Sea life month #1: Tenbo! (And a general update)

With the whole taking over the Salford Zine Library thing, the exhausting hot weather and being on holiday in Tenby, we haven't had much chance to update the blog for a while. Please forgive us! As a result of our incompetence, woodland month is going to be extended! But it's also going to be overlapped by SEA LIFE MONTH. The reasons for this will become clearer later. In fact, these two 'months' are not so much monthly themes any more, they're probably more like non time-specific series of posts.

Tenby

The diehard fans amongst you may remember that we went on holiday to Tenby last year. Well this year we went again! We really like Tenby, although phone signal is hard to come by and some bits of it are plagued by horseflies. Despite that, the weather was amazing, we got to do loads of swimming in the sea (remember, this is sea life month, this is not a coincidence) and eat loads of ice cream.

The main thing we wanted to do while we were in Tenby was go to Fecci's Ice Cream Parlour, as featured in the third issue of the Young Explorer Zine (Buy here or here). We like its slightly faded charm and the amount of novelty ice cream sundaes they have on offer. This time Liz went for something called a 'Crinoline Lady' which looks like this:

Let me talk you through what you're looking at here. Yes, that is a plastic doll stuck in the middle of the ice cream. The doll was actually only a (naked) torso with a stick at the bottom to poke into the ice cream. As Liz was eating, the doll was being undressed and, to be honest, it was a little bit creepy.

Anyway, there's lashings of ice cream and whipped cream (the white ball gown) complete with black cherry, sugar paper flower and hundreds and thousand adornments. And a fan shaped wafer at the back. Very tasteful. Liz wasn't able to finish it - she might have been attempting to save the young lady's modesty or she might have just been suffering from a dairy overdose.

Ice cream isn't the only thing that Tenby has going for it. Check out this view! Cor! I spent the first 18 years of my life living by the sea and I never really took advantage of it. I find being by the sea very relaxing so I'm going to try and spend as much time at the seaside as possible from now on. There's something about the sound of waves crashing against the shore that never fails to slow my heartbeat down a bit. In a good way, not in a cardiac arrest/dying way.

There is nothing we like better than a boat trip. While we were in Tenby we got to go on two! The first was a seal safari around Caldey Island, where we were *guaranteed* to see some seals. And we weren't disappointed! On the way around the island we also got to see some lovely rocks/cliffs (see above) and a couple of puffins (we weren't quick enough to get a photo of the puffins but we instantly fell in love with them). Then came the stars of the show.

This is the best photo we got of a seal. We saw about twenty of them altogether, dotted around the rocks and in the water. Apparently they like to lie on the rocks and sleep while their food digests, which I think we would both have enjoyed after our massive ice creams. That one is a male, or a 'bull' ^^^

The second boat trip actually landed on Caldey Island, where there is a monastery, a little village, a lighthouse and some lovely coastal paths. We'd been warned against taking the trip due to the earlier mentioned plague of horseflies, but we thoroughly sprayed ourselves with insect repellant and went for it anyway. There were loads of them! Everywhere you went, horseflies. Gross. Thankfully we didn't get bitten though.

Caldey Island is beautiful. It reminds me a bit of an island we visited when we went to Oslo, except it's a bit smaller and is more Welsh. I'll leave you to look at some photos of Caldey Island while we go away and think about other things to blog about. See yer!

Local Favourites Part One: Potato Scones

Hey! Did you know that the third issue of Young Explorer (Which is, according to the Shrieking Violet, "Manchester's loveliest zine") is now available to buy for a mere two quid? Well it is. The theme, this time, is food and there are loads of dead good things to digest in there. Like Laura Kirsop from Internet Forever talking about what she eats when she's on tour, a comic by Stef Bradley of Today Zine super stardom and loads more besides. There's more info here if you're interested.

There's also a super nifty bit in the middle of the zine about regional food stuffs that you would probably enjoy. We talk about our favourite local foods and then there's an annotated map of Britain with arrows and things on it, so that you know where all these nice foods are originally from.

To accompany that bit of the zine, we're going to do a series of blog posts where we attempt to cook each one of the six things that we highlighted as being our favourite regional foods. Then we'll share the recipe, and post some pictures of how things looked as we were going along. This first post is POTATO SCONES.

Potato Scones

Potato scones are pretty easy to make. We've intentionally started with the easiest recipe of the bunch and will probably forget about the harder ones on the list. But potato scones are dead nice and are a perfect accompaniment to any fried breakfast (Particularly if you're vegetarian or Scottish). I had them for the first time in Edinburgh years and years ago, in a breakfast that also included chips and hash browns. So much potato! You don't have to go so spud mad though - we've restrained ourselves here and served our potato scones with some nice beans and fried mushrooms.

Ingredients
500g floury potatoes
115g self raising flour
A knob of butter
A splash of milk
Sprinkle of salt

Step one - mash some potatoes. About 500g will do. Lots of recipes that we found said 'floury potatoes' are best, but we just bought the one kind of potato that the Sainsburys in Piccadilly Station sells.

Step two - mix in about 115g of self raising flour. And also a wee bit of salt. Och, I have only just started writing about potato cakes and already I've turned Scotch!

Step three - turn your flour/mashed potato combo out on to a surface that you've dusted with some flour. Give it a bit of a kneading, but don't go too mad. Just push it all together roll it around a bit until it resembles a big ball of dough. Like this:

I wish we could take amazing photos of our food, like those on Fish, Chips and Gelato. But we can't, so these will have to do.

Step four - roll out your ball into a pancake type shape. 1cm thick, perhaps? Quite thick but not really thick. Thicker than a pancake. If you've had a potato scone before you'll know what you're aiming for, anyway. At this point you can cut your big potatoey pancake into quarters and fry them separately. Or you can just put the whole thing into the frying pan and cut it up when it's cooked. I have no idea which way is the most authentic. Possibly the former, so obviously we did the latter.

Step five - if you're going for the 'stick the whole thing in the pan' approach, fry it for about ten minutes and then awkwardly slide it out on to a plate. Using another plate, flip the scone over and then slide back into the pan (We were regretting not cooking them in quarters at this point) until both sides have gone kind of golden and crispy looking . Then turn the whole thing out on to a chopping board and then quarter it. Don't worry, yours will look better than ours.

Step five - serve with whatever fried foods you fancy eating. Or I guess you could eat them on their own, but you know, that wouldn't be as good.

So what's your favourite regional food? Tell us about it. Please. We never get any comments on here! Alternatively, why not tweet us, talk to us on Facebook or follow us on Instagram and Pinterest?

Enjoy the nice weather!

S

Choux Buns

We've always considered choux pastry to be beyond our limited cooking abilities, but choux pastry is amazing. Chocolate eclairs, profiteroles and choux buns are up there with the best cakes/desserts, so we've been meaning to try and make something with choux pastry for a while now. Liz's friend Sarah (who seems to be getting mentioned all the time on this blog these days) bought her a beautiful Ladurée recipe book and we eventually got around to trying their 'Choux a la Rose' recipe yesterday.

Sadly, as our closest supermarkets didn't have anything even vaguely like rose water or rose syrup, we had to go without. So technically we made 'Choux a la Nothing'! I was secretly pleased because rose is a bit gross.

Ingredients

120g plain flour

100ml milk

100ml water

1 tbsp granulated sugar

1 pinch of salt

80g butter

4 eggs (beaten)

A pot of double cream (whipped)

Raspberries
80g white chocolate
Some red food colouring

This recipe takes a while, so make sure you have plenty of time to faff about letting things cool and all that. A Bank Holiday, lazy Sunday afternoon or day off work would be excellent.

Step one: Sift your flower. We never usually bother with this bit when making other things, but thought it was worth the extra effort in this case.

Step two: Put your milk, water, sugar, salt and butter in a saucepan and then it will look something like this...

Step three: Bring this appetising looking mixture to the boil and then remove from the heat. Tip your flower into the hot liquid and then mix it with as much enthusiasm as you can muster until it forms a kind of thick batter/soggy dough. Put it back on a low heat for a minute or two to get rid of some of the moisture.

Step four: Put the mix in a bowl and leave to cool for a bit. We left our bowl on a windowsill to speed things up a little bit, and the unseasonably cold weather really helped us out here!

Step five: When the batter has cooled down a bit, start adding your egg, a little bit at a time so that the batter doesn't split. This bit will look a bit gross and you'll feel like you've completely ruined everything, but don't panic! Persevere and you'll get there. When everything's mixed in and in one large, smooth blob in the middle of your bowl you're ready to get piping!

Step six: Stuff the batter mixture into a piping bag and then pipe circles on to a baking tray with greaseproof paper on it. We used a cookie cutter as a guide for how big we needed to pipe our circles, but you could draw circles on the paper or just do it by eye. The recipe wasn't clear about how thick the circles needed to be, so we did them about 1cm thick. Probably?

Step seven: Put the tray in a pre-heated oven (About 160 degrees) for 10 minutes and then open your oven door slightly to let out some of the steam. Prop the oven door open a little by wedging a wooden spoon in the top and then bake for another half an hour or so (Thankfully our oven is broken and the door doesn't close properly anyway - this is the first time this has actually been an advantage).

Step eight: Poke a little hole in the bottom of your delicious looking buns (To let the steam out) and then leave them to cool on a cooling rack.

Step nine: Now, the recipe calls for creme patisserie here, but we just used whipped double cream because we're lazy like that. Also because whipped cream is amazing. Put the whipped cream (Or creme patisserie if you can be bothered) in a piping bag and then, using the little hole you made earlier, fill each one until you can feel it bulging. You don't want them to burst though, so don't go mad. Here you can see some cream poking out of our buns!

Step ten: Melt some white chocolate and mix in a little red food colouring to get a nice pink colour. Dribble over the top of the buns and leave to set a little while. Then dab some of the leftover whipped cream on the top of each bun. Use this as a glue to stick a raspberry on each of the choux buns. Voila, as the French say.

We were pretty chuffed with the finished results. Maybe being a French patisserie chef isn't as hard as it looks?

S

Souper!

One of our favourite things to have for our lunch when we are at home is soup. Soup is pretty brilliant. It can basically be made out of any vegetable; if you can blend it you can make soup with it. When it comes to soup there is definitely a wide range of skill levels. Usually we opt in for the super easy, cheap and fast options, as we are both pretty greedy and impatient when it comes to waiting around for lunch.

Two of our favourites are probably pea and mint or carrot and coriander. They both just involve boiling the vegetables until they are soft in some vegetable stock, blending them, and then adding the herbs and blending again. The bit where you add the herbs and blend again is probably the crucial part when making carrot and coriander soup as it stops the soup from going a strange greeny brown colour. Gross! Sometimes we even skip the fresh mint step when making pea and mint soup and just stir in a few spoons of mint sauce. Yum yum.

We do very much enjoy all soups, but at the moment there is a new soup in our flat that we can’t get enough of: cauliflower cheese soup. This soup takes a little more time than other soups we make, and is in no way classed as healthy, but taste wise it is delicious. We found the recipe on Good Food, but we have adapted it a little to make it more unhealthy (and therefore, more delicious!).

Ingredients

Knob of butter
1 large onion, diced
1 large cauliflower (you need to cut off the leaves and chop it into florets)
1 spud (peel off the skin, chop it into small-ish bits)
700ml vegetable stock
400ml milk
200g cheddar, diced (OR try mixing up your cheeses. We added some smoked cheddar too)

Step one: melt the butter in the saucepan. Add in your diced up onion and sauté it for a bit until it goes all soft and translucent. Keep stirring so you don't get bits of burnt onion stuck to your pan.

Step two: add the cauliflower, spud, vegetable stock and milk (and a bit of salt and pepper, if you like) and bring to the boil. Turn your hob down and then leave it to simmer for about half an hour or until the spuds and cauliflower and nice and soft.

Step three: BLEND! The best bit about making soup is blending. We have a hand blender that does a pretty good job. The original recipe said that you could use a potato masher but, quite frankly, that sounds mad to me. Anyway, after a bit of blending your soup will be thick and creamy. But it isn't finished yet!

Step four: CHEESE TIME. Tip in your cubes of cheese and put the pan back on the hob. Stir the cheese around until it melts into the soup, but if you're impatient you don't have to wait until it's fully melted. It's nice having lumps of half melted cheese gloop in your soup.

Step four: serve in bowls with some bread (or toast!) on the side for dunking.

Try it! Or maybe you have a better soup recipe? Let us know, please!

See yer!

L and S

x

Cheesed Off

I have this amazing idea for a restaurant/bar type place that would specialise in cheese boards and other cheese related foodstuffs (Welsh rarebit, cauliflower cheese, that kind of thing). But that's not all. Borrowing slightly from Meatball Shop in New York, the premise would involve people ticking off the cheeses they want on a betting shop style coupon and then handing it over at the bar. Then their chosen selection of cheeses (or other cheese related foodstuff) would be prepared and taken to their table. If anybody wants to invest hundreds of thousands of pounds into this extremely niche and unprofitable business idea, let me know.

Until then, I'll have to make do with ordering my cheese boards in non-specialist eateries without being able to use a coupon to make my cheese preferences known. Bakerie, on Lever Street, does a pretty good cheese board. We went there a while ago and you get three cheeses (from about six different options), mini gherkins, pickled onions and some dead nice bread and it is flipping great (grate?). They do a meat board too, if you don't like cheese very much. Although if that is the case I'm not really sure why you have bothered to read up to this point.

Recently we went to Marble Brewery's 57 Thomas Street. I have decided that developing a penchant for real ale would really round off my 'look' (cringe). Still, no matter how hard I try, it always tastes a bit gross to me. So the fact that they do a cheese board gave me the opportunity to simultaneously try and make myself like beer while enjoying some amazing cheeses.

I can't remember what beer we had, but I actually quite enjoyed it! I think if I persevere I might actually develop a taste for it. Fingers crossed. Anyway, as the photo above clearly shows, they have a pretty massive collection of cheeses to choose from.

We went for the 9 cheeses for £10.95 between us, although I can't remember for the life of me what we ordered. Some kind of brie, the blue Cheshire, a crumbly Lancashire of some description and uh, other ones. The Bath Oliver biscuits were incredible, as was the pickle that came with it. My mouth is watering as I type.  We had a kind of smoky flavoured cheddar amongst the nine, and that was probably my favourite. They were all absolutely delicious though. Cheese!

Feel free to share your favourite cheeses below, don't keep your top fromage tips to yourself!

See yer!

S

Morecambe

A couple of weeks back we decided we'd go and spend our weekend in Morecambe. We've both always wanted to stay at the newly renovated Midland Hotel, and they had a deal on dinner, bed and breakfast. And the food was supposed to be amazing. And I'd never been to Morecambe before, but Steve had and he's very much a fan.

We seem to spend a lot of time at the seaside, don't we? I'm not really sure how Morecambe compares with Cleethorpes and Southport, two other seaside towns we've visited recently. Morecambe is a bit more depressing I think. But there's nothing wrong with spending a weekend in an eerily deserted seaside town at the end of the summer season. If anything, it's better when there's less people around!

The giant polo thing in the photo on the right is one of the last remaining rides in the now abandoned theme park on Morecambe sea front. Wikipedia says that it was a Noel's House Party/Mr Blobby themed amusement park, which is probably why it was abandoned.

The meal at the hotel was incredible. I'll talk you through what I had. Starter! Scallops with bacon, peas, pea puree and a sauce that I don't remember. It doesn't look very appetising but it was really quite nice.

Scallops!

Lamb!

The lamb we both had for our main course was even more amazing. The tasty bit of meat in the middle is lamb rump, the wheel things around it are lamb confit belly (!) and then there's some borlotti beans, broad beans and peas in a rosemary sauce. Probably one of the best things I've ever eaten.

Trio of berry desserts!

Dessert was pretty excellent, too. Steve had a cheese board and I had the collection of berry desserts, which consisted of (going clockwise!) an elderflower and blackberry jelly, a raspberry mousse and a summer fruits pudding. Complete with fancy fruity swirl on the plate. Swish-o!

The next day we went to a little vintage shop/tea room called Dotty's Vintage. They had some lovely clothes for sale, but we were there for the tea room really. We had a lovely pot of tea and some cherry and almond scones. Yum!

Sadly it was absolutely chucking it down on the Sunday, so, after sitting in a shelter and watching the waves crashing against the sea wall for a bit, we made a hasty retreat and went back to Manchester. Morecambe's really nice! I think I'd like to go back again, possibly in the summer when it's not so grim looking.

Bye!

L x

Apple Chutters

On Saturday we made THIS CHUTNEY RECIPE. We'd made it before, and it was pretty nice. It turned out well this time too.

Hmm, it doesn't look particular sexy at this stage does it? FYI, it's got apple (obviously), gallons of cider vinegar, onion, heaps and heaps of sugar, raisins and cranberries in it. We gave a couple of jars away to friends, I'm going to give one to a colleague for her birthday, and we had it with our super exciting tea!

Our friend came over on Saturday evening and we made the fried courgette recipe from the Leon cook book that we always make. It's nice. It's just fried sliced courgette with a bit of garlic. We served it with a semi-improvised stab at making apricot and chickpea falafel, which had a little bit too much apricot in for me, but everyone else seemed to like it. Here's the wonderful table setting, just in case you're wondering what our tea looked like. I flipping love rocket.

SPOILER: there was a bottle of salad cream on that table too, but it was moved out of shot as it kind of dragged the sophistication levels down quite dramatically. Also, the plan was to have a photo of us all having a great time together, but we both look pretty stupid in the photos and there isn't one of Rebecca on her own. Unlucky.

Here's a couple of the jars of chutney that we gave away! One was for our aforementioned friend Rebecca, who infrequently writes a blog and zine called Threads and Letters and the other we gave to Natalie, who famously writes the Shrieking Violet zine and blog, and is generally great. 

I think that's it. Oh! Apparently people are reading this blog. If you are reading this post and you have a nice chutney recipe, why not comment and tell us what it is rather than being selfish and keeping it to yourself? 

Many thanks,

S