The Year in Brief…

Once again, we apologise for the long blog silence. Hopefully the summary of 2011 that follows will provide sufficient explanation as to why blogs we write in our heads usually don’t make the transition to the pages of Word Press.

End of January 2011: Bébé makes his long-awaited appearance. We download the WordPress app for the smartphone, thinking foolishly that we might be able to blog between feeds, diaper changes, crying, etc.

April 2011: It’s April already? What happened to the last three months? There’s a blur of laundry, but most of the rest is wiped out in sleep deprivation. We venture on our first real trip with Bébé to Spain (see other entries).

May 2011: Buoyed by the success of our trip to Spain, we take Bébé to Bath. C does a course at the Bertinet kitchen, G takes in the sights. Two days later, feeling even more adventurous, we venture to Paris, to see what one of our favourite cities is like with a baby. Not bad… but we do go to the same restaurant several times for dinner, since we’re not brave enough to venture too far from our rented apartment. Good thing we like the Moroccan food at Chez Omar. Omar apparently likes babies.

Summer 2011: After conquering European travel with Bébé, we venture across the Atlantic to Canada for G’s brother’s wedding and summer in Canada with grandparents (and babysitting!). We’re pleased to report that Bébé is a great traveller. Sadly, we discover that we’ve turned into the people at the airport with piles of luggage. If we’re the people in front of you at the security line-up, we apologise. We used to mock them as we sauntered around with our reasonably sized backpacks. Sigh…

Autumn 2011: Time flew by in a mess of introducing Bébé to solid food. This meant new challenges to our culinary repetoire, but we’re pleased to report that for now, Bébé seems to like food that’s flavourful and spicy. He also seems to be rather obsessed with bread…a little like his father…

And that brings us to the end of the year. Christmas was spent in Edmonton, where we hoped to introduce Bébé to the wonders of snow and winter. Unfortunately, the weather gods were against us, and he was instead introduced to icy sidewalks, and one afternoon of skating outdoors. Well, he sat in his stroller and was pushed around by many willing friends.

All in all, 2011 was great, flew by in a blur, and we resolve to attempt more regular blogging in 2012. Yes, really…even though Bébé is becoming a very busy toddler…

Caldeirada: Cooking, the Galician Way

To the untrained palate, Galicia probably doesn’t hold the culinary appeal that make other parts of Spain so tempting. The Basque Country revels in Michelin-starred pintxos, Catalunha is famed for molecular gastronomy and tomato wars, Extremadura has the best ham in the world, Valencia has the paella, and Andalucía has tapas and sherry, but Galicia doesn’t really feature among the country’s best-known culinary offerings.

Galician cooking is home cooking. Being predominantly rural, it won’t surprise you to learn that the food here is based around simple, rustic farm recipes. You’ll be hard pressed to find a restaurant serving food neatly piled in stacks, there’ll be none of this jus and balsamic reduction business, and the only foam you’ll see is likely to come from your own mouth as you salivate over another delicious plate of seafood. For what Galician food lacks in presentation, it more than makes up for in the quality of produce, of which Galicians are extremely proud.

Pulpo con cachelos

Calamari

Line-caught hake

Pescado en caldeira

Razor clams

Pulpo a la plancha

Prawns

Porco celta

Cocido gallego

Empanada de bacalao

Scallops

Finisterre: To the ends of the world

After some deliberation as to whether Bébé’s first international outing should be in Tuscany or the French Alps, we settled instead for Galicia, Spain’s northwestern-most region and final destination of pilgrims on the camino de Santiago. No such strenuous activity for us, though; our destination was Casa de Trillo, where we would spend a relaxing (yes, that’s right) week with a 3-month old. Casa de Trillo is one of many casas rurales throughout Spain, traditional farmhouses that operate as B&Bs. The house is part of a working farm run by Rosa and Jesús, who is also founder and president of the Galician Slow Food Association (he will emphasize that there is no microwave in the house). There are six guest rooms, each simply but impeccably decorated, and the hosts provide a welcoming relaxed and familial atmosphere.

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Nine-week old

Once again we must apologize for the long hiatus. Such are the exigencies of life with a nine-week old baby. A real one this time, not merely of the sourdough variety (that one is over a year old now, and still going strong in the fridge). We have vague musings of things to blog about every so often, but never really seem to get to it. Until today. Bébé is sound asleep, and while taking a break from watching Julie & Julia (a movie! An actual, whole movie! When was the last time that happened?*) to eat leftover birthday cake (raspberry and chocolate, from Konditor & Cook), I felt inspired to start a blog entry.

Yes, having a newborn in the house can be quite a handful. In a good way, of course, but still a handful. For a start, sitting down for dinner doesn’t happen. Dinner is taken in turns while the other person tries to put bébé to sleep. Meals also become simpler, involving foods that can be eaten one handed without the need for a knife, and can preferably be made in batches and stored for subsequent, one-handed meals (today’s 2-day old lasagna being a good example). They must also be made with ingredients that bébé will not find offensive when he gets the distilled version some hours later (i.e. chickpeas are out); a cranky baby at 3am makes for a cranky parent for the whole of the next day.

But we wouldn’t want you to think that we’ve been starving, or retired from the kitchen. To be sure, there have been a fair number of pizzas, but some of them were even home-made, and we haven’t yet resorted to an M&S meal for two [EN: at the time of publication, this is no longer true, except that said meal was not from M&S. So technically it's true]. We’ve become experts at mashed potato, and bolognese sauce, and meatballs have become staples in our freezer. We’ve also been perfecting the art of the baguette (on which more later), also good for freezing, and have even taken a turn at making ciabatta. And we’ve decided to expand our pâtisserie skills: G will be taking a pastry masterclass at The French Tarte (bébé’s new favourite hangout) on Friday, and I’ll be doing a one-day croissant and viennoiserie class at The Bertinet Kitchen in Bath at the end of May. We’ll let you know how it goes!

Hainan chicken (海南鸡)

While flicking through recipes to decide what to do with a pair of duck legs, I suddenly felt an urge to make Hainan chicken. Unlike other culinary misnomers, I think it’s relatively safe to assume that Hainan chicken does really come from the south China island of Hainan (海南, literally “South sea”) and that it does, in fact, involve chicken, as opposed to, say, a donut. Hainan chicken is a classic southern Chinese dish that is served, in one or other variation, in many a hole-in-the-wall food shack throughout southeast Asia. The whole chicken is poached, keeping it pale and moist, and the soup stock is usually eaten on the side. The chicken is cut into small pieces, which should have just the right combination of juicy meat, slippery skin and succulent bone. The chicken is served on a pile of boiled rice, with a dipping sauce of ginger, salt and spring onion.

Hainan chicken with green onion and ginger dipping sauce

Coconuts and Bananas does fusion

The more time one spends in the kitchen, the more one gets the feeling that fusion food must be something invented by someone with too many leftovers in their fridge and not enough incentive to cook. Of course, they probably had fancier leftovers, which is how they came up with miso-marinated black cod with a salad of pea shoots, daikon and pickled ginger, orange, honey and wasabi dressing, and wakame crisps. In our kitchen, it’s more like Indo-Lebanese saag paneer and rice vermicelli, stir-fried beef (from last night’s teriyaki) with green beans, and enchilagna (a mexitalian dish of chilli in between layers of crispy corn tostadas, topped with cheese and baked). Yes, all on the same plate…[EN: Only one of us likes all this together on one plate. The other prefers to eat her food one dish at a time, so as not to get a really nasty version of this odd fusion]

Nine-month old

It’s interesting how you get into a routine after a few months. I have a pretty good feel now for when our nine-month old needs to be fed and cleaned, and how to get fairly consistent behaviour with minimal effort. Generally, I slap it around a bit and shove it in the fridge overnight.

Chocolate and Guinness…

…make a mighty fine cake. But first you need to buy some beer.

And that’s where our story starts. Well,  not quite. It starts with the need to make a cake suitable for a 40th wedding anniversary. Other stipulations: it must be nut-free (allergies), it must travel well (2 trains, 3 stations, 80 minutes of travel time), it must be made in advance (see travel times for reasons why), and if at all possible, it must use the brand-new bundt pan that has journeyed from Canada to grace our shelves, but is still shrouded in its cardboard wrapper.

The natural solution to my cake needs was the Chocolate Guinness Cake, first made for a girls’ weekend in the mountains, where it was declared good enough to eat for breakfast. Now that’s a seal of approval. The recipe comes courtesy of Fine Cooking, and no cake recipe from that website (or magazine) has failed me yet.

Iceland- the country, not the store

[EN: For the benefit of the non-UK readership, we feel that this blog entry should be prefaced by some contextual information. Iceland is the name of a chain of frozen food stores. They sell frozen peas, fish fingers, McCain oven chips, that kind of thing, and advertise under the catchy slogan "Mom's gone to Iceland". Note that on hearing that ad on TV, most reasonable people assume they mean the store, not the northern land of the Vikings.]

If further confirmation were needed of the dire state of the banking system, a recent visit to our local bank proved illustrative [EN: in the interests of confidentiality, we will not divulge the name of the bank. Let's just call it Bank 'B'...]. Our visit was precipitated by an impending trip to Iceland, land of Björk, trolls, and pickled shark, for which we needed some Icelandic krona. Our conversation with the teller at the ‘travel money’ counter went something like this:

Buying a bed in London

There is a common anecdote about how a butterfly flapping its wings in China makes you buy a bed in London. I paraphrase slightly perhaps, but I do think such causal processes are interesting. How is it, for example, that you go into IKEA intending to buy some tea lights and you end up with five picture frames, a Poang chair, two CD racks and some scented candles? And so it is when you’re expecting a baby. You start off thinking you need the aforementioned Poang chair for night feeding and you end up buying a bed. How? The reasoning goes something like this. You actually already have two Poang chairs in the living room, but it would be nicer to have a couch, so you could put one of the chairs in the bedroom and buy a couch instead. Except that you’re sleeping on a futon, which doubles as a couch, but hasn’t been used for that purpose for the past two years. So in fact, you could move the Poang chair upstairs, move the futon downstairs to use as a couch, and buy a new bed. A real, grown-up one. Wouldn’t that be something?