We’re heading to pizza land today for a little break. It’s time to find out if Italy has what we want, so for me that includes food and wine. I do know that the change in weather might be nice, although we’re expecting warm days. I’m told that Italy actually gets real summer weather… I think it might be time to buy some shorts!!
We passed through our newly opened local supermarket and picked up some lovely fillet steak on Tuesday. In deciding what to have with it we didn’t realise that we had chosen “meat and three veg”. Actually it was…
Pan fried fillet steak - rare – sliced thinly
oven roasted chips
salad of butter lettuce and sliced tomato – covered with fresh salsa verde and fresh goat’s cheese.
Topped off with a lovly French Cotes de Blayne from Chateau les Millards.
Recently Brian, a friend of mine, blogged about food miles (see entry here ). This is the concept of how far your food had to travel to get to you. Here that can mean quite some distance. I recall the first month that we were here we bought a packet of mixed berries. Strawberries, blueberries and raspberries. It wasn’t until I was eating them that I saw the country of origin (which can sometimes be difficult information to obtain). It was something like this… the Strawberries came from Spain, the raspberries from Argentina and wait for it, the blueberries from Egypt! Kate and I agree that food miles aren’t good for the environment. ALSO food miles aren’t good for food! Quite often, the food has to be picked/collected in a very unripe/un-ready state to be OK for the distance it’s about to travel. It’s not only distance which is a consideration, but mode of transport. We get our fruit and veg delivered by a box scheme company Able and Cole. One good thing about this company, besides their organic produce, is that they never FLY food, ie our fruit and veg has no “airmiles”. So we feel it’s important to reduce the carbon footprint of our food. However, this said, we don’t eat potatoes all winter because of our views, we do end up with variety. I’m not sure where everything in our Veg box comes from, but variety is important too.
I have also taken this idea to heart with my wine consumption. France is very close to the UK, so I feel I should drink more French wine. Sounds reasonable doesn’t it??
Another thing Brain was on about was honey. Firstly, there’s nothing wrong with Australian honey! (he was complaining how Capilano is widely available in supermarkets…) But I might be biased… I’ll point out that he’s correct, British honey is hard to find. We found out that British honey is not very strictly regulated. Imported honey on the other hand has to meet very strict criteria, in particular the content has to be quite “clean”. ie low herbicide levels. The bees aren’t to picky, they seem to be attracted by any pretty flower, so I guess these regulations are a good idea. That said, local honey is something that we came accross while we were doing the rounds of the county shows. We even ended up with a creamy honey made from bees collecting in canola fields. The canola honey was amazing! Besides being very tasty (surprisingly) it was solid white in colour!
All that said, it’s the local farmers market Friday week, so I’m extra inspired to get up early to go buy me some local produce…
Kate won a trip up Magdalen College tower a while back at a bushfire fund raiser held in Rhodes House. It is an impressive bell tower that stands on the City side of the river as you enter Oxford. The tower begun life in 1492 and stands 144 feet tall. It is usually not open to the public, but special permission can be obtained to get the key… now the key is something special
The trip up the tower is via a narrow staircase with a ladder for the last 8-10 feet. Once I got to the top, turning around and looking down at what I had come up made me guess as to why it’s not open to the public!
From the top, I think you get one of the best views of Oxford! Several more photos here. I think this is a particularly nice view because you are on the edge of Oxford, so you can see across all of what you are normally surrounded by.
Lovely eh? I think something that was special about this little trip up a little tower is that you get to see things that you normally don’t see from street level like these chaps…
What a waste of stonemason’s talent! We were told that most of the decorative work on these nice old buildings was not on the original plans, so it was the stonemason’s artistic licence. Needless to say with Magdalen tower, as with the rest of the college, they went to town…
Also in this batch of photos you’ll see dinosaurs with red noses…
Kate and I took a long weekend over Easter to head North. Our aim was the Isle of Skye in Scotland. It’s about 550 miles (about 900 km) from our place to where on Skye we were headed. We took off on Wednesday night and made it as far as the Lakes District. Given that we arrived after dark, I was quite excited to see our camp site the following morning
Wow… it was spectacular scenery all around! Here we spent a day looking around at the lake side towns and the lakes themselves. Kate was quite happy to visit the home of Lakeland, the kitchen appliance retailer. I was quite happy to drive around not looking at the road…
A bunch of photos can be found here
One interesting thing we did was take a steam gondola ride on Coniston Water. This lake is famous for the world speed records by the Campbells. Have jet engine boat will travel at speed… 300 mph! The weather in the Lakes was quite wet, but I assumed that with all of those lakes you need some precipitation!
Friday we headed further North to Skye. Once beyond Glascow, the roads became smaller and slower, but more scenic like this…
Once on Skye we were amazed at the amount of sheep! Wandering around – unfenced!
We caught up with David, Rachel and Archie for some tripping about. Archie spent most of his time being carried about by David which entertained him sometimes and gave him some place to nap other times.
Kate started her career as a sports fisher-person after purchasing a new rod and kit from the local (and very helpful) fishing shop in Dunvegan.
I was content to try the fishing, but spend most of my time taking photos.
We left Skye on the Monday and started South for home. We stopped in a little village and treated ourselves to some fresh sea food (cooked up on the side of the road).
Following our treat, we stayed the night beside a loch – don’t know which one! and awoke to a wonderful view right out our tent door
Wow eh? After packing up we headed to the town of Stirling. We stopped off at the William Wallace Monument (aka Braveheart) to take in some history. Stirling was where Wallace first showed his prowess as a battle tactician stopping the advance of the 5400 strong English army. After our history lesson we headed home, some 8 hrs more travel. It was a long drive, but had some spectacular scenery. I think I’d do it again… maybe for more than a long weekend next time?
We’re finally back from the endless string of holidays we’ve had recently.
Keep an eye out for all the posts and photos… there were many, but I will cut them down to a select 300 or so!
One thing I was that I thought was neat was this poster found in a WWI museum in France…
