Tour o’ Scotland part the second

Friday: over the highlands after a black pudding fry-up breakfast, past Inverell to the west coast, over vast tracts of rainy mountains devoid of humanity bar the road and the odd abandoned decrepit crofter’s cottage, lunch in Poolewe (mussels and scampi – and chips) and a B&B in Mellon Charles, Aultbea. Dinner was prawn cocktail and fish pie with new spuds, at the Aultbea Hotel. Again, much better than we could have expected from anywhere similar we’ve been to in England. Watched the sun go down as we ate, the long summer evening drawing out to 21.30-ish, and almost an hour later still not dark. Fog on our breath as we headed for the car, though. Summer.
We were pleased to make the acquaintance of Sidney (the seagull,) who had a bad leg and was helped by the owners of the B&B when they first arrived – 14 years later he’s still in regular attendance at the kitchen window (he likes cat-food, they say,) having brought generations of his offspring by, and his leg is long since well-recovered. Since the dog died, he’s now the family pet, albeit a wild and standoffish one (sadly didn’t get a photo.)

Saturday: Another Scottish fry-up, all the usuals, again with black pudding, alongside two slightly hung-over Scots lads from Inverell who were in town for the local annual raft race (they came 4/6.) The very loud and jolly landlady, Pauline, served tea and teased them while they winced, while her husband Phil did a fine job in the kitchen (they make their own bread, their own jam, their own marmalade – which was nice.
Off, then, to the Inverewe Gardens which were impressive, if rhododendron heavy. After two hours of plant-gazing we set off via the scenic route to Skye, around the rugged and sheep-filled coastline past Sheldaig, through Applecross where we had another surprisingly good Scottish pub lunch. Halibut with a local prawn (which looked like scampi to me) sauce, and local wild salmon, new potatoes and asparagus. Then over the Bealach Na Ba mountain pass (impassable in winter), which we’re told is the highest road in the UK, and spectacular and hair-raising, especially with its one-lane road. The one lane road thing (very common in these parts) works well – every so often there’s a ‘passing place,’ a little bulge on the side of the road, and almost all the drivers are very aware and careful and courteous in the face of the difficulty that the system imposes, especially with the number of tourists and campervans and left-hand drive vehicles.
So, some time later, we found the bridge at the Kyle of Lochalsh and drove over the sea to Skye. Not quite in the manner of Bonnie Prince Charlie (we weren’t disguised in drag as servant girls, for a start.) Found a wi-fi hotspot, checked the email to confirm our accommodation, only to find the offer of same, happily confirmed from our end, had been retracted. So, we drove to north to Portree and saw a sign to the Cuillin Hills Hotel which seemed like a good, though potentially expensive, option for a place to sleep, and it was (good, that is. More expensive than we would have liked, but arriving so late in the day we got a good deal on the room.) No view from the room to speak of, but a lovely view over Loch Portree was to be had from the front of the hotel, on the lawn, restorative dram in hand (21 year-old Ben Riach.) Then Linda met the midgies, which we’d been warned of that morning, and we had to move indoors. And so to dinner, where we had oatmeal-crusted herring, and lobster with pea risotto. Very fine, and everyone was lovely and helpful and accommodating (especially the receptionist, who had given us a surprisingly good price, and warned us to take the word of travel agents as we would politicians’.)

Tour o’ Scotland part the first

Tuesday, up at the proverbial crack of dawn for the 7AM train out of KX. Next stop, bonnie Edinburgh!

Nightmare finding the bus to the (very substandard) B&B, it turns out that Princes St (and most of the rest of Edinburgh) is being dug up for a tramway. Just the one. None of this mucking about with multiple routes – just simple, good old-fashioned A to B transportation. Perhaps needless to say, many Edinburghians are less than thrilled.

Leaving the accommodation (‘petite’ they told us, before sending us and our baggage down the hallway with a magnifying glass,) we head to Leith; some buses and some walking in drizzle, to see the sights, and eat some fine Scots fare – oysters, mussels and smoked haddock with fishcake at the Ship on Shore (which proclaimed sustainable seafood on the menu but sold dredged scallops. Not impressed with that little bit of greenwashing.) Not much really in the way of sights – tourists by the horde up the Royal Mile to the castle – but we start a walk in Holyrood Park, as it started to rain again. So, caught a bus back to the B&B (we had day passes, v. good value at £3) to dry out and check emails and suchlike things. Managed to get hold of a Flickr friend, and we arranged, despite a reprise of the Princes St shambles, to meet for a quick drink and chat and some (not so great) Chinese. So now I’ve met someone, in person, though the interwebs. Even my mother beat me to that.

Weds: haggis with trad fry-up for breakfast, pick up car drive to Elgin via Perth, Pitlochrie, Blair Athol (where I had “Sporran o’ Plenty” for lunch – a steak stuffed with haggis – with chips) &c.

Indian nosh in Elgin, much better than expected, for dinner. So much for my ambition of three meals of haggis in a day.

Thurs: around Elgin to beachy place with very blue water called Findhorn – crab and the biggest fish and chips (haddock) known to humanity. Chips, always chips. No Mars bars yet, deep fried or otherwise. We watched the rain roll in from the west as we ate, and headed back to the car just in time to get wet. Post lunch – Speyside whisky tour – visited the Cardhu distillery at Knockando and toured, discovered there are many cute names for bits of whisky making. Also discovered that peaty whiskey isn’t the be all and end all of whisky. ‘Plain’ whisky stills are beautiful and look like giant gramophone horns, in copper. Rained on again. Stopped also at Aberlour, and passed by many other famous names. Drank water directly from the River Spey – yum!

Dinner – Thai restaurant in Elgin – best fishcakes we’ve ever tasted, the rest average but by no means bad – waitress delightful, we slipped her a very large tip because her bosses looked evil. Didn’t leave a general meal tip, which could have been a terrible mistake.

Cats

Today we’ve had tea, poached eggs on toast (with chipotle Tabasco and Worcestershire sauces,) followed by a walk up to the markets, where we bought peas and broadbeans and smoked eel and smoked mackerel and heritage tomatoes and mozzarella di bufala (English-made) and asparagus and strawberries and early-season cherries (bloody great!)

Came home and had oysters, then a pea and bean risotto for lunch. Bloody amazing for about £10 for the two of us.

Just been listening to Cat Empire. It’s a sunny summer’s day (the longest one, it’s the solstice!) and they’re brilliant. I’ve been trying to work out how to define what they do – a bit ska, a bit gypsy, a bit mariachi, a bit wog, a bit of a bunch of other stuff, all fun, all great. Feeling good, sitting in the sun with a drink, couldn’t be better.

Then Cat Stevens comes on- Tea for the Tillerman. Great songs, it has to be admitted, but what a palooka. Sorry, but anyone who can happily commit to a fatwah is in my book necessarily an idiot. Come to think of it, anyone who can happily commit to a religion is in some way deeply defective, as far as I can tell. So the music is poisoned. Such a shame.

Yay for Cat Empire, oysters, peas, beans and rice!

The Flavour of Mystery

It is a mysterious taste, as it turns out, because only about 700 people in all of Great Britain have actually tasted anything like it. Good, fresh food, that is (maybe a tiny exaggeration).

The mystery began, as you may remember, when we booked a meal at Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage HQ. The secret handshake survived the emailing, and as per instructions we walked with a map carefully memorised (but not eaten, lest it spoil the feast to come), and proceeded on foot down the darkening unsignposted country lane to the designated rendezvous point.

From there, with a group of fellow secret-handshakees, we were conveyed to the final destination by (relatively) unmarked stealth-tractor.

Out of the tractor and into the welcoming yurt (!) (arrayed with chilled Somerset apple brandy apéritifs and marvellous crab canapés) we hors d’oeuvred around the small cheery wood-burning stove warming the cool Devon evening. Then, suitably refreshed, we were welcomed to River Cottage proper. Once on the premises, we discovered, it was pretty much open slather. ‘Don’t disturb the Head Gardener, that’s his place over there, and don’t go into the room that’s been booked for the private function’ were our only real proscriptions. ‘Wander around the kitchen garden, visit the pigs, the geese (and they were delightfully friendly!), the ducks, the generator room, the kitchen, annoy the chefs, that’s what they’re here for!’ The place was ours. ‘Even look at the menu, if you want, before the meal starts!’ The veil of mystery had been whipped away to reveal…

We ate and drank (look here for some of the delicious beverages we imbibed) and yapped copiously in a converted barn, on two long trestles, about 15 to a side, couples across the table from one another, so every couple had four strangers to talk to. Once seated, there was a complimentary glass of English sparkling wine, and the head chef (Noni, Australian, gorgeous) made an appearance to commend the food to us, and tell us the names of the animals (and vegetables) that had given their lives that we might be sated. The bubbly, accompanied by a wild sea-bass ceviche (a bit bland for our taste) was, surprisingly, very good, and the names of the beasts, ‘pig’ and ‘lamb’, weren’t too off-puttingly personal.

— from James Rose – (?)

So to the food, should you be interested – I liked the pig’s liver pâté. It had a rustic granularity, and lightness, lent to it by breadcrumbs, but Linda thought it should have been smoother [it's pâté! pâté! (ed)] The fish soup was a winner. Hearty and fabulously full of stocky richness, well matched to the chorizo chunks swimming lustily back and forth across the bowl. The lamb was pretty damn good, but could have been, in an ideal world, a little bit more succulent (the poor little thing was sacrificed for us and was cooking for about 24 hours and still managed to be a teensy bit dry). The cheeses were a fine mix of assorted goat and cow varieties, with plenty of flavour, but all hard cheeses basically, some more variety in texture would have improved the plate hugely. Also, who knows how many hedgerows had to die to make that jelly? And so to the strawberry fool, what can you say? Fruity, sweet and creamy – quintessential dessert! [Linda didn't like it at all].

So yes the food was good – not the greatest we’ve had, but close to the best we’ve had in Britain; and the fine, fine staff made the evening top stuff (if ever you read this lovely people you were wonderful – human and informed and all the right things) but the secret to the whole affair was the throwing together of a bunch of strangers, adding lovely tucker and lots of yummy beverages et viola! A top time was had by nearly all. Linda even got to sing along to Big Yellow Taxi with a lovely Cornish lass. What more can you ask for from an evening?

River Cottage rocks!

And we must tell you about the Chicken Out campaign soon.

Out for the weekend

Woohoo! I have days off!

Now that the horror fillum Book of Blood has finished (and that’s a genre, not just a description – I think the director was going for Dario Argento mixed with Great Julienning Disasters Through History, ep.14) I have some time to enjoy the lovely English August. Currently hovering at 18-20C, during the day. Nearly warm enough for short sleeves!

So this weekend we’re off to Devon, spiritual home of the scone, I would assume. Debun, as one of the locals calls it. Maybe they all do. That’s two more research topics for this intrepid reporter. Stand by. The weather report is for mild and fine, until about the hour we arrive on the train at Axminster (I’m very keen to check out the local carpets – I intend to do some barefoot studies), at which point the rain is predicted to set in and keep us moistened for the weekend.

Our spirits will remain strong, however, as we are booked to dine at the River Cottage HQ eating establishment, professional home of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, champion of chickens and all-round good food guy. But more on that next time. Don’t even try to find the location of the restaurant on the website – it’s a closely guarded mystery, I think, and they send you instructions for the secret handshake in an encrypted email only after you’ve actually committed to the booking. Two months in advance. I could be corrected on certain details, maybe, but not without losing some of the fun from the story.

Okonomiyaki

Thanks to a dinner party hosted by our friends Chris and Miwako, we discovered this top ‘new’ (it’s been around for 400 years apparently) food in Sydney. It’s Japanese of course and means something like ‘whatever you like’. Whatever you like is mixed with eggs and cabbage and various other things and then cooked, sort of like a big thick pancake, on a hotplate and decorated in the cutest way with saucy spirals (somehow I doubt that mayonnaise is a 400 year old Japanese staple but what do I know?) and bonito flakes that wave at you and look like they’re still alive. And now we have found our new regular restaurant in London – Abeno.

It’s not primarily for the food that we loved Abeno, although it was very good – it’s the theatre of the whole thing. You are at a table with your very own hotplate, you order from a menu with many, many choices on it, then the (very cute) waiter/chef/cleaner-upperer brings all the ingredients to the table, mixes them, cooks them on the hotplate and serves them to you. It’s all very top fun to watch and induced us to leave an extra big tip because the cuties were working so hard..

Kiso mix – mushroom, lotus root and cheese (!), and spicy naniwa – kimchee mostly. One side cooked…

Flip, lid on…

decorated and ready to eat

Surprisingly, the kiso mix was the better of the two (we really only ordered it for novelty) – in some strange alchemical way the mushrooms, cheese and lotus turned into a tangy, crunchy yumminess.

And the best thing of all – we drank sake from a box! The box was filled way past overflowing -like a sake waterfall – to indicate the host’s generosity apparently. The funnest drink experience ever. It took me ages to screw up the courage to actually drink from said box in case there was some special Japanese way of doing it, but after consultation with Jamesy we decided that there was really only one thing to do…

Kampai!

We had so much fun Jamesy even came up with a haiku:

London sake spring

okonomiyaki here

but first we must drink

Ol’ Tripey

In case any of you our dear friends hadn’t noticed, we’re in old Blighty. Which is famous for tripe. Built on tripe. Tripe and onions, tripe and… um. And you may have noticed we like to explore the fun (and now exotic) bits of the eating experience, willing to do our bit for the nose to tail, so of course tripe it must be in all its forms! And so to Borough Markets, the first stop for any foodie in London. Bloody hell this place is marvellous, in fact the best food market we’ve ever seen, and boy have we seen some beauts – Bangkok – wowzer!; Adelaide – swoon; Prahran – yummy; farmers’ markets at Fox Studios in Sydney – aww (oh how I miss you Toby’s Estate)! Now where was I? Oh yes, heading to the best market in the country for the arguably signaturey dish of the country – after all isn’t tripe and onions why most of you have never even ventured near a piece of delicious cosy stomachio? Even though you’ve never even seen one, let alone tasted it?

But what did we find dear readery friend? NO TRIPE. That’s right. None. In the middle of the most populous city in the most populous country in the UK – no tripe.

I shall elaborate on my theory for this astonishing lack in the next post. Now I’m too weak from lack of innards to do so.

St. John, Smithfield

In honour of James getting measurably older we set out for lunch at one of Britain’s finest eating establishments – St. John. Fergus Henderson, the proprietor, made ‘nose-to-tail’ eating fashionable in this country – that is using the whole animal, not just the ‘best’ bits. And the building is a former smokehouse in the East End, pretty much as they found it – they’ve just painted it white.

I arrived at Smithfield on time, but James was late because of work. The lovely maitre d’ made sure I was supplied with water and aperitifs and was charming – I ordered a glass of what was basically house white and he praised me for my good taste! Maybe it was because I could pronounce ‘viognier’ and not many antipodean types can…

The picture above is the restaurant’s signature dish – very dramatic indeed! It looks like some sort of Gaudi-ish apartment block on a plate, with parsley. You even get a special implement to eat it with – stabby on one end, scoopy on the other. Stab, scoop onto toast (sourdough from St. JOHN bakery), add yummy grey sea salt from specially provided mound on plate, parsley on top, eat. Ah yummy. Very comforting on a coldish-but-not nearly-as-cold-as-it-should-be-at-this-time-of-year’s day.

So that was our starter, then we went on to mains – James ordered lambs’ tongues with butterbeans and anchovy, I ended up with smoked eel, beetroot and horseradish due to lack of pigs’ cheeks (I hope you’re not feeling squeamish at this point). My eel was perfectly smoked and complemented by the sweetness of the beetroot and the heat of horseradish cream. James’ little lambs tongues looked very cute with their giant butterbean companions and the textures worked well together. After extensive excavation he still failed to locate the anchovies, but perhaps they had melted in to something. The salad we chose as a side dish was much more heavily dressed than I’m used to, but I suspect that’s something to do with this being a British restaurant. The side dishes, by the way, were hilarious – a choice of spring greens, potatoes, salad, Welsh rarebit, or cheese. Cheese! Or cheese on toast! As a side dish – now that’s my kind of menu!

And how was it? – well it was – nice. Not spectacular, but that wouldn’t be British would it? We had a rather pleasant time, with one criticism – our waitress quickly figured out that we weren’t there on anyone’s expense account and wasn’t interested in us. She did, however, know what a macchiato was – yay!

And this is the thing – it made us remember those great restaurant meals down under in our heady, nearly forgotten, pre-mortgage days – our many many jaunts to the Burdekin dining room, our super top lunch at Cicada (where I discovered I was eating unfledged pigeon and finished it anyway because it was so delicious), dinner at Cleopatra where a simple green salad was a revelation (gawd is there any way to write about food without sounding like an old tosser?), dinner at Vulcan’s (mmm slow cooking and chequerboard icecream) and so on and so on. What splendid value for money St. John was – we got 20 meals for the price of one!

The newt world order

Yes, the title is particularly misleading. This post has nothing to do with amphibians, nor their emergence as our (probably deserving) overlords.

Instead, I’m going to tell you about walks in the country in England.

First a quick description of my terms – well, term: when I say country, I feel confident in saying that anytime you see two patches of greenery bigger than a footy field that are more mud than grass you’re probably in ‘the country’, even if it’s not even an hour on the train out of central London. Suddenly it turns into a weird mixture of field, rolling hills, and ticky-tacky box-shaped housing. If you look another couple of hundred metres beyond the train-tracks you’ll see some houses built before the ’50s, and possibly before the 1850s.

The funny thing about the English hobby of rambling (as opposed to bushwalking in Australia or tramping in NZ) is that you can walk from some convenient town for five hours, and in the course of that walk pass through three villages, including two pub stops, and have high tea in the meantime, before catching your train home. My experience of bushwalking in Australia is: get off train, walk for five hours through dry bush while praying that the water you brought with you will last the distance, pray also that track finishes where it started, and catch train home, parched and hungry. Much more satisfying! You really know you’ve been on a walk!

It seems to drive a small economy, though, the walking thing – we stopped at a little pub called the Stag and Huntsman at midday the other day, after walking for a pleasant couple of hours along the Thames, and luckily we were dead on midday – by half past there wasn’t a seat in the house, and the collection of hiking boots in the entryway was second to none by the time we left, nothing you’d find in an Australian pub, half the clientele were in (as I suppose they call them here) stockinged feet! Quaint, I like to think =^), but rather civilised.

The pub food (most important, besides the locally brewed ale – I keep saying that English ale actually makes sense when it’s sub 10 degrees outside) was not so bad, though huge – Linda ordered the chicken liver pate, and I got the ploughman’s lunch. There was probably 3/4 of a kilo of pate, with 4 large triangles of white toast, sad salad and Sauerkraut of the most scooped from a bucket description, whereas mine consisted of a pickled onion (pretty good) the same sad salad and Sauerkraut, but with a brown roll, chutney, and half a kilo of Oxford blue and Cheddar*. We were keen do set off and do some serious walking afterwards. And we didn’t stop for tea in the next village. We just kept walking.

Henley. Check it out.

Jo, the ball’s in your court.

*Amounts may be exaggerated for comedic purposes. Though not by much.

Food is where it’s at. Man.

It’s been a little chillier than I’ve been used to. Average max. daytime temperature in Sydney, I’m told, for winter, is 19C. Lately, it being but Autumnal here, we’ve been living in just over half that, I have been told.
Time for some time in the kitchen. (As always, but it sounds better when you’d rather not be outside due to inclemency of the weather.)

Roast pheasant, stuffed with butter and sage, alongside roast onion, garlic, parsnip and potato. Bloody great, and only £4 for the bird as opposed to the comfortably more than £10 that we’d pay for a(n organic) chook (that’s a chicken for any non-antipodean types who’ve found their way here.) It’s smaller, of course, but tasty as all get out. And it’s not some weird inbred specimen.
And they say English food is shite. Well it is, but it doesn’t have to be! The ingredients are all here!
Here’s another bargain delight:

The mussels are less than £4/kilo, (that’s live, so the shells make up most of the weight) and a kilo is enough to flavour vast amounts of tucker – this risotto was muscularly flavoured with just the stock from steaming them open in wine, never mind the vast wealth of flavour when the mussels themselves were added at the end. It was almost a disservice to the rice, and the homemade chicken stock it was mostly cooked in, the way the mussels wrestled them into submission, but a little fennel (bought), and bronze fennel (the fine dark strands in the picture) which comes out of our garden, with a little of the parsley which grows beside it lifted it all again, the way fresh herbs do. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the cheese! You may know that a trad risotto has a Parmesan quotient, but we figured that that wouldn’t play nicely with the mussels. Luckily we found at the market a fun mozzarella di bufala that was mild and lovely and NOT rubbery, but melted in delicious strands around the other ingredients – I’m tempted to do it all again next weekend!