Falling Sky

Back In The Kitchin

There's already been two reviews of the day we went to the Kitchin earlier this month - you can read the Missus's here, or AA Gill's here (though he was there for the dinner menu, it was the same day). My gibberings follow!

I'd never heard of The Kitchin, the Leith-based Michelin-starred restaurant, until I went there for a belated christmas lunch with work colleagues in January this year, after which I've been champing at the financial bit to go back, partly to see how the menu changes with the season, mainly to introduce my good lady to the food there. The former point relates to the importance that head chef Tom Kitchin puts on seasonal food - and while it feels like all chefs and restaurants currently trumpet their belief in seasonal food, Kitchin really seems to practice what he preaches. More than the buzzword du jour, the concept of seasonal food is presented as the cornerstone of The Kitchin, reflected in the motto From Nature To Plate (the title of Kitchin's new recipe book, which we'll be checking out in a few weeks time). As to the latter, while I had cheerfully feasted on meaty goodness at the January lunch, the vegetarians of the group were equally enthusiastic about the quality of the meat-free food at the Kitchin. Finding decent restaurants that serve vegetarian food to as high a standard as their meat mains isn't always easy, so this was something I really wanted to share with the Missus.

Poetically enough, it was through the process of her becoming Missus - ie, we got married - that the opportunity arose, thanks to my new work colleagues (I'm now in a different building, same employer) clubbing together to get us vouchers for the Kitchin as a wedding present. Although presented with them in June, it's taken four months for us to be able to find the right time to go - while it's open on a Saturday, I much preferred the thought of going during the week - but a couple of weeks back, fighting back cold-related sniffles, we finally found a window in our calendars on a Tuesday. So, how'd it go?

Well, we went along for lunch rather than dinner - with the set lunch menu, you can get three courses for £24.50, two of which would be covered by the voucher, whereas the a la carte prices are notably higher and would've made a dent in our wallets even with the voucher. As for the tasting menu... well, a glutton can dream, because goodness knows what salary I'd need to be on before I could justify £65 plus drinks for dinner, though I've no doubt the quality would make it worthwhile. First Minister? Anyhoo, the Kitchin hasn't noticeably changed in nine months, nor does it need to, though curiously it felt smaller, cosier, more intimate this time round, the difference of not being in a large room-filling group. Though undoubtedly more relaxed than other restaurants of a similar standard (or so I presume), and even though I knew to expect it from last time, it's still a bit odd having waiting staff unfolding the napkin or refilling our water glasses with a bottle already on the table, since we've always expected to do that sort of thing ourselves. Still, it's not as if that's all the waiting staff do - on the contrary, they were excellent, knowledgeable in the food yet with an air to relax rather than to intimidate as the cliché of the high-class waiter leads you to expect. Speed of service was impressive without giving the impression of being rushed, the sense being of a well-oiled machine running smoothly, attentive but not intrusive.

Right, nosh!

One of the highlights of the January lunch was the appetiser, a cream of celeriac soup that was just bursting with flavour, so I was looking forward to seeing what little goodie turned up before the lunch proper. We weren't disappointed, presented with a little bowl of superb roast pumpkin soup, as rich and flavourful as that celeriac soup, topped off nicely with toasted pumpkin seeds. So good! Appetite suitably teased, onto the starter.

What's that, you yelp. Ravioli of braised squid served in a languistine consomme, I answer. Uh... okay, you say edging away. But stop! Whatever your experience or expectation of eating squid, this was a revelation. If I didn't know that there ravioli contained squid, I would never have guessed, nor could I have imagined what it was. Braised, that squid became something fascinating and new to my tastebuds, closer perhaps to sausagement in texture than anything else, yet with a flavour all of its own somewhere between meat and fish, complemented with a sweetly sour consomme so good that I struggled to resist the urge to slurp every last drop from the bowl. One suspects such things just aren't done in swanky restaurants, but if I'd had a straw handy...

Main! And that, chums, is roast mallard from Perthshire, served with wild Scottish mushrooms and sauce 'aux abats', (the latter translates as offal, in case you were wondering). Rubbish photo, taken too close to the dish and with low lighting it really does the food no justice whatsoever. This was wonderful, in another world entirely from the usual duck dishes available at take-aways and gastropubs, the meat succulent and tender, draped with a rich sauce that made every bite a pleasure to savour without overpouring the flavour of the dear departed duck.

Rounding off the meal, here's the dessert - pistachio soufflé served with pistachio ice cream. Two pistachio flavoured sweets sounds worryingly samey, but no! Instead it's a textbook example of just how differently one flavour can be prepared. The ice cream was cold (fancy that!) and smooth, triggering taste nostalgia of pistachio ice cream in France when I was a kid, countered by the hot and perfectly risen soufflé. It was a treat to note how both clearly tasted of pistachio, yet at the same time were so different, complementing each other nicely. Most of all, both soufflé and ice cream were sodding delicious, rounding off the lunch perfectly.

It'd be nice to be able to have at least one critical thing to say about the whole shebang, but it's annoyingly impossible - the Kitchin yet again proved itself to be adventurous, ingenious and surprising in its dishes, while still keeping its ingredients firmly rooted in Scotland. Service was impeccable, friendly, utterly devoid of snobbishness. Both lunches there have been absolute solid-gold knockouts, so good that £24.50 stops being a rather high figure for a lunch and starts looking like a downright bargain in terms of getting what you pay for. If you're ever in Edinburgh and want a meal to remember, a real treat, I find it very hard to imagine you could do any better elsewhere in the city - or beyond, as the ever-increasing award haul suggests. Go, go, go. And take us with you.

Fowey: In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country

Boards of Canada: In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country

Finally, after Cheltenham, St Austell, St Ives and Perranuthnoe, here's the last honeymoon post, four months after the event.

(Incidentally, this afternoon I'd typed a great long post for this that took a couple of hours to put together - only for Typepad to inexplicably lose and autosave over the top of it just now, which is immensely frustrating as I have no idea how it happened. The safest move seems to be writing the text of the entry offline on Ecto instead, but I had assumed the Typepad system was solid enough to rely upon. This suggests otherwise. Anyway...)

We'd spent a week staying two nights a time at three luxurious yet different B&B/hotels, allowing us to see different areas of Cornwall despite being reliant on public transport and our own little legs, but by this point we'd done all our touristing and just wanted to spend some time with each other, the countryside and not much else, far from the gibbering crowds, staying in the kind of place that normally we would absolutely love to go to but wouldn't be able to justify the cost. And so, Badgers Hollow.

Badgers Hollow is part of Coriander Cottages, based within walking distance of Fowey but far enough away that coach parties are but a distant memory. It's an old cider mill that's been superbly renovated into an environmentally kosher open plan holiday cottage, complete with solar panels, wood burning stove (sadly we had no excuse to light it, the weather remaining gorgeous for our whole stay there, but its presence makes the thought of a winter stay most attractive), fleece insulation (ditto on the winter stay), a jacuzzi bath big enough for two and a ultra-tech kitchen with appliances more intelligent than us, full of the sort of things that we'd have in our dream home, if only we could make it come true. But the location was the icing on an already perfect cake - the view from the front door looked like this...

And the view from bed:

Why yes, those are my feet. Not that we would often leave the curtains and patio doors open whilst in bed, but even if we did the only neighbours likely to see us were horses and ducks - oh aye, there was that pheasant that popped round one day. There are others staying in the adjoining barn and the main farm area, but it's arranged in such a way that if it's solitude you want, solitude you get, and so we did. We went for self-catering - while you can choose to have B&B rather than self-catering, it felt better to spend our time there living entirely at our own pace - besides, another week of meaty cooked breakfasts could have left me looking decidedly portly. There were some basics waiting for us when we got to Badgers Hollow - cereal, milk, tea, juice, local meat, fruit & veg - much of which lasting our whole time there, and there were a couple of lovely shops in Fowey itself where we could buy ingredients for dinner. Fortuitously, we were there slap bang in the middle of Cornish asparagus season, along with juicy strawberries and sweet little new potatoes, so my dinner usually looked something like this:

And it was absolutely delicious, as much a pleasure as eating at the Victoria Inn. The asparagus needed the barest of boils, that juicy taste well worth the peculiar smell that would follow, while the bacon and sausages from local butcher Kittows were easily a match for Puddledub and Crombies, washed down with whatever Cornish beer had taken my fancy that day:

We would have dinner (and breakfast, and lunch if we weren't elsewhere) sat outside either on the terrace or balcony with no soundtrack but birdsong, the random whinny of a horse and, now and then, highly aggrieved quacking from the female ducks as the mallards attempted their rather disturbing form of breeding, comically failing at every attempt from what we could tell, leading to their own aggrieved quacking as they walked away from the duck pond dejectedly, while an osprey would routinely arc through the sky, divebombing nests. The sun blazed down, a gentle breeze would blow across the field, multitudes of bunnies would appear in the neighbouring field at dusk, we were in our own little heaven.

Still, we did leave the cottage now and then, mostly to saunter down to Fowey, once to go on an enjoyably gradient-filled walk to a wee village, Golant. Fowey itself is a pleasant enough fishing village, though it feels as though it's tourism not fishing that keeps it going. Certainly not as annoying as St Ives, the amount of traffic winding through the thin streets could still be irritating and we tried to avoid later times in the day when it got busier. A pleasant enough place to visit, but a bit too busy for our tastes, especially with Badgers Hollow waiting for us - it was a relief to know we had that to go back to. We kept coming back to the Dwelling House, an excellent cafe (not that you'd know it from the website) with a particularly good line in cakes and (naturally) cream teas:

Yum! Their fish salad platter maintained the quality, locally caught fish served up with (that word again) locally grown salad, and no doubt we'd have eaten there even more if Badgers Hollow didn't keep calling us back. Food For Thought served a perfectly fine paella, prawn eyes beadying back up at me, but felt a bit too busy and polished for our overly-discerning ways, though their ice-cream stand was a tasty blessing. Pinky Murphys, on the other hand, was much more fun, full of genuine character and good nosh to back it up, while the location meant that those who drove straight into the centre of Fowey and never left it remained oblivious to its charms - we were particularly glad for their wi-fi connection to catch up on wedding snaps and emails. The aforepictured Bird shop is full of kids stuff, the kind of thing we nod approvingly at (stripes! wood! Moomins!) and White Doll Arts featured some lovely simple pottery, which we bought, and a floofy cat, which we didn't. And I could hardly visit a coastal town like Fowey without partaking in a fish supper, courtesy of The Other Place (I commend their restraint at not going for 'Plaice' there). There were a couple of restaurants that looked delicious for lunch - most notable Restaurant Nathan Outlaw - but without vegetarian choices on the lunch menu they were no good for us. A pity, but we probably would have felt utterly out of our depth, honeymoon or not, and when the alternative was home-cooked goodness eaten overlooking rolling hills as the evening sun gradually dipped behind the trees for a tiny fraction of the price... well, I can live with that.

It really was a little slice of perfection, as much as our week in Stromness last year, a brief step into a different life. With no mobile or internet signal to intrude, we were free to enjoy our own company, sometimes reading, sometimes just soaking up the gloriousness of it all, decompressing from the hyperchaos of wedding preparation, talking about the future and getting used to having a ring rattling around on my finger. It's hard to imagine any B&B topping Ednovean Farm, so self-catering was the only way we could improve on that experience, and so it did, ending the honeymoon on a gentle high. Living up to all the expectations we'd had, we couldn't have hoped for any better and we'd gladly go back (if finances would ever allow). Cornwall may not be the distant, far-flung location that other couples go for, but for us it was ideal - train-travelled, surrounded by countryside and coastline, very well fed, with the time and the peace of our own little world - a perfect honeymoon.

Jam Gone Wrong

A few weeks back we had a go at making a batch of plum jam.  All went well, but once jarred it clearly hadn't set and all looked too sloppy and syrupy.  Right, thinks I some time later, I'll put all the jam back into the pan, add some more jam sugar, boil it and jar it, that's sure to make it set.  And it did!

And there's four jars just like this, filled with ultra-dense super-sticky sub-organic matter! Anyone need some grouting done? Some homemade No Need For Nails?

Now I need to figure out how the deuce to get this... stuff out of the jars - I fear industrial solvents may be required. At this rate I'll never make it into the WI...

Perranuthnoe: The Blue Room

The honeymoon continues!  Bidding goodbye to the palm trees of Boskerris Hotel and suitably full from a delicious lunch at Porthminster Cafe, we took the train southwards from St Ives to an equally sun-drenched Penzance.  It looked like a nice enough town, but we were heading for quieter things, taking a taxi out away from the town and into the south Cornish countryside, finally rattling up a country track to reach our destination, Ednovean Farm.

Photo by the Missus

We'd had a wonderful time staying at both Anchorage House and Boskerris Hotel, and would certainly recommend them to all, but Ednovean Farm has to be my favourite of the three.  An old farm where they still have hens and horses (I believe the room we stayed in used to be a cowshed...) with three rooms for couples, no children, beautiful gardens and a simply divine south-southwesterly view across rolling fields, over Perranuthnoe and to the sea.  We stayed in the Blue Room, undoubtedly the best choice, with a nice big bed, French doors opening wide to reveal the stunning view and a nice wee private terrace too.  As with everywhere else we stayed, there was a TV and DVD player, but with real world visuals like that we had no need for them, happy to sit outside and take it all in, the light, the countryside, the blissful peace of it all.  The 'look' of the room and accompanying bathroom was spot-on, put together with details that felt charming, never cheesy, and the roll-top bath was the perfect size for two. Breakfast both mornings was lovely, with the option (which we took the first day) of having a breakfast delivered to the door of our room, allowing us to cheerfully devour croissants at our leisure.  The second morning we went up to the gorgeous open-plan dining room/kitchen that damn near made us giddy with the sheer Country Livingness of it all, locally-sourced food cooked up on a Rayburn, the sizzling bacon drowned out by birdsong outside.  The hosts, Charles and Christine, are very friendly and helpful - anyone with a complete set of the Aubrey/Maturin books can't be bad - and Olley the cat was a far less yappy feline than our local mog.  And being welcomed with tea and eccles cakes certainly didn't hurt.

So what's to do there?  Well, we'd rather got all the touristy stuff out of the way over the last few days and had no particular plans, just the way we like things.  Walking, eating, reading, or just lazing around was pretty much the order of our two days there, with the coastal village of Perranuthnoe an easy country path walk from Ednovean Farm.  Perranuthnoe's a lovely wee place, reminded me of my home village Islip if it were plonked down by the seaside, surrounded by fields and tiny roads, old houses with welly boots outside.  Coastal paths head out to the east and west of the village as part of the South West Coast Path, both of which we gave a go - pretty easy-going, mostly keeping close to the coast, the westerly path bringing you towards Marazion and St Michael's Mount.  The beach at Perranuthnoe was a little gem, popular enough but never crowded to the extent of Carbis Bay or St Ives, a pleasure to stroll along or just sit on the rocks and watch the waves gently roll in, and a food cabin - appropriately called The Cabin - serving up way-above-average food and drink (though it's recently raised a veritable stushie in the village news with proposals for quadrupling its size).  There's a group of craft shops and art galleries brought together in an old L-shaped set of buildings, where we bought a cracking mono print by an artist whose name is sadly illegible on the artwork so I can't sing his praises, and I had another (delicious) cream tea in the sunshine.  And then there's Victoria.

The Victoria Inn dates back in one form or another to the 12th century, apparently.  It's a nice pink building, quite prepossessing and unshowy, the interior retaining that sense of an old village pub complete with nautical touches (a 3000W bulb from a lighthouse, model boats in boxes, that sort of thing), snug corners, free of pretence.  As with every other pub I went to in Cornwall, local breweries Sharp's and Skinner's ales were on tap (Doom Bar was particularly ubiquitous).  But the real draw is the food - it's a gastropub, but a gastropub par excellence, on a different planet to those pubs with twenty different mains, every one of them from a freezer.  Described as a 'destination pub', it was taken over by Stewart and Anna Eddy, the latter taking care of the food having previously trained with Raymond Blanc and Michael Caines.  The commitment to locally sourced ingredients is immediately apparent looking at the menu and specials, featuring Cornish crab, duck, beef, turbot, asparagus, mackerel, pork, strawberries, cod. We managed to book places for both Saturday evening and Sunday lunch and subsequently found out we were jammy sods to even have got one of them, another couple at Ednovean Farm having failed to get a table for Saturday.

Saturday night I went for a mains special, honey roast Cornish duck breast with sweet potato puree with apple and smoked bacon, followed with lemon posset with local strawberries and lemon shortbread.  The duck was a knockout, richer and juicier than any I'd tasted before, complemented by a puree I'd never even considered making with sweet potatoes but worked like a charm.  The lemon posset, aside from teaching me a new word, had a sharp sweet tang savoured in small spoonfuls along with the strawberries.  It was superb food, presented with care yet still in enough quantities to fill us up and at none of the prices or pretension that one might expect from a chef of such pedigree (the duck a bargain at £17.50, the dessert £5.25) and we slowly ambled our way back up the country paths as the evening sun slowly sank into the west, the landscape awash with a warm dusky light, rabbits scampering on the fields.  Sunday lunch was equally impressive, going for Cornish cod with local asparagus and lemon butter sauce, a great combination of flavours that made me grateful for going on honeymoon during proper asparagus season, followed up simply but tastily with some Cornish Moomaid ice-cream (with a name like that, how could I resist?), again quite excellent.  Honestly, you have no idea how much my mouth's been watering writing this last paragraph...

Is the Victoria Inn really worth travelling to Perranuthnoe for?  Absolutely, but there's plenty of good reasons to go to this little village on the coast regardless.  It's a refreshing break away from the busier, noisier parts of Cornwall, a path less travelled by tourists, and Ednovean Farm was such an absolute pleasure to stay at - we would gladly return. Slow lazy meanders along a near-empty beach, strolling along miles of coastland with nothing to hear but the sea, wind and birdsong, sat outside in the evening light reading or cosied up in the Victoria Inn, our stay in Perranuthnoe was as close to perfection as we could have ever hoped for.

Next stop: a little bit of Penzance, a whole lot of Fowey...

St Ives: Drink, Don't Drive

Westwards ho, from St Austell to St Ives - except we didn't go quite that far, getting off a stop early at Carbis Bay to check in at our next home-from-home, Boskerris Hotel.  As the name suggests, it's a full-blown hotel but not particularly huge, 15 rooms in all.  As befitting our honeymoony status, we stayed in the Celebration suite, a lovely big room looking out onto the bay with king size bed and a corner bath for two (in which we came close to boiling ourselves alive, but never mind that).  The bath robes and slippers from The White Company were a treat to swan about it, and the Bose iPod dock was a handy extra. The feeling of luxury was more subtle than our previous stopping point, more conventionally hotel-like but still special and thoroughly swish - the only complaint being that the walls could have been thicker, having been awoken at 2am the first night by the sound of the occupant of the neighbouring room being sick in their bathroom.  Bwurgh!  That aside, our stay was glorious, the whole hotel full of nice touches, a much more individual and genuine experience than staying in some behemoth Hilton, such as the giant map of Cornwall along one wall complete with notes on the best places to visit, eat, suppliers of their food, or the chalkboard with the days weather and any events happening that day locally.

 

We'd got to the hotel by midday, an earlier check-in than usually allowed but the staff were extremely accommodating (as they were throughout our stay) so we were able to drop our luggage off in the room and head out for lunch.  Now, initially we'd planned to go to the Bean Inn, a completely vegetarian restaurant in Carbis Bay, until we found out it was only open in the evenings. Scuppered, we decided to walk over to St Ives instead along the coastal footpath, especially as it didn't look all that far on the map.  And indeed it wouldn't be, as the crow flies, but the map didn't show the startlingly steep climbs and dips the path takes. A bit of a shock for my leg at first, though I think the stretching actually did it some good, and the path was a very pleasant walk that we ended up taking quite a few times over our two days there as we bounced between Carbis Bay and its larger neighbour. The gloomy weather that had drizzled over Eden had given way to glorious sunshine and warmth, ideal summer holiday weather that didn't let up until the end of the honeymoon, bringing out gorgeous shades of turquoise and aquamarine from the sea and making suncream essential. As we entered St Ives at Porthminster Beach, we saw the sun had brought out lots of people (it was half term holiday in England that week) complete with a boggling number of men with great bellies perched on top of too-tight swimming trunks and a conspicuous amount of chunky jewellery, the beach a sea of pale skin turning scarlet. You could almost hear the sizzling.

Not the best of first impressions, but things quickly picked up nicely at the beachfront Porthminster Cafe. We saved eating in the restaurant there until our last day at Carbis Bay, opting for a lunchtime chippy from their take-away on the same premises. I went for the fish and chips, pictured right, and oh my golly. Since tasting an absolutely knockout fish supper in Stromness last year, fish & chips elsewhere has tasted bland and pointless, so I was delighted to have found another awesome fish supper on the opposite side of the UK. Look at that beauty! A battered coating that crunched like a good 'un yet didn't overpower the fish like they often do, the fish itself fresh and juicy, with good tasty chips and a wee portion of tartare sauce to go with it, all served up in a biodegradable box with little wooden cutlery. Seaside perfection.

Things then took a turn for the goddamn worse as we went for a post-lunch stroll through St Ives. By rights I should've loved it, street after winding street of lovely old buildings, the sound of the sea, sun beating down. But instead I loathed it for one very simple reason: cars. The amount of traffic moving through the town was staggering, far far more than it can realistically take, and if ever there was a case for shutting roads off to cars then St Ives on a sunny day is it. The tipping point came when, waiting to cross a road, a large car roared past just a few inches from my feet - I believe my exact words to my wife were "FUCK THIS SHIT." Never have I felt so unwelcome as a pedestrian or so at risk of getting clonked by huge SUVs stuffed to the ceiling with holiday bumf storming down tiny streets designed for a horse & carriage, and this pretty much soured St Ives for me for the rest of our time there - I was very grateful we were staying outwith the town itself, in the far more chilled-out Carbis Bay.

Still, there were a few quality moments to be had in St Ives. Firstly, the aforementioned Porthminster Cafe, where we had a delicious lunch before heading on to our next stop on the honeymoon. Secondly, Tate St Ives - sort of. See, I'm used to Tate galleries being free, so paying over £5 for entry didn't sound too good, especially when the examples I've seen of the work inside have been, well, not to my taste. So while the Missus paid her moneys and looked around, I hotfooted up to the cafe - quite busy inside, but the outdoor area was empty, folk being put off by the wind. Wimps! Choppiness aside, it was glorious sitting out there with the late-morning sun blazing down, so much so that I did my first drawing in sodding months whilst supping on an ice tea and enjoying a carrot cake, finding St Ives far more enjoyable at a distance. Thirdly, and the only way I could be led back into St Ives after that first disastrous experience, was the fortuitous happening of the annual CAMRA Kernow St Ives beer festival, where I made my merry way after Tate St Ives while my recently betrothed braved the throng-packed streets. As I was still taking painkillers for my leg, I restricted myself to 3 half-pints and deliberately chose some lighter local libations out of the 70-odd available - Keltek's 4K Mild (4.0%), Lizard's Kernow Gold (3.7%) and Skinner's Ginger Tosser (3.8%), thankfully not served by a redhead. This left me pleasantly merry for the rest of the day, and I still treasure my souvenir glass beer mug. Now, if I could just go there again sans painkillers...

On the whole though, Carbis Bay was where it was at for us. Ambling along the coastal paths was a pleasure, though rather exhausting in the sunshine, the beach certainly less packed than St Ives. The cream tea at Boskerris Hotel was a stunner, the scones that much lighter than any we'd had before, served warm and savoured while sat on the terrace looking out to the sea, a view inspiring enough to have me breaking out the watercolour pencils again, while my recently-betrothed looked lovely knitting in the sunshine. Despite the close proximity of St Ives and the multitude of restaurants there, we had dinner both nights at Boskerris Hotel - we didn't even know there was a restaurant there until we checked in (there's no mention on the website), but the menu sounded promising and the results were superb. On the first night I had the catch of the day (can't remember what it was, certainly not a fish I'd come across before, but damn tasty) pan-fried with caramelised fennel, a recipe I need to get the hang of, with cherry tomatoes and new potatoes, and an eminently nomable sticky toffee pudding for dessert. The next night I went for Cornish lamb cutlets with a splendid mash potato, sugar snap peas & roasted root veg, and for dessert (not shown above) a trio of Roskilly's excellent ice creams. Their dedication to locally-sourced nosh was all over the menu, the fish caught daily from St Ives, and the freshness was there in every bite - I couldn't have asked for better.

Next stop: Perranuthnoe...

St Austell: Gardens of Eden

Two pleasant train journeys - broken up by approximately 3 minutes in Plymouth - brought us into St Austell a bit sooner than planned.  We didn't spend much time in St Austell itself, heading out to Anchorage House for a 2-night stay.  It certainly looked swanky on the website but even so we were initially quite overwhelmed by the sheer luxuriousness of it all, especially as we were staying in the swankiest of the swanky, complete with two levels and an open-plan bedroom/bathroom.  Honeymoon or not, we couldn't help but think "woah... this is too good for the likes of us," so different was it to what we've been used to.  It was everything promised, the kind of luxury we'll most likely never experience again - for one thing I could never really justify it to myself but for the honeymoon - but for 48 hours it was a curious thrill.  The swimming pool was a particular delight, since I had it all to myself both times I went, carefully exercising my still-swollen leg, while the breakfast served was excellent, setting the standard for the rest of the holiday.  Staying at Anchorage House was almost dizzying, like a particularly rich meal in a restaurant normally way beyond your paycheque, and made a fine start to the honeymoon-proper.

So, what to do there?  In a word, Eden.

Eden Project, that is. It's the first thing people mention when you say you're going to Cornwall (the second is either pasties or cream teas, of which more later) and understandably so.  A stunning achievement, encompassing geology, agriculture, art, biology and plenty more, the domes rising out of the Cornish landscape like the future we were promised in the 80's.  It was plenty busy when we went, what with us choosing the very worst time of the week to go - ie early midweek, rainy day - but even so it wasn't a problem.  The Rainforest Dome was pretty heaving with people, but not claustrophobically so, while the Mediterranean Dome was quite relaxed and quiet.  While the Rainforest Dome is clearly the showstopper, immense plants rocketing up into the sky, waterfalls crashing down, I actually preferred the Mediterranean, the smaller scale allowing you to take your time, appreciate the details, get close up to the flowers, watch the cheekily tame birdlife winding up the staff.  Outside was ace too, though most people were hiding indoors from the rain, with some very impressive sculptures rising up from the slopes and a kitchen garden that had us longing for a back garden of our own.  As tourist attractions go, it's pretty much perfect, the equivalent of a David Attenborough nature documentary in educating through wonder and fascination, worth crossing the country for.

And for nosh?  Our first evening there was spent, at the recommendation of our hosts, at Austells (in retrospect, our second evening should've been there too), a two-rosette restaurant that still kept things pretty relaxed.  As luck would have it, we went on Pie Club night, a two-course meal at a very fair price, a smart move by the proprietors presumably to encourage repeat business from locals - if overheard conversations were anything to go by, it worked.  The food was excellent, nicely simple and well done (I remember being particularly impressed by the creamed potatoes).  The same, sadly, cannot be said for the following night when the lack of culinary options available to a carless couple became apparent.  We ended up in a large pub restaurant between St Austell and Par, the Britannia Inn, and the sight of the menu gave me the fear, being a big list of unconnected dishes, most likely all from the freezer.  Lack of options combined with growling tummies led us to the table against my instincts, and oh, my friends, it was ghastly.  The food served was clearly done with quantity not quality in mind, no pleasure to be found in the whole meal (I took no photos and appear to have wiped the detailed memory of what particular dish I had, leaving only a general sense of UGH) and I left the place snarling at the sheer fuck-awful crapness of it all.  More proof, if needed, that the longer the menu, the lower the expectations, and that just being in Cornwall was no guarantee of a decent meal.

However!  Lest we end a honeymoon post on a culinary huff, it was while in St Austell that I tasted my first cream tea, and that's something worth celebrating.  We'd walked back from Eden Project - the rain had stopped, the buses looked crammed and it was a pretty sweet stroll through rolling hills and tiny villages - and, having been in Cornwall for more than 24 hours, I felt the distinct need for scones.  Initially we weren't too sure quite where to go, but Pine Lodge Gardens appeared on our strolls and we made our way straight to the Tearoom.  A cream tea was duly ordered and received, followed by a moment's hesitation as I wondered which went first, the jam or the cream?  A handy leaflet explained that while Devon would have the cream applied, then jam, in Cornwall it was jam first, so off I went.  Just look at that!  Calories be damned, it was sodding delicious, a fine start to my cream tea odyssey.

Next stop: St Ives...

Cheltenham: There & Back Again

With the wedding all blogged out, it's onto the honeymoon (you can read the Missus's lovely summary of the whole shebang here), pausing on the Sunday for a post-ding-dong lunch with our families at our local and generally staggering around in a blissed-out daze. Monday swung around and after a morning of bringing back decorations, drinks and sound system from the Book Trust we made our way to Waverley stations to begin our southward sojourn. The initial plan for the honeymoon was to Interrail around Scandinavia, but as sterling took a plummet last year and the estimated cost of doing it all got worryingly high we decided to rethink the whole honeymoon. We soon figured that it'd be best to stay within the UK, freeing us from the uncertainty of fluctuating currencies, taking the opportunity to go somewhere we'd never been and to do it all as luxuriously as we liked.

The obvious answer, once the idea of doing Skye on the posh was dismissed, was Cornwall. It's far enough away that it could never realistically be done as a day trip or weekender from Scotland (especially by train), promised gorgeous countryside, miles & miles of coastline and the prospect of oodles of tasty local produce, all at the farthest end of the country. Granted, we could've flown down to the south of England but we despise flying, enjoy taking the train, and when better to splash out on swanky First Class and the free tea, nibbleys and comfort that brings? So, off we chunted, through the Borders, the Lake District, into the Cotswolds, eventually pulling into our first stop of the 'moon - Cheltenham.

Well, Cheltenham Spa according to the train station, but the spa passed us by. We stopped off in Cheltenham on the way down and back up, breaking up what would otherwise be a 11 hour train journey, staying both times at the Cheltenham Lawn B&B, which was pleasant enough.  I didn't think much of Cheltenham itself - it felt like a town trading on past glories yet its best days were long gone, the streets echoed with overgrown boy racer after overgrown boy racer, the same hordes of bellowing dolts getting drunk that you'd see in any other British town.  How does one pass time in Cheltenham?  We went to the cinema (Coraline, bloody brilliant), we ate, we walked, we slept, we counted the hours 'til we left.  Perhaps I'm being unfair dismissing it so, but that was my impression on both brief visits.

Still, we did eat and that's always good.  On the way down to Cornwall we had dinner at Gianni Ristorante, an Italian restaurant recommended by the friendly lady at the B&B, where I gorged on some tasty funghi ripieni and then met my match with a very rich, very generous tagliata.  Coming back, we had dinner at Burger Burger, where initial concerns that it was just another bog-standard burger bar were quickly dispelled - very impressive, from the absolutely spot-on banana milkshake to the three mini burgers that filled me up nicely, giving Wannaburger a serious run for their money (well, were they not hundreds of miles apart).  Fair prices, great food, excellent service, ethically sound - Burger Burger was definitely the highlight of our time in Cheltenham.

Next stop: St Austell...

The Food of Love

Back to the wedding we go, this time to give credit to the quality nosh that got served up for our guests to devour.  It had always been our intention to use as much locally-produced food as possible, to try and involve suppliers who we normally buy from at the Farmers Market, even to get some baking done ourselves.  Knackering my leg just before the wedding put paid to that one, but we managed to achieve the rest.

First up, the afternoon reception.  Now, something that I've often noticed at weddings is that the menus give a ludicrously pretentious description awash with the food fashion buzzwords of the hour for a dish that in reality is no great shakes, the kind of spiel so suitably mocked at 6:50 of Meades' Slow Food.  So that was something to be avoided from the start.  The options were limited all the further by the fact that the venue we were using, the Scottish Book Trust, didn't have an industrial-sized kitchen as other, insanely-priced venues may.  Initially, this looked like a huge problem since it ruled out most caterers unless we wanted to go the way of the cold buffet but in retrospect the restriction turned out to be a blessing, nudging us towards an option we might never have come up with otherwise.  After all, if you've not got a kitchen large enough on site to cook hot food for 50-60 people, what do you do?  a) Cold buffet, b) find another way to heat the food on site, c) call out for pizza.

We held on to the idea of (c) as a last resort (the back-up plan for the reception was actually to pop up the Royal Mile to Wannaburger and order a massive take-away) but focused on (b).  How else to cook food on site?  Simple - a barbecue.  Once we realised that the whole thing started to fall into place.  For one thing, it's pretty difficult to come up with gourmet-guff descriptions of a burger - with a barbecue, you know exactly what you're getting.  It also allowed us to serve both vegetarian and carnivorous dishes, though this meant ruling out some good-looking local caterers (we would have loved to involve The Engine Shed in some way).  A couple of different caterers had the wherewithal to do such a barbecue and we ended up plumping for Saltire Hospitality.  After reading the industrial horrors of grain-fed intensively-reared cow factory farms in The Omnivore's Dilemma it was particularly important to me that we had Scottish beef, grass-fed, preferably organic, which Saltire were able to offer via Simon Howie, Perthshire über-butcher. Presumably because of arrangements between Saltire and Howie we weren't able to use one of my preferred meat suppliers, Well Hung & Tender, but to be fair the meat served up by Simon Howie was very good, if not quite up to the juicy excellence of WH&T.  They were also able to supply organic chicken, bean burgers and some really good vegetable skewers, all of which was barbecued on site in the garden outside.  Being in Scotland, there was of course a contingency for heavy rain - Saltire had the ability to cook the food elsewhere, then hurtle over to the venue with it all kept in hot containers, but thankfully it didn't come to that.  There's nowt quite like seeing (and smelling!) a decent barbecue in action, and the very informality of it was in keeping with the relaxed vibe we'd wanted for the whole day.

For pre-ceremony noms, I'd planned on baking a whole lot of these for people to nibble as they arrived, but my ripped calf prevented me from being able to spend any decent time in the kitchen in the days leading up to the wedding.  However, this was the perfect excuse to go ahead with Operation Tunnocks, dazzling our guests with the shiny shiny wrappings of 100 teacakes, plus caramel log and wafer bars to go with them.  I've loved Tunnocks teacakes ever since I moved up here in 2002, at times veering on addiction, and knowing they continue to be made in Uddingston (oh, to visit, but they've a year-long waiting list!) helped keep in line with our local nosh aim. I think having the Tunnocks there at the start helped in setting the tone for the day, as did Mum's knitted cake and the sight of the wedding cake...

Ah, yes, the cake. Or, the cake. Or, if you like, the cake.  We'd considered a whole bunch of possibilities for the wedding cake in the year and months of planning the day, from making one ourselves to a whole lot of muffins to a giant pyramid of Tunnocks teacakes to not having anything at all - after all, the prices for a 'proper' wedding cake were boggling and the results, while sometimes visually impressive, were almost always the same under the icing.  Besides, the Missus doesn't much like fruitcake and starting our marriage with a bloody expensive cake that only one of us would like eating really didn't seem like a good start.  We were pretty settled on going for the whole-lot-of-muffins route when, at the end of February, we settled down to watch Rachel Allen's excellent Bake programme on BBC1 (er... via Bittorrent, that is).  The highlight was her visit to Edinburgh to see Bruntsfield/Gullane's finest German baker, Falko, where he demonstrated how to make a traditional German cake - the tree cake, or baumkuchen.  It was fascinating to watch, as it's baked by applying cake batter to a horizontal spit that slowly rotates in front of a wall of flame.  Sadly the Falko demo isn't available online, but here's a video of a much smaller one:

Nifty, innit?  Apparently, only once a German baker has proven himself to be expert at this can he be described as a konditormeister because of the skill required to do it right.  This immediately pressed a whole bunch of buttons for me.  One - locally produced, baked up at his Gullane bakery where we've gleefully feasted before, the work of a true artisan rather than a block of bog-standard fruitcake and slabs of industrial icing.  Two - the connection back to mainland Europe, particularly Germany, Bavaria, Prussia, felt like a nod back a few generations to the original Nagls, even though I am woefully ignorant about my family tree.  Three - the wow factor... because, really, how many people have ever seen a cake like that before?  Not many, especially up here in Scotland, and I had no idea it even existed until Rachel Allen showed us the way.  That's the thing about wedding cakes, just like much of the whole wedding industry - you're presented with variations of the same thing over and over again, until it's hammered into you that this is how it must be.  It's only by turning your back on all that, on wedding fairs and those ghastly magazines, and realising it can be however you want it to be that the wedding planning can actually be enjoyable.  So it proved with the cake - my only concerns were how it would taste and what it would cost.  A slice bought from the Bruntsfield cafe in March was a delight, a fascinating taste that more than lived up to the appearance, sort of spongey, sort of spicey (cinnamon and nutmeg, at a guess) with a nice citric glaze around the edge that allows it to keep for a surprisingly long time.  I then met the konditormeister himself to discuss the cake - and was very pleasantly surprised to find that a full-size metre-long baumkuchen would cost £250.  As a figure, that sounds high, but divide between, say, 50 guests and you're looking at £5 a piece - a price certainly worth paying, not to mention cheaper than some wedding cakes we've seen.  One of the key moments on the wedding day itself was coming into the venue and seeing the cake for the first time in all its glory, towering above the small fry.  The reactions from guests, most of whom had no idea it was going to be there, were worth the price alone - as was the sight of Kal walking through the Royal Mile carrying it triumphantly, a Cake-Bearer Supreme.

DRINK!  Here we were able to support the wares of three of our favourites at the Farmers Market.  First up, Laprig Apple Juice (no website sadly), buying a range of different single-variety apple juices along with their delicious apple & rhubarb that I love to bits.  Secondly, the wonderful Black Isle Brewery, whose ales I've been buying almost weekly for the last few years.  I really wanted to introduce our guests to their excellent beers, going for a selection of the Red Kite, Blonde and Heather Honey, and when one of the boxes arrived with a couple of broken bottles the man behind the brewery took the effort to drive over to ours on the night before the wedding and replace it with another box.  Chap!  Contrast that with Brewdog who had initially offered a discount on orders for the wedding - then, when I actually went to make the order, changed their mind.  No great loss, since the Black Isle beers are superior, but disappointing all the same.

Thirdly, necessitating a little adventure up north, the Cairn O Mohr winery. We've been getting their excellent alcohol-free elderflower wine for years from their market stall, and planned on having a good helping of that at the wedding, but were intrigued by their Oak & Elder wedding blend, available only from the winery itself up in Errol.  Being car-less, we enlisted the help of my Dad to drive us up there one Saturday, taking ever-thinner roads until we were greeted by a giant wooden head, then another, then another.  What a place!  You can see more of Missus's photos from it here, but it's really best to see it for yourself if you can (more details here).  Not only were we able to sample the wedding blend - it was lovely, certainly better than champagne, and we bought a case accordingly - but also another non-alcoholic rose elderflower wine that was used for the toast alongside the oak & elder.  The winery is a fascinating place, out amongst huge fields of berries, giant wooden heads and a good-sized converted barn venue used for gigs that would've been perfectly good for the wedding itself.  On top of that, we ordered in water from Highland Spring and - the one deviation from Scottish-sourced stuff - a range of fair-trade wines from Fairhills in South Africa.

The evening at Marlins Wynd was much more hands-free - the venue itself was supplying the food and drink, after we'd checked their buffet menu and been pleased with what we saw.  We asked the organiser to make sure plenty of Black Isle beer was available, hopefully leading a few people to try out the delicious Red Kite.  All the above does sound like an awful lot of work, but it meant the food and drink was as much a reflection of Missus & me as the readings, the vows, the soundtrack.  The cake made a perfect talking point, not to mention really tasty, and it felt good to know that we were supporting Scottish suppliers while at the same time giving our guests some really good scran.  After all, although ostensibly the day was for Missus & me, we really wanted to give our guests as good a time as possible, as thanks for a) making the effort to attend and b) for playing their parts in leading us through our lives to that point.  As Stacey eloquently put it back in February 2008 in a comment that really helped us identify what we wanted from the big day (cheers mate!):

Well, here's the big secret: it's not really your day. I mean, it's ABOUT the both of you, but it's really a party for everyone else at which you're the center of attention. The way I finally looked at it was that the wedding was our big Thank You to everyone we loved who had gotten us to that point and continue to support us.

I still have people telling me how great the wedding was, how fun, etc. and I still feel like I missed the party of the year because I was so busy running around, taking pictures, and talking to everyone. I don't think I'd change anything, but I've learned that OTHER peoples' weddings are for me to enjoy; my own was the opportunity to give them one hell of a show.

Absolutely spot-on.  Hopefully we succeeded!

Tastes of the East

As the great day comes hurtling ever closer like a giant fluffy bunny on rollerskates, I've been able to keep my noggin distracted from over-worrying about the wedding with three key subjects - food, the seaside and Half Life 2. The latter two, well, I'll save them for a little later. Now, home cooking's all very well, but sometimes it's good to go elsewhere and be served meals that would otherwise be impossible or impractical to make at home, especially when there's no washing-up at the end of it. Here's three splendid examples of good food served up to me in the Edinburgh/East Lothian area over the last few weeks.

The Sunday roast at the Caley Sample Room is a monthly pleasure for the Lass & I.  She gets a nut roast that's actually - shock - good, while I can indulge my bloodthirsty carnivore aspect with some juicy slices of roast beef. Much to our horror, we heard earlier this year that the Caley was up for sale, conjuring up horrorshow images of the place being Wetherspooned, food relegated to cheap frozen meals and dubious meat. Thankfully it appears to have passed into hands very careful to maintain the reputation that the pub has clearly built over the last few years for food and the Sunday roast remains as good as it had ever been. Indeed, on the evidence of our latest roast, they seem to be focusing more on seasonal vegetables - I'd never had cauliflower with a roastie before, but it worked out very nicely. Only sore spot with the pictured lunch was slightly under-boiled roast potatoes - a few more minutes in the water would've given a softer floury centre, but that's not been a problem before.

I've blogged with wide-eyed sugar-rushed enthusiasm about the Germanic baked wonders of Falko before. With my Dad visiting this weekend (we went on a wedding wine buying journey into the rural realms of Perthshire as documented by the Lass) it was a good opportunity to head over to Gullane again for the sweeeeet. Within 10 minutes of opening at 11am on Sunday, the place was pretty much packed but we scored a table in time before beginning the painstaking process of choosing what cakey goodness to get. It's such a pleasure eating at the Gullane cafe - I find it much more relaxed and enjoyable than the Bruntsfield branch, but then I find Gullane in general much more relaxed and enjoyable that Bruntsfield in general, so it probably comes with the territory. Anyway, I stuffed my fat face with a cappuccino/banana cakey thing, shown here - normally I wouldn't touch anything with the slightest hint of coffee (why does it even exist in a universe that contains tea?) but I was so taken with the presentation of it that I decided to give it a go. Wise move, that man - while the cappuccino taste was present, it was complemented by the banana, and it was relatively light, making it a nicely mellow sweet. If we can possibly help it, all future visitors to Castle Von Naggle will be herded over to Gullane's Falko to be indoctrinated into these exquisite cakes by the coast.

Just to the east of Gullane, North Berwick is proving to be a quiet revelation for us, a coastal town in East Lothian perfect for quiet walks across yellow sands and volcanic rock with no sound but wind and waves, yet just half an hour on the train from Waverley. We'd never been until a few weeks ago, but now can't get enough of the place. Our first daytrip there led to us walking into a town centre pub and having an immensely bland lunch (fresh fish? Aye, fresh from the freezer...), after which we did our homework on where we should've gone. We've since been to the Nether Abbey's Fly Half Bar & Grill twice, each time a pleasure. Having tasted the fish served, I'm convinced by their promises of freshness and locally sourced produce. Sunday lunchtime saw me getting my teeth into a stunningly fresh grilled halibut, served with asparagus, poached eggs and a hollandaise sauce. It was a textbook example of letting the flavour of ingredients shine through by not mucking about with them, rather the combination of fish, veg, egg and sauce came together to make a real treat for my tastebuds. I've never been a huge fan of fish dishes in the past but this was glorious. Thankfully, they also do a great job with vegetarian food, as the Lass noted hither and thither. In addition, they've an impressive range of real ale on tap and it's just far enough away from the town centre that it's unlikely to be mobbed by daytrippers on the sunniest of bank holidays. As I cheerfully yelped to the Lass between mouthfuls, "it's our new Caley!" Not that there's owt wrong with the old one, but were we to move east in the future, well, it's good to know there's somewhere of equal goodness out that way for us.

April In The Kitchen

All sorts of things have been cooking in our kitchen over the last few weeks, thanks in no small part to some of the excellent books I was given for my birthday. Leiths Baking Bible, a gift from Stu & Andrea, is an absolute treasure trove of bakey goodness and I've already become hooked to parsnip and beetroot loaf cake, a surprisingly tasty and sweet cake that brings out the sweetness of the root vegetables. Might sound freaky at first, but no more so than carrot cake, and its proven a great use for excess beetroot and parsnips from the weekly veg delivery. There's also a cracking naan bread recipe in there that's become de riguer for curry nights and freezes nicely. Cheers guys - there'll always be a place for you at Nagl's Bagels.

Other treats are to be found in Rachel Allen's excellent Bake (she's like a Nigella Lawson who exists in our world and understands the focus should be on food, not lifestyle and cleavage) which does the remarkable job of containing recipes that aren't in the decent bundle of baking recipe books already wodged into our increasingly stuffed kitchen library. Case in point - the sweet potato and pecan loaf cake I made on Sunday. As with the aforementioned parsnip & beetroot loaf, the key ingredients are grated, giving texture and a intriguing sweetness - if you didn't know what was in it, you'd be very hard pressed to identify the sweet potato. Suggest the recipe and people will more often that not go "wuh?" or downright "eww!" but serve it to them unidentified and you're bound to get a definitive "NOM"... closely followed by "... what is that?" I've also used the white soda bread recipe a couple of times now for midweek bread. Considering I'm used to taking hours over the rising of bread, it's strangely unsettling to have a loaf that's made just by mixing flour, buttermilk, sugar and bicarbonate of soda then plonking it in the oven, but that's exactly what happens - and it works! The taste is reminiscent of scones and although it doesn't have the airyness of my usual white loaf, it's not particularly dense or heavy either and goes a treat with soup or jam. The recipe's here - go, print, try it, eat it!

As to non-bakey stuff, all sorts of stuff gets made during the weekdays when I don't have the light or patience to be taking photos or notes of what I'm making (the Lass is a lot better at that sort of thing - see Monday night's gobi from the superb Leon: Ingredients and Recipes). Still, on Saturday I was at the market and surprisingly pleased by the appearance of bunches of asparagus and rhubarb at the various veggie stalls. I completely scrapped what I'd planned to make that evening and instead used the immensely useful MacGourmet database on the iPod Touch (ooh, haven't wibbled about that yet) to find potential recipes involving both (though not at the same time, mind).

I ended up settling on a main course recipe from Denis Cotter's Wild Garlic, Gooseberries and Me (which has been raved about here before) - asparagus, spinach and Durrus cheese egg rolls with balsamic beetroot sauce, along with some avocado salsa from Cotter's Cafe Paradiso Cookbook. The ingredients list was pretty short by mains standards, but took a fair bit of work. Not perfect by any means - I overdid the balsamic beetroot sauce, as the photo below shows, giving it a much thicker, almost stodgy consistency rather than the smooth sauce desired - but the taste of the finished product was glorious, as full and tasty as I'd hope for from a restaurant.

As for the rhubarb, I turned to Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook, finding a wonderfully simple recipe for rhubarb sorbet. Despite not having an ice-cream maker, it was still possible to make the sorbet over the course of the afternoon, and the finished product was excellent. The flavour was really strong but not over-powering, while the colour had such a rich brightness it was almost hard to believe it was 100% natural, but it certainly was, and will surely end up being served up to future guests at Castle Von Naggle.

Oh, and if nothing else, make these cookies. Get the cooking time right (ie keep it short) and they're downright perfect.