Holiday part 3

So, there you have it. Holiday part 3, the third and final in this series (because our stay in England basically lasted for only three days if we leave out the days it took to get there). This meal would be our final real dinner in England, so it had to be good.
Our (N, S and me) quest on Google Maps led us to Chipping Norton, which supposedly had nine restaurants. We parked near the city centre, and on our way walking there, the first restaurant we came across, Wild Thyme, was situated right in between "The Arctic Fish Bar" and a real estate agent in what seemed like an unsightly little long narrow. However, the menu appealed to us, so we decided to blindly go for this restaurant -- contrary to my usual habits. Whenever I'm in a city on  holiday searching for a restaurant, I take the same strategy N uses when shopping for new shoes: visit all shops there are, only to choose the very first one you visited. However, this time we just chose instead the first restaurant we came across without checking out the other eight places *gasp*. That's why, this time, I can't tell you, my dear reader(s), whether there are indeed more than one restaurants in Chipping Norton. It doesn't matter though, this one would prove to be a very good one.

For starters, we all had the watercress soup. No pics unfortunately, because (once again) we had whetted our appetites eating olives (including kalamata!) to such an extent, that I totally forgot about taking pics and instead just charged on the presented food. Nice side-touch to the olives where slices of freshly (self-baked?) bread. For myself I had a date-walnut variety or something like that. It was nice, but the next time I guess I'd choose another one. Anyway, the soup was very nice. No sharpness there whatsoever, what I was afraid of, since watercress can be quite tangy when eaten raw. Perhaps the added cream might have tempered things a bit, but it was nice. In it were poached quail's eggs, poached exactly right -- runny yolk and all.

Next, for mains, we have some pics:

S had the double baked goats cheese souffle, baby beetroot, red onion marmalade, toasted hazelnuts. She liked it, but wouldn't have chosen it a second time.

N had Plunkett's lamb; roasted best end, braised breast, new potatoes, rosemary, ratatouille, roasted baby aubergines, tomato & basil sauce, which according to her was very good. The only thing she didn't like in the dish were the baby aubergines, but well, I guess you can't have it all.

For myself, I had a craving for vegetables, since the past few days seemed to have been filled with proteins and carbohydrates only. So, without choosing a vegetarian dish (which by the way seemed to have less vegetables than the one I chose), I chose a light fish dish: Line caught seabass, steamed over samphire, summer vegetables, new potatoes, and basil butter. Indeed, there were many vegetables: peas, shelled broad beans, new potatoes, carrots, samphire (nice touch). Very vegetabl-y, very nice. The peas and broad beans gave it some earthy flavors, the samphire a marine touch and the carrots a sweet addition -- albeit all quite subtle in their flavoring.

Then, there was dessert. Because of N's lactose intolerance, she was presented a nice selection of raspberry and strawberry (multiple fruits were available to choose from), S had a variety of gooseberry preparations and for myself, again contrary to my usual picking of something sweet for dessert, I chose cheeses. I think it had something to do with the lightness of the many vegetables. Regarding the past few days, I had prepared my stomach for more proteins, so leaving out those proteins this time and instead choosing a lot of vegetables, it was yearning for something more savoury this time. Even though I don't like cheeses that much, I did choose them this time. And a lot of them were great! They had me stuffed when I tried to eat them all and finish the plate (alas, I failed, even with N and S's help). So, dessert pics:

N's raspberries and strawberries

S's gooseberry crumble, brulee and ice cream.

My plate of 8 different local (!) cheeses, offered with a variety of homemade biscuits and apple chutney. One of the soft goat's cheeses was produced by one of the former guitarist's of the band Blur, and was very nice. Even the blue cheeses, which I usually detest (why would someone in their right mind ever choose to eat molds) weren't that bad although they scared me a little bit. N, who ranks cheese among her most favorite foods, couldn't resist and just ate some despite her lactose intolerance, just ignoring the possible consequences.

All in all, this restaurant proved to be a great place. The interior was somewhat bistro-chique, like a place you'd expect in the French Provence, but in a more-or-less distinguished way. The only funny thing was, that us being their first (and only non-local) guests that evening, we were seated in the back part of the restaurant, which was separated from the front part by a bar and a door-opening, where the local guests (or at least, the native English speakers) were seated. I guess over here, one would be seated near the windows, to show to possible customers that there are more people eating there already and thus making it more inviting for those possible customers to walk in. Nevertheless, in the back part, we were situated next to patio doors swinging open outside to a little patio where an outside terrace was situated, which made for a nice spacious feeling in an otherwise little long narrow.
Also, N and S kept remarking about one of the waitresses skirts - that her skirt had a split in the back which would seem to run all the way to her knickers and thus exposing them (and they were the female part of our company). However, when I looked, it seemed to be a very decent skirt with no knickers showing whatsoever. :-( :-)

So, there you have it. The third and final holiday food part. There is some additional material, including a short fast-food sidenote and some schnapps in Germany. When I feel like it, I might post about it. However, instead I will have to post about my (great!) birthday dinner yesterday, so when I have prepared that, I might not feel like posting about some meager food experiences with kind of worthless pictures anymore. We'll see.

Burger King Mountain Burgers

At long last! After some Blogspot problems, I'm finally able to post a small review on the Burger King Mountain Burgers. They're the temporarily available trio of burgers at the BK over here. According to the commercials shown on TV, they're supposed to celebrate some kind of rugged outdoor life. You know, for those occasions when you're at the office and feel like making a campfire, or feel like canoe'ing down that flight of stairs because it resembles a river.

A and me went to sample two of the three varieties. A had the Blue Cheese variety, and for myself, I chose the Rocky Cheese. The third burger that completes the trio would be the Smoky Barbecue.

As so often is the case, the real deal is a far cry from the grand version pictured in the ads. In this case, the disappointment was not in the flavour, but in the size. The ads and also the pics shown on the menu displayed in the restaurant, made it look like the burgers would be Whopper-sized. Not so. Their diameter was that of a regular burger.


This one, shown above, is the Blue Cheese variety. It didn't have actual blue cheese on it, but instead came with a blue-cheese-sauce. A will post his thoughts on this one in the comments below.



The one shown here, is the Rocky Cheese. Flavourwise, it was A-okay! Each Mountain Burger comes with two patties. Then, on mine, there's a slice of fried cheese on top. That is topped with some kind of barbecue sauce, a slice of tomato and some lettuce. It makes for a very fine burger. The cheese is of a very lightly flavoured kind and provides more of an extra protein-boost than an additional flavour. It combines well though, with the overall experience. The bbq-sauce is very thin, it ran off the sandwich. It has a slight pinch of heat to it, which in turn helps spice up the overall burger-experience.

All in all, despite the fact that the burger comes smaller than expected, it's a nice one. I wouldn't mind ordering it again. One last note, both positive and negative, on the fries. Negative: I ordered Twister Fries, but I got regular ones. I didn't feel like going back to the counter to ask for the ones I ordered but instead just ate the regular ones. Positive: even the regular fries are so much better than the McDonald's variety (I won't even mention the soggy KFC ones). The crust is very thin and seems extra crispy. Twister Fries are even better than that, as they not only come twisted, but also with some additional flavour-enhancing spices. One might beg to differ (N does), but in my opinion these are the best fries.

Lunch at Puur!

So, there it is: the third and final post, needed to catch up. This time, it's about lunch today. N took me for lunch to Puur!.

It's a rather trendy place which only uses biological things or so, I don't know exactly.

We had a tall, cool glass of OJ.

N had the salmon club sandwich, pictured above. I had the regular club sandwich, which had chicken breast filet, bacon, egg and tomato. Very nice.

The place didn't only have MacBook-yuppies, trendily listening to their iPods, but also some funny art by Zeptonn:

Digital prints on canvas. Also, there were wall paintings and stickers. Very nice! It made me want to recreate such art.

Ubuntu cola

Back again from Norway, with a stop in Sweden and a stop in Danmark, so time to pick up where I left off. By the way, G&A are married and it was a beautiful wedding! Also a great stay in Norway.

Wednesday the 29th we were in Sweden still, and we decided to make a trip to two nearby islands offshore, Tjörn and Orust, though they were both connected by bridges to the mainland. Like our travel guide mentioned, they didn't have anything special to visit, they were just nice places to drive or rest.

Now, the gas station where we refueled had these 0,5 L coke-bottles, which were named Ubuntu cola! Isn't that great? For those of you who don't know the other Ubuntu, it's quite a popular Linux distribution (computer operating system) and I guess the most renowned. It's free software. From their website:

Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'Humanity to others', or 'I am what I am because of who we all are'

Unfortunately, the coke wasn't for free. However, it tasted like it should have been :). Which is to say, it didn't actually taste like coke (no, not even like Pepsi). I guess it was part of some sort of charity project, so I guess it's good for your karma at least.


At the local bakery at one of the villages on Orust, I got this funny little bread, which wasn't really anything special. Like the picture shows, it had some lettuce, hard-boiled egg slices, tomato and cucumber. On top of it was some pieces of pickled herring. All over Scandinavia they have these kinds of pickled herring. Where the Dutch pickled herring is either very salt or very sour, the Scandinavian type is subtly sweet with a hint of sour. I like it! It went well with the other ingredients on the bread and made for a nice snack.

Soy Lasagna

Because of her throat infection, N had difficulty swallowing food. So for today, she wanted lasagna, because that would be easy to swallow. Having done groceries shopping with a different menu plan in mind last saturday, I actually hadn't ingredients at hand to make my traditional lasagna. So, I came up with the improvised stuff I'll describe below.

No store-bought pasta sheets in the cupboard. Darn. That would mean that I had to make my own pasta. The agony :'(. So, to start with, I took 200 grams of pasta flour (tipo 00), two eggs and some salt. Clutched the eggs in the pile of flour and gradually stirred in more and more of the flour to form some dough.

Well, that doesn't look too bad for someone who doesn't like making dough. The kneading wasn't actually that hard, because the dough basically wasn't too sticky. I let it rest for over an hour in a plastic bag in the fridge, while making the tomato sauce.

I fried some onion, carrot and zucchini along with a laurel leaf. My traditional recipe requires leeks and leaves out zucchini and carrot.

Added a tin of tomato chunks and half a liter of tomato passata. Then some fresh basil leaves and freshly ground salt and pepper, and three teaspoons of sugar. In hindsight, I might have left the sugar out because of the bechamel sauce.

Instead of browning the ground meat first in a skillet, I crumbled it straight into the boiling sauce. Normally, there should be a tin of corned beef included also. I let it cook for an hour.

Rolled out the pastry and cut it in half.

Mangled it through the pasta machine to get some nice long sheets of pasta.

Cut it into pieces which I thought would fit the tiny oven dish, cooked it for two minutes and let it drain off on a teacloth.

Cooking some pasta sheets in water with an added beef stock cube.

Next, I set out to make my very first bechamel sauce using soy milk instead of regular milk, because of N's trying out to avoid dairy products, while waiting for her lactose tolerance test. I was afraid it might winnow, but it behaved very well, just like regular milk. Consistency turned out to be the same.

There you have it. The first layer of tomato sauce and bechamel sauce.

Stuffed the dish to its max and sprinkled some grated parmesan cheese on top (hard cheeses apparently lack lactose, so this should be safe).

And there you have it! My very first improvised lasagna with soy, made from scratch.

I didn't like it that much. The soy milk was too sweet compared to regular milk, and the bolognese sauce didn't come near my regular bolognese sauce. N liked it though, so she was happy. Today, she took the leftovers with her for lunch while trying to work for a few hours despite being sick.

Nachos Todos deconstructed

Nachos todos are great! Even though making them requires little effort, it’s even simpler to make some deconstructed nachos todos. Chop up an onion, fry with 150 grams of ground meat, half a tin of corn and some jalapeño peppers (plus salt and pepper). Serve with nachos, some diced tomato and cilantro, sour cream and taco sauce. Easy peasy, done in under ten minutes! Serves one (Me! Yaay, yum!)

Sunday Dinner

Sunday dinners usually allow me to spend a little more time on preparing the meal. This sunday, I made the dish above (or below, but it doesn't really matter of course, because they're different photos from the same dish).

I preheated the oven to 50^oC (122^oF) and put a steak in, and let it there for about half an hour. Meat apparently tends to cook at 50-60^oC (122-140^oF), but cooking at too high a temperature supposedly makes the collagen contract and thus squeezes out all the meat's juices, giving you a tough piece of meat. Therefore, cooking at a low temperature maintains the tenderness. However, it will take longer for the heat to reach the core of the meat, so you'll need to cook your meat longer. After cooking in the oven I fried the meat for exactly one minute on each side and let it rest five minutes, wrapped in tin foil.

I cut the meat to 2 mm slices and served them on top of a pile of fried mushrooms, which were put on top of a heap of napa cabbage (raw), mixed with some tinned corn kernels and a dressing of chili sauce and pickle juice (the acidity of the pickle juice cut nicely through the sugary richness of the chili sauce, and the heat of the chili saus gave it all an extra zest).

I drizzled two tablespoons of chimichurri on top, which I had made two hours in advance, using parsley, cilantro, two garlic cloves, balsamic vinegar and oregano perfumed olive oil. On top of that a nice hand of alfalfa.

Alongside it I scooped some leftover couscous salad, which was previously made with stock welded couscous, fried bacon rinds, garlic and herb olives, parsley, cilantro, deseeded, skinned and diced tomatoes and diced cucumber.

I must say, it was a nice experiment which turned out pretty okay. N. loved it and it looked quite good. Surprisingly, the flavours mixed quite well. The acidity and heat of the cabbage/corn contrasted the hearty flavour of the beef and mushrooms, which in turn were complemented by the freshness of the chimichurri and the alfalfa. A lot of raw vegetables made sure it was a healthy meal, together with the fact that we shared just one steak amongst the two of us - something which I never thought would do for a meatlover like myself :)