La Boheme

No, 'tis not the opera, it's the new restaurant in Sv Ignoto street in Vilnius. It's taken over the space of the Stikliu Bociu folkloric type restaurant which was empty for years.

Last night it certainly was not empty - maybe it has only very recently opened. Part of the building has been divided off for some other business, maybe a club? La Boheme now has 3 rooms, all different in character, with one as a normal restaurant space full of young people, another as a more classy restaurant room (where I believe the posh people go - I gather the not so young Mr American Chamber of Commerce was spotted there, maybe post the July 4th event at the embassy) and finally a light semi-lounge type room, with an arrangement of sofas and low tables in the centre, and some bistro-type higher tables in front of a bench running round the sides. The bench is so high that people's feet do not reach the floor - what do they expect customers to do - have a Roman feast? The centre tables were taken up by a large musical group - saw bits of 'Jauna Muzika' there and others, some dressed as if they might be post-concert - but it was only about 8 pm.

The waitress was lovely, though she seemed to speak not that much English - not that that should matter in a restaurant in Vilnius, though most waitresses do. But when we asked for butter for our bread (getting margarine, presented in a way which suggested our request was unusual) we nearly got water first.

I had to spend some time translating the Lithuanian menu for my friends, which would have been easier had I thought of bringing reading glasses....Usually menus have fairly large type.

The food, frankly, was disappointing - and while the prices were sort of middling, for the quality of the food they were a rip-off. The bread was the soggy supermarket variety - we can do better than that, surely. My friends had the mushroom soup which they found lacking in mushroom essence. I had French onion soup which could have done with the onions being properly caramelised (ie flavour!) and a shot of white wine would not have been a catastrophe. More to the point, where were the cheese and the bread? Very thinning!

Followed by seafood risotto for one of my friends, a breaded bit of chicken stuffed with spinach for the other one, and prawns for me. The seafood risotto looked like all risottos, like someone had eaten it before - and it had obviously been thrown at the plate! Something green for decoration might have improved the appearance. My other friend's chicken looked like something taken out of the freezer - it almost bounced. The chips looked nice, though. My prawns ....I would not call 8 prawns round a small heap of salad an evening meal. Yes, it was from the menu's first courses, in the Italian style, but so was the risotto which would have been a lot more filling. The prawns were nicely presented and had a very nice sauce - but it was not a meal, and vastly overpriced at 19 LT.

It's ok for a beer hall and having a few snacks, but I wouldn't go there for a good meal!

Free Rice!

Here you can test your vocabulary skills and donate free rice to the world food programme at the same time. It's hard, and maybe even addictive....

Plummed out!

I can't believe I've processed over 20 kgs of plums this week! I like them a lot, and they are so easy to process....I feel sorry for my friend Pat in Scotland who can only buy them in packs of 6 (and even though I think they should be larger than the ones here [which I suspect are damsons] that's still a ridiculous little amount at no doubt a vast price). Then again, here I spend about 30 p on a kilo of plums, but nearer 4 quid on a 500 g packet of cornflakes. You do begin to appreciate why people in the UK, where the costs are no doubt inverted, are the shape they are.

So now I've got two kinds of plum jam; one made from a German recipe involving lots of balsamic vinegar (I'm not totally convinced), one British kind with lots of sugar; 21 jars of bottled plums, 5 bits of baked plums in the freezer, two cakes (tomorrow evening's singing is in a very special place and we always bring supplies, though I am not totally convinced of the cakes either...). I noticed the price had gone up this weekend, but I'm not sure if that's due to my neighbourhood which has more foreigners, or whether it's coming to the end of the season.

Apart from that I did two hour-long runs, wrote three mini-essays, went to the theatre and ate out, did a bit of revision, and for that harmonised the Georgian alternative national anthem 'Suliko' (in 3 parts) into something that was intended to be a Bach chorale (in four parts), but does not sound that much like it (especially since I've now also messed around with accidentals). Meant to do it a la Mozart, too but began to wonder if it is not a little bit modal? I can't do modal harmony, I don't think. For a Georgian tune, having looked closely at harmonic patterns, it is certainly much more western than many other Georgian songs (phrase length, cadences etc). Now I know why some people find it a bit cheesy, but if you get a group of Georgians together abroad sooner or later they will burst into it.

Talking of food, I see the Observer has 'a second helping' of Nigel Slater's new book 'Eating for England' (note, only England). Having listened to his book 'Toast' this offering seems to offer nothing new, according to today's excerpt. He is still nostalgically looking back at the glory days of his childhood (which weren't actually all that wonderful, our Nige, were it?) and the food he enjoyed/experienced then, like marmite, custard, coleman's mustard, dairylea cheesespread and so on. Much as the chapters in 'Toast'. Or is he picking up here what he left out? It's nice to look back at food people ate then (when some had more physical jobs, children could play outside etc), but some of that food was pretty ghastly, too. Take Marmite, dairylea, salad cream (someone somewhere recently had salad cream, thinking it was mayonnaise, and got an interesting surprise).

Jarring moments

I know I am paid enough money to buy any food I like, at any time that I like it, but there is still that Scottish streak in me. The one about preparing for the future because you don't know what's round the corner.

So in the autumn, particularly in Eastern Europe, where people are preparing for a hard winter ahead, I start to feel the need to do the same. Even though years of experience have told me that I never get round to eating all the food I have frozen or preserved. Be honest - what's the bottom of your freezer like? But you never know....

Add to that the fact that I like anything with plums, though like with all fruit I'm not a great fan of the raw stuff - you never know whether they are under-ripe or over-ripe, or whether they contain a wee beastie or two. (Remind me of the wee beastie story later!).

Stewed plums I love, plum cake I brought into work the other day, baked plums - they are so juicy and oozing that you hardly need any sugar. Another bonus, together with that of the plums being not far from prunes....

Last weekend I bought five kilos of plums, in the expectation that I would be able to buy some jars to put them into. Jars? How to describe them at the market? No jars to be seen, only lids which looked like they needed an implement to attach them to jars, rather than being screw-top. And presumably they would be destroyed in the opening process. All not very convenient. But still no jars to put under the lid.

Then I asked a friend to go somewhere to buy some. He said that he'd have a look at home to see if he had any. That was Monday. Yesterday asked again, he'd forgotten, others had forgotten, I had retrieved two coffee jars from work...and baked and frozen lots of plums. Not sure if you can bottle baked plums - but they would be so much better than cooked plums....

Thinking creatively I decided to buy food that comes in jars. But how much can I eat quickly? And usually I don't buy that kind of stuff! I spotted the ideal jars in the corner shop - they were full of plums imported from Germany! So I bought some sausages and some peas. At that moment my Scottish streak must have deserted me because I realised afterwards that I had paid 7 Euros for 10 little Viennese sausages, which are not that exciting to eat. I mean, come on!

Today I asked another friend; he said - I know exactly where to go. We went and got 15 beautiful jars with screw top lids. And I now know where that place is and can get more. Now, what else can I bottle/preserve? I've found a very nice recipe for a special kind of plum jam...

British food

...well, actually, it's all about English food here and here. The English ministry of culture and something is making a list of English icons, things that are typically English (What about it, Scotland and Wales?). So far the website includes cheddar cheese, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and fish and chips. Bit staid, no? Luckily the Guardian appreciates its role as a national newspaper and has opened the debate for Britain (what about Norn Iron??). The Guardian's blog has responses from many corners of the world, of all the foods people living abroad are missing....

Among them:
Heinz baked beans (get them in Georgia and Lithuania)
Bird's custard (don't)
Marmite (ye gads!)
sticky toffee puddings (can't get them)
English cheeses (they are strong!)

I had a ball back in the UK a few weeks ago, enjoying:
a cooked breakfast every day
porridge in Dartington (but how did they manage to make it lumpy?)
fresh fruit salad with cream
fish and chips
Alpen muesli with that dusty taste
unsweetened grapefruit juice
toast with butter and marmalade
bread and butter pudding (can make it)
rice pudding (can make it, and Lithuania sells a wonderful cold version of rice pudding)
custard, custard, custard.....

See why I'm having to run off the weight I gained?

In Eastern Europe people aren't that much into puddings after meals; they prefer fruit Which Is Much Healthier, of course - and often the fruit is much tastier.

Bread!

Can't wait to get back to Georgia tomorrow, to get some real, fresh, crusty, tasty bread I can sink my teeth into! (And then presumably, a week later, in Australia, too). Will stop and pick some up on the way home from the airport!

The bread in Moldova is factory-made and cling-film wrapped. There are different kinds of bread from white to brown, to filled with sweet things like dates, but it's seriously bland. Have not seen a baker anywhere - there was one shop which sells 'piine calda' but that might just have been hot pies, and it was no longer functioning anyway.

Having said that, in Vilnius there are also few fresh-bread bakeries, though you can get fresh bread in most supermarkets - even the mini supermarkets; the large supermarkets usually have an instore bakery.

Restaurants in Moldova have their little quirks, too. Went to Dacu La Varta, a tiny restaurant in Vasile Alecsandri street, and ordered a shashlik. Leaving aside the fact that the meat came with nothing apart from a lettuce leaf, not an onion, a tomato, a little coleslaw from a bucket, nor a piece of bread (which I had to ask for as a paid extra), the price was also, suddenly, double the price it said on the menu. Why? The price on the menu was per 100 grams, and my portion had been 200, they told me (the fact that I had only eaten about 130 grams was probably not a good negotiating point). The price did have a little star beside it pointing to a footnote stating that the portions could have different sizes. Last week's 300 grams of goulash lasted me for four meals...
I thought it was a foreigner rip-off but people in the office said that this could be the case. Be careful out there!

Dinner last night at the Leogrand hotel; very nice, but don't be in a hurry! That applies even to ordering - no-one rushes to your table, on a sticky summer's night, offering you cool drinks - or any drinks....It only lasted 3.5 hours for the six of us.... If you have a life, there are lots of advantages to staying in a flat - where you can do other things while your dinner is cooking! But it was nice to go out for a change.

Here's a recipe for a filo-wrapped mars bar. It's a few millimetres away from a deep-fried one, but only very few millimetres.....

Noticed a few older men with faces that would have graced the back of a bus, accompanied by young women whose mothers had clearly run out of fabric while making their daughter's dresses.

Foodie memories

Not quite sure about the 'foodie' bit. ...Was discussing Katharine Whitehorn with my friend Pat, and we discovered that we had both written to her in response to an article in the Observer about supercilious social security officers (which we both were at the time), explaining to her the realities of the job - such as working late to stop someone's electricity getting cut off....

My first 'meeting' with Whitehorn was in late 1977 when I moved into a bedsit (a dreadful place in Englefield Green; a house formerly belonging to Sir Donald Tovey - it had a stave with a note as a weather vane, but had since been bought over by an avaricious landlord who like to pack them in tight. The rent was £12 per week for a room with shared bathroom; quite a bit out of my £30 a week net pay). I needed to cook, and not having learnt to cook in my childhood, other than opening packets of this and that, I bought her book 'Cooking in a bedsitter'. It was great! I wish I could remember recipes from it...It was particularly good at 'everything in one saucepan' type of recipes which were nutricious and of course cheap. Students only ever had one ring for cooking. For me this went on for a long time, and for part of his early life my son thrived on food cooked on a £5 Baby Belling (two rings worked at any one time) which I had picked up at an auction and restored for another £2. I see amazon sell this book used for £3.98. Not sure about the hygiene aspects of buying a used cookery book...

This article mentions a number of student cookbooks. I also had Jocasta Innes' 'Pauper's Cookbook' because I sure was a pauper for a long time. Delia's 'Frugal Food' also rings a bell, though I do not remember finding it particularly useful. And there were a whole range of other cheap and healthy cookbook, including an American one, which of course used 'cups' as measuring units - but it had recipes for the most delicious biscuits involving oats and raisins (surely not nuts, too - I could not have afforded them) - when I still made biscuits.

These were great cookery books, with lots of tricks for stretching food - like adding oats or beans to mince; bean or lentil anything was recommended as very nourishing (though not in a bedsit, they stink out the place). Unfortunately I lost that collection when I moved house and left them behind by accident - by the time I noticed it, the next tenant had thrown them out. The fact that the cat had had an accident over some of them at some stage probably did not help either. Now, who was talking about the hygiene aspects of used cookery books?

5 top restaurants

Wu Wei has allowed people to tag themselves to describe their 5 top restaurants. Not sure that I can manage 5, and they certainly won't be the highest-falutin' cuisine ....

My currently favourite restaurant, for heart attack on a plate, is the little khatchapuri restaurant just up from the Marjanishvili theatre in Tbilisi. It's near my work, and it does the best Adjaran khachapuri I have tasted so far. This khachapuri consists of crispy bread dough shaped into a boat, into which is poured a mixture of egg, salty cheese, topped with a raw egg yolk and a generous lump of butter. You mix it all up, and then dip bits of the bread crust in the mixture. It's out of this world! This restaurant has the right kind of oven to make a success of this khachapuri - I've had insipid, soggy versions in other restaurants which might have done other food well, but for this it needs a stone oven. My favourite lunchtime mix is this khachapuri and a Borjomi water for about 4 Euros.

The next favourite is the yakitoria, in Moscow and Kiev. It's a chain of Japanese restaurants, working on a franchise basis, I think, and you get the same food everywhere. The one opposite the Novotel in Moscow, near the Mendelevskaya metro station, is the best one. There's nearly always a queue, so the food is really freshly made. In others sometimes the rice and also the fish can be a little dry. It was great comfort food at challenging moments in projects! Cost for a decent sized sushi and a beer or two is about 20 Euros or so.

Cafe Landtmann in Vienna is the greatest for an early breakfast on the way back from far flung parts. Their breakfast is magnificent, though the rolls could be made with more characterful flour. Costs a fortune (12.70 Euros for their 'great breakfast' plus money for having your coat taken care of and for going to the toilet; as opposed to the 2.90 Euros for a similar breakfast I noticed in an East Berlin cafe recently) but it's well worth it. In the evening the cooking is very traditional Vienna; probably not outstanding but it's the atmosphere you pay for and watching Vienna at play. In the mornings you sometimes see people returning from balls. The cakes are scrumptious, too and you could pretend to be a Viennese pensioner sipping your melange....

Henderson's in Edinburgh's Hanover Street is a well-established vegetarian cafe/restaurant with self-service. It may be vegetarian, but the calorie count can be high. They always have a selection of main courses, salads and deserts, and the helpings are serious. Their trifle is to die for - lashings and lashings of cream and custard, and is it a chocolate sponge underneath? At festival time there is always a queue, but it moves quickly, and you always find a seat, often beside middle-aged ladies reading the Scotsman. Just up the road round the corner it has a bistro with table service, and there is also a shop where you can buy healthy food. Very reasonably priced for the UK.

Schneeweiss in Berlin serves Alpine cuisine (the name does not mean 'Snow-White' of the 7 dwarves, but simply 'snowy white'). It's not poached edelweiss, or gentian soup, but interesting food nicely served, in big helpings. Everything about it (apart from the food) is white, and that includes the website. It's usually full of twenty/thirty something people having a good time, in a restrained German sort of a way, not in a gassed, puking up everywhere sort of British way (other young Germans take care of that). Prices are similar to those at Henderson's, but with nice service and beautifully presented food.

Pudina Masala - or Fabindia

After my son's return from India a small orange tub appeared containing 'pudina masala'. Interesting. The reports I received on it were not that great.... but I took it with me to Georgia anyway to try it out.



It's wonderful!!!! Pudina masala is a spice mix consisting of Pudina (a kind of mint), Pipal, Cumin (which gives it that slight sweaty feet flavour), cloves, lemon extract, peppermint and three different kinds of salt. This particular tub is full of the organic stuff, of course; If you sprinkle it on a salad, and then add balsamic vinegar and olive oil, it's sublime! Wonder if it's possible to get it in Europe anywhere?



The company that makes it, fabindia, exports now to 33 countries, amongst whom find themselves Scotland and Wales, as well as England and Northern Ireland. That should gladden Alex Salmond's heart! Unfortunately they only export things like clothes.... but maybe, one day....



Fits in very well with Madhur Jaffrey's 'Climbing the Mango trees' which I'm reading just now. More anon.

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Jewish Lesbians

...as I put down Naomi Alderman's book 'Disobedience' for the last time I picked up the Guardian's interview with Charlotte Mendelson who it seems writes about much the same topic. What a coincidence, as the father in Muriel's Wedding used to say every time he bumped into his lover. Couldn't remember where I had picked up Alderman's book, since I had not been to an English-speaking country for a while, and then it came to me - it was in one of the British bookshops in Vienna (Mariahilfer Str).

'Disobedience', Alderman's first book, is about a young woman from not just any Jewish Orthodox household in Hendon, North London, but one where the father was the 'Rav' which appears to be a particularly high class, visionary, leading kind of rabbi. Much like the girl in Abraham's 'The Romance Reader' reviewed here. And perhaps the pressures on children are the same in the very strict Christian/Muslim/other households where the head of the household is a community leader in that particular faith.

The young women in both stories rebel against the very tightly controlled lives they are supposed to lead, starting with strict rules about clothing and ending in very tight expectations on what kinds of life they should leave. Alderman's main protagonist Ronit, whose mother died when she was very small, leaves the family home as a young adult and makes a new home and successful life for herself in New York (though she does attend a therapist - or does that mean she is particularly successful that she can afford one). When her father dies, in London, she returns home and then all sorts of old wounds burst open again, relationships are re-inflamed, some more positively than others, and she reviews her position in relation to her religion.

The book has a very interesting structure; each chapter is preceded by a quote from a Jewish prayer, which is then followed by what seems like a brief rabbinical discussion of the meaning of various aspects of life, such as 'marriage' or 'secrets'. After this events in the lives, current or past, of the two other main characters take place, told in the third person singular, followed by Ronit's description of what happened to her and what she was thinking, written in the first person singular, and printed in a different font. This must have given the writer a very nice little discipline, and for those of us who know little about judaism, it's very interesting. In passing also rituals, such as those around burials, and those of the Sabbath, are described in great detail (there appears to be a dish called 'potato kugel' - I wonder if that is the same as the Lithuanian 'kugelis', a rather heavy kind of potato cake, baked in the oven).

The book could perhaps have been a little more complex - it seems to travel along a rather straight line, and there are not that many surprises when you turn a corner; but after all, it's a First Book. It's quite funny, especially when Ronit talks, who on the one hand looks rather wryly at the life she has left behind, and on the other hand is still very familiar with it. Her description of one of the character's headaches (which the author suffers herself) is stunning - much like the headaches, I suspect.

This edition concludes with a rather unnecessary interview with the author ('what did you find most difficult about writing 'Disobedience'?'), followed by recipes for the sabbath from Claudia Roden's 'Book of Jewish Food'. One of these is a chicken soup recipe - I'm a great believer in Jewish chicken soup for moments of stress, weakness, and especially post travel sickness. The book offers a variety of additions to the chicken soup. I like to boil a thick slice of lemon in it, together with some minced chili from a jar; that really spices it up and gives it a far eastern flavour - as a Korean violinist confirmed who I had to feed the soup when she was suffering from the flu during the Heifetz competition. (Perhaps not ideal for dodgy stomachs, though).

Toast

I got this book, by Nigel Slater, first as an audio-book which I loaded on my Ipod thingy to 'read' whilst travelling. A book that saves on weight is a useful book. I'm not used to audio books, however, and find it difficult to keep up the concentration; particularly when in Tbilisi I connected the Ipod to a set of speakers but wandered around the house, or clattered around the kitchen. It's different with music - and in fact I have the strangest ability to go into something akin to a trance even with the loudest music pouring into my ears, getting my rest and still not missing a note. But with wurdzz it's different.

So somewhere somehow I picked up a copy of the book. To my transatlantic readers it should be explained that Nigel Slater is a food writer who has been writing in the Observer (a Sunday newspaper) seemingly forever; I can't remember who was there before him, maybe Prue Leith? There was someone else before her, Kate/Katherine Whitehouse (??) but I never experienced her as a foodwriter in a newspaper. She did write a wonderful paperback on cooking in a bedsit which came out in the mid 1970s. Unfortunately I left all my cookery books behind when I moved house in 1986, and the successors in the flat threw them out. There had been some interesting stuff amongst them; I managed to replace some of them with their later versions. He has brought out, as is every foodwriter's wont, a number of very interesting cookery books, and of course you can read his recipes every week in the Observer.

This book is about his childhood and adolescence. He tells it, heading every chapter, some very short, with a heading of food. This is very nostalgic, though some of those foods, like the trifle with the very firm jelly (Delia Smith would not make it like that) and many other of the ready-made foods are thankfully a flavour of times past. I hope. Cadbury's Smash? Angel Delight? Perhaps with the current obesity epidemic in the UK, they have been replaced by much more evil foods. The story is told in a very flat, northern sort of way (especially if you listen to Slater reading it). A bit Alan Bennett, but not quite as droll, with short sentences and simple words. If you read it very carefully, you come across gems like someone having 'lips like a cat's bottom'. Slater seems to have had a bit of a hard childhood, what with his mother dying when he was around 10, a fairly unapproachable father who sometimes threatened to place him in care, and who died when Slater was about 16, and the demon cleaning stepmother. His mother could not cook but she loved, the father could not cook and his love was expressed in strange ways, and the stepmother cooked wonderfully but definitely did not show any love to the boy. Add to that the fact that he woult not eat certain foods, driving his carers crazy. All pretty horrendous stuff, really. No wonder he escaped as soon as he could. At the end of the book we also learn things about hotel kitchens which we wish not to know.

It's a great book for recalling a particular period of life in Britain what with the food - especially the prawns Marie Rose - , the house in the countryside with steamed up windows, the Aga and no central heating, and the early attempts at love or rather sex. It would make a great subject for a sociological study of which level of society ate which food. I do remember the packets of trifle mix including the jelly, the custard, the biscuits and the hundreds and thousands, but that's nothing like Delia's rich sherry trifle with the biscuits, the fruit, the sherry (if you like), the double cream custard, and the further layer of double cream on top. Scrumptious? Let me go and look up the recipe!

Black things

My family understands the term 'black things' very precisely. 'Black things' is liquorice. Any liquorice is not bad, but for me the ultimate are the products of Katjes, a company with a Dutch name based in Germany. My favourite ones are the ones in the red packet, called 'Kittens'. 'Cats' Ears' in the green packet are much the same, in a different shape - and somehow they feel quite sharp what with the points. They are the original ones which started off the company. They are shaped like a little cat, fairly hard, and that makes them last longer. Especially in the winter they go rock hard. I remember moments of my childhood, on holiday in Austria, aged 6, when I'd go to bed with one tucked in my cheek, melting away very slowly (and eroding my teeth, no doubt). Total bliss! Later on I discovered that these hard ones also attach themselves very effectively to teeth, and I've lost more than one filling through them....The next favourite ones are the ones in the yellow packet in front of it, called 'little cat's paws'; they are very soft, and it's very easy to chomp your way through a packet. I am so possessive of them, when I get them, that I hide them - just in case I meet another liquorice lover who I might have to share them with. There are not that many of us, even in my family - luckily. I know two liquorice lovers in Lithuania, who I don't see all that often - I usually try to bring them back a packet, but if I don't see them....

The thing about these products is, which I had already realised through extensive empirical research, that 80% of their market is in the three north western German states, as confirmed by a recent newspaper article. You can also get them in Denmark (Copenhagen airport), and Sweden and Finland are big on liquorice, too, as are the Netherlands. But trying to get them in southern Germany is quite a challenge; apparently the Bavarians like their sweets 'colourful, sweet and funny'. Simple people, eh? They call liquorice 'Baerendreck' (bears' droppings). Austria? Forget it. Luckily you can get them in Berlin where I am going next week; in fact Katjes have just opened a factory in Potsdam, a bit of an unemployment blackspot (and, most unfortunately, talking of things black, also a racism blackspot). Not sure if I am quite as committed (or should be committed?) to go and watch the production lines.

In the UK you can (could?) get Katjes products, but never the liquorice. When their products first arrived on British shelves, I wrote to the company, asking about the liquorice. They replied with a parcel of six packets of the stuff! Heaven! You could possibly get Haribo liquorice, but it was not so nice. Liquorice Allsorts - geeez, who would want to contaminate liquorice with all that pink sweet stuff? I'd peel off the pink or brown bits....You can see my situation, after growing up in the Vatican of liquorice - every time I'd go to Germany I would buy quite a few packets of the stuff. Any birthday or Christmas parcel minus 'black things' was just not right.

There are at least three problems with liquorice; it stains your mouth and teeth black; people can smell that you have just eaten them, and, when I gorge on them, scoffing half a dozen packets in as many days, they definitely clear me out (literally having a blow-out...). That's apart from the fact that it allegedly raises the blood pressure (yes, please, in my case) and if you eat many of them whilst pregnant it doubles your chances of giving birth early; there are also questions relating to its effect on male potency. None of which are my problem. They are advertised as 'fat-free', but oh dear, the calorie count....

I love the stuff!!

When one is in the know...

...in Georgia one no longer buys the wine in a boring glass bottle, corked and sealed....One goes to the little wine shop up a back alley, or sometimes even in a main street, and buys the wine loose. As you can see it comes in all sorts of bottles - you just ask for the number of litres you need. Here we have an unknown bottle with a Coke top, a 7-up bottle with a Borjomi top, and a Nabaghlevi bottle with a Sprite top. If you are fastidious, I suppose you could bring your own bottles .... So now we know what happens to all those bottles that the poor people collect out of everywhere. And no, so far I have not got sick from the wine. It costs about 2.40 Euros for a litre of red, and less than a Euro for a litre of white wine.

Bizarre moment No 57 in the wine shop; it's a very small shop and there are always some people sitting on chairs, looking vacantly at the door - not convinced whether they are employees. One of these asked me in German if I spoke German, and I confirmed this. When he asked where from, I said 'Vilnius', as is my wont. Whereupon he launched into Lithuanian! Geez. His parents were of two different European countries and he had spent some time in Chicago where it seems he learned Lithuanian. As one does, in Chicago - my Chicago readers might confirm? He also speaks English, I think, and Georgian. When I asked why he was here, he said because he is an orthodox ('ortodoksas' in Lithuanian, it seems). I wonder when he had last spoken Lithuanian - it was halting, but it was good!

A humbling moment

Foreigners, in travel guides to any poor country, are usually advised not to give money to beggars because it will encourage people to beg. So we don't, usually. And then you see the residents of the country giving money to the beggars. And even more, today I spotted some street children buying a drink from a sweet drinks seller near the market, and when they offered to pay, the seller refused to take the money. It makes you think.

Today was kind of a dreich day, constantly slightly raining - do we call it 'smirr' in Scotland? Totally out of veg, I wandered over to the market near the railway station. It's not what you might call a tourist attraction, but it has good vegetables, meat (if you are not squeamish) and everything. Strange though, how even in the indoor part of it, I found myself skating around on a thin layer of mud.....Buying meat is difficult for me, what with it being big hunks of meat with a lot of bone, for those larger Georgian families. But I found some liver and watched with fascination as the salesman dug into his pocket with his bloody hands, trying to retrieve some change. Also bought a bottle of those sauces that the Georgians love. This one is red, but it seems to be as sour as the green sauce I have tried elsewhere. Not sure what they are made from ....something a bit spicy and/or a bit sweet would have been nice. They are all home-made and bottled in recycled bottles. Let's not think about the hygiene police. Whilst I was negotiating this purchase, a guy slipped by and offered me a delightful watch with yellow glass across the clock face. I showed him my nicer Swatch watch. He departed.

Urban rustic

Fancied eating out today, what with having no veg in the house, no time to buy any, and anyway....

I'd had my eye for a long time on 'In Vino Veritas', a restaurant at No 8 Kikodze street near Freedom (Tavisupleba) Square, which belongs to my favour theatre director and actor, Robert Sturua and Zaza Papuashvili. Let me rephrase that - the name and the design belong to these two. No points on originality on the name. I wonder how this all works - do they get a cut of the takings each day, but don't need to run the restaurant?

It's in the basement of a block of flats, and made to look a bit like a cave, with exposed 'roof beams' and so on. It's not as bright as the picture on the website. On entering I found myself facing a startled waitress who could not quite deal with me....She went to get help, and after that everything was fine. It seemed that two parties were going on at the same time, so a loose customer did not quite fit into the regime.

Foodwise it seems like an average Georgian restaurant, with all the usual salads, soups, kebabs, shashliks, khatchapuris and main courses. I had the wonderful tomato and cucumber salad with walnuts (always to die for) and a beefsteak with boiled potatoes. Eastern European beefsteaks are not like a fillet steak (maybe no beefsteak is like a fillet steak?); they are usually a lump of meat beaten to within an inch of its life, often with a fried egg on top. I had the vision of the fillet steak, but the reality of the dead lump of meat. It could have been worse and covered in crumbs. The boiled potatoes were very nice, as they should be, at a price of almost a Euro each. The cappucino at the end was made from cappucino powder. As it happens, I like that but it ain't cappucino. The wine only came in bottles, and since I always have a wee glass while practicing the piano after work, I did not really need another bottle, even to take home, especially now that I have discovered how to buy wine loose.

So, the food is averagely good - I noticed that they do the shashliks straight in the restaurant, so they should be very good. The atmosphere is quite nice (perhaps better if a party does not take over almost all the tables in the room, leaving one lonesome table for other customers) and the owners are very nice as is the staff once they get over their surprise. You can probably get the same quality of food elsewhere for less - in the end it depends what you want to pay for, I suppose.

Still Life with Chicken

Tried out the central market today, a busy, bustling market for all kinds of foodstuffs near the Tbilisi railway station (first time I had penetrated that far into that side of Tbilisi).

Like in all markets in all former Soviet countries, especially at the hotter end, it does not do to inspect the state of the floor too closely. Also like everywhere, however, the food is displayed at its best with piles and piles of fruits, vegetables, chickens (dead), meat, cheeses, probably honey somewhere.... The choice of vegetables is the biggest I have seen in Tbilisi - before I could never find fresh spinach, even though there is a Georgian salad involving nuts and spinach, but here it is (though I still have about 2 kg in the freezer).

Living alone, the problem is buying small quantities. Here I bought the smallest quantities I could....as seen in the photo. This all needs to be processed - the food is so ready to eat that it does not keep long. No trip to the market, or indeed the supermarket next weekend, I guess.

Points of particular interest - the round bread at the back, which someone tells me is called 'lavash' like the very thin Armenian bread (don't entirely believe this story). The pot of matsoni, Georgian yoghurt at the front - wonderful stuff. A bit of a little round white cheese, slightly salty. A bag full of mushrooms...and of course a chicken, complete with head and feet (very clean, and nearer an 'A' size than a DD size like British chickens). Of course when it is weighed you also pay for the head and the feet....

Even though the prices were not marked, I did not think I was being ripped off particularly, as I might be in some other countries - the prices seemed fairly normal compared to those I have seen written down in other shops. The lady with the cheese was appalled - she told me it cost 6 laris, I gave her six laris, but actually the price was per kilo and she only wanted two. Another lady taught me to say 'a kilo' and 'half a kilo' in Georgian. 'Erti kilo' and... the other one is complicated!

Talking of food, the Guardian led its readers to a lovely blog for quick Indian cooking which looks very interesting. Must look for something to do with all those aubergines - but I could also look at www.aubergine.org!

A couple of days ago I discovered a wonderful Turkish restaurant, the Ankara in the area quite close to the Turkish Airlines Office (around +- No 130 Agmashenebeli Avenue). It's a lokantasi where the food is on display, you pick it, a waitress loads it together with a huge basket of bread and a glass of water on a tray and follows you to a seat at a table. Great for lunch - and it's cheap, too. They have the rice pudding!!!! But with it being Georgia, nothing goes without nuts, so a teaspoonful of grated nuts is sprinkled on top of it.

My top 5 of Turkish food

1. Rice pudding - comes cold, with more corn starch than rice, but oh, the taste
2. anything with aubergines
3. hot chocolate - just right (though a hat of stiff whipped cream would make it just perfect)
4. Cacik (or Tsatsiki in Greek)
5. Eating in a Lokantasi

Here endeth the Turkish Adventure.

Turkish politics

Got back to the hotel from dinner on the Friday night, switched on the telly and found a CNN report of the murder of Hrant Dink, the Armenian-Turkish journalist, in Istanbul. Eh? Not so I had noticed. CNN showed a huge demonstration involving, it seemed, thousands, in protest of his murder (which surprised me a little bit). Apparently he was killed by some stupid boy aged 17 or so. Boys should really be locked away between the ages of 14 and 20! Someone had probably wound him up. It must be really hard to govern a country like Turkey which has such huge differences in outlook between different parts of the country.

I had heard nothing at my end of the town. Where was all this happening? So I changed my plans for Saturday and went over to Beyoglu - the big Ataturk cultural centre is there, and I thought that's where the demos might have been, too. My Lonely Planet guide had a walking tour for that neighbourhood, and maybe I could do it in reverse, arriving at Taksim, the nerve centre of that side of Istanbul.

This line of people (read men!), on Galata Bridge, was busy fishing for tiddlers - the tiniest fish, no longer than an index finder, and half the width. There were hundreds of them. Not sure of the point of it all.

Well, I did not even find the starting point (or the end point). Partly this was because in Istanbul roadsigns are a little scarce; also I did not have quite the right understanding of the scale of the map. So what was supposed to be a day-long enterprise had me standing, after quite a lengthy detour (I worked out afterwards), on Taksim Square by 10 am...and for the rest of the day?

Luckily creeping up the very steep hills I had clocked a poster for a concert, by the Istanbul Devlet Senfoni Orkestrasi (Devlet might be a word for a type of institution, like 'municipal' or 'national'). And it was to be at 11 am, in the Atatuerk cultural centre. Perfect, or what?

That gave me just enough time to dip into the lovely cafe nextdoor and partake of not one, but two dainty custard/fruit tarts (see picture - they are on a saucer!) - they were so small that even a dieter could try out both tastes.

The Atatuerk cultural centre is, to be frank, a monstrosity. Built probably in the late 60s or 70s, it is a smoked glass cube, with lots of lights hanging down, darkly teak pannelled walls, red chairs, lights in the ceiling of which random ones work, and a shell for the orchestra. The hall is used both for orchestras and concerts, but the shell suggests that the acoustics for orchestras is not so great.

Anyway - the hall was full mostly of older folk, though also a school class or two. The programme was Rodrigo's 'Concerto Madrigal' for two guitars and orchestra, and Mendelssohn's 3rd symphony. I'm not a great guitar friend, but ah well. The problem with them, apart from the plink plonk, is that they always need to be amplified when playing with an orchestra. Here we had the two guitarists Liat Cohen and Ricardo Moyano. Liat, female, was very much the dominant partner in this. She got all the good tunes...the way they were sitting, her hair hung down so that she could not see her partner (but in some ensembles that does not matter). She also moved her microphone with the result that she sounded as if she was sitting beside you, and he - well, we could see him play. The orchestra seemed to have been told that they had to play quietly for the guitars, and this they followed to the letter, to the point of inaudibility at times. At other times, in any case, the orchestration did not seem that great, and much hanging about took place on stage. I feel no need to hear this piece again in a hurry. For their encore, the two guitarists dropped their music stands and their hair and suddenly came to live with some typically guitarish kind of piece.

The Mendelssohn was nice enough, though I do wonder why it was called the 'Scottish' symphony. Did he write it when he was there, bobbing about in the sea outside 'Fingal's Cave'? Anyway, a perfectly pleasant morning in Istanbul. Interestingly, the orchestra had 28 women out of a total of 67 players - the highest participation of women I have seen anywhere in Istanbul!

Then I wandered back across the square to start the walking tour the right way round... except I could not be bothered to bob up here and duck down there, to peek around a corner or slip down a lane.... The main street, the Istiklal Caddesi, was heaving with people streaming up and down in both directions. The busloads of riot police were loitering at the top of the street, going shopping for their lunches, chatting to their friends, all very relaxed. This seems to be the main shopping street, with many brand name shops, but also many bookshops, quite a lot of whom have English books....

And then there were lots of cafes, self-service restaurants, posher restaurants - a street full of bookshops and restaurants cannot be bad, no? Had a gorgeous lunch in the lokantasi 'Aga', full of slightly ageing men (in the side street by the mosque Agua Camii) - this is a restaurant where you look and point at the food, and it is brought to you at the table (about 5 seconds later). I am not sure that you get alcohol in some of this locantas. Picked something covered in strips of aubergine which turned out to have the tenderest, pinkest meat under it I could imagine? Rabbit? Once I got to the bone I realised it would have been a wer-rabbit. No idea what kind of meat it was. But soo goood!

(In the evening I ate in another locantasi, almost next door, the Haci Abdullah, with a melt in the mouth chicken on a puree of aubergines, a kind of slippery, shiny puree perhaps also with potatoes, but what a taste!! Total bliss - and much cheaper than some other restaurants I had been to).

Tootled on down the street; found a tiny demo about Hrant Dink taking place (about 40 people), with some riot police chatting quietly nearby. The Turkish Daily News said that yesterday's demo had contained 60 people, and yet CNN had shown thousands all facing the same way (unlike a shopping crowd where they go in both directions). Strange - whose news were right?

Crossing the bridge again to Sultanahmet I passed the ferry terminal, and wasn't there a wee boat just ready to leave for a round trip? It was to last 1 hour 15 minutes, or maybe 1 hour 50? Popped up on deck, where, on a January afternoon, it was none too hot....

We sailed over back to the Beyoglu side, then pottered along the coast under the large Bridge joining the Asian and the European side - it took so long that I began to worry whether I had got on a ferry and might have to find my own way back, but as darkness sank, eventually the boat went over to the Asian shore, and returned to the harbour with a very few and rather frozen set of deck passengers. Brrr. - And then the hotel had no water, so no chance to warm up!

Heart attack on a plate

For the last few days I had noticed the restaurant near work (just up the road from the Marjanishvili Theatre) with large pictures of the Adjaran khachapuri on its window. It always looked busy, too!

Yesterday some friends went there for lunch and raved about it, so today I took my turn. The only foreigner in the restaurant I effectively blocked a table for four - no-one wants to sit beside a foreigner...A rather dopy local couple was hovering when I sat down - I don't know if I had taken 'their table'. I know they were dopy because 10 minutes later some other people entered the restaurant and took the next empty table, and the couple again stood behind them and let it be taken from them. If I were you, girl, I would not marry him.

I ordered the khachapuri in the picture (courtesy of Wikipedia) - it seems that it is not fast food - but it's fresh food! Half an hour later it appeared on the table.... shaped like Napoleon's hat, filled not only with the raw egg which you then scramble inside the hot bread (my friend had lightly described it as 'scrambled egg on toast') but also with dollops of salty Georgian cheese, and with a great lump of butter on top. That was soon removed, but still - it was extremely filling. This kind of khachapuri has to be made freshly for everyone otherwise the thing with the egg won't work. I don't think I will have it every day....

Nostalgia

Listening to Nigel Slater's 'Toast' whilst cooking (reheating) dinner. His delivery is somewhat flat and northern (like a diluted Alan Bennett) but the meals he mentions bring back memories....

Although I did not spend my childhood in the UK, I recognize many of the meals - Spaghetti Bolognese, with the spaghetti boiled for 20 minutes; Sherry Trifle with a thick layer of jelly (didn't Birds of Birds' Custard fame make a trifle pack that you just put together?), flapjacks (never cared for those a great deal), jam tarts (never made them but saw them in shops), Victoria sponges, his mother always burning the toast - no doubt he'll come on to macaroni cheese in a little while....This brings back a lot of memories! Although I spent my British formative years at Finlaystone, where not a tinned or frozen product would darken the door, I had my fair bit of exposure to the plastic food of the 70s, with the cooked breakfast at my agricultural college every morning, and two more heavy cooked meals for the starving farmer's boys; the salads which were naked except for salad cream (a lettuce leaf, a tomato, some cucumber, a boiled egg, and a stick of celery), later the digestive biscuits and the milk whilst pregnant, olive oil only bought in small bottles at the chemist's and to be applied to the skin, externally.

At Finlaystone most of the food was home produced; all vegetables bar potatoes were homegrown, in the winter the meat was often the result of going shooting; other meat was grown on the home farm and often home butchered (legal in those days). The Finlaystone breakfasts were out of this world, especially on chilly winter mornings, in a 'Big Hoose' with at the time rather limited heating; the grapefruit juice followed by hot and cold milk (cornflakes with hot milk and sugar are a particular delight), the fried or scrambled eggs on a small slice of fried bread with a slither of crisply done bacon, followed by toasted homebaked wholemeal bread, always a little on the dark side, with home-made Norfolk marmalade, made from Seville oranges, and in the winter with crystallised sugar. That really laid a sound basis for a morning working in a frost-ridden garden.

And for an extra dose of nostalgia I am listening now to the original Decca recording of 'Peter Grimes' which has just been reissued and which I picked up in Vienna. The recording was conducted by the composer, Benjamin Britten, with Peter Pears as 'Peter Grimes'. It's a tragic, tragic story of a fisherman who has problems with his young apprentices (keeps losing them overboard) and as a result is ostracised by his community. Based on the poem 'The Borough' by George Crabbe, and set in East Anglia, where Britten spent most of his life. It's probably the most successful opera by Britten, but he's written some other nice stuff as well, not least his 'Lachrymae' for viola with that sublime and extremely moving ending of the Dowland song.


I bought the LP version of this 'album' in Bournemouth in April 1971 when I was on my first English language course. It cost 14 pounds at the time (nothing much has changed then, last week I bought it for 22 Euros). Immediately prior to this course the then Royal Manchester College of Music had visited the town I grew up in, for a fortnight of rehearsing and producing this opera with multitudinous students - huge crowd scenes.... Unfortunately I cannot remember the names of any of the singers, at least one of which (the 'Peter Grimes' character) got an immediate engagement at a German opera house. It was an amazing fortnight, and I hung out at the theatre all the time - that's when my English language skills turned around....