Cornish Cows, Cream and Ice Cream

I was going to write a post about London, but after watching the Eden Project DVD that I forgot that I had, I was eager to post about Cornwall. I went to Cornwall about a month ago, newly recovered from a monstrous illness that made me sleep 18 hours a day, or approximately 3 whole days out of 5. Determined to get better before I left, I took a load of antibiotics. If I was a cow, I would've thumbed my nose at me and refused to consume any of my dairy products or meat. Hell, I'd even consider my saliva toxic. But what can I say – I love human antibiotics when consumed responsibly and I don't plan to be eaten by any organically conscious carnivorous meatatarians on a blood thirsty food trail.



This is the standard postcard and painter's view of St Ives, a hilly little town by the sea. I decided this was going to be home base and found a B&B on the hill. Check out the view! This was just one of the windows of my room. There were 5 in my room.



I know England is the home of B&Bs, but I've had some pretty amazing B&B experiences in America. I stayed at Tregony Guesthouse and they offered either the full English breakfast with two kinds of bacon and more food you could stomach, or a healthier smoked haddock and poached egg. Either breakfasts come with cereal, fruit, yogurt, juice, toast, jam and coffee. Enough to push me over the edge if it wasn't for the absurdly steep hills with handrails to climb.

Anyway, I wanted to get to Porthcurno. The bus stop in St Ives is nondescript. The roads are so narrow, it's doubtful that a big bus could pass through them. Candice warned that buses were infrequent and things were difficult to get to in Cornwall if you didn't have a car and it was really a place where 2 or 3 days didn't cut it. No biggie, I had a bunch of time. So on the first day, and the most beautiful cloudless day, I decided to go to the hardest place to get to. No trains went there so it was alllllll bus. When I finally talked to the bus station manager, who rolled into work at 9.35, he told me that the best way to get there was to take service 300 all the way around. St Ives is on the top right corner of this crappy webcam screenshot map and Porthcurno is at the bottom, 1 stop past Lands End.



Jeepers.

When I boarded the first bus of out St Ives, I asked the driver what time we'd get there. And he said well, it was 9:45 now, and we'd get there at about 12:15. I balked. Then hesitated. Then I probably made a face. "But it's a LOVELY ride!" sigh. I paid the £6.50 and hopped on, thankful that I was still groggy from the overnight train ride into Cornwall and wasn't aware that the return ride was also another 2 1/2 hours.



It was probably the most beautiful bus ride I'd been on. It was open top and I roasted to a crisp on a cloudless day as we drove by fields and coastline. One of the first places we drove past was Zennor, which is between St Ives and St Just where Moo-Maid ice cream is from.



Actually, there is a legend about a mermaid of Zennor. But who cares about mermaids when you can eat some MOOMAID ICE CREAM? Especially when the ice cream comes from happy cows such as these:



This is how all cows should live, but big industrial agribusiness says NOT. So make sure all your beef and ice cream is grass fed, y'all.



Indeed, nobody can resist a moomaid! Unless you are unfortunately lactose intolerant.....or is that reallllly a deterrent?

On another day, I went to Trebah Gardens. Apart from a very nice garden map, giant rhubarb taller than you, some fresh fish and some Roskillys ice cream at the award winning cafe, I wasn't that impressed. It was rated one of the best gardens for children and since I'm easily entertained, a garden good for children is usually good for me. However, apart from a couple of kiddy signs and playgrounds, there wasn't anything every entertaining about it. Double disappointment, especially since I'd taken 3 trains and walked a mile to the bus terminal only to find out that the bus information was wrong and I'd missed my bus and the next bus was in an hour. I was fuming. I took a cab and when I arrived there, I told the concierge flatly that there was misinformation on the website and for an organization that prided itself on being green, encouraged sustainability and strongly suggested green travel, they made it AWFULLY hard to get there by foot and public transportation. I'm not that into gardens, but I'm into food. Flowers couldn't really make up for it. Only some Roskilly's Cornish Clotted Cream Ice Cream could.



Could you NOT be happy after this unless you had clotted arteries???



Look, happy bunnies!

Ice cream is all over the place in Cornwall. When I was so grumpy at Trebah, I made up for it with 3 ice creams. I had an extremely chocolatey one in Falmouth, the Roskilly's at the Garden and some Moomaid when I got back to St Ives. Good thing ice cream scoops in England are small. I also had some Kelly's clotted Cream ice cream in Porthcurno, but that was pretty unspectacular.

The Eden Project's ice cream was something to shout about though. I had 2 scoops of honeycomb and 1 scoop of ginger with the loose change I had left in my backpack.



This is an ice cream place under a verrrry cute cafe in St Ives, about 5 minutes from my B&B. What I'd like to know is...what is the Hokey Pokey flavour....

Spargeltown

This happened in the beginning of June, I'm more than a month behind! I took a 5 hour train ride on the ICE from Berlin to Frankfurt Airport, where I met back up with Peiz, freshly flown in from Newcastle and the Take That concert and we drove SEHR FAST on the Autobahn to Heidelberg. I thought I might die. Just a little.

Heidelberg is the home of spargel (pronounced "schpargel", from what I can gather), or white asparagus. We went to Schwetzingen Schlossgarten. It was very ordentlich. and German. And full of manicured greens and spitting deer.



It was very pretty, in a controlled way. So my enthusiasm for it couldn't be shown by throwing my arms out in wild abandon and lunging across fields of short clipped grass. Rather, I restrained myself and ate an apple while walking and observing water fowl by the ponds.

In true German fashion, Peiz's boyfriend Andreas announced: OK, I have made a plan. First we will drive to Swetzingen, then we will walk around the garden. Then we will go home and have a snack, maybe some pastry. Then we will pick up the spargel and go to the Apple Store with my father. Then.....it's spargel time.



itallhappensreallyfast! let'sblastthroughthecherrypie! nowquickletsgogetthespargel!



Asparagus in Germany is usually white, unlike the usual green variety. And it's usually eaten with lots and lots of hollandaise and ham/bacon/ham and bacon. It's really mild, hearty, thick, but not terribly asparagussy. But then again, I'm comparing it to green asparagus....

Every morning we had a selection of at least 5 cheeses, a zillion different hams, tomatoes, an array of juices and coffee and a large pot of tea. I loved this bread! Who wouldn't love a loaf called Golden Toast?!




Andreas' mother made some tasty tasty stuff for dinner that didn't make it into my digital card reader :(

Random Gourmet & Viognier Overindulgence

The dish: Mushroom curry, homemade pickles, and sticky saucepan carrots

I am going on a road trip tomorrow so I was looking to use up all the groceries from my fridge. I had a big bag of carrots (my Mom got a tooth pulled and I thought I would make porridge with soft veggies for her), and a big box of white button mushrooms my Mom got. I don't normally buy white button mushrooms since they are pretty tasteless (you could try a crimini maybe?) so I had to ponder for a few minutes what to do with them. I decided to slice them up and make a quick mushroom curry from the jar (actually, do this one second, I didn't realize the carrots would take so long - close to an hour boiling off the stock).



We picked this breakfast skillet pan up at a yard sale for $1. Best yard sale find ever. Perfect eggs all the time, non stick!

I dumped the sliced mushrooms and a sliced shallot onto the pan with a healthy cut of butter and salt. (I learned from a mushroom farmer at the Lansdowne market in Old Ottawa South that butter and salt are a mushroom's two best friends. Melt the butter and toss the mushrooms around in it for awhile till they've soaked it all up and the onions have started to caramelize (med heat). Don't leave them or they will burn, though a little charring adds flavour. Add a heaping tablespoon of Indian curry from the jar - I think I would recommend a butter chicken sauce but all I had was Raj Masala Balti Curry Paste. (Though I like Patak's as a brand). When the shallots are caramelized and the mushrooms browned, the curry is ready. Since my curry paste was tomato-based rather than butter-based, I turned off the heat and threw on a sliced-up fresh tomato and tossed that around in the residual heat for a bit. I would recommend the butter curry and no tomatoes if you do it right. I served this over some wholewheat couscous, which I realized is so much more flavourful than regular couscous, and goes really well with the buttery flavour of the mushrooms.

Next I decided to try Jamie Oliver's Sticky Saucepan Carrots for a fun way to cook carrots:



Find the recipe here, or google it if the link location has changed. This is a great way to bring out the natural flavours of carrots.

A few precautions:
1. This recipe really requires fresh market carrots. Since they are only seasoned with butter, salt, and pepper and cooked in their own juices, the whole dish relies solely on the flavour of the carrots, so supermarket carrots just don't cut it.
2. When he says "use medium-sized carrots", do as he says even though the luscious picture in the cookbook makes it look like he used the fattest carrots he could find in the bunch. It's not a problem of them cooking through, merely a flavour issue.
3. When he says fill the pot with water halfway up the carrots, err on the side of less than halfway or you'll be waiting forever for the stock to boil off. One-third-way might even do the trick since once it gets boiling, the water will roll up higher than the actual volume to cook most of the carrot (see picture above, where I only filled it halfway).



The finished carrots. Use lots of butter (I ran out) to get a tastier char on the bottom.

Lastly, I added a side helping of some homemade pickles I made a week ago. I used a kimchi base from the jar since it was my first time, but it just has the most basic ingredients, so doing it fresh shouldn't be too hard (garlic, salt, chilli pepper, sugar, ginger, vinegar). I used pickling cucumbers, fresh ginger slices, and daikon radish, but you can try your own favourite veggies and post the results! (Definitely pickle some fresh ginger slices though, they are divine and add flavour to the other pickles). I added a little sesame oil for flavour, and then vinegar to fill the jar (though I was worried they would get too sour so only filled halfway and laid the jar on its side, turning it whenever I was in the fridge over the course of 24-36 hours. You could experiment with filling it the whole way but diluting the vinegar with water.

My pickles are kind of bastardized pickles Chinese style. They are more marinated in vinegar than pickled (no chemical change) but I prefer it that way because the vegetables keep their original fresh and crisp flavour. That also means, though, that you can't store them in the jar for too long or they get soggy. (Though that is never a problem for this pickle-maniac!)


The final dish.

After dinner I opened the bottle of Viognier 2007 from Fielding Estate Winery that we picked up in Beamsville Bench, Niagara, which won Gold at the All Canadian Wine Championships. I normally like drier whites, but this one was so unique and flavourful I couldn't resist it. In addition to Fielding's description (click the link above), I would add that this wine has a distinctly pineapply tropical flavour with a strong honey note, though there is a musky edge (not sure if I would call it spicy, more like the bitter flavour of a nice fruit rind, with a heady aroma reminiscent of papaya or durian) to lift the sweetness into a greater complexity. It was soooo tasty I ended up drinking the whole bottle while watching An Arctic Tale. Don't do that, I don't recommend it. Get a friend so you don't drink the whole bottle. That honeyness doesn't sit well in your head the next day.



My new best friend, Colleen, who was handling my tasting (what do you call a wine expert working in a winery? not a sommelier?), seemed to be able to read my tastebuds like a tongue psychic. According to Colleen, Fielding specializes in aromatic whites. Everything she picked out for me ended up being my new favourite. I came home with the 2007 Viognier and the 2007 Sauvignon Blanc (a beautifully balanced wine half fermented in stainless steel, half fermented in oak). As I was paying for the wine, she apologized for not being able to chat more with me since they were busy catering a wine party. I promised I'd be back.

This is exactly the kind of treatment that makes me want to return to a winery. I'll never understand why anyone working in any customer service field thinks that snobbery and elitism ups their reputation (that's you, prick at Organized Crime with mediocre wine!). Fielding was recommended to me by a lady from Hidden Bench just up the lane (a class act in its own right with above average though not mindblowing wines -- I will blog about them as soon as I open a bottle!). The lady at Hidden Bench said Fielding was her favourite, and now Fielding is my favourite too -- they just had such a wide selection of really excellent and unique wines, you couldn't possibly get sick of going back for more.

As an added bonus, Fielding and Hidden Bench are in the most beautifully scenic hidden horseshoe. If you can only make one stop, this horseshoe could keep you busy for an afternoon if you take your time. This is off the QEW highway. Find the full Niagara Wine Route map here.



Notice that North and South Service roads run along the highway - a safe and scenic route for cyclists, which solves that driving + wine tasting problem.

More about my wine tour soon!

Mostly on the bicycle and cafe cute times

To get some exercise, see some sites, get me educated and smell some flowers, I signed up for a Fat Tire Bike Tour to Potsdam. The Nazi Third Reich tour looked a little menacing and Nazi architecture seemed to be very severe in an already very orderly Germany and therefore unappealing to me at the time. Every city has its landmark which is always a over hyped and overrated. I wanted to avoid the Berlin Wall like the plague, so the Berlin Wall tour was out. I also don't like glazing over stuff in a general fashion, so the All-In-One city bike tour was also out. The Potsdam bike tour was the longest and most luxurious looking. It also didn't have the hazards of tram tracks and pedestrians. I hate city bike riding. GREAT! That took care of that.

On hindsight, I probably should have done all those tours because the guides are endlessly entertaining and endearing. The above is a picture of the first thing our guide, Charles, drew for us once we arrived in Potsdam. He said that the all the Prussian rulers had very boring names. They were named either Friedrich, Wilhem or Friedrich Wilhem. You can remember them by their hairdos, hats or facial hair. It was actually the second Friedrich Wilhem that was called Friedrich Wilhem the First, so our guide told us that the real first Friedrich Wilhem was really Friedrich Wilhem to the power of zero.

To get to Potsdam, we had to haul the bicycles up the escalator to the train station at Alexanderplatz. You have to push the first wheel onto the escalator and squeeze the brakes. DO NOT LET GO OF THE BRAKES WHEN YOU ARE ON THE ESCALATOR, OTHERWISE BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN.



A newly made friend of a friend, Suzann (friend of Sofia), offered to let me stay at her place in between Prenzlauer Berg and Pankow because her roommate was leaving for the weekend. It worked out spectacularly, because this was also the day I was scheduled to move into an 8 person dorm (barf) in the hostel. She also insisted that I have a proper night out in Berlin. This means that we spent the entire night and early morning not sleeping. The middle stamp was at an old East Berlin style club that played appropriately themed 70's style funk. All the furnishings were straight out of the 70's and the warm yellow glow from the round lighting fixtures and smokey room put me into a daze. There were silent movies playing on the walls. It was all very strange. Anyway, I went on this bike tour on a three hour nap. I scrambled to get to Alexanderplatz.

As we were waiting on the platform for the train, a guy from Sao Paolo immediately took off down the escalator, in search of some snacks to eat. I wanted to do the same because I hadn't had any coffee. No coffee + no sleep + bicycle + me = very dangerous. The Frenchman called after me "CAN YOU GET ONE FOR ME TOO!" I raced down and raced back up because the line was too long. Definitely NOT pleased. Even grouchier than before. As we waited 2 minutes for the train to pull in, the French dude goes "You could've gotten me a coffee by now." RAGGGGGWWWHHH. STOP IT.

The amazing thing is, there was a vending machine on the train, a train similar to the Metro North or Long Island Rail Road and it cost 1 euro, and was better than any American dishwater diner coffee. Fantastic! We sipped coffee much to my relief and the Parisian's disgust, and both our caffeine headaches went away. I was riding the bicycle and taking pictures and talking to people and I thought hey, this is great, my bike riding skillz are pretty good, even though it was affecting the quality of my photographs. Then I tried to run up on the sidewalk and promptly fell off the bike and was quite confused.

At the beer garden we stopped at for lunch, my scrapes began to bleed and Charles the Guide handed me a bunch of alcohol swabs and band aids as we talked about living in DC (he'd lived there for 7 years). I also made friends with Adam, the other lone young traveler, an Australian software engineer from Brisbane, who managed to get a month off work to go traveling and was leaving the next day for Vienna, then Paris, then Monaco, then I don't remember. I had 2 bratwursts and fries and apfel shorle. He had the same and a liter of beer. He finished ALL of it. He also fell off his bike at the end of the tour.



We stopped by Sanssoucci (Without Worry), summer palace of great Prussian ruler Friedrich the Great. He said that when he died, he wanted to be buried there because it was so beautiful, it was the only place where you could be sans soucci. Eventually, 60 years after his death, his body was exhumed and brought up to where it lies now. He hated his wife, so he was buried next to his dogs. People leave potatoes on his grave because he was responsible for introducing potatoes as a staple crop in Germany.



Later, at Cecilienhof, where the Potsdam Conference was held, I cut my my hand on the bicycle lock and Charles the Guide said that he had approximately enough band-aids to hang out with me for another two hours. SIGH! So also at the Cecilienhof, the French guy got some ice cream that was mediocre. Or mediocre by French standards. But I guess mediocre nevertheless. So after we returned the bicycles, I really needed a real coffee, so I asked if Adam the Traveling Australian if he wanted to chill out at Kauf Dich Glücklich (Shop Yourself Happy), which is now a cafe that sells cheap homemade ice cream (0.70 euros) and cheap but good espresso drinks (1.50 euros). Bonus points playing Ellen Allien and Apparat!



It's verrry cute. I had 2 scoops of ice cream, guava and chocolate, had way too much coffee and talked about spontaneous travel and being very accident prone.



And when he realised that he was talking to an official glutton, asked where he could go for a fun festive dinner with some people he'd met at his hostel, Circus, the one that I wanted to stay in but were fully booked. I sent him in the direction of White Trash Fast Food. I don't have pictures of that, but it's a bit of a bizarre place. It used to be a Chinese restaurant, now taken over by hipsters and they left all the tacky Chinese decorations in place and added their own bizarre collection of decorations. They're known for their rude menu and burgers. They also were playing some REALLY BIZARRE Nazi porn on the TVs when I was there. It's something so bizarre I'm not sure how to express how bizarre it was in words. Most bizarre.

Anyway, extremely fun times! And would only be made more fun if I knew how to work a turntable so we could check out some German techno at the record shops, but alas I could not! And I also had to hurry back to make Suzann some pork chop for dinner.

A Rosy Summer in Niagara

Mousse was feeling lonely on the blog and B took his camera to New Brunswick so I rummaged around in his photo folder and found this to post.

This is dinner on our balcony. It has been such a gorgeous place to dine this summer and I feel so lucky to have found this apartment. The big tree right in front of the balcony has a squirrel that is always diligently padding its nest with fresh soft leaves from the neighbouring tree, scurrying back and forth in its work as you eat. Adorable.

The dinner featured in the picture is a celebratory lobster dinner for B on the day he (finally!) got his driver's license (Now it's my turn... we are such a pair of procrastinators). Anthony Bourdain's favourite chef question is: "What would be your last meal before the electric chair?" It is true love when you know little details like this about your sweetheart without needing to ask. I am 100% sure B would say a lobster dinner with garlic melted butter and a bottle of wine. The wine above is a local Niagara 2007 Cabernet Rosé from Cave Spring Cellars - a surprise find, refreshing and perfect for summer.

Rosés are a new discovery for me. I realized this year that they don't have to be sugary sweet concoctions, but can be crisp and refreshing and deeee-lightful! Another good choice, though not local, is the Argentinian Fuzion Syrah Rosé, though it tends to fly off the shelves because it is so cheap - $7.45!!! (Have you hopped on the Fuzion bandwagon yet?)

I used to only drink red wine but the best wines in Niagara are, in order: ice wine, then white, then rosé then red and so I have taken the opportunity this year to expand my horizons, and to great benefit! My current favourite local wine is Strewn winery's Barrel-Aged Chardonnay (2007). Its oak-y flavour is divine.

P.S. All the wines above can be found at the LCBO (Ontario). Not sure about elsewhere.



Me at Organized Crime vineyard in Beamsville Bench, Niagara Peninsula. (The wine here was so-so and a little overpriced for the region, and the wine-taster guy was über-snobby towards young people (even though we had a friend with us who really knew her stuff) and reeeeaally anal about making sure to collect every 50 cents for each wine tasted. But the history of how they got their name is pretty entertaining.)

I will be visiting more wineries while my Mom is in town. Will let you know if I stumble on anything good!

Love,
Pamplemousse

The Original Grumpy in Berlin

It turns out that Peiz and I had dinner at Hasir too! In Kreuzberg, the Turkish neighborhood in Berlin. It was raining and she was looking for the restaurant where she ate at the last time. When in doubt, eavesdrop. While she was trying to locate the eatery and pointed to something across the street, a local showing some friends around said "there is good, but if you want really really good Kabob, you have to....." they dropped out of hearing range for a little bit, but I caught up with them "HERE!" OK! We were also going to eat there. Success!

Nowhere near as grumpy as he was in Iceland, Anthony Bourdain's Berlin episode was very entertaining. mmm Rogacki.

Rogacki, I love you

This is on such a backlog. This happened on June 5th, 2009

Peiz had just left Berlin, and I awoke bleary eyed and all alone. Hmmm a whole day free with nothing planned. After chowing down on some squirrel muesli, bio yogurt (I'm not sure what that means exactly), blueberries and goats cream cheese slathered carrots, what else to think about but...lunch. My dad called me to say he just remembered that I was in Berlin and when he was watching Anthony Bourdain, there was a deli/meat market/food extravaganza with every cut of meat and every slab of cheese you could imagine!!!!!!! You could even eat there too and there was so much food, it was OBSCENE!

PERFECT! A day of culture (museums) and obscene gluttony.

The first task was trying to locate it. My dad couldn't remember what the place was called but could describe it in great vivid detail, which made it extra frustrating because typing "ENORMOUS place in Berlin with obscene amounts of anything you want and so much food you don't know what to do with it." into Google doesn't really help. Actually no. I can't remember exactly how it was described, but I spent a good amount of time scouring the interweb for it, using roughly those keywords.

I sent him the website. and he texted back "Jawohl!! Das ist das Geshaft" which means "Yes!! This is the shop."

Right, mission to locate food! It was all the way west in Chalottenburg, a residential neighborhood.



You get off the U-Bahn at Bismarckstrasse. Okay, so it's not way way west, but from where I was staying, it was a little bit wester than usual.



This is the outside. You can get fresh German eggs. HERE.



you can also get some FRESH FISH AND SHARK. RAWR!



The standard collection of cheeses....



I love to eat....GERMAN MEATS!!!!!!!!!





Rogacki is set up with a market around the inside perimeter and with stalls in the middle with stand around tables for you to eat quickly at. I must've walked around the place maybe 4 or 5 times before deciding what I wanted. I was tempted to get a selection of meats, but with a giant blue fish on their awning, how could I pass some of it up?



This is a peculiar fish. I haven't decided if it's saying "I have a secret" or "I house things good and fresh" or "I am very wary and suspicious of you" or "Stop eating my friends" or "You will spend more time here than necessary" or "Geez, another tourist?" or if it is just apathetic.

Actually, there weren't that many tourists. They were all tough looking German speaking folk. So I motioned to the server at what most people were eating: breaded fried fish and potato salad.



Es ist gut. yum.

Back to Berlin

Oops...vacation distraction. Back to vacation food. My first couple of days in Berlin were spent in a daze, following a seasoned German speaking Peiz around. The only things I knew were "Hauptbanhof", change at Alexanderplatz for all the trains and take the Train to Pankow (also a song) to get back to the hostel. And stop by the biomarkt to get organic produce.

I can't believe I was so ill prepared!!!!!! Peiz dragged me around the city to forage for food. I was so starving when we got to this place near Rosa Luxembourg. She said that it was a pay as you want restaurant and the last time she was there, she felt so guilty, she gave them 20 euros. I think this place is called Weinerei, according to Peiz's facebook description, in between Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg neighborhoods. From what I could gather, Prenzlauer Berg is kinda like the Park Slope of New York. Lots of young people and 30-somethings with their babies, good eats, good places to party, organic supermarkets.


(photo snagged off Peiz's facebook)

The old East Berlin has turned into a little bit of a hipster paradise and the buildings are low lying, old, solid and retains a lot of its cozy charm. Weinerei was extraordinarily charming – they make everything there themselves. There were two soups as well as some sandwiches, pastries and cakes to choose from. They were out of one soup and we had the curry soup with apples and mmm other delicious things.



I had two bowls of it with some bread. I think it cost 3 euros and you could have as much as you wanted. Peiz was a little disappointed, but I wasn't! It was a gooood curry soup. If I actually put a little more effort into planning the Berlin leg of the trip, I would've probably wanted to drop by a squat and sample their food and entertainment. Berlin seems to have all these hidden secret places to eat at and to discover, like Spreepark, an old abandoned amusement park in the old East Berlin. Dinosaurs! Weird moustache go carts! Creepy swans! Forgive his overly dramatic storm cloud effects.

Also, there was a secret restaurant, The Shy Chef, where it was like being invited to someone's home. They would email you directions to get to the location, which would be somewhere obscure and you'd be questioning if you were heading in the right direction. It's a 50 euro cash donation to eat there and it's a 5 course meal. According to the website, it is a super secret club. A super secret food club is something I'd give a couple of limbs to be a part of.

Cookies Cream was another place that I would've liked to go to. According to New York Times, it's behind the Westin, down a dark alley and you have to hop over a bunch of garbage bags to get there.

Picnic and picnic hamper envy

There wasn't anyone who seemed like I could persuade to spare a couple of plastic cups, so these were our wine vessels, that curiously resembled Christine and I in real life (height-wise). We went to the New York Philharmonic outdoors in Central Park and packed a last minute picnic. I toted along my last slab of cheese and have been cheese free for 3 days and am getting a little ANTSY.



mmmm cheese.



Sorry! Excuse the inappropriate knife usage!

Delicious cheese, made even more deliciouser with local cherries. This was an Italian cow's milk Mountain Gorgonzola and is aged between 6-12 months. According to the Murray's Cheese shop desciption, it is PUNCHY and SPICY. YEAH! It is lovely. Christine gave me a cheese voucher for my birthday and wrote "Extravagant cheese for recession times". I'll have to dig out and put towards next week's cheese fund. Just thinking about cheese makes me want to run down to Grand Central and load up. ugh. Restraint!

I made friends with some of my neighbors sitting around me. One of them was a British doctor reading a book of translated Chinese poems and had spent a year working in KK Hospital in the 1970s, another was a Jamaican who seemed to know a lot about Singapore. We all shared the same birth city: London



The spoils: I made some German-esque style potato salad (cold) with garlic scapes, a mustard vinaigrette (whole mustrad seeds), basil olive oil and white wine vinegar. I also made some cucumber yogurt dip with plain yogurt, lemon juice, smashed up garlic, cucumbers, salt and pepper. Christine supplied the chips, wine and grape leaves. Delicious times for cultured events!

Movies in the park sometimes call for pizza, but a symphony orchestra calls for a semi extravagant picnic. Thank goodness I didn't have any food envy, but I may have had a case of picnic hamper envy. I looked some up on the interweb when I got home.

OBSERVE:



Baguette consideration = very good.



Plate/Cutlery and food separation = TREASURE CHEST OF FOOD = most excellent




Seems to have what appears to be a cooler compartment for food. GREAT! I don't need breakable glasses coming along on my picnic, so those can be cheese compartments. Very nice!

And then I saw this portrait of ridicule:



Come on get real! There is no way all of that is squeezing into that hamper! Who eats that much processed food on a picnic anyway? hmm ok scratch that. But I shelved my picnic hamper plans quite quickly after realizing that my plain old expandable cooler was just fine.



Someone's looking extremely happy for a Grumpy (right)!