Random holiday rambling, August 2014

Things I have learnt on holiday;

1) Cockroach poo looks remarkably like mouse poo. It's also weirdly crunchy.
2) An upset stomach is still the best bikini diet, but it doesn't help shake off that pale and pasty, 'just arrived' look
3) Either "Jingle Bell Rock" is no longer classed as a Christmas record, or Paphos, 3rd August 2014 sets a new record for inappropriate festive cheer on the radio...
4) No matter what age the children, parenting is spending 99% of your time trying to keep them quiet to avoid annoying other people.
5) In a classic tale of middle class woes, my children do not know how to work a simple pop-up toaster. After all, everyone we know has a Dualit. Oh, the shame.
6) Speaking of shame, I can't help thinking that if you are going to have a large tattoo of what appears to be a bull with giant horns in between and over your breasts, and then sunbathe topless, it looks a bit odd if you suddenly go all shy and start walking around with you hands covering your boobs. No. Not talking about myself, for the avoidance of doubt.

Things that I already knew, but have been reinforced;

7) I'm really, really not built for tanning or sunbathing, and never will be.
8) A "meze" platter always seems like a good idea when contemplating a menu with an empty stomach, but it will only inevitably end in wasted food and the knowledge of what a Christmas turkey must feel like. A bit like the Mediterranean equivalent of a"meal for two " at a Chinese takeaway.

9) Nice as it is to go "offline" for a period of time, it is becoming increasingly difficult to live without internet access, especially when life necessitates the researching of cockroach poo.
10) It's always good to be reminded that swimwear is a great leveller. (See also 6, above)

Review - Walkers Hoops and Crosses

Yes, yes, I know - another review. It seems I'm easily bought with food. As an aside, I got offered weight loss treatment for review a while ago, which I declined as I have a terrible aversion to talk of weight loss. Weight GAIN, however, I can get on board with.

As I have probably stated before, I don't have a sweet tooth. I do, however, have a BIG weakness for savoury. Alongside cheese, I think crisps are probably my biggest weakness. How could I therefore turn down the opportunity to try Walker's new "Hoops and Crosses" snacks?

Bizarrely, I think they are actually aimed at the kids. How dare they.

The Blurb:

The "selling point", if you will, is that these new snacks differ from their existing range in that they are a) baked (and therefore lower in calories than standard crisps - 85 cals in a packet to be precise, although it should be noted that you do only get 18g in a bag, vs 25g for a standard bag of Walker's crisps), and b) 56% wholegrain. According to the people at Walker's 27% of children in the UK do not get any wholegrain at all. Obviously, I'm not a nutritionist, and can't verify that myself, but a quick google search confirms that wholegrain is generally a Good Thing.

The thing about lower calories can often be that other nasties are put in to replace the lovely taste that fat gives us (sugar and salt being the obvious candidates). So, yes, the hoops and crosses are higher in sugar than normal crisps because of the specific flavours used, but I was pleased to see that they aren't noticeably higher in salt.

The Taste:

Hoops and Crosses comes in 3 flavours - Roast Beef, Prawn Cocktail and Salt and Vinegar. Sadly we were sent the roast beef flavour, because I confess that, despite my love of crisps, I personally loathe both roast beef and prawn cocktail flavours, finding them generally too strong and artificial-tasting (interestingly it appears Walkers do not do their "standard" crisps in roast beef flavour any more). However, it seems they went down a treat with the rest of the family, so what do I know!

The overall texture is similar to other baked corn snacks, and while the wholegrain is visible, it did not seem to affect the taste in any way.

The verdict:
I'd buy these - although I'd love to see a few more flavours!
7 sardines out of a full tin of 10 ;-)

Review - Lizi's Granola

Much to my children's disgust, I'm a terrible Puritan when it comes to breakfast. If it was up to me, they would eat unsweetened gruel every day. I've never bought "children's" cereals coated in sugar or chocolate, and I'm always very conscious that any cereals I do buy are as unsweetened as possible. As we've never had chocolate spreads or frosted cereals in the house, my children have never really questioned this - and, at the risk of sounding terrible smug, I have to say that their favourite breakfast is either porridge with a bit of dried fruit or just a sprinkle of cinnamon.

Yes, there are health reasons for this, but also from a purely selfish point of view, I essentially buy what I like, and the rest of the family have to lump it. I'm a big believer that children should basically eat the same as adults as early as possible, and I'm very, very lucky that my children are not particularly fussy eaters.

Before you all think my diet resembles that of Gwyneth Paltrow, yes, we do have the odd treat at weekends - and that includes breakfasts, whether it's a fry-up, or a pain au chocolat. The children have always liked to have a bowl of what used to be called "crunchy oat cereal", but these days everybody seems to be calling it granola.

 My reluctance to allow them to have it every day has mainly been down to the sugar content, so when I got an email from the folks at Lizi's Granola telling me about the low sugar and low GI in their granola, I was intrigued.

Lizi's Granola comes in various flavours  - Treacle and Pecan, Pink Apple and Cinnamon, Organic, Belgian Chocolate and Original. We reviewed the Original flavour:

Taste:

The Original cereal contains (amongst other things) oats, coconut, cashew nuts, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, hazel nuts, almonds and walnuts. However, I have to say that the nut content is not immediately visible from the bowl above. I assumed this would be a good thing, as DD1 likes some nuts, but does have a tendency to pick out larger lumps. However, she did say that she didn't like the taste as she couldn't pick out those specific nuts she didn't like (so much for not being fussy...)

Personally, I liked the consistency this gave the texture - it didn't seem to have the larger lumps of oats stuck together that you get with other granola. I appreciate this may be a personal preference though.

It definitely tasted less sweet than the previous granola we had tried (which was a Sainsbury's own brand one), which is a no-brainer as it contains half the sugar content:

I found the taste just the right sweetness, however, I think I would end up adding a bit more interest to the flavour overall by adding some other bits of fruit (dried or otherwise) into it, which I fear may be slightly counterproductive!

"Fillupability":

Lizi's sells itself as having a low glycaemic load (as obvious from the prominent GL on the label), which, as far as I can tell is another way of measuring "good carbs". (You can find more about GL on their website) The simple theory being that these carbs release energy slowly , keeping your blood sugar stable and feeling fuller for longer.

I have to say I never really struggle too much with this as I eat a lot of oat-based cereals anyway, but in my unscientific use I definitely didn't feel any mid-morning hunger pangs, so guess it works!


Overall Value for Money:

This 500g bag retails at £3.45, so roughly similar to other "premium" granolas, so if I saw it I'd probably buy it again.

I quite like the fact that you can buy multiple bags online at a discount, both on their own website, and via various online eco stores, as well as amazon. It also retails in supermarkets such as Tesco and Waitrose.


Final Tin rating: 8 sardines out of 10 ;-)

Are you an adventurous eater?

Note: vegetarians look away now... ;-)

So it seems that the horsemeat scandal is widening to encompass more countries and a wider selection of food producers. I think most people would agree that it's a shocking state of affairs all round, and everything that can possibly be said about the whole thing has probably already been said.

I have to say, however, that the big issue for me was the pure and simple fraud of it, rather than the any ickiness about it being horsemeat. You see, while I would never in any way condone cruelty to animals, I am not at all sentimental about them either. Guess what? I've eaten horsemeat, and it tasted quite nice.

In fact, when I thought about it, I realised that over the years I've digested quite a lot of what some people would consider "non-standard" meat items:
- snails
- alligator
- ostrich
- kangaroo
- crocodile
- reindeer
- elk
- just about most game you can think of
- goat
- eel
- most raw fish
...and pretty much every seafood/shellfish you can conceivably imagine.

I'm not a huge fan of offal, but I will eat it to be polite, and have probably had my fair share of liver, hearts, kidneys, tripe and tongue in my time. I've therefore always prided myself on how adventurous my palette is and it pains me somewhat when my eldest daughter in particular turns her nose up at perfectly un-adventurous food items!

In many ways, our diets have become more adventurous than in my childhood. My children have eaten a huge number of exotic cuisines from around the world that I wasn't aware of as a child. In a lot of other ways, however, some foods that were quite commonly found on our table when I was a child seem to have fallen out of favour completely - not only various animal "extremeties" (am I the only one who remembers eating giant bovine tongues, oxtail and pigs trotters?), but also meats like rabbit - wonderfully tasty, yet which has seemingly fallen prey to sentimentality about cute bunnies. Previous food scares obviously play a part, but also perhaps a certain "sanitisation" of our food that results in more processing and ironically a move further away from being able to tell what is in it.

It seems you have more chance of being adventurous with food with non-meat items these day. A quick perusal of recent recipes list the following items that I hereby confess to never having tried:

Chia seeds (never even heard of these before)
Quinoa (ditto)
Flaxseed
Goji berries
Salsify

...although perhaps I may be forgiven as most of those are not home-grown traditional UK produce.

Quinoa. (Apparently.)

Perhaps we're on safer ground with these of course, although pesticides and genetic modification also mean that there is never any guarantee that things that we don't expect also end up in non-meat items. Other that growing your own there is no real fail-safe way of knowing what you are consuming.

Anway, all of that is a convoluted way of asking what the weirdest thing is that you've eaten? I'd love to know!

An Ode to the Humble Tomato

Tomato, tomato, why do you tempt me so?

Tomato, tomato, I love you, don't you know

Tomato, tomato, I can't eat you any more,

Tomato, tomato, you make my hands so sore.

Your juicy ripe red goodness begs to be consumed

Yet my love for you, I fear, is doomed
No longer shall I you dismember
I shall have to stick to...er...cucumber.

Carfest

I'm strictly a "Today" programme kind of gal first thing in the morning. It's a habit that I've inherited from my parents - Radio 4 in the kitchen. I find there's nothing more likely to wake me up properly (other than a decent cup of coffee) than huffing along with John Humphries et al to the latest guff some politician is making up.

I therefore hadn't heard of Carfest, the festival thought up by Chris Evans in aid of Children In Need, until a friend mentioned it to me. The idea, apparently, was simple - a festival for families, combining his favourite things; cars, food and music. It appealed immediately - my husband is a car fan, I like food, and who doesn't like music? As it also meant giving the newly purchased tent another outing, it seemed like a good idea all round.

So, one April morning saw my friend and myself simultaneously on the phone to each other and waiting for the ticket website to go online, and we managed to garner a much-sought after weekend camping pass for the two families.

Last Friday, therefore, we ventured into deepest Hampshire, queued with several thousand others, and jostled for space to pitch our tents. It turned out to be a weekend of many firsts, not only the first festival I had been to since Glastonbury in (eek) 1995(!), but also the first festival for my children, and I think it was probably the perfect introduction for them - not too large for it to all be a bit overwhelming, but also plenty of entertainment (best bit? "The dancing diggers", apparently). Other firsts included my first experience of a "shewee" - something which impressed my daughters so much I don't think they will ever want to go to the loo sitting down again!

It was all a bit more civilised than I remembered my last festival experience to be - the atmosphere was lovely and friendly, the food was varied and extremely delicious, and you knew you were at a middle-class festival when Ocado were delivering to site. Between our party of seven, we managed to sample burgers, sausages, noodles, paella, burritos, smoothies, whitebait and pancakes, and make our own buffalo milk ice cream. It's also fair to say that the "Best of British" tent full of small food producers giving out samples also got a good going over.

We danced to "Rockaoke", this guy here, The Bootleg Beatles, Razorlight, Texas, and many more. We got soaked on Saturday and fried on Sunday, and I think my eldest daughter won prize for most authentic festival "look" with her shorts, fleece, wellies and sunglasses combo. All in all, however, I think I knew the first family festival was a success when we got in the car to go home and my youngest daughter burst into tears because she didn't want to leave...

How To Holiday Like A Spaniard

The Tin family have been off on their jollydays, and we've all come back rested, refreshed, and raring to go again with life. We took the ferry to Santander in Northern Spain, and hired a little cottage around forty-five minutes up the coast near the resort of San Vicente de la Barquera and had a lovely time. Definitely highly recommended! Two weeks on the Spanish "green coast" relatively little frequented by foreign tourists  (a sprinkling of French, some fellow Brits, and the ubiquitous Dutch - seriously, how do they get everywhere in Europe by car?!) meant that I was able to observe the native Spaniards enjoying their R&R. Here, then, is my advice should you want to try and emulate them:

1) The obvious one - if you really want to holiday like a true Spaniard, stay in Spain. After all - why would you go anywhere else when you have fabulous weather, beautiful countryside, a myriad of activities, great food AND people that speak (little other than) your language? It's a no-brainer, right? If you are wise, you will flock to the Northern coasts of Asturias and Cantabria where the heatwave engulfing Spain brings the temperatures to a pleasant 30 degrees C, rather than those of the mid-40s affecting the rest of the country.

"Our" beach nr Pechon, Cantabria

2) Whatever you do, take a lunch break at around 2pm. This way you leave all car parks, tourist attractions and beaches free for the crazy foreign tourists who don't know about decent lunch breaks and siestas. Instead, clog up all the terraces of local restaurants eating all manner of delicious seafood and smoking wildly to your heart's content.

3) Be ridiculously bronzed on the beach. Easy! - you're Spanish - even at your pastiest you still resemble a delicate biscuit colour that an average Northern European can only hope to emulate after slathering themselves in fake tan for the entire two weeks (No, not me, noooo - my tan is ENTIRELY natural. Ahem.) After all, Pastiest Person on the Beach(TM) is always guaranteed to be a rare foreigner anyway.

Oh, and 3a) Go topless ONLY if you are very young and very skinny, or old enough not to care what people think. (*shudder*)

4) Should you fail at 3), for whatever reason, demonstrate to everyone that this is because you are a Very Important Executive that spends a lot of their time in an office doing Very Important Things, and has no time for silly beach games, by pacing the sand non-stop with a mobile phone glued to your ear and a furrowed brow, gesticulating wildly with your spare hand.

5) Choose your tourist attractions wisely. Ignore the major internationally known hotspots of the Northern coast like the Guggenheim in Bilbao. It is full of French tourists from across the border, on whom the fantastic David Hockney paintings are somewhat lost, as demonstrated by the whispers of "bof, je connais pas, hein", accompanied by trademark Gallic shrugging.
Instead, flock to the picturesque town of Comillas, where you will throng like over-enthusiastic paparazzi to one of Antoni Gaudi's earliest works, and one of the few outside Catalonia, El Capricho.

6) If beaches are not your thing, make those unfit types listed in 4) green with envy by nonchalantly climbing the foothills of the Picos de Europa mountain range either on foot or by mountain bike without so much as breaking a sweat in 30 degree heat. Kudos.

7) Refuse to speak anything other than Spanish, thus making even vaguely linguistically-minded foreign types, one of whose seven languages does NOT happen to be Spanish, feel painfully inadequate, uncultured, and rushing for the Michel Thomas at the first opportunity. *Sigh*

8) If all of the above fail, just ignore them and have a ruddy marvellous time.

The Perfect Sandwich

So, there I was this morning, listening in to an apparently endless series of conference calls, whilst simultaneously keeping an eye on Twitter (multitasking of course being an incredibly important skill that I need to practice to keep me sharp for the workplace), when I spotted a tweet from Jay, highlighting her latest blog post. I popped over, and promptly regretted the fact that I had not yet eaten lunch. It prompted such a rumbling in my tum that I started fantasising about food...

All I had time for today, however, was a sandwich. This did not bother me at all - in my eyes, the humble sandwich is a wonderful invention, and has been a regular meal for a lot of the British population since it was invented.

So it got me thinking - if I was only ever allowed one single kind of sandwich to eat for the rest of my life, what would I choose? First, I thought of tasty Scandinavian open sandwiches - maybe a bit of smoked salmon on rye bread...

...but much as I love them, I had to dismiss them purely on the grounds of practicality - sadly, they're not really great in a packed lunch. The rye bread is not soft enough to absorb the topping, and a sandwich needs to be "closed" to keep it from falling apart.

I would therefore like to sing you the praises of the humble cheese sandwich. Not just any cheese sandwich, however - there is a definite art.

The bread has to be fresh, cut by hand from a loaf. I don't mind if it is white or wholegrain, as long as it has the right amount of softness in its bite. The cheese has to be a thick chunk of mature farmhouse cheddar - smooth and creamy, yet with the right amount of nutty bite and crumble. Add to this some juicy tomato slices, and a crispy lettuce leaf. No pickles, no sauces - I wouldn't want anything to spoil the cheddar.

Perfect.

Go on - tell me; what's your favourite sandwich? I'd love to know!

(By the way, to work out the dimensions of your perfect cheese sandwich, try the Cheddarometer! )