Food

Some Cheese Bloggery

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Wandering into town today (because we have no snowpocalypse here in Darkest Somerset) I discovered a stall in our little mall selling cheeses. The young man running it has a mobile deli business, and being based in Somerset cheese is mostly what he sells. So of course I ended up buying some.

Not having Kevin here to help, I didn’t buy a pile of different cheddars to do a comparative tasting. I did, however, taste a few at the stall. The one called “Glastonbury Thwacker” was smooth and tasty but not quite as sharp as I live. The “blue vein” from Green’s of Glastonbury was much stronger, but I eventually opted for the equally strong and more delightfully named “Old Stinky”.

I also bought a Dorset Blue Vinney, a smoked cheddar with garlic that is guaranteed to see off any vampires and Twlight fans, and a Somerset Camembert. French readers will doubtless roll their eyes at that last one, and they are probably right to do so. However, Somerset cows are every bit as precious as California cows, and these cheese were allegedly personally signed by a lady called Bella so I figured I should see if these bovines know what they are talking about.

Running Errands

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Sunday is generally housework and errands day here. That includes maintaining the technology. Where other people might clean the car, we work on the electronics. So today we have been to the Toy Shop (otherwise known as Frys) and spent lots of money on gleaming technological goodies, including a 1 Tb drive with a RAID mirror for serious backup of my work-related data. More on not-so-superfluous technology later, but this post is actually about food.

On long shopping trips (which we still haven’t finished, we just came back to dump some stuff and collect something we had forgotten) we tend to end up eating out. Inspired by this chart, and by the enthusiastic recommendations of Damien G. Walter, we headed for In-n-Out Burger. As burger bars go they actually are quite good. To start with they are, as far as I know, the only burger chain in the USA that does not try to force you to eat Evil Dill Pickle. Everything is cooked to order, including the fries which are actually chopped up from real potatoes in the restaurant rather than being extruded and frozen in a factory. The fries have been cooked in 100% vegetable oil (trans-fat and cholesterol free) since 1948, and you get a packet of salt rather than having them come pre-salted. So all-in-all I would say that Damien is right to be enthusiastic about them, even if they are burgers.

If this seems horribly un-American, well this is California. Also their cheeseburgers are infinitely extensible. The menu includes a single and a double, but the cash registers are programmed to allow you to add as many extra patties and cheese slices as you like. Naturally this has tempted some college students to try to set records that would daunt even Mike Gatting.

Out and About

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

The last 24 hours have been fairly busy for Kevin and myself. We’ve managed no less than four separate events in that time.

Last night we attended the Transgender Day of Remembrance service in San Francisco. It was extremely well attended — not just standing room only but packed solid. The event went very smoothly, and included messages of support from Mayor Newson and the State Senate (the latter delivered personally by Mark Leno). It is always depressing to attend such events and hear about how many people have been killed (often very brutally killed), but at the same time it is good to see more and more people expressing sorrow over the murders, and more politicians prepared to stick their necks out by doing so themselves.

Having finished there we headed off to FyDySyFy, a Friday night fannish meet-up that takes place in the bar of the Hyatt Regency down by Embarcadero. It is a fairly small event — there were only six of us there — but the hotel is truly spectacular inside and the hot buttered rum they were serving as a winter warmer went down very well indeed. Many thanks to Espana Sheriff for inviting us along.

This morning we had a board meeting of SFSFC, much of which was given over to a post-mortem on the World Fantasy Convention that we ran. Thankfully most people seem to be very happy with us, though the art show was well below par and the World Fantasy Board appears to never be happy with the performance of its operating committees. Most importantly, we did not lose money, though the people who are continuing to spread rumors of rapacious profiteering on our part will need to be very creative with our accounts in order to justify their claims.

Finally this afternoon a group of us headed up to Alameda for an open day at St.George’s Distillery, our local vendor of superb flavored falling-over-water. The theme of event was “prom night” and there were many fine outfits in evidence, but we decided to go as the school’s goth kids. Kevin Roche and Andy Trembley were superbly attired as ever, and my outfit went down sufficiently well for one young lady to ask me if she could have her picture taken with me.

As well as various spirits, fruit liqueurs and so on, the event features numerous quality food vendors, including another local favorite: Recchuiuti Chocolates. There was also a band called Farewell Typewriter who played mostly cover songs but were very good.

So I’m totally rocked out on absinthe and 80’s pop numbers. Thankfully Kevin makes a wonderful designated driver. I’m now off to drink lots of water and orange juice. I’ll leave you with a photo of us in the old aircraft hanger that the distillery calls home.

Cheryl & Kevin in Hanger One

The Tim Tams Have Landed

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Heads up, America, the world’s best chocolate biscuit is now available at a grocery store near you!

Yes folks, Pepperidge Farm has done a deal to import Tim Tams from Australia. (And I do mean import – it says “Product of Australia” on the wrapper, which I don’t think it would say if they were made locally.) Our local Safeway has both the standard and caramel flavors. Apparently they did a trial last winter, but the biscuits were exclusive to Target. According to this report, this winter the standard and caramel flavors will be available widely and Target will have an exclusive on the dark chocolate variety.

Stock up while you can, people. They will only be available through March.

By the way, this report suggests that there are differences between the US and Australian versions. That’s by no means impossible – Arnott may have had to change the recipe to comply with US food laws, or Pepperidge management’s ideas of what Americans like. I’m not sure I have any actual Australian-bought Tim Tams, but I do have a packer of the “Arnott’s Original” variety that World Market has been importing for some time. I will do a tasting and report back.

Morning in Nottingham

~ Cheryl

Hello, I am awake. It is a bit overcast here today, but it looks like it might burn off. My room is on the Floor #9, which after allowing for the function space and converting to US numbering is, I think, the 13th floor of the building. I have a fabulous view out over the city, but I think I’m looking the wrong way to see Sherwood Forest. Some mad fool is up in a hot air balloon and is doubtless getting very cold.

More about the convention later. In the meantime, here is the web site for the food festival.

Settling In

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

I have spent the evening doing important stuff like eating curry and drinking Guinness. Specifically:

Pete Crowther and Les Edwards are celebrating their 60th birthdays and we have been helping them.

“Chutney” in Nottingham is a rather good Indian restaurant.

Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem is a well known local pub that dates back all the way to 1189 and claims to be the oldest pub in England. Although they started business almost 600 years before the founding of the Guinness brewery, they have managed to keep up with modern developments in beer.

Tomorrow there is a convention. There is also a big food festival in the city center. Choices, choices… I think I can do both.

It appears from the program that the British Fantasy Awards banquet is tomorrow night and not Sunday lunchtime. This is good, because it means that all you folks in the USA will be able to join us. Expect live coverage on SFAW from around 4:00pm Eastern, 1:00pm Pacific.

Boston Dinner: Thursday

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Tomorrow night around 7:00pm Frank Wu and I will be doing a “Frank and Cheryl celebrate their Hugos” dinner somewhere near the Prudential Center (‘cos that’s where I am staying). I don’t know exactly details yet, but if you are interested in coming along email or tweet me.

Kay: Bri will call you tonight. I’d love to meet you.

And no, Frank and I are not paying for everyone. Winning fan Hugos is great for the egoboo, but gets you no money. Also I’m not drinking as I have a training course to run the next day. 🙁

More Funny Foreign Food

~ Cheryl

I have been very remiss on the food updates. Time for a long post.

We need to start in New Zealand where various people offered me interesting substances. There were Toffee Pops, which are rather like flat, round Twixes. They were nice, but not a patch on Tim Tams, I’m afraid. Rather more interesting were Pineapple Chunks – lumps of pineapple-flavored candy coated in chocolate. The candy can be either chewy or crunchy, which may depend on the ambient temperature or on the batch – no one seems quite sure.

Also found in New Zealand, though it is originally from South America, is the feijoa, a type of fruit related to the guava. I had a feijoa smoothie at it was quite pleasant. Despite what Wikipedia says, the Kiwis pronounce it fey-joe-uh. Us Californians know better.

Finally in New Zealand there was the great Mars v Moro taste test. This, you will recall, was all about the Mars Bar (made by Mars, and not called Mars in the US) and the seemingly identical Moro Bar (made by Cadbury’s), both of which are available in NZ. Having done a back-to-back tasting I can confirm Peter Hamilton’s judgment that the Moro is much less sickly-sweet. Whether this is a good thing or not is open to debate, as I suspect it means you can eat a lot more of them in one go.

In Australia I mainly contented myself with checking out new varieties of Tim Tams. I particular like the Black Forest variety in the Sweet Surrender range. I also discovered the new Tim Tam Crush range, which is a different shaped biscuit. I have tried the honeycomb and a mint flavor, and I have a cookies & cream packet yet to sample. They are nice, but I much prefer the traditional biscuits.

While the eating in Adelaide was very good, there was little in the way of bush food. Even the cheeses we bought from the market were French. So for my last night here I determined to find something Australian to eat. The hotel restaurant obliged. For starters I had Morton Bay Bugs (a type of small lobster) done like a prawn cocktail. The main course was Barramundi with stuffed squid in a bouillabaisse sauce. And for dessert I tried some local cheeses from Raw Materials in Gippsland. The cheddar was pretty good, though not very strong by Somerset farm standards. The blue was OK, though a bit uneven in texture, but I’m sorry to say that the “brie” tasted nothing like brie.

Seeing that I was dining alone, my waitress offered to fetch me something to read. I ended up with some copies of Australian Vogue and was astonished to discover from it that Australia is now officially the most obese nation on Earth. And this from a nation that is supposedly obsessed with sport! Obviously they all only watch it these days. I know I have eaten too much while I have been on the road. I ought to go out and walk. But I have a luxury hotel bathroom at my disposal, and a new flavor of Lush bath bomb. I’ll start the exercise regime tomorrow.

Funny Foreign Food

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

It is a lovely day here in Auckland – pretty much like an English summer’s day – so I managed to get out to the little shopping area close to the hotel. There is a small convenience store there and I went looking for strange New Zealand food. I’m afraid there wasn’t much, especially not that was easily to sample when living in a hotel. I did find a flavor of TimTams that I had not seen before (the “sweet surrender” chocolate hazelnut version), but they are, of course Australian.

The one success I had was to find the necessary supplies for an experiment. You can buy Mars bars in New Zealand (that’s Milky Way bars for Americans), but in addition Cadbury’s markets a very similar chocolate bar called a Moro. My local food expert, Peter Hamilton, assures me that the Moro is far superior. I shall do a comparative tasting and report back.

Montreal: Eating, Tourism, Supplies

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

As we had a few hours before Kevin needed to leave for the airport we took walk around the city. It was very productive. I have a lot of photos. Meanwhile here are some highlights.

The breakfasts at Eggspectation continue to be awesome.

The archaeological museum, Pointe-à-Callière, will be having an exhibition about pirates during Worldcon.

Old Town (Vieux-Montreal) is well worth a visit. There’s a long stretch of Rue Saint-Paul where every second or third shop is a restaurant. We found a Polish restaurant, a Portuguese restaurant, several places that advertised good beer and so on. Really, it is hard to go hungry here.

After that we checked out the IGA grocery store just up the road from the Holiday Inn. It has everything you need for party supplies, and if the order is over CA$50 they’ll deliver for CA$4.75. It also happens to back on to a large shopping mall with a big SAQ (government liquor store) if you don’t like the wines and beers in IGA.

There are also several small grocery stores in Chinatown.

The short version is that Montreal is starting to look like a really good Worldcon venue.

Kevin has his own assessment here.

Ou Est M Roberson?

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

As we all know, Chris Roberson is in the bar. But which bar, exactly? Where are people going to gather to drink in Montreal? That was one of the questions Kevin and I have been trying to answer today. We are not having much luck.

The obvious places to look were the Intercontinental and Embassy Suites. Both hotels are very close to the Palais, and experience from Denver suggested that the drinking crowd would not want to have to walk all the way to the party hotel. However, the Intercontinental is currently undergoing renovations and we didn’t even manage to find a bar in there. The Embassy Suites does have a bar, but it is way too small for our group.

Google is not much help. A search for pubs in Montreal didn’t find any sponsored links within easy reach of the Palais, but there are a couple of non-sponsored possibilities that we need to look into. So I guess it is out onto the streets again for us.

Update: Well, that wasn’t hugely successful. Here’s what we found.

The bar in the Holiday Inn has a fair amount of good seating space, but the beer selection is poor. It would be a good place to meet up if you are planning an expedition into Chinatown, but I don’t think it is a good prospect for serious drinking.

Also at the Chinatown end of the Palais is a small, boutique hotel called Place D’Armes. It boasts a lounge bar called Suite 701. It looks like a place for serious martini drinkers, and is probably quite expensive.

The main entrance to the Intercontinental is on Rue Saint-Jacques, and by going in that way we found a small bar attached to an expensive restaurant. Again it doesn’t look like a serious drinking venue, but at least poor Jonathan won’t expire.

Across the road is a place called Pub St. James, but it looks like it has gone out of business. There’s also a tapas bar, but it advertises DJs, and free drinks for women on Tuesdays, which I think tells you everything you need to know about its purpose.

So we went back to the Delta. The bar there is OK. There’s a fair amount of seating space, and it has a better beer selection than the Holiday Inn. It is only about 5 minutes walk from the Palais, and the evening programming and parties will be there. We explained to the manager than in August we’d be bringing along a large number of crazy British beer fanatics who would drink her establishment dry and she didn’t faint with shock.

There are a couple of Irish pubs a bit further away, but unless anyone has any better suggestions it looks like the Delta will be the bar of choice.

Montreal – Day #3

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Good morning world. Kevin and I are off to check on the quality of the local dim sum here in Montreal’s Chinatown. Yes, I know, it is a tough job, but someone has to do it. Our local food guide, Jo Walton, has proved wonderfully effective to date and we are very much looking forward to this. There may be some twitterage on the live blog.

Montreal = Win

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

So far so good. Of course it always depends on what you want out of a Worldcon site, but here’s why we are happy.

From the front door of our hotel (the Holiday Inn Select) we can see the back door of the convention center across the street. Our hotel is on the edge of Chinatown, and this evening we had a very nice Chinese meal for around CA$15/head (including tip) at a restaurant that is open until 4:00am.

Chinatown: every Worldcon should have one.

More in the morning. Right now we need sleep.

In Full Swing – #pcon

~ Cheryl

We have been to dinner. That is, Paul Cornell, Kim Newman, Eugene Byrne, Maura McHugh and myself. We went to the restaurant across the road that I had spotted on my previous trip. The B movie posters in the windows have been replaced with pictures of giant robots. They are running a 2 for 1 promotion. We ate very well, and had win, and it cost 88 Euro for five of us. Bargain. Going back tomorrow.

If you are on Twitter you will have noticed that I had Duck Shepherd’s Pie for dinner. Thank you for all of the suggestions as to how one herds ducks. It took the restaurant a while to round them up, but it was worth the effort.

I’m now back in the hotel bar. It is now Saturday. The bar is packed and doing a roaring trade. I am, of course, only here because of the wifi access. The pint of wheat beer that Feorag recommended is only here to prevent me from being thrown out.

Meanwhile, I have email to answer.

Shopping Report

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Today I went to investigate the new Westfield Mall in Shepherd’s Bush. Bay Area folks will be used to such things, but it is a bit of a departure for London. It is, however, dead easy to get to by Tube, which is a very good thing. It is probably about the same size as Valley Fair, but with more open space inside it. Fortunately today it was pretty quiet.

I didn’t buy a Hugo dress. I did find a very nice dark blue one in Debenhams (just the color you suggested, Keri), but they had nothing between a 10 and a 20, and in any case it was £100 which seemed a bit painful after last year’s $22 bargain.

I almost bought a coat in Next. It looked great on the mannequin, but it was a bit padded and consequently made me look even more fat than I am, which is not good. But I did manage to find new stocks of Whittard’s mango tea at last. I’d been getting worried that they had stopped making it.

On the way back I stopped off at Oxford Circus to check out Hugo nominees in Borders. FAIL. Not one of the Best Novel nominees was available in the SF section. i did finally find one lost and lonely copy of The Graveyard Book in the YA section, but that was all. Tsk.

I did also check Liberty in case they had a Vivienne Westwood dress I wanted them to put aside in case I win the lottery, but no luck there either.

The other piece of news I got from the trip is that the Victoria Line will be closed all weekend. This has caused me to change my plans for tomorrow. Instead of going to find a pub for the Wales-Ireland I’m going to stay here and listen to the games on the radio instead. If we win I can watch the game on the iPlayer next week.

Shopping and Twitter

~ Cheryl ~ 11 Comments

I spent a few hours today in Taunton shopping and looking at apartment rental prices (which are finally starting to come down). Much of this has been chronicled on my Twitter feed. I’m finding Twitter very useful for this sort of thing, because it is so easy with the iPhone to take pictures and tweet about them. In particular I have been cheesetweeting. I’ve also reported on the books I have purchased.

On the subject of Twitter, I do now have the technology to create a daily Twitter digest here. I’m holding fire on this because I gather that this really annoys some people. I can’t see why (though I do ignore Twitter digest posts myself), but I’m willing to entertain explanations.