My Lovely Blogaki

One of the things that has surprised me most about England is that there is no cake shops, patisserie, as such. You can find patisserie or pasticceria in London, but these are foreign imports, it is a new culture.

There are sweet shops, but they sell only candies. If you want cakes, you have to go to bakery, yup, bread shop.

At the beginning, I thought it was because the British people do not really have sweets culture, but then, I found out the British sweets, which they call "puddings", are very good! It is no doubt partly down to the excellent quality of dairy here (i.e. milk, butter and cream, but cheese is probably not as good as in France or Italy), but not only that. The English people do make very nice cakes!

Some examples, although probably not the best ones. I bought these from a chain bakery shop called Bakers Oven near our house.

This oblong cake is called "Custard Slice".



The icing is super-sweet, but the custard isn't and make a good combination. I love custard, and although it wasn't the best example (I don't expect so much for the price I paid), it goes very well with white tea (meaning "tea with milk" here).

And these are custard tarts.



The eggy thing inside the casing is not custard cream, but custard pudding. The moisture of the pudding infiltrates into the case and it is pretty soft. Probably I have never told you but I LOVE custard pudding, so I loved these too. They were not very sweet. It costs 50p (US$1) for one.

They were so nice and made me happy

This Thursday I went to a big supermarket called Sainsbury's near my work place. It is a good supermarkt of lots of interesting things, but I don't usually go as it is for me a detour to go there and to go home.

But that day I really needed to go to a DIY shop, near Sainsbury's, to buy hooks to repair my closet. I found ones for a reasonable price and now my closet is in function again.

Anyway, Sainsbury's. It has an in-store bakery and make nice breads. On one of the shelves I fond these:



Black bread balls !



Are they burnt!? Why are they selling burnt black bread?

When I went closer, I saw this tag.



So these were meant to be burnt?

I guess it is all white inside, but even so it looked courageous to sell them on purpose.

As the British bread tend to whitish or beige in colour, these black balls took my be surprise.

Last Saturday 3 friends and I went to Peak District and for lunch we stopped at this country pub, Okeover Arms.

It was quite an experience ... well in an unexpected way!



We booked a table a few days ago. When we arrived at 12 o'clock, there was no one eating in the dining area.

In the photo, it looks cosy. Yes, it was cosy, but it was quite dusty, too, as if it has not been cleaned for a while.

Also dirty were table cloth and napkins. My napkin was clearly used by some one else before.



This is one of our starters. It was named "Garlic Mushrooms en Croute" (£4.75).

En Croute means wrapped in pastry and baked, but it is clearly just "served with toast".

It tasted all right, but the description was wrong, and over-priced for what was.



This is another starter (we took only two starters, and shared), Peppered Mackerel en Croute (£4.95).

Again, the description is wrong. It is just a piece of peppered smorked mackerel served with toast.

It was odd again, and I thought that the fish was over-cooked, so too dry.

If they served these dishes with garlic toast or French baguette, they could look much better, but probably it was too much for the chef.



For main course, we ordered four types of meat, and this is one of them, Herb Crusted Seared Venison Served with a Rich Port Jus (£13.95).

This was the best of the lot. The meat was so beautifully done and tasted really good. Although one of the friends said it had too much dried herb, I liked as it was.



This is a transh of the meat. It was rare as it should be.

We ordered also wild boar, pork belly and rib eye steak.

I thought the pork was poorly done, as it was quite hard. Pork belly should be slow cooked to the degree that it becomes melting soft. I thought the chef did not know how to deal with it.



This is side dish. The quantity was poor for 4 people, as well as the freshness of the vegetable. The carrots were almost dry.

I am usually served a good quantity of veggie in British pub, so this was a real disappointment.

It was also a fatal mistake that they did not have any bread to give us, even though there were bread dishes on the table and we did booked our table days before.

Price for all was about £60, so £15/head. This includes as drink only 2 glasses of coke (the others had water); it is not expensive, but not even cheap for the quality, quantity and the service we had.

Yes, service, it was almost inexistent. The owner chef guy was welcoming, but he bearly got out of the kitchen to ask us if everything was ok so I did not even have chance to complain. The waiter was a teenager in really dirty uniform that desperately needed ironing.

The whole experience was pretty dire.


Afterwards, we went for a walk in the area, which was a magnificent beauty. We spent two hours walking around.

And when we passed in front of the pub on our return, out empty dishes and glasses were still on the table. After two hours! They must be pretty lazy people and it explains why everything was so dirty and dusty.

So, we found another face of Great Britain!

When I went to Wales with friends, we stayed at a B&B. In UK, B&Bs are not the cheapest option of where to sleep. At this B&B we payed £90 for a room for three.

But if we go to decent B&B, we can expect a decent breakfast, and this is the one I had there.

In quantity wise, it was not "plenty" for British breakfast standard, but the quality was satisfying. Sausage and bacons were tasty and the tomato was just picked from the owners' garden (this B&B was something called "farmhouse", i.e. the farmers offering some rooms of their house to travellers). It is fair to add that, besides this plate, we had free servings of breakfast cereals, orange juice, and toasts, so there was no way that you could have gone out hungry.

Unfortunately it was not particularly Welsh. The Welsh breakfast includes typically lavarbread (cooked seaweed), fish and shellfish. Next time I will be in Wales, I should try to find it!

Do you know eel jelly? Famous British delicacy.

It is basically boiled eel bits, but the collagen of the fish makes this clear jello.

It used to be a kind of food you could find in fish & chips shop, but now you have to go to fishmonger to find it. This one I bought from a local fishmonger.

First I tried to eat it with lemon, but mud taste of eel was too strong. So I added some soy sauce, and it improved much, and with some wasabi, it became even better.

I think, however, the eels are best eaten in Japanese ways.