Good Eats: Best Meals in 2020

Traditionally, I’ve ended the year on my blog by looking back at all the good dishes I’ve eaten during the past year.

 

Well, 2020 was a strange year – with very little travel and eating out at restaurants – unlike previous years. It’s a bit more difficult to recap the best meals I’ve eaten this year. However, most of the best meals in 2020 were homemade and eaten at home.

January 2020

The year started out hopeful. One night, we met friends after work to take advantage of a 3-course meal at Gaucho in the South Kensington neighborhood of London. While sipping my glass of red wine in the chic bar, I had no idea what the upcoming year would have in store for us. Highlights: scallop ceviche and chicken Milanese.

At the end of January, we flew to Barcelona to meet up with American friends visiting from NYC. Highlights from our dinner at Can Boneta –known for its Catalan tapas and small plates – included octopus with creamed potatoes and veal carpaccio. 

Our last meal in Spain was a tapas lunch at Mercado de la Sagrada Familia – cheap platters filled with Spanish jamon and queso and a side of patatas bravas.

At the end of January, I even managed to drive to Bath for a day with two girlfriends. We enjoyed an Italian lunch at Sotto Sotto with its vaulted cellars and bare stone walls.

February 2020

We planned an overnight trip to Liverpool, one of the larger English cities that we hadn’t visited yet. We went to a food hall, a beer festival with hundreds of people and ended the night at the Cavern Club – a crowded night club where the Beatles once played. A weekend like this would be unthinkable right now.

At the end of February, we were supposed to go to Milan, which ended up being one of Italy’s epicenters of the Covid-19 virus. We opted for a nice dinner out in London at Eneko Basque Kitchen & Bar, which was offering 3 courses for £28. Highlights: beetroot tartare, pork ribs and a decadent chocolate tart for dessert.

March 2020

On March 9^th, I flew to the US to visit family and celebrate the 90^th birthday of my husband’s grandmother. I made a two-layered carrot cake for the occasion. I’m glad we had the chance to visit family before the pandemic took hold of the entire world.

Luckily, we flew back to London, landing on the 16^th of March – the day Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the initial UK lockdown. We were in for a bumpy ride.

At the end of March, we celebrated our 10^th wedding anniversary in our garden at home instead of on the beach in Thailand as we originally planned. I made a an issahn-style pork salad and pad thai, and hubby made pina coladas to drink.

April through Summer 2020

And thus, this started the beginning of our lockdown life in London.

I was furloughed from my pastry job. Hubby was working from home. I began cooking all the time and joined the sourdough baking bandwagon. I learned the ups and downs of feeding and taking care of my starter and also had difficulties sourcing flour several times.

I made Turkish kebabs, pide, sigari böreği, mucver and revani – a semolina cake.

I sometimes made Italian focaccia, pasta, ravioli and pizza.

We took advantage of the sunny days and went on long bike rides and grilled outside.

I baked bagels, challah and cakes at home. I soon started donating treats to my friend’s business, The Plattery, who started cooking for low-income people who needed food. (NOTE: we’ll still be donating meals in 2021, so if you can help donate here, please do.)

 

I made homemade tortillas and pulled pork so we could celebrate Cinco de Mayo at home.

We discovered a fish delivery company called The Upper Scale and cooked our own seafood feasts at home like French moules frites.

 

July 2020

For more than three months, cinemas, hair salons, museums, restaurants and bars were closed (except for take-away and delivery services) in the U.K. The country’s first lockdown ended on 4^th of July.

Toward the end of July, we booked our first trip post-Covid-19 restrictions and drove up to the Peak District for a week. Our life didn’t change too much – hubby still worked from “home” and I went on long walks and cooked at our rental cottage. However, we did manage a few visits to the local pubs – as long as we could dine outside.

August 2020

We booked our second staycation and stayed in a rental cottage in southern Cornwall for a week. Sitting outside at a pub, smelling the sea air and eating fish and chips – life never seemed so good!

September 2020

We ventured out of the city again – this time we donned our facemasks and took our bikes on a train heading to Norwich in the County of Norfolk. Over the course of six days, we managed to cover 205 miles/325km on our bikes. We ate a lot of pub meals to fuel up for our long bike rides and ended that staycation with a big steak dinner.

October 2020

Although I’ve tried all sorts of new recipes during lockdown, I started taking some online cooking classes in October. I learned how to make pastel de nata from a Portuguese woman in Lisbon and Argentinian empanadas from a lovely couple in Columbia.

We also managed – just barely – to escape to Wales for a couple of days for hubby’s birthday. The foodie highlight of that staycation was cooking Welsh lambchops in our nearly 200-year-old rental cottage.

November 2020

My favorite foodie holiday, Thanksgiving, fell during our second lockdown. We still pulled off a socially-distanced dinner with our neighbors and piled a table full of festive delights such as grilled turkey, green bean casserole, sweet potato casserole, roasted veggies and more.

 

December 2020

As mentioned in my previous blog post – How to Pretend You’re in Paris via London – we were able to treat ourselves to one fancy meal out before London went into lockdown – AGAIN!

This year has been all about cooking and baking new recipes at home, becoming a pantry raiding superstar and foraging for ingredients around the city. I’m thankful that I’ve learned some new baking skills, but I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to work in restaurants and enjoy dining out with friends again in 2021.

 

Wishing you all a Happy and Healthy New Year!

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Delightful Dahlias in Cornwall UK

Driving down the tiny, rural lanes in Cornwall means you often end up reversing or finding a spot to pull over when you meet another car in the road.

But sometimes, you might end up reversing because you saw the most incredible burst of color and you just had to find out what it was. Luckily, I had checked in my rearview mirror before doing this.

In early August, during our UK staycation in Cornwall, I was driving near Penzance and happened to see this flash of color which turned out to be a field of dahlias by the National Dahlia Collection. This garden features more than 1,600 different varieties of dahlias and is free to visit from June to September. It is impressive!

You can even see St. Michael's Mount located in Marazion in the distance here.

This collection was first established in 1983 in Oxfordshire by a private collector, David Brown, who wanted to preserve dahlias when the flowers were growing out of fashion in the 80s and 90s. Over the years, the collection moved until it happened at is current location. If you are a keen gardener, you can even order dahlia tubers and garden ready plants online or at the collection when it is open.

Dahlias are one of those flowers that blooms prolifically from late summer to autumn. I’ve always admired these flowers, but I don’t have much room at our London flat to grow much more than some potted herbs and veggies.

But the English have long loved dahlias especially during the Victorian era. When the Horticultural Society (later RHS) started regular flower shows in 1831, its September event was dedicated entirely to dahlias. In 1881, the National Dahlia Society was started in the UK.

• Did you know that by the 1930s – at the height of their popularity – there were 14,000 named dahlia varieties?
• And did you know that dahlias are the national flower of Mexico? Dahlias are wildflowers in Mexico and Central America but were brought to Europe by a Spanish expedition in the late 1700s and later cultivated.

·      On our trip, I spent about an hour at the garden taking dozens and dozens of photos of the colorful blooms and trying to capture the honeybees in action. Now, if only, I could have my own garden like this.

Pompon Dahlias

Decorative Dahlias

Waterlilly Dahlias

Misc Dahlias

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Good Eats: Best Meals in 2018

Well better late than never. Between work and travelling a bit this month, I’m quite late on compiling my annual roundup post of my favorite meals from that year.

Perhaps this year, I’ll try and stay on top of my favorite meals as they happen.

Just like 2017, 2018 was a year that both hubby and I worked a lot in London, but we always find enough time to take several trips and enjoy some special meals together.

Beef – It’s What’s for Dinner

We kicked off 2018 with a fancy steak dinner in London with a good friend who was moving to Jakarta, Indonesia, for work. Hawksmoor is London’s prime location for a steak dinner and consistently ranks as one of the city’s best restaurants. Who needs a better reason to finally go here!

You pay for what you get as Hawksmoor is an award-winning British steakhouse that serves British grass-fed, dry-aged beef and sustainably-sourced seafood from Brixham. The company works with small farms around the UK that raise cattle to its “specific set of guidelines around the quality of the animal’s life.”

We started off with roast scallops cooked with white port and garlic as well as roasted bone marrow with onions. Yum! I don’t recall what cut of steak we ordered, but it was delicious and weighed nearly a kilo. Steaks are priced per 100 grams. If you don’t want to spend a lot of money, I would recommend booking a table for Hawksmoor’s Sunday roast special.

Talking about Tacos

In February, we travelled back to the US to visit family and friends. I added on a few extra days, so I could hang out in NYC with friends. I treated myself to a fancy 3-course lunch at

Empellón, an upscale Mexican restaurant started by Chef Alex Stupak. For my $38 lunch (about £30), I chose the sticky rice tamal with red chile duck starter, chicken tacos with goat’s milk yogurt for my main and the sweetly spiced Mexican chocolate ice cream sandwich for dessert. While the meal was tasty, and I had some good people watching from the bar, I honestly wished that I had just found a street taco truck instead.

Farmer’s Market to Table in Canterbury

In March, we took a day trip to Canterbury, a cathedral city in southeast England (Kent) originally built by the Romans, lined with cobbled streets and centuries-old timber-framed houses. After a day of splendid sightseeing and taking hundreds of photos, we returned to The Goods Shed, an all-day restaurant overlooking a daily market, with its own bakery and an open kitchen. Ingredients are sourced from the in-house market, which was quite busy earlier in the day when we popped in. Though I didn’t take many foodie photos, I would happily return again just to eat the roasted local chicken cooked in wine with mushrooms and crispy lardons that I ordered.

Eating French Classics in Paris

Remember when we did our DIY tour of the Champagne region of France? Well, our group of friends stayed one night in Paris, and we ate a delicious dinner together at Les Enfants Perdus, a highly rated restaurant near the Gare de l’Est station. With a Michelin-starred chef in the kitchen, the menu is sure to delight with such French classics as foie gras, tuna tartare, steak tartare and sole meunière.

Seafood Sharing Plates in Chelsea

In April, we dined at Chicama in London with fellow American expats whom we hadn’t seen for a year and both have Latin American heritage. This Peruvian hotspot is known for its South American seafood sharing plates, so we enjoyed several tasty nibbles such as charred octopus, ceviche and some tapioca puffs. Surprisingly, this restaurant also had some of the most interesting desserts that I’ve had in a while – a deconstructed pavlova of sorts and a decadent, modern-looking chocolate pudding.

Seaside Sunsets and Birthday Treats

For my birthday in May, we picked the last-minute destination of Jersey Island, one of the English Channel Islands. Although I had little time to plan this trip, I think that Jersey ranks as one of our top (surprising) travel destinations for 2018. We kicked off our night with sunset drinks at the aptly-named Atlantic Hotel’s Ocean Restaurant, which overlooks the Atlantic Ocean on the western side of the island. We opted for the 3-course menu for £65 so we could sample the desserts. Unfortunately, I was too busy enjoying the night that I didn’t take any notes on the food, but at least I took photos. Also, I recall that everything was delicious and plated wonderfully.

Visiting Jersey was a real birthday treat and a foodie weekend at every turn from local winery tastings to visiting a Jersey cow farm. I should write a post about that whole trip.

Seafood Bliss in Cornwall

During the summer, I was rather busy with work except for a weekend trip to Brittany, France, and a 4-day weekend to Cornwall at the end of August. Cornwall is another foodie destination, and we had two memorable meals there.

On our first night, I had booked us dinner at St.Enodoc Hotel, which features a lovely terrace overlooking the Camel Estuary. However, of course, it was raining the night we went. The menu showcases some of Cornwall's finest local produce, and seafood is the star here as it is at most restaurants in the Cornwall area. The restaurant was run by 2008 MasterChef UK winner James Nathan (and formerly run by top chef Nathan Outlaw), but not sure who is at the helm now.

You can’t move to England and have never heard of Chef Rick Stein. He is like a foodie legend here, and we’ve watched his television shows countless of times. He is so famous in Cornwall and owns several restaurants and shops in Padstow that the town is nicknamed “Padstein.”

At Rick Stein’s flagship aptly called the Seafood Restaurant, we had a 3-course lunch for £41 – a reservation I booked a month in advance. I should mention that we even saw Chef Stein walking around the dining room. What a delight!

For my lunch, I had moules marinière in a creamy garlic and parsley broth followed by a roasted fillet of Cornish hake with wilted spinach in a beurre blanc (sauce). Perhaps having two dishes with cream sauces was a bit much, so I just had a strawberry sorbet for dessert. But all very good!

Country Dining in New Forest

For hubby’s birthday in October, we took our bikes on the train and headed out to New Forest for the weekend. We stayed at one of the spa hotels called Careys Manor Hotel, which once was a royal hunting lodge. For dinner one night, we dined inside at the Cambium Restaurant, which is run by Chef Alistair Craig. The whole menu focuses on local ingredients from the forest area, which featured hearty autumnal flavors during our visit. Definitely recommended!

Wonder what delicious meals 2019 will hold for us!

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