Tag Archives: food and drink

A Few Holiday Reflections

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s always a bit of a let down when you return home after a holiday. The weather isn’t that great, there’s a whole lot of washing to do of your holiday clothes. You start wishing things like, maybe we should have had another week? We were travelling in a motorhome and I start to think why didn’t we go there or go to see that? There’s always the next trip of course and the good thing is that as I’m now retired, I don’t have to go back to work. Anyway, while I’m feeling a little deflated looking out at the rather dull suburban view from my window it might be a good idea to take a look back at the last few weeks in France.

One of the things I’ve always liked about France is their laid-back lifestyle. Over there, and perhaps more so in the rural areas than the big cities, everything stops for lunch. No, not a quick sandwich grabbed on a 30-minute break, lunch times in France are something to be enjoyed and for care to be taken over. Shops close between 12 and 2 pm and it’s only in recent years that some supermarkets will stay open during those times.

At picnic tables all over france, the French descend on sunny days with huge containers of food and wine. Tablecloths are laid and the food is eaten and enjoyed at leisure.

Restaurants in France always have a plat du jour, a dish of the day and many are served as part of a formula menu comprising of starter, main, dessert and/or cheese. I always thought that the plat du jour was something a French restaurant had to serve but I couldn’t find any evidence of that on the internet so perhaps it’s just a tradition. Plenty of bread is always served with a French meal and it is usual for the waiter to top up your bread basket when he or she sees it is empty.

My favourite French restaurants are those which have a buffet starter. There is usually a small choice of main courses but over on the buffet table there will be a large selection of salads, cold rice and pasta dishes, pâté, cold meats in various dressings, shredded carrots and chopped beetroot. I try to avoid the various fishy dishes like cold rice and tuna but I usually find my plate piled with goodies.

House wine is usually served by the pichet, small jugs. Very small at 25cl and larger ones at 50cl. On hot summer days I tend to go for the house rose but more often than not Liz and I will share a pichet of red.

Cheese in a French restaurant with a pichet of vin rouge

Our first French meal this year was in the Buffalo Grill, a franchised restaurant you will see all over France. It’s like an English steak house serving steak, burgers, ribs and so on. A small salad in a bowl came first before our choice of mains. Mine was an excellent cheeseburger, Liz had a steak and the dessert was some ice cream.

In the town of Saumur, we had our first proper French lunch. The starter was the lovely French buffet I talked about above and the main was confit duck for Liz and a chicken in curry sauce for me. Curry is an unusual dish to find in France as the French don’t seem to go in for spicy food. The curry sauce was to me very mild and more of a slightly curry flavoured cream sauce. It came with fries and the traditional green beans and I have to say, I do love French green beans.

Curried chicken and frites

For dessert we ordered ice cream for me and cheese for Liz and we split the two between us. It was a lovely meal although perhaps a little too much for someone like me who rarely eats lunch.

Most weekends we scour the internet and find ourselves a few brocantes or vide greniers to visit. Vide greniers or car boot sales are usually part of a village fete and there will also be music, wine and food to be found. I remember going to one a few years ago which was interrupted by a pretty heavy shower of rain. In the UK, the vendors would have quickly packed up and been off but in France it was a different story. Plastic covers were quickly whipped out and people took shelter in the food and bar area. Liz and I stood at the bar and drank a glass of cheap red wine and when the skies cleared, we carried on looking for bargains.

I like travelling in our motorhome but after a few weeks living in a somewhat cramped environment I was glad to get to our French villa. I say our French villa even though it is a rental property. We have stayed here a couple of times before and it is ideally placed for everything we need although a bar or restaurant within walking distance would be nice.

The sun going down after a day by a plan d’eau

At the villa I usually try to act like a writer. I get up fairly early and after a cup of tea and a quick scan of my emails on my iPad I crank up my laptop and do some work on my writing projects. In my draft blog folder I’ve currently got eight blogs awaiting attention. Most are just ideas but some are partly written blog posts that need an injection of effort and inspiration to get them finished. The sequel to Floating in Space is still only half finished but I still chip away at it, a few pages at a time as well as a few other stories, screenplays and poems that all need urgent work.

After a little of that it’s time for a late breakfast, brunch might be a better word, and to have a swim and a read by the pool. I remember once reading about Noel Coward that while staying at his house in Jamaica, he rose at 8 am and worked at his writing until 12 when lunch was served. No wonder he produced a fine body of work while I have only produced one novel and one poetry anthology.

A big disappointment on this last trip was the failure of one of my video cameras, my GoPro Hero. I had intended to put together another travel video and at first, I thought it wasn’t going to be possible as I hadn’t shot enough video. However, looking back through my video files I see I’ve got hours of unused video from our previous trips so perhaps I can just cobble something together after all.

Looking back through some of my old video I came across what was quite a scary moment. We were travelling through the town of Rouen, a lovely old town but quite a busy one. I’m always a little nervous driving in big cities, especially in an area where there is lots of traffic and also when the road goes into multiple lanes. I’m pretty good at driving on the right-hand side but in multiple lanes I find myself drifting to the left-hand lane and I usually have to say to myself, Steve, get over to the right.

As you leave Rouen, there are numerous roundabouts and the French have come up with an interesting congestion busting idea. If you are carrying straight on you can duck under the roundabouts down a tunnel and in fact, Google maps which we often use, tends to direct you down into the tunnels. The big problem is that our motorhome is between 2.8 and 2.9 metres in height, just over 9 foot and the tunnels have a height limit of 2.6 metres if I remember correctly. One year I was getting flustered and ended up in the lane for the tunnel but then realised I wasn’t going to fit. Luckily there was an exit lane back to the main carriageway and after some scary reversing we managed to get out.

A big disappointment this year was not seeing much of my favourite cheese, Rondele Bleu. It’s a blue cheese produced in a light mousse style. I think we managed to buy the last tub in one supermarket and then failed to find it again in any other store.

Naturally, we brought quite a bit of French wine and cheese back to the UK but already our stocks are getting low. Time to plan another trip perhaps?

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TV, Julia and Chopping Onions

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Not so long ago I published a post called A Kind of Foodie Sort of Blog Post. It was about cookery and food and brought me in quite a few new readers as well as some new subscribers. A lot of those subscribers were food bloggers and to a certain extent they must be feeling a little short changed with their new subscription as I haven’t written much on the food and drink subject since. Anyway, at least they have had some different content for a change, stuff about 60s and 70s TV shows, classic films and secondhand books and so on. A change is a good as a rest as they say. Anyway, perhaps it’s time to redress the balance and thank those new readers for their support with another foodie sort of blog.

I’ve not been at my best this week. I tested positive for Covid 19 and at one point I felt so bad I thought I might have picked up Covid 20 and 21 as well. I’m feeling much better now and another positive lately has been in the bread making department. A few weeks ago, I made a loaf of bread without the assistance of my bread maker. I’d read somewhere that it’s best to make a wholemeal loaf using a combination of white and wholemeal flour. I found a recipe in one of my numerous cookery books which called for 500g of flour so I thought I’d use 250g of each. As it happened, I only had a little wholemeal flour so I made up the shortfall with white. I added my yeast and salt and olive oil, mixed it up and gave the result a good kneading and left it to prove for thirty minutes.

It rose quite well so I gave it a second kneading and then found I didn’t have a tin in which to bake it. After a rather frantic search I came across one of my mother’s old cake tins and used that. My bread later came out of the oven looking wonderful and tasted just as good. I do love warm bread with a good lashing of butter. Now you might be thinking well done, he’s managed to make himself a loaf of bread, bravo! Yes, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself but could I reproduce that feat, could I make another?

Only yesterday I made another loaf using a 50-50 white and wholewheat flour mix. It wasn’t quite as good as the first one so I reckon in future I might use a 40-60 mix, even so, I’m already looking forward to the next loaf. Also, the thing is, once you have some great bread you need something equally as good to have with it, great cheese or pâté or great soup even. Perhaps it’s time to take a look in my cookbooks or see what my favourite TV chefs have to offer on the small screen.

Talking about TV chefs I want to talk about a TV show, a current TV show. Yes, not from the 1960’s or 70’s like I usually write about but an actual current mainstream TV show. It’s Julia, the story of American TV chef Julia Child.

These days a lot of new TV shows always seem to be on some TV channel that I don’t have access to, Disney+ or Netflix for instance but happily, Julia is currently showing on Sky Showcase which, thanks to Liz’s Sky subscription I can actually get to see.

Those of us in the UK are probably not that familiar with Julia Child. In the 1950’s she lived in Paris with her diplomat husband where she embarked on a training course to be a French chef. She learned all the tricks and techniques of French cookery and she was so keen about it, she decided to write a cookery book called Mastering The Art of French Cooking which she hoped would bring the excellence of French cuisine into the American home.

The TV series picks up Julia later living back in the USA when she gets invited onto a local TV show to talk about her book and rather than just talk about cookery she took into the interview room a hot plate, a pan and some eggs and proceeded to cook the interviewer an omelette.

Julia is played by Sarah Lancashire, a British TV veteran. She started her career in TV soap Coronation St where she played the dizzy Raquel. She played the character for five years but then left to do other things as she apparently tired of the relentless fame of being a TV soap star. Since then, she has starred in many other TV productions and series. In 2000 she signed a ‘golden handcuffs’ deal binding her exclusively to the TV channel ITV. The deal was worth 1.3 million pounds and made Sarah the highest paid UK actress at the time.

It’s hard to say why I like Julia so much. Lancashire is excellent as Julia as is David Hyde Pierce who you might remember from the US sitcom Frasier where he played Frasier’s brother Niles. It appears to be a faithful reconstruction of 1950s America. It’s gently humorous and it’s interesting to see the dynamics of TV production in the 1950s, what the TV executives of the time thought would and would not work and also how the idea of a TV chef came about. There are no car chases and explosions but instead there is plenty of food.

I’m not a great cook myself but I do like watching food programmes, especially those that highlight the skills of a particular chef and how we, the great food eating, TV watching public can try to emulate them.

Now this isn’t the first time Julia has been portrayed on the screen. In 2009 Nora Ephron wrote and directed the film Julie and Julia. It was based on two books, My Life in France, an autobiography by Julia Child and a memoir by Julie Powell based on her blog, in which she decided to cook all 524 recipes in Julia’s cookbook, in a 365-day period. Meryl Streep played Julia Child in the film and I’d be hard pushed to name another film based on a blog, if indeed there are any. Meryl’s version of Julia Child was quite unsurprisingly very similar to Sarah’s and I’d be hard pushed to say which I prefer.

In the film Amy Adams plays Julie Powell, the blogger who decides to cook all of Julia Child’s recipes, all 524 of them for her blog. She experiences a number of disasters and frustrations but she finally pulls off her task and to her surprise, her blog ends up with a huge amount of followers and becomes a great success. The film also looks at the other Julia’s life in France and the trials and tribulations of learning to be a French chef. I mentioned earlier about the skills of a chef and I do love those moments in TV cookery when the celebrity chef will dazzle the viewer with their incredible chopping skills on an onion or something. For me it’s just chop, chop, chop, gradually getting through the onion. For the experts is one quick superfast ch-ch-ch-chop with an entire onion reduced to slices in seconds and in the film, Meryl Streep as Julia goes on a great chopping spree to hone her chopping skills.

I can completely identify with the disasters and frustrations experienced by blogger Julie as can most amateur cooks. Sometimes I have made a fabulous meal, other times I’ve produced that same meal using the same recipe and it’s been a little tame to say the least. What made the difference between the outstanding chilli from last week and the insipid offering from today? What did I do wrong? Was it the meat or the seasoning? Did I miss an ingredient? Usually, I never manage to work out why my food went wrong which is really annoying.

So, shall I look in my recipe books for a soup recipe to go with my fabulous fresh bread or just make a sandwich? Maybe it’s time to settle down with Julia Child’s book? I was saving it for a holiday read but what the heck, I think it’s time for a cheese sandwich, a cup of tea and a good read.

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Cooks and Cookbooks

Posted on by Steve Higgins

For this week’s blog, I thought I’d try and combine a love of cooking with my love of books. I suppose most people are taught to cook, or at least pick up the rudiments of cookery from their mothers. I hope I’m not being sexist when I say that, then again perhaps some people picked up their cookery expertise from their fathers, if it was dad who was the cook of the house.

My earliest memory of cooking something for myself is making tomato soup. Well, perhaps not actually making it but warming up the contents of a can anyway. My next culinary adventure was boiling an egg. I still like those two particular meals, boiled eggs and tomato soup. I once decided to make treacle toffee after seeing a recipe in a summer edition of a comic I used to read and then completely cocked it up. My mother, usually a pretty gentle lady went completely up the wall after I wasted a bag of sugar and caused a total mess in her kitchen. No further cooking assistance from her was ever forthcoming. Even in later life she was a little coy about revealing her culinary secrets. I once asked her how she made such lovely roast beef and after some prodding she told me that she started off, just like all the books say by putting her beef into a hot oven. Later she reduced the temperature but added some water which would help the roast cook.

Mum was a great cook but had a limited repertoire and things like curry and chilli con carne were things completely outside her realm of understanding.

When I left home when I was about nineteen, I bought my first cook book and it’s one I still have today. The Epicure’s book of Steak and Beef Dishes by Marguerite Patten. I think I bought it in a cheap remainder book shop and it’s full of additional recipes I have cut out of magazines or newspaper supplements. It’s my go to book whenever I make a chilli or a bolognese or even a roast dinner. It contains all the rudiments for my favourite meals.

Jamie Oliver made his TV debut in 1999. He was spotted by a TV producer making a documentary about the River Cafe where he was working at the time. His TV show The Naked Chef followed soon after and his cookbook from the series was a best seller. I’ve got quite a few of his cookbooks in my collection which I always refer to when I get down to some serious cookery. In particular I like his 30 minute and 15 minute meal series. In many ways Jamie speaks to the modern cook, the one who likes to try and use fresh produce and not to be always warming up ready made food. The one who has to juggle working and bringing up a family. Not only that, his TV shows are fresh and fast moving and I love his enthusiasm for food and cooking. I think I mentioned a while ago that I recently made a pizza using home made pizza dough. Where did I get the recipe? From one of Jamie’s books of course. His books are pretty popular but there always seem to be plenty of them in the various secondhand book shops that I frequent.

A long time ago, probably back in the 1980’s, I got hooked on Ken Hom’s Chinese cookery programmes. I liked the way Chinese cookery worked, in fact I liked the whole process of preparation and stir frying. I got myself a wok, seasoned it according to Ken’s instructions and started stir frying. I do love it when you see the Chinese chefs stir frying at very high temperatures on TV cookery shows like Ken’s but getting those very high temperatures in a home kitchen is pretty much impossible. I made some nice meals but nothing ever seemed to taste the way it does from the Chinese take away. Perhaps it’s time to drag that wok out of the storeroom and have another go.

Another favourite TV chef was Antonio Carluccio who sadly died in 2017. He had a number of shows on the BBC that combined cookery with travel in Italy. I remember one where he stopped a farmhand who was about to open his sandwich box in some field in the Italian countryside. I say box but in fact it was something wrapped in greaseproof paper, some fresh bread, some tomatoes and some Italian cheese. It looked pretty appetising to me. Antonio once explained that one of my favourite meals, spaghetti bolognese, is something that doesn’t exist in Italy but even so, he showed us how to make an Italian ragu with a mix of beef and pork mince. I use pretty much the same recipe for my bolognese these days.

I do love a good curry but I don’t have any curry cookbooks by famous names. Instead I’ve always relied on this slim volume by Naomi Good. It’s straight to the point and using it I’ve always managed to put together a decent curry.  It’s not a curry that falls into any particular category, it’s not a Korma or a Vindaloo, it’s just a basic curry with plenty of spices and usually made with minced beef. Sometimes it comes out pretty hot, sometimes not and I usually finish it off with a good dose of coconut milk. Most of the time I have to confess, I usually return to the basic curry recipe in my very first cookbook.

So what else do I use when I need cooking inspiration? Well, I’ve got a whole lot of bits and pieces of recipes clipped from magazines as I mentioned earlier. Sometimes I just scan through them and have a go at whatever I fancy.

Pages cut from magazines and newspaper supplements

Do you have a favourite cookbook?

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https://youtu.be/JzJA9YIAGls

5 TV Chefs Who Will Change the Way You Cook!

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I do like my food. Like everyone I have my likes and dislikes, for instance, I’m not a great lover of fish although I’ve been known to eat cod, hake, calamari and even mussels. Good food though is more than just ingredients or produce and a good chef is in his own way as much of an artist as a great painter or a poet. I do love watching great TV cookery shows and although I am not a great cook, I have sometimes tried to follow the advice of various TV cooks who have inspired me to make something exciting. The results will not be spoken about here but getting back to those TV chefs, who is your favourite?

Ken Hom.

A few years back when I first lived on my own, I saw one of Ken’s TV shows and began to wonder if I could actually make some tasty Chinese food. I remember going down to the Chinese supermarket in Manchester and picking up various things like sesame oil, lemongrass and of course, my first wok. Chinese cooking is quick and fresh and most of the work is in the preparation because the actual stir frying is a pretty quick process.

I followed all of Ken’s instructions and seasoned my wok and now and again I manage to dish out some reasonable food. I couldn’t quite find the clip of Ken Hom that I wanted to show but below is a recent clip with Ken talking about his food.

While I’m on the subject, wonder what I did with my wok?

Antonio Carlucci.

One of my favourite cuisines is Italian. Some people say pasta is boring but I’ve never really felt that at all. I love pasta, especially spaghetti and my favourite pasta dish is a very simple one spaghetti aglio olio e peperoncino. It’s basically spaghetti with garlic, olive oil and chilli. Simple and tasty and it’s always handy to have some fresh bread nearby to mop up the olive oil. Antonio Carlucci, who sadly died in 2017, made a great series back in the eighties and one of the highlights was where he visited some small Italian village and the locals showed him their authentic versions of pasta or how they made a ragu for instance. I’ve always liked simple rustic cooking and I think that is what is at the heart of Antonio’s food.

If I remember correctly that ragu was something involving tomatoes, onions and garlic, all of my favourite ingredients. I couldn’t find a clip from it on YouTube so here’s one of Antonio in his later years.

Jamie Oliver.

Jamie Oliver is a very modern cook and he seems to cultivate a sort of Jack the lad streetwise fast-talking persona but he really is a great modern chef. In his many TV shows he caters for the modern household where people come home from work after a busy day and inspires them to cook some simple and fresh food instead of just shoving a frozen pizza in the oven.

Jamie made his TV debut in 1999. He was spotted by a TV producer making a documentary about the River Cafe where he was working at the time. His TV show the Naked Chef followed soon after and his cookbook from the series was a best seller. I’ve got quite a few of his cookbooks in my collection which I always refer to when I get down to some serious cookery.

Here’s one of his many YouTube videos showing how to make another of my favourite Italian dishes, Bolognese.

Keith Floyd.

Keith Floyd is the master of the TV cookery programme and his shows from the seventies and eighties were the forerunners of some of today’s TV cookery shows. Floyd visited lots of places, soaked up the local atmosphere, checked out the local dishes and produce and then turned up somewhere, a village square, a beach or even a local restaurant and started cooking. During each monologue to the camera, Keith made sure the cameraman filmed exactly what he wanted him to film, giving a running commentary on the ingredients and the cooking process as well as directions to the cameraman. The supping of wine during the cooking was clearly compulsory. His shows were a mix of travelogue and cooking visiting various far flung places and his impact on the genre is still visible in today’s food programming.

Rick Stein.

Rick is a direct link to Floyd in many ways. Rick’s first appearance on TV was when Floyd visited his famous fish restaurant in Padstow and later when Floyd’s producer wanted to work with someone new, Rick turned out to be the obvious choice. Rick, together with producer David Pritchard produced a series called Ocean Odyssey which was a big hit and the two went on to make more foodie programmes together. A recent series and one of my favourites was Rick Stein’s Long Weekends. Incidentally, a while back I reviewed Ricks autobiography which is well worth a read if you ever see it on the bookshelves.

Graham Kerr.

I had always thought that Graham Kerr, AKA the Galloping Gourmet was Australian but a quick check over on Wikipedia showed me I was wrong. Kerr was born in London to Scottish parents who were hoteliers and later Kerr moved to New Zealand where he became a culinary advisor to the New Zealand Air Force.

In New Zealand Keith appeared in a highly successful cookery show called Entertaining with Kerr. Later the show moved to Australia and later still Graham and his wife Treena made the move to Canada. There Graham began a new cookery show produced by Treena called the Galloping Gourmet which again was very successful. The title came from Kerr’s fast moving and enthusiastic style in which he literally galloped into the studio.

The format of the show was a film travelogue followed by Graham cooking a dish inspired by his travels live in the studio. I remember watching his shows as a child where he would taste the dish and then give the camera a look of food rapture before running into the audience and grabbing someone to taste his food. I loved it and it’s always been one of my foodie favourites.

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France in Six or Seven Restaurants.

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I was tempted to label this post as another of my ‘Sun Lounger Thoughts’ but as Liz and I have just returned from another motorhome trip through France and neither the sun or a sun lounger made much of an appearance, well then, I thought I’d give that a miss.

I do love France but sometimes I think my love affair with this country is waning. I love the relaxed lifestyle, the food, the restaurants, the innate calm of sleepy French villages but, I do miss the absence of nightlife. The nights when I would stay out till the early hours are long gone of course but I do like a nice friendly bar or a busy restaurant. In rural France those things are hard to find.  In our favourite French town of Doué la Fontaine it is hard work to get a restaurant table on a Saturday lunch time but on Saturday night, the bars close around 9 pm and the restaurants are empty except for a few English tourists.

Coming over on this latest trip Liz did her usual research and found a lovely restaurant in the town of Montreuil sur Mer, a short walk from an Aire du Camping Car. As we motored along serenely through France after exiting the Eurotunnel Liz was urging me to get a move on but I knew in my heart of hearts that like so many other plans earlier in the year, the restaurant would be either closed or one that did not open in an evening.

We arrived in pouring rain to find that a huge amount of cars were parked in this small town. We had decided, wisely I thought, to park up and check the restaurant was open before going to the motorhome parking area. I squeezed gingerly into a small space and then we donned our rain coats and went off in search of food. One positive sight, apart from the numerous parked cars was the various bistros and bars all with a thriving clientele.

We wandered eagerly through the old cobbled streets and finally came to the restaurant Liz had found on the internet. Yes it was open and yes there were people inside! We entered to a round of bonsoirs from the serving and cooking staff clustered around the open kitchen, A table for two? Have we booked? No but could you fit us in? Yes of course! Moments later we were seated in a lovely restaurant full of old world charm and plenty of happy faces enjoying their food.

Le Pot du Clape specialised in home made soups and French flans so we started with mushroom soup and I chose a flan Italienne and Liz ordered a Welsh, nothing to do with Wales but a sort of cheesy quiche. The food was excellent and we particularly liked the red wine served at room temperature unlike so many establishments which serve cold red wine.

The next day we motored on further south. The bar is sadly closed at our regular stopping place in Gizeux and when we stopped at Bourgeuil the hotel and restaurant where we dine regularly was also closed. Oh well, time to light the barbecue once more! While I’m on the subject of barbecuing I think it’s important to share these two universal facts.

One. Always watch your barbecue because if you don’t it will burn itself out before you’ve had a chance to set the table and serve the salad.

Two. Never watch a barbecue because if you do it will just take ages and ages to get going and just when it finally reaches optimum cooking temperature well, it’ll probably be time for bed!

The view from our camping spot at Gastes.

Liz found us a super place to stop by a lake at Gastes. Nine Euros for two nights seemed pretty reasonable even to a tightwad like me so we found ourselves a nice spot with a view of the lake and parked up. The first evening was a lovely and warm one so out came the barbecue again. The next night was my birthday and there was a restaurant just by the motorhome parking area. We had a look in and there wasn’t much to the menu but the place was actually open with people inside eating food. Happy days!

That evening we got ourselves dressed up and meandered down looking forward to a birthday meal. However, the French restaurant curse struck again. They didn’t do food in the evenings! Quelle dommage!

I’m happy to report that we did finally finish the holiday with a lovely meal. We parked up in the village of Clérac in a lovely leafy aire. Sadly a bunch of noisy idiots in a clapped out campervan parked next to us and proceeded to annoy us no end with silly juvenile larking about. After a while they decided to move to the other end of the park and left us in peace. We walked into the village and found the hotel restaurant ready for business.

The Auberge des Lacs Bleus is well worth a visit if you are ever passing. The starter was an excellent cold buffet served with plenty of crusty French bread, next up was an escalope of chicken served in a tasty creamy sauce and we finished with some excellent cheese. The wine too was lovely.

Buffet starter looking yummy.

Of course I should mention the tasty food that Liz serves on board our motorhome. We have three rings on our small gas cooker and a grill but sadly no oven so cooking can be a challenge but even so we regularly find ourselves miles from anywhere enjoying a lovely English breakfast of bacon, sausage, mushrooms, egg and tomatoes, served with toast or fresh bread if there is a boulangerie nearby.

On one of our last nights in France we dined on Pasta Bolognese served with crunchy French bread and followed by an impressive cheese board sourced from the French supermarket Super U. Who needs French restaurants anyway!

Steve Higgins is the author of Floating in Space, a novel set in Manchester 1977. Click the links at the top of the page to buy or for more information.

 

Fast food, slow food, and French Food

Posted on by Steve Higgins

macweblogoIn the late 1930s a fellow called Patrick McDonald opened a fast food stand in California selling mainly hot dogs. Later, his sons took the business over and realising hamburgers were their top selling item they decided to revamp the entire operation, focusing on quick service and snack food that was served literally ‘fast’.

They reopened with their new concept in 1948 calling their fast food establishment simply ‘McDonalds.’ They franchised their operation and other ‘McDonalds’ started springing up over California and Arizona. In 1954 a man called Ray Kroc bought up the franchise for the rest of the United States and in 1961 he bought out the McDonald brothers for 2.7 million dollars. He then went on to build the McDonalds Corporation bigger and bigger and to export the McDonald restaurants all over the world. Even to France.

Plat du jour

Plat du jour

Now, as a great lover of France and the french way of life, well, some of the french ways of life that is, it’s always been a great source of interest to me to see how the french would accept the fast food concept. As much as I love the french way of eating, the entree, plat, dessert et fromage, and plenty of bread, I do feel that french cusine is a little over rated. The fact of the matter is, some of the things that the french like to eat, well, they are just a little bit odd.

If you think about it, you can perhaps imagine ancient man many thousands of years ago. Picture him now, taking a good look at something like a cow for instance and thinking, “you know, bet there’s some tasty meat on that animal. I could slaughter it, cut a thick wedge of meat off, slap it on a griddle over the fire, some salt and pepper and bet it would taste lovely!” Yes, that’s thinking that I can understand, especially later when that same ancient man refined his original idea by adding a baked potato or a few chips to the meal and maybe even a side salad.

The ancestors of today’s frenchmen must have thought in a different way, well different to us anglo saxons that is. Just imagine some ancient frenchman in the same situation but instead of checking out the cow he has his eyes on a frog, hopping merrily about and croaking, as they do, and he begins to think like this: “Hey, wonder if I killed that frog, chopped its legs off and cooked them in a little garlic, what would they be like?” A thought that would never occur to any right minded Englishman in a million years! Imagine another frenchman, coming out of his cave on a damp morning and noticing a lot of snails wandering about in his back garden: “Hey, why don’t I cook those with some shallots and garlic?” he thinks. “What a great idea!” Wrong! Crazy idea! Take another look at that cow Monsieur!

Anyway, getting back to McDonalds. In Saumur, one of my favourite french towns, Liz and I dropped in to the local McDonalds  for a quick snack before making our way up north towards Calais. I think we ordered something from the breakfast menu like a bacon and egg McMuffin. Well, the trays behind the counter that are usually stacked with hot food were not stacked with anything so the staff asked us to settle down in a booth and take advantage of the free wi-fi and that they would bring our food over in a moment.

After a while, one of the staff came over, there was some sort of further delay so did we want another tea anglais on the house while we waited? OK. Eventually, after I had checked all my e-mails, started off a couple of blog posts and re written part of ‘Floating in Space‘ (ok, slight exaggeration) our food eventually arrived. After visiting McDonalds Saumur a few times I have found that this occurance is not unusual. In fact, it’s quite normal but the french seem happy with the situation and I think I know why: They do not understand the concept of fast food at all!

It’s the same in a french restaurant. They leave you for ages reading the menu as if it was ‘War and Peace.’ It’s not! Anyone can read the menu and decide what to have within five minutes. Oh and what about a drinks order while we wait? Oh no. The french waiter likes to give you plenty of time to choose. When you finally give the waiter your order, things go at a pace reasonably similar to that of a UK restaurant but then at the end when you are waiting and waiting for the bill, don’t they realise you have finished and actually want to leave?

The french like to savour the whole eating experience, even the reading of the menu and while I do agree with that initial concept, the french sometimes take it a little too far. No, the french food experience is not fast food, it’s slow food!

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Restaurants I have Known and one or two Memorable Meals!

Posted on by Steve Higgins

 

Restaurants I have known and one or twoGoing out for a meal has to be one of the great pleasures in life. It’s certainly one of my favourite things to do. There are many things that make for a great dining experience. The food of course is the important factor but it’s not just that. The restaurant and the atmosphere play a big part. The location too, is important and the table, but after the food the most important thing is service.

St Annes and Lytham have some wonderful restaurants embracing various food cultures. There is Anatolia serving Turkish food, The Greek Flame serving, not unsurprisingly, Greek food. The Marrakech has a lovely Moroccan menu. Woks Cooking in Lytham is my favourite Chinese eating house and Ego, also in Lytham serves Mediterranean food with a smile and outstanding service.

One of my all-time favourite meals was at my favourite French restaurant not far from Calais in a place we found on a country road, miles from anywhere. Liz and I stopped there many years ago for an early evening meal. For starters I chose celery soup and Liz ordered the pate.
I was a little disappointed with the rather small dish that was presented to me but then a huge tureen of soup arrived which was wonderful and produced about four small servings, one of which went to Liz while I sampled her pate which was full of rustic flavours and was perfect served with fresh French bread.
The main course was a simple omelette, light and fluffy with a fresh salad and Liz’s fish was lovely with a creamy curry like sauce, unusual for French country cooking.

Another great French restaurant is in Saumur, my favourite French town. Again, I don’t know the name of it and it’s always hard to find, in fact we usually tend to stumble upon it after walking around for a while. It’s a small restaurant that spills out on the pavement and I do so love those three lovely courses that French restaurants serve; starter, main and a cheese course, served with red wine and plenty of crusty bread. There is no rush in a French restaurant and there’s plenty of time to watch life and people pass by as you dine.

IMGA0302Tapas are pretty fashionable in the UK these days and we sampled some lovely tapas at the Blue Note restaurant at the Marina Rubicon in Playa Blanca earlier this year. The highlight was the Canarian potatoes served with mojo sauce, lovely.

Yes, I’ve come a long way as a diner from the Plaza Cafe in Manchester where my friends and I used to call in the early hours of Sunday morning after a late night drinking and chatting up the girls. The Plaza served curry and there were three options: mild, hot, and suicide! Yes, how we used to laugh as we called up “Three suicides please!”

A lot of people seem to think I’m a fast eater. I’m not sure if I am but if that is the case; it surely comes from late night curries like the one above. If you are with six boozed up guys and you want something to eat, you have to grab it and get it on your plate as soon as possible otherwise you might just end up with nothing but a plateful of rice as my friends used to clear the table faster than a horde of locusts.

My one hate of restaurants though is this. Do waiters lie in wait for me to take a big mouthful of food before coming to the table? Many times I’ll try my food then nibble on small portions just in case the waiter approaches. When I finally think, ok, he’s not coming over, I’ll shovel in a good mouthful and out of nowhere a waiter is sure to appear.
“Is everything all right for you sir?”
All I can usually do is nod and try to mime someone enjoying their meal . .

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