After a sleep-in followed by a walk on the beach (we went to the beach just about every day), Jac made a trip to Noble’s Bakery (located at 99 Durlacher St, Geraldton) to get us some breakfast – yep, you guessed it, pies. She returned from the bakery somewhat bemused. She’d asked what sort of chicken pies they had (for me), and they looked at her like she’d just asked for something really strange and inappropriate – you know, strange like she’d walked into a McDonald’s and ordered caviar, grilled lamb cutlets and salad, and angels on horseback.* Anyway, they told her they don’t do chicken pies, and so she got something else. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not criticising the bakery for not having chicken pies – they can bake and sell whatever pies they like – I suppose I’m just amused by their reaction to Jac’s question, like it was a really really weird thing to ask. Incidentally, we ate pies from three different bakeries during our holiday (I’ll tell you about the other pies very soon), and the other bakeries had chicken pies, so [shrug]. Anyhoo, first of all, we shared a steak and mushroom pie.

The pastry was lovely and the pie was meaty, with very tasty gravy, but I didn’t think it was mushroomy enough. Now I don’t expect most steak and mushroom pies to be as mushroomy as the ones from Bentley Bakery (now that is extremely mushroomy), but really, a pie that goes by the name of steak and mushroom really needs much higher mushroom content. As a meat pie, it was very good though.

We then shared a meat pastie.

The pastie was delicious, loaded with meat, potato and carrots. I love how pasties are so thick in the middle, a lovely big savoury bite of meat and vegetables. Mmmmm. I must eat pasties more often.

Remember how I mentioned that Jac had bought a bulk pack of chicken pieces? Well, for dinner we had chicken. First, chicken wings. Jac simply marinated them in soy sauce (we brought a little jar of soy sauce with us) and black pepper and baked them in the oven. We had a couple of wings each.

For the main course, more chicken. Jac used a packet mix to coat the chicken pieces before baking (sorry, I should’ve written the brand and name of the mix down – all I can remember is it came in a green box, from the supermarket) – the chicken came out of the oven all golden-brown and crispy on the outside like fried chicken – it was really yummy and finger-sucking good. As you can see, there was a lot of chicken. I assure you, although we did not eat it all for dinner, none of it went to waste – what we didn’t eat that night we finished off the next day. I ate it cold, straight out of the fridge – I love cold fried chicken.

To go with the chicken, we made a salad with lettuce, grape tomatoes, cucumber and the last hard-boiled egg. The dressing was the very flavoursome oil from the antipasto mix Jac had bought for nibblies from the deli counter at Coles – it had sundried tomatoes, marinated mushrooms, olives, fetta – the last few sundried tomatoes and mushrooms found their way into our salad too.

We ate the chicken and salad with bread from Noble’s – brown burger buns which we sliced and buttered. Now this bread was gooooood – chewy and nutty.