Posts filed under 'Food writing'
There’s a bloke out there who makes cheese. Cheddar, I believe. He has a website about cheese, and a webcam of a particular cheese, so you can watch in mature in real time. I read somewhere that there’s another bloke who logs on every night to see how the cheese is getting on. He finds it soothing, something peaceful at the end of the day.
Meanwhile, I have my one remaining tree that’s not quite out in leaf. This week, it’s finally started sprouting. Soon, the leaves will droop like normal leaves do, and it’ll look like the rest of the trees, where you can’t quite believe they haven’t been in full leaf for ever. Trees look mighty permanent at that stage. (If you really want to know, it’s the big tree by Mansfield Traquair church, just by the bus stop. Eye level view if you sit upstairs on the bus.)
So I shouldn’t really complain that there’s another season of Big Brother starting…and Dan working his way through episodes of The Apprentice. We all like to see how something’s going, little by little. We’re also quite keen on big changes, out of nowhere. Why else would we watch sport, if not to think that any minute, it could all change…or something of that kind. (You can probably tell I don’t watch a lot of sport. But I do make an effort when the Olympics are on, or something of that kind. Life achievement stuff. Theirs, not mine, I mean.)
We like to see the passing of time, I suppose, in ways that help us feel we are in control, rather than having it happen to us. The tree blooms, the cheese matures, whether we’re watching or not. But spectators that we are in this day and age, we like to take part a little. If only to have something to write on our blog.
June 1st, 2007
Have just looked back at the last two posts, and funnily enough, they are both about food. Again. So I might as well have thirds, and write another post about food.
Dan has put up a picture of Eric in Paris, but truly, we were there too…We had three and a bit days there before a work meeting for me, and made the most of trying out the amazing range of restaurants around the Montparnasse area where we were staying.
Adding on my few days for work meetings too, managed to truffle through Japanese, Moroccan, Vietnamese, French (restaurant, and bistro-style), Breton (ie crepes). In a work culture where you have wine at lunchtime, lunch is subsidised at the office you are visiting, and the meal lasts two hours, it was all very pleasant.
Meanwhile, the b’stilla is a reference to the Moroccan restaurant we visited. B’stilla (or pastilla) is a dish I have wanted to try for a long time, and the restaurant happily had it on the menu. It is essentially a speciality of the kind brought out for weddings - a very special chicken pie, or pigeon in the more traditional version. It is encased in very fine filo pastry, and has the sweet-savoury thing popular in the eastern Mediterranean and middle East. For the pie, this meant that the top was dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon.
The other attraction of the restaurant was the cat. As we arrived, we could see a waiter trying to catch a cat which was paused to run into the restaurant - and as we walked in, so did the cat. This is clearly not very hygienic, it’s true, but we happened to be given a table by the waiter’s stand where the bills were made up. The cat was clearly well known, and ended up curled alongside the senior waiter, who laid on a saucer of something, while directing the other waiters.
The cat knew its stuff too, and proceeded to charm several other tables. I’m sure that there must have been some kind of truce between leftovers and pushing your luck, and the waiters seemed pretty relaxed about the whole thing.
The title is of course an attempt at a pun on a line from Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. The middle talky bit, that everyone thinks they know. Go on. You know you want to sing along.
May 14th, 2007
I shall start this blog with a couple of literary references, neither as yet checked. My French is also not strong enough to be sure whether biscuits needs ‘perdu’ or ‘perdue’.
Anyway, Proust wanted to do a bit of rediscovering of the past, and managed something like that through the (for him) evocative taste of madeleines, the shell-like sponge cakes that you can buy fancy moulds for in nice cookshops.
I can’t claim that I’ve read Proust - and I am told that his Recherche de temps perdu is pretty long, so this could be deliberate on his part. However, I have now attempted my own equivalent, on a long weekend in and around Leeds.
I lived about seven miles outside Leeds between the ages of c. 4 and 7, in a village called Bramhope. (Small world statement: a lady from my church in Edinburgh also grew up there, and the pictures of her eldest being taken out in the pushchair around the village look very like those of my younger brother in the same setting.) A few miles up the road is Otley, a market town, and site of the hospital where my brother was born. At the time when you had to be born in a particular county to play cricket for it, it was heartening to know that he had got the best - Yorkshire.
Bramhope has now become quite posh, and we saw at least one DJ’s car (with souped-up number plate) as well as what are some huge houses. But this is still Yorkshire, where people are careful with money. The lady in the travel centre in Leeds would not allow us to buy two adult bus day tickets when we could buy a family ticket and save 20p. (I have to say that we also got slightly odd looks from the bus drivers that day, wondering where our brood had got to.)
Here comes the second literary reference. An ancient Greek writer claimed that it was not possible to step in the same river twice, because it was always flowing, so the water was no longer the same, even though the river continued. A good statement to bear in mind when revisiting former haunts, as time, like the river, does tend to move things on.
However, what amazed me that weekend was how much was still there, over 20 years on. One particular highlight was visiting the market in Otley, and finding that they still sold the same kind of ginger biscuits that we would buy there when I was a child. Not only that, but they sold them out of a mobile caravan type van, as they did years before. The only difference was that now they are pre-bagged in plastic rather than sold in paper bags. This means that the stall holders can’t indulge in the knack of swinging the bag round by the top corners to form a seal, but otherwise it was very satisfactory.
Are the biscuits truly the same? Perhaps a little less gingery. But then I think this has more to do with my tastebuds tolerating spicier food than I might have done at six.
Sadly, I don’t know what Proust actually did when he got his madeleines. We bought two bags of biscuits and went back to Bramhope on the bus. A grand day out.
May 14th, 2007
So, the soup making has abated a little, mostly through being away a bit.
In the meantime, the seed potatoes passed on by Mum have actually been planted, and are starting to come up.
Mum and Dad grew potatoes in pots last year, and we were with them one weekend when we earthed up a pot. “Treasure!” said one. “Lucky dip bran tub!” said the other. (The parents, not the pots.) It is quite fun reminding yourself that potatoes do come out of soil, rather than pre-printed bags from the Co-op…
So, this year, we were given six seed potatoes, nestling happily in an egg box, with a useful instructions postcard which explained that we should put them in the soil, they grow, we put more soil on, they grow more, and we put yet more soil on.
I can’t tell you it was excitement I felt when I checked today and saw they’d done the first growing spurt, and were due their first soil top up. But at least they were doing the stuff.
Those of you who knew our previous flat in Inverleith would have seen our garden all in pots. I became confident with things that grow in shade, damp or both. (Scottish gardening at its best??) Moving to a garden with soil and grass, I became a bit afraid of the big stuff. Doing a job where activity peaks in spring and autumn doesn’t really help for gardening either.
Anyway, now we have some plants in the two flower beds, and plans for a further one. I suspect we’ll enlist the mums again. But for now, it’s back to stuff in pots. Self-contained (naturally) and satisfying. Almost as much as picking snails off things and whanging them over the fence into the gap between our garden and next door’s wall. That’ll set back their plans for world domination…for a few more hours.
I will of course give you an update when it’s tattie howking season, but if I’m lucky, I might even manage another food crop like lettuce before then. (The snails meanwhile think I’ve planted several: clematis, magnolia…)
May 14th, 2007
Back to the (primeval) soup…here are the results of the next batches:
- broccoli and Cheddar: a particularly fetching green, biggest thumbs up
- curried parsnip: not as nice a colour, but very soothing
- carrot and carroway: lovely colour, great smell while the seeds are cooking, great taste too
- curried green lentil: yet to be tested…
Don’t know how many soups I have to make before the blender has paid for itself, but we’re enjoying ourselves, and hopefully even keeping some colds at bay too.
The soup is not shining, it’s true - although my face above the soup pot may well be…
March 10th, 2007
When I was still putting our news into yearly letters for Christmas time, I found myself wanting to categorise different years by activity: the year of the flat, the year of decorating, or whatever.
I’m not sure whether it feels like that anymore, as certain tasks come round again, or get repeated. However, there is a new theme emerging at the moment: soup making.
My liquidiser broke last year - a testament to a time when machines were made to last more than a couple of years, given that it started off being used to make my meals when I was a baby. This year, I bought a new hand-held one, and am probably a bit over-excited in seeing what it will do. Soup seems to be the most obvious place for trying it out, especially while the evenings are still quite cold.
For those who really want to know (and indeed for those who don’t too, since I am quite proud of the results), soups so far include: leek and potato, green lentil, pistou, and hopefully this evening, broccoli and stilton.
There’s nothing like variations on a theme to help you feel you are getting the hang of something. I promise there won’t be turtle soup (thinking back to the title of this post). But for now, no vegetable is safe. And maybe a few other ingredients too.
P.S. Dan has just pointed out that I need to explain the title. It’s from Alice in Wonderland, where the Mock Turtle is singing about soup. Off you go and check.
February 18th, 2007
Had my mum and dad round today for cups of tea and cake, following going out for lunch with them.
When there’s company, time to get out the Enormous Teapot. This is not related to the Enormous Turnip, although it could probably have its own children’s story about it.
The teapot was a wedding present from our good friends Rachel and David, and the first present we opened on our return from honeymoon. We laughed and laughed - the teapot can take up to twenty cups of tea. Perfect for my enjoyment of mass catering. The teapot still draws admiring glances from new visitors.
This blog is partly a chance to emphasise the joys of tea and cake. Having a teapot is one thing, having cake to go with it is a bonus. Today’s was lemon cake, baked by mum as a late birthday cake.
I’m not sure that cake doesn’t deserve a separate blog posting, as a fairly important element, in celebrations, gatherings and the like, as far as I’m concerned. But for now, enough to say that cake made it an occasion today.
January 28th, 2007
I managed my first proper roast dinner this year!
When I’ve said this to others, they always tell me that a roast is easy. But with timings of potatoes and veg to add to the equation, I was never sure I would manage to make it work out at the right time. As a former vegetarian, I probably worry more about whether the meat is cooked, etc, quite apart from knowing how to carve it.
For the vegetarian readers, I also managed a nut roast this year, Dan’s mum’s speciality from a time when she cooked macrobiotic meals more. Nut roast is actually Dan’s favourite meal ever, a great reassurance to me when we started going out, and my cooking repertoire was mostly veggie.
2 factors that made doing the roast even better:
- handing cookbook to Dan for him to come up with an ambitious recipe for stuffing. Why roast a chicken if you can’t do it in style too?
- having a few recipes for leftovers, such as risotto, that I felt comfortable with. So not only do you enjoy the roast, you have a further feeling of smugness when you make use of the rest!
Having said that, my homemade stock has tended to sit in the freezer, as I forget I have it. In a toss up between rapidly defrosting the stock, and grabbing a stock cube instead, the stock cube wins every time.
Perhaps next year, I’ll attempt some other kind of roast. On the other hand, I’m sure I can practice the chicken one for a while yet…
December 6th, 2006
Yesterday we went to a Christmas Fair at our local Church of Scotland, Granton Parish Church, just across the street.
At 50p entrance which included tea and biscuits, a bargain afternoon’s entertainment!
Sadly, we didn’t win anything in the raffle, but we came away with home made jam and cakes, plus a few more second hand books for the collection.
Our tip off came from Paul’s mum Rosemary, who lives up the road with us, and has got involved in the local churches. After the fair, we went back to her flat to see how it’s coming along.
Rosemary treated us to our first mince pies of the year, as well as scones and some excellent blackcurrent jelly, also bought at the fair.
December 3rd, 2006
Our first main family gathering of the year was in March, for Auntie Catriona’s 80th birthday. Catriona lives in Greenock, but also owns a cottage on the isle of Jura, off the west coast of Scotland.
Jura was the regular holiday destination while I was growing up, and I introduced Dan to its delights fairly early on while we were going out. We’ve also brought friends there over the last few years, who have generally gone away sold on the whole experience.
So, you can imagine we were pleased to have a little slice of Jura available in Edinburgh - in fact, there was a whole birthday cake in the shape of Jura. Catriona was really pleased, and we had fun bidding for different sections of the island by name. However, we made sure that Catriona got to keep the Craighouse section, the main settlement on the island where the cottage is based.
We also had fun trying out the Italian restaurant in Juniper Green, which we returned to in May for the Boston Mackenzies’ visit. The owner handled the unveiling of the island with great respect!
December 1st, 2006
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