Meals here at the Center for National Resilience are delivered once a day, somewhere between 4 and 6pm, and consist of a package of a hot dinner (and a cold dessert), along with cold breakfast and lunch that can be stored in your cabin fridge. There's no choice, you get what you're given (subject to dietary needs), and if you don't want it when it arrives the only alternative is to let is get cold, but it's not all bad news. There are no repeats for any meal all week, which means that even if one of the meals isn't your cup of tea, at least you know you don't have to have it again any time soon, and the variety of the menu is an enormous positive in a world where every day is much like any other day.
The menu is (roughly) repeated every week, so as we go through these meals for a second time I thought a little food review might be in order. I'm no connoisseur , being more of the "I see, I eat" disposition, and my slightly strange dietary needs might men that this likely isn't a particularly useful guide for anyone else, but hopefully it gives folks who come to stay here a bit of an idea of what to expect. It doesn't seem like quarantine is going away any time soon, after all.
Monday
I'm not really a granola guy, preferring plain museli for my breakfasts, but when the accompanying liquid is stewed fruit rather than milk, you don't really have a choice but to embrace the whole sweetness vibe and just run with it. It makes for a big ole hit of the sugars, but it's hard to go too wrong with stone fruit, the mix of crunchy granola bits and squishy fruit works well, and the little accompanying croissant makes for a nice palate cleanser.
The Aussie Tuna Salad is one of the less cohesive meals on the menu, being a general selection of veggies, potato salad, corn on the cog, a hard boiled egg, and also a tin of tuna. It's not really a meal that goes together all that well (I certainly wouldn't recommend the potato/tuna combo), but it's fresh and munchable over the course of the afternoon, and if you're still suffering jetlag or adapting to the weather that's no bad thing.
When we had this as our first meal here, fresh off twenty-something hours in transit, I have to say that I expected the worst. As we found out over the course of our stay, lots of meals can be cooked en-masse and delivered none the worse for wear in a plastic container, but a chicken parmigiana isn't really one of them. The schnitzel gets all sweaty instead of having a nice crispiness to it, and generally this was all the low-points of the pub schnitzel that many of the highs, even though you can tell that it was probably delicious when it was first cooked. Still, there's a lot of it, and sometimes that's what you need.
Dessert in our first week was a rather scrumptious key lime pie, but this week it was replaced with a cupcake celebrating our returning olympians. Cupcakes are almost always underwhelming (especially when compared to a key lime pie), and this butter-icing flavoured example was either par for the course of a little below. Not the best day on the menu, this one.
Tuesday
I have this one down in my notes as 'the weird one'. Tuesday breakfast is a little pot of mostly mushrooms, along with a little egg and some spinach, which is all very fresh and all, but as a person who somehow never acquired a taste for mushrooms, it's all a little overwhelming. This week I learned from last time and decanted the mushrooms when I first got them, so that they didn't diffuse their taste over the whole meal, and that made the whole thing a lot more enjoyable. Vegetables for breakfast is something I could get used to, I think.
Whereas yesterdays salad felt like a bunch of things thrown together that just don't go, today's ploughman's lunch is much the same sort of idea, but just works a whole lot better. The highlights are a little slice of camembert and a piece of turkey roll, and any small disgruntlement I might have felt over breakfast were soon forgotten. Mrs. Owl, whose pregnancy means that she didn't get either the soft cheese or the cold meat, but a little less favourable about hers, but we both went away satisfied and generally sated.
And then came the dinner I'd been secretly hoping for as soon as I knew we were coming to Howard Springs, the barramundi, because an eleven-year-old Owl drove his parents absolutely mad ordering barramundi anywhere and everywhere we went across the Northern Territory back in the dim dark past. While my dreams had it crumbed or at least battered, this version with a fragrant sauce and rice was a good move given the plastic container, and abolutely lived up to expectations. The little cheesecake for afters was particularly delicious, too.
Wednesday
Todays breakfast saw a return of the granola, this time with a thick, creamy yoghurt instead of stewed fruit. I liked this one better. It was also accompanied with a couple of hash browns, which are strongly in the 'this is supposed to be a hot food' category, but were actually pretty nice alongside a decent cup of tea. Lunch was a lamb and chutney wrap, which was fine and all, but probably the least memorable of the lunches. I'm just saying it could have had a little falafel, that's all.
The dinner for the people with normal digestive systems was an extremely lovely-smelling Butter Chicken and rice, but as a person who explodes in contact with chilies, I got this risotto-stuffed capsicum, which was decidedly less aromatic. The risotto and the capsicum are both pretty nice and the proportions of each are just about right, (although filling the whole container makes for a very large meal indeed), though the meal is brought down by the addition of a tomato sauce that is fine in its own right (pretty sure it's the same one from the parma) but doesn't really gel with the rest of the dish. This week's risotto had a lot less mushroom that last week's version, and given my relationship with mushrooms as described above, I greatly appreciated the tweak.
Dessert was the citrus tart that I missed out on Monday, so that's a win. The balance of crust and lemony goodness and a touch of cream is just right without being too sweet, which is no small feat. Mrs Owl got the same thing but with a layer of meringue on it for some reason, which she said threw the whole thing off, so I think I won this round.
Thursday
Breakfast quiche continues to be the most delicious of the breakfast options, and also substantially more filling than some of them, which is a useful feature when it's typically 16 hours since ones last meal. I got yoghurt as a side this week as opposed to last week's utterly inedible jelly, so that's a nice little bonus.
Quinoa salad for lunch, which is a nice way of saying that a bunch of vegetables and a chicken drumstick have been added to a pile of quinoa. All of the parts are nice enough, but in what is becoming a bit of a theme of the B-tier lunches, they don't really go together to make a meal in any particular way. I learned from last week and didn't completely drown it in the Japanese dressing, which was a definite improvement.
The grown-ups had what I'm assured was a rather excellent (though bitey) Lamb Korma, but I had a Five Spice Chicken with brocolli mash that was a dramatic improvement on the rather plain roast chicken and rice from last week; I'm rather enjoying the extra little bit of variance in the dietary needs meals compared to what the rest of the crowds are getting week after week. The brocolli/cheese blend was an excellent side to the chicken, so no lunchtime problems here. Could have done with a little more, so I guess I'll fill up on fruit and this delightful little cheesecake.
Friday
It's the strange breakfast! Not to be confused with the weird breakfast. I love the strange breakfast! Chia berry goopy thing takes a little bit of getting used to, but it is both delicious and surprisingly satisfying. Hoorah for this superfood that I otherwise would only encounter in the pages of my crossword, or maybe I'm confusing it with ACAI. Either way, delightfully scrummy.
For lunch I had a duck and crispy bean sprout bowl topped of with a mild mustard dressing for a little extra oomph, another example of a salad that is definitely meant to go together and really hits the spot, though I suspect the normal version also comes with chilies (I didn't miss them!). The same can't be said for Mrs. Owl's pregnancy-friendly version, which without the beansprouts or the duck was apparently a little underwhelming. I have no idea how bean sprouts made the list of all the things they say you're not supposed to feed pregnant people, but apparently that's a thing, because they were consistently substituted.
For dinner, steamed atlantic salmon, which in my opinion narrowly beat out the barra (sorry, madam barramundi, I still love you best, I promise). A creamy dill and caper sauce that I was very happy to slurp the last of, some roast potatoes...understated but delicious. The caramel slice afterwards was many things but definitely not understated. Fine with a cuppa and would have done well accompanied by a big ole dollop of cream, but a little over the top all by itself.
Saturday
None of the egg meals have been a disappointment, and that streak was not broken by the scrambled egg and sun-dried tomato roll for breakfast this morning. Definitely improved by leaving it to warm up a little rather than straight out of the fridge (especially since I've turned my fridge right up in the vain hope of freezing some icypoles), but tasty either way, and definitely a lot better thing to put in my mouth than covid swab number five earlier on the morning, which I did not enjoy waking up for at all.
The prize for best lunch of the week was easily taken out by the Chicken Campanelle Salad, a lovely pasta salad with a creamy mayonnaise sauce, with perfectly balanced little splashes of fruitiness (apples and cranberries) and crunchiness (capsicum and celery). It doesn't look like much, but mhmm-hmm, yes please.
Despite featuring Hokkien noodles, normally a automatic win for me, the Chicken Stir Fry that I got instead of the rather incredible smelling prawn laksa that the chili-tolerant were delivered left a little bit to be desired, but it did have the added bonus of not making my glands swell up and try and choke me, so I suppose beggars can't be choosers. Mrs. Owl's laksa had a bit of an accident on delivered and laksa kinda went all over the place, so we hope that the cleaning protocol after we leave will be able to take care of that. The fruity nutty fruit an nut cake was pretty delicious, too.
Sunday
Cute little frittata triangles for breakfast today. They taste like a perfectly serviceable frittata, but they didn't feel like a whole lot, so even after filling up on fruit (oh my word I am drowing in kiwis) we started lunch a little early. Lunch was a Korean Chicken Bowl - which mostly consisted of couscous mixed with what I think was pickled beetroot. The cold chicken has become another old and reliable friend; maybe it's not all that exciting, flavourwise, but I don't think any of it was ever dry, which is quite an achievement.
They saved the best dinner for last, however, because the braised lamb shank is really top-notch. The lamb falls off the bone (another example of a meaty meat that is not hurt at all by sitting in a plastic tub), the sauce is rich but not too much, and the lack of mashed potato for the rest of the week makes mashed potato feel rich and exciting. Very much the sort of meal that makes me feel sorry for the vegetarians, and a very satisfying last hot meal to finish up on. With a little chocolate torte, too (I tell you want, the person you makes the little tart cases must be making a mint).
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And that's it. We're back to Monday's breakfast tomorrow morning before we fly out, but for all intents and purposes, we're done here, and while being stuck in the same room all fortnight has gotten pretty old, I think it's fair to say that the food has been a highlight the whole time. It can't be easy cooking for this many people day in and day out, nor to provide interesting meals given the constraints of the quarantine situation, but the catering team has kicked it out of the park. I suspect I'll be missing some of these lunches when I have to fend for myself again out there in the big bad world.
Farewell, Howard Springs, thanks for everything. Let us meet again in happier times one day soon.
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