Trip to Whistler

Last weekend some friends and I went up to Whistler Blackcomb for a few days. It was beautiful up in the mountains. We had great weather and I’ve been congratulating myself all this weekend, because the weather up in Whistler this weekend is terrible! So we chose the right weekend to go.

The weekend wasn’t about food, but of course a trip can’t be fun if you don’t have good things to eat. We had great burritos one night, cooked up by people from Arizona who know their Tex-Mex; a salad of cucumbers, celery, feta, pita, and mint another night; a coconut birthday cake with blackberry filling; and fresh squeezed juice at the Whistler farmer’s market.

There are no recipes this week, since I’ve been working for the past several weeks in Vancouver, but on the way back from Whistler I stopped in at Horseshoe Bay to pick up some lunch. There’s a sandwich café there and I ordered a veggie sandwich. The sandwich was great, because of a very specific thing they did, which I want to tell you about. The lower half of the bread was spread with a thin layer of cream cheese, topped with walnuts and smoked almonds. The smoked almonds and cream cheese with the vegetables was wonderful! I intend to find some smoked almonds and make some of those sandwiches myself.

Jersey’s Black Butter

Above is a cottage on the property of Samarès Manor, on Jersey, whose gardens we toured. I think this might be one of the guest properties they rent out. It was so beautiful I had to share this picture, although I am sure it would look much more picturesque without the vehicle in front.

While in Jersey I discovered that they have a regional speciality called “black butter”. It’s actually a kind of apple butter, flavoured with treacle and various spices. It tasted quite a lot like black licorice to me — you know, the strong expensive kind.

While in Jersey we went to an upmarket restaurant that overlooked St. Aubin’s Bay and there I had this dessert:

The ice cream on top was black butter flavoured and I thought I’d bring a jar of black butter back, just out of interest and because I thought my family might like to try it.

You can see it’s shiny soft black stuff. You can’t see that it tastes very strongly of both apples and licorice. After having some I can see how if you grew up with it you’d be a fan but as an adult coming to it for the first time you might need to work up a taste for it.

The restaurant in St. Aubin was quite nice, not the dream I’d hoped for. There are a couple of Michelin star restaurants on the island and I would have loved to try them out but the price, once translated from English pounds to Canadian dollars, was just too much on top of everything else. I was still choking a bit on my restaurant bills from Ottawa and decided to keep the Michelin star experience for another day. But we did have a nice seafood meal. I had oysters (my aunt was horrified and tried not to show it, watching me swallow them), some squash soup, and a lobster, crab, avocado, and mango  salad. I did think of taking a picture of the salad, it was so impressively arranged, but it was delivered in the half-lobster shell with all its tentacly legs trailing over the plate. Ever since my friend Eve commented on how repulsive one of my pictures looked, I have been very concerned about the aesthetics of what I show you! Which explains why there are so many dessert pictures and such a dearth of pictures from other courses. Desserts somehow always please the eye.

As I type this, I am sitting in a cheap hotel in Langley, British Columbia (taxpayer dollars in this instance dictating that I stay in a hole and not the nice clean Holiday Inn down the street). I had a “gourmet” hotdog at the ferry terminal that was a complete letdown ($7 later) and an apple and sandwich four hours later. And I am yearning to sit and overlook the bays of Jersey on a warm summer evening, eating that lobster and crab salad, and not fretting about my meetings this week. You can guess where my mind will drift during the powerpoint presentations tomorrow when I am not presenting.

Jersey dairy and Jersey crab (Jersey = Channel Islands, not New)

While I was in the UK my aunt and I decided we’d like to take a look at the Channel Islands, so we visited Jersey. I loved it. Being from Victoria / Vancouver Island I’ve always thought that the island is not only incredibly beautiful, but that we know our tourism. I have to tell you, Jersey is as beautiful (although in a different way) and their tourism industry makes ours look like amateur hour. Up above is a picture of the Corbière lighthouse; the road to it gets flooded with the tide so you can only visit during certain hours.

One of the wonderful things about Jersey is their adorable Jersey cows that they export all over the world. And their adorable cows produce the most wonderful dairy products. The island has its own dairy (called, accurately but unimaginatively, Jersey Dairy) that sells wonderful yogurt and soft ice cream. Above you can see the ice cream cone I had at the beach. You can also see in the photograph the nice sweep of sandy beach, one of many on the island, and another reason to love going there: the pallid Brits who made me feel completely at home in my swimsuit and oh-so-white skin.

I didn’t know before researching for this trip that Jersey was known for its crab. Fresh crab sandwiches are sold all over the place, just plain bread and butter stuffed with fresh crab and maybe a few potato chips on the side (crisps). I loved those too. I had one of my crab sandwiches on Gorey Pier, which you can see here:

Up behind it is Mont Orgeuil castle, which once was a home of Sir Walter Raleigh, one of my favorite figures of history. You can see a bit of its wall. I hiked up there (and it is a hike) and had great views over to the coast of France. The water around Jersey was so blue and so clear. It was like the water you see in photographs of the Caribbean. Only colder.

British Cream

One of the things I love about going to visit Wales is the chance to visit the Marks & Spencer food halls. It was a sad day for Victoria BC when they retrenched and closed their stores outside of the UK. So when I go over, I eagerly look forward to a visit. Their food is fabulous and one of the things I can’t praise highly enough is their habit of labelling produce with where it came from. On your box of strawberries, for example, there will be a label with not just the price, but the shire and the name of the farm where the produce was grown. The strawberries you see above came from Kent and the farmer’s name was Marion.

Allow me to take a moment to point out that if in North America we tracked food in such a way it would be virtually impossible to have these mass cross-state food poisonings where no one knows where it came from until weeks after the food was consumed.

Another thing I love about grocery shopping the UK generally is the wide variety of cream you can buy. I counted once, in Marks’, and found 6 different types of cream for sale: pouring, clotted, half, thick, and I don’t know what else. In the picture above my Kentish strawberries are topped with thick cream from Dorset. That’s right — that’s not ice cream you see above, it’s pure thick cream you have to spoon over your fruit. …Oh, how I love you, fat globules. Why are you so lovable and appealing? Why can I not resist you, even when I know you carry destruction with you?

Cardiff Cockles

I spent a lot of time in June and July traveling and so with that, and trying to juggle work and other commitments when I was home, I have completely neglected the blogging. So here I am with the first of a few posts to try and catch up on what I’ve been doing food-wise.

First, I have to ask, is it just me, or is it a no-no to handle someone else’s groceries? I was at the grocery store yesterday and I had some things on the conveyer belt. No one was behind me, so I didn’t stack my purchases all together in order to make room for anyone else. After a moment, a woman comes up behind me. Rather than starting to use the inches of conveyer belt available to her, she reaches forward and pushes my prospective purchases forward, and then starts unloading her basket. What is the etiquette around that? Is it OK to handle someone else’s stuff like that? I thought it was rude and a do-not-do myself. Not that I said anything…I almost never do, because when I do it here on the island it invariably turns out to be someone that knows me or my family and then it’s just embarrassing that I told them off/ honked the horn in the car/ asked them not to touch my groceries.

So part of June and July was spent in Cardiff (Wales). Up above is a picture of the back entrance to the city market where you can find stalls of food: fish, meat, vegetables, fruit, bread. And teapots, pets, and clotheslines. I made a special trip there to try cockles. I had seen Rick Stein enjoying cockles (a type of shellfish) on one of his food programs. They looked wonderful and it reminded me that my grandfather had always loved them.

Perfect, I decided — a great little thing to do next time I was in Wales. I would go to the market to buy and eat some cockles as a kind of culinary tribute to a man I love and miss.

Once in Cardiff, you go down to the High Street. From there you go into the Cardiff market and walk past all the stalls — the teapots and vegetables — and follow a smell of fish. At the fish counter there are at least two dozen types of fish and shellfish on ice, with men in hats behind the low oval counter. You can also buy laver, a kind of minced seaweed, to make laverbread there, a traditional Welsh dish which I didn’t appreciate as a child, but eating sushi has now given me a taste for it.

“Yes, my lovely, what would you like?” the man in the white coat and hat asks me. Sternly ignoring the flies drawn out by the heat of the day, I ask for a hundred grams of cockles. He piles them into a white styrofoam container with a two-pronged wooden fork, and I hand over some coin. To the side is a stainless steel counter, the white-tiled wall mirrored along its length, and you can stand there to consume your food. To hand are malt vinegar and salt, and like any member of the Commonwealth, I know that salt and vinegar are always destined for chips and for fish in any form.

I took a moment to think of my grandfather. This was his favorite, and I am prepared to adore cockles forever in his memory. I shake over the vinegar and salt, pierce a cold plump morsel, and pop it in my mouth. I chew, and hit grit. I think the salt must be unusually hard, and try again. More grit in between my molars. Maybe I got a cockle that wasn’t well cleaned. I keep assuring myself that soon, any minute now, I’ll find one that isn’t full of what seems to be sand. I finally give up. The tribute is over, and I do not love cockles. My big moment is ashes and sand in my mouth.

I checked with my mum later and she said that cockles should not have grit; they were not cleaned properly. Those cockle-cleaning bastards! They ruined my culinary tribute and made me eat sand. Repeatedly.

I will try again next time I go…but I will buy the cockles elsewhere.