Last week was our long-awaited radio prize holiday at Lochgoilhead, and it was fabulous. How did we win a holiday on the radio? Earlier this year, I heard about a contest that Real Radio Scotland were running which was basically an essay competition in which entrants wrote in and explained what is it about Scotland that makes them proud. I told my Scottish husband that he should write an essay explaining that he has a foreign wife and that it makes him proud to show me everything that's great about Scotland and how nice it is to be able to rediscover his own country through my fresh eyes...or something like that. Sure enough, my super husband wrote the winning entry and they gave us a week at Drimsynie Estate at Lochgoilhead as a prize! We've been waiting for this week to come since we heard the news in January and last week was finally our time. We didn't really know what to expect, so we were pleasantly surprised to find such comprehensive facilities and a great range of organized activities - it was almost like being on a cruise. We had an unforgettable week of swimming, bowling, ice skating, table tennis, badminton, miniature golf, nature walks and good food. Here are a few pictures...
The village across from the estate where we stayed.
Fallen leaf on the beach. The colors were gorgeous at this time of year!
It was a wonderful and much-needed break in so many ways.
We tracked a seal at the head of the loch for quite a while until I got this shot. Hello, Mr. Seal!
No holiday is complete without two cats. Alvin has been overgrooming, so he spent most of the time in his cone, poor fellow.
Gorgeous hydrangeas
Alvin had a little un-coned moment to take in the misty morning air.
Loch Lomond
The day after we got back, it was just me and my husband again and we didn't want that holiday feeling to end, so we drove up to walk to the top of a hill we'd never climbed before. It's called Duncryne and though it's steep, it's not a long climb and there's this fabulous view of the southernmost bit of Loch Lomond to be had at the top.
Now it's back to the regular old rhythm of life and though I'd much rather be back up at Drimsynie, it feels great to have been able to enjoy an entire week of relaxation and unforgettable scenery. We'd all like to go back next year. Guess we'd better start listening to the radio again...
I'm deep into my low season now - it's been months since I've had a work trip and a while yet until I get to lead another tour. These are the days when I start to get itchy feet. To cure my wanderlust, I went to Ireland last week. Ryanair had a fabulous sale in January and I was able to get a round trip ticket to Dublin for a song...okay, more like a couple of albums, but you get my drift. I had never been to Ireland before this trip, and the fact that I'd been living just across the water from the Emerald Isle for a year and-a-half without making a visit was really starting to bother me. I just had to go!
I had such a lovely time. I stayed at a hostel that I wouldn't recommend for luxury or funkiness (good or bad funkiness, really), but it served its purpose well. And it was super cheap - a big plus for a tour manager stepmom in the depths of her low season. The hostel is called Paddy's Palace, if anyone's interested. It was safe, pretty clean and within easy walking distance of the touristy part of the city center. I'd definitely stay there again on my next solo visit to Dublin.
Most of my time in Dublin I spent on my feet - walking around, enjoying the city, people watching and exploring yarn and fabric stores. Ryanair has the strictest baggage allowances, so I just bought one light fabric remnant and called it good. I was able to get out of town on one day, taking a tour through the Wicklow Mountains to the medieval capital of Kilkenny. It's weird to be on guided tours because I feel like I'm at work. I don't make a habit of booking bus tours, but sometimes it's a good way to keep my own skills sharp. Here are some pictures:
Cemetery at Glendalough
Customs House by night
On the front steps of Kilkenny Castle
I adore my family and I must state for the record that my husband is a wonderful travel partner, but I also love to get out on my own every once in a while and have a little adventure just for myself. The very best part of this whole trip was coming back home a refreshed and de-stressed wife and stepmom. My fun-o-meter shot way back up to unprecedented levels after my return. I'll do my best to keep my sunny new attitude even after this Irish glow wears off. The fact that the days get lighter and lighter all the time certainly doesn't hurt. And they tell me it will eventually get warmer around here, too. I can't wait.
Are there any other solo travelers out there? It's not for everyone, but it can be tremendously rewarding.
Hello, blog buddies. You're in luck! Facebook is now blocked by the Iranian government, so since I can't while my internet time away over there, I'm going to come here and make an update. Much to my dismay, YouTube and Flickr are also blocked. Once the tour starts in earnest tomorrow, I won't have much time for internet anyway. Keeping track of a dozen retirees on vacation doesn't leave me with much energy at the end of the day.
I arrived at the crack of dawn and immediately set to catching up on all the sleep I missed out on while I was up packing my suitcase until 3:00am on departure day. There's not much to say just now. I slept most of the day and then went out for a walk. Now I'm tired again - thank you, jetlag. Oh, there's a talking bird here in the lobby lounge. He squaks "SALAAM!" at regular intervals to folks passing by. I'll try and get a video, but of course I'll have to wait to upload it because of the whole lack of YouTube thing.
My copy of "The Package Deal" didn't arrive before I left. I was really hoping it would, because it's so nice to have a good book to read a bit of each night before bed. I brought "The Life of Pi" instead and I'm not enjoying it as much as I feel like I should. It's for book club when I get back to Glasgow, so I'll carry on reading it, even though I'm finding it quite directionless and just generally blah. At least I know "The Package Deal" will be waiting for me when I get back. That's one more thing to look forward to!
Some of you have asked about pictures. I was going to give you a direct link, but I can't get into Flickr to pull up the set. So here are the long form instructions on how to see my Iran pictures from last April: go to http://www.flickr.com/ and search for "devinshire" - that's me, and then click "view sets." Iran is in there, as well as pictures from the other places I've been.
I might not be back on the blog for a few days, but I just wanted to pop in and say I'm here and safe. Take care, everyone.
Thanks for your lovely comments about my last food post. Those take a while to put together, so it's nice to hear they're being read and appreciated. I'm going to aim for about one of those per week to keep the flow of recipes and culinary encouragement going.
My family and I went on a camping holiday in the Peak District over the weekend. We camped in Buxton, which is in Derbyshire (pronounced Darbyshire - silly me, I spent months thinking Derbyshire and Darbyshire were two different places!), about halfway between Manchester and Sheffield. This was our first camping holiday as a family and we all rated it a big success. I would have loved to spend one more night away, but that's the only thing I'd change for next time. Here are a few pictures from the weekend:
Double rainbow
When we saw the double rainbow out the car window as we headed toward the campsite, we knew we were in for a good trip. The weather was mostly good, but the nights were quite chilly. You can't have it all!
All aboard the miniature railway!
On Saturday, we went to a large Victorian park in Buxton and met up with a family I know from elsewhere on the internet. There were eight of us together - four adults and four kids - and we had a great time. The park had so much going for it: well-tended grounds, an indoor swimming pool, several duck ponds, two play areas and, best of all, a miniature railway! My husband and I just had to accompany the kids on their train journey (you know...to make sure they behaved). What fun! I wish we had a miniature railway in our local park.
Super campsite
For the most part, we were very pleased with our campsite. We had to move on the second night because a drunken party atmosphere had set in while we were at the park. Moving was a bit of a hassle, but our effort was richly rewarded by a much quieter corner of the campsite.
The Three Stooges
Another perk of our new location was a visit from some friendly fowl. This trio came right up to the door of our tent and posed for this photo.
Stalac-tastic
What family camping trip is complete without a visit to some spectacular caverns? Certainly not ours. On the way out of town, we stopped at Poole's Cavern and took a tour of the caves there. I love caves! I might even love them more than I love miniature trains. Following a super cave tour, we had a picnic lunch before getting back in the car for the big drive up north. On the way back home, we stopped at Old Trafford, the stadium of Manchester United, so a certain eight-year-old stepson of mine could see it with his own eyes. He was asleep as we approached the stadium, so it must have felt literally dreamlike for him to finally be seeing a place so iconic to him. What a great trip all around!
When we got back home, I sadly discovered that "Reading Rainbow" has been taken off the air after 26 years. I'm not sure about any of you, but I grew up watching "Reading Rainbow" in the '80s and I used to dream of being on the show one day and talking about my favorite books. One of the PBS guys in the article said that the beauty of "Reading Rainbow" is not that it taught kids how to read, but why to read and and how to truly enjoy reading. That's exactly what I took away from the show. So goodbye, "Reading Rainbow." Here's the opening sequence. Watch it with me for a bit of nostalgia:
One good piece of bookish news I received on returning home is that I won La Belle Mere's book giveaway! As the winner, I'll receive a copy of Izzy Rose's book, "The Package Deal: My (not so) Glamorous Transition from Single Gal to Instant Mom." I am so excited to read this book because it seems like it's closer to my actual story than any of the other stepmom books I've seen out there. Watch this quick video to see what I mean:
What a long post! There certainly was a lot to catch up on. I hope you all had a good weekend and that you're enjoying better weather than we are right now. That's all for now!
The bacon, pea and basil macaroni turned out to be a quality family meal, but with a few lessons learned. Of course I have a report. We've moved since the last time I posted cooking pictures, so the kitchen are a bit different (welcome to our new flat!). Here's how it all went down tonight:
Chop, chop!
I did all the chopping first so I could just grab ingredients as needed. Do you like my internet-fabulous tea towel trick here? It hides the countertops so well! Clockwise from the top in this picture we have six bacon rashers that I snipped with kitchen scissors, two leeks, shredded cheddar cheese, frozen peas and fresh basil (though using dried is totally not the end of the world).
It's starting to sizzle
After chopping everything up, the first step in cooking the dish is to put the bacon and leeks in the hot frying pan with a tablespoon of vegetable oil and let them cook for ten minutes or until the bacon is golden - I cooked the bacon on a low temperature until it just started to take on a golden hue. Next time I make this dish, I probably won't put the leeks in with the bacon right away. They wasted away as the bacon cooked and you could barely tell they were ever there by the end. Next time I'll put them in about 3-4 minutes before the bacon is finished cooking so they have some chance of staying partially intact. I'll also use a bigger pot altogether, because it got a bit crowded at the end. Every meal is a learning experience!
A two-burner meal
I added the peas and let them cook through and my water has still barely come to a boil. Another tip for the future: start the macaroni earlier! To avoid burning the bacon, leek and pea mixture, I had to turn that burner off while the pasta cooked.
Oven-ready!
Finally, the macaroni cooked all the way through. I stirred it all up in the frying pan with some of the cooking water, half of the shredded cheddar and a small tray of soft cheese (this is cream cheese - please refer to my brief "Americanization" at the end of this post if you're in the States and want to cook this without going crazy or doing all the converstions yourself). Once all the ingredients were well worked in, I sprinkled the other half of the cheddar cheese on the dish and put it in to grill. Our grill (broiler) takes a bit longer than others I've seen, so I decided to serve up the soup while our pasta dish developed a nice, slighly crusty top.
For starters...
This is the carrot and parsnip soup that I posted about two days ago. Doesn't it have a lovely color? And it's so smooth! This soup is easy to make, packed with nutrients and a big hit with the family. That's what I call a keeper. I served up this soup with a bit of my signature "everyday garlic bread," which is wheat toast with a thin spread of butter and a tiny bit of garlic salt sprinkled on top. You can use white toast, if you prefer, but wheat is better for you and I'm sure you already know that. Okay, I'm done preaching. So we ate up the soup while the pasta baked away and when we were done...
A super cheesy pasta bake
The pasta finished baking! What a super dish. It went down very well with the stepdudes and it wasn't hard to make at all. I'll be doing this one again in the next few weeks, that's for sure. However, I'll ditch the frying pan next time. Bacon cooks up just as well in a bigger pot and it would make it so much easier to stir everything up if I had a bit of elbow room to work with.
One word of advice: if you plan on cooking this recipe for your family and you're thinking of skipping the mustard so your mustard-hating kids will like it better, don't! Both of my stepsons are big-time mustard-haters and they gobbled this dish up like crazy, despite the fact that I put a huge dollop of yellow mustard in the dish before grilling it. I strongly suggest keeping the mustard...just make sure your youngsters don't see the jar on the kitchen counter!
I hope you enjoy making this dish. For any of you U.S. readers who want to try this, here is an recap of the ingredients list with any relevant "Americanizations" in bold:
Now that school is in session again, we're right back into our school year routine of hectic mornings, storytime before bed and Friday night game night! I know "Friday night game night" sounds a bit redundant, but that's just what we call it. When school is in session, we play a game almost every Friday evening, and tonight it was Junior Scrabble. My younger SS and I were on a team against my husband and older SS. Our team won, but I'm still sore about the fact that "moox" isn't a real word.
I'm cutting this one short because the guys are off to bed and my husband and I are going to have a Friday night movie night with "Burn After Reading." Before I go, here's a headband I finished yesterday and wore for the first time today. I got two compliments from moms in the schoolyard this morning - not bad!
It's my first Valentine's Day as a stepmother! This morning, two boys woke me up with coffee and cards. They gave me one from the two of them and one from their dad and sat on the bed while I read both. I thanked the boys with hugs and shouted my thanks through to the kitchen to my husband, who was making up our usual Saturday batch of pancakes. What a great start to the day!
I received Friday the 13th flowers last night
I've been quiet on the blogging front lately because things have been quite hectic in our already busy household - we're moving! In addition to all our moving preparations and challenges, we have immigration hurdles to jump through before I can get my UK spousal visa. Our days have been filled with manual labor and red tape. So while I am intent on getting this blog going, there might be a hiatus on the horizon. Please stay tuned. :)
We had the Italian-Style Shepherd's Pie last night. This is a great meal for four with a bit left over for lunch the following day. I’ll describe the steps I took to make this dinner. Experienced cooks might find parts of this explanation a bit pedantic, but it’s important to remember that not everyone is completely comfortable or intuitive in the kitchen and some of us need a bit more hand-holding. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that! There were many holes in my culinary knowledge base when I first moved in with my new family and I roved the internet for hours on end looking for inspiration and ideas. That’s pretty much the point of what I’m doing here. So on with the dinner…
Do this stuff first!
The first thing I do when I'm cooking anything, but especially a first-time recipe, is go through the list of ingredients and make sure I have sufficient quantities of everything I need. There are few things as frustrating as having a dish halfway cooked and then realizing you don't have something the recipe calls for, so take the time and get it right before you start. Once I'm sure I have all my ingredients together, I do all the chopping and measuring first. As you can see in the photo above, I chopped all my veggies ahead of time so they would be ready to add exactly when I needed them.
The heat is on
Once all the ingredients were properly chopped and measured, I put the meat, onions, carrots and spices in a skillet to cook for about 5 minutes. The recipe calls for seasoning salt, which isn't available in Scotland, so I cobble together my own little mix of spices that's a bit different every time: salt, a couple of dashes of cayenne pepper, garlic salt and cumin. This blend doesn't resemble actual seasoning salt, but it seems to work well in all of my dishes. Once the meat browned evenly, it was time to add the last ingredients to the filling.
A fine filling
For the final step of preparing the filling, I added the mushrooms and a 350 gram (14 oz. is fine) jar of tomato and basil pasta sauce. You can add whatever kind sounds good to you. As I mentioned in the earlier menu planning post, I use real mashed potatoes in this pie, as it's more economical than using the flakes, not to mention MUCH healthier and better tasting. It requires a bit of extra work, but it's well worth the effort. I dropped 6-8 medium peeled potatoes into a pot of boiling water just before I chopped up all the veggies. While the filling mixture simmered away, I mashed up the potatoes.
A fluffy layer of mashed potatoes to top it off
The dish is nearly ready to pop into the oven! I poured the filling into a 13x9 casserole dish and then spooned mashed potatoes evenly over the top. If you don't have enough mashers to coat the whole dish, don't worry. You can try spreading the potatoes a bit thinner, or even leaving a hole in the middle! Remember, the recipe only calls for 8 dollops of potatoes around the edge. I just like to coat the whole dish for aesthetic reasons and to keep more moisture in the pie while it cooks. Plus, it increases the potential for leftovers. Once the dish has been coated in potatoes using whichever style you choose, sprinkle a thin coating of parmesan cheese over the top, place it in a 375° (190°C or gas mark 5) oven and check it after 25 minutes.
Italian-Style Shepherd's Pie, finito!
If the top has turned a nice golden brown with maybe a little crust forming on the side, your dinner is ready. The thing I love most about this Shepherd's Pie and other dishes of its ilk is that they are one-pan meals. It has veggies, meat and potatoes all in one casserole dish, which means less fuss in the kitchen overall and not as much washing up to do at the end of the meal. Plus, veggies seem to go down easier with kids if they are part of a dish rather than their own side. So it all adds up to a winning dinner in my book. The family gave it high marks, too - an all-around good dinner.
The tartiflette went well tonight. I made a few on-the-spot recipe changes and if I'm being honest, I should have allowed for a bit more baking time than I did. The potatoes could have been just a teeny bit softer and the top just a little crunchier. But c'est la vie...it was a late dinner anyway, so if I jumped the gun, it was only to get all the hungry mouths fed faster. Here are some pictures of our Wednesday meal:
Bed of Potatoes
First, I peeled and boiled two pounds (~900g) of potatoes for about 10 minutes. Then I chopped up an onion (no onion pics, I was too busy crying) and put them in a hot pan with a spoonful of oil to fry while I cut up the softened potatoes. After slicing them thinly, I spread them across the bottom of an ungreased 13x9 dish. A 13x9 dish has a 3 litre capacity and the recipe called for a 2 litre dish. I still don't have all my conversions down pat, nor do I know how many litres all our baking dishes hold, so I'm making up a lot of this as I go along! This is one of the main reasons why I augmented tonight's recipe. The other big reason is that I made it for five last Thursday (Grandpa came over for dinner) and there was just enough for everyone. I happen to be a fan of leftovers, so I decided to make more this time.
Oven-ready dinner
This is probably the least appetizing of the whole batch of dinner pictures. My apologies. Everything in the dish is cold and it hasn't had a chance to melt into potato and cheesy goodness yet. But you can see the potential! The oven is hot and ready to bake this dish into a fine dinner.
I mentioned above that I fried up an onion while I was layering the pan with potatoes. Once the onion was nice and soft after about 10 minutes of frying, I added the cut up bacon. The easiest bacon to find in Scotland is thick rasher-style slices, rather than the thin strip bacon that's most common in the US. I must say, I prefer the rasher bacon and that's what I'd encourage using in this recipe.
After the bacon had about three minutes to fry with the onions, I added just over a cup of wine and brought it to a boil, per the recipe. Next time I make this, I'll try a non-alcoholic wine and report on its effectiveness in the dish. As soon as it reached the boiling point, I poured the wine/bacon/onion mixture over the bed of half-cooked potatoes. Then I spread about four big spoonfuls of creme fraiche (sour cream) and 150 grams (~1 3/4 cup) of cheddar cheese on top of the mixture and popped it in the oven. The recipe called for Reblochon or Teleggio cheese, but I couldn't find either at my local grocery store, so I just went for a white mature cheddar. It works just fine, trust me.
So we let it bake for about 25 minutes and...
The finished product
It's ready to go! As I said at the beginning of this post, I really should have let the dish cook for just a few minutes longer because the potatoes were not as soft as they could have been, but it went over very well anyway. I was the only one who seemed to notice this minor shortcoming (well, and my husband, but this is only because I was grumbling in his ear about it for the first few bites) and it was a hit with the kids, which makes for an easy evening all around.
Plating up
So there you go. Add some steamed carrots and you have a hearty winter dinner with some good leftover potential, too. This is a nice easy meal with a name that's SO amusing to say: tar-ti-fle-tte. I think it's supposed to be pronounced with three syllables (like pirouette), but I say it with four, adding a fake flourish at the end. It's more fun that way.
All aboard the miniature railway!
