Quite Random

Favourite foods

Butternut squash soup

Isn’t food brilliant? Can’t get enough of it. It’s a damn good job that eating, something you have to do so you don’t die, is also something that can be so pleasurable. Other than overcooked liver in school, the time I mistook taramasalata for strawberry ice cream, and the times when my mother deceitfully tried to sneak parsnips into my dinner when I was a child by disguising them as chips, eating has been a favourite hobby for most of my life.

Some favourite foods, and where I might get them:

• English sausages, buttery mashed potato and thick caramelised onion gravy with peas (home)
• Roast pork, apple sauce, roast and mashed potatoes, veg (home or the Funky Munky, Siem Reap)
• Chicken nuggets (Soria Moria, Siem Reap)
• Double bacon and guacamole burger, coleslaw, chips and onion rings (Wilde’s, York)
• Khmer fish amok or curry with big chunks of potato and carrot (Paper Tiger or Khmer Kitchen, Siem Reap)
• Rotisserie chicken in a crisp baguette with lashings of mayonnaise (Sainsbury’s then home)
• Vietnamese barbecued wild boar and venison eaten with whole lemon grass, salad, and lime pepper dip (small unnamed restaurant in Kon Tum, Vietnam)
• Roasted butternut squash soup with parmesan baked parsnip wedges topped with creme fraiche (home)
• Corn on the cob dripping with butter (home)
• Moules mariniere (home or Belgo)
• Proper fish and chips (Elmsett chip van, Petergate Fisheries in York)
• Risotto (home)
• Argentinian steak with everything (Las Tanjeras, Mendoza)
• Patatas bravas (anywhere they speak Spanish)
• Salt and pepper squid with garlic mayo (practically anywhere)
• Aloo baigan masala (practically anywhere)
• Ben and Jerry’s Caramel Chew Chew ice cream (the shops then home)
• Apple crumble with custard (home)

OK, I have to stop. All I have is an eccles cake and instant coffee.

Shopkeepers of the world unite

I drove mum to Weeley today to do a funeral. Weeley is a village in Essex. There’s a crematorium, and a pub, and nothing else but houses. Well, there was an old guy wandering around wearing only shorts. In that respect, it was like Cambodia, but only in the old-guy-wearing-only-shorts respect, because I came to the conclusion that Cambodia is better than Weeley.

I only wanted something to eat. A year in Siem Reap and I’m accustomed to walking a short way and seeing a shop with a big orange ice box out the front and bags of things you can eat hanging from the ceiling. Weeley has conversely got bugger all except the smell of old beer drifting from the pub over the head of a lone man with a black Harley Davidson. And an old guy wandering around in his shorts. The people in Weeley, and practically everywhere else in this country, have totally failed to open a shop in the front of their house so I can snack when I want to and I’m stuck in a strange village with nothing to do for forty minutes. Most people obviously think they’re too bloody special to be shopkeepers, they’d rather sit inside watching TV.

My landlady in Cambodia opened a shop out the front of the house and ran it with a few of the other ladies from nearby houses, and they didn’t even give a monkeys if they sold anything, it just let them sit on the street where they could pass the time nattering and observing everything and everyone that went past. This was a creche for biddies and neighbourhood watch nerve center as much as a retail establishment.

So I salute the small shopkeepers that are there when you need them, and am going to start looking for a big orange ice box to put outside the front of my house.