite a lot of cold white wine, Jacqi and I constructed a stir fry. Using a heavy duty burner on the end of a tank of propane, and the aforementioned pan, we started with two rashers of bacon that hadn’t been put back in the fridge – fried them off to get the fat. Then we cooked unfeasible amounts of strips of chicken breast – in batches – and set them aside with the bacon. Then in went onion and garlic, begged from Sheena (the lady of the house) and olive oil. It was quite hard to keep these from burning, as the burner seemed to be pretty much binary – hot or off – but we managed, and kept adding more oil, although I switched to rapeseed quite quickly due to the heat. Then heaps of sliced mushrooms were added and fried off. Back went the chicken and bacon, together with sea salt, black pepper, plum sauce, teriyaki, and garlic and chilli sauce (it was a very well stocked travelling larder!), together with a few slooshes of white wine to keep it at the right consistency. We hurled in some chopped basil (which I’d picked up from the supermarket for mini pizzas) at the last minute. Quite a few slooshes of white wine also went into the cooks – it was very hot out there in the sun, never mind the cooking! Sheena had made a pork curry and cooked a stack of rice, so it all blended rather well together. I was going to do something with steak and red wine in the evening, but everyone was a) full, and b) suffering from the sun, so I brought it home again; there’ll be some recipes from there later – it came out of the freezer, so needs to be used up. |
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