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.