In readiness for the beer day, Simon finally finished installing a hand pumped beer engine over the sink in the kitchen, and had it ready to go with an English real ale on tap, served warm and flat, just the way it is meant to be.

Outside the kitchen window is a dogbox, with a fridge inside, a temperature controller, two kegs, and a complicated system to add CO2 to the keg as the beer is drawn out by the hand pump.

One of Simons beer chums had come back from the US, and had brought a whole bunch of beers from US microbreweries which are not available in Australia, so there was a lot of sampling, sipping, sniffing and appreciating going on.

To deep fry a turkey, start with one of these. A large bore needle for injecting marinade. Inject most of the marinade through several injections into the breast and thighs.

You will need a big pot, this one is 50 l. You will need lots of oil, in this case 16 l. You will need a high pressure gas burner to get the oil to temperature and hold it there. You will need a hook nailed to a jarrah stick for getting the turkey in and out.

You will also need to keep careful note of the frying temperature, so I used two thermometers at the same time.

I know the skin looks burnt, but that is just the honey in the teriyaki marinade. After 22 minutes of cooking, a 3.5 kg turkey is crispy on the outside, moist and completely cooked on the inside, and not oily at all. It cooks much faster than in an oven because the oil bubbles through the inside and cooks from both sides.

Having 16 l of boiling oil opens up all sorts of possibilities. We did deep fried pineapple fritters, banan fritters (both lovely), and also 4 deep fried mars bars. The mars bars are delicious, but they dropped their batter when the chocolate melted and I only got the middle back.

Darryn did camembert/brie, with quince paste in the middle, egged, crumbed and deep fried. Spectacular!

2 kg of squid, scored, sliced, dusted in rice flour, five spice, salt and pepper, deep fried.

Then served with a sprinkling of spring onion, chillies and garlic. Lovely!

Some chorizo sausages, slow grilling over coals, also a butterflied chicken from Darryn, brined, marinaded and slow grilled for about an hour. Also lovely!