Katyboo1’s Weblog

Didn’t get in until late, so I’m updating using the time machine method.  Andrea and I spent the evening immersed in Henry VI part I, and I was far too tired to tell you all about it when I got in.  I was exhausted after all those battles!  It was brilliant though.  I am now very excited about seeing part II on Saturday and part III next week.  I am just a bit sad that they stopped after III.  Still, Richard III creeps up on us after that, so we won’t be entirely done with names and numbers.

Talking of battles I must just let you know that the pancakes went off without a hitch and the children actually managed to behave themselves long enough for me to cook them, which was a rare and wonderful moment in our lives.  I have made the executive decision that I don’t like cooking pancakes, and while I am quite happy, nay ecstatically happy even, for someone to open a pancake house, preferably in Glenfield, I will not be applying for the job of short order cook.  They’re just too fiddly.  By the time I’d cooked seven of the bloody things, the kitchen was dripping with batter, there was a pall of greasy, pancake flavoured smoke over everything, the table was stuck together with chocolate spread and syrup and I hadn’t managed to eat one.  A woeful state of affairs I think you will agree.  The only good thing about it was that the children were so sticky that they had no choice but to stay at the table, because they were welded to it.

We opted for traditional English pancakes in the end, and to add insult to injury, after slaving over a hot stove, they all agreed that they prefer American style pancakes.  I do confess that I agree with them, although I didn’t say that at the time.  I held my dripping ladle in a threatening manner and stared balefully at them through the smoke instead.  There is a particularly fine pancake house in Las Vegas where you can get sweet and savoury ones of every size and description.  I love the plate of tiny dollar sized ones.  You can eat several hundred at a time before you start to feel sick, and because they are small you somehow feel more healthy when you’re doing it!

What I want to know is why we don’t have pancake restaurants in England.  There used to be one in Nottingham, called ‘The International House of Pancakes’, which closed down.  There are also a few in London which are a chain called: ‘My Old Dutch’, which are excellent, but other than that, the pancake cupboard is bare. 

Now I can’t believe that people don’t want to eat them, given the levels of enthusiasm with which pancake day is approached by all and sundry, and by the overwhelming smell of pancakes cooking which greeted me and the kids as we walked down our road on Tuesday night.  There is definitely a market for the humble pancake, so why is nobody exploiting this?  I know that I don’t like cooking them, but somebody must.  After all, if a chain called Spudulike can still be in profit after all these years, there must be room for a pancakeulike near you.  I am going to offer free marketing to the person who agrees to start a pancake chain in the U.K., on the proviso that they open the first one in Leicester.  It’s a niche that needs to be filled my friends…

The Dutch also know how to do good pancakes, even though theirs are the flatter, more European variety.  They are particularly good on fillings.  I used to go to Amsterdam quite a bit when my ex-husband worked for a Dutch publishing firm.  We would visit a pancake house called Meneer Panne kuuk.  I know it’s not spelled like this in Dutch, but that’s what it sounded like.  Translated it is Mr. Pancake.  Anyway, I have no idea if it’s still there, because this was years ago.  I do recommend heartily that you try and search it out however if you happen to go there.  Eating stacks of pancakes the size of your head smothered with cream, is infinitely preferable to sitting in a coffee shop getting stoned out of your gourd in my opinion.  Some people obviously like to do both.  I think that the getting stoned bit just wastes time and interferes with your ability to consume pancakes by the yard.  Not good.

There also used to be a very fine Peruvian restaurant which did the most delicious chocolate cakes.  I visited there on several occasions.  I have never been to a Peruvian restaurant anywhere else, or even seen one, but if you do find one, I recommend trying it out.  Having said that, if I were ever to go to Peru I expect I would be heartily disappointed by the cuisine which would be nothing like what I was expecting (I expect it would be quite llama heavy).  It might be nice, but I have my doubts.

A friend of mine used to live in Goa for six months a year (nice work if you can get it).  The rest of the year she lived in Cricklewood, so you feel that she really did deserve the time off.  It’s hard work living in Cricklewood.  Not everyone has the stamina for it.  I asked her what was the first thing she did when she got home after her six months off.  She said that she went to the local takeaway for a curry!  Apparently, the curry we eat here bears no resemblance whatsoever to what they eat in India.  Both are good, but worlds apart.  Someone told me that one of the main ingredients in most standard takeaway places in the U.K. is Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup.  Whether that’s true or not I don’t know, but it’s an interesting thought.  It’s what my mum always used to feed us when we were ill.  Maybe that’s why I find curry so comforting.

The other interesting world food fact that I have been puzzling over is the fact that we do Mexican food extremely badly in this country.  There are Mexican restaurants, that dreadful chain of them which lurk in leisure parks next to the equally execrable Frankie and Benny’s springs to mind, but they are hideous.  Oxford has a goodish Mexican restaurant, which I believe is one of a few, called Maxwells, but other than that the world of Mexican cuisine has yet to reach us.  This is a shame, as it’s delicious.  Any people who can come up with deep fried ice cream as a dessert, are fairly close to the top of the list in my book.

The weird thing is that the best Mexican food I have ever tasted was actually in Canada.  The Canadians do spectacularly good Mexican food.  It’s delicious.  It’s pretty good in New York as well, but Vancouver is the win.  I was discussing this with a well travelled friend of mine who had been to Mexico on her holidays.  I was just congratulating her on picking a country with a fantastic cuisine when she looked very glum and said that the food had been hideous and that they couldn’t wait to come home to something nice.  I was amazed at this and immediately took Mexico off of my list of gourmet holiday destinations.  She brightened up a bit and said that they had had one delicious meal while they were there, in Tijuana.  She and her partner had been so impressed that they had gone to thank the cook and it turned out that she was from Vancouver!  This added fuel to my theory of Canadians being the best Mexicans, which is a very international way of thinking about things.

Jason was mulling over the idea of a job in Belgium this week.  Now before you get excited, it’s never going to happen.  Whenever there is bad weather, or the interest rates rise, or he’s had a bad lunch at the works’ canteen, he comes home to look at all the jobs that are available overseas.  Before we were together he worked overseas a lot, but since then he merely scrolls through the job pages wistfully.  This was one of his wistful days! 

I wouldn’t mind Belgium quite honestly.  Brussels is supposed to be one of the gourmet capitals of the world, and I’ve never been there.  I know they’re obsessed with DIY and statues of small boys pissing, I read a book about it once, but I do like my food, and as long as they didn’t want me to wire a plug or watch the small boy pissing, I would be fine.  My only experience of Belgium was that I once had the great misfortune to have spent a week in a dank hotel in Ostend with my parents when I was twelve.  It was a hideous experience, the only high point of which was my frenetic consumption of waffles.  I ate to forget…

My father should never, ever be allowed to pick holiday destinations.  He has a knack of picking the most repellent places, and then finding the worst hotels, and matching restaurants.  He had fond memories of Ostend from 1963, so we went.  The whole town was awash in a sea of yappy type dogs, and yappy type dog crap.  It was architecturally reminiscent of an NCP carpark with fully inclusive hot and cold running piss filled stair wells, and there was more red light district than there was town.  One one memorable evening when my dad decided that it would be a good idea for us to go for a walk for our health, he got us lost in the red light district for three hours and then trod in a huge pile of dog shit while my mother alternatively screamed imprecations at him and kept shrieking at my brother and me to ’stop looking at those women, you’ll go blind!’

The hotel was made out of chipboard and pine veneer planks.  The lounge was the size of my dining room table.  It smelled like a dentist surgery with a faint whiff of cat pee and was festooned with rubber plants.  It was so claustrophobic that you couldn’t sit there for more than five minutes without going insane.  This meant that as the rooms were the size of Youth Hostel bunk beds, there was nowhere to relax.  Consequently we had to go out a lot. 

My dad hates spending money, but had no choice but to book us on an extensive list of coach tours.  We motored through the flat wastelands of Belgium for weeks.  We went to Brugges one day.  It was beautiful.  I don’t remember eating anything because my Dad was horrified at the price of everything.  We went to Holland another day, in a vain attempt to escape.  We spent the day in a gorgeous little town somewhere.  I remember that they had a restaurant on a floating raft in the middle of a lake.  By this time we were chewing our shoes off with hunger.  My mother took charge and insisted that my father had to feed us.  We ate tiny pancakes in the middle of the lake.  They were some of the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted (as we had been starving for five days and the only thing the restaurant served was potato croquettes, a minced rat would have probably tasted like manna from heaven, but there you go!).  My dad had hysterics for about five hours afterwards as they cost about twenty quid each.  My mother was unrepentant and told him it served him right for making us stay in Ostend in the first place.  She had wanted to go on a wine tasting holiday in France…

His other outstanding achievement was in Spain when we were travelling from one coast to the other and he managed to book us into a hotel full of thieves and murderers by the side of a river which resembled an open sewer and in which rats the size of dolphins gambolled freely.  The restaurant was a truck stop which was so thick with cigarette smoke that you had to wear an aqualung, and the rooms were what can only be described as sticky.  That was the memorable occasion that my brother actually broke the entire toilet free of the bathroom floor and panicked (rightly so) because there was a six foot fountain of sewagey water jetting out from the broken floor tiles.  It was a pleasure and a delight.

Usually things are o.k. as long as you avoid going anywhere with my dad that he has booked and which involves an overnight stay.  I have had memorably odd holidays with other people, including backpacking across France for a week with my elderly grandmother, who insisted that she wanted to stay by the Eiffel Tower in Paris, only to find that it was too expensive.  Instead we ended up staying in a working brothel in the Arab quarter and sharing the bed with a collection of random stranger’s toenail clippings.  I was knackered and fell asleep (fully clothed I might add), on top of the bed.  She stayed up all night listening to the shenanigins of our uninhibited neighbours and updating her knowledge of sexual relations in the twentieth century.  It’s not many people who can claim that they have taken their granny to a French brothel.  She was not impressed.  It was the toenails that did it…

Now as you know, I have a genetically coded fear of camping, in which I am prone to run screaming for the hills at the mere mention of beetles in the ground sheet.  I will say this however, you cannot say that I haven’t lived, nor that I don’t know what it’s like to rough it.  It’s all part of life’s rich pattern apparently.