For the seafood lunch we prepared fish stew that came in a glass jar with French writing. Oh la la! It was brown, expensive and, well, fishy smelling. It resembled the same base used in gumbo. In it we dunked slices of toasted french bread that had any of rouille, butter, real crab meat, horseradish, or tomatoes along with fresh parsley and mature cheddar cheese. We made each slice slightly different in a veiled attempt at keeping the girls interested while they helped prepare the the meal. We sprinkled a little extra shredded cheese on top of the soup and dug in...
As for side dish, we ate whelks - okay, I ate whelks, Lucy and Ellie just admired the pretty spiral shells and Erin gave me a foreboding "don't you insist on making me try that suspicious smelling slightly slimy grey mollusk buster". They were served with real lemon juice and parsley. They were a bit chewy and had a slight smoky flavor. I later learned ("learnt" here in the UK) that you avoid the whelk's digestive tract because it contains toxins. The key word here is "later" as the fishmonger mentioned no such thing when I bought them; I happily slopped the whelks down, goo and all. For the record, even if you had told me in advance "don't eat the digestive tract!" I may still have managed to do so, for much like an oyster, you really can't tell what one fleshy blob is from another. Avoid that little black vein? Pass on that grey mass over there? Skip the pale clumpy stuff in the middle? This must be how early humans learned what they could and couldn't eat. "Ops, Urk just dropped dead after eating whizzle-zogs. That must be in the not-a-food group of organic substances."
So aside from being thankful for a successful gastronomic adventure (yours truly shall be one human that continues to pass on his genes thankyouverymuch. No yacking or near death experiences were to be had.), they weren't too bad and I'm glad we tried them. Or maybe I should say "we're glad I tried them".
To top off the meal we had fresh picked spinach from the local Pick Your Own gardens, cherry tomatoes and some cold white wine. Ribena juice for the girls.
Tomorrow we eat seaweed salad. Challenge of the day to ponder: how to trick, ahem, "encourage" a 3 and 5 year old to eat super salty, greener-than-anything-edible-you've-ever-seen seaweed. I plan to rinse the seaweed off to reduce the saltiness, go with a little spring onion, then add some parsley, tomato, lemon juice and a touch of black pepper. Maybe we'll ease into it with some MSG-fortified (mmm, healthy!) fried Japanese seaweed snacks.
The theme here: seafood and the Brittany Coast. We really liked that area in the brief time we were there last April (If you're paying attention: yep that was precisely when Eyjafjallajökull blew it's ashy lid. Ugh.), only passing through from Paris en route to the British shore. That journey conjures up some images of WWII that I've been researching (That is, the Brittany Coast itself reminded me, not our tumultuous journey together. It turns out that we as a family are pretty darn good travelers and rarely have tumultuous moments. I'll revisit this theme if/when I blog about our trip to Scotland.), specifically The Miracle of Dunkirk, when some 30,000 British troops were evacuated from the shores of France by ordinary British civilian pleasure boats. This was in 1940 when the Blitzkrieg was making quick work of France.
Alas one final fishy story though before we part ways. I also recently tried another apparently typical London dish: jellied eels.
Again, I'm including these qualifiers in the description because "typical" is what it says on the top of the plastic container; and "apparent" because I've certainly never heard my cockney colleague at work ever fondly sing the praises of those "right tasty jellied eels gov'na!". No sir. By the way, I should mention that we had a good friend in town all the way from Beijing. What a trip! Fortunately she had a good excuse not to be subjected to my latest foray into aqueous delights as she's well into her first pregnancy (congrats and best wishes Cathleen!). Too bad because otherwise I would have been able to compare notes with a willing someone; certainly no one else in our house volunteered to swallow these chilled, jellied, bony specimens. I can at least say that they are relatively... healthy. Anyway, behold some interesting history and descriptive pictures about jellied eels.
2 comments:
what a lovely meal you describe..
I really don't think I could eat any of this - know your Dad would of tried, but not me. I'm with your girls on this one!!!
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