For the love of kitchens!

We are now staying in an apartment with a kitchenette and I feel calm and happy. I had been counting down the days until we next had a kitchen.

Let me take a moment to describe some of my meals in Manchester, Liverpool, and the Isle of Man.

Everybody knows the UK is all about pub food and big, hot breakfasts. This isn’t too bad on day one, when you are looking for a pub meal, the options on the menu were classic pub; beef and stout pie, burger (they don’t put salad on them here – wtf?) fish and chips etc… (not a lot for the vegetarians). But in these areas we found that the pub food didn’t live up to our expectations. Our wedges with cheese and bacon consisted of were few burnt chunks of potato swimming in a bowl of half melted cheese, the pies and fish were just OK and my mashed potato tasted distinctly of Deb potato powder.

And the vegetables… the poor vegetables made me want to cry. They are boiled until pale, bland and devoid of anything resembling structural integrity. The ‘caramelised’ onions may as well have been steamed for two hours then covered with vegetable oil and I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I have wished that some of the crunch and caramalisation from the chips would jump onto the vegetables and I hoped that everything would taste better if they were on the same fork-full. But unfortunately that plan only resulted in the vegetables falling through the fork and splashing into the gravy moat surrounding my meal. I was desperately missing green things, fresh things, properly cooked broccoli.

So you might be thinking ‘try something else then’. Well we did, Italian and Chinese food and when I say that ‘margherita’ equals American style cheese pizza and ‘Vegetable Chow Mein’ equals deep fried noodles covered with simultaneously burnt and soggy bamboo shoots you can imagine how I felt.

The breakfasts were the classic English breakfast, a novelty on day one but by day three your arteries have developed a nervous tick and you find yourself working out how to politely explain to the host that you are really just in the mood for cereal.

By the time we reached the Yorkshire Dales we were desperate not to have another meal like those ones, we were preparing to buy cereal for dinner to eat in our room. But when we arrived we found there was no corner shop and that the rooms did not have bar fridges, so with the thought of dry cereal for three days straight we reluctantly went downstairs to the town’s only pub.

Well, as we walked past the blackboard one of the bar staff was busily changing the menu based on the chef’s specials for the day and with a little glimmer of hope we ordered. This time the mashed potatoes were beautiful, creamy and lightly seasoned with seeded mustard, the gravy was perfect and the meat tender, there were also delicious vegetarian meals.

We were reluctant to leave again and indeed when we in the middle of Dublin there was very little that wasn’t a pub and the pub we eventually decided on charged us an exorbitant amount of money for something that looked a lot like cat food and wasn’t nice at all, served with a side of soggy chips. (Although the other places we visited in Ireland did have much better food.)

This has lead us to an interesting idea that pub food in the UK gets better the further away you are from a city. We have no idea why this might happen, or why pubs in a town of about 50 people surrounded by fields are able to get a better range of quality exotic ingredients than one in the centre of a city with over a million people but that’s our observation.

Getting back to our little kitchenette in Cork, we went to the English Market and bought wild samphire, surprisingly local buffalo mozzarella, smoked tomato, sage and black pepper sausages, and two bottles of wine for less than some of the pub lunches. Using our little mobile pantry of pasta, oil, garlic and condiments we made (though I say it myself) an absolutely amazing dinner.

P.S. We did decide to head out to dinner in Cork on the last night because we found a menu with options and prices that caught our eye, it was affordable and beautiful food. If you are in Cork go to the Market Lane restaurant and bar, you won’t be sorry you did.

Isle of Man

The Isle of Man is principally known for the TT race and motorbikes in general – indeed the first thing I was asked about when telling of the plans for the trip was about the TT. To answer your questions right off the bat, yes, we went round most of the TT track (on a bus, it’s just the main road around the north of the island…), yes the roads are incredible (or try here), yes we think the racers are even bigger lunatics than before and no, I am not in the least bit inclined to get on a motorbike for a lap of the island.

The thing you may not realise is that the Isle is both a company and personal tax haven and, unlike the UK, there is no death duty. The consequences of this are a little unusual. For example, there are banks everywhere – many of them big multinational banks that don’t even have an office in Sydney.

Inequality of wealth is also very visible. While the average house looks, well, average and often quite run down there are lots of houses of the super-rich; sitting on the train we went past one house which looked like a renovated castle complete with a personal boating lake and private small railway that could be used by the owner to take friends around the property. One of the locals pointed out another house to us (we originally thought it must be a hotel) which the owner built to accommodate their grandfather clock collection, reportedly the largest collection of its kind in the world.

Walk through any of the harbour side suburbs of Sydney and you will see more expensive cars than you will here, but you will, from time to time, spot a very expensive Aston Martin.

But in contrast with this most people on the Isle seem to be struggling. Every street we walked down had at least one house for sale, and streets with rows of for sale signs were not uncommon a lot of which are run down looking townhouses and apartments. There were piles and piles of thick magazines and newspapers on real-estate available at the airport. Usually the most optimistic of publications, they were talking about the huge number of properties available, that many houses had been on the market for a long time, and that sellers should consider lowering their high expectations. The average asking price for a typical 2 bedroom terraced house was around 250,000 GBP, quite a bit higher than similar houses near coastal areas of England.

This wasn't the only time we saw four houses in a row for sale

The main source of employment for the locals is tourism, mostly from the UK mainland and tourism generally has been declining steadily over more than the past ten years, particularly as longer distance holidays have become so accessible for people living on the UK mainland. The jobs market used to be bolstered by the banking sector but this has also declined since the GFC. Yet the tourism campaign of the Isle is still clearly focused on British tourists – apart from the TT. Therefore they are trying to sell the British a lot of what they already have, history, rolling hills, old-world trains, and unpredictable weather.

If marketed properly the Isle could have a lot of appeal to international travellers, with its many beautiful port towns, rolling green hills that finish in tall cliffs which dive into the ocean, friendly people, ruined castles, steam trains, old lighthouses, and many hikes, bike rides and kayaking to suit different experience levels.

All in all, we enjoyed our time on the Isle of Man. The people are lovely, scenery beautiful and the roads amazing. We just hope the available food improves.

Rolling hills: check, stone walls: check, sheep: check.

We've been otherwise engaged

We know this blog has been a bit quiet for about 3 weeks, at first we were just spending some time writing other blogs then we got engaged which distracted us a bit while we used the places that had WIFI to Skype with family. Here’s a couple of posts we (mostly) prepared earlier!