A stranger in a strange land…
….. The Bear and I set off tonight for Argentina!
I won’t be cooking but I will be eating.
I shall tell you all about the delicious things we find on our travels from Buenos Aires, to the Iguazu Falls, to Salta, to Tucuman.
We shall travel on Tren a las Nubes – the Train to the Clouds – and explore valleys and mountains….
And now?
Well, I really should start packing!
One of the lovely things about staying in hotels is that you feel entirely justified in eating what’s generally known as a full English breakfast. At one time (as a direct reflection of the harshness and rationing of the war years) English cooking was pretty dire and the best that anyone would say about it was that we made excellent breakfasts. Actually, given time to enjoy it, I think English breakfasts are probably still one of the best things about English cooking.
Starting with porridge and moving on to bacon and eggs, followed by toast and tea or coffee, there really isn’t a better way to start the day. Working means you rarely have time to have a “proper” breakfast (though what on earth could be classed as improper about muesli or an egg, I don’t know) so weekends and holidays are the only time we really have to enjoy them.
Because we had been to Craster the day before and smelled the delicious whiff of kippers smoking in the smokehouse, the Bear decided to have a grilled kipper.
That quite surprised me because he really isn’t truly Omnivorous yet and besides being convinced that beans and celery and other “stringy” vegetables are out to strangle him, he’s also very much against eating any fish with bones….
And bones are something a kipper has a lot of. Still, that’s the Bear. Full of surprises.
I think the Bear was quite surprised as well but he masked his horror and dug in and even enjoyed it.
I suppose a kipper is something everyone ought to try at least once and the Bear has now tried it. He might even have them again.
Next stop on our jaunt was the Alnwick Garden, in the grounds of Alnwick Castle, which some of you might recognise from the Harry Potter films.
The Alnwick Garden is possibly the most spectacular contemporary garden in the UK today and features one of Europe’s largest treehouses,
which is a fantastic restaurant… if you want to eat there, though, you have to book well in advance as it is so popular
And the grounds are packed with beautiful water features
and elegant gardens….
Bamboo labyrinths and rose gardens… water sculptures
and this …The Poison Garden. Walled off and separate – all the plants inside are poisonous and you are escorted around by a guide.
.. the detail on the gates is incredible
and what’s really marvellous, is that they were made by a genius artist, Ridley Amos, who happens to be the father of one of the Bear’s friends! The detail is incredible, with each leaf perfectly made and distinct from each other leaf.
If you are in Northumberland then you should try to visit Alnwick. You really cannot fail to be impressed.
We set off next, crossing the causeway to visit the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, where St Aidan set up his monastery in 635 AD
and walked out to the Castle,
which is stunning in its stark beauty.
The Bear loved it.
We crossed back to the mainland as the sun set.
We had walked at least 7 miles that day – not a lot, I know, but the fresh sea air and the biting winds made us ravenous and we ate, that night, in Bamburgh, the freshest fish you could imagine
and the Bear confessed that before he met me he used to like eating mushy peas (that’s some, in the picture) on top of crumpets! I have no idea how he came up with that concoction and no real desire to explore the reason why. All I can say is that no other chef has come up with that as a recipe to be proud of and as for the Bear, well, he doesn’t do it anymore.
I told you he could be surprising at times… and then he surprised me some more, by teaching me to play Table Football with three coins and our fingers as goalposts. You have to keep flicking the coin between two other coins all the way across the table to get to the goal. Why this hasn’t caught in in restaurants across the world, I really don’t know. I suppose it may have something to do with the fact that we were laughing a lot. Wine may have helped, I agree.
And then it was time for bed… the last night of our weekend away.
Back to home and me to start a new job… and start cooking again.
As some of you know, I was born and brought up in the far north of England. I’m only living in the Midlands now because I married the Bear…… I try and get back there at every opportunity. That’s where my family and and also where some of the most stunning places in the UK are. The Bear, being a Cockney, from the south of the country, doesn’t know much about the North and hasn’t really travelled around there. I kept saying I had to show him how beautiful and wild the countryside is and how stunning the coastline.
As you might also know, it was my birthday recently and we decided to make the most of it, so both of us had time off to celebrate and to head north… which kind of explains my absence from the kitchen and the blog. This then, isn’t about cooking… just eating and travelling. Travelling to somewhere that most people know nothing about and have never visited.
Maybe it will inspire you to visit Northumberland.
Before we started out on our trip north we had a meal at Iberico World Tapas – one of my favourite ways of eating…. what greedy person wouldn’t love tapas? Instead of having just one delicious thing to eat we chose lots of delicious things – cheeses and hams; salted squid and stuffed courgette flowers; patatas bravas and beef…… and belly pork…so many wonderful tastes, textures and flavours. The menu is on the website if you want to look…..
The next day we started driving north.
To those that don’t know, the industrial towns of the north can look dark and grim and people assume that is all there is, but once you get past Newcastle and take the coast roads heading further north you get to some of the wildest and most spectacular coastline anywhere. All I ask is that you look at the pictures and follow the links for more information. I am so proud of the north and its wild beauty and I hope that some of you will make your way there at some point.
On our way North we stopped, first of all at Alnwick (pronounced Annick, for those of you not brought up in the North) because there is the most wonderful secondhand bookshop there called Barter Books and one of the things I wanted to do was to see if they had any old cookbooks to add to my collection. What you can do is bring your old books (if they are good quality) and barter them for credit or other books…. It is the most fascinating place – in the old railway station at Alnwick – with a model railway running round the top of the bookshelves in one part of it. It is the perfect secondhand bookshop, with tables and comfy chairs amongst the stacks. Imagine the bliss….. look at their website and you will get a far better idea than I can give you.
And look what I found in the cookery book section…
… an old cookbook, printed just after 1963, “The First Ladies Cookbook – Favourite Recipes of all the Presidents of the United States”
It starts with George Washington and goes right through to Lyndon B Johnson who was President of the USA at that time.
All those Presidents…. all those recipes!
I had to buy it. Well, when I say buy… I had arrived with two bags of books I didn’t want and handed them in – Barter Books assesses whether they want them and if they do, how much they want to pay for them and that amount is put into your account… so you can spend it on books in the bookshop. So, not exactly bought, but bartered.
At first, I thought I would play Cookery Lotto , thinking that would really broaden our cooking experience, but as I started leafing through it I realised that this may mean I was being forced into making something like this
Calvin Coolidge’s favourite… Pineapple Salad, which involved covering a fresh pineapple with cream cheese, glace cherries and strawberries…..
I have to say, that just isn’t going to work for me.
(But you see that tea pot? My mother has one like that… it has a little burner underneath to keep the water hot! Isn’t it gorgeous?)
Anyway, the more I looked, the more danger I was in of having to cook something that really wouldn’t be to our taste at all, so Cookery Lotto was out.
There were recipes I was interested in… how about this…
Tomato Pudding. Adored by Dwight D. Eisenhower.
If you can’t quite see the recipe, here it is
1 10-ounce can of tomato puree, 1/4 teaspoon of salt, 1 cup of white bread, cut into 1 inch cubes, 1/4 cup boiling water, 1/4 cup of melted butter and 6 tablespoons of light brown sugar.
Add sugar and salt to the tomato puree and water and boil for 5 minutes. Place bread cubes in a casserole. Pour melted butter over them Add the tomato mixture. bake uncovered for 30 minutes at 375 degrees F (that’s about 190 decrees C for us in the UK) Serve with quail or roasted meats.
Not written to be the world’s most tempting recipe, but, you know, I can see that Dwight may have been onto something.
I bet that bread goes deliciously soft and develops a lovely crustiness to the top… the tomato would make it savoury…..and to serve it with meat?
Well, I am going to give it a whirl.
I may have to tweak it a bit, perhaps using chopped plum tomatoes to lighten the texture and decreasing the amount of sugar… but there’s something about it that appeals. What do you think?
And then I looked at Herbert Hoover…
Well that’s not Herbert Hoover, obviously. That is a picture of his Maryland Caramel Tomatoes.
8 ripe tomatoes of equal size, white pepper, 1 tablespoon of salt, 1 1/2 cups of brown sugar 1/4 cup of butter
Method:
Skin the tomatoes. Carefully cut off the tops. Place them in a buttered baking dish, suitable to serve them in. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and brown sugar. Dab each of them with butter.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C in the UK) and bake for half an hour. Then, remove to the top of the stove and over a low flame, reduce the juice until it is a thick syrup. The, once again, balke them in a hot oven (400 degrees F/200 degrees C) for half an hour. Serve hot.
Again, it might need a tweak or two… AND a baking dish that can go in an oven and on top of it…. but perhaps to serve alongside pork?
So. Pretty much of a result. A fascinating book and potentially a few great ideas in there. I was feeling very happy with myself and really, we hadn’t even started our little holiday.
We left Alnwick and carried on heading north… driving out to the coast, first of all to Craster, a tiny village famous for its kippers, with a tiny harbour
and walked from there, along the coastline to the ruined castle of Dunstanburgh
before driving further north to Bamburgh where we were staying for the next two nights. Bamburgh is a beautiful village, once the capital of Northumbria, with yet another huge castle, high above the village.
Click on the links and see just how lovely the Northumbrian coast is.
That night, sitting in a tiny restaurant, we toasted each other and congratulated ourselves on choosing the far north as my birthday trip.
And there were even more lovely things to do the next day!
Caron was first to pick a number and a column…
Page 99 of Australian Gourmet Traveller Annual Cookbook, 2008 is in the pasta section and the second column is papardelle.
We’re making pasta! And the only ingredients are 4 eggs, 1 tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil and 560gm “00” durum wheat flour.
Pappardelle is broad flat strips of pasta. Broader than fettucine.
All I can say is thank goodness she didn’t choose column 1… because we’d have been searching for a kid’s shoulder on the bone to make a ragu with.
That’s a goat’s kid’s shoulder, obviously.
So, this weekend is pasta time! Goodness knows what sauce I will make to serve with it – I shall cross that bridge when I get to it.
In my attempt to widen the variety of dishes I cook and also to introduce an element of randomness, I thought of the weirdly wonderful Cookery Lotto. I have lots of cookery books that I might read but really need to start cooking from.
Thing is, I hadn’t really got round to doing anything – I just chose what I fancied. The one time I let the Bear choose something he picked a dish, Pork and Pepper Goulash which was something I would never have chosen. Turned out to be absolutely fabulous! Just goes to show that I need to be nudged along a bit.
So, I told you all how many books were on the bookshelf next to me. If you remember, everyone had a chance to pick a number and the plan was that we would get the average from those numbers. That would determine which of the books on the bookshelf would be picked.
I used my incredibly advanced mathematical skills to work out the average
See that? That was 6 am this morning as I added everything up.
And then I divided by the number of people who had put numbers in.
It came to 57.2222.
So I thought 57 would do.
I scurried along to the bookshelf and started counting.
And this is what came out.
The Australian Gourmet Traveller Annual Cookbook. I bought it last year in Melbourne as we sat around the airport waiting for a hugely delayed flight to Hobart, Tasmania.
The interesting thing is, though, see that first picture where I am dragging it out of the shelf? You can see index tabs.
That’s what I do when I see recipes I would like to cook.
Notice, I said “when I see”
I haven’t actually done them!
So, it looks like a very good book to pick. There are recipes in there that took my fancy…. now all I have to do is cook them!
The next part of Cookery Lotto is picking the recipe.
The recipes start on page 16 and go right through to 236.
There are three columns.
So… first one to pick a number between 16 – 236 picks the recipe page!
Then pick either 1,2 or 3 to get the column and the recipe.
First answer wins!
(Oh and be very grateful – the next book along was this
I have a feeling that any recipe from there might not be as exciting as one from the Gourmet Traveller!)
Right back in the beginning, when this blog started out, I knew that I would have to stretch myself.
It’s easy, so very easy, to just stick to cooking what I normally cook when what I wanted was to see if I could do something different most days of the week. I thought that taking pictures and telling you all what I was doing, would make me too embarrassed to repeat myself. I have lots of cookery books so there had to be thousands of recipes close at hand… just waiting to be chosen.
I needed to work out how I picked the recipes I was going to make. The difficulty was that I might just go along with whatever I fancied, when what I needed to do was to cook things completely randomly.
Could I be trusted to pick randomly? Probably not. I’d probably choose what I quite liked the look of and reject the tricky or the not immediately likeable recipes.
And then I came up with Cookery Lotto. I had lots of cookery books and I have lots of friends. Put the two together I thought……
The basic idea was that one of them chose a random number and, in a very scientific fashion, a cookery book was chosen.
The technical explanation of this method? I counted along the bookshelves until I got to the number that was chosen.
Then… and this was the cunning bit… I told them how many pages there were in the book and someone else picked a page number!
I had nothing to do other than cook what they came up with.
On the first go, Looby picked “The Prawn Cocktail Years” and Els picked page number 49… and the result was Creamed Spinach. A resounding success in my eyes, but there again, I do so love spinach.
The poor Bear isn’t such a fan but as I am training him to be truly omnivorous then he does what he is told and he eats what he is given. He sort of liked it.
He’s really hoping that this time he gets something he would really want to eat.
So… Cookery Lotto, Part Two!
New rules though….. what we do this time is that everyone who wants to join in just picks a number… then one day later I see how many answers there are and divide the sum of the numbers by the amount of people picking them… that gives answer number one, which is, the cookery book we are working from.
Once we know that, we will know how many pages are in the book and we do the same thing for the recipe.
I have just gone and counted along the bookshelves…in this apartment there are 156 books close to hand. That should give us something to go at.
They range from cookery books bought in Bangalore for a few rupees to books bought in specialist book stores costing over £50. There are thick books, thin books, old books and new books… There’s books on there that I adore and there are, I have to say, books I have never ever cooked from.
So…. the game is on.
Pick a number from 1 to 156. It’s not too much to ask is it? Just pick a number and tell me what it is….
Happy New Year to everyone……
I suppose there will have been many of us feeling slightly tired today.
We had a fantastic night with our neighbours, with high jinks, merriment, champagne, cheering and competitive Wii playing.
We undoubtedly behaved in a riotous fashion… and if it weren’t for the fact that all the neighbours were with us then there would have been complaints from them about the shrieks of laughter.
I hope you all had as good a time as we did.
2010 – here we come!
Today is the day that I think about what I want to achieve in the new year.
I am going to be more focussed this year – the resolutions I made last year were “discussed”
…………with the help of numerous glasses of champagne, and our beloved L&L, in a revolving restaurant, high above Hobart, Tasmania.
We were spending days in the brilliant sunshine of an Australian summer
and eating fresh oysters and fish straight from the boat
and it all seemed so easy.
Of course this would be the year that we did things… we would lose weight, become supremely fit, reverse the ravages of time and become all-round-gorgeous.
Ahem.
Maybe it was the sun that went to our heads?
This year, though, I am going to really make an effort. In all honesty, all I did try to do was to cook delicious things for the Bear and his friends. I just didn’t try to make us thinner. Butter and cream featured strongly……Nothing wrong with butter and cream, though, but perhaps I had been just a tad generous.
I have started to collect recipes that gave us 400 calories and under per serving, so that if we were very sensible with breakfast and lunch, we could have a delicious supper and still keep to just over 1000 calories a day, which should, theoretically, make us whippet-thin within weeks. It would also allow us room for manoeuvre if we had people round.
The problem with diets is that it is so easy to lose interest when faced with a crispbread and some cottage cheese. If I could produce meals with a sense of luxury about them but still keep the calories low then surely we would be on to a winner?
Of course, last year I wasn’t writing this. Any bold promises I made were only heard by a select few and they are unlikely to point and laugh and tell me I am a failure.
This year I am writing it down so whoever reads this will see what I have said. I can’t threaten you with violence if you point out that I have failed, as I do to my nearest and dearest.
So… in 2010 I will make it my aim to seach out delicious recipes that are low calorie… BUT would make you think you are not on a diet.
I will make sure that we eat healthily and happily.
I will make sure that this time next year there will be a distinct difference in our shape and size and general state of health.
I will still cook the occasional greedy and gluttonous treat but that will be balanced by our other efforts.
Instead of saying “I really should” or “I’d like to” or “Let’s think about”, I will say that we ARE doing something. That mushroom foraging course I always say we must book – well, we will do it.
Those walks I say we will go on – well, we shall do them.
I shall read my favourite cookery books again and work through them… I have picked out the first few…. Elisabeth Luard, for example. There is so much to explore in this book – European Peasant Food reflects recipes that make the most of the ingredients to hand. Recipes that have been forgotten, in the main, and really need to be revived
Also, we are very lucky in that we have some marvellous friends from Turkey who KNOW how to cook – nights spent with F & E have inspired me to look through my collection and I shall make more Middle Eastern/Turkish/Moroccan food…
And I shall also read through some of the books that first inspired me to cook
And once I have done all that….. well there are still many more packed bookcases to work through
So, this time next year, the last day of 2010, how much will I have achieved? Will I be thin, fit, well fed and well read? Or will I have fallen by the wayside and just managed the reading and feeding?
Here’s to 2010!
Happy New Year to everyone and may all your wishes and resolutions come true!
No matter how gloomy things are, there are always things that can make me smile
This fork, for example, always makes me smile.
I bought it years ago… years and years ago. I had left home and was a student, living in a ramshackle flat. I couldn’t cook in those days and probably only used it to stir tinned soup.
Still, things gradually changed and I started to cook properly and so the fork got more use.
Look at it – you can tell I am right handed because over the years it has worn down on the left hand side. We must have been eating fork for years. Well, tiny little bits of worn away wood from the fork, anyway.
Probably the Health and Safety people would say that it is a heinous kitchen crime to feed people wood. I don’t care. It makes me smile. It makes me think of the hundreds of hours I must have been standing at a cooker, stirring away
It’s cold outside, bitterly cold and we spent this afternoon visiting a relative in a hospital. That’s not going to make you smile but coming home to a warm fire and a hot drink…. and crumpets
Well, that makes you smile.
I made crumpets not so long ago, when my sister in law was visiting us, but today I just bought a packet. Hot and dripping with butter – perfect.
Here in the North it’s snowing and it is lying deeply . It’s bright and crisp and while it is like this, I really like it
Ankle deep in snow, in the bright sunshine. That’s good and I smile at that. Especially when I can see my mother’s house
And I know that inside the family will be waiting….
Last night, one of my oldest friends came round to my house with her husband to celebrate her birthday.
We drank Moet & Chandon Rose Imperial and smiled. Who wouldn’t?
And the other thing that always makes me smile is this
It’s a picture hanging on the wall in my kitchen. I have no idea who painted it or what it is called. It was on a card that I was given for my birthday once….
I think it was meant to resemble me…. but it always makes me smile anyway.
See? I don’t need to win the lottery to be happy.
Find the simple things in your life that make you smile!
I get up in the morning in the dark, I drive to work in the dark, I leave in the dark and get back in the dark.
Sometimes I wonder if the world has ground to a halt and it is permanently dark outside.
Last night everything was shrouded in fog as well as being dark…..
I’m tired and I can’t think of what to cook – well, I can think of lots of things but they all involve me being around to cook them.
I might have to drive back to the North at short notice, which will mean there will be no cooking going on…. there will be, perhaps, reviews of the delights of hospital sandwiches and what kind of coffee can be had from a clapped out machine in a corridor.
So, if you don’t hear from me, think of me and the family and say prayers for my digestion…..
