Holiday part 1

Instead of putting all pictures from this Summer holiday together in one long blog post, let's divide them into separate posts per events. That ought to save me some time and prevent me from postponing it until the next holiday.

We spent a few days in the nice rural counties in the South-East of England. While staying their, our friends S & O took us to one of their favourite Oxford restaurants: the Trout (map), situated in a lovely place near a water mill and a river. But of course we don't care about scenery at a food blog. We care about the food!

Let's state upfront that I didn't take any pictures of my own food. Why? Well, the food of the other three in our company was served first. So, while waiting for my course, I took pictures of the other three courses. When finally my food arrived, I was so hungry that I immediately dived in, without the slightest notion of taking a picture (the wait probably took only 1-2 minutes, but seeing the other food and having whetted our appetites with some bread and olives I guess I let myself go). For myself, I had ordered deepfried cod in Peroni beer batter with chips and pea puree and a tartare sauce, which in itself was good because it was prepared with fresh ingredients; the cod itself was a little tasteless unfortunately.

Now, for the pictures:

O had a burger with gherkin, mustard mayo, cheese, relish, extra bacon and chips.

S had a pasta dish, strozzapreti, with artichokes, olives, tomatoes, rocket and goats cheese

N had a ribeye steak, with balsamic roast onions, rocket, horseradish, parmesan and chips.

Toast Skagen

The first two days of our stay in Sweden being quite rainy, we spent them indoors. Friday we went for a nice drive around the country and stopped in Ljungskile, somewhere on the south-west-coast of Sweden.

It had some kind of small vessel harbor, on the banks of a fjord. Next to it was a restaurant where we had lunch. N took the fish and chips, I took the Toast Skagen. My first real Scandinavian dish this holiday! Hurray.

I knew it from TV, when some Dutch chef (Rudolf) went to Stockholm to take on a Swedish chef (no, not from the Muppets) in a Toast Skagen contest. He even managed to win that by public vote. It is a shrimp salad on toast. The shrimp salad consists of shrimps (yeah really), red onion, dill, sour cream and mayonaise and is served with some red caviar. I knew I liked it, because after having seen the TV show I had made it myself and I liked it. I did find that the flavour enhances when it's left to stay for a day, so the onion gives off more flavour. However, in a restaurant where everything is prepared fresh, they can't do that naturally, so it had a less intense flavour but was still great.


N's fish was on the other hand quite tasteless. Luckily there was some yellowy sauce accompanying it which gave it some flavour.