There are few British cultural traditions from which I gain any pleasure or in which I have any interest at all, however, one that I am more than happy to indulge in is possibly one of the most traditional and truly British of them all…cream tea!
The fundamental content of a British tea couldn’t be simpler. A cup of tea, a scone, clotted cream and strawberry jam! Obviously there are variations on this classic combination including using whipped cream as a simple and cheap substitute to the far superior clotted version, or mixing it up with a different type of jam. Personally, being a creature with a small aversion to change in the things I know to be good a certain way, I find it difficult to sway from convention…but on the right day and under the right circumstances I can be convinced to go with a good quality homemade raspberry jam instead. That is absolutely as far from the norm as I am comfortable to push myself. One aspect of this age-old British classic that does divide those that choose to partake pertains to perhaps the most banal feature of the construction…which goes on the scone first…the cream or the jam?! This may seem like an insignificant and potentially even irrelevant question but it is one that divides a nation. For a Devonian cream tea, tradition states that one must begin with the cream and crown this with a dollop of jam. The Cornish alternative prefers jam topped with a generous spoon cream. Interesting…or perhaps not so much! To add more controversy to this incredibly important (irrelevant) debate the earliest documented references to cream tea are sited from Devon, thus suggesting that the more traditional preparation of this painfully traditional British classic would be the Devonian cream and then jam method! HOWEVER, since this tradition has become a bit of a phenomenon and one which tourists delight in in tearooms the world over it is actually the Cornish method of jam and then cream that has reigned supreme! Should a visitor to London choose to go for afternoon tea at any of the cities wonderfully old school English establishments and ask what the best way to serve their cream tea would be the answer will almost unquestionably be…the jam and then the cream. So there you have it, the pointless question that divides a nation. Whilst sipping your cup of English breakfast tea, served in a pot and consumed out of a bone china cup complete with saucer, should you delicately place a hearty serving of clotted cream on your lovely warm fresh baked scone and then apply the sweet and delightful strawberry jam or should you start with the jam and the complete the masterful creation with a spoon of cream?! The decision is yours and yours alone! Personally, I’m not really fussed! As long as all of the elements are there and they taste good my affiliation to either Devon or Cornwall is of little importance, just give me the scone, cream and jam and I am a happy camper!
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Previous image was deleted as it was not my own - Credit to https://www.ketogenicsupplementreviews.com/ (this company is not related to our blog)I was asked today what my favourite cuisine was and funnily enough this is not a question I get asked all that regularly, nor is it a question for which I had an instant answer. I like a lot of foods and more generally, I like lots of food! I thought about it for a while and decided that the best way to come to a conclusion would be to think about what my favourite dishes are…okay…Spaghetti Bolognese (Italian), Dim Sum (Chinese), Pad Thai (Thai), Sashimi (Japanese), BBQ Ribs (American), Sunday Roast (English), Goan Fish Curry (Indian)…this is by no means a list that contains all of my favourite dishes, but they are a selection of the first few that came to my mind and made my little theory of using my favourite dishes to answer the question suddenly seem pretty useless! Like I said, I like food!
Clearly I had to approach this little conundrum from another angle…so I posed myself another question, if I had to eat one thing for every meal for the rest of my life what would it be?! The answer to this question came almost instantly…salmon! Okay, second part of the question…how would I prepare the salmon?! Sashimi (Japanese)…no wait en croûte (French)…oh but I love blackened (Cajun)…but I couldn’t live without smoked (Norwegian/Scottish/Canadian)! This was clearly another completely futile line of thinking. So I concluded, maybe I don’t have a favourite cuisine overall! I have favourite dishes from different cuisines and I have a favourite food that I like cooked a range of ways from a lot of different culture’s cuisines but I don’t think I can categorically say that I have a favourite cuisine exclusively! Is that weird? Maybe I am just too indecisive or too flaky to make such and rash commitment. Maybe I have tried so many things in so many places that the choice is just too hard to limit so severely. Or maybe, just maybe, I like food just a little bit too much and I am a dedicated glutton who couldn’t possibly restrict myself to just one option when it comes to the culinary smörgåsbord (see…there’s another one, Swedish) that is the world’s offering of stomach filling delights! But I’m still willing to pose the question to you…what’ Most of the Foodie Friday posts thus far have been descriptions of local dishes that I have tried along my travels or something related to my experiences of eating a range of foods in a range of different countries. At the moment we are actually having a small rest bite from constantly being on the move and are settled in England. One thing that we miss greatly when being on the road is actually being able to cook for ourselves as this forms such an important part of our daily lives when we are living ‘normal’ lives. Since we have been back in England and had access to a real kitchen we have taken full advantage, cooking up some of our favourite treats as well as experimenting with a couple of new things. One of the banes and the beauties of trying to cook new dishes is the unknown element of preparing something new and just how far you can go with adapting a recipe in order to fit your personal preferences. Fortunately, more often than not both Riv and I get away with the minor alterations as we have a fairly decent idea of what ingredients are in dishes as a necessity and what can be substituted or omitted. This is a result of the fact that both of us would consider ourselves to be fairly decent and knowledgeable cooks. However, that being said, there are certain things that in spite of our knowledge and experience of food and cooking we find almost impossible to master. What I find most amusing about this is that in our case, and those of others I have spoken to about this, these are often shockingly easy culinary tasks! Ask my wife to prepare some kind of massively complicated multiple layer cake with a variety of fillings, frostings and decorations and she will get it on point nearly every time. Alternatively, she is also incredibly adept at lovingly and intricately slicing, dicing and chopping a range of Asian ingredients in order to prepare the most beautifully balanced homemade dim sum steamed dumpling filling. However, ask my darling spouse to prepare popcorn, in any form (microwave, stove heated, air-popped) and she is almost guaranteed to serve you up a bowl of black popcorn shaped charcoal bits! Personally my kitchen roadblock comes in the form of eggs. Not all eggs might I add, but probably the easiest of all the cooking methods. I can fry eggs, I can poach them, I make a pretty good omelette and courtesy of a Heston Blumenthal trick I make what have been described by more than one person as the best scrambled eggs in the world! But can I soft boil an egg? Never! However hard I try, whatever methods I follow, one of two things always happens, it is either hard boiled or I crack the top to reveal a gooey opaque and lukewarm raw egg! I have actually reached the stage now where I am starting to believe I will never be able to master this unfeasibly easy skill and might just as well give up and stick to what I know! Maybe that sounds defeatist but after as many soft boiled eggy fails as I have had I’m just not sure I’m willing to waste any more time or any more eggs! As I’ve said, I’m not the only person I know who has this one simple method or dish that they just cant master, it seems to be a trend amongst many a cooking enthusiast but that doesn’t really solve to ease my frustration around soft boiled eggs or Riv’s repeated stress when faced with a popcorn preparation situation! What’s your cooking black hole? Where do you face the challenge of whipping up something ridiculously simple and feeling like it is comparable to teaching yourself Japanese using a German dictionary?! Share your tales of trouble and strife in the safety of the ‘Foodie Friday’ family!!
I am very much a believer as a traveller in the idea of ‘when in Rome do as the Romans do’, and more to the point, as a foodie, eat as the Romans eat! As I’m sure you have all become aware by now when we are on the road I try all of the local dishes that I can get my hands on.
Recently we went to Holland and while we were there one thing we knew we wanted to try was the famous Dutch treat, stroopwafel. This delightfully and deceptively simple snack is a bit of a Dutch institution and literally translates as syrup waffle. Some (or indeed many) of you may be familiar with these courtesy of Starbucks who sell their own caramel version. I have had these on a number of occasions and while they are nice enough, they are not a touch on their traditional Dutch counterpart! The origin of the stroopwafel came from a baker who simply tried to find a use for his daily leftover biscuit wastage. In order to make them sellable he added syrup and sold them as a cheap sweet treat…from this moment of economical and characteristically Dutch waste averse ingenuity the stroopwafel was born! To create the slightly more refined version of a modern stroopwafel, flour, cinnamon, sugar, eggs and butter are combined to make a dough, which is then quickly cooked up in a flat iron waffle press (or similar contraption). As soon as it is cooked through it then has to be sliced in half (this is the tricky bit if being done by hand rather than some kind of industrial machine) and a hearty filling of thick syrup is placed in the middle before being pressed down to fill all the space between the two halves. Job done!! These can obviously just be eaten as they come and are absolutely delicious. However, having tried a fair few of these while in Holland and actually tried my hand at making some myself when we went to a stroopwafel making class in their birthplace of Gouda, I believe there is only one way that these syrupy delight should be consumed! Obviously if you get one that has just been made then the waffle will still be hot and the syrup inside soft and gooey and they are perfect! If they are bought from a bakery or a supermarket they will no longer be in their optimum state…but all is not lost. The Dutch are a smart lot and they have made their standard stroopwafels very slightly larger than the diameter of the average mug, this is no accident! Taking a stroopwafel and leaving it resting over a piping hot mug of your chosen beverage brings all the joy of a warm waffle and melty syrup back to glorious life!! It will not come as any surprise to any of you that my beverage of choice is always a cup of tea, but coffee, hot chocolate and any other number of steaming hot drinks would work just as well! A lot of yummy things come out of Holland, not least their pretty extensive selection of regionally produced cheeses like Gouda and Edam but I think these biscuity wonders might just be my favourite! Go on, try them, you will not regret it! I can promise you with this one So for the last week we have been travelling with a friend of ours from Ireland who just so happens to be a meat eater. I make this rather odd reference to her eating habits as it opened up a world of culinary joy to me that I have yet to have indulged in on our trip around Europe so far...the wonderful world of the meat platter in Germany! Over the course of our week together so far my new partner in meaty crime and myself have indulged in 3 different (4 in total but one was repeated) meat feasts and they have all been fabulous in their own wonderful way! Our first such carnivorous delight presented itself to us in Munich and was called the Everest Platter. While this was not exactly a platter of variety it certainly earned it's 'Everest' title. It consisted of a mountain of chips, beautifully crowned with not one, not two, but eight large and perfectly golden pork schnitzels. This platter was advertised on the menu as being suitable for 4, so we ordered it with the genuine intention of consuming the leftovers (in theory two schnitzels each) for lunch the next day. Upon the arrival of the platter I was simultaneous delighted and terrified by the sheer size of each of these incredible looking schnitzels. Under such circumstances I often choose to avoid wasting valuable stomach space with carby boringness and focus solely on the star of the show. This was no exception! We quickly tucked in and served ourselves with a schnitzel each. 2 minutes later and my first one was gone, it was time for number two! A further 5 minutes later and the second one had been swiftly demolished and at this stage nothing had really touched the sides of my stomach. I served and consumed number three, this time at a slightly more socially acceptable pace. By this time I was starting to get pretty full, but it almost felt unfair to just leave one lonely schnitzel sitting all on it's own...so that went down the hatch two. My meat consuming buddy made a valiant attempt with 2 1/2 schnitzels before finally throwing in the towel, but in her defence she did also have a fairly decent go at the chip mountain below the schnitzel goodness. This was a good, if not entirely nutritious start to the enormous plates of meat that were to pave our culinary way around Germany.
Our final and probably most epic tray of animal, landed on our table in Alpirsbach. This particular epicurean treat came with the title of the Balkan Platter and I feel it was named such on account of the fact that it could have very easily fed most of the region! Literally piled high on the plate was sausage, kofta, burgers, schnitzel, steak, bacon and skewered pork medallions, with two hefty heaps of rice and an overly generous portion chips thrown in for good measure (oh and a side salad to make it look like this was not entirely unhealthy)! I'm not going to go into too much detail regarding the almost embarrassing levels of excessive meat consumption that followed, but suffice it to say that neither my right hand man nor I failed to do some serious damage to the baked, fried and breaded farmyard that had befallen us!
So one thing I learned from travelling around Germany with a valiant and gutsy fellow meat eater is that the Germans really know how to do meat, and that doesn't just extend to their almost endless regional varieties of sausage. If meat is wanted in Germany then meat can be got and they don't do it lightly. I can highly recommend one of these meaty madnesses, but I'm not sure any cardiologist would, so consult your GP prior to consumption if you are concerned! All you need is tea...
Ok, so this may not be considered a traditionally 'foodie' thing to post about, but one thing I have learned from spending extended periods of time on the road and having travelled via number of different methods (planes, trains and automobiles all included), through a number of different countries/continents, is that something that can never be over estimated in it's unfailing simple provision of pleasure is a good cup of tea! On our first trip around South East Asia in 2013, this little cup of happiness proved itself to be harder to come by than I had expected and at times than I was willing to accept!! Over the course of the 9 months that we ventured around I was served a concerningly broad plethora of hot beverages that were classified as 'tea'. Now yes, it is true, under the right conditions I am the epitome of an English tea snob...100 degree boiling water, a PG tips pyramid tea bag, fresh milk and one sugar (and the perfect shaped mug if I'm allowed to be really fussy)! However, on the road I am more than willing to be flexible...Lipton tea is fine, hot milk, powdered milk...heck, coffee whitener would even do. If not whitening agent is available I will put up with black tea and if I have to forgo the sugar I can deal with that too. But even with my liberal attitude to what can consist as tea, I do have my limits!! One such limit reaching occasion occurred when we were visiting Angkor Watt in Cambodia on aforementioned SE Asia trip. We had got up before the crack of dawn in order to go and watch the sunrise over the temple plain (which by the way was incredible) and by about 10am my then girlfriend (now wife) and I were desperate for a morning caffeine fix. Our tuk tuk driver happily informed us that there was a cafe in the centre of the complex that was targeted at tourists and served both tea and coffee. While we usually ignore these sorts of places we jumped at the chance to have a quick hot caffeinated beverage before continuing on our day. We went, and Riv was served a perfectly acceptable instant black coffee. I on the other hand was served an abomination so abhorrent that even recounting this story via keyboard causes my inner tea loving Brit to cringe a little. What I had requested, off the menu might I add, was a hot Lipton tea with milk. What I was served was... Are you ready for this?! A glass beer mug, the bottom third of which was full of a thick layer of condescend milk (with a couple of token dead flies scattered throughout), atop this puddle of condescend joy was what can only be described as warm tap temperature water and to complete this creation a sad little Lipton tea bag, floating on the surface, trying it's very best to do something relating to brewing in this tepid clear liquid! I wanted to cry. I didn't even know what I could do to try and make this 'beverage' acceptable, but this was not the cup of tea I had imagined when the possibility was planted in my head. It was at this point that we made an executive couples decision. As soon as we got back to England (which was only a couple of months later) we were going to buy a travel kettle, and arm ourselves with a supply of teabags. If we could get sugar/milk in any form along the way then that would be a bonus, but the key elements for something that truly resembled tea (hot water and a teabag) would always be there. From the moment we acquired our travel kettle we have never looked back and would never again travel without it, to any county or via any method. It comes with us in our backpacks, it came on the cruise, it is currently with us in our camping car. We now also travel with a packet of sweeteners (as sugar proved to cause some messy problems) and often some powdered milk. Like I said, it's not the tea snobs ideal cuppa, but it feels almost as satisfying at those moments of stress, tiredness or total unreasonable meltdown! The simple pleasure of a cup of hot tea can solve almost any problem...at least for me and it has regularly proved to be the perfect remedy for range of traveller's woes! Morning, noon or night there is nothing quite like a good cup of Rosie Lee (by the way, that tea for you non-Brits out there) to brighten up my day! Raclette - The only answer to all the cheesy dreams you haveFrance…land of all things delightfully indulgent about food; rich sauces, decadent deserts, hearty regional delights guaranteed to make your tastebuds sing and your heart stop! This great country presents a unique culinary hurdle for my wife being a vegetarian. Throughout our time on the road, she has become accustomed to the universal misconception that certain meats ‘don’t count’ and is often required to remove unwanted animal additions from meals. However, in France it appears that the idea of being a vegetarian is about as comprehensible as complex astrophysics or the offside rule! How and indeed why would you opt to eat a meal without meat…?! This attitude on the surface would appear to be almost prohibitively problematic for a vegetarian visiting France were it not for one very significant saving grace…cheese! This countrywide obsession continually provides my darling wife with ample sustenance and very little chance of monotonous repetition as this country boasts over 1000 varieties of the stuff!
One of her favourite types of cheese actually originated in Switzerland but is widely enjoyed by the French and is called raclette. Raclette refers to both the variety of the cheese and the dish in which it is used as a whole. Since discovering this dish some three years ago on her first visit to France it has been right up there on the top of her list of favourites. Unfortunately our ability to recreate it outside of France is distinctly hindered by the limited accessibility of both the right equipment for preparation and the right cheese! As a result of this notably sporadic enjoyment of one of her favourites it became of primary importance to acquire as soon as possible after arriving in France. And so it was done… In and of itself raclette is a fairly uninspiring and plain cheese compared to some of the weird and wonderful varieties available in France, however, it’s not so much about the cheese on it’s own but the method of preparation and consumption. Traditionally the cheese would be hung in front of an open fire to slowly soften, and as it did so, strips would be cut off and then eaten with potatoes, cured meats, breads and pickles. The accompaniments to the melted cheese have remained the same, however modern culture has developed the rather more practical cheese melting method in the form of an electric hotplate. Nowadays you can simply slice small squares of raclette and then place them on a small tray under the heating elements to slowly and dreamily liquefy. Once it is sufficiently melted the cheese is then added to your side dish of choice and voila! It may sound uninspiringly simply but the result is something pretty special. I’m not sure it would have exactly the same appeal with a slice of melted cheddar on a piece of supermarket sliced white bread and a piece of luncheon meat, but with a nice fresh crusty baguette and some delicately cured ham or locally grown heirloom French tomatoes it definitely takes on a more delectable form! I don’t think this can be described as being an example of one of France’s top dishes, nor would it make the list of most nutritionally valuable, however, it is certainly delicious and something which should definitely be tried on a visit to France. Bon appetit! |
Follow us on Instagram or send us a messageAbout Foodie FridaysWe love food, as most people do! And when we are on the road this doesn't change. We, like many people, believe that food is one of the best ways to really get to know a culture and it's people, as so much about the way people live their lives around the world is centred around food. This means that when we travel we actively seek out the local foods and delicacies. Sometimes that comes in the form of unusual and exotic produce from markets and sometimes from street food vendors serving an array of barbecued, fried, steamed or entirely indistinguishable goodies. Having tried and tested these goodies for some time now, on our adventures around Asia, Europe, North and South America we have discovered some pretty wonderful treats that we have decided should earn a bit of publicity. So, as the working week drifts away and the weekend winks at you like a naughty temptress we will share with you one of the delights that we have encountered from around the world! We hope you enjoy reading about these as much as we enjoyed eating them! Archives
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