Chalk & Cheese

The Flat VI Or, The Honeymoon is Over II

2009-09-07T04:20:00.015+01:00

Our new apartment is super-cute (thanks again to our new friend, Christine, for her frank and judicious help in locating a suitable domicile). We've even found room for nearly all of our kitchen implements and stemware.

We were quite at home - and probably more ensconced than we'd realized - in Connecticut; and it's been more than a little unsettling to try to learn to navigate the vagaries of shopping for groceries and ordering coffee in our new surroundings. Aside from being unspeakably hip, our fellow Portland residents are admirably socially conscious and environmentally responsible. The streets are mobbed with cyclists and practically all of what's on offer in restaurants and our spectacular new grocery store is local, fair-trade, and organic; the city farmers' market is a vast thrice-weekly happening. We've been pleasantly humbled to find that so many of the leftist political positions we strove to adhere to back East are practically centrist here. Of course, sometimes, we Oregonians just go to the beach.

Before we get too settled, we thought it best to quantify the roadtrip experience that got us here:

Days on the go: 18
Miles under our belts: 4,118
Blog posts: 10
Locales in which we spent at least one night: 12
Nights spent in the tent: 10
Pictures taken: 449
Postcards sent: 16
National Parks / Monuments / Lakeshores / etc. visited: 7

We’ll be spending the coming months acquainting ourselves with the brewpub capital of the world (incidentally, Portland boasts the highest concentration of microbreweries anywhere, with 32 pubs in the city and 38 in the surrounding area) and the many regional totem pole sites. We may share a few new recipes and travel experiences around the Pacific Northwest, but for now, thanks for reading and come visit us in Stumptown!

More pictures of our exciting adventure in Oregon, so far, are available here:

Oregon!

2009-08-31T03:47:00.010+01:00

Dodging crazed cyclists (boy, have we seen a lot of those) and bighorn sheep (ditto!) , we pushed off at first light from East Glacier and climbed the Going-to-the-Sun road, over Logan's Pass towards the west side of the park. We rolled through the remainder of Montana, northern Idaho, eastern Washington and over the Columbia River into our brand new home state.

This last leg of our trip was not without its own excitement. Our route followed the final portion of the original Oregon Trail through the Columbia River Gorge, which was thickly dotted with kite- and windsurfers. Rather thrillingly, our view of Mount Hood was intermittently obscured by the thick smoke of a huge wildfire that was burning near the town of Mosier. Undaunted by these inevitable hazards of western life, we glided into Portland by sunset, in plenty of time for a large salad of mixed greens and several pints of local beers at one of the many bars and clubs frequented by our tattooed, bearded, and bespectacled neighbors (and that's just the ladies).

We're your huckleberries

2009-08-29T05:15:00.004+01:00

Glacier is considered by many to be the crown jewel of the American National Park system. But in fact, our Canadian friends share in its glories; Glacier partners with Canada's Waterton Lakes National Park to form the world's first and only International Peace Park, which is also recognized by UNESCO as a particularly glorious part of the world's longest undefended border (our trip brings the grand total of World Heritage Sites we've chronicled here to 27, out of 890). Part of what makes the park(s) so special is that it/they is/are awfully remote. Most of the tourists who make it here are dedicated outdoorspeople, as one must be even to begin exploring the vast, steep, cold, moose-dominated, grizzly-harboring wilderness. The highlight of our visit was a seventeen-mile hike to Iceberg Lake and the Ptarmigan Tunnel, the latter reached by an ascent of nearly 1000 feet in about two miles. We were quite pleased with ourselves for not collapsing into a helpless heap on the side of the mountain to be devoured by ants and buzzards.

The culinary headline in Glacier is the wild huckleberry, a small blueberry-esque berry that is a favorite of grizzlies, especially when the great bears are in hyperphasia in preparation for their winter hibernation. The roads around the park are littered with restaurants and stands selling huckleberry-flavored everything, from jam to beer. After Tam choked down an only-just-mediocre huckleberry milkshake in Missoula, we stuck to snacking on the raw thing along the trail between intermittent grizzly-startling clapping and singing. The aspiring gastronomic etymologist will be interested to note that early American colonists, upon encountering the native American berry, misidentified it as the European berry known as the "hurtleberry," by which name the Yankee fruit was known until, through generations of slightly sloppy pronunciation, it became known as the "huckleberry." So, there you go, Mr. Finn.

More pictures of our exciting adventure are available here:

The soggy, foggy, cloud-shrouded Tetons

2009-08-26T01:10:00.005+01:00

Our time in the Grand Tetons was brief (it turns out we're fair-weather campers), but the clouds broke enough for a peek at the peaks, after a hearty western chuckwagon breakfast of sourdough pancakes in Moose, Wyoming.

We split via Idaho for the surprisingly hip town of Bozeman, Montana, where we dried out our tent and our socks, and sought professional help for our trusty laptop after a dramatic hard drive crash - many thanks, Professor Science! (All of our material possessions have been falling apart on this trip; so far we've endured a frizzled computer, holes in our hiking boots, multiple car repairs and a flat bicycle tire - all of which, however, allows us to attest to the handiness and helpfulness of those who live under Western skies.) A prime rib dinner and a judicious tasting of some local microbrews with appropriately Montanan names (Moose Drool, Big Sky Trout Slayer Ale) has us feeling restored and ready to scale the glaciers.

More pictures of our water-logged adventures are available here:

Hang on to your pic-a-nic baskets

2009-08-23T17:29:00.007+01:00

For starters, most of Yellowstone lies within an enormous volcanic caldera. The charming geysers, hot springs and geothermal pools that have inspired so many picturesque postcards also serve to remind the savvy tourist that the whole place is fixing to blow again at any moment. Couple this potential for large-scale geological catastrophe with the more immediate likelihood of being gored by bison or mauled by a grizzly bear (Hey Boo-Boo!), and it quickly becomes clear that by setting off on an apparently innocent jaunt into the famous first-ever national park, we were taking our lives into our own hands.

Intrepid as ever, though, we steeled our nerves and set off west from Rapid City, through Deadwood Gulch, down the stunning Ten Sleep Canyon and at last to the historic Old Faithful Inn, just as the sun was setting and the namesake geyser was erupting. We just made our dinner reservations at the hotel’s main dining room, where we continued our commitment to menus of trout and wild game. (Laura was deeply impressed with the massive columns of twisted pine that hold up the inn itself. She's decided to hide away in the rafters and spend a long, thoughtful winter there someday, and is working on the problem of access to supplies of food, wood, whiskey and long philosophical tomes in various foreign languages.)

The park itself is enormous (over two million acres, bigger than the state of Delaware!) and we scrambled for four days just to scratch the surface of the myriad sights to behold. Indeed, we struggled to take in the vast wilderness, dissolving into incoherence time after time as we witnessed the massive geological and biological forces of the immense, untamed landscape. We covered all of the standard ground: geyser-gazing near Old Faithful, peering over the edges of the park's Grand Canyon, trying to look stoical in the face of sulfurous odors at Mammoth Hot Springs, and sitting in traffic while bison, elk and moose loped down the middle of the road.

We are pleased to report that, upon entering Yellowstone, we spotted a license plate from the great state of New Mexico, bringing our grand total to fifty states, plus the District of Columbia, and nine Canadian provinces and territories. The search continues for a roving pickup truck from Prince Edward Island...

More pictures of our exciting adventures are available here:

Who's bad?

2009-08-20T01:32:00.006+01:00

Ahh, the Badlands! ‘Hell with the fires out,’ as one early explorer had it, and for us a landscape reminiscent of the moon, with gunslingers peeping around from every corner. Luckily, we had our American flags and slingshots ready, as well as our camera.

A brief turnoff in Rapid City afforded us the opportunity to have another car part replaced (at this rate, we’ll have a whole new vehicle by the time we get to Oregon, each spark plug a treasured memento of a different stop on our travels). Fortunately, we also got the opportunity to sample some local brews at the Firehouse Brewing Company, which makes a particularly delicious beer called Smoke Jumper Stout. Tam, perhaps homesick for New Orleans in all these American wanderings, had his with some gumbo.

Then to the Black Hills of South Dakota, where there once lived a young boy named Rocky Raccoo-oon...We camped in Custer State Park, where we encountered herds of bison on the way to the bathroom each morning and witnessed traffic jams caused by the meandering of antelope and big horn sheep.

The Black Hills seem to have inspired quite a number of endearingly loony engineering projects. There’s Mount Rushmore, of course, but there’s also a wildly improbable scenic highway created by blasting hole after hole out of the huge rocks and building a road that proceeds entirely in terrifying hairpin turns and rough-hewn log bridges. Part of it leads to a succession of enormous granite columns known as the Needles, which the equally insane descendants of the aforementioned crazy engineers like to climb. We stood by and gawked at this evidence of generations of eccentric enthusiasms.

We ate a dinner of locally snared rainbow trout and recently roaming buffalo at the Custer Game Lodge, where Calvin Coolidge once brought his family and staff for a summer White House retreat. The next morning, feeling quite au fait with the ways of the West, we took to the road once more. Next stop: Yellowstone!

More pictures of our exciting adventures are available here:

Paranoia Strikes Deep in the Heartland

2009-08-19T01:26:00.007+01:00

Crossing the Mississippi felt like a milestone, particularly since the landscape flattened into western farmland almost immediately and the road began to stretch out in front of us perfectly straight for hundreds of miles. We put the pedal to the floor, watched the amber waves of grain roll by, and fantasized about joining the ranks of rosy-cheeked farm families who live in big white houses surrounded by even bigger red barns.

But our drive through America's heartland was also disheartening. At the edge of every cornfield we passed, signs indicating which patented, genetically-engineered strain of maize was under cultivation reminded us that this iconic farmland also helps constitute the ever-growing industrial food complex. Those of our devoted readers who know us personally have already tired of our endless strains about, you know, eating “food, not too much, mostly plants,” as per Michael Pollan. Two years ago, upon returning from our travels abroad, we pledged in this space to endeavor to seek sustenance that was local, organical, and seasonally available. In Connecticut, that means eating a great many parsnips (Tam's favorite!), but it also meant delighting in getting to know the farmers at New Haven's City Seed Famers Market in Wooster Square and trying new ways of preparing their wares. Without dwelling on the myriad infuriating ways in which so much of America's food is - quite literally - manufactured, we can attest to the great pleasure to be had in seeking out sustainable and ethical food sources and connecting with a local food economy. So, with many a regretful sigh and a disapproving shake of the fist, we abandoned our pastoral fantasies of presiding over acres of tasseled corn. (Other daydreams about chucking the rat race to produce small-batch foie gras/goat's cheese/ farmhouse ale in a stunning rural setting remain intact.)

Thankfully, a pair of detours afforded relief from our pangs of self-righteousness. The first of these was the Jeffers Petroglyphs, where flat red rocks bear the faint traces of drawings scratched into the granite five thousand years ago. After a great deal of squinting, peering and gesticulating, we got the hang of it and began to point out turtles, arrows and thunderbirds with no trouble at all to the other baffled investigators surrounding the rocks.

The next stop was at the Pipestone National Monument, a quarry considered sacred by American Indians who used the red stone found there for carving peace pipes. We watched an expert drill holes into the stone in preparation for its new role and Tam contemplated purchasing one to go with his totem pole, before deciding that right now, acquiring a couch for our new love nest takes precedence. Plus, the car was jammed with provisions for our first camp dinner - potatoes, rainbow carrots and onions mixed with a little diced salami, roasted in the embers of our campfire and flavored ever-so-slightly with pine smoke.

More pictures of our exciting adventures are available here:

Plenty of fun, but no sign of the Purple One

2009-08-17T01:05:00.004+01:00

Without a doubt, the Leinenkugel’s Brewery in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, offers the very best deal we’ve encountered on our budget roadtrip. At no cost, the 176-year-old business has samples, tchotchkes, postcards (with postage!), and among the very best tours we’ve ever taken. Our genius guide walked backwards at a pace, whizzed through facts and punchlines about the history and workings of the Germanic brewery, and harmlessly flirted with a group of old fishing buddies, all while maintaining a delightfully bored visage. Among any number of fleeting production figures, we learned that the aforementioned Curly’s Special Ale is actually produced as a "no-name" brew, available to businesses to brand as they please; locally, it’s known as both Dale’s and Schlobberknocker’s. In the tasting room, we tipped back glasses of Creamy Dark, Special Amber, and Leinie’s Original, accompanied by a salty Bavarian Pretzel.

After roaring into Minneapolis - St. Paul with a hole in our exhaust system, we took the car in for some routine maintenance and headed out to explore the Twin Cities by bicycle. We toured the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden before watching the home team get trounced by Cleveland at a Minnesota Twins baseball game (it was a shame). Exhausted from pedalling and cheering, we made for the city’s trendiest dining room, the 112 Eatery, where we feasted on sweet and sour crab salad, stringozzi with lamb sugo, and tagliatelle with foie gras meatballs. We expect mostly bison burgers from here on out.

More pictures of our exciting adventure are available here:

Pasties and a G Thing

2009-08-13T23:53:00.007+01:00

The first leg of our trip West brought us North, through picturesque Charlevoix and Petoskey, then over the Mackinac bridge to Michigan’s wild and remote Upper Peninsula. Almost immediately, the traffic dissipated and we found ourselves on the straight and lonely country roads that lead to Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore on the southern coast of Lake Superior. The geological wonder from which the park derives its name is a series of sandstone cliffs that have been worn away by erosion and colored by mineral deposits in the earth.

By the time we arrived in the decidedly down-at-heel Munising Falls, gateway to both Pictured Rocks and the Hiawatha National Forest but appearing as little more than a scattering of houses around a waterfront paper factory, we were ravenous. The most illustrious of the UP’s contributions to world cuisine (not an especially vast category, to be sure) is the pasty, a kind of savory pastry stuffed with beef, potatoes, and whatever other root vegetables happen to be available (potentially including turnip, carrot, rutabaga and parsnip). The pasty actually has Cornish origins; in the 19th century, the UP experienced an influx of Cornish miners hoping to ply their trade in the region’s growing tin and copper industries. Their underground toils left their hands covered with arsenic from the chemicals used for excavation, and these hand pies were made with a convenient thick dough handle so miners could safely grasp and consume their lunch before discarding the contaminated remains. We ate ours with runcible spoons.

By the next afternoon, we were in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where we toured storied Lambeau Field and sampled a pint of Curly’s Special Ale, fermented by Leinenkugel’s Brewery (see above!) exclusively for Packers devotees. Fully fortified, we opted to stay on in Green Bay to check out the new blitz packages at preseason practice and offer the team a few useful (and much-appreciated) pointers.

More pictures of our exciting adventures Up North are available here:

Westward, Ho! Or, Chalk & Cheese Redux

2009-08-12T23:51:00.006+01:00

Two years have passed and much has happened since we returned to the United States after circumnavigating the globe in search of enlightenment and yummy treats. Our faithful readers will no doubt join in our rejoicing that Laura has received her proper bona fides and been declared a meritorious creature of genuine intellectual worth. Moreover, she’s accepted a job offer on the West Coast, and we’ve decided to reincarnate our humble blog to document our adventures – culinary and otherwise – as we embark on the great American road trip and chase the sun towards our new lives, as locovores and fervent hippies in Portland, Oregon. (Incidentally, Tam has plummeted ever deeper into his career crisis, but remains as provocatively charming as ever.)

We embarked from Connecticut at the end of June, kissing friends, lovers, and minor acquaintances goodbye after a final feast where our bitter tears only enhanced the briny succulence of Frank Pepe’s famous clams casino pizza. After a glorious week in coastal Delaware, where we enjoyed crabs, crab cakes, beer, crabs, the company of friends and family, beer, and crabs, we began our trek West with an extended holiday in northern Michigan, where we gardened, grilled, lumberjacked and lorded it over the tennis courts.

Now, fully restored, we plan to cover the remaining three-quarters of the continent in two and a half action-packed weeks, with stops at any number of campgrounds, diners, national parks, gas stations, major metropolises, and minor roadside attractions. Despite our travels around the world, it’s clear that there is much within the confines of our own national borders with which are woefully unfamiliar. While we don’t know what we might encounter in the coming weeks, we can guarantee forthcoming accounts of roasting a grizzly bear over an open fire, killing and eating rattlesnakes with our bare hands, and hunting moose with a blowgun. And, of course, stay tuned for periodic updates on the on-going license plate game…

Pictures of our exciting pre-roadtrip summer adventures in Michigan are available here:

The honeymoon is over

2007-07-29T03:23:00.000+01:00

After 329 days on the go, and with over 31,000 miles under our belts, we have returned to northern Michigan, where we started our journey around the globe. We've laughed; we've cried. We've gotten drunk and shaved our heads (actually, that was just Tam). We've made friends from all over the world and come to understand the implications of the International Dateline. How could we ever begin to quantify or summarize our many exciting adventures? Some people make lists:

Blog posts: 95
Countries visited: 12
Cities / locales in which we spent at least one night: 39
Languages in which we learned to say hello and thank you: 5 (including English, from "G'Day" to "Cheers")
Number of times we were transported by the following means of conveyance:
Airplane: 16
Boat: 12
Bus (for intercity travel): 19
Bicycle: 2
Rental vehicles: 3
Taxi: Too many to count, but including one really memorable moonlit trip along the east coast of the Sinai Peninsula and our first foray into travel by stretch limo on our approach to Waikiki
Train (for intercity travel): 20
Tuk-tuk: 2
Pictures taken: 1, 294
Postcards sent: 54
World Heritage Sites visited: 26

All year, we've used our humble blog to report on the yummy treats we've enjoyed on our trip around the world, but we thought we also ought to share some of the perspective we've gained - and resolutions we're hoping to follow now that we're home - especially with regard to food.

First, we've resolved to eat more seasonally. The best part about our time in Israel was shopping for food almost exclusively at the Mahaneh Yehuda market, where, for instance, strawberries were evident in abundance and sold for a pittance for a couple of weeks, then replaced by cherries when the new harvest began. In Thailand, people use fruits and vegetables picked that day in the street food with which we were so enamored. Even in England, where the climate doesn't lend itself to the production of delicious produce in January, gastropubs hunker down in the winter with parsnip purees and soups of celeriac, eschewing fruits and vegetables imported from warmer climes.

This leads to another vow of ours - to eat locally, something done by necessity in most of the poorer countries we've visited but often hard to accomplish in the United States, where the average grocery store food item has traveled 1,500 miles to reach your plate and a peach grown in California is cheaper to buy than one grown down the road. Of course, the issue of “food miles” has received a lot of attention lately, not least in the form of books recounting experiences of eating totally locally for extended periods of time. The truth is, we're unlikely to stop using flour milled from imported wheat or sugar grown in the Caribbean; but we are going to make every attempt to buy produce and meat grown and raised reasonably close to our house. The environmental impact is tremendous, but there's a culinary one as well; the locally-grown, fresh parsnip is likely to make a more satisfying winter meal than the aged Californian avocado, with a little of the ingenuity that cooks in other nations display to a much greater degree than we Americans who are used to having oranges (however desiccated) whenever the desire strikes. So, inspired by rural France, urban Malaysia and even the corner pub in Hammersmith, we have resolved to sharpen our knives and ignore the temptations of mangoes in Connecticut.

We’ll be spending the rest of the summer gorging on cherries and peaches in northern Michigan. In a few weeks, it’s back to our little corner of New England in time for the first apples (and maybe, just maybe, the last lobsters) of the season. We may share a few new recipes, travel experiences and totem pole updates in the coming months, and we’re hoping that the memories of warming winter stews, street-side satay sticks and humble plates of hummus will sustain us and inspire our cooking as we try to apply the lessons of a year abroad to life at home. Thanks for reading!

Get out your adze

2007-07-27T09:31:00.000+01:00

Since we left the States last September, Tam has been snapping shots of the (sometimes totemic) sculptures we've seen in our travels. Most of these photos have made appearances in this space before, but never all together or in a nifty embedded slideshow ...

Two days on an isthmus

2007-07-26T14:03:00.000+01:00

On our last official stop before returning to northern Michigan, we spent a couple of days in Madison: state capital and county seat; home to the mighty Badgers of the University of Wisconsin and the best farmers' market in the US; and, if that weren't enough, a hotbed of pinko commie liberal politics. On our visit, we were treated to some great local beers, an outdoor concert by the Madison Symphony Orchestra, and a basket of fried cheese curds, all at the same time. What a magical place.

Back in the USA

2007-07-25T06:44:00.000+01:00

After an overnight layover in Auckland, New Zealand, we touched down unscathed and set our weary feet on American soil for the first time in nearly eleven months in Honolulu on the island of Oahu. We are going to have some re-acclimating to do.

Our hotel in Waikiki (where we got upgraded to an "executive" room - the only explanation being that the check-in lady pitied us, in our torn, travel-stained garb) was just steps away from the beach, where we splashed in the surf and sipped startlingly delicious guava juice under a centuries-old banyan tree at the Moana. Not too shabby.

The next morning, we caught a plane to the Big Island (Hawaii), where we visited with friends and played astronaut on the lunar landscape of the Kilauea caldera in Volcano National Park, where the air smells of sulfur (not unpleasant to a sinner, as Mr Clemens remarked) and steam rises ominously from cracks in the ground. (The sky, too, was looking ominous, as tropical depression Cosme blew closer to the island. Thankfully, we were not washed away.)

After a morning of guessing at the provenance of tropical fruits at the the Hilo Farmers Market, we split up the coast to Waimea for a day of splashing at Hapuna Beach (sustained by surprisingly delicious beach-side fish tacos), a sunset stroll on the coral and lava-rock coast at Waikoloa, and a dinner of locally sourced mahi mahi, amberjack and kalua pork (the little piggy is salted, wrapped in banana or ti plant leaves and slow cooked in an imu, an underground oven, to produce a delicious shredded meat reminiscent of Southern pulled pork barbeque).

Back to the south, we visited the black sand beaches at Punalu'u (supposedly the hangout of outlaws and Witness Protection Program participants, but also famous for its population of huge sea turtles) and Rainbow Falls near Hilo, and sampled some local grass feed beef and poke (raw ahi marinated in spices and tossed with green onion and sesame). We are not ready to leave for the mainland, but we must heed the call!

More pictures of our exciting (and all-too-short!) adventures in Hawaii are available here:

Belated birthday wishes to Uncle Gary!

Freezing here in the south

2007-07-18T09:04:00.000+01:00

On our way from Sydney to Melbourne, we stopped in Canberra, notable as Australia's national capital and the city where Laura made her first appearance in the world. She was, by all accounts, a beautiful child, well mannered and a joy to behold. The city of Canberra, on the other hand, is a total bore. Onward!

We found Melbourne to have considerably more character, with lots of hip bars and cafes. On Saturday morning, we hit the Queen Victoria Market, where foodies from all over the city come to do their weekly grocery shopping. It's a fabulously multicultural affair with local meats, produce and prepared foods of every description from every culinary tradition imaginable. We grazed on chargrilled artichokes and tiny Italian pancakes served with fresh berries and cream and dreamt of having a market like this back home.

On our last full day Down Under, we took a tasting tour of four vineyards in the Yarra Valley. Rather than the Chardonnay or Shiraz for which Australia is best known, this cool climate growing area is a source for fine Pinot Noir and an outpost of Domaine Chandon, where they make sparkling wine according to the traditional French méthode champagnoise. Who would have thought that a nice brut would pair so well with a vegemite sandwich?

More pictures of our adventures in Canberra and our exciting adventures in Melbourne are available here:

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Strange things are afoot at the Circular Quay

2007-07-07T13:57:00.000+01:00

Yeah, we know, we promised: no more pictures of that captivating and photogenic structure that dominates the Sydney skyline ... We've seen the Opera House from every angle and at every time of day. We've seen it from the ferry, from the Harbour Bridge, from Taronga Zoo and from Campbell's Cove. We toured it from the inside on the Fourth of July, when we went to see the Barber of Seville and earlier that afternoon, we gazed at it from a restaurant at the end of the wharfs of the Circular Quay (coincidentally called Rossini, and home to the most wonderful panzerotto, a donut filled with cinnamon-scented sweet ricotta cheese).

But we haven't spent all of our time in Sydney standing agog at the foot of this architectural wonder. Oh no! We've also walked among the fishes at the aquarium at Darling Harbour. We've spent lovely afternoons strolling the beaches and watching the surfers at Manly and Bondi. We've toured the Rocks and shopped the Paddington markets. We've visited the impressive collection of modern Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islanders art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. We've sipped a few beers at a few charming pubs and thrown back some extra-schmancy cocktails at the Victoria Room in Darlinghurst. We've had coffee - really excellent coffee.

And we've been careful to stay well fed. On our very first night in Sydney, we supped at the hip little trattoria across the street from our flat, feasting on calamari Sant'Andrea; a light, creamy al dente risotto; a fork-tender braised pork ragout; and a pair of exquisite cheeses, all from a blackboard menu scribbled in Italian. Over the weekend, we lunched at a speakeasy overlooking the Campbell Parade and Bondi beach. The tasting menu included a sweet, babaganoush-y grilled eggplant dip; a well-balanced rocket salad with dried cranberries, cashews and radish; more calamari (it's a thing); and grilled kangaroo (!) on a bed of creamy mashed sweet potato.

All told, we've been having a really excellent time. It's weird, though, to be so far (nearly ten thousand miles) from home and to find ourselves in a culture that seems so familiar. Still, it's an awfully pretty country.

We're off to points (further) south; more pictures of our exciting adventures in Sydney (and surrounds) are available here:

Meat pies & the Opera House

2007-06-29T11:51:00.000+01:00

Philadelphia has cheese steaks. New York has soft pretzels and pizza-by-the-slice. Chicago has hot dogs. New Orleans has po-boys (and Dino's pizza, but only for the truly initiated). New Haven (our fair city) has hamburgers at Louis Lunch. London has curry. Dublin has fish-n-chips. Oxford has those sketchy kebab vans. Cairo has kushari. Bangkok has satay. And who can count how many shwarma and falafel stands we've seen in the past several months?

In Sydney, there are meat pies. We've only been in the Gateway to Australia for twenty-four hours and already our modest perambulations have revealed numerous pie stands, where hungry Sydneysiders can stop for a quick bite after a couple of pints. The most famous one on the continent, Harry's Cafe de Wheels, dates from 1945. We sampled the house specialty known as the Tiger, a "floater" or stack of beef pie, mash, mushy peas and gravy, all meant to be gulped down while admiring the view at the end of the Wharf Woolloomooloo. The floater is probably not going to take the world of haute cuisine by storm any time soon, but Laura would like to state for the record that she thinks mushy peas are an underappreciated menu item.

With our appetites sated, we rounded the Domain towards Farm Cove, for our first encounter with the trademark scene of the hemisphere. The Sydney Opera House has just been awarded UNESCO World Heritage status and is looking even shinier and grander than usual. (Incidentally, the Opera House - billing itself as "the Wonder Down Under" - is also vying for nomination to the list of the new seven wonders of the world, as are some other sites we've visited this year, including the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids at Giza, and Petra. Get your votes in now!)

We hereby pledge that we will not, in the coming days, fill this humble space with picture after picture of Sydney Harbour, but man, it's a beautiful city.

The Flat III

2007-06-28T07:36:00.001+01:00

We're subletting a one-bedroom flat in the Potts Point area of Sydney for the next couple of weeks. It's fine, complete with a small kitchen for deep-frying wallabies or whatever, but the beauty part is the view to Elizabeth Bay:

G'day mate!

2007-06-28T00:55:00.000+01:00

Well, our readers will no doubt be relieved to hear that we are alive and well (if exhausted)and in Sydney, Australia, after a five day camping expedition in Far North Queensland and a trip to the Great Barrier Reef. Our itinerary for the past several weeks had the ultimate aim of getting us deep into the Outback in time for a three-day Aboriginal Dance and Cultural Festival this past weekend. After a seven-hour overnight flight from Singapore and a five-and-a-half-hour drive (in an enormous campervan on the wrong side of the road!) north along the rainforest-edged coastline, we made it to Laura (not the person, the town where the festival was held) just as the sun was setting.

Once we'd gotten our fill of didgeridoo playing (as you do) and reluctantly come to terms with the fact that there would be neither waltzing nor dancers named Matilda, we drove back down south to the Atherton Tablelands, for some more rainforest trekking Ozzie-style. We spotted a number of waterfalls, a couple of platypi and a truly impressive fig tree, but alas no roos (woe) and thankfully no crocs (yay).

Truth be told, this was no culinary adventure - witchetty grubs were not on offer and we subsisted mostly on sandwiches and canned soup - but in Yungaburra we did enjoy one elegant meal of redclaw yabbies (crayfish, for those from Up Over) and sweet potato gnocchi, roasted pumpkin and avocado salad, and local roast beef with watercress, all washed down with an excellent Tasmanian Pinot Noir. It was our first anniversary, after all. One thing we have learned: the Ozzies love coffee (there are several plantations in Northern Queensland). At the dance festival, you could get a cappuccino but not a hot shower. We're still learning how to order (there's a whole independent system - "flat white" means coffee with milk, "short black" means espresso, etc.), but in the meantime, we're sucking down lattes like they're going out of style. (Which, of course, they are. Trends are circular; they ebb and flow; nothing is permanent; the moment is fleeting; carpe diem and so on.)

Our last adventure in Queensland was a day of snorkeling on the Norman and Hastings reefs. The winds were high and the water choppy, but we squeezed into our wetsuits and dove into the Pacific with gusto, only to be greeted warmly by a whole host of new brightly colored friends. Our readers will understand why we did not take any pictures of the incredible iridescent coral or the many schools of brilliant fish teeming around it; everyone knows what happens when you take your camera snorkeling and we're no dummies.

... but more pictures of our exciting adventures Down Under (so far) are available here:

... and, as promised, more pictures of our exciting adventure in Singapore are available here:

Singapore fling

2007-06-20T11:55:00.000+01:00

We arrived in Singapore by train from Kuala Lumpur, dropped our bags at our hotel and split for the Raffles Hotel for a couple Singapore Slings. The official recipe for the famous drink, first created here by a Mr. Ngiam Tong Boon circa 1913:

30ml Gin
15 ml Cherry Brandy
120 ml Pineapple Juice
15 ml Lime Juice
7.5 ml Cointreau
7.5 ml Dom Benedictine
10 ml Grenadine
A Dash of Angostura Bitters
Garnish with a slice of Pineapple and Cherry

More pictures of our exciting (sometimes sober) adventure in Singapore coming soon! In the meantime, some pictures of Kuala Lumpur - where the Malaysian flag was first raised in Merdeka Square fifty years ago this August; and where Laura saw monkeys in the (relative) wild for the first time (they hang out in the trees and are fed by passing motorists in the Lake Gardens) - are available here:

In the jungle, the mighty jungle

2007-06-19T03:25:00.000+01:00

While in the Cameron Highlands, in addition to touring the tea plantation, we threw ourselves into some intrepid jungle trekking.

More photographic evidence of our astonishing display of fortitude in the wild is available here (on our way out we also visited a honeybee farm):

Tea for two

2007-06-17T11:51:00.000+01:00

This morning, we took a tour of the BOH tea company’s Sungai Palas Estate. We gawked at the breathtaking sight of tightly pruned tea trees clinging to the steep hills and paid careful attention on our tour of the factory. Here’s what we learned:

Like wine, a tea’s character is greatly influenced by the environment in which it is grown. A tea garden’s particular climate, soil, altitude and amount of rainfall create subtle differences in the tea’s flavor and aroma. Cloned plants are selected based on yield, resistance to disease and number of plucking points, nurtured in shaded nurseries, and transplanted to the fields after one year. In about two years, the tea bushes are ready for plucking. Many of the tea trees on the plantation are over eighty years old and the plants can live to be over 120.

Workers pluck the tea bushes about every three weeks when new shoots grow or “flush.” Machines, winches and vehicles are used where the land is flatter and more accessible, while on the steepest slopes, individual workers (here, mostly from India and Nepal) use shears to pluck the plants by hand.

After plucking, the leaves are withered to reduce moisture. The plantation uses either troughs with perforated beds through which warm air is blown or bins in which the ambient air is blown through the leaf. The withering process takes 12 – 20 hours and is usually done overnight.

Next, the leaves fed into rolling machines that twist and break the withered leaf, distorting and rupturing its internal cells and liberating and exposing its juices for fermentation. Again, the factory employs a variety of methods, including its original rolling tables that date from 1935 and newer Cut-Tear-Curl machines with interlocking rollers and rotovanes, which are basically huge corkscrews that squeeze and grind the leaf.

Fermentation, or more precisely, oxidation, is a natural chemical process in which enzymes in the leaf are exposed to oxygen. It is at this stage that the leaf develops the right flavor, aroma and color. The leaf enters the fermentation process still green; at the end, it has turned coppery in color. The leaf is either spread on trays to ferment or fed through a series of rotary blades.

During the drying process, the fermented leaf is fed into machines through which hot air is passed. This halts the fermentation action, reduces the moisture content and crystallizes the juices, thus converting the leaf into its familiar crisp, black form. The factory’s furnace is fueled by rubber wood.

After drying, the made tea is graded according to particle size by passing it through a series of vibrating sieves. Each grade of tea has its own density and flavor characteristics. There are four main grades: “leaf” indicates made tea whose whole leaf is intact; “broken” indicates made tea whose leaf is broken; “fannings” are small broken grades; and “dust,” the smallest and lowest-quality grade, is most often used in tea bags because it steeps more quickly.

Tea tasting is an important part of the process, too. The tea taster checks the flavor, aroma and stringency, swilling the tea around the palate to judge its thickness or body. We sampled the plantation’s Palas Supreme tea, which is hand-picked and –processed, so none of the above applied. It was excellent.

Oh, and LOTS more pictures of our exciting adventure in Southeast Asia (so far) are available here:

... and here:

Happy Father's Day, P!

Time for a Tiger

2007-06-17T11:36:00.000+01:00

So, we began our whistle-stop tour of Southeast Asia in Bangkok with modest ambitions: to catch a few glimpses of the major highlights on the well-worn tourist trail, including the royal temple of Wat Phra Kaeo and the adjoining Grand Palace, the enormous reclining Buddha at Wat Pho, and most importantly, to dig into some serious, genuine Thai cuisine. In the end, none of this would prove too difficult; our hotel was on the main tourist strip, the Thanon Khao San, just steps away from our intended sightseeing destinations, and lined with food carts, restaurants and bars. Plus, Khao San boasts plenty of interesting sights of its own: mini-dress-clad bar touts, wandering souvenir saleswomen, aging hippies who moved there in the sixties and never left, and backpackers from around the world dressed to kill in the tropical heat.

It’s not difficult to get excited about food in Bangkok. Every few steps, we passed another hawker stall or pushcart vendor serving a new, enticing, and often (to us) completely unfamiliar snack. We quickly learned that street food is where it’s at in Thailand and we sampled every variety we passed, including meat-on-a-stick of every ilk (namely, chicken, pork, liver and oysters), served in little plastic bags full of chili sauce (Tam’s favorite); pancakes made from unorthodox ingredients, like a particularly delicious deep-fried pancake of little whole shrimps (complete with head, shell and whiskers) and kaffir lime leaves; tiny dumplings made of creamed shellfish and rice gluten; glistening unidentified fruits of dramatic appearance (later determined to be jackfruit, dragonfruit and margotene); and, of course, noodle dishes in all their infinite variety and complexity. Laura was an especial fan of the pickled peppers that come in miniscule plastic dishes to accompany any type of noodle soup, most often – in our experience – swimming with cinnamon-laced sliced pork, bitter boiled bok choy, and dumplings (oh, the dumplings!). The tremendous variety of intestines and animal extremities on sale raw, baked or deep-fried was astonishing; the buckets of chicken feet were the least of it. Our single regret was that the pushcart of fried insects passed us at too swift a pace. Really, next time…

On the third day, we rose again from our beds in time to catch a tuk-tuk (a sort of brightly colored rickshacum motorcycle) to Chinatown for a quick stroll through the markets, then on to the train station for a 24-hour journey south to Malaysia. We arrived on the island of Penang to find that our culinary choices had broadened to incorporate Chinese and Indian influences. In the former colonial capital, Georgetown, we spent our day hopping from temple to clan house to mosque and exchanging friendly greetings with the Tamils, Thais, Chinese, Indians and Malays that populate the diverse and highly integrated city. In between, we sampled more noodle soups (less spicy and meatier than the Bangkok variety) and more meat-on-a-stick (bought from a hawker who proudly boasted of being a third-generation satay “specialist,” and demonstrated his special fanning technique for Laura – quick wrist flicks seem to do it). Our new friend pointed us to Little India, where we sampled chappatis, samosas and chicken curry, then wandered back for the local specialty laksa (a strong fish stew with noodles, enlivened by huge quantities of chopped lotus flower, bok choy and shrimp paste), and had tiny banana- and coconut-stuffed pancakes served on a banana leaf for dessert.

The next morning, we made a breakfast of a brilliantly colored Chinese dessert called ice kacang, featuring sweetened red beans over crushed ice. It attracted us with its supernaturally bright colors and the large crowd of enthusiastic consumers who encouraged us to sample it and helped us to order, but we were quite unable to discern most of its ingredients and sadly cannot help to identify those clear, bean-shaped gelatinous balls. Its taste is likewise quite indescribable.

Yesterday, we took at bus to the Cameron Highlands, a hilltop station founded by the British in the 1920s as a retreat from the heat of the lowlands and now a popular vacation destination renowned for its jungle treks and tea plantations. As soon as we dumped our luggage, we set out to sample the local delicacy known as a “steamboat,” a kind of Asian fondue. Seated at an unusually large table for two, we were presented with platefuls of raw shark, jellyfish, cuttlefish, beef, squid and shrimp, along with noodles, whole eggs, tofu and vegetables, all of which we cooked ourselves in a huge, bubbling double-cauldron of spicy broths. Laura made a huge mess at her place setting and we had to slink out of the restaurant in disgrace. It was tasty, but Tam thinks that a dinner out shouldn't be quite so much work.

Of course, no honest culinary account of a trip to Bangkok or Georgetown would be complete without fessing up to a little bellying up to the bar. In Bangkok, we drank local Singha lager at a super-trendy bar called “The Station” located under the canopy of a disused gas station, with chic young tipplers sipping fruity drinks at candle-lit tables scattered among the pumps. In Penang, we spent our first night draining bottles of Tiger lager at the Hong Kong Bar, a one-room establishment with a linoleum floor and mismatched plastic furniture which – we were informed by an enthusiastic young cadet – has been the watering hole of the various Australian fleets stationed in Malaysia for more than fifty years. The crowd of Ozzies certainly looked right at home, and cheered and whistled when the owner, a tiny, middle-aged Chinese woman with heavily accented English, pumped her beer in the air while offering a loud and enthusiastic rendition of the Queen classic “We Are the Champions.” Around the corner, a transplanted English pub known as the Soho Free House was by far the most happening scene in Penang, jammed with swanky young businessmen ordering whole bottles of Johnny Walker Black and heaping plates of fish and chips while watching interviews with David Beckham on TV. Rule Britannia, we guess.

Balls to Walls

2007-06-08T15:21:00.000+01:00

One peculiar aspect of being a visitor in Israel (and there are many) is that you have a freedom to move around in a way that Israeli citizens really don't. Israelis, unless they are settlers, are not allowed to visit the occupied territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. (There is considerable debate in the Israeli press about the logic of spending huge amounts of money, manpower and resources trying to hang on to territory most of the citizenry can never enter; and plenty of Israelis are coming down against it, far more than you would guess from reading the papers in the US.) So, in our last few days as wide-eyed observers in the Holy Land, we took advantage of our foreign passports and relative mobility to cross over to the West Bank: in this case, to the formerly popular tourist destination and famed little town of song, Bethlehem.

Israel is a tremendously fractured society with deep and hostile divisions, not only between Jews and Arabs, but between religious and secular Jews, the right and the left, immigrants and non-immigrants. These enshrined social, religious and political divisions often lend Jerusalem an atmosphere of barely controlled hostility. Neighborhoods in the Holy City tend to be homogenous, self-contained enclaves of different religious and ethnic groups, and separate public transportation systems serve Arab and Jewish areas. The state-owned Egged system runs to Jewish neighborhoods, most cities in Israel, and the settlements in the territories; less plush Arab buses serve East Jerusalem and other Arab parts of the city and will take you to the main centers in the West Bank. There is almost no mixing, even when Arab and Jewish neighborhoods are right next to each other. So to go to Bethlehem, we caught a bus from East Jerusalem to the military checkpoint a short distance outside our destination.

The checkpoint is in the infamous new "security barrier" that divides Israel proper from the territories acquired in the 1967 war, a victory whose 40th anniversary this week has aroused so much discussion around the world. As American tourists, we passed right through with unopened passports; a few Palestinians (with rare permission to pass through to Jerusalem) were subjected to a high-tech fingerprinting scheme and careful inspection. On the other side, the Palestinians of Bethlehem have constructed an elaborate graffiti protest against the wall, their segregation and their loss of civil, political and human rights under the Israeli occupation. It's a sophisticated political statement, with large comic portraits of Palestinians alternating with protest slogans, mainly in English. (The title of this post is a quote from one of the less serious contributions.) It's clearly designed to be viewed by the international community that used to visit Bethlehem with some frequency; passersby and taxi drivers, obviously proud of the portraits, stopped to chat and encourage our interest.

Bethlehem itself is home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. It was once almost entirely Christian, but the Christian population has dwindled significantly due to major emigration since 1948, and Bethlehem now has a Muslim majority. Nevertheless, it's still an important pilgrimage site for Christians around the world, and used to be a major tourist attraction. In 2002, an Israel Defense Forces raid on the city led to a five-week standoff between the IDF and a group of Palestinians in the Church of the Nativity (below; it's one of the oldest churches in the world, built originally by Constantine's mom Helena over the supposed birthplace of Jesus). This incident, combined with increasingly draconian travel restrictions, has led to a significant dropoff in tourism, and the building of the wall has contributed further to severe economic difficulties in the city. The streets of Bethlehem were almost empty, with lots of shops offering Christian souvenirs but no tourists to buy them. One desperate store owner asked us to broadcast the news of our safe return from the West Bank to other potential visitors. If Mary and Joseph came to town today, they'd have no trouble finding a room.

This trip concentrated a lot of the impressions we've gotten in our two months here. Israel, and especially Jerusalem, is an astoundingly militarized place. For us, it's still shocking to see thousands of uniformed teenagers toting machine guns; everyone in Israel except for Arabs and ultra-orthodox Jews has to serve in the army. (Women serve for two years, and men serve for at least three and are considered reservists until they reach forty-five.) The resources devoted to the military are stupefying. So much energy, time, money and effort is focused on the military efforts and the maintenance of all sorts of social, political and economic divisions that there's little left over for the sorts of projects that make a place livable: the arts, a vibrant public sphere, universities and intellectual life, public cultural events. Instead, the worst aspects of American cultural influence are clear; strip malls, fast food and stalls selling vulgar T-shirts infest the city. The Christian sites have been largely taken away from the Christian Arab community which has run them for centuries and been turned into what one American Episcopalian priest we met called a "Holy Places Disneyland."

Many Israelis themselves see Jerusalem as an unappealing place; in a recent poll, 78% of Israelis said they would not be willing to live there, calling it impoverished, backward, intolerant and unattractively sectarian. Other cities in Israel have a very different feel - Tel Aviv has a much less militarized appearance and boasts a vibrant civic culture, and Haifa is much less segregated and is a friendly and welcoming place. But it has been depressing and discouraging to witness these levels of hostility, segregation and disregard for the rights of other in what is often called one of the most sacred cities in the world. We hope that the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the occupation will provoke international thoughtfulness about ways to change the situation.

In the meantime, we're off to Bangkok!

More pictures of our adventure in Israel (including shots of a certain pair of scantily clad bloggers floating in the Dead Sea) are available here:

Au bon pain perdue

2007-06-02T10:49:00.000+01:00

When Tam's mom first moved to Arizona, her apartment was just a few blocks from a Krispy Kreme donut shop. When Tam's brother Charley, whom you may remember from our last breakfast post, came to visit, he would stop on the way to pick up the schedule of when the freshly baked donuts would be ready. As soon as the next glazed batch hit the shelves, Charley bring home a dozen, still warm, dip them in a freshly beaten egg and make French toast with them. He confided his secret: a whole stick of butter.

In Jerusalem, we've been enjoying a (slightly healthier) version of French toast, in which the donuts are replaced with challah bread. Challah is a staple of traditional Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jewish cuisine; it's a sweetened, egg-rich, braided bread, eaten especially on the Shabbat. It's sprinkled with either poppy or sesame seeds, which represent the manna given to the Jews by God during their wanderings in the desert after the Exodus. Unlike most other European sweetened breads, it does not contain dairy, because it usually accompanies meat-based Shabbat meals. Originally, challah referred to a small portion of dough separated out from the main piece and given to the Jewish priesthood; now, according to strict interpretations, there are no ritually pure priests (since the destruction of the Temple), so the challah portion of ritual bread is usually burned. But challah is still an extremely prominent part of the Shabbat meals, and people buy giant piles of loaves in the Mahaneh Yehuda market every Friday in preparation.

It also makes for excellent French toast, due to its slight sweetness, its absorptive qualities, its fluffy interior and crunchy crust, and the nutty savoriness of the seeds. We make challah French toast with a simple egg dip, and top it with lemony strawberries and honey-sweetened yogurt for a delicious Shabbat breakfast.

Challah French Toast with Strawberries and Honeyed Yogurt

3 eggs
1 cup milk
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon butter (or more, you know...)
6 thick slices challah bread (best if slightly stale)

1 quart fresh strawberries, hulled and sliced
2 tablespoons sugar (or to taste; depends on how sweet your strawberries are)
juice of 1/2 lemon

1/2 cup plain yogurt
1 1/2 tablespoons honey

Mix strawberries with sugar and lemon juice in large bowl and toss to combine. Allow to sit for about 20 minutes.

Mix honey and yogurt in small bowl.

Mix egg, milk, sugar and salt in a large bowl and add slices of bread. Let soak for a few minutes. Melt butter in skillet over medium heat and add bread. Cook until golden brown on both sides.
Serve immediately, topped with strawberries and yogurt mixture.

Serves 2.

In the kitchen in Nahala'ot

2007-05-31T11:54:00.000+01:00

Eight months ago, when we left the United States for a year-long trip around the world, we intended to use our humble blog not just to keep our friends and families up-to-date with our whereabouts and well-being, but also to share our experiences cooking and eating around the world. The truth is, however, that with a couple of glaring / glowing exceptions (grilled shrimp with artichokes at Chakra in Jerusalem, local steaks paired with vin de la terre in the Golan heights), our gastronomic experiences in Israeli restaurants have been somewhat underwhelming. Jerusalem is crammed with perfectly respectable falafel and shwarma joints and (slightly) more upscale "Italian" restaurants, but none truly stand out; and, as we all know, man can live on pita bread alone for only so long.

In our own kitchen in the Nahala'ot neighborhood of West Jerusalem, we've revelled in the fresh bread and produce from our local market, but our domestic culinary options are regrettably limited by our resources; a single pot, a small teflon skillet, a two-burner hotplate and a microwave. (Our own inventiveness in the face of these obstacles has admittedly been less than inspiring too, possibly owing in part to the fact that we don't have a proper eating surface and most often end up taking our meals at home lolling on the bed. This is not to complain; in fact, it's very comfortable.) We've enjoyed constructing simple, produce-based meals: sandwiches of grilled chicken, chunky guacamole and tomato and red onion salsa, various preparations of creamy farm-fresh eggs and bright, crunchy salads - but none of our preparations have seemed especially blog-worthy.

This is all to explain the recent dearth of food-themed entries on Chalk and Cheese. To atone for our disgraceful negligence on the culinary reporting front, we offer here a simple but perfect dish of pasta and cherry tomatoes that has been a staple at our Jerusalem dinner / bedside table. Of course, it helps to have wonderful tomatoes, but the real secret is the sequential additions of garlic.

Pasta with cherry tomatoes (a narrative recipe)

Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil and add two servings of pasta. Heat some olive oil over medium heat and add 2 cloves coarsely chopped garlic and some crushed red pepper, to taste. Add 2 cups halved cherry tomatoes and cook for about 4 minutes. Remove from heat and add one clove of minced garlic and the juice of 1/2 lemon, and season with salt and pepper. When pasta is cooked to al dente, drain it and stir in 1 tablespoon of good olive oil and the tomato mixture. Season with salt and pepper and serve topped with grated Parmesan.

Mmmm.

From sea to shining sea

2007-05-28T16:07:00.000+01:00

We set off last Monday for a jaunt around the north of Israel, starting with the Sea of Galilee (known here, less biblically, as Lake Kinneret). As the bus descended into the vacation town of Tiberias, which is supposedly steamy, chaotic and jammed in the summer but whose trinket shops and tropical-themed bars were echoing hollowly at this time of year, we could see Jesus' old stomping grounds lapping at the shore. It's surprisingly small, and we decided that biking around the coast to the Jordan River was the perfect way to see it.

We rode a pair of clattering rental mountain bikes south, alongside roaring semis and giant tour buses with darkened windows, down to "Yardenit," the spot on the Jordan River where the Israel tourist board, with some help from an evangelical pastor in New Mexico, has decided that Jesus was baptised. (The Jordanian site of Bethany, which contains ancient ruins long associated with the settlement of John the Baptist and the prophet Elijah, is another contender and has been entered for World Heritage status.) This uncertainty, however, did not discourage the hordes of pilgrims from China, India, Nigeria and Kentucky who flocked down the steps to recreate the baptismal experience, some wearing rented oversize white gowns presumably meant to recall Jesus' cottony garb. On the way out, they were all shuffled through the gift shop where you can buy anything from a Budweiser Israel T-shirt to a plastic crown of thorns; the latter comes with a "certificate of authenticity."

On the way back, hot and sweaty (Tam says "glowing"), we stopped in for a little splashing of our own at one of the many water parks between the highway and the sea, and rewarded ourselves for our exertions with a dinner of the local specialty, grilled "St Peter's fish" - a romantic name, it turns out, for tilapia.

The next day, we rented a car and began a driving tour of the Golan Heights. The southeastern part is remarkably empty, with miles of dry brown hills fenced off by barbed wire and signs warning of land mines, and not another car to be seen. As we got further north, the hills got higher and greener and we could see Druze villages, vineyards and the peak of Mount Hermon. We chugged up the vertical passes to explore "Nimrod's Palace," a fortress built by the medieval Arabs but later associated with the Biblical giant (and descendant of Noah) Nimrod. The sprawling stone complex, built to protect the all-important trade route to Damascus, looks out on astonishing vistas in all directions. We picnicked on zaatar bread and fruit, and drove as far up Mount Hermon as we could before being turned back by scary signs warning of IDF training grounds and firing ranges.

We headed back down the mountain to Safed, a tiny town on the side of the mountain, which has served as a center for Kaballah and been a magnet for Jewish mystics and messianic believers for centuries. We arrived just in time to see the sun set behind the hills, casting a rosy glow on the eighteenth-century stone buildings and narrow alleys of the old Jewish quarter. Unfortunately, the sunset also marked the beginning of a Jewish holiday and meant that, here in the most religious town in Israel, absolutely everything was closed; people lined the streets on the way to synagogue, but all the falafel and juice stands were inexorably shut. We got back in the car and backed down the mountain to find a hamburger to sustain us until the next morning, when we jetted out of town as fast as possible in search of coffee and a muffin.

We split back east and hiked down to the famous hexagonal pool at the Yehudiyya Nature Reserve in the southern Golan, where geometric patterns of basalt rock form a dramatic little swimming hole and waterfall. After a final night by the sea of Galilee, featuring a dinner of local steak and a really very tasty bottle of sangiovese from a Golan winery, buses and trains shuttled us west to explore the crooked stone alleys and Crusader ruins of the somewhat ramshackle but charming coastal Arab town of Acre. We wandered around the eighteenth-century mosque of al-Jazzar, which incorporates elegant Roman columns into its flowery courtyard, and watched this guy fishing below the medieval city walls.

Then south to Israel's third major city, Haifa, a port town dramatically situated on the slopes of Mount Carmel overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Haifa is generally quite devoid of tourist attractions, tending more towards industrial shipping equipment and very large cement-block buildings; but it does house the World Baha'i Center and the Baha'i Shrine, where the martyred prophet known as the Bab is buried. The shrine is surrounded by magnificent terraced gardens which extend down the mountain in the very center of the city. Tam, inspired both by the beauty of the gardens and by the progressive principles of the Bahu'llah, has decided that the solution to his career crisis is to convert to Baha'ism and reinvigorate the economy of northern Michigan with an international Baha'i retreat center. Now he just has to sell the idea to the zoning board of Leelanau County.

We ended our adventure with a beach day at Netanya, the Fort Lauderdale of Israel, where retirees from all over the world play excruciatingly slow games of bingo at all the sidewalk cafes, restaurants cater to the huge numbers of French and Russian tourists with menu offerings combining shwarma, schnitzel and foie gras, and laziness is taken to such an extreme that you can actually take a giant elevator down to the beach. Seriously.

More pictures of our exciting adventure are available here:

We got a brand new camera; we love to take a photograph...

2007-05-17T20:57:00.000+01:00

Well, our new camera arrived this week and you know what that means ... no more grainy pictures on cheap, aging disposable cameras! To test out our new toy, we spent the day touring the sites on the Mount of Olives - like the Church of the Pater Noster and the candlelit Tomb of the Prophets - and, of course, the all-important Temple Mount. (Did you know that technically Jews are not supposed to go to the Temple Mount, because of the risk of inadvertently stepping on the Holy of Holies which is never to be approached until the end of days? There's actually a warning to this effect at the entrance, signed by the chief rabbi of Israel.)

On the way home, we did a little shopping at the Mahaneh Yehuda market where we've been buying most of our food, braving the crowds and the brutal old ladies to partake in the glossy piles of olives and nuts, the sumptuous strawberries (shoveled into bags by a grinning kid using a dustpan) and the still-hot bread.

This was Jerusalem Week, a lengthy, parade-heavy, flag-waving celebration of the "unification" of Jerusalem in 1967 - an ironic turn of phrase to describe the most rigidly segregated city either of us has ever visited. The parades featured thousands of schoolchildren singing vaguely pitched nationalist songs, and tractors ... lots and lots of tractors. A reference to the kibbutz movement, perhaps?

More (sometimes grainy) pictures of our exciting adventure in Israel (so far) are available here:

Hamesh de Mayo

2007-05-09T20:38:00.000+01:00

Top five ways you know you're not in Jerusalem anymore:

1. There's nary a sideburn ringlet or bewigged head to be seen.
2. No old ladies are body-checking you to get to the front of the queue at the market.
3. When you go to a restaurant, nobody asks you if you have a gun.
4. No one will throw bleach on you if you walk down the street in a bikini.
5. You can eat as many cheeseburgers and as much shellfish as you want.

After another week of fighting the crowds of religious fanatics along the Via Dolorosa, we were ready for a break from the Holy City. On Friday morning, we elbowed our way onto the bus and fled like Jonah to Tel Aviv. A friend of the family who lives there generously offered to show us around; she met us at the bus station and took us on a little driving tour of the city, pointing out the Bauhaus architecture and the wide promenade which lines the beach from the southern port of Jaffa all the way to the northern marina - a distance of about 4 miles, crawling with bikini-clad beach bunnies and ancient crones alike enjoying the wide stretches of white sand and sparkling water.

The next morning, we set out early to walk the length of the promenade from Jaffa. Jaffa, once famous for the orange and olive groves surrounding its walls, is a contender for the oldest continuously operating port in the world, and was an important stop on the old incense trading routes from the Arabian peninsula to the western Mediterranean. It was conquered at various times by the ancient Egyptians, King David, the Romans, the Arabs, the Crusaders, the Mamluks, Napoleon, the Ottomans and the British. The city's Arab inhabitants were almost all driven out during the 1948 war and it sank into a state of destitution, housing only the very poorest of Israel's immigrant communities for a decade. In the 1960s, the Old Jaffa Development Company decided to transform the city by reimagining it as an artists' colony. Its old stone houses and crooked streets were renovated and rebuilt, gardens were planted in its center, and the port was reopened. (We watched a film on the history of Jaffa in the visitors' center, which skipped startlingly and unapologetically from the nineteenth-century use of Jaffa's port straight to its 1960s renovation.) Now, it's a beautiful little city in the shadow of the uber-modern skyscrapers of Tel Aviv.

We wandered north from Jaffa along the beach, picnicking along the way on some leftovers from dinner the night before: stuffed zucchini, kibbeh (spicy minced lamb inside a crust of deep-fried bulghur), tomatoes and fruit. After some very satisfying beach time, we toasted Cinco de Mayo with some Coronas (yes, this took some searching, but we're only getting savvier) and a dish advertised as nachos that turned out to be some Cool Ranch Doritos, served with a "salsa" that owed a considerable debt to Heinz ketchup. Ah well, we tried.

We abandoned the Mexican theme for dinner and took advantage of our distance from Jerusalem to gorge on shrimp in butter and some excellent local wine, though the grilled chicken, seasoned with harissa and pickled lemon and served on a bed of lentils, was the real highlight of our dinner by the sea.

Proof

2007-04-26T13:50:00.000+01:00

We really are in Jerusalem! After a few days of rest, grocery shopping in the market, and attending to the increasingly desperate laundry situation (which was alleviated in no way by camping in the desert), we bought another disposable camera and set out for a walking tour of the Old City. We passed through the gates, climbed the Citadel, fought off trinket vendors in the old markets and put on our most pious faces at the Western Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

We've been a little unsure about what comprises Israeli cuisine. Flatbread, olives, dried fruits, falafel, shwarma and falafel, all staples throughout the Middle East, are common here; but you can also buy Eastern European specialties like pickled fish and cabbage in the markets, and all the famous Jewish breads and cakes, especially for Shabbat. We've been sampling all these things piecemeal, but weren't quite sure how it all came together. So in an effort to take the measure of our new home's national foods, we braved the crowds on Israeli Independence Day and made our way past Zion Square to celebrate with style at Chakra, a gathering point for hip Jerusalem gourmets, where we tested our mettle against the huge and tasty prix fixe menu. We began with fresh baked Iraqi pita bread and a tray of antipasti, which included peppery roast sweet potatoes, chunky guacamole, and chicken liver pate fortified with apple cider. Next came a whole roasted eggplant, shrimp fried in ribbons of potato, ultra-thin beef carpaccio, grilled fish, tender fried calamari, and grilled shrimp with artichokes, followed by a meat course of kofta, grilled entrecote and filet. For dessert, we enjoyed panna cotta with warm raspberries, molten chocolate cake, and vanilla ice cream topped with honey and pine nuts. Seriously. It was more food than we consumed in our last four weeks of travel. Excessive, but delicious; the seafood and the ice cream were especially notable.

The strawberries at the market have also been fantastic; we're been slicing them and macerating them in sugar, lemon juice and chopped fresh mint and topping with a little plain yogurt or marscapone cheese for a delicious and relatively healthy spring dessert.

Let's Go Get Another Guidebook

2007-04-20T17:04:00.000+01:00

Last summer, after our wedding, we took a road trip along the coast from Charleston, South Carolina to Duck, North Carolina. Aside from boogeyboarding and sampling a variety of lowcountry delicacies (like shrimp and grits - mmm!), we weren't sure what we might do along the way, so we brought along a guidebook for the region.

Coastal Carolinas is a quirky little book published by an unknown small company called Moon Publishers and written by one Mike Sigalis, a native Carolinian and Charleston fanatic with pronounced Bolshevik leanings, now living in exile somewhere in the Appalachians. As we plumbed through its pages, it became evident that Mike had no interest in hitting the appeal-to-the-masses tone of more commercial efforts like Fodor's; his book was totally idiosyncratic, sometimes hostile to its potential readership, and eccentric to the extreme in both its tone and its recommendations. One favorite passage, a digression on the relatively low elevation of the area, reads as follows:

With this lack of horizontal diversity comes a certain lack of drama. If Rebel Without a Cause had been set on the Carolina Coasts, Natalie Wood's boyfriend could never have flown off a cliff to his death. He'd have thudded into a huge barrier dune before he even got to the beach. And if he'd somehow reached the strand, he could never have drive neasily across the hard-packed sand, and once in the ocean, could have kept driving fifty yards towards Liverpool before the engine ever got wet at all. Then his car would have stalled out, and he could have swum safely back to shore through the pint-sized breakers.

Initially, we whiled away the hours in the car by reading such passages out loud to each other in incredulous, mocking tones. But as the days passed, Mike started to seem more sympathetic, like a slightly deranged but good-hearted uncle or a wayward frat brother. By the middle of our second tour, it was as if Mike was in the car with us, directing our travels away from overcrowded hotspots ("South Carolina's beaches are a national treasure, and certainly [with the possible exception of central Myrtle Beach] a vast improvement over the overbuilt strips farther south in Florida") and towards sites like the truly bizarre Weeping Radish Brewery on the island of Manteo, offering pink-hued political and social commentary along the way. "Mike thinks..." became a mantra, and Mike's favorites became our own. Even the dilapidated hotel whose rooms were themed according to decade (our door sign had lost some of its letters, and bore the engagingly pathetic moniker "Room of the oaring wenties") seemed, under Mike's influence, an endearing example of worn Southern kitsch. Frequently hilarious and consistently weird, our guidebook shaped our trip in its own peculiar way.

This year, as we've begun to make our way around the world, we've had to rely on guidebooks in a more serious way, not just to find the best restaurants and hotels with clean sheets but to navigate the public transport, visa systems and cultural landscapes of totally foreign places. Over dinner at the Jerusalem favorite Spaghettim (where they top heaping plates of pasta with over 75 different sauces) yesterday, as we discussed our upcoming trip to Fiji, Laura commented that, while she is aware that people have travelled abroad without a guidebook, she's not sure how. The importance of the guidebook has been accentuated recently by our sad dependence on the thoroughly unreadable, out-of-date and generally unreliable Let's Go Travel Guide to Israel and the Palestinian Territories (after a similar experience with Let's Go Italy, Bill Bryson christened the series with the more appropriate title above; we have yet to come across a restaurant listed in this book that is still extant and/or occupying the listed location, although luckily some recommended drinking holes have survived). We were informed by a bookstore owner the other day that Let's Go is nevertheless the best guide to the area; a Rough Guide hasn't been published since 1998, and the Lonely Planet is even older. So Let's Go remains the only viable option, despite all its deficiencies and passages like "the Russian Compound's hip bar scene hugs the old world Mea She-arim like spandex on a yenta." Yikes. Where's Mike when you need him?

Telegraph?

2007-04-16T15:10:00.000+01:00

One interesting (and, for Americans, very handy) aspect of travel abroad is the near universal presence of English. German tourists rely on their English to communicate with Italian hoteliers in Florence; English signage in Paris caters to international visitors from all over the world. In the Middle East, this phenomenon can be attributed to colonial influences as well as touristic convenience, but it's always fun to see "grilled lamp shops" (mmm!) on a menu or "McDonald's" transliterated into Arabic under the golden arches. We noticed advertisements for telegraph(!) facilities at the train station in Alexandria and for what may be air conditioning at a pool hall in Cairo; the sign for the Burger King in Aqaba stands against a mountainous backdrop at the edge of the desert, and an Egyptian tourism poster states the obvious.

Keeping up with the Joneses (and T. E. Lawrence)

2007-04-15T19:23:00.000+01:00

Looking back ... we took a minibus from Aqaba, cramming ourselves into a vehicle full of people and luggage and food and with even more suitcases and taped-up boxes strapped to its roof. The crowded, weighted-down bus got a flat tire just as we crested our slow, steady climb from the Red Sea into the mountainous desert to the north; the driver pulled over and all the men nimbly leaped over the luggage on the floor and out the door. In no time, they efficiently jacked up the bus and replaced the tire, allowing them all to have a smoke break in the process. It was a well-honed system.

We got to Wadi Musa in the evening. The town, just outside of Petra, exists solely to serve the tourist population, and as such doesn't feel like part of Jordan at all; it's more of a neutral international space, not unlike a rather dusty outdoor airport. Succumbing to the atmosphere, we had some ice cream (okay, and a little whiskey, too) at the Swiss-owned luxury hotel Mövenpick. (We were amused to note that a small postcard shop called the Pick 'n' Move had sprung up next door, across from the Indiana Jones Snack Bar.) We watched the other tourists as they gawked at the belly dancer in the bar, and prepared ourselves for an early assault on the huge site of Petra the next morning .

You approach the ancient Nabatean city through a long, dramatic gorge called the Siq, emerging suddenly into the light right in front of Petra's most famous facade, the Treasury. A day scrambling around on the rocks yielded glimpses of caves, huge carved facades, dramatically lit stone landscapes, streaky worn sandstone; natural and man-made wonders combine to make Petra completely astonishing.

The next day, we got another early start to take the 6 AM bus to Wadi Rum, a 30-square-mile protected area southeast of Petra containing some of Jordan's most beautiful desert scenery. It's often associated with T.E. Lawrence, although his actual connection with the place was limited to a passing comment that it was a very attractive landscape, because the movie Lawrence of Arabia was filmed here in 1962; now many of the canyons and rocks have been renamed things like the "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" and "Lawrence Spring."

There's nowhere to stay in Wadi Rum. If you want to spend some time here, you have to arrange to camp at a Bedouin campsite, and you really need a guide to go hiking or driving around; all those red rocks start to look the same to the uninitiated after a while. Our guide met our bus and took us on a jeep tour, including some hidden Thamudic petroglyphs carved into the rock. We cooked chicken and stew over an open fire in the company of our fellow campers, an English/Dutch family based in Amman who proved to be incredibly athletic. In the time we were there, they managed to hike every trail that we did and climb every (steep, windy, hot, drifting, generally grueling) sand dune that we did - twice, literally! (To add to our disgrace, they were all scheduled to compete in a 50K run from Amman to the Dead Sea the next day.) We were shamed, but our own slow and pathetic amblings did yield some great vistas and the supremely satisfying sight of about ninety camels grazing quietly in the desert.

More (alas, grainy) pictures of our hair-raising, spine-tingling, transfiguring adventure are available here:

Rooms with views

2007-04-15T13:16:00.000+01:00

So far, on our journey around the world, we've been fortunate with our blind choice of accomodation (knock on wood). Herewith, some photos of the often incredible vistas from our various homes away from home...

The rural countryside from the one-time honeymoon suite, Provence, France

Paris, France

New Town, Edinburgh, Scotland

Athens, Greece (yep, that's the Acropolis)

Over the harbor towards Kosta on the mainland, Spetses, Greece

From the foot of the Akronafplia fortress, Nafplio, Greece

Down onto the Midan Tahrir (Liberation Square), Cairo, Egypt

Across the Eastern Harbor towards Fort Qaitbey and the Mediterranean Sea, Alexandria, Egypt

From our sleeper carriage from Cairo to Luxor

The rural area around the village of Gezira, across the Nile River from Luxor, Egypt

The Red Sea coast from Nuweiba, Egypt (actually, our room didn't have a window; this is from the breakfast patio. We know, we're only cheating ourselves.)

The town of Wadi Musa, outside Petra, Jordan

From a Bedouin camp in Wadi Rum, Jordan

The Flat II

2007-04-13T08:35:00.000+01:00

Our garden level studio apartment in the Nahala'ot neighborhood of Jerusalem (our camera still isn't working; these pictures were kindly provided by our landlord):

In addition to the patio, there's a small kitchen with a dorm size refrigerator and a hot plate; there's also a microwave, cable TV and wireless internet. We're off today to explore the neighborhood and get some groceries!

A three hour tour

2007-04-12T21:57:00.000+01:00

There’s a ferry that sails from the port town of Nuweiba, on the eastern coast of the Sinai Peninsula, to Aqaba. We decided we would make the short flight from Luxor to Sharm el-Sheikh, then find a way up the coast to Nuweiba in time to catch the ferry to Jordan the next afternoon.

We arrived into the Sharm el-Sheikh airport at about 11 PM and discovered that there were no more buses to Nuweiba. There were, however, a number of taxi drivers hanging around and, after an hour of haggling, theatrical walking away on both sides, chasing down again, reconciliation, and repeating the terms, we finally got one of them to agree to take us north, over the mountains to our destination.

Clearly, the paltry sum of money involved meant that our driver could to take his time. We stopped at a truck stop for tea; at a gas station to top up; along the side of the road to chat with the folks in another taxi; and, at the very top of the mountains near St Catherine Monastery, to douse the radiator with water and pray under the full moon by the side of the road. Our driver tried enthusiastically to teach us some Bedouin songs and explain the lyrics and we sang and coasted down the mountains with the headlights off (as the Egyptians do) as the shadowy rocks rose up on every side. We found our hotel at about 3 AM and collapsed into bed.

The next morning, we made our way to the port. Nuweiba is not, as our guidebook would have us imagine, a little holiday town by the sea, popular with campers. Instead, it’s a commercial port with few buildings and lots of barbed wire. We waited for four hours in the customs area for our ferry, surrounded by hundreds of people. When the ship finally arrived, there was more delay as the authorities collected everyone’s tickets and passports on the boat; and then, when we docked in Aqaba, it took another hour to get our passports back. By the time we got into Aqaba, it was nearly 10; our one-hour ferry ride across the Red Sea had lasted nine hours!

It was all worth it, though, when we headed out to the beaches south of town the next day to check out Aqaba’s famously unspoiled coral reefs. We swam with the fish (and eels, and sea slugs, and all kinds of exciting marine life), marveling at the colors and variety of the reef and reveling in the beautiful water.

When we got back to Aqaba, we sampled some of the local marine life in a different and delicious form. Fish sayyeida - essentially, spiced rice served with fish or fish broth - takes a variety of different forms throughout the Middle East. The sayyeida we tried in Aqaba recalled our own recipe for Cinnamon Chicken and suggested a variety of improvements, including using top-quality Basmati rice (always a good idea) and topping it with very crispy thin-cut fried onions. Since our original post, we've also learned the virtues of pickled lemon and often serve it as a condiment with this and other dishes.

The most common local fish served in Aqaba's restaurants is red mullet, freshly caught and usually grilled whole. In addition to the sayyeida, we tried the "Floka special fish," served (not unlike a hotdog) with two sauces, mustard and tangy tomato, and the "Floka spicy fish," topped with a spicy tomato and red pepper sauce. All versions were quite delicious.

More pictures of our exciting underwater adventure are available here:
A postscript: Sadly, our efforts to capture our submarine expedition for posterity have left our "waterproof" camera frankly frizzled. With disposable cameras in hand, we travelled from Aqaba to Petra (aka the Canyon of the Crescent Moon) and camped with the Bedouins in Wadi Rum (where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed). We hope to post photos of our exciting adventures in the Jordanian desert soon; until then, suffice to say that we were awed by each step. We made it to Jerusalem, by walking across the border from Aqaba to Eilat and then taking a bus via the Dead Sea, and are now looking forward to some much needed rest in the Holy City.

Karnak-ak-ak-ak-ak-ak-ak-ak-ak

2007-04-05T18:19:00.000+01:00

Before leaving Luxor, we visited Karnak, a vast temple complex (over 200 acres!) just north of the city. Under the scorching sun, we explored the Precinct of Amun, an enormous temple dedicated to the various incarnations of the supreme god of the New Kingdom. We strolled past colossi and obelisks, sphinxes and reliefs (one detailing the earliest known peace treaty), into the Great Hypostyle Hall, which our guidebook poetically describes as "a forest of titanic columns covering an area of 6000 square metres – large enough to contain both St Peter’s Cathedral in Rome and St Paul’s Cathedral in London."

Parched, we returned to our hotel for a little unwinding in the tropical garden and some fresh fruit juice. Throughout Egypt, thirsty travelers can refresh themselves with a fresh squeezed glass of whatever’s in season at any number of corner juice stands. In addition to mango, orange, guava and apple juices, our hotel made its own karkaday, a sweet, deep-red concoction made from hibiscus flowers and served cold or hot.

More pictures of our exciting adventure in Egypt are available here:

Tombs & colossi

2007-04-04T21:12:00.000+01:00

On the west bank of the Nile River, past the small village of Gezira (where we're staying) and vast plantations of sugar cane, the Theban Necropolis houses countless tombs and temples. We visited the Colossi of Memnon and the Valley of the Kings, then trudged over the hot, dry Theban Hills to Deir al-Bahri. We caught a ride to Deir al-Medina, where ancient Egyptian craftsmen constructed mini-pyramids to mark their own small but elaborate tombs, and explored the Ramesseum (the inspiration for Shelley's "Ozymandias") before retiring to our hotel for icy drinks, a brief siesta, a dinner of kebab with aubergine sauce, and a couple more drinks. Intrepid exploration is hard work, but it's not without its rewards.

Stella!

2007-04-04T17:32:00.000+01:00

Whilst in Egypt, we've been savoring a tasty and light local lager called Stella. Brewed in Giza by the Al Ahram Brewery (a subsidiary of Heineken, who could learn a thing or two from their Egyptian brewmasters), Stella is supposedly concocted using a recipe dating from pharonic times and comes in a few varieties - "local," export and premium - the chief difference being alcohol content. It's delicious and nutty and goes great with shwarma.

Last night at dinner on a rooftop restaurant overlooking the Nile and the Temple of Luxor, we paired our Stella with an Egyptian delicacy called kofta, a spicy grilled minced lamb-ball. Its name derived from the Perian kūfta which means (surprise!) meatball. Similar dishes are common in Asian and Indian cuisine and recipes appear in the earliest Arabic cookbooks. Tam likes it with rice!

They've got friends in every town and village from here to the Sudan. They speak a dozen languages, know every local custom...

2007-04-03T13:55:00.000+01:00

... They'll blend in. Disappear. With any luck, they're in Luxor already.

And we are! (Does anyone here speak English? Or Ancient Greek?)

After a bland dinner (was it fish? chicken, maybe?) and a couple of expensive beers in the smoky club car (where they blasted Middle Eastern pop music through the wholly inadequate tiny PA speakers such that it all sounded an awful lot like the most distorted tracks on the newest Tom Waits record), we spent a fitful night clanking and swaying our way south from Cairo. When our steward knocked on our cabin door at 5 AM to announce our approach to Luxor, we bore disappointingly little resemblance to either Cary Grant or Eva Marie Saint.

We were rewarded for our pains, though, as soon as we reached the ancient and battered ferry to Gezira, by the view across the Nile of the day's first sunlight on the mountains that surround the Theban Necropolis. We gawked and swooned with pleasure at the beauty of the river valley at dawn while our fellow passengers, all locals in Bedouin dress to whom this glorious sight was familiar to the point of banality, nodded in apparent approval of our appreciation.

Alas, we've no culinary adventures to report, as minor tummy troubles have been keeping us on the white rice. (And just where do you find applesauce in Egypt?? Surely Indiana Jones would know...)

The Alexandria Duo

2007-04-02T11:42:00.000+01:00

On the coast, with a cool southerly breeze blowing inland from the Mediterranean Sea, Alexandria was a welcome relief from Cairo’s complete insanity. The city was an international hub in antiquity, with beautiful marble-paved roads, golden palaces and the most famous university and library in the ancient world; its decline began with the destruction of the library in the Ptolemaic dynastic wars (around 48 BC; Christian mobs finished the job with some book burning in 293 AD), and most of its glorious buildings sank into the Eastern Harbor or collapsed and were buried. Alexandria was once again raised to the status of a great city in the early 19th century, when Muhammed Ali revived it as the seat of the royal palace and Egypt’s most important port. It attracted merchants, entrepreneurs, artists, writers and drifters from everywhere in the world, and gained a reputation as a place of decadence and romance which was cemented by its prominent role in English, French, Greek and Arabic literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet and Constantine Cavafy’s poetry (made famous in the English-speaking world by E.M. Forster’s praise in his guide to Alexandria) were perhaps the ultimate representation of the decadence of the city, which Durrell described as “princess and whore, royal city and anus mundi.” The character of Alexandria changed dramatically with the mass flight of foreign residents after the revolution of 1952, leaving the shells of their grand buildings, cafes, shops and churches behind.

We arrived under cover of darkness and could only see the sweep of the city lights around the Eastern Harbor from our Corniche-side pension room. The hotel itself was reminiscent of the European era, with a large sitting room full of forties-style curving furniture, Art Deco flourishes in the masonry and stuffed birds everywhere. We ate some pseudo-French food at a café near Durrell’s old neighborhood, then retired for drinks and a little post-colonial-fantasy-indulging at the famous Hotel Cecil, where Durrell, George Bernard Shaw and Somerset Maugham all stayed and where the British plotted their strategy for the El Alamein battle of 1942, which turned the tide for the Allies in the Middle East. It was nearly empty, with a few friends of the lounge singer encouraging her with some rather desultory claps.

The next day, we wandered around the city, observing the peeling paint and crumbling facades of the once-grand European-style mansions throughout the downtown. The Anglican Church of St. Mark now has a mainly Sudanese congregation; the Frank Square, once the hub of European social activity, has been renamed Midan Tahrir (Liberation Square), though it still boasts its grand statue of Muhammed Ali in the center. The Roman theater, a small but remarkably elegant one carved from beautiful golden marble, and some foundations (possibly of the ancient university) are the only downtown reminders of Alexandria’s classical splendor. We had some truly dreadful crepes - and, to be fair, some really great mango juice - at the legendary Trianon, a European-style patisserie and an Alexandria institution for its numerous associations with artists and writers and its grand, soaring carved wooden décor.

A stroll down the Corniche led us to Alexandria’s most recent attempt at grandeur, the new bibliotech. Intended to be the modern equivalent of Alex’s tremendous library of antiquity, an international repository of learning and knowledge, its round mass of reading rooms rises from a pool of water by the harbor in a manner intended to represent the rising sun and is decorated on the other side with carvings from every known language. It’s equally impressive inside, and we were treated to a tour which elucidated not only the principles of its architecture but also its numerous international digitization projects.

After a quick siesta, we ended our day at Cap D’Or, that rare Middle Eastern watering hole that caters to the local drinker. We feasted on salty grilled sardines, tahina and salad, French fried potatoes dressed with salt, pepper and cumin and grilled calamari with peppers and onions, and watched with admiration as men snuck bottles of beer wrapped in newspaper under their jackets and out into the street.

A (tres romantique) sleeper car on an overnight train should have us south of Cairo to Luxor by breakfast, for a couple of days in the company of the pharaohs.

Welcome in Cairo

2007-03-30T10:31:00.000+01:00

Tam has been singing the Indiana Jones theme song ever since we boarded the plane to Cairo. As we descended towards the city, we began to get a sense of just how vast a city of 20 million people (!) really is.

Cairo is a huge, teeming, overwhelming place. Thousands of ancient black-and-white taxis play a death-defying game on the roads, where lane lines and traffic lights are meaningless; shanties are built on top of one another, with huge concrete-block buildings covered in satellite dishes and trash stretching out in every direction. The westernized downtown area, where the museum and most of the hotels are, was modeled after Baron Hausmann's much-admired/ much-reviled design for Paris in the late nineteenth century, with wide boulevards and carefully laid out streets. A little of this romantic grandiosity still meets the eye today; this is Midan Tahrir, just outside our hotel.

We teamed up with another world traveller, who's been making his way from Manchester for nearly two months already, and haggled (rather skillfully, if we do say so ourselves) for a taxi into the city. After checking into our modest hotel, we headed for the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, an incredible, sprawling place full to overflowing with artifacts that seem to have been collected, placed behind their glass cases and labelled with thumb-tacked typewritten pages (or not) a half-century ago and left untouched since. Still, the treasures found in the tomb of King Tutankhamen are mind-bogglingly impressive.

Later, famished, we feasted on falafel, babaganoush, ful and tabbouli at a diner called Gad; diners are probably the most common type of restaurant in Cairo, being cheap and usually pretty good. Gad was packed, with waiters carrying unbelievably huge trays sliding from table to table on the slippery floor with practiced flair. Egyptian cuisine, especially in the north around Cairo and Alexandria, shares many characteristics with the food of other parts of the eastern Mediterranean. Ful medames (slow cooked and mashed fava beans) is commonly considered to be the national dish of Egypt and is eaten with garlic and olive oil or deep fried to make falafel or ta'miyya. The name derives from the Egyptian word for fava beans and a Coptic word meaning "buried," referring to the original means of cooking the beans in a pot buried in hot coals. Egyptian bread or 'aish masri ('aish means "life" in Arabic) accompanies every meal. At Gad, part of the restaurant is open to the street and you can watch the guys spin the dough to unbelievable thinness on their fists before flinging it down on the rounded griddle. After a couple of bottles of the local lager (the ancient Egyptians invented beer, you know), we returned to our hotel, exhausted just from negotiating the city.

We set out the next morning for Islamic Cairo, an older section of the city that teems with markets, mosques and people. After getting completely lost for hours in a bazaar that went on for miles and sold every conceivable variety of shoes, bags and plastic knick-knacks of the sort that end up in dusty charity shops in London, we finally managed to orient ourselves with the (scant) help of the map in our guidebook, and found the old bazaar of Khan al-Khalili, with its legenday spice suq (market). Laura got some expert tutelage on the various types of saffron and cinnamon, dried crushed flowers and herbs that characterize Middle Eastern cuisine, sniffing little spoonfuls of each brought out of barrels and drawers.

The touristy parts of Cairo are overrun by touts, postcard vendors, children desperately trying to sell plastic statues of ancient Egyptian cats, and aggressively self-promoting taxi drivers. But after tea at the legendary Fishawi's, we crossed the street out of the market and instantly were in a different world, where our foreign clothes and peculiar hair color provoked cries of "Hello!" and "Welcome in Egypt!" but no sales pitches. We walked along dirt roads while children drove donkeys hauling carts of vegetables, passing the Al-Azhar mosque along with a number of less renowned madrasas and mosques where people were going about their business. The stroll eventually led us to the Citadel, begun in the late twelfth century by Salah al-Din; its walls enclose the royal palace and the Muhammed Ali Mosque, built in a giant reconstruction program in the early 19th century and now among Cairo's most famous skyline silhouettes.

Across from the Citadel are two other grand mosques, the Mosque of Sultan Hassan (a positively enormous edifice begun in 1356, which has survived numerous structural problems and use as a storage base for artillery during a number of medieval dynastic struggles) and the pseudo-Mamluk Rifai Mosque, which houses the tomb of Sheikh Ali al-Rifai, founder of the Rifai "whirling dervish" sect of Sufi Islam.

Wandering back downtown, we found a place to feast on babaganoush, tahini, grilled chicken, and roast pigeon stuffed with rice and liver (surprisingly tasty), then retired for a couple of beers at a hotel bar down the street. Most of the bars in Cairo are in hotels and cater to the expat population and wealthy Cairenes; the majority of ordinary citizens congregate in coffee shops to chill out, set the world to rights, smoke and play backgammon. Alcohol, technically forbidden in Islam (although this stricture is often interpreted loosely), is a luxury product in Cairo; it's quite a shock to pay as much for a couple of rounds of beer as for a night in a hotel room, even though that's still less than a few pints would cost you at our local in Shepherd's Bush. Still, the relaxed atmosphere is a welcome relief from the bustle of the city and we enjoyed the scent of the shishas wafting around us from the next table.

The next day, we set off in the morning to explore the Coptic Quarter. About ten percent of Cairo's 20 million residents (seriously, 20 million people!) are Coptic Christians, and have traditionally gathered in this tiny quarter to the south of town, which is built on the ruins of the city of Babylon (you can see parts of the Roman wall, and one of the Babylonian fortress towers built by Diocletian). The Coptic Quarter contains Cairo's oldest and best known churches and also the just-renovated Coptic Museum. This, we agreed, is one of the very best museums either of us has ever visited; it's housed in a beautiful building featuring elaborately carved wooden ceilings reminiscent of Coptic church architecture, and displays an amazing collection of Coptic frescoes, textiles, sculptures and manuscripts (including some pages from the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts, found in a jar in the Egyptian desert in 1945) from the 4th century to the present. The brilliantly colored frescoes from the monasteries of St. Jerome were like nothing we've ever seen. We also took in part of a Coptic Orthodox service at the tiny Hanging Church, so named because it is built over a water gate through which Melkite, the last Byzantine viceroy of Babylon, escaped just before the city surrendered to the Muslims in 641; then we peeked into the Convent of St. George, where many devout Coptic Christians had gathered to pray and press their hands against dozens of icons of the saint. The tiny Church of St. Sergius, reached through a medieval stone corridor, is virtually underground because the ground has been built up so extensively since the church's founding in the fifth century.

All this religious education made us hungry, so we stopped for some falafel at a little cafe just outside the convent (hey, nuns have to eat too!) which was notable for its delicious coating of toasted sesame seeds and the spicy heat of the accompanying babaganoush.

Restored, we caught a cab west across the River Nile, driving past lush green fields and grazing animals to the Pyramids, perched between the edge of the jammed, dusty streets of Giza City and the never-ending, rolling dunes of the Western Desert...

We ended our last full day in Cairo at Abou Tarek, another crowded Egyptian diner, this one specializing in - actually, exclusively serving - kushari, a nourishing (and filling) dish of noodles, macaroni, rice, lentils and onions. There is an accepted protocol for eating kushari, which we learned by observation: the other diners at our communal table dressed their heaping bowls with spicy tomato sauce and even spicier garlic oil from metal pitchers, then tossed the concoction together with a spoon. We followed their example for a fantastically satisfying meal, but declined the rather glutinous rice pudding which is the most popular dessert in the desert.

Mycenae becomes eclectic

2007-03-27T10:26:00.000+01:00

When we got to the small town of Kosta on the Peloponnese, we weren’t sure what was next, but managed to ascertain that the bus waiting at the ferry port was going in roughly the right direction and hopped on. It was a gorgeous ride inland through the southeastern corner of the Peloponnese, right through the mountainous region of Arcadia, which lives up to its name in every respect: glorious soaring peaks, hillsides layered with olive and lemon groves, millions of tiny yellow daisies peeking out under crevices in the rock, windmills, goats and sheep grazing in the orchards and occasionally impeding the progress of the bus.

After a brief stop in Epidaurus, we reached our destination, the port city and original capital of modern Greece, Nafplio. We got our bearings and mounted our assault up the steep hill towards the city’s Akronafplia fortress and the sprawling pension where we would spend the next couple of nights. The climb with our luggage was rough, but upon arrival, we were rewarded with homemade lemonade and an incredible view of the port, city and fortress.

During dinner at a small taverna, where we sampled a local specialty of pork and peppers called kolokotroneiko, the power went out throughout the entire city. The kitchen staff was unfazed and continued their cooking by the lights of some candles tossed casually into a large glass. We finished our wine, settled our bill and made our way through the darkened streets along the waterfront, where tables were being lit up with candles and people chatted excitedly in the flickering light. At an outdoor café on the Platia Syndagmatos, we tried some tea made with sage leaves and the largest piece of baklava this side of Macedonia.

After breakfast on our hilltop terrace, we caught a bus past Argos to Mycenae, the place of the famous ruins linked to the legendary rule of the House of Atreus and the tragic dynastic struggles of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra. First unearthed by the arch-romantic German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who was convinced that the Homeric epics and the tragedies of Aeschylus had a basis in fact, it is a stunningly evocative place, easy to imagine as the setting for the Greek epics performed many centuries later in the Theater of Dionysus on the Athenian Acropolis. We played amateur archeologists in the beehive Tomb of Clytemnestra, and posed as invading generals under the Lions Gate guarding the magnificent ramp up to the royal palace where the unfortunate Agamemnon was murdered in his bath upon his glorious return from Troy.

A postscript:
Apparently, the electrical supply in Nafplio is somewhat undependable, as we spent our second night in the city sipping wine in the dark again: a romantic adventure!

More pictures of our exciting adventures are available here:

Speedboats and masquerades

2007-03-25T10:23:00.000+01:00

After spending the morning repacking and much of the early afternoon wandering around the ports at Pireás (just south of Athens proper), we hopped a boat to the Argo-Saronic island of Spétses – named for its famous pine forests. In high season, most of the Greek islands are serviced by ferries; in late March, when there are few tourists and frequent thunderstorms, the hydrofoil or “flying dolphin” is the foodie-traveler’s only option. Turns out, however, that these funny-looking little speedboats, all acquired from the former Soviet Union and repainted in patriotically Greek colors, were designed for cruising on placid eastern European rivers and not on the open Aegean Sea, making for an alarmingly bumpy ride. Stops at the idyllic ports of Póros and Ídhra were followed by a brief storm that necessitated slowing the boat to idle through the whitecaps.

When we made it safely to port, arms exhausted from gripping the seats for so long, we were met by our kindly hotelier, who led us up, up, up through the town to his simple pension and then directed us to the Taverna Lazarus for dinner, telling us it was particularly known for its barrel wines.

Greece has made wine for many centuries, of course, but it’s only recently that Greek wine has been accorded any recognition internationally. We’ve been drinking local wines, usually “from the barrel.” The most characteristic has been retsina, a white wine fermented with pine resin, which we sampled alongside roast goat in lemon sauce. The taverna owner told us that they import grapes from the mainland and then ferment the wine with Spétses pine pitch in the large barrels at the front of the room. It was slightly sweet, with a piney aroma and a juicy mouthfeel, and our hostess, trotting around the room with a giant aluminum pitcher full of it, treated us to an extra little jug after our dinner … “for the road.”

The next morning, we woke to the sort of glorious sunny day one expects on a visit to the Greek isles. We meandered through town and found a bike shop, where we plunked down 10 euros and headed out on the 25 km (and hilly!) ride around the island. Spétses is notable to us (although apparently not to anyone else on the island) as the setting of the English author John Fowles’ famous book The Magus (Tam says Magoos), in which a young English schoolteacher and aspiring writer takes a job on the island – lightly camouflaged as an imaginary place called Phraxos – and falls into the clutches of a wealthy Greek philosopher and two beautiful but enigmatic English twins, who prove to be conducting an elaborate masquerade game that he is unable to comprehend. We were pleased to discover the overgrown and nearly abandoned grounds of an improbable English-style boarding school where Fowles taught briefly and which matches his narrator’s description in every particular, and spent much of the remainder of the afternoon entertaining competing conjectures as to where the other events in the novel occurred. Sadly, much of the landscape has been altered dramatically since Fowles lived on Spétses; two forest fires in 199o and 2001 laid waste to more than half of the island’s pine forest. Still, the beaches and views to the other islands and back to the mainland were breathtaking, and we came across the occasional pine grove that made us look around for the mysterious masked figures that populate the pages of Fowles’ novel.

Before catching a ferry to the mainland on Sunday morning, we witnessed some of the revelry on the island as the locals celebrated the confluence of Greek Independence Day and the Feast of the Annunciation. The cafés were filled with musicians and children in traditional Greek costume. We blended right in.

Next stop: the Peloponnese!

Consulting the oracle

2007-03-22T10:16:00.000Z

We took a day trip from Athens to Delphi to consult the oracle. Alas, there’s not much to report culinarily. (Truth be told, we got ripped off at the snack bar for a dry sandwich and some completely unpalatable olive oil potato chips – yuck!) Nevertheless, the sights both ancient and natural were unbelievable and the clouds and drizzle made it all the more dramatic.

The oracle’s advice, which we added to the accumulated words of wisdom already adorning the inside of the desk drawers in room 107 of the Acropolis House Hotel:

Greece!

2007-03-21T09:57:00.000Z

Descending from the clouds, we caught site of some Greek islands and then - Athens, spreading out in all directions as we gazed out our airplane window. After finding our hotel and gawking at the view of the Acropolis (lit up in rather garish green lights) from our little balcony, we found a small ouzeri where they brought a huge platter of mezédhes to our table from which we chose our dinner: fried sardines, eggplant, calamari, a salad (Greek, of course) of tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, red onion, feta cheese, olives, capers and olive oil, and tzatziki, all washed down with some ouzo on the rocks. This method of service was quite a relief, since neither of us had made much sense of the menu posted out front, which made no concessions to non-Greek-speakers – culinarily a good sign, but logistically problematic!

Greek cuisine is heavily dependent on a few ingredients: olives and olive oil, local fish, lamb, eggplant, lemons, yogurt and feta, and vegetables like tomatoes, spinach, okra and bitter leafy greens. These basic ingredients are combined in any number of ways: lamb and eggplant could be served together as moussaka, or grilled and fried to make separate mezés. (The fried eggplant we’ve had has been a revelation.) Cucumbers appear in salad and are also chopped to give texture to tzatziki, a garlicky yogurt dip. Meats are sometimes grilled, as in souvlaki, but are also stewed with vegetables to produce mayirefta dishes– literally, “cooked.” Some of our favorite dinners so far have been in this category, like the delicious lamb shank braised with okra at the Platanos taverna in the Pláka district of Athens.

Ouzo is the characteristically Greek tipple. It’s made by boiling the fermented grape-mash residue left after wine-pressing and flavored with star anise or fennel. If you’re familiar with other licorice-y Mediterranean drinks, like pastis in the south of France, raki in Turkey or arak in Lebanon, you’ll recognize the concept immediately. Like all these, it’s served in small glasses accompanied by a bowl of ice and a pitcher of water, so that you can dilute it to your preferred strength; it’s clear in the glass, but turns cloudy when you add water. Laura thinks it turns her tongue numb. The word “ouzo” probably derives from the Italian osu Massalia, used to label early raki shipments from Ottoman distilleries in Smyrma, Constantiople and Lésvos to Marseille. Similar drinks go by tsipouro (in the north mainland) or tsikoudhiá (on Crete), or there’s the unflavored soúma available on islands in the eastern Aegean.

Like any first-timers, we spent our first full day in Athens touring the Acropolis complex with the hordes of just-off-the-cruise-ship tour groups and field-tripping students. Tam had been laboring (though not too hard) under the mistaken idea that our British Airways flight from Heathrow would mark a departure from hearing fluent English for the coming months. Not so! While we have no illusions that we are on anything but the center of the proverbial beaten path, it’s still amazing how many Midwesterners one can meet in Athens even in the off-season. We mingled with them outside the Parthenon, where classical Athenians paid homage to their gods, and in the ruins of the agora (market) where philosophers and citizens gathered to buy figs and lay the foundations of Western society.

We finished our afternoon with a quick snack at a café just east of the ancient sites within view of the Acropolis, where we enjoyed cheese saganaki (deep fried and topped with honey and sesame seeds), “Greek cheese pies” (cheese-filled filo), and another Greek salad (what to prevent the scurvy – so far so good).

Northward Ho!

2007-03-19T23:28:00.000Z

We took the train north from London, through York and Durham. The scenery took a dramatic turn north of Newcastle, with glimpses of wild coast, crashing waves and huge rocks jutting into the North Sea, with little stone villages nestled into crags along the shore. Alighting in Edinburgh, we emerged into the twilight to see the castle looming above the city on ancient volcanic rock. Thunder crashed. A million shades of grey colored the medieval Old Town. It was a dark and stormy night.

Scotland was home to Tam’s forebears, and he felt his blood stir with ancestral memories of tartans and mossy crags as soon as we arrived. After a brief jaunt through a freezing downpour, we downgraded our culinary ambitions for our first night and supped on mussels and haggis-stuffed chicken in a lovely pub near our little guest house, washing it down with some ale and a few sips of whiskey, chatting with some proper Scottish locals, and bearing witness to the unexpected St Patrick’s Day victory of Ireland’s cricket team over Pakistan. Tam was pleased to note that B. Rankin was of material assistance in the glorious triumph.

By morning, the skies had cleared and we headed off to Edinburgh castle to relive Scotland’s glory days (not that they’re over, of course). The climb up the almost sheer rock face on the north side of the castle was enlivened by thousands of yellow daffodils, swaying in the bitterly cold wind but lending a spring-like air to the view. The vista at the top was nothing short of spectacular, as we watched a snowstorm blow across the Firth of Forth, then turn west around the city. The castle itself is pretty neat, too, capped by a tiny Norman chapel – possibly the oldest building in Edinburgh – built by King David and dedicated to his mother, St Margaret.

We spent the (entire) afternoon at lunch with friends (one a fellow blogger) at The Grain Store, a rambling stone-walled second story restaurant serving an excellent three-course lunch that featured Scottish smoked salmon with capers, hare confit served on beetroot risotto, grilled mackerel, pork belly with wilted greens, and a bitter chocolate cake with espresso cream sauce that recalled a pint of Guinness. After a few hours at the restaurant, we retired for a brief tutorial on single malt across the street at the Bow Bar, where we sniffed lots of fancy bottles and were instructed that a little water in your scotch awakens the peaty flavors. It’s a fine line, though; Laura was scolded by a fellow customer standing by the bar for having overdone the water in her drink. Fortunately, it wasn’t too weak to act as a necessary fortifier for the icy walk home in the howling wind.

The next day, we finished our tour of the Royal Mile, spit on the Heart of Midlothian for luck, marveled at the Thistle Chapel in St. Giles Kirk, saluted John Knox’s House and stopped at a tapas bar full of kilted Spanish speakers. We ended at the Holyrood Palace and Park and hiked straight up the Radical Road – named not for its intimidating incline, but for the leftist political leanings of its builders – for another thrilling view of the city and surrounds.

Confident that we’d earned it, we had what may be our last pint of real ale for some time at what was surely our favorite of the pubs we tried in Edinburgh, the “Oxford” Bar on Young Street. There, we mingled with the thickly accented and bushy-cheeked Scots that gather nightly to warm themselves inside and out sipping scotch and water by the fire and watching ancient British sitcoms with great enjoyment.

For our final dinner in Edinburgh, we decided that it was time to come to terms with Scotland’s most notorious culinary creation. Haggis is a kind of pudding made of sheep's 'pluck' (heart, liver and lungs), minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and traditionally boiled in the animal's stomach for approximately an hour, which is nearly universally disliked around the world, but which the Scots embrace and adore. A Room in the Town presented an upscale – and delicious – version in the form of a terrine: haggis, neeps (turnips) and tatties (potatoes) layered, molded and topped with chili-spiked gooseberry chutney. The haggis was earthy and meaty-tasting, and the spicy tartness of the chutney cut nicely through its richness. Our waiter explained that different butchers – and many families – have old and highly secret recipes for combining oats and sheep parts, differing dramatically in consistency, spice and strength. There’s also a ubiquitous and seemingly oxymoronic product known as vegetarian haggis, in which the meat is replaced by pulses and vegetables.

The other highlight of the meal was a slice of ginger snap cheesecake, flecked with crystallized ginger and caramelized just a bit around the edges. We were impressed enough to consider concocting our own version - once we get home to our spring form pans.

More pictures of our exciting adventure are available here:

Hoax Horror Seizes Shepherd's Bush

2007-03-14T10:37:00.000Z

This morning, we were lounging around in our flat (enjoying the last of the sticky toffee pudding with some tea) when sirens blared outside and there was a frantic knock on the door, followed by shouts of "Police! Open up! Police!" We leapt up and opened the door to a fully armored and shielded young policewoman, who informed us that there was a "suspicious package" very close to our building and that they were evacuating the area. Running outside in our pajamas, we joined crowds of people gawking at the army of ambulances, fire trucks, police cars and canine detectives milling around in front of our hitherto unnoticed building. They talked about getting out the "little robot" to defuse the bomb and assembled lots of impressive-looking equipment. Deciding that nothing was going to happen any time soon, we wandered down the street for some coffee, watching double-decker buses and delivery trucks trying to back down the street while the fruit vendors who line the Uxbridge Road looked on with undisguised amusement.

When we returned, the crowd was dispersing and the bomb scare was declared a hoax; we're now happily back in our unharmed little flat.

The tabloids, which have already decided that our neighborhood is a hotbed of undesirable political activity, will have a field day. Perhaps it will be quieter in Egypt...

Taking Stock and Pulling Up Stakes

2007-03-13T11:32:00.000Z

We're off on Saturday to celebrate St Patrick's Day in Edinburgh and then to see the world. Will the Greeks understand our rhyming slang? How are Egyptian bangers'n'mash? What's the best real ale in Jerusalem? These and many more pressing questions will soon be answered. Stay tuned!

London has been great - we'll miss it.

More pictures of our exciting adventure (so far) are available here:

Spontaneity Schmontaneity

2007-03-12T22:33:00.000Z

The following is absolutely 100% true:

For the past few days, the weather in London has been uncharacteristically amazing - sunny and warm during the days, brisk and clear in the evening. So this afternoon, upon emerging from the travel clinic, we decided on a whim to forget about our pressing need to do some serious itinerary arranging and spend the day soaking up the sun at the Tower of London. Why not, after all? It was beautiful out, and we thought we should be sure to make the most of our last days here in England. So, we grabbed our tickets and a quick snack and made our way to the surprisingly long entrance queue. While in line, we learned that the King of Ghana was visiting the Tower and that security was exceptionally high for his visit. Beneath the portcullis, the guards rifled through Laura's handbag and even opened her wallet, in case she was secreting some kind of tiny but deadly weapon (a poisonous spider, perhaps). Undeterred, a crowd was forming around the Beefeater just inside the gate for the next tour. We followed the nattily dressed Yeoman Warden through the Tower for an hour, learning lots of sordid details about the various executions and murders that punctuate its history and laughing dutifully at his well-practiced jokes. When we ventured past the inner wall, a member of our group noticed the Royal Standard flying over the White Tower (the original central keep built by William the Conquerer). Our beefeater explained that this was Prince Charles' flag, signaling his presence in the Tower this afternoon. We thought little of it; HRH was surely in some posh, secluded room, discussing the fine points of postcolonial theory with the king of Ghana over tea and scones. But as we emerged from the Waterloo Barracks and into the light of the central courtyard, we noticed a group of tourists growing larger down by the new armouries. We hurried down, just in time to see Prince Charles himself step out into the crowd and make his way towards the White Tower, shaking hands and chatting about the weather with the camera-happy crowds. We were within feet of His Royal Highness, close enough to hear his practiced small talk and jovial guffaws - and, thinking we were in for nothing more exciting than a morning at the doctor's office, we had left our camera at home!

You'll just have to take our word for it.

P.S. Sue, he looks like he's pining.

How English can you get?

2007-03-11T19:46:00.000Z

As our time in London draws to a close, we're starting to cast about for some conclusions, making lists of all the loose ends we need to tie up and the places we need to visit before the next leg of our trip around the world. We're creating ever-more-interesting concoctions and casseroles from what's left in the fridge and the back of the cupboard. Recipes using pork belly and Special K will be gratefully accepted!

Today, though, on our last Sunday in London, we shrugged off the mantle of responsible leftover consumption and embraced that quintessentially English culinary tradition, the Sunday Roast - in this case, rare roast beef seasoned with cumin, coriander, garlic and ginger. This might seem like a rather un-English combination of spices, but it was inspired by a highly regarded eighteenth-century English recipe published by the doyenne of English cooking, Elizabeth David. In her Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, she argues that the use of such apparently exotic spices as coriander and ginger was actually fundamental to English manor house cooking from the seventeenth century onwards, a result of England's strong ties with the Middle East and North Africa.

We accompanied the beef with roasted root vegetables, and sticky toffee pudding for "afters." The roast was fantastic, but the sticky toffee pudding was the most fun to make, as it turned out that the secret to its stickiness is to poke lots of holes in a newly baked spice cake and pour hot toffee sauce into them, thus imbuing the cake with its characteristic gooey goodness. Traditionally it also has dates in it, which we left out for two related reasons: 1) we didn't have any dates and 2) we both hate dates. If you feel differently, by all means add some in, finely chopped or even pureed.

We served this with the last dregs of Tam's delicious Christmas port from Fortnum and Mason; it's also good with tea and, like all of our dessert recipes, makes a fine breakfast.

Sticky Toffee Pudding

For cake:
1 1/2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
1 cup (packed) dark brown sugar
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
2 large eggs
1 cup chopped toasted walnuts

For toffee sauce:
1 cup whipping cream
2/3 cups sugar
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Sift dry ingredients together. Cream butter, sugar and eggs together. Combine wet and dry ingredients, mixing just until blended. Mix in walnuts. Pour batter into 8x8 buttered pan and bake until skewer comes out clean, about 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, make the toffee sauce. Combine half of cream with sugar and butter in heavy large saucepan. Boil over medium-high heat until mixture thickens slightly and is deep golden, stirring constantly, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat; cool 5 minutes. Gradually whisk in remainder of cream (mixture will bubble vigorously). Stir over low heat until mixture is smooth.
Poke warm cake all over with a chopstick or the handle of a wooden spoon and pour half of toffee sauce over, making sure it soaks into all parts of the cake. Let sit for at least 30 minutes.

Serve warm, topped with remaining toffee sauce and creme fraiche or unsweetened whipped cream.

Makes about 9 servings.

See what you want to see ... in England

2007-03-07T19:41:00.000Z

Many apologies to our faithful readers for our uncharacteristically long silence! Life has been been busy here in S'Bush, what with wrapping up work in the archives, tying up loose ends at Imperial College, and trying to determine the very cheapest way to travel to eight different countries in the next five months (we'll keep you posted)! Plus, we had an unexpected visitor: Tam's brother Charley decided that he should seize the opportunity to visit London while our tiny loft was still available. So, we set ourselves and our friends to squiring him around town and making sure he met all the cute Commonwealthers at our local pub, the Crown and Sceptre, as well as introducing him to the gastronomical and other wonders of London ...

March has been doing its whole in-like-a-sneaky-lion thing, with cold and windy downpours that blow up just as the crocuses have lulled you into complacency and you've forgotten your umbrella or ordered your coffee to go. We've been looking longingly at the photos of sun, sea, mountain and desert in our recently acquired guidebooks for Greece, Egypt and Jordan. On Saturday, though, we had an unexpected respite: a beautiful, sunny and even reasonably warm day. So, with Charley, we hopped the bus to Oxford and wandered the cobbled streets, strolled through the Fellows' Gardens at Magdalen, soaked up the sun, sniffed the daffodils and imbibed a little real ale, along with the smoke and heady conversation that characterizes such Oxford institutions as the Bear, the Turf and the Eagle and Child (known to faithful customers C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as the "Bird and Baby").

As the lunar eclipse cast an eerie red glow on the kebab vans that unaccountably line the streets of Oxford after dark, we boarded the bus for an intense bout of Travel Scrabble on the way home. (Laura is the reigning champion, in case you had any doubt. Her master-stroke was the brilliant placement of the seven-letter "fiction" on a triple word score, clinching her glorious victory. Yay!)

Other highlights have included Monday night gastropub crawls with our indefatigable academic friend John (including soft-boiled quail eggs and rhubarb fool at Portobello Road's hip Fat Badger, and a tour of hard-to-find pubs in Kensington and Knightsbridge like the Nags Head, the Grenadier and the Swag and Tails); opening night at the Royal Shakespeare Company's new production of The Tempest, with Patrick Stewart's Prospero stranded in a modernist arctic landscape; cocktails in the Knight Bar at Simpson's on the Strand; a fine showing at last week's black-tie Oscars-themed pub quiz; a boat trip down the Thames and a trip to Greenwich with the staff from the Crown and Sceptre, complete with funny hats and permanent marker mustaches (no pictures survive, thank goodness). At last count, in his six days in London, Charley tried over twenty-four ales - some more than once. We're not sure if that's connoisseurship or overambition!

When in Shepherd's Bush...

2007-02-18T15:56:00.000Z

With the first mincing-machines, prison, school and seaside boarding house cooks acquired a new weapon to depress their victims, with watery mince, shepherd's pie with rubbery granules of left-over meat, rissoles capable of being fired from a gun.

- Jane Grigson

Some of our readers may know that Tam is in the midst of a career crisis; in fact, you may have read it in our profile. Some years ago, between jobs, he seriously considered herding sheep for Laura's cherry-farming cousin, who was entertaining the idea of using a flock of sheep to keep the grass short in the orchard, with the additional hope that the residual sheep's milk would make excellent cheese. "I'd make a great shepherd," Tam told him. "I look fabulous with a crook, and I can be sore afraid at the drop of a hat." Alas, it turns out that sheep prefer the taste of cherry bark to grass, but then, who doesn't?

So, instead, for the past few months Tam has been wrestling with his future from Shepherd's Bush in west London, each glance at the tube station sign a constant reminder of the tragic failure of his shepherding career before it even began. There are competing explanations of the name of our fine neighborhood; it may have arisen from the use of the common land here as a resting point for shepherds on their way to Smithfield Market, or, rather less romantically, the area might have been named after someone in the neighborhood (in 1635 the name was recorded as "Sheppards Bush Green"). Either way, mustn't grumble; even if you're not a shepherd, you can still have pie...

Despite her less-than-inspiring description, we adapted our recipe for shepherd's pie from the classic English Food by the queen of English food (or anyway, British food writing), Jane Grigson. If you do it right, she admits somewhat reluctantly, shepherd's pie "can be well worth eating." It definitely makes a splendid meal for a cold February evening in the bush.

Shepherd's Bush Pie

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 lb minced lamb
1/2 teaspoon dried rosemary
pinch crushed red pepper
1 teaspoon tomato paste
1/3 cup dry white wine
2/3 cup beef broth
2 tablespoons flour

4 medium potatoes
1/2 cup whole milk
1 tablespoon butter
Salt and freshly ground pepper

Preheat oven to 325 F.

Heat oil in skillet over medium heat. Add onions and cook until translucent; add garlic and stir for a minute. Turn heat to medium-high and add lamb, rosemary and red pepper, and season with salt and pepper. Cook until lamb is thoroughly browned. Mix half of broth with flour and stir or shake to combine. Add tomato paste, wine, broth and broth/flour mixture to the lamb and simmer for about 10 minutes, covered.

Boil potatoes and mash with milk and butter, seasoning well with salt and pepper. Spread lamb mixture in a baking dish and top with potatoes, drawing fork over top to create ridges. Bake for about 40 minutes, then put the dish under the broiler for a few minutes to brown the top. Let sit for 10 minutes before serving.

Serves 2-3.

<- Europa Latina ->

2007-02-13T21:20:00.000Z

A couple of weeks ago, we popped into the travel agency over lunch to book a trip to Barcelona, having determined that a weekend in the Spanish sun was just what was needed to boost our spirits during the February doldrums. Sadly, the girl behind the counter - her countenance becoming wistful as she half eavesdropped on the traveller next to us who was planning a voyage to Tonga, Tahiti and Easter Island - informed us that Spain was out of our meager budget and suggested a trip to Scandinavia, apparently a real mid-winter deal. No matter how great the bargain, we decided, we weren't in the market for a bleaker, darker weekend than we could spend in Shepherd's Bush. We were about to depart despondent when Tam's eye fell on the map on the desk. "What about Lisbon?" he asked.

This is how we ended up in the airport on Friday afternoon, gleefully leaving the uncharacteristic snow in London behind and browsing through guidebooks to find out what there was to do in Portugal, about which we knew almost nothing (beyond its role as the producer of the delicious port Tam got for Christmas and has been sharing, generously). When we landed, we took a bus into the city and spent nearly an hour looking for our hotel. Our maps of Lisbon totally failed to indicate that the city is built on lots of extremely steep hills, and by the time we found the hotel and dumped our bags in the rather monastic room, we were panting for some liquid refreshment.

We stopped by the Solar do Vinho do Porto, the Port Wine Institute of Lisbon, where you can learn about port in the best way possible: by choosing from among dozens of makers and types of wine and sipping it in armchairs in the quiet room. We tried a tawny and a late bottled vintage port, swirling, sniffing and nodding vigorously with the best of them.

Wandering into the deceptively sleepy Bairro Alto neighborhood, famous for its late-night party scene, we came across Pap'Acorda, one of the hippest restaurants in Lisbon and highly recommended by nearly all of the travel literature we had read on the plane. There, under the tutelage of the world's haughtiest waiter (seriously, career waiters in hundred-year-old Parisian brasseries have nothing on this guy), we sampled Portuguese-style tuna and ultra-intense grilled salt cod with cabbage and potatoes. Lisbon looks like a Mediterranean city, with its pastel buildings with ruched terracotta roofs, the curly flourishes of iron surrounding its balconies, its glorious sweeping harbor and warm open squares filled with coffee and wine drinkers at all hours of the day and night (oh, and it's balmy even in February); but the cuisine is firmly based in the Atlantic, emphasizing cod, potatoes, greens like kale and spinach and cabbage, sausages and sheep's milk cheese. Tam finally elicited a friendly response from the waiter when he ordered the chocolate mousse for dessert, which was spooned onto a plate tableside from a giant metal bowl containing enough mousse to satisfy an army of chocoholics.

With our bellies full of fish and our heads light from the slightly bubbly vinho verde, we emerged from the restaurant and into a full-blown block party! The cobbled streets that had been deserted only a few hours earlier were now, just after midnight, in full swing with groups of beautiful young Portuguese revellers weaving from bar to bar and spilling Sagres lager from their plastic cups. We had no choice but to succumb...

The next day, we started off with strong coffee in the Praça da Figueira, a lovely tiled square featuring a statue of Joao I. Much of Lisbon was destroyed in a tremendous earthquake in 1755; after the catastrophe, most of the city was rebuilt and laid out in broad boulevards and elegantly proportioned squares. We wandered through the shopping district down to the Praça do Comércio, the pre-earthquake location of the royal palace, now a wide-open pavilion surrounded on three sides by the faded yellow facades of eighteenth-century government buildings.

Lisbon is full of tiny, clanging wooden trams, winding their way slowly up the steep hills. We caught one up to the Castelo São Jorge , where there were spectacular miradouros (lookout points) over the city; then we proceded to get radically, completely lost in one of the few neighborhoods that survived the earthquake. Alfama is a conglomeration of narrow crooked paths winding up and down vertical inclines, houses leaning to the side, laundry fluttering from windows, neighbors yelling to each other. We felt like voyeurs (which we were, of course) peering curiously into the windows of a medieval village.

[The larger building on the left of the horizon above is the Igreja e Mosteiro de São Vicente de Fora (Church and Monastery of St Vincent Beyond the Walls). Vincent was martyred in Valencia in 336. When the Moors sacked that city in the 8th century, his remains were brought by sea to Portugal and are now kept at the monastery. Legend has it that two ravens escorted the relics, and so the image of a ship accompanied by two birds is prominent in Lisbon.]

Stops in some churches, including the cathedral, followed, along with a fantastic lunch of eggs and Portuguese sausages at a hip little restaurant (Lisbon is among the most design-conscious cities we've ever visited, with a profusion of weirdly shaped furniture and avant-garde lighting fixtures). When
we finally made it out of Alfama (we were thinking we might have to move
in, and were planning the color scheme of our publicly aired laundry), we went to dinner at the Casa do Alentejo, another delighful institution designed to educate through delicious consumption - in this case of the regional specialties of Alentejo, east of Lisbon. Tam had some pretty great monkfish stew, but was jealous of Laura's truly fabulous octopus. Here again the atmosphere was conceived with great care; in this case the architecture swung wildly from Moorish to art deco, and the walls were tiled with traditional Portugese azulejos. We ended the night with little plastic cups of ginjo, a homemade cherry brandy sold out of a streetside stand, across the road from a clarinetist playing an astonishingly perky version of "Strangers in the Night." We dropped a couple of coins in his hat and waltzed home.

Lisbon is one of those appealing cities - like New Orleans - that went through a long, slow decline, and now exists on the edge of the world it occupies, central to nothing and with a concomitant commitment to food, drink, poetry and fashion, accompanied by a rejection of economic endeavor and urban gloss. Black-clad elderly women lean out their crooked windows, shouting to their neighbors up the steep hills; ultra-trendy teenagers ride the trams in their skinny jeans and super-hip kicks; both are celebrating living in a city whose moment of power and glory was a full five centuries ago, its brief ascendancy remembered but apparently unmourned.

On our last day, we took a (much more modern) tram out to Belém, a neighborhood to the west of Lisbon hosting the remaining symbols of this long-ago power: the famous Mósteiro dos Jeronimos and the Torre de Belém, both outposts of the medieval city and shining examples of ornate Manueline architecture. The Tower's turrets are adorned with carvings of various beasts, including the first Western image of a rhinoceros (sculpted after a pet given to Dom Manuel I, which was eventually presented to Pope Leo X and served as the model for Dürer's famous drawing); from the top we could see little explorers practicing their mad maritime skills in the River Tagus. We were rewarded for our bracing riverside perabulations with shots of coffee and the local delicacy, pastéis de Belém, custard tarts topped with cinnamon and powdered sugar. We can confirm that the best are served at the Antigua Casa Pastéis de Belém, but then, you knew that already...

Before catching the bus back to the airport, we acted on a hot tip that Bonjardim, an unassuming fish restaurant among a sea of competitors on the Rua das Portas de Santo Antão, was the place for succulent spit-roasted chicken. Satiated, we had just enough time for a pre-flight spot of tea at a smoke-shrouded airport outpost of Harrods, where Portugese explorers can pick up a green-vested English teddy bear before they set out on their modern-day adventures. Hey, Vasco da Gama never went anywhere without his.

More pictures of our exciting adventure are available here:

Les Oeufs à la Benedicte

2007-02-04T13:15:00.000Z

The genesis of the original Eggs Benedict is shrouded in mystery, with at least two Benedicts offering competing claims to the dish's invention; but it is certain that it came out of a hotel restaurant in New York City in the late nineteenth century, and it seems probable that its ingredients were, among other things, intended to provide consolation to customers suffering from the after-effects of a night of debauchery. In the hundred years since its creation, Eggs Benedict has acquired any number of well-known variants, among them Lox Benedict, Eggs Florentine, and the New Orleans version Eggs Hussard.

We've always been fans of both the original version and the spinoffs. And the other day, in the depths of the rainy English winter, we were recalling a sunny summer breakfast we had with our families in Leland, Michigan at the idyllic Riverside Inn. Their Sunday brunch menu is essentially a list of riffs on Eggs Benedict: one eschews the traditional Canadian bacon in favor of a grilled-to-order Black Angus tenderloin; another not only replaces the bacon with smoked salmon but, in an inspired move, also substitutes crabcakes for the traditional English muffins.

Tam's brother Charley ordered a rugged Benedict that substitutes Applewood smoked bacon and sourdough bread for the typical pig and carb, and adds a side of fresh asparagus. In this case, the truly original turn was to smother the layers, not with hollandaise, but with a smoked Gouda cream sauce (henceforth known as SGCS). Around the table on that sunny day fans were easily won, and some became fiercely devoted to the sauce; indeed, Charley's many travels through the world since then have often embodied a long search for a culinary experience to equal his first encounter with SGCS.

This morning we took inspiration from the memory of that lovely summer brunch, and created our own, rather Francophile version of Eggs Benedict. This recipe features, with apologies to the Riverside Inn, a gruyere cream sauce spooned over poached eggs and smoked ham layered on a croissant. It's worthy of a special occasion and would go splendidly with a mimosa (or a Bloody Mary, if necessary), but will perk up any Sunday morning when accompanied by steaming coffee, orange juice and the Sunday paper.

Les Oeufs à la Benedicte

2 croissants, split lengthwise and toasted

4 slices smoked ham, warmed briefly in skillet

4 large eggs (as always, as fresh as possible, please)

1/2 cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons dry white wine
1/4 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/4 cup grated Gruyere, packed

Salt and freshly ground pepper

Heat cream to just under boiling point. Add wine and mustard and stir for a few minutes. Add Gruyere and turn off heat. Stir until cheese is melted and sauce is smooth. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Poach eggs in simmering water just until yolks are set. Layer ham on top of croissant halves, then top with eggs. Spoon sauce over the top and grind pepper over it.

Serves 2.

A postscript:

Another possibility for Sunday breakfast... Recently, looking for a way to use up some rapidly blackening bananas in our fruit bowl, we searched banana bread on Epicurious and came across a recipe whose more than 200 user reviews were not for the site's recipe but for the narrative instructions of one of the early commenters, a guy named John who gave an extremely simple recipe for banana bread that he claimed was the best ever. All the commenters agreed, so we tried it out and can verify that it's hands down the most fantastic banana bread we've ever eaten. So, kudos to John and check out his instructions and all the comments here. Yum.

Ah, the peat

2007-01-29T20:16:00.000Z

Late January roasting barley fermenting hops stout hopscotch hopwhiskey stench of coffee but not Irish; cash in fish and chips on the jade lawn of Christ Church / gruel at Gruel, breakfast at Bewley's, Guinness at any pub that would have us have ourselves have we mentioned Dublin?

Yes, we spent the weekend in Dublin, and had all kinds of exciting emerald-tinted adventures, recalled here not in feeble stab at a stream-of-consciousness rant but chronologically...

Saturday

1. The Irish Museum of Modern Art, whose commitment to brand-new work far outshines any of its English counterparts - no Matisse to be seen there! - is housed in the old Royal Hospital at Kilmainham, built in 1684 to accommodate invalid soldiers. The combination of 17th-century architecture and 21st-century art is striking, and the restored gardens on the side of the building are beautiful. It took some determination to trudge up the hill around the cranes and tractors of an immense construction site, wending our way through a maze of orange fences; but the juxtaposition of old and new - the purple walls against the old stone, the five-foot silver axe leaning casually against a tree - made the trip
more than worthwhile.

2. The Guinness brewery, of course! This Irish landmark occupies a huge chunk of western Dublin, and is surrounded by forbidding 20-foot-high cement walls that put us in mind of a medieval castle more than a repository of alcoholic pleasures. The pilgrim can smell it some distance away, and approaches accompanied by dozens of other dedicated travellers en route to the Canterbury of stout. The caws of apparently giant ravens meet you as you enter the shadows of the towering fermentation tanks, lending a somewhat macabre aspect to the whole experience. This impression is dispelled, however, when you realize that the sounds are actually coming from loudspeakers placed at the top of the tanks; they are there to scare away pigeons, who, we were informed by a temporarily unoccupied hansom cab driver, "ru'n the Guinness."

The inside of the "Storehouse" is the glitziest tour this side of Chocolate World. We were guided by a video version of the master brewer, who walked in and out of giant flat-screen TVs explaining the details of the brewing process and inviting his guests to taste the barley and watch the malting. We gradually made our way upstairs following his instructions, and engaged in a little quality control at the bar at the very top of the building, where you exchange your entrance ticket for a pint of the good stuff and sip it as you look round the glassed-in circular room, which offers unrivaled views of the city and quotes from Joyce embossed on the windows.

3. Lunchtime! - and we had the most fantastic fish and chips of our young lives, bought at the tiny shop Leo Burdock's and messily consumed without benefit of fork, knife or napkin on the green of Christ Church Cathedral.

4. A wander around Dublin Castle, built by the English after their occupation of Ireland and standing as a reminder of Ireland's colonial past. It was built on the site of Dubh Linn, "Black Pool," after which Dublin is named. We skipped the tour of the state apartments in favor of a trip to the Chester Beatty Library, a truly fabulous collection of Christian, Islamic, Buddhist and Hindu religious manuscripts. But after a lengthy perusal of small print in dark rooms, we began to feel the need for a rejuvenating pint - it had been nearly four hours since our last one, after all - and headed to the Palace, one of Dublin's oldest pubs and a traditional hangout of Irish journalists and writers, among them Yeats and Kavanaugh. We engaged in much pithy conversation, peppered with salty wisdom and Celtic metaphors.

5. Dinner at Gruel. A cheaper offshoot of the renowned Mermaid Cafe, this hipster restaurant specializes in simple but delicious Irish dishes, including a salad of greens with pinto beans, sweet potatoes, radicchio and a blue cheese dressing; smoked haddock fish pie; and shank of lamb - seared, braised, re-seared and served with beans and root vegetables - which Tam reduced to a clean bone.

Sunday

1. The next morning, we woke relatively early and headed to Grafton Street (Dublin's main shopping area, and the part of town most obviously benefited by the economic assistance of the European Union) for breakfast at the recently reopened Dublin institution Bewley's Oriental Cafe. The building boasts high ceilings and some remarkable art deco glass windows, featuring lots of stylized peacocks; it's just the place to down some eggs and black pudding for breakfast, or to wonder aloud how they manage to make porridge taste like an ice cream sundae (top-quality steel-cut oats - okay, and the giant gob of whipped cream on the top might have something to do with it, too). Dublin is a real coffee city, with loads of cafes and a population that prefers double espressos to Earl Grey tea; Bewley's roasts its own beans, and provided our first cup of genuinely hardcore coffee since we visited Paris last month.

2. Onward, to stroll around Fitzwillam and Merrion Squares and admire the Georgian architecture of Dublin's finest houses, elegant squares and the beautiful landscaped parks of St Stephen's Square and the Iveagh Gardens. Laura was especially enamored of the candy-colored Georgian doors, and took many pictures of them, most of which were inexplicably blurry or deleted as being of no interest whatsoever. This one survived.

3. We reverently entered the gates of Trinity College, Dublin's most venerable institution of higher education. It was founded in 1592 and for many centuries remained one of the most prominent bastions of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy, until the Catholic Church determined that Catholic attendance there would no longer be considered a mortal sin - in 1970. We wandered through the quads and got a close-up of the famous Book of Kells, as well as a look at the aptly named Long Room library, featuring a mini-exhibit on the Irish playwright J.M. Synge and the foundation of the Abbey Theatre under his and Yeats' direction.

(Incidentally, although his talents as a thespian are not widely known or commonly esteemed, Laura's dad once made a memorable one-off appearance in a production of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World for the British Council in Barcelona. His effortless conversion of tragedy to comedy with the delivery of a single line is the stuff of legend.)

4. Definitely time for another pint: an excellent Guinness at the Stag's Head followed by another, this time to wash down Irish rock oysters at Davy Byrne's, where Leopold Bloom eats a Gorgonzola sandwich (rather un-Irish fare, actually) in Ulysses.

5. We finished up the day with a stroll through the grittier neighborhoods of Northern Dublin, where you can see bullet marks from the 1916 Easter Rising in the columns of the General Post Office. You can also take in the much-discussed Spire of Dublin, built to improve the tone of the neighborhood but given various unflattering nicknames by the Celtic Tiger's good citizens (some choice examples: "Stiletto in the Ghetto," "the Rod to God", the "Erection at the Intersection," and the "Stiffy by the Liffey").

And finally, a look at Customs House and a sunset stroll by the river on the way to catch the bus to the airport.

More pictures of our exciting adventure are available here:

Frightful weather, old chap

2007-01-24T18:30:00.000Z

We awoke this morning to find a soft blanket of white and drifting (OK, grey and drippy) snow, an extreme rarity in London. South Kensington was a bona fide wonderland, with the shop windows of warm patisseries carefully filled with freshly prepared winter treats and bouncy children with adorable English accents launching ineptly constructed snowballs at anything that moved.

After a mild, Al Gore-ish start to the season, winter has come to London! And, as everybody knows, the best way to warm up is from the inside out. So here, we offer three ways to face the chill and prevent yourself from wasting away this January...

Let It Snow!

Another Uxbridge-Road-inspired dish. We enjoyed this hearty side with a roasted breast of chicken and the last leftover bottle of Christmas muscadet.

Lentil, Onion and Rice Pilaf with Minty Yogurt Sauce

4 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
2 1/2 cups water
3/4 cup dried lentils, rinsed, picked over
3/4 cup long-grain white rice
juice of 1/2 lemon

2 large onions, sliced

1 cup plain yogurt
1 cucumber, peeled, diced
1/2 cup chopped fresh mint
juice of 1/2 lemon

Salt and freshly ground pepper

Heat 2 tablespoons oil in large saucepan over medium-high heat. Add chopped onion and spices; sauteé until onion softens, about 4 minutes. Add garlic and saute another minute. Add water and lentils; bring to boil. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer, covered, 10 minutes. Stir in rice; return to boil. Reduce heat to medium-low; cover and cook until liquid is absorbed and rice and lentils are tender, about 15 minutes longer.

Meanwhile, heat 2 tablespoons oil in heavy large skillet over medium-high heat. Add sliced onions; sauteé until soft and beginning to blacken, about 20 minutes. Mix onions into pilaf, add lemon juice and season with salt and pepper.

Mix yogurt, cucumber, mint and remaining lemon juice and season with salt and pepper. Top pilaf with dollop of yogurt.

Serves 4.

Adapted from Bon Appétit, November 2003

Let it Snow!!

Our regular readers will be aware that one of our favorite sanctuaries on a cold evening (or any evening, really) is the pub. The very first London gastropub, The Eagle, proudly pioneered all of the now cliché gastropub accoutrements like chalkboard menus, an open plan kitchen and careful approaches to traditional English dishes like rabbit casserole or "Ste. Ana" marinated steak sandwiches. Our favorite tipple-on-tap was the Eagle IPA - not a traditional winter warmer, but a fine ale nonetheless.

Let It Snow!!!

Tam grew up in south central Pennsylvania, where the local German Baptists and Mennonites eat egg noodles on their mashed potatoes (topped with something aptly called "yellow gravy," which will go undiscussed here). The same tendencies presumably influenced this traditional Swiss dish, which combines pasta AND potatoes with a delicious cheesy sauce and is meant to be served with tart applesauce; it sounds like a peculiar combination, but is actually very delicious. Plus, it's totally a great way to carboload, man...

Make a quick homemade applesauce by combining chopped apples with a little water, lemon juice, sugar, cinnamon and a smidgen of nutmeg and simmering until apples are soft; mash with a fork for a coarse, chunky texture that goes nicely with this dish.

Älplermagronen

3 small Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
8 ounces spirali pasta (or whatever you've got; tubular shapes work best)
1 tablespoon butter
2 medium onions, sliced
1/2 cup whipping cream
3/4 cup whole milk
1 cup (packed) grated Swiss or sharp cheddar cheese
1/2 teaspoon mustard (use Dijon if you're using Swiss cheese, strong English mustard if you're using cheddar)
Salt and plenty of freshly ground pepper

Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter 8 x 8 x 2-inch baking dish. Cook potato in large pot of boiling salted water until tender, about 10 minutes. Using slotted spoon, transfer potato to large bowl. Add macaroni to same pot of boiling water; cook until just tender but still firm to bite. Drain macaroni. Add to bowl with potato.

Meanwhile, melt 2 tablespoons butter in heavy large skillet over medium-high heat. Add sliced onions and sauté until tender and brown, stirring often, about 15 minutes.

Add onions, cream, milk and cheese to potato mixture and mix well. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Transfer to prepared dish. Bake until heated through and cheese melts, about 20 minutes. Let cool 5 minutes; serve hot, with applesauce and salad alongside.

Serves 4.

Adapted from Bon Appétit, March 1997

Over the Thames and through New Forest

2007-01-21T12:56:00.000Z

After a hectic week - including a goodbye party for an Ozzie mate heading back to Sydney, a friend's birthday celebration at the Crown and Sceptre, a visit from Laura's cousin coming through town after a long Grecian exile, and a (successful!) audition for the London Symphony Chorus - we'd had enough of city life and were craving some fresh salt air and some Hogs Back TEA (Traditional English Ale). So we split for the coast to visit some outdoorsy friends in Hampshire, where they sail, bicycle, walk and swim year-round along the beautiful shore, in view of the Isle of Wight. There's nothing like a bracing walk along the beach on a windy January day to put you in the mood for a fish pie and a pint (or two)...

Oh, and about the pierogis...

2007-01-15T22:13:00.000Z

Pierogis, whose name comes from the Russian pirog, meaning pie, are small, half-moon-shaped pastries stuffed with a savoury filling. They look a lot like Chinese potstickers, and there has been some speculation that the Mongols introduced them to Eastern Europe on one of their periodical bouts of western warfare; but, as Alton Brown is quick to point out, stuffed pastries appear in nearly every culture (wontons, ravioli, Cornish pasties) and their origin is impossible to trace. On our recent trip to "England’s best Polish supermarket," Mleczko, which happens to be across the street, we bought "pierogis ruskies," filled in this case with dry cottage cheese, potato and onions (the ingredients list laboriously translated word for word from online sources - ah, the marvels of the modern age!). They're traditionally sauced with butter, topped with fried onions and bacon, dolloped with sour cream and served with borscht or as an accompaniment to another kind of soup. Our pathetic non-Polish arteries couldn't quite face such an onslaught, so we opted for a marginally healthier approach; still sauced with butter, but accompanied with a salad of mixed greens and thickly sliced red onion, tossed with olive oil and white wine vinaigrette. This turned out to be a magical combination; the sharpness of the greens and the crunch of the onion provided a splendid foil for the bland, cheesy richness of the pierogis. As a final touch, we topped them with sour cream and authentic Polish horseradish (pictured here with a photogenic interloper), just to give them a little kick.

Ratatouille Kablooie!

2007-01-14T14:07:00.000Z

Sunday afternoons ... in our home, they're traditionally taken up with thoroughly lazy (Tam says "restful") activities: Scrabble, football, Bill Watterson books. But this week we decided to add cooking-in-quantity to the list. This burst of activity is due mainly to an extremely unfortunate encounter Laura had last week with a ham and cheese sandwich in the cafeteria at the National Archives. In description, it sounded innocuous; but when it arrived, it proved to be not simple ham and cheese but stuffed instead with what the English call a "filling" (in this case, fake mayonnaise, processed shredded cheese and canned ham and onions; cheese and pickle is another popular combination). Having forgotten to make a lunch in the morning, she had no choice but reluctantly to swallow the soggy excuse for a sandwich and resolve to take her vengeance, or anyway to be diligent forevermore in packing her own midday repast.

So, today we engaged in a little easy cooking intended to provide delicious and healthy lunches for the week ahead. This concoction combines Middle Eastern-style couscous, flavored with olive oil, lemon and mint, with French ratatouille, made by roasting peppers, zucchini and eggplant (if you're English, courgettes and aubergines) until caramelly and sweet. Although now commonly made throughout western Europe and the United States, ratatouille was long a virtually unknown regional specialty of southern France, and there was no published recipe for it until the publication of a book called La Cuisine á Nice in 1930. It's highly flexible; you can incorporate any number of vegetables you might have around, and it can be eaten hot or cold. So, feel free to experiment!

Couscous with Ratatouille and Mint

6 tablespoons olive oil, divided
4 bell peppers, whatever color you like, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 eggplant, cut into 1-inch pieces
3 large onions, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 large zucchini, you guessed it, cut into 1-inch pieces
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 teaspoons dried oregano
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1 1/2 cups cherry tomatoes

2 cups couscous
2 1/2 cups water
juice of 1 lemon
1 cup chopped fresh mint
Salt and freshly ground pepper

Preheat oven to 400 F. Spread all vegetables except tomatoes on a large baking sheet and toss with 3 tablespoons olive oil, garlic, oregano, red pepper, and salt and pepper to taste. Roast until browned and tender, about 1 hour. Add tomatoes and roast an additional 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat water to boiling and pour over couscous. Cover and seal tightly; leave for 5 minutes. Remove cover and fluff with a fork. Toss with remaining olive oil, lemon juice, mint, and salt and pepper. Mix in vegetables.

Makes about 8 lunch-time servings; this would also make a good side dish to accompany grilled lamb or chicken.

A trip to the market, a trip around the world

2007-01-13T13:42:00.000Z

DATELINE: Uxbridge Road ("a west London road which was a decade ahead of its time")

Every day at rush hour, at every busy tube station and bus stop, thousands of London commuters avail themselves of free newspapers. With sensationalist headlines like December's "Killer Fog Traps Travelers" and telefocus paparazzi pictures of Kate Moss sunbathing topless, rags like London Lite are indistinguishable from bad tabloids. This past Thursday, however, in their style section, The London Paper got it right with their full page exposé on our street in Shepherd's Bush, entitled Round the World in One Exotic Trip: "Uxbridge Road doesn't claim to be glamorous ... but for food shopping it cannot be beaten, with a myriad of Lebanese, Polish, Syrian, Caribbean, Sudanese and Somali small businesses thriving there." The full article, and a cute little "audio slide show," is available here (pay no attention to the next slide show about a certain photographer).

Whatever its pretentions to glamour, Shepherd's Bush is undeniably an immigrant neighborhood (we fit right in!), and it's not unique; we've often been surprised at just how international and even transient London's residents are generally. Nearly everyone is here temporarily. Indeed, it's really quite difficult to meet anyone who is actually English, much less a homegrown Londoner. A full third of London's population is foreign-born, and consequently the trade in exotic ex-pat comfort foods - from rose petal paté to peanut butter - is big business; witness the American foods section at the newly remodelled world-famous food hall at Fortnum & Mason.

Inspired by the sensationalist press coverage of our own neighborhood, we spent the afternoon exploring the specialty grocers, delis and international food markets and that spill out onto the sidewalks of our street. While snapping pictures at our favorite Middle Eastern supermarket, Al-Abbas, Tam was stopped by one of the produce vendors, who insisted on posing for a portrait with his wares.

We shopped for sujuk sausages at Naama and picked up some pierogis from "England’s best Polish supermarket," Mleczko. Tomorrow, we plan to construct a multi-cultural experience of our own: eating an English Sunday roast and watching the NFL playoffs at a pub in West Kensington which turns into a gathering of homesick American sports fans every Sunday evening. Go Saints!

An Epiphany!

2007-01-06T19:08:00.000Z

It is often said that cooking is about celebration. This is particularly apparent to the dedicated cook during the holidays. For a month every winter, there are myriad excuses for celebration nearly every day, and baking cookies and searing roasts come to seem a karmic necessity, designed to demonstrate our gratitude and full appreciation for our families, communities and homes, and to ward off those elements which threaten them. People who never bake or cook during the rest of the year develop sudden urges during the holidays to try their mother's recipe for cruellers or their grandmother's roasted goose; it is a statement, telling the world that they are aware of their blessings and are doing their utmost to preserve them.

But in January, the guests go home; the tree comes down; the lights work themselves into tangled balls in the closet; all that's left is to vacuum up the pine needles and throw yourself down on the couch to contemplate the inevitable failure of those resolutions to go to the gym more often and eat more bananas. Causes for celebration, and for cooking, vanish overnight. Chinese takeout beckons, and is made all the more attractive by well-intentioned but ultimately depressing articles in January issues of cooking magazines that suggest that now is the perfect time to start eating sprouts for dinner and fruit for dessert.

Our last house guests left yesterday; Laura's brother departed on Wednesday with the sad, sad words, "I guess I'll see you in the summer"; today we spent the day (it was raining, by the way) wrestling the Christmas tree back out of our tiny flat and dealing with a month's worth of laundry. After 22 straight days as hosts, we were nearly at a loss for what to do now that we have the city of London to ourselves again.

What about popping a bottle of cava (left over from the holiday festivities, but no matter) and spending some time chopping and cooking elaborately just for ourselves? We'll look around at our freshly cleaned and suitcase-free domicile and make plans for 2007 with gusto, verve and excitement. To accompany our little celebration of solitude, we will make this light, bright, and flavorful cure-for-too-many-winter-stews-and-the-post-holiday-blues, suggestive of all the exciting travels that (hopefully!) await us this year. (Another cause for celebration is that Tam's begun his new job at Imperial College London. The South Kensington campus is situated a couple of short blocks from the Victoria and Albert Museum, perfect for lunch-hour visits, and within skipping distance of some great local pubs, perfect for any time.)

Ceviche, a specialty of Central and South American countries, is in its most basic form some kind of raw fish marinated and "cooked" in lemon and/or lime juice and some spices. We cooked our shrimp very briefly in boiling water first, since it was from the supermarket and just didn't look quite up to being consumed raw; but if you have a reliable fishmonger and some really fresh shrimp, don't hesitate to do it the traditional way.

There are numerous etymological derivations of the word ceviche; the most commonly cited is that the word comes from the Latin cibus (food), through the Spanish words for food (cebo) and fish stew (cebiche). But it might also derive from the Persian-Arabic word sikbaj, which simply referred to a spicy, aromatic food. Here, the basic idea of ceviche is extended to include some delicious crunchy, spicy and sweet elements which add to both the texture and the taste of the final result. The addition of olive oil is likewise not traditional, but we like the unctuousness it provides, and also the suggestions of the Mediterraean inherent in the citrus-olive combination.

Ceviche-Style Spicy Shrimp Salad with Fennel, Shallots and Tangerines

1 lb large raw shrimp, peeled
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil (we like a peppery variety for this)
1 tablespoon grated lemon zest
juice of 1/2 lemon
1/2 small ginger root, peeled, 1 teaspoon finely chopped and remainder cut into strips
1 cup orange juice
juice of 1 lime
2 small carrots, cut into matchsticks
1 small hot red pepper, seeds and veins removed, chopped finely
1/2 fennel bulb, sliced paper thin
3 large shallots, thinly sliced
2 tangerines, sections halved lengthwise
1 tablespoon finely grated tangerine zest
Salt and freshly ground pepper

Bring small pot of water to boil. Salt water and drop shrimp in for 30 seconds. Drain and run shrimp under cold water to stop cooking. When shrimp are cool, halve them lengthwise and toss them with half of lemon zest, lemon juice, 1 tablespoon olive oil, chopped ginger, and salt and pepper. Chill. (That's you and the shrimp.)

Combine lime juice, orange juice, and strips of ginger in small saucepan. Bring to boil and simmer until reduced by half. Put in bowl of ice water to cool. Season with salt and pepper.

Heat 1 tablespoon oil in skillet over high heat. Add carrot and remainder of lemon zest and toss until carrot is crunchy-tender, about 3 minutes. Remove from heat and place carrots over bowl of ice water to cool.

Toss fennel, shallots, pepper, oranges and carrots with half the orange sauce and season to taste with salt and pepper. Toss shrimp with remainder of sauce. Mound shrimp in center of 2 plates and arrange salad around it.

Serves 2 as main course, 4 as appetizer.

Adapted from Gourmet, June 2004

Inside Man III: And a Happy New Year

2007-01-01T15:28:00.000Z

New Year's Eve at the Crown and Sceptre: the best table in the house, great food, the staff stopping by for champagne toasts every few minutes ... the Inside Man's brief tenure as a barman has paid off in spades with great new friends and solid regular status, if not in actual cash. We went out with the pub staff the night before; Geoffrey (Laura's brother, in from New Haven for the holiday) and his English friend Peter both instantly established themselves as drinking legends in their own time. As it turned out, this was merely a warmup for New Year's Eve, when we boogied late into the night with the Ozzies and other Commonwealthers on staff while Geoffrey tried desperately to decide which of the many girls with charming accents he should dance with next. Laura and Tam threw in the towel and went home at about 3 AM, only to get a scolding phone call from Mike the Manager informing them in no uncertain terms that the party was not over and ordering them to come back immediately. Geoffrey, seeking to understand the soul of the British drinker, spent New Year's Day at the pub as well, among the crowds of Queens Park Rangers fans demonstrating a touching faith in Humphrey Bogart's recipe for curing a hangover. Our last set of holiday guests are coming in tonight and have promised to nurse us back to health in return for a bed to sleep in!

Some Connecticut Yankees on Tottenham Court Road

2006-12-28T13:08:00.000Z

Our families and some good friends braved the fog at Heathrow and joined us in London to celebrate the holidays. Our strict itinerary (chants of our mantra, "Don't be late; don't deviate!" rose up frequently from the intrepid travellers) included stops at the Harrods Food Hall (for a little last-minute truffle-hunting) and the Winter fair and skating rink on the grounds of the Natural History Museum (complete with honest-to-goodness open-fire-roasted chestnuts).

After a Christmas eve carols service at Saint Paul's Cathedral, the gang sank a few pints at our local, the Crown & Sceptre, before crowding into our tiny flat for our first bona fide personal Christmas tradition, a meal of New Orleans-style barbecued shrimp, which we followed this year with a dessert of poached pears.

New Orleans-Style Barbecue Shrimp

1 pound shrimp (21-25/pound or larger), heads-on
1 stick butter or margarine, or 2 tablespoons olive oil
Pinch of crushed red pepper, cayenne pepper, salt, white pepper, and black pepper
6 cloves chopped garlic
Dash of Worcestershire sauce
3 lemons, sliced
4 ounces beer, optional
2 1/2 tablespoons paprika

Melt butter with crushed red pepper, cayenne pepper, salt, paprika, white pepper and black pepper. Add garlic and saute 1 minute. Add shrimp, Worcestershire sauce and lemons and beer, if using, and cover. Simmer 2-3 more minutes.

Serve over white rice and with French bread.

On Chrsitmas morning, we opened our stockings in Shepherd's Bush (oh yes, there were Christmas crackers, paper crowns and sherry) and the flock herded itself to Notting Hill for lunch at the oh-so-Dickensian Windsor Castle pub, where we enjoyed a menu of home-made sage and pumpkin soup; goats’ cheese and spinach tart with roast tomato chutney; turkey breast with Victoria plum stuffing and chipolata; roast corn fed chicken served on roast seasonal vegetables with redcurrant jus; whole roast trout with roast vegetables, fennel and artichoke; garlic and herb marinated lamb chops with redcurrant gravy; and chocolate puddle pudding (not, Casey was relieved to learn, chocolate poodle pudding); grilled brioche with mixed berries and vanilla ice cream; and rhubarb crumble for afters.

Although we did not, for obvious reasons, participate in the British tradition of bringing boxed presents to our servants on Boxing Day, the holiday did not go unmarked. Boxing Day dinner was a hearty meal of Irish stew following some shopping (tip for future visitors: don't attempt to hunt out bargains on Oxford Street on December 26th without some serious body armor) and a brave stroll along the Thames culminating in a thrilling carousel ride near Blackfriars Bridge.

Other highlights included an investigation of the impressive plunder of empire at the British Museum; a stop to admire the new Islamic gallery at the Victoria and Albert; the Royal Shakespeare Company's performance of Much Ado About Nothing, featuring a Latin Beatrice and Benedict whose witty banter played out against a background of militance and class conflict in 1950s Cuba; and numerous pub stops across the brightly lit city.

More pictures of our exciting adventure are available here:

Christmas

Like leaves that before the wild hurricane fly

2006-12-19T20:44:00.000Z

Our tree is decorated; the stockings are hung on the railing of our loft with care; and, while there's no time for long winter naps, Tam is looking dapper as ever in his little cap. Visions of sugarplums ... well, what else is new? Our holiday preparations are at a fever pitch, with shopping (sampling) trips to Fortnum and Mason and last-minute double batches of Christmas cookies.

The city, too, is adorned in its Yuletide finest. This year, the display of Christmas lights spanning Regent Street (where classic British understatement is usually the watchword) is sponsored by the Disney Company, which has seized the opportunity to promote their new animated film (apparently a story about the misadventures of some cartoon mice who find themselves in the city's septic system). As a result, in addition to the dazzling spectacle of colored lights, visitors are treated to the sight of enormous illuminated sewer rats dangling above the street.

As we prepare for a short hiatus from our little blog while we entertain our families and friends who are travelling to London for the holiday, we send good wishes for good cheer to our loved ones whom we'll miss this year but about whom we will think often and fondly during our Christmas celebrations. Ho ho ho and all that from London; wish you were here!

Happy Christmas!

Totally Baked

2006-12-17T00:40:00.000Z

Orange Cookies

This recipe came from Tam's great-grandmother Mollie, of Cowdenbeath, Scotland, and we're proud to bring it back to the motherland. They have a delicate, crisp texture and a subtle tangy orange taste. Tam's mom recalls, "I remember eating them as a small child; they were around for as far back as I can remember. They were not necessarily a Christmas cookie. Grandma almost always had fresh cookies baked for daily tea time. " There's no doubt that these make for great tea biscuits, but they also recall the tradition of finding an orange in the toe of your Christmas stocking.

2 cups sugar
1 cup unsalted butter
1 ¼ cups orange juice
4 eggs
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
4 ¼ cups sifted flour
¼ cup grated orange rind

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs. Mix well.
Stir together dry ingredients.
Combine the two mixtures.

Drop by rounded teaspoons onto greased cookie sheet.

Bake for approximately 10 minutes. Remove from oven when edges are lightly browned. Allow to rest for 5 minutes before removing from cookie sheet.

When slightly cool, glaze with:
2 tablespoons orange rind
6 tablespoons orange juice
2 2/3 cups powdered sugar

yield: 10-12 dozen

Sweet-Tart Fresh Cranberry Orange Walnut Drop Cookies

Laura devised this recipe to incorporate all things Christmas into one great cookie! The results have lovely burst of tartness from the fresh cranberries, nicely balancing the sugar and spice in the dough, and walnuts add a nutty depth and crunch. They look beautiful and make a nice gift.

1/2 cup unsalted butter
1 tablespoon orange zest (packed)
3 tablespoons orange juice
3/4 cup sugar plus extra for sprinkling
1/2 cup light brown sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups fresh cranberries
1 1/2 cups chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Cream butter, orange zest, 1/2 cup sugar and 1/2 cup brown sugar together in a large bowl. Mix in eggs and orange juice.

Mix dry ingredients in separate bowl. Rinse cranberries and, while they are still a little wet, toss them with remaining 1/4 cup of sugar to coat.

Mix dry ingredients into butter-sugar mixture (dough will be stiff). Fold in cranberries and walnuts.

Drop by teaspoons onto ungreased cookie sheets and sprinkle tops of cookies with a little sugar. Bake for about 10 minutes or until golden brown. Remove to cooling racks.

Makes about 5 dozen cookies.

Un peu de la belle France dans le Bush du Berger

2006-12-16T00:12:00.000Z

This week, our families began to arrive in London for the holidays. The first bunch came into Gatwick the other day and we have already paraded them around, introducing them to the culinary highlights of our neighborhood: the Middle Eastern market down the street with the best olives in the city, displayed in huge plastic tubs and flavored with peppers, garlic and lemons; the meat shops where the butchers sling giant half-carcasses of lamb over their shoulders and stroll down the street; and the little Lebanese shop across the road that sells freshly roasted almonds and pistachios out of huge bins as well as every conceivable variety of those tiny honey-soaked nut pastries whose intense, grainy sweetness is a delicious and necessary foil to the tongue-tingling bitterness of Arabic coffee. But today, rather than a tagine or tabbouli, these markets provided all the necessary components of a taste-of-France menu inspired both by our recent travels and by the Eastern Mediterranean ingredients in which the Uxbridge Road abounds. We celebrated our families' safe travels and the beginning of our holiday revels with this warming country French stew and an oh-so-Parisian tarte Tatin.

Chicken Provencale

3 tablespoons olive oil
1 4-5 lb chicken, cut into pieces
20 pearl onions, peeled*
1 lb baby bella mushrooms, halved
5 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
1 teaspoon quatre epices
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1 14 oz can petite diced tomatoes
1 cup dry white wine
2 long strips lemon peel, cut with vegetable peeler
1/2 cup good-quality green olives, pitted
Salt and freshly ground pepper

Heat olive oil over medium high heat in a large pot. Sprinkle chicken pieces liberally with salt and pepper. When oil is hot but not smoking, add chicken and cook until browned on all sides, working in batches if necessary. Remove chicken to a plate, maintaining the heat.

Add onions, spice mixture and red pepper and cook until onions are browned and beginning to be tender. Add mushrooms and cook for a few minutes longer, then add garlic and stir for another minute. Season with salt and pepper. Add chicken back into pot.

Add tomatoes, wine, lemon peel and olives. Bring to a boil, then turn heat to low and simmer until chicken is cooked through and liquid is reduced, about 40 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Serve over rice or mashed potatoes. This stew is even better the next day.

Serves 4.

*The easiest way to peel pearl onions is to drop them into boiling water for a minute, which allows you to slip their skins off easily.

Tarte Tatin Adapted from Gourmet, March 2001

1 frozen puff pastry sheet, thawed
1/4 cup unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
7 to 9 Braeburn apples, peeled, quartered lengthwise, and cored

Preheat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.

Roll pastry sheet and cut out a round to fit skillet; transfer to a baking sheet and chill.

Spread butter thickly on bottom and side of well-seasoned iron skillet and pour sugar evenly over bottom. Arrange as many apples as will fit vertically on sugar, packing them tightly in concentric circles.

Cook apples over moderately high heat, undisturbed, until juices are deep golden and bubbling, 18 - 25 minutes.

Put skillet in middle of oven; bake 20 minutes, then remove from oven and lay pastry round over apples.

Bake tart until pastry is browned, 20 - 25 minutes. Transfer skillet to a rack and cool at least 10 minutes.

Just before serving, place a platter over skillet and invert tart onto it.

Serves 8; leftovers make an excellent breakfast.

Exploring Shepherd's Bush by Bus

The Perfect Winter Salad?

2006-12-15T23:45:00.000Z

It seems like every visit to our favorite London gastropub, the Anglesea Arms, is a memorable experience. A recent evening found us slumped on the worn leather couches, warmed by the fire and a couple of pints of bitter, and grazing on a dozen briny Irish rock oysters; a plate of buffalo mozzarella, tomato, basil and red peppers; and a salad that combined strong, wintry flavors so successfully that we decided to try it at home.

Winter Salad with Sweet Potato, Shallots & Feta and Roasted Garlic Vinaigrette

6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 large sweet potato, peeled and diced into 1/2 inch cubes
1/2 teaspoon quatre epices*
4 echalions** or 8 shallots, unpeeled
1 head garlic, unpeeled
1 cup 1/2 inch cubes of good-quality feta cheese
1 lb mixed greens
4 teaspoons balsamic vinegar
Salt and freshly ground pepper

Preheat oven to 425 F. Sprinkle sweet potato with salt, pepper and spice mixture. Add shallots and head of garlic and toss with 1 tablespoon olive oil. Spread on baking sheet and roast, stirring occasionally, until vegetables are tender and sweet potato is browned, about 30 minutes.

Mix remaining olive oil and balsamic vinegar in a large bowl. Cut the top off the head of garlic and squeeze its flesh into the oil and vinegar mixture. Cream it with a fork and beat it into the mixture. Season with salt and pepper.

Peel shallots and cut into 1/2 inch pieces. Toss greens with dressing and divide among 4 plates. Arrange sweet potatoes, shallots and feta around or on the salad, grind fresh pepper over the top, and serve immediately.

Makes 4 first-course servings.

*Quatre epices is a French spice blend, available at some specialty shops. If you can't find it, substitute a blend of pepper, cloves, nutmeg and ginger.

** Echalions, sometime called banana shallots, are a kind of long, oval-shaped shallot grown in the eastern regions of England. They have an especially sweet taste, but regular shallots would also work fine!

Joyeux Noël

2006-12-13T21:32:00.000Z

This year, we decided to give each other an early Christmas present - a trip to Paris! La Ville de Lumière seemed especially bright, with holiday displays in the windows of the shops on the Champs-Élysées, an enormous tree in front of the Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris, and "Joyeux Fêtes!" greetings hand-painted on the windows of every cafe. It was everso tres romantique; so lost in love were we, as we embraced our way from the Musee d'Orsay to the Tour d'Eiffel, that we hardly noticed the freezing drizzle, our failing umbrellas or any onset of les sniffles. Was it our passionate kisses or the dizzying heights of la Cathédrale's bell tower that made our knees feel weak?

It will come as no surprise that our stops at the Centre Pompidou and Sainte-Chapelle were mere interludes between meals. We stopped for sustenance as often as we could, at a traditional creperie near the Arc de Triomphe - where we enjoyed mugs of cider with the specialties de la maison - or for quiche and (French) onion soup at a cafe on the Ile St-Louis.

Our important gourmandising, though, was saved for the evenings.

We dined at Brasserie Flo on Breton oysters (which were kept and prepared on the sidewalk in front by this man, whom we shall call Pierre), choucroute, and Tam's first steak tartare, which was minced and bound with egg in the kitchen, then tossed with herbs and spices tableside by our waiter - tres chic. Brasserie Flo was founded in 1886 by an Alsatian named Floderer and purchased in 1968 by Jean-Paul Bucher (whose purchase of the famous Cafe Balzar caused great controversy in Paris a few years ago, but on whom we have no position) - the first of his many restaurants. Brusque service, expensive champagne, clouds of smoke, everything you could
possibly ask for in a French brasserie.

Le Coupe Chou in the Quartier Latin, with its stone walls, candlelight and open fire, was a different gastronomic experience altogether. It serves classic Parisian fare: pates and terrines, escargots, confit du canard, boeuf bourgignon. The food was lovely, but the true highlight of our evening there was the masquerade birthday party going on in the next room. Parisian after Parisian arrived decked out in top hats, wigs, masks, fishnet stockings and elaborate shoes, passing by our table with a swish of feathers and fur. It was a most entertaining sight to contemplate as we sipped our wine and quaffed our coffee.

The next day we felt brave enough to take on the overwhelmingly giant collection of art in the Louvre. It seems to be a peculiarity of art museums in Europe that people come great distances not to see the beauties of the Mona Lisa or the Winged Victory of Samothrace, but to take pictures of themselves with an arm around said famous works. Indeed, any actual close examination of these pieces arouses considerable irritation among fellow museum-goers whose photos you have unwittingly marred with your presence; the etiquette is to line up and have your friend/wife/uncle snap a quick photo of you grinning with, say, the Dying Slave, then move quickly out of the way for the next guy. Unenthused about this mode of observation, we headed for some less frenetic parts of the huge museum, and spent a happy few hours examining Corot and Degas at leisure.

In the last few hours before our train departed, we indulged in that most Parisian of all pastimes, shopping. We made a quick sashay through Le Bon Marché, all decked out for the holidays in sparkling lights and golden baubles, watching elderly French ladies in hats and furs debating over Chanel bags and Hermès scarves. Then we crossed the street to Paris' grocery store du monde, La Grande Épicerie de Paris, which sells everything from perfect glossy fruit tarts and glorious fresh produce to olives and cheeses; it even has an American specialties section where you can buy things like Heinz ketchup and Karo syrup. We bought some Camembert to take home, and spent the train ride home looking around innocently when people wondered what could be causing the terrible smell in car 4.

More pictures of our exciting adventure are available here:

Paris

Stone Age Soup

2006-12-08T10:35:00.000Z

It may surprise some of our readers to learn that, despite being newlyweds and foodies, our kitchen in Shepherd's Bush is woefully ill-equipped. It's true that mere months ago, we were showered with wonderful culinary wedding gifts from our friends and families - a blender, an ice-cream maker - and we delighted in using them for a couple of months before we left the US. In truth, our stateside kitchen is the envy of all who have the pleasure to behold it. We're proud to have nearly every useful gastro-gadget known to man, from microplaners to Laura's beloved Cuisinart, plus a great set of dishes to boot. Alas, upon embarking on our current extended honeymoon / research adventure, we had little choice but leave all of our culinary wonder widgets behind.

Actually, as we've outfitted our temporary, bare-bones kitchen in London, it's been interesting to see which items we've deemed to be essential - a desert-island list of kitchen utensils. In addition to the service for six set of stainless steel cutlery (knives, forks, soup spoons and teaspoons), service for four set of dishes (plates of two sizes, bowls and mugs), a pair of serving dishes, and various assorted glasses from the 98p Store, we've also accumulated the following:

bottle opener
can opener
8" chef's knife
colander
grater
12" iron omelette pan
liquid measuring pitcher
vegetable peeler
4 quart stainless steel pot with lid
1 quart stainless steel saucepan with lid
tongs
spatula
2 wooden spoons
whisk
baking sheet
8" square cake pan
toaster
electric kettle
French press style coffee maker

We recently added a 10" serrated bread knife to this list when Tam confessed that his new primary criteria for buying a loaf of bread was how easy it might be to cut with a chef's knife.

As you might imagine, this limited roster precludes the accomplishment of many a kitchen task, most notably blending, pureeing and mixing (electrically, anyway). The creation of beautifully creamy vegetable soups, for example, has been made vastly more complicated by the sad, if temporary, loss of our immersion blender. But with a little ingenuity and a willingness to engage in a little light manual labor, we've discovered such tasks can be accomplished; and their completion can not only lead to a sense of connection with cooks of past, less technologically advanced ages, but can also result in some satisfying culinary results, as in this lovely winter soup.

Leek, Potato and Parsnip Soup

2 slices bacon
1 leek, chopped
1 teaspoon dried thyme
2 medium russet potatoes, peeled and chopped
3 parsnips, peeled, cored and chopped
4 cups chicken broth
1/4 cup heavy cream
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Salt and freshly ground pepper

Heat large heavy pot over medium heat until hot. Add bacon and cook on both sides until crispy and brown. Remove bacon with tongs to paper towels, leaving fat in the pan. Turn heat to medium low.

Add leeks and thyme, seasoning liberally with salt. Saute for a few minutes until soft, being sure not to let them brown. Add potatoes and parsnips, and just enough broth to cover vegetables. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and simmer until vegetables are very tender, about 20 minutes.

Mash vegetables thoroughly with wooden spoon or fork until they are a creamy mass, then thin out the mixture with the remainder of the broth. Let simmer for another 5-10 minutes. Remove from heat. Add cream and lemon juice, and season to taste with salt and pepper. If you like, crumble the bacon and sprinkle on top of each serving.

Serves 4.

A couple of notes:

Obviously, the unorthodox part of this recipe is to cook the vegetables in a small amount of liquid and then add more broth later. We did this to facilitate mashing the vegetables by hand, which is much more difficult with more liquid. If you have a better-equipped kitchen, you could of course blend the whole mixture with an immersion blender in the usual way. For an extra-creamy, luxurious result, you could then put the soup through a sieve.

Also, we served these garnished with parsnip chips. If you want to try this, here is how to do it:

Parsnip Chips

2 tablespoons olive oil
2 parsnips, halved across and then sliced paper thin (if you have a mandoline, this would be a good use for it)
Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper

Heat olive oil in large skillet over medium high heat until hot but not smoking. Add parsnip slices, carefully spreading them out in the pan. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cook, turning when necessary, until slices are brown and crispy. Remove to paper towel and season with more salt and pepper if desired.

These are not quite as crispy as deep-fried chips would be, but they're very tasty and make a good snack!

Inside Man II

2006-12-07T18:50:00.000Z

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the pub...

The Inside Man’s infiltration has been short-lived, but with the holidays on the horizon and a new career waiting in the New Year (or so the fortune cookie would have us believe), Tam is ending his tenure at the Crown and Sceptre this week. In addition to the thrill of being called “barman” on a regular basis, his time inside has yielded some useful information about drinking in London. While this slang doesn’t rhyme, it might help you out if, some day, you find yourself behind the bar in an English pub taking orders for drinks you’ve never heard of from people whose accents you don’t understand.

Shandy: Half lemonade, half beer (usually lager)
Shandygaff: Half ginger ale or ginger beer, half beer (usually lager); the omniscient Wikipedia claims that "this drink is known to have existed in England since the 1600s"
Snake Bite: Half hard cider, half lager, with a shot of black currant cordial (lime and black currant cordials seem to be popular additions to pints of lager and, in the case
of the latter, Guinness)
Lager Top: Beer with a small splash of lemonade; as the name indicates, this is usually made with lager as well, but in his short time behind the bar, Tam served several ale tops and shandies

One of the unique things about the Crown and Sceptre is the international bar staff. With Tam’s short-lived tenure, the staff includes representatives from five of the seven continents - and there really aren’t that many Antarctican pint pullers. Incidentally, Tam creamed his colleagues in a recent round of Trivial Pursuit: The International Version, wherein each color represents a continent (also unapologetically excluding Antarctica; we suppose there just aren't that many questions to be asked about penguins).

Our local second division football (soccer) team is the Queens Park Rangers (QPR), whose pitch is nary two blocks from our flat. Since long before it was acquired by Fullers, the Crown and Sceptre has been the pre-match meeting place for QPR fans. One aspect of this interesting local-to-locals relationship is the presence of this portrait of the QPR mascot, the Rapid Ranger, on the wall between the bar and the kitchen. When Mike the Manager first took the reins of the pub just over a year ago with an eye towards its dandification, he thought of selling the portrait and hanging some less-kitschy black and white prints in its place. He received bids in excess of £3,000. But, just before he got it off his hands, he got a message from the Fullers central management office stating that under no circumstances and for no sum was he to part with this priceless work of art. Consequently, Sotheby's won't be descending on the Crown and Sceptre any time soon.

The great big annual London foodblogger cookie swap

2006-12-05T00:35:00.000Z

One great reason to do a little blogging is the potential for invitations to events like this weekend's Christmas cookie hoo ha. Wonderful wine paired with a tasting of fondue and raclette, lively conversation with some of the city's most devoted foodies, plus a whole bunch of amazing cookies...

But what do you eat when you get home from a cookie swap? You're not really that hungry, but you need something to counteract all the sugar. For weeks, we've been toying with a recipe for a zucchini omelette. This frittata was a happy byproduct of our quest, and makes for an excellent and easy post-gluttony light supper - a food category especially relevant during the holiday season!

Zucchini (Courgette) and Gruyere Frittata

1 tablespoon butter
1 small onion, chopped
1 medium zucchini, cut into matchsticks
1 clove garlic, chopped
4 large eggs
1/2 cup Gruyere cheese, grated
Salt and freshly ground pepper

Preheat broiler.

Melt butter over medium heat in a skillet until it stops foaming. Add onions and cook until beginning to soften, about 2 minutes. Add zucchini and cook until tender and browned. Add garlic and stir for 1 minute. Season with salt and pepper. Turn heat to low.

Beat eggs together in small bowl and season with salt and pepper. Add cheese to egg mixture and pour evenly into skillet with zucchini mixture. Cook over low heat until eggs are almost set, about 4 minutes. Put under broiler until top is puffed and beginning to brown, 1-2 minutes, and serve immediately.

Serves 2.

Creoso I Cymru

2006-12-02T10:39:00.000Z

For Americans, traveling in the United Kingdom differs from travel anywhere else in the world, in that every tourist experience is influenced by preconceived notions gleaned from the mountain of British literature we consume from childhood onwards. British writers have historically dominated children's literature; for every Lemony Snicket, there are several E. Nesbits, John Masefields, C.S. Lewises and now, of course, J.K. Rowlings and Philip Pullmans to form images of the streets of wartime London and plant an awareness of the house system at Eton in the minds of small inhabitants of rural Michigan and Pennsylvania. Later, long before we actually see the Houses of Parliament or the spires of Oxford, we have visions of the dirt and squalor of Dickens' Victorian London; we understand the distinctions between earls and barons and their implications for the desperate social climbing depicted in Jane Austen and Trollope; we know about the elitism and superciliousness of Waugh's Oxford ("I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour"); we see Dublin through the eyes of the Blooms. The result of these years of inculcation is that Britain often seems vaguely familiar when we finally arrive - almost, as Alison Lurie says in her tremendously witty transatlantic comedy Foreign Affairs, "an experience of déjà vu."

Wales, though, is underrepresented in the British literature that crosses the Atlantic and forms pictures of the isles in our innocent Yankee heads. We arrive with perceptions, accurate or otherwise, of England, Scotland, Ireland, but what do we know about Wales? We've read some Dylan Thomas, and devotees of epic novels featuring characters with really long names might have come across John Cooper Powys. Laura's vision of Wales comes almost totally from a set of children's books by Susan Cooper called The Dark Is Rising, set partially in Wales and portraying it as a place of ancient secrets and violent magical forces. So, in our vague imaginings, Wales appeared remote and isolated, a place of dragons and fog. Who knew what we might find there?

We left Paddington Bear behind in the morning, still waiting patiently for his rescuer, and began the winding journey westward, collecting some basic facts about Wales along the way. The political identity of the area has been quite fluid right through the twentieth century, and its national character is by no means as assured as Scotland's or Ireland's. The southeastern part of Wales for which we were headed, despite being identifiably Welsh culturally, was until recently not considered part of Wales at all; before 1974 it was unclaimed by either England or Wales, and maps of the region were titled "Wales and Monmouthshire." Cardiff was only proclaimed the Welsh capital in 1955, and the revival of the Welsh language dates only from about the 1960s. Although the Free Wales Army and Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (Welsh Defense Movement) were responsible for a series of bombings protesting the investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales in the 1960s, enthusiasm for Welsh independence was often somewhat attenuated and in 1979 the Welsh decisively rejected the idea of a Welsh assembly in a referendum. (It was mooted again and passed with a very narrow majority in 1997.)

Wanting to see some of the countryside before getting to Cardiff, we disembarked in Newport and caught a quick glimpse of the Norman cathedral where the fifth-century founder of the church, St Woolos, is supposed to be buried. It's also the site where the Chartists, protesting for parliamentary reform, were gunned down by British soldiers in the massacre of 1839; Queen Victoria later knighted the mayor who ordered the shootings. Having hit the high points of Newport, we ran back down to the station and boarded the next train towards Gloucester, then alighted (as they say here) at Chepstow, where we caught an extremely rickety local bus going towards Monmouth. (The driver seemed somewhat surprised to have two new additions to what was clearly a fairly constant clientele.) As we careened around a sharp curve in the country road, the stone skeleton of Tintern Abbey rose up before us. The ruins of this Cisterian monastery manage to convey much of the asceticism to which the industrious members of the Benedictine order aspired; on a chilly afternoon in late November, it was easy to get a sense of all the isolation any self-respecting, self-flagellating monk could ask for.

A short train ride got us to Cardiff in time for a stroll up Cathedral Road and dinner.We had a great time hanging out in the bar at the Churchill Hotel, where logs were piled up around the fireplace, people chatted in Welsh on the couch, and lights flashed on a Christmas tree decorated in the height of Celtic kitsch as everyone downed pints of Brains. The name of this popular Cardiff ale makes for some startling coincidences on Welsh menus, like "Steak and Brains pie." When the Brains-sponsored Welsh football (soccer) team plays in France, where alchohol advertising on uniforms is forbidden, the players wear jerseys that read "Brawn" instead of the usual "Brains." Clever, no?

While a breakfast of eggs and kippers(!) was certainly a treat, the culinary highlight of our adventure was easily lunch at the Armless Dragon. Specializing in contemporary Welsh cuisine, the set menu included game terrine and chutney (plated with sprouts and mixed greens), spiced aubergine soup (served with a drizzle of créme fraîche), mackerel and crab sauce (on a bed of baba ganoush-like aubergine mash), braised lamb (with a turnip mash - a modern take on hotch-potch), and sticky toffee pudding.

(A note on the dessert: the British word "pudding" refers to any number of foods that are prepared by mixing various ingredients with a binding agent. A British pudding may be sweet or savory, and can be baked, steamed or boiled. Colloquially, "pudding" in the UK may also refer to dessert generally, as may "sweet" or "afters." Specifically, sticky toffee pudding is a British dessert consisting of sponge cake made with finely chopped dates and covered with toffee sauce. As one might expect, its origins are in dispute, with claims to its invention made from Millington to Newburgh, but there is some consensus that Francis Coulson popularized and shared the recipe at his Sharrow Bay Country House Hotel in the Lake District. We like it with vanilla ice cream. Oh, and "aubergine" means "eggplant.")

We walked off lunch with a stroll through Cardiff Castle, a somewhat bizarre structure which was rebuilt and redecorated, incorporating Roman and Norman remains, in the late nineteenth century by the fabulously wealthy and apparently somewhat eccentric Earl of Bute. He acquired the property through marriage and, in collaboration with the decorative artist and architect William Burges, created a romanticized Victorian version of a fairytale medieval castle in which he and his family spent six weeks every year pretending to be feudal lords. This odd monstrosity encloses a large area of grounds and a twelfth-century Norman keep, surrounded by a moat, in which Robert, Duke of Normandy, was imprisoned in a most unfraternal way by his brother Henry I. It's a splendid place from which to direct battles or watch the sun set over Cardiff.

Maybe next time we'll see a dragon.

The first batch

2006-11-29T14:55:00.000Z

Another of our favorite uses for molasses is these delicious cookies, baked in preparation for this weekend's great big annual London foodblogger cookie swap, hosted by the Passionate Cook and with probable appearances by the folks at Cook Sister!, SpittoonExtra, Xochitl Cooks, Pertelote, Bill, Please, Cherry's Kitchen , Daydream Delicious, Il Blog di San Lorenzo and more. Watch this space for pictures of the event.

This is the first cookie baking of the season here in Shepherd's Bush! By the time Christmas rolls around, we'll have it down pat.

Ginger Spice Drop Cookies

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup chopped stem ginger in syrup (or crystallized ginger)
1 cup dark brown sugar
3/4 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1 large egg
1/4 cup black treacle (blackstrap molasses)

Combine dry ingredients in medium bowl; whisk to blend. Using electric mixer, beat brown sugar and butter in large bowl until fluffy. Add egg and molasses and beat until blended. Add flour mixture and mix just until blended. Mix in stem (or crystallized) ginger.

Preheat oven to 350°F. Drop tablespoonfuls of batter onto sheets, spacing 2 inches apart.

Bake cookies until cracked on top but still soft to touch, about 12 minutes. Cool on sheets 1 minute. Carefully transfer to racks and cool. (Can be made 5 days ahead. Store airtight at room temperature.)

Makes about 30.

Adapted from Bon Appétit, March 2000