Another market

I didn’t associate street markets with Berlin before I arrived, but there’s one at least … the Haeckerstr market, which only operates Thursdays & Saturdays apparently. But I was in luck, and enjoyed it. Small but perfectly formed! There’s fresh produce, and food to eat, as well as craft-y stuff (as well as good shops nearby … a book store, Muji …). On the first visit just browsed, with an espresso from the Italian coffee stall in hand, and later, for lunch, a gozle (have I got that right?) from two Turkish women at another stall. It’s a flat bread, like a pita, with spinach & white cheese worked into the dough, and wrapped around salad. A little too much red onion in the salad for my taste, but apart from that tasty and fresh. That, anyway, was the Thursday. Returned on the Saturday … decided I was going to cook roast pumpkin & feta frittata for the friends I was staying with … so left the market with a small pumpkin & a lettuce for the accompanying salad. The flesh of the pumpkin, I have to say, was a lovely deep orange … very important for the dish, gives it a visual richness. And dinner was a success. Thank goodness for straightforward recipes! I posted it earlier.

Scottish Sunday

Sunday in Glasgow. A fine day, and out walking along a path beside a stream, bird-watching. When you stop and look, so many differents birds, quite surprisingly many. And looking at, looking for birds takes the eye away from the pollution, the plastic, the shoppng trollies, that befoul the stream. However, overall it was lovely, a very British thing to do. And our destination a pub. Only ten years old, D says, but it looks the real thing. So, maybe made of plaster board, but the beams are solid & genuine, and it has an open fire. None of those nasty gas imitations here. The pub’s full of families eating and drinking … it’s near a shopping centre so I don’t think these people have walked here, though some look as though they would benefit from a long walk, or three. But the atmosphere’s good, and if the food is average … but perhaps the Sunday roast was the ‘right’ choice … the beer is good. Just a half of some real ale. Not enough to make me sleepy … there’s the walk home after all … but enough to make it all a very British experience.

Harrod’s

Are the food halls of Harrod’s to foodies what the caverns of Moria are to dwarves? A wonderful place for wandering and ogling. Emerged with a selection of Leonidas chocolates, my favourites, and a smoked salmon roll. Wandered up past Buckingham Palace to St James’s Park, another favourite, to sit by the water and watch the birds … and be pestered by a squirrel, as bad as seagulls on the Picton foreshore! … where I ate my little lunch. Well, not the chocolates, they were for after dinner. Anyway, it was a lovely little interlude in a busy day, and the generous amount of smoked salmon in the roll made me think that the egg mayonnaise sandwich I grabbed from the ubiquitous Pret a Manger was about the same price and far less tasty. In other words, make Harrod’s your local!

London

London, I do love it and it’s many faces. Tatty & run-down … arrive at Heathrow Terminal 1 & see if that’s not your first impression. Splendid … the iconic skyline, the buildings. And reassuringly unchanging. That perhaps is the human face of the city. At the bottom of the road where I’m staying is a market, the North End Road market. It’s just great. Fruit stalls, vege stalls. Fish, cheese. And ’stuff’. It’s not big, but it’s busy, and cheerful (especially if you take being called ‘love’, and ‘darling’, as evidence of good cheer), and seems cheap. Of course, very little is locally grown, or even seasonal. The Peruvian asparagus we had my first night, for example. Is this a treat I wondered, feeling that as a good guest I should eat them, and try to keep them down … asparagus is FAR from my favourite vegetable. And trying not to wonder about the food miles.

Roast duck

There’s a bit of a reluctance, travelling alone, to go into restaurants full of groups having a good time. Better to seek out the cafes where local people eat, perhaps on their way home from work. May not be the haute-est of local cuisine, but good honest food. I was quite pleased yesterday to discover barbecued roast duck and rice from a sort of fast food outlet, Cafe de Coral, at one of the railway stations. Eating it standing up at a counter, beside a plate glass window, in full view of the passing foot traffic … would people stare? But no, not that I noticed, and chopsticks and duck don’t pose any sort of problem for me. So I wasn’t creating a spectacle. And I LOVE that roast duck, so my focus was on the food.

There was a bit more of a chopstick challenge at dinner though … deliciously fatty knuckles of pork, but so hard to manage. They’d provided a fork with the chopsticks, and I wasn’t too proud to use it to impale the meat with my left hand, while I prodded and poked with chopsticks in my right. Free entertainment for other diners? No, they were intent on their own eating.

And, as a postscript, some things in HK may be expensive, but eating like this sure ain’t.

A fine bakery

Back in Hong Kong, back at the same hotel I stayed at the start of last year. The great thing about returning, the immediate locale is a little familiar. A couple of road names known, a couple of small restaurants remembered. But best of all, just around the corner on Nathan Road, a great little bakery. Yamazaki Bakery. Excellent little croissants, and so inexpensive. Also, and this a real treat, delicious egg custard tarts. Those are something I somehow associate with Chinese cuisine … blame that on a taste sensation in Singapore once upon a time. But anyway, I can’t recommend this bakery enough … it’s always humming, mainly young women picking their selections with tongs onto trays … and then can be seen at the bus stop nearby nibbling away.

Anyway, so I’m skipping hotel breakfasts and eating in my room. Very contentedly!

Leaving, on a jet plane

Am at Auckland airport, once again, on my travels. Grazing on an apple & a glass of bubbles as I wait for my flight to be called. Half past ten at night, and the place is busy. Guess none of us will be looking so bright-eyed in twelve hours’ time. I know I won’t! Anyway, a chance to add a few random thoughts …

The garden, now planted up with vegetables for summer. Tomatoes, lettuce, zucchini, peas, silver beet. The same as last year. The reassuring cycle of the seasons. I hope, when I return, to find it looking healthy, if not yet bountiful. And, fingers crossed, none of the blight that affected the tomatoes last year.

And last night, a great Kiwi feed, courtesy of our neighbours … West Coast whitebait. Perhaps the fritter recipe in the Edmonds’ Cookbook is not the most flattering way to treat that expensive delicacy, but that’s how we had them. And they were fine. But I do recall once, in a restaurant, having them tossed in a beaten egg and lightly dusted with flour. That was the best ever, but I didn’t feel confident to try it last night.

Lots more I’ve been meaning to say, but it’s not important, can wait. Except to add, we have eaten again at Caffe Italiano in Cuba St since my last post … disappointing this time. I start to wonder whether it’s a franchise, and about quality control. Think it may be time to find a new favourite cheap-ish eatery.

But for now, I’m looking forward to some eating treats in Hong Kong.

Sticky rice with mango

Free from the conference and a couple of days at leisure in Bangkok, time for eating & shopping. At the Mah Boon Krong food hall made sure that I left space for a serving of that simple but delicious dessert, mango with sticky rice. It’s the contrast between the sticky, tangy rice with just a hint of salt in the accompanying coconut milk, and the juicy, yellow, non-fibrous Thai mango that works so well.

On conference lunches

Food at conferences can be one of the talking points among delegates, and the target on unfavourable comments on evaluation forms. But no complaints here. Am impressed that at lunch each day we don’t do the buffet shuffle, but sit at round tables. And are served 6 or 8 very good Thai dishes. Some familiar, some not. Always a soup at the centre of the ‘lazy Susan’ – tom yung khung (the spicy prawn soup) the first day, tom kha gai (coconut chicken) the next, and something different, the name of which I’ve forgotten, today. And after the main dishes have been cleared it’s time for polimai and kanom – fruit & sweetmeats. Though today the little cakes were replaced by that extraordinary dish of egg custard baked inside a pumpkin. Yummy.

Hotel breakfasts

It amazes me that, when I go down to the hotel dining room at 6.30 in the morning, it’s so full of people. People who are clearly not insomniacs, people who appear to be bright-eyed & bushy-tailed after a good night’s sleep. Not people like me who have been awake since 5, or even 3, and are feeling grumpy about being jet-lagged. However, let me say, this hotel (the Imperial Queen’s Park) does breakfast – &, indeed, service – very well. And with over 1000 rooms (I’m sure I read on their promo material), while it’s not really my sort of hotel, I don’t suppose they’d survive long without excellent management in place. And at breakfast they triumph. Thank goodness, because when jet-lagged & grumpy one doesn’t want to be crossed first thing in the morning! When I’m in a hotel I don’t require all the trappings of a cooked breakfast but I do like certain basics to be right: (a) a pot of tea rather than a cup from a passing Kona, (b) juice that isn’t cordial, and (c) good croissants. Big ticks on each of those scores.  Also, a great selection of almost-home-made-looking jams … damson plum, red currant, strawberry, and others … attractively presented in glass jars.   And other interesting things that I didn’t sample … pale green pandanus jam to go with the French toast, for example. My sole complaint – Australian rather than NZ butter … which everyone knows is superior!