Table 9, snowy run and daffoldils

When my wife and I were in Dubai, we were treated to a gourmet experience at the Table 9 restaurant. Table 9 is run by 2 young chefs who used to work for the (in)famous chef Gordon Ramsay. It’s a very pleasant restaurant, not at all pretentious, and the service is excellent, but it is the intensity of the flavours in the food that stands out. I had the taster menu and swapped the veal for scallops, plum and seaweed, which sounds an odd mixture, but the scallops were done to perfection and came on a bed of fine seaweed, on a base of intense plum sauce. While the scallops were excellent, for me the key highlights were the lobster dish – lobster, coconut and mango (see 1st photo – sent to me by Table 9) . I talked to Nick Alvis, one of the chefs after the meal and he agreed to send me a photo and a description of a couple of the dishes. The lobster dish is “Lobster marinated in chip shop curry sauce. Coated in roasted coconut with fresh mango and coconut cream puree.” All I can say is that they must have found a fabulous chip shop. The flavours in this dish hit you one after the other. An excellent culinary and artistic touch is the mango – what you think might be pasta in the photo. The other highlight for me was the lamb – “Lamb, smoked aubergine, scratchings, tomato: Smoked aubergine + raisin puree, plum tomato chutney (vinegar, sugar, shallots), large leaf spinach, lamb belly scratchings and lamb dressing (roasting juices, vinaigrette, lamb fat and lamb stock) – a range of mouth watering tastes all in one dish. This is a treat and a fairly expensive i.e. one to save up for.

Back home and from 31 degrees and wall to wall sunshine in Dubai, back to 2 degrees and a biting NE wind and snow. I took my wife Val up the hills for her morning run – slightly more sheltered up the hills. Snow here in the morning melted but a few inches up the hills (see 2nd photo), so a muddy and snowy run (see photo 3). Too cold for me to go on my bike, so I went to the gym. I do this only in desperation as I find the gym very confining and even with downloaded Guardian short stories and Thinking Allowed to distract me, it’s always a long slog.

Back at the house, with camera still in hand, I photographed some of the small daffodils which are now out in my garden (see photo 4). There’s poem I like by Alicia Ostriker called “Daffodils” and she writes ” I’m photographing the yellow daffodils/ With their outstretched arms and ruffled cups”. Daffodils always remind me of open mouthed choirboys with ruffs on their necks. They always have their heads slightly bowed, and appear to me to be diffident flowers, not wishing to be showy, despite their obvious beauty.

Lobster, coconut, mango dish from Table 9

Country lane and snow

Running in the snow and mud

Mini daffodils

A Word A Week Photo Challenge – Round

This is my contribution to the challenge.

Fruit – lunch in Dubai

It’s their round! (Dubai)

Course closed – no round of golf today! (Dunbar)

Rounds of lower and raindrops (Wagga Wagga)

Warm Xmas, turkey in brine, and ring out the old

Firstly, a Guid (good) New Year tae yin and aw (to one and all) and I hope that 2013 brings you all love, luck and laughter in droves. For the first time ever, my wife and I left the UK and had Xmas in a warm country. We went to Dubai (see photos below) to spend Xmas with our son, daughter in law and 1 year old granddaughters Abigail and Lola. I thought that it might be strange for it to be 28 degrees on Xmas Day but we’d been there for 4 days and were accustomed to the heat (very pleasant) by then. Many people of my age whom I met in Australia told me of Xmases when they were children when the tradition was still to eat inside – with no air conditioning - in a house in which an oven had been on for hours roasting a turkey, and their mother – it was always the mother in those days – sweated buckets to produce the meal. My son Stuart is an excellent cook and although I’m not usually a turkey fan, I enjoyed his moist and tasty turkey – perhaps it was the 24 hour soaking in brine - a la Nigella Lawson - that did it. In the brine is water, salt and pepper, peppercorns, cinnamon, caraway seeds, allspice, star anise, mustard seeds, onion, ginger, maple syrup, honey, parsley and orange. Another key tip is to baste the turkey well while it cooks.

So, back to Scotland for New Year. In Dunbar, we have a very local expression Auld Year’s Day and Auld Year’s Night for what you probably call New Year’s Eve and what many people in Scotland call Hogmanay. On my poetry calendar for the 31st December, was an extract from Tennyson’s In Memoriam which included the lines:

Ring out the old, ring in the new,/Ring, happy bells, across the snow:/ The year is going, let him go;/ ring out the false, ring in the new

In Scotland, we talk about being home for The Bells i.e. the strike of midnight. Traditionally, you should clean your house, empty the ashes from your fire, and clear all your debts before The Bells. Oh aye, and as soon as the bells have struck, have a wee dram e.g. Bruichladdich. Cheers.

Dubai lantern and Burj Al Arab

 

View of Dubai from 125th floor of the Burj Khalifa

Oats and buttermill loaf and smoked haddock quiche

It’s a dreich (you can listen to the definition on this link) winter’s day here. The sky and sea are uniformly grey, the promised snow has not materialised and the rain arrives from the SW. So what’s a man with no work (of the money earning kind) to do? firstly, up the High Street to the community baker’s. Above the door it says “The proprietor: The Community”. They have a great range of bread which I enjoy e.g. sourdough with rye but today it’s an oats and buttermilk loaf for me (1st photo below). It has a rather crumbly texture but a lovely crisp shell and a different taste from most breads. Having it today with homemade lentil soup was a treat and even looking out the window, it seemed a little brighter. The oats tends to fall off the top when you cut the bread, but no waste here, just heat up your soup in a bowl and brush the oats into your soup. It’s also very nice toasted.

While up the street, I got some undyed smoked haddock from the fish shop, and shallots, mushrooms and potatoes (Saxon) from the fruit and veg shop. I was making smoked haddock quiche with shallots, mushrooms and cottage cheese. It’s a mixture of recipes I’ve come across and I make my own version. I have a 10in (25cm) metal quiche dish, so have to adjust the ingredients to suit as most recipes go for the 8in version. I put 4oz of wholemeal and 4 oz of plain flower in a bowl, plus 3.75oz of margarine and mix this with a hand mixer (which I prefer to use rather than my food processor). I add one egg and some iced water and mix this to make a pastry ball which is slightly moist – better too moist than too dry. I put this in the fridge for 30 min. I rolled the pasty out and lined the quiche dish, leaving an overlap of pasty. I pricked the  pastry all over and brushed it with beaten egg. If you do this, you don’t have to use baking beans and grease proof paper. I put the pasty into the oven for 15 mins at 190 degrees. For the filling, cook the chopped shallot in oil for a couple of minutes, then add the sliced mushrooms (I used 8 medium sized button mushrooms). Remove to a plate to cool. Wipe the frying pan clean and add a bit less than a quarter pint of milk and the haddock (I had 12oz). Cook this gently and turn the haddock once. Remove the haddock with a slotted spoon on to the plate with the mushrooms and onion. Put the liquid into a jug and put in the fridge to cool. Put the haddock, mushrooms and shallots back in the pan and add 6oz of cottage cheese. Mix this gently. I mixed the cooled liquid with 2 beaten eggs and some single cream. I carefully laid the filling into the pastry case and slowly poured over the egg mixture. The quiche is then cooked for 35 mins – after 25 mins, I turned the heat down to 180 degrees. The 2nd photo below shows the result. We had it warm tonight i.e. not straight our of the oven, but removed (carefully!) from the quiche dish and put on a wire tray.  Very tasty and tomorrow we’ll have it cold for lunch.

Oats and buttermilk loaf

 

Smoked haddock, shallott, mushroom and cottage cheese quiche

Old libraries, cooking and Bass Rock

On a recent visit to Falkland Palace (see photo below) in Fife, the guide showed the small group of visitors into the library, and although the contents of this library are unremarkable, the decor is not, with the lavishly decorated ceiling. It is quite small, especially compared with the huge library at Newhailes which may have had its own classification system and was praised by Dr Johnson. The Newhailes collection was mostly acquired by the National Library of Scotland and contains 7,000 volumes, many of which are rare. My next visit to the National Library will include an attempt to view the collection in person.

One of my plans on retirement was to do more cooking and to be more adventurous. I think this may have to wait until the autumn and winter, although cycling back after 40 miles (65k) on Saturday in pouring and cold rain, it didn’t feel like summer. With our older son and his wife coming for the weekend from Edinburgh, on Friday evening I cooked a Jamie Oliver recipe favoured by our younger son and his wife in Dubai. I cooked salmon from the local fish shop in Dunbar High Street (just up the road), along with new potatoes and green beans from the Crunchy Carrot shop, just along the street. In the recipe, you put a layer of green beans under each salmon fillet on a layer of tin foil – you need double the size of tin foil. I found that you need to blanche the green beans first – the recipe tells you to use them straight. On each salmon fillet, you put a good teaspoon of green pesto (from a jar although you can make your own), then fold over the tin foil to make a parcel and cook for c20 minutes, checking that the salmon is cooked through before serving. You can also put some small vine tomatoes in with the salmon. Mmm – very tasty.

On the road to North Berwick today, I stopped to take a photo of the Bass Rock and you can see in the photo below, that it is covered with gannets. Many people looking at the rock think that the white is guano (bird droppings) but it is the sheer numbers of gannets which transforms the colour of the rock at this time of year.

Falkland Palace frontage

Bass Rock covered in gannets

Galanthophiles and cooking chicken

I love coming across new words which look like one thing and sound like another. Take Galanthophile for example. It’s obviously someone who loves something – the phile shows that. But is it someone who loves galant people or who loves being galant? Not so. A Galanthophile (noted in The Guardian) the other day, is a lover of snowdrops and apparently, people were offering nearly 400 GB pounds for a rare species on EBay recently. I would consider myself an admirer of snowdrops, so maybe not a galanthophile exactly. Below is a picture from last year of a garden full of snowdrops outside a farmhouse about 6K from where I live in Dunbar.

Snowdrops at Pitcox farmhouse

My younger son Stuart is a very good cook and adapts recipes he finds (e.g. from Jamie Oliver), so I copied one of the recipes the other night. I think that it may be called tray baked chicken. It’s very simple to do and looks very good when served. You take 2/4 chicken breasts, score them and rub in oregano and paprika. You then brown the chicken breasts in some olive oil and butter in a pan, and place them in a square ceramic roasting dish. You then glaze the pan with rosemary and red wine, and pur this over the chicken. To the roasting dish, you add a quartered lemon and 4 cherry tomatoes on the vine (not loose), and cook in the oven at 180 degrees for 20 minutes. When you serve the chicken breasts, place the tomatoes on top for a professional look. My own addition to this was to serve the chicken on a bed of creamed leeks (chopped leaks softened with margarine/butter, with a tablespoon of creme fraiche added), and some Charlotte  potatoes. The photo below shows what mine looked like, although Stuart’s looked better. Both tasted very nice.

Chicken with cherry tomatoes

Education Eye and summer soup

From FutureLab an interesting new tool called Education Eye which ‘maps hundreds of the top educational websites, blogs, forums and practitioner case studies’. It looks like a very good way of trying to keep up to date with some of what’s going on in the web. You need to register to use the tool to get access to the articles, many of which give links to others, but registration is brief. Once into the Eye, you can search for what interests you e.g. I searched for ‘information literacy’ and found some interesting material. It’s certainly worth a try and may well be a good shortcut to keeping up to date.

It’s summer here in Scotland, so  the heavier winter broths give way to lighter summer soups. No more grating carrots, potatoes or turnips (aka swedes) but a much easier combination of chopped leeks, courgettes and broccoli, with some dried and fresh basil added to your choice of stock. This is, in fact, fairly fast food, as you put the leeks into the pan and sweat them with margarine or butter or olive oil, according to taste, then add the courgettes and broccoli. give it a good stir round, so the vegetables are coated. Add your basil and stock, simmer for about 20 minutes, let it cool and then liquidise. You can also add potatoes if you like to this soup. Of course, what I (and the French of course) call courgettes, you (and the Italians of course) may call zucchini. In Australia, it’s zucchini and broccoli is pronounced broccol-eye. Serve with a spoonful of creme fraiche and crusty bread and that’s your lunch fixed.

Podcasts and boudin noir

In the last 2 semesters, I have been providing my students with a weekly podcast on the topic they are studying and in one smaller class, I provided students with a podcast feedback on their assignments. I’m now analysing the responses to a questionnaire for the smaller (20 students) class and the online evaluations for the larger class (150 students). Students responded very well to the podcasts and in particular, enjoyed the personal touch in a distance education environment. The assignment feedback podcasts wer particularly welcomed as students said that they took more notice of the verbal comments (which accompanied detailed written feedback) and were more likely to act on suggested improvements if they received a podcast. Podcasting is reasonably common in schools now but I’m not sure whether assignment feedback is much done. Depending on your class size, it can be time-consuming but it is worth trying. If any of you use podcasts for feedback to students, please let me know.

Out to dinner last night with friends Tam and Sandra. Tam and I went to school together at the age of 5, so we’ve been friends for (you choose a number) years. We went to the Cafe Marlayne and for my first course I had boudin noir and scallops. The faint hearted should probably look away now. Boudin noir is the French equivalent of black pudding and both can be described as blood sausages as dried blood is the main ingredient. In Scotland, black pudding is often part of the traditional breakfast and if you want to try the crispy and less fatty kind, then go for Stornoway black pudding. Alternatively, have it as a starter on baked apple with Cumberland sauce.

Googlegen and courgettes

In the post are 2 hard copies of the journal Scan and I’m alerted,  in one of the articles by my colleague Lyn Hay  and byColleen Foley, to a report on the Google generation by 2 UK academics. The report argues that the Google generation are people born after 1993 who are “growing up in a world dominated by the internet’. One of the  interesting aspects of the report is the negativeviews of the Google generation which are pointed out by the authors. This will be familar territory for TLs who are witness to the often limited ability of the Google generation to actually use Google effectively. The report refers to research showing that student information literacy ‘has not improved by widening access to technology’; that students tend to rush searches and lack a focus on evaluation of  what they find; that students’ search strategies are often limited; and that students’ effective use  of keywords in searching is often lacking. One of the recommendations is that libraries become more ‘e-consumer friendly’ and ‘less stodgy and intellectual’. How does this fit with your library?

I’ve been growing courgettes this year – first time for many years. If you’re reading this in Australia, then you’ll be more familiar with the term zuchini. The French and the British don’t often share terms but in the UK, the term is courgette. The origin of the vegetable is from Mexico about 7-9 thousandyears ago. I like to use courgettes in cooking Italian recipes such as lasagne or spaghetti dishes but they are a tasty ingredient of ratatouille. The courgette flowers are attractive (see picture below) and you can eat them, although I’ve never tried it.

Courgette flowers

The Innovative School Librarian and Great Corby

There’s a new book from Facet Publishing who have published a number of my books.  Innovative School Librarian looks very promising and contains chapters such as:  the librarian’s vision and values; integrating the library; and innovating. The book is edited by the effervescent Sharon Markless, who has done some excellent work in the school library field over a number of years. Sharon’s co-authors appear to have produced a book which not only has an innovate title but also takes a new and much needed look at the role of the school librarian. This looks like an interesting and potentially very useful book for school librarians and teacher librarians, and not just in the UK where it’s published. Check it out.

At the weekend, my wife and I went to visit our son Jonathan and his wife Rebecca in the historic and attractive town of  Carlisle.  There’s an interesting walk in the town centre where you can visit the  very large cathedral and the impressive castle. There are also nice walks along the river where lots of sheep graze happily, ignoring the 2 lanes of traffic above them on the bridge. In the evening, we went to the very impressive and great value for money restaurant at The Queen Inn, where the service is excellent, the food first class and the rural setting is exquisite. If you go, try the chicken and pistacio nut pate, the loin of venison or pork, and the puddings (to die for) including a very sweet but irresistible sticky toffee pudding. Very good wines and a regular section of very good real ales. I had Coniston Bluebird Bitter - tasty and refreshing.