Pudding!

street in Albufeira

We were on holiday at the Cerro Mar Gardens in Albufeira in Portugal we made a couple of visits to the hotel restaurant. After some excellent swordfish it was time for pudding.

The dessert menu had a range of choices, but one caught my eye. It was Pudding and the English translation was Pudding.

Yes I could have asked the waiting staff what this was, but I decided to risk it and order it for my dessert.

I had no idea what Pudding would be, but there was an air of anticipation in what would arrive at the table.

This is what arrived.

pudding

This was a creme caramel.

It was quite nice, it’s not something I have had recently, I actually don’t think I’ve had it since the 1990s, or even earlier. It’s not something I would probably order, so it was nice to have the surprise.

Why no oven chips?

French fries
Image by Matthias Böckel from Pixabay

I wrote about my impressions of self-catering at Cerro Mar in Portugal in a previous blog post. 

I do like to shop at local supermarkets and buy local produce or ingredients to cook with. As self-catering can be quite limited, I do sometimes on holiday buy convenience food to cook.

One of things I did find different in Portugal was the lack of oven chips available in the local supermarkets. They did sell frozen chips, but these were for deep fat frying.

I don’t know if this is a cultural thing, having bought oven chips in France and Spain on previous holidays.

I did buy the chips, but cooked them in the oven with some oil. They were okay.

Self Catering in Cerro Mar

hotel complex

I have in previous years written about my self-catering experiences when going on holiday abroad.

Coping with self-catering in Calpe

Self-catering at La Croix Du Vieux Pont

This year we went on holiday to Albufeira in Portugal. We were staying at the Cerro Mar Garden apartments.

The self-catering kitchen in the apartment was large, spacious and well equipped.

kitchen

As well as a full size oven, four ring hob, there was a large fridge freezer, a dishwasher and a washing machine. There were lots of pans, utensils and kitchen tools. The kitchen knife was nice and sharp as well. There was a good chopping board too.

What was missing though, were some baking trays for the oven. This restricted how we could use the oven. There was also no sieve or colander. We did pasta and rice, but it was a bit of a challenge in getting them drained.

There was a kettle, a toaster, and a coffee machine. Our coffee machine was leaking, but this was quickly replaced by the hotel. It was a filter machine, I would have preferred a Nespresso capsule machine or similar.

In the past on self-catering holidays it has been challenging to cut fresh bread, this time the local supermarkets had a self service bread slicing machine you could use, so I used that to slice the bread.

One of the pans had a uneven base which meant it didn’t work on the induction hob, took me a couple of goes to realise that, as I don’t normally use induction hobs.

I appreciated the big fridge we had, and the freezer section. On self-catering holidays in caravans (mobile homes) the fridge can be quite small.

Overall it was a great apartment, and the kitchen worked out really well.