Food and Drink

Cheerios – Food of the Gods

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My sainted wife gave me an early Christmas present!

Cheerios

For all that I enjoy living in Britain, there are a few national peculiarities that continue to puzzle me. A case in point is the Cheerios Affair. Any reputable grocery store will stock a number of bizarre offshoots of the Cheerios clan – honey/almond, multi-grain, “chocolatey”, basil/chipotle (OK, I made that last one up), but the humble simple unsweetened toasty perfection of the original 100% oat Cheerio is nowhere to be found.

This is not merely an academic observation – my standard breakfast for going on 40 years has been a bowl of Cheerios. The chaos that might befall if I had to eat some other kind of cereal is too terrible to contemplate.

We do have the option of driving for about two hours to the nearest American PX, which also stocks other essentials of life unknown to the Brits: Miracle Whip, Texas Pete’s hot sauce and crunchy peanut butter in tubs larger than a teacup, but with fuel running at £1.20/litre this is an expensive proposition.

It’s probably a sign of age that we didn’t immediately work out the obvious solution. Of course you can Google Cheerios and of course you can have them delivered to your door. And this being Britain, of course they will show up the day after you order them. (That’s the standard delay for mail delivery). And just in time too – I was down to my last box.

Civilization as we know it is once again saved by the power of the world-wide web! Perhaps I’ll send a box of O’s to Sir Tim Berners-Lee as a reward. 🙂

Music

Another reason to listen to good music

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So as I now know there is a feature of BMW cars that allows the owner to open all four windows at once. Why one would want to do this is a bit of a mystery, which is perhaps why I didn’t remember it from reading the owner’s manual. To open all the windows one need only press for three seconds on the door locking button of the key fob and hey presto.

Of course one could accidentally press on the button whilst, say, carrying wine boxes upstairs. On a rainy night.

I went downstairs this morning to find a rather damp interior. Moreover some of the local “yoofs” had clocked that the car was open and ransacked the interior looking for usable stuff.

Scattered across the passenger seat were the three CDs we had in the car: “Bags’ Groove” by Miles Davis et al, “Ali and Toumari” by Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté, and “Raise your spirit higher” by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Evidently these had low stealability and didn’t make the cut. If we were fans of, say, Rihanna or Nicky Minaj we would now be sad.

Of course that last sentence stands on its own merit. 🙂

So deduction: listen to quality music in your car. You and your insurance company will be happier.

Food and Drink, Recipes

Guacamole

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For a long time I failed to see the point of guacamole. It was a tasteless green paste that occasionally showed up on your plate at natural foods restaurants, the proprietors apparently believing that its sickly chartreuse hue contrasted pleasingly with the dish you had ordered.

Then in 2002 I had a religious experience. At the end of a fine week at a cycling camp run by Lon Haldeman and Susan Notorangelo (see link to PAC Tours), we now-hardened roadies decided on a night out in Tucson. Imagine if you will a mile long strip of Mexican restaurants, only very few of them were mere generic Mexican – instead they featured cooking from the Yucatan, or Oaxaca, or Veracruz or Chiapas, and so on. A veritable cornucopia and only one meal to eat. Happy sigh.

Once we chose a place and ordered drinks, the waiter asked us if we wanted guacamole. The consensus was yes, so I went along with the crowd. Shortly thereafter the guacamole lady showed up with her cart, and after asking how we wanted it, proceeded to mash up the avocados and our chosen condiments in a large bowl. The result was a revelation – fresh, flavourable and very satisfying. I kept a close watch on how she made the stuff and have developed this recipe based on her technique plus a bit of experimentation. It’s dead easy to make and extremely delicious.

Guacamole Recipe

Principles:

Guacamole is a rustic peasant food. It should be fairly rough in appearance: basically a well blended mass but with lots of chunks of avocado of various sizes. Looking a lot like this:

Guacamole

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Food and Drink, Recipes

In praise of chili garlic sauce

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Chili garlic sauce

 

Seriously. One of mankind’s greatest inventions. Make a basic stir fry, then just before you thicken it, mix in two or three heaping teaspoons of the magic elixir. Result – nirvana. Or to be more correct, ambrosia (food of the gods).

This is a good brand, but they’re all pretty much the same. Chili, garlic and salt. Normally I would tend to shy away from products from the People’s Republic – their problems with food producers using dodgy ingredients are well documented – but I have to admit that the Lee Kum Kee sauce has a nice fresh taste. Speaking of fresh, remember that this ingredient is very inexpensive. It will last forever in the fridge but if it’s been open for six months or so why not splurge on a new jar?

OK, I hear you thinking, what’s a basic stir fry?

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Food and Drink, Travel

Salisbury Pubs – Reviews

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As a thirsty tourist in Salisbury you will be faced with a large number of pubs eager to have your trade. Most of these are quite sound so it’s hard to make a really bad choice, but there are a few that are particularly reliable.

Having been here for two years and having visited most of the local establishments (purely for research purposes!) I can make a few recommendations. The following ratings are entirely subjective, but include things I consider important in a pub: mainly ambience, beer selection and food.

As the Americans would say, Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF): My top choices for Salisbury pubs are The Cloisters, The Avon Brewery, The Rai d’Or, and The Old Mill (which is actually in Harnham rather than Salisbury)

First, a word about food. The challenges faced by the pub industry (see sidebar below) have created a situation where many pubs have become restaurants in order to survive. This is not a bad thing – many of the pubs I visited on my first trip to Britain in the early 80s were proud to offer a full menu of crisps, ghastly packaged Scotch Eggs and peanuts. So the fact that in most pubs you can now buy something decent to eat is not a bad thing.

However my particular prejudice is that pubs should serve pub food. The “gastro pub” (soi-disant) can be an interesting place to eat but the better and more precious and “cheffy” the food is the less likely that you would want to drop in for a pint (even if they allow you to do so). If I want restaurant food I also want restaurant amenities – which as a minimum include table service by people who know about what’s on the menu and how to serve it, tablecloths and silverware, and most importantly a trained chef in the kitchen who makes the food rather than heating up prepared meals.

So… with one exception these pubs are rated on their ability to deliver the canon: good ales, a decent wine for my bride, and a menu that includes fish and chips, beef burgers, gammon steak with egg and chips, and Sunday roast.

Salisbury Pubs – The top four:

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Bikes, News

Keep the rubber side down: Things I apparently haven’t learned about cycling

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On Cycling Crashes

So it’s now three months since The Incident – i.e. doing an endo on my road bike at about 35 kph. Full disclosure: two km into my first club ride with Sarum Velo I decided to  shift from the brake hoods to the drops to negotiate an upcoming turn, and (it would appear) hit the brake lever in the process. One moment happy, the next moment upside down skidding down the pavement on my soft pink skin. It was, said the following riders, spectacular.

The result of a moment’s inattention was two broken bones, a bunch of road rash and a whole lot of torn muscles. I have broken a fair amount of bones in my day – these were #10 and 11 I believe – mostly as a result of excess enthusiasm (Broom-i-Loo comes to mind) and a broken rib or two is par for the course for cycling crashes.  The fractured acromion was a new one. For those not up on anatomy the acromion is the bit of the scapula that connects to the collarbone at the self-evidently named acromio-clavicular (AC) joint. I was somewhat dismayed when my fortyish orthopedic surgeon stated that he had never seen a broken acromion – one is always more confident when they have seen a million of them! A bit of research showed why. Only 3% of traumatic injuries involve a fracture to the shoulder area, and of these only 3% include a broken acromion. If you break an acromion you are 20% likely to have been killed in the process. So OK, I this was a special one.

The result was eight weeks in a sling, then a gradual process of physio and strengthening. Tom, my Army-supplied therapist, is really good and as a triathlete he totally gets that I want to get back on the bike ASAP. He is doing his best to manage expectations, but sometime this week I am cleared to try a flat ride of 10-15 km.

The prognosis is full recovery, with the bone recovering full strength at the six month point, and full muscle strength (such as it is!) recovered after five months.

The Gios, you will be pleased to hear, has had a much easier road to recovery. The fine folk at Stonehenge Cycles have got her fully back to fighting form and she looks at me every day hoping to be let out of the barn.

Gios Cinquantenairo

So, is there a moral to all of this? Well, I could conclude that riding bikes is for the young and easily healed, but that ain’t happening. In the soft coddled lives that we lead there needs to be some sort of challenge to maintain a connection between the real world and the unreal virtual world where I write emails for a living. Riding a bike fast is glorious, but it wouldn’t have the same value if it didn’t have the element of real risk. To get all Kierkegaardian about it, fear, danger and occasional massive pain seem to be the price to pay to be in the real world, driving the horse cart home instead of falling asleep and letting the horse take the lead. Just the same, I could have gotten the same reality-value out of a near miss, so… perhaps a I will try to be a bit more prudent in future. At least until I’m back at race pace! 🙂

The easily fixable damage:

Cinelli handlebar

Selle Italia SLR saddle

Lazer helmet (though sadly not as perfect a match for my bike colours that the now-dented Bell Alchera on the right)

Cycling crashes - Bike helmets

Internal bits of the shifters (Thanks to Campagnolo for making spare parts available, unlike that other component manufacturer…)

Brake hood covers (ditto)

Shifter cables and bar tape

Bib shorts

Not replaceable:

My favourite jersey

Cycling crashes - Bike Jersey

My faithful 14-year old Cyclomaster 409 computer

Bikes, Tools

Moon X Power 500 Cycling Headlight

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Moon X Power 500 Cycling Headlight

The winter days are very short in my current location so I asked the guys at Stonehenge Cycles for a recommendation on lights for night riding. I don’t generally ride more than 90 minutes at night so a hub generator would be overkill, but I do need bright lights for the narrow country lanes around Salisbury. And I’m tired of cheap lights that corrode into uselessness because they aren’t watertight. They recommended the Moon X Power 500. The price was £80 at time of purchase, but this has now dropped to the £60 range.

Moon X Power 500 Cycling Light
Moon headlight and taillight

 

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Recipes

Rôti de porc poêlé

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Rôti de porc poêlé

(Adapted from Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, Simone Beck, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol 1)

This has become one of our all-time favourite recipes and a great option for small dinner parties, but we came across it in an odd way. We were planning a big dinner because my sister Marianne was coming to visit us in Edmonton. I had come across a recipe for pork roast that sounded great – the sauce included madeira and three kinds of mushrooms. We were in Safeway picking out some chanterelles when Lynn said “does Marianne eat mushrooms?” Zut! She hates them and has been known to pick them off of pizza before eating it. So what to do with the large pork roast we had already acquired? A quick scan through the cooking “bibles” led us to this recipe. It is easy to make, delicious and not at all fiddly. With the exception of a bit of mashing at the end, the work is done and cleaned up long before the guests arrive.

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Recipes

Swiss Steak – Eleanor Kerr’s Recipe

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Simple and delicious! This recipe comes from my late and dearly missed mother-in-law, Eleanor Kerr. Unlike most Swiss Steak recipes there is no tomato included – just pure beef for beef lovers. It must be served with mashed potatoes so you can mop up the gravy.

This could be made with the finest artisanal heritage locally sourced Wagyu beef, but actually it works really well with whatever you have.

Ingredients

  •  1 lb round steak
  • 1 good-sized onion
  • Beef stock or red wine
  • Flour to coat
  • Salt & Pepper
  • Fat. The best thing is to get a piece of beef fat from the butcher. Otherwise render the fat from your beef and add oil to make up the required amount.

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