Sometimes in life, the effort you put into something is disproportionate to the reward you get from it. It’s just one of those things.
Another one of those things is that sometimes in life, you can’t help but sit back and think, ‘Well, I’m glad that’s over.’
Our callaloo experience was, if nothing else, memorable. Continue reading
Regular readers will have noticed that we tend to follow a rough geographical order when making our international recipes, so would rightly be slightly confused by the fact that we’ve now jumped from Bermuda to Tibet. This is because when we started this project, our list of countries followed a rule whereby each country bordered the countries on either side of it on the list, but there was no way to take this linear approach and also include all the countries – so we have a separate list of ‘leftover’ countries. Now that we’ve reached the Caribbean islands (of which there are a lot, and if the Pacific Islands are anything to go by, they’re all likely to offer up quite similar foods), we thought we’d intersperse them with those leftover countries. So: Tibet. Continue reading
Before making this dish, we knew two things about Bermuda: shorts and Triangle. We’ve now bumped this up to three things, having added its traditional fish chowder to our repertoire. Unlike the creamy, thick chowders we’re used to, Bermuda’s version has a tomato base and isn’t stodgy at all. It’s also very spicy, thanks to the addition of chilli sauce (more on that in a minute) and is so full of vegetables that ‘fish chowder’ is almost a misnomer. Recipes on the Internet are all pretty similar but we thought The Bermudian seemed a reputable enough source – we just made a few tweaks here and there. Continue reading
We’ve only been to the USA once, in August 2013, when we visited Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and New York City. We were there for ten days and were overwhelmed by the size of everything (security queues at Dulles Airport, hotel rooms, food portions, personalities, buildings, roads, monuments, duration of baseball games…) – but in such a good way. We crammed a lot into our relatively short stay, and fell in love with the Land of Liberty, and we can’t wait to go back!
Of course, for us, a major part of any successful holiday is the food. As well as trying to follow in the footsteps of Man v. Food’s Adam Richman wherever we went, and making sure we had Philly in Philly/New York strip in New York/Long Island Iced Tea on Long Island, and eating bologna without really understanding what it is, we dined at a farm-to-table restaurant in Washington, ate cheesesteaks and hoagies at a ball game in Philadelphia, and visited the legendary Katz’s Deli (of When Harry Met Sally fame) in NYC. Not to mention the piece of red velvet cheesecake at Junior’s Diner that defeated even Ash. Continue reading
Leaving the food of Europe behind (for now) and jumping over to the Americas feels like we’ve really made some progress in this cooking journey. We started in Wales and have made our way through most of Europe, Asia and Oceania, discovering so many new dishes (and ingredients) along the way. Now we’re embarking on a whole new region, starting with Canada, which we are excited about – but which also posed a problem.
Many of you will be aware that Canada’s national dish is poutine: fries, cheese curds and gravy. Poutine seemed to experience a bit of a rebirth in London a couple of years ago, probably partially because of the ‘it’s cool to eat really unhealthy food and Instagram it’ age we’re in. (Speaking of which, remember that you can follow us on Instagram @goodfoodonbadplates – with very little unhealthy food, in fact!) We’d never actually tried it though, so the idea of making our own was quite fun… until we realised that we don’t have a deep fryer so wouldn’t be making brilliant fries, didn’t know where we’d get cheese curds from, and probably wouldn’t make gravy worthy of this revered dish. Continue reading
‘Russian food – well, that’s borscht, isn’t it?’
The look on Ash’s face was a mix of horror and dismay. Whilst he’ll eat beetroot if required, he is certainly not in its fan club, and memories of a Russian housemate stinking out the house by boiling beetroot were adding to the feeling of dread. Miranda’s Australian background means she’s more in tune with beetroot and its benefits, but even she wasn’t all that excited about the thought of this particular meal. However, we both had to make our peace with the fact that it’s Russia’s national dish and that’s the challenge we set ourselves when we started this project.
Fortunately for us, we were saved by Diana Henry and her lovely book Roast Figs Sugar Snow, which contains a recipe for Russian smoked fish pie with cream cheese pastry. As we mentioned a few weeks ago, we did say that if we had an appropriate recipe on our bulging shelves, we’d use it – so smoked fish pie it was! We were saved – and more than a little relieved. The book tells us that Russians love pies, so we were happy to play along. Continue reading
It’s appropriate that we’re up to Finland on our culinary journey at a time when the whole world seems to have gone crazy for Moomins, the white, sort-of-hippo-esque cartoon creatures created by Finnish writer and illustrator Tove Jansson. There is a Moomin shop in central London, a Moomin exhibition at the Southbank Centre and, on the other side of the globe, a Moomin café in Bangkok – and undoubtedly other Moomin experiences around the world. Ash grew up with these quirky characters, but Miranda hadn’t even heard of them before moving to England. Her ignorance has been slowly cured over the years, but never more so than a couple of weeks ago when the ladies of the family went to the aforementioned Southbank Centre exhibition and learned about all things Moomin.
But even the Moomins couldn’t help us with Finnish food, so for that we turned to Wikipedia, which told us that typical a Shrove Tuesday menu in Finland consists of hernekeitto (pea and ham soup) and laskiaispulla, a sweet cardmom-flavoured bun filled with whipped cream and jam. Shrove Tuesday was imminent, so it seemed that we had a plan.
On reflection, however, it wasn’t as perfect as we first thought. The soup and the bun were each going to take a couple of hours, which isn’t really what one wants on a Tuesday night. We also couldn’t deny the fact that we were starting to feel a little bit sad about missing out on pancakes on Pancake Day. So we had a rethink and did a bit more research, and discovered that in Finland, it is traditional to eat hernekeitto on Thursdays (the Shrove Tuesday thing presumably being an annual aberration), along with a special dessert pancake. Even though we were going to be making this on a Tuesday, it seemed like a good compromise – so our Shrove Tuesday menu was created. Continue reading
