Holiday part 2

In part 2 of the holiday series, I'd like to take you to to a wonderful little tea room in Shipston-on-Stour. Well, actually, I can't take you there literally, but you catch my drift. N and I took S there to have some tea and lunch (quite hungry at 14:00).

S had a cheese-scone with avocado, brie or camembert and cress

N had toast with scrambled eggs and bacon

For myself, I ordered a classic scone with strawberry jam and clotted cream

Note about the clotted cream: I had always wondered what it would be like, since it can't be bought here in the Netherlands. It turned out to be closer to butter than to whipped cream, which may alternatively be served in the Netherlands when having tea (for example, at the Theefabriek). It was rich. It was delicious. It was artery-clogging, heart-stoppingly good. Yum!
Also, I think this was the first time I had an actual, full-sized scone. Not the mini-versions we always sample at the Theefabriek, nor the selfmade attempts at scones that wouldn't rise and stay compact little bricks. No, this was a piece of pastry, the size of a tennisball, very fluffy yet satisfying.

To me, it made for a very nice English tea-drinking event.

Strawberry Fanta

Today was the day for a little shopping spree. A and me agreed to go on a shop-emptying food-tour, to gather as much delicious things as possible. More specifically, we were going to the Amazing Oriental. A place which, as you might expect, offers oriental foods.

I won't delve into the details of the 50+ different noodle soups they offer on endless shelves of ramen goodness, of which we only managed to take only somewhat like 10 different ones (before running out of shopping basket space). Or the 2-for-the-prize-of-1 freezer goodies, like Endless Amounts of Spring Rolls (EASR) or risolles. Okay, EASR may come down to just 120 spring rolls -- but still, that's one nice way of having enough snacks in your freezer until 2011, their apparent expiry date (don't expect the rolls to make it to that date). I won't mention the five different types of crips and other bagged or canned snacks.

No, instead, I'll tell you about the Strawberry Fanta we came across.

It came all the way from Thailand. Afraid as those Thais may have been that such a long journey might decolorize this drink, or that it might lose flavour, they made sure to put in extra colorants, sugar and artificial strawberry flavouring.

This drink was more pink than the Amsterdam Gay Parade. It radiated pinkness to such an extent, that Barbie would start to paint over her doll house just to make sure that it hadn't turned white all of a sudden in comparison. In fact, it was that pink, that I suspect that the Thai economy is booming merely by the amount of money made by the pink food colorant producer.

Flavourwise: it tasted more like that pink chewing gum type, than like strawberries. It was chemical. It was artificial. It was sweeter than pure sugar itself. Yes, it was that sweet, that my dentist has already bought himself a third house over in France because of the money he'll make on my caries.

Delicious.