niq’s soapbox

I’ve just had a pint of good English beer with my meal. As one does from time to time.

It’s a premium beer with a great flavour. But not, alas, at its very best. In this season, my kitchen - in common with the rest of the flat - is rather too warm. English beer is famous for being “warm”, but that really just means warmer than refrigerated, not summer temperatures. My kitchen in winter keeps beer at an excellent temperature. Alas not in summer, and keeping it in the fridge is no solution, because that’s far too cold for English beer to retain any decent flavour. That’s one reason I drink more Weizenbier in summer: it’s great to drink well chilled on a hot day.

Traditionally, the right place to keep English beer is a cellar, but ever fewer of us have any such thing these days.

All of which reminds me of the time in Italy, when I had to replace the fridge/freezer provided by my then-landlord, after it had packed up once too often. I went to a big superstore selling lots of white goods, to take a look at what was available. What I picked up had not just fridge and freezer sections, but a third compartment which was kept at about 12°, notionally for fruit and veg in the Italian summer. Great - in that climate, a larder was really useful!

With our English summer, it’s less necessary than in Italy for our fruit&veg - though it would nevertheless be nice. But a store at 12° would be ideal for English beer, too.

Why don’t we see those 3-compartment fridge/freezer/larders here in the UK?

For my last night in sunny California (and yes, it’s been sunny and fine throughout my time here), I went to the posh italian-flavoured restaurant next door to the hotel. It’s the only one in the area that looks and feels like a restaurant (as opposed to a café), and it’s twice the price of the others, so I went in with high hopes.

Distinctly underwhelmed. It was adequate, but no way was it worth the premium over the other local eateries.

Overall, I’ve encountered a variety of food here, ranging from excellent to distinctly mediocre. That’s much the same as back home. The difference is that back home I can usually make a reasonable judgement before committing to eating somewhere, while here I’m struggling. So the best restaurant meal I’ve had was with my colleagues in a thai place they know and love, while probably the worst was the one I had on Saturday in San Francisco, also in a thai place, but one I found for myself.

Thinking about it, when I first lived in Italy I encountered more bad food than you’d believe of that country, but my experience improved with time. I guess it really is about experience, of a kind that doesn’t travel very well between cultures.

Like that famously-bad traveller, the sense of humour, perhaps?

One of the best lunch spots in Tavistock is Robertsons, the organic wholefood café.  Recently they’ve expanded, and announced evening opening serving pizza: Fridays in December, and three evenings a week in the new year.

So, I had to sample their evening fare, and today I twisted Chrissie’s arm into joining me for a meal there.  It’s not really pizza: indeed, the pizza of the day is just one item in a small menu, and we both had different things, (albeit with common hints of italian influence in the recipes).  Apart from having alcoholic drinks, it was really a café meal: very nice, but lunchtime rather than evening portions.  So now I’m adequately fed, but by no means as well-stuffed as expected.

They also had a live band in there playing.  They were bad, but not obnoxious.

Next door to them is the Birds Nest, the Chinese restaurant that serves probably the best evening meals in Tavistock.  I don’t think they need fear the new competition too much, but it’s nice to have another choice locally.

The Beeb’s early morning farming program[1] today featured a finalist in their “farmer of the year” media event. Today’s finalist is someone who makes a business growing herbs in Scotland, and I found it genuinely interesting.

The Beeb’s farming coverage is mostly in the vanguard of the propaganda effort telling us that farmers are good but hard done by, and supermarkets (especially Tescos, the biggest and most successful) are evil. Today’s herb grower is a clear exception: he’s spent twenty years not whinging, but building a successful business instead. His biggest customer is Tescos, but rather than tow the usual BBC line, he explained that they shared the common goal of selling fresh herbs to consumers, to everyone’s benefit.

That positive attitude to cooperative marketing will look familiar to open sourcers, but doesn’t of itself make an open source style of business. What provoked me into blogging was the additional information that this farmer has spent a lot of time travelling the world in search of best practice and ideas, and shares them freely with whomsoever is interested. That sounds like a genuinely open source style of business model.

[1] no link - the website is wrong: either it’s featuring another day’s (week’s?) program, or they changed their minds. UPDATE - this link now works, but will probably change again.

Food in this country has improved hugely in my lifetime. Why can’t water do likewise?

In the UK, water is something that comes from the tap. Other options are a major ripoff: the choices are “still” (utterly flat, not as nice as tap water) or “sparkling” (obscenely gassy). That seems to apply to expensive brands with classy-looking labels, just as much as supermarket “value” brands. Only the flavoured variants are (in some cases) nice to drink.

Italy was different. There’s a culture of drinking water, so for example, if you go for a restaurant meal there’s an automatic expectation you’ll drink water (as well as whatever else you drink - typically wine). With that culture comes water that’s altogether nicer to drink. In particular, water that’s neither flat nor gassy, but naturally effervescent (best) or slightly sparkling.

Recently I’ve looked out for something drinkable amongst the (expensive) foreign waters on sale here (isn’t it just obscene that we should import water here)? There’s one Italian brand: San Pellegrino is familiar from my years in Italy, but was never one of my favourite brands. It’s sold here both in plastic and glass bottles, but alas, only the glass bottle stuff - the most expensive of all - tastes good.

But now at last, I have in the fridge a botted water that’s both nice and a little less expensive. I think it’s french: called something like Badoit, though I forget the name. I think I may have found a brand worth drinking, though I resent paying as much per litre for water as for fruit juice!

September is peak season for blackberries. And this year, it’s been great, with warm, dry, sunny weather for ripening, after an unusually wet summer.

But this last week it’s turned colder and we’ve had some heavy showers. Today’s pick of blackberries was adequate, but no longer up to the standard of what I got a couple of weeks ago. The season is winding down, though there are still quite a few unripe ones, that could become nice if we get decent ripening weather (and if the bloody council doesn’t trim them all to oblivion).

I can’t do my usual, which is to turn some of them into a crumble or pie and freeze the rest, ‘cos the freezer is too full. So I’m going to try and combine some of them with excess apples and chillies in a chutney. That’s not something I’ve cooked before, so it’s a new culinary venture. Wish me luck!

I’ve just received a huge bag of chillies through the post.  They look hot!

It’s all noodl’s fault.  He’s back in Blighty from Thailand.  I’d joked on IRC about wanting some nice chilli from .th, and he took me at my word, bless him!

I’m a lover of hot chillies.  Several times a week I’ll indulge in a stirfry or curry, and we’re just heading into the season of turning big vegetables into rich soups.  Not to mention dips and infusions.  But now I’m going to have to broaden the repertoire further: perhaps take advantage of superabundant blackberries and apples and brew up some chutney.  Or even try homemade chilli jam (yes, there’s a local shop that sells chilli jam, and it’s delicious).

/me breathing fire for the forseeable future!

The high summer gives us the seasonal luxury of wonderful soft fruits.  Autumn brings a different range of goodies.

But here’s a difference.  Summer’s best produce is commercially grown, and comes to us via the shops.  Autumn, by contrast, brings us produce we can get more directly.  In my kitchen today, I have blackberries which I picked myself from the roadsides, and apples (both eating and cooking) and runner beans, from various friends gardens.  It’s still, alas, just a modest part of the diet, but it makes a nice contrast to everything being commercial.   This is clearly seasonal, peaking around now in the early autumn.

Another month or so of abundance, and we’ll be heading for the later autumn and winter season of root vegetables and rich soups, and the best citrus fruits imported from the med.  But that’s back to the shops for everything, unless someone has a really nice surprise in store.

One of the shops by the market is advertising veg boxes.  I must remember to ask about them.

Got up early this morning.  The valley and hillsides were wreathed in a heavy morning mist.  Went out to pick blackberries.  We’re more-or-less into peak season for them now, and I didn’t have to go far to get a good pick.  Going out so early (unusual for me), I was in competition not only with insects, but quite a lot of snails that seem to like them.

Late morning was the first tasting, as I went to the cheese fair, an event organised by our superb local cheese shop and featuring a lot of their suppliers.  This year some wine, beer and cider producers were also exhibiting.  Combine that with the hot summer weather we’ve had so little of this year, and I should just about be ready to zonk out for the afternoon.

But there’s more.  This evening it’s a meal for Alan’s birthday, at the Royal Inn, one of our best local pubs.  *burp*

You know Autumn is here when the blackberries are ripe on the bramble.  This year, like last, autumn has come early, and this morning I picked my first blackberries of the year.  The ripe ones are still relatively few and far between, but I managed to collect just over two litres of them, mostly from on and around the old viaduct.

I fear it will not be a good season for them, mostly because it’s too wet.  The last time we had a season with no prolonged dry periods was 2004, when it became a challenge to find berries that were ripe without being also rotten.  There are definite signs of that happening again this year, unless we get a change to more settled weather over the next couple of months.

I started on the canal towpath (very little fruit there yet), before going up to the viaduct.  On the footpath along the Callington Road, some ghastly old bat emerged from a house on the far side of the road and asserted her rights to the blackberries there.  Not that she’d have been physically capable of picking them.  Contrasts sharply to one occasion last year, when I was picking them along the road out to Mount House School, and a very nice lady hailed me and asked if I’d like to collect a few cooking apples from her ample surplus (several big trees) to go with them.