Tag Archives: food

One of the many pleasant aspects of visiting a new culture or area is that the ol’ taste buds can get excited about a new range of food items. Madeira may be a modestly sized island, ~36mls/60kms x 14mls/23kms, but it was a rich source of new flavours and textures to explore.

Just about the first meal anyone mentions when you announce that you are about to visit Madeira for the first time is their Scabbard Fish with Banana recipe. It sounds a little weird to us, I suppose, my mother certainly wrinkled her nose when I mentioned it, although we are quite used to serving fruit with meat so why not with fish meat? Interpretations seem to vary a little but its essence seemed to be a fillet of fried fish with a couple of halves of fried banana. The Scabbard Fish is a deep water fish (down below 800m/2500ft) and is most interesting in its unprepared state. I know I’ve shown it before but here it is again for the sake of completeness. Verdict: quite pleasant but I wouldn’t rave about it.

My first brush with traditional Portuguese fare, though, was Bacalhau a Brás,  a dish which resembles Kedgeree, really, It’s made with flaked Bacalau (salted Cod) in a mixture of egg, onion and grated potato (which replaces the rice in Kedgeree). There’s a few black olives thrown in as well for good measure. I loved it and chose it for both my Sunday lunches on the island.

Some while ago I watched limpets being prepared somewhat experimentally by a couple of our TV chefs, one being my hero, Mr. Stein. Enter one of my biggest irritations of the British people. Here we are, surrounded by a rich source of delicious food in our offshore waters, much of which our dullard population at best ignores or at worst refuses to try, such that our bounty is shipped of to the much more discerning foreigners. Mention snails or frogs’ legs to many a Brit and you’ll get a reaction along the lines of “yuk, that sounds ‘orrible!”. These are often the same folks that will happily stuff the lining of cows’ stomachs down their neck in the form of tripe. Limpets sounded exciting to me, why don’t we use them? They are really just a small version of the very highly prized abalone, after all? They encrust most of the rocks along our rocky shore and, though perhaps difficult to gather, should be plentiful. I’ve wanted to try them for some time. Bless Madeira! The Madeirans love ‘em and even have a special pan on which to cook and serve Grilled Limpets (or Grilled Limpeds, as I saw them advertised on one restaurant board). They tend to get the garlic butter treatment and I thought them utterly delicious.

For a bit of a blow-out on our last evening meal in Madeira, we finally bumped into a classic Portuguese dish called Cataplana. Actually, a cataplana is really the cooking pot from which the dish takes its name. The cataplana is a sort of symmetrical clam-shell shaped pan/pot, typically made of copper, in which all manner of combinations of mouth-watering delicacies are baked in the oven. Our version – they clearly vary tremendously – contained a mixture of pork and seafood including clams, prawns and mussels. We both loved it and it made a very fitting end to our enjoyable week on Madeira.

A final footnote. While waiting on Sunday to board our TAP flight back to a cold and potentially snowy England, we couldn’t help but be amused by the sight of this advertising hoarding in Funchal airport’s departure lounge. Recognizing that the spelling and particularly the pronunciation of the English language is tricky and must be a bear for a teacher to explain so we won’t laugh but this brought a smile to the face of a Brit who didn’t want to go home.

It was a nice stay on a very friendly island.

Madeira’s population is roughly 250,000 in round numbers. About 50% of these live in the capital, Funchal, with its buildings climbing up hills surrounding the harbour rather like the banked seats in an amphitheatre. Today was our last full day on Madeira and we were free to wander around and explore the town to our hearts’ content.

Target one was the market, which starts at 7:00 AM. Outside the hall we came across ladies selling flowers dressed in their traditional costumes o colourfully striped skirts and hats bearing contrasting side triangular shapes that looked to me like pixie ears. Cute! Such ladies, we were told, used to walk down the mountain side carrying their flowers to sell at the market, then walk back up the mountain side after their day at the office; distances of anything up to 10kms/7mls each way. That’d keep you fit.

The market hall itself, on two levels, were mainly the fruit and vegetable stalls with the buzz and bustle I’ve come to expect of non-UK European food markets. I hadn’t, however, come across anything approaching high-pressure fruit selling before but here, they were particularly keen on offering tasters of mangoes, passion fruits and the like followed by a pre-emptive close. We tasted – everything was excellent – but resisted signing a contract.

At the rear of the market hall was the fish market where we were able to come face to face with a Madeiran speciality, the black scabbard fish. Being essentially an old volcano in the Atlantic ocean, the land shelves away rapidly and the surrounding waters get very deep very quickly. The scabbard fish is a deep water fish that is, well, frankly bitch ugly; it’s very long and thin with a black skin, large eyes and fearsome looking teeth – most unappetizing in appearance. However, once prepared it makes damn good eating and is traditional served with another popular commodity on Madeira, bananas. Fried fish and bananas – yum! It sounds odd but it’s a curiously interesting combination – exactly what I jump at on a menu.

After the market, target two was one of Funchal’s two main gardens. Both require a climb and one way to achieve the climb is via a cable car which, though it struck us as a little on the expensive side, looked the most fun. Actually, there are two separate cable car runs linked by a short walk. The first takes you up to the higher of the two gardens, the tropical garden. The second brings you about half-way back down again to the lower botanical garden. To return, you have to reverse your journey and go back up before descending all the way back to sea level again. This seemed a slightly curious arrangement to me but I’m sure there was some logic to it somewhere. One of our party had already visited the tropical garden and pronounced it “very green” so Carol fancied the botanical garden instead. The combined ticket for both cable cars and entrance to the tropical garden was ~€28.00 each.

Our choice turned out to be a good one. Firstly, it most certainly wasn’t just green:

Secondly, while Carol was in her element and I was wandering around pretending to be interested in nature without a pulse, up popped a very unexpected visitor and landed beside me posing cooperatively for my first dragonfly encounter of 2012. It even waited long enough for me to purloin Carol’s proper camera. New species are always a thrill and, though this looked basically like a Common Darter (Sympetrum striolatum), it was actually a related species, an Island Darter (Sympetrum nigrifemur). By itself, this would have made my day but then I spotted a new entry for the butterfly collection, too, a Macaronesian Red Admiral (Vanessa volcania). Big grins all round.

Our wildlife thrills were not yet over. Having retraced our cable car route back to sea level and whilst investigating Funchal itself, we spotted a few large butterflies flitting about the small but charming Municipal Garden in the middle of town. I knew that the Canary Islands and Madeira were two of the very few places in Europe that were home to populations of Monarch/Milkweed butterflies and, though I might have secretly held hopes that I’d see one, I really didn’t expect to. Here they were, another new species for the collection. They weren’t alone, either. A very small blue was flitting about the grass and, though we really needed our wildlife lenses, we did manage to catch it on pixels and identify it as Lang’s Short-tailed Blue. (A publishable view of the topside proved impossible to get.)

All in all, a pretty successful day.

4:40 AM is not a very friendly time for check-in desks to open at London’s Heathrow airport. I started investigating my travel options and discovered, according to one friendly parking service lady, that “they” had only recently begun opening check-in desks before 5:00 AM and that, consequently, their regular shuttle bus services and didn’t begin before 5:00 AM. Neither did the “meet and greet” services, effectively valet parking where one drives to the terminal and is met by a man who zooms off to undeclared destinations with ones car, begin until 5:00 AM. So, we seem to have adjusted early morning flight times without adjusting the support services. Sound familiar? Regular long-term parking still works but you have to summon the bus rather than having a regular circuit being performed. We opted for a taxi, which was to be £65.00 plus, of course, a decent tip for the poor sleep-deprived driver.

3:30 AM is not a very friendly time for a taxi to come calling. [Ed: it’s about an hour’s ride from home to Heathrow, to be safe.] An hour or so earlier and it would be worth toughing it out by staying up and not bothering with bed. Naturally, going to bed early doesn’t work ‘cos you just lie there awake until you’d normally have hit the sack. So, bed it was with our beauty sleep rudely curtailed at 2:40 AM by a very gentle alarm courtesy of Nokia.

All our bags were packed and ready to go …

[Ed: O Hell, did you have to?]

… and, sure enough, our sleep-deprived driver arrived on the dot of 3:30 AM to collect his two sleep-deprived but excited passengers, one of whom almost left his bag in the porch, complete with dancing shoes. Dancing shoes? Yes, well, Carol did say we were off to Madeira to do the levadas. Dreadful Portuguese puns aside, mercifully the driver was awake enough to notice and retrieved my bag for me.

With Heathrow just beginning to wake-up, check-in was a breeze. Luck continued when we were handed an exit row and, with the TAP plane only about 50% full, we had a very comfortable 3hr 15min flight to Funchal, Madeira, where we were greeted by Donal, our tour leader, and sunshine. Funchal is pretty much an amphitheatre of buildings clinging to a steep, curved mountainside surrounding  a harbour where cruise ships frequently call. Actually, Madeira being little more than a 50-mile wide collection of volcanic mountains, all it’s settlements are really amphitheatres of buildings clinging to steep mountainsides.

Madeira is on the same time zone as the UK [Ed: sensible people.] so we were settled in our hotel room by 11:30 AM in plenty of time to try something local for lunch. We found an appealing restaurant with street tables and I couldn’t resist what is apparently a popular Portuguese rendition of salt cod called Bacalhau a Brás. Not being keen on salt cod, Carol chose some very tasty grilled squid and, since the home team had named their beer Coral, Carol also fancied a glass with her name on it, albeit misspelled. I kept her company. Well, you can’t let a lady drink alone. And very good it all was, too.

You may notice the patterning on the street in the above picture. Most of the streets and paths/sidewalks in Funchal sport patterns made from a mosaic of black and white tile pieces. As far as I could tell, the pattern in each street was also unique. Laying the mosaics must have been very painstaking work but it was well worth it and makes for an attractive finish. Being a quiet Sunday, I managed a snag a sample picture of one of the more ornate side streets, unimpeded by pedestrians or cars attempting to flatten tourists standing in the middle of the road and armed with snappy cameras.

An enjoyable if painfully early start. The walking begins tomorrow.

At last, after a long wait and an even longer winter, ‘t was time to wake up our hibernating Billy Bailey from his storage field and make preparations for two weeks in Dorset. I actually collected him on Friday so I’d have all day Saturday for spring cleaning. To refresh my memory as much as anything else, I parked him in front of our house using the fancy remote control mover. The mover has power actuators which drive the actually mover motors onto and off of the caravan’s wheels. It took a while but I remembered how to activate them and drive him into his preparation spot. I pressed buttons to remove the driving motors. Only one came off, the other remained firmly in place. Repeated attempts produced the same result.

I felt like a pilot coming into land when the co-pilot calmly informs you that only one undercarriage leg is down and locked. There is a manual removal mechanism requiring many turns of a spanner; the flying analogy continues with visions of Memphis Belle, frantically winding down the starboard undercarriage leg manually. I summoned an engineer who’s coming the day after we get back. I waggled a few wires around attached to the remote controller’s main control box and lo, all was now well. Relief! Something needs looking at, though.

Saturday preparations went well but I really must stop trying to multi-thread. That’s a skill requiring the female of the species. Whilst loading Billy and our car, I fired up some charcoal to barbecue a fine-looking Gressingham duck. I continued loading. After 45 minutes or so the briquettes were ready so I hastily decanted them into my trusty Weber and, even more hastily, slashed the skin of our duck and popped it in to cook. I finished loading.

90 minutes does a small duck nicely with most of the fat running out. I removed our fine-looking Gressingham duck. My heart sank as I noticed the duck’s tail (it’s parsons nose) was still bent back and tucked into it’s body cavity. Firstly I removed the parson’s nose. Secondly I removed the plastic bag of giblets from inside our fine-looking Gressingham duck’s body cavity. ARGHH! In my multi-tasking haste, I’d completely forgotten that, unlike prepared chickens, prepared ducks come with their giblets (or accessories, as one Farmer’s Market lady likes to call them) tucked inside them. The giblets were bubbling away inside their plastic bag and seemed quite well cooked.

All was well, the plastic had not melted and the duck was delicious. No more multi-tasking, though!

I run Google Analytics on my web site, more out of evil curiosity than anything else. It’s not as if I’m trying to sell anything so I don’t need to know anything about “conversion rates”, whatever they are. It’s just nice to know that a few people are finding me and reading my musings. Typically, my site bounces along with 10-15 hits a day some of which, I’m sure, are due to myself checking or referencing my own material.

Having just returned from our lambing trip in France complete with wi-fi and blogability, I thought I’d spin into Goggle Analytics to see what the form had been. The summary page instantly had be wondering: it had a green arrow and number indicating visits were up 78.5% (over the previous month, I think). I clicked on the “view report” link to see the graph. Sure enough, for the lambing week I had the usual 14, 17, 13 kind of numbers. The weekend we were travelling home from lambing, though, showed a dramatic and quite extraordinary peek looking like the Matterhorn towering over the surrounding plain:

1. Saturday 5th – 165
2. Sunday 6th – 85
3. Monday 7th – 28

What?!

The most popular page was shown as a recipe in Gastroblog – www.curdhome.co.uk/recipes/?p=67 [note to self: I really must try to get the WordPress pretty hyperlinks working one day] which turned out to be the eminent Mr. Rick Stein’s Ragout of Lamb from his French Odyssey. Whilst in Gastroblog’s administration pages I spotted a new comment awaiting moderation though, for some reason, WordPress had not notified me of it [note to self: must try to find out why notification emails are not getting through]. I read the comment and light began to dawn:

Saw Rick Stein make this on the BBC’s Saturday Kitchen this morning and decided to look it up.  Off to the butcher’s now to get the lamb.  Drooling already!

- Nancy, SW France

Ah ha, so maybe that’s it! Folks could have been watching Saturday Kitchen, leapt onto the Internet in search of the recipe and found me.

I did a quick test: into the Google search page and enter “Ragout of lamb Stein” and, lo and behold, #1 on the list of hits – JC’S Gastroblog.

Bingo! Isn’t television wonderful?

Well, we’re back for our first full day back at home after a wonderful trip around France and feeling a little cool. The larder was bare so we popped out shopping to get supplies. Carol fancied something warming and suggested a Spaghetti Bolognese so I popped the ingredients into our shopping trolley … or I thought I had. It was down to the frozen brain again probably but, when I came to begin preparation I discovered that “Mr University Challenged” had forgotten the bacon. Drat!

Carol ran me quickly round to the local Co-op and I bought a pack of “The co-operative British unsmoked rindless back bacon”.

The package appeared to contain nothing but rashers of bacon. Therefore it came as something of a surprise when I noticed that the very next line on the package label, in relatively large print, read:

86% Pork
 

What?!

The following two items on the labelling were “Quality Bacon Standard” and “Assured Food Standards” marks.

The back of the packet, in rather smaller print, made it clear that the vast majority of the missing 14% was water. I realized water was frequently injected but I don’t think I realized to what extent. 1/7th of what I’d bought and paid nearly £5 per pound for was water.

In my humble opinion, “Quality Bacon” is 100% pork, allowing a few decimal points to cover necessary preservative for shelf life, of course – I still don’t want to eat mould.

If you possess only one barbecue, it should be a Weber 22½ inch kettle. There’s just something quite impressive, for those who’ve not seen it, in extracting a golden brown, hickory-smoked whole 15lb turkey from beneath the lid of your barbecue. It gets even more impressive when the assembled diners realize that, for some reason, Webers tend to keep the food moist rather than drying it out. A rare and much-appreciated feature when it comes to turkey cooking.

Fortunately, this doesn’t apply to me. I’ve got four barbecues, five if you count the brand new, still boxed replacement Weber kettle lurking in our loft ready for when my 20-year-old trusty original finally gives up the ghost, though two of them are portable travelling barbecues.

Barbecues should, of course, be charcoal powered. Anything gas-powered may superficially resemble a barbecue but it is really just an oven in the garden. All my barbecues are charcoal powered. Real lumpwood charcoal is the finest fuel for direct grilling of things like fish and steaks but, to power the indirect, long-cooking required for the smoked 15lb turkey trick, charcoal briquettes are most appropriate; lumpwood just doesn’t burn for long enough. The aptly named American Kingsford charcoal briquettes are best – they are, indeed, king – but regrettably we cannot buy them in the UK. (It has been known for friends to hand-import them but we really need a bona fide supplier.) No, we must put up with inferior briquettes that emit noxious fumes when first lit. Fortunately, these noxious fumes get driven off reasonably rapidly, within about 15 minutes or so, before the real heat builds up and you start cooking. Only the neighbours get tainted and not the food.

A week or so ago, my winter charcoal stocks having finally been depleted in our thus far inglorious so-called summer,  I was out buying some new supplies. I was quite excited to see something new on the market this year: Weber charcoal briquettes. Since Weber knows everything there is to know about charcoal barbecues, presumably they also know a lot about briquettes. They claimed to burn hotter and longer than regular briquettes. Maybe these would prove to be a reasonable substitute for Kingsford briquettes. Maybe these would not emit such plumes of noxious fumes. I bought two 7Kg bags and prepared to hickory smoke a turkey (only a 10 pounder) for some friends.

When the day came to bronze the bird, I threw two fire lighters (a lazy but trusted technique) into my charcoal chimney along with my new Weber briquettes and lit up. For some reason, I also shut the air vents, as recommended by my hand-importer of Kingsford, even though I usually leave them open.  A little smoke began to drift upwards so I went to make other preparations as it burned up. 15 minutes or so later Carol spotted that there were, indeed, very few fumes being emitted from the Weber briquettes. Regrettably, there also seemed to be very little in the way of heat being emitted from the Weber briquettes. Yes, they had failed to light. In 20 years of barbecuing, I had never before suffered an ignition failure. Panic! Reload with the old, trusted noxious fumes generating briquettes and start again. Better and, after a couple of hours, a beautifully-bronzed hickory-smoked 10lb turkey.

I tried the Weber briquettes again yesterday. No guests this time, just a modestly sized chicken for myself and Carol. I also took the precaution of using three lighting cubes and reverted to my normal technique of opening the air vents to get a good draw. Smoke began to drift up. After about 10 minutes the smoke died down. The heat also died down. My second ignition failure in 20 years. This stuff certainly doesn’t emit nasty fumes. It doesn’t emit anything.

I decanted the Weber briquettes, half-filled the chimney with noxious-fume generators and topped off with the recalcitrant Weber stuff. Finally, success! The regular smelly briquettes fired up readily and seemed to generate sufficient heat for long enough to force the Weber briquettes to burn.

I’ve no idea how one is expected to light these blasted Weber briquettes without other charcoal. I think a blow-torch or tactical thermonuclear device would be needed. Very disappointing!