Odd Things to smoke

The Borders is lovely, the weather is very nice for the end of year, cold but sunny. My wife got a letter from the dentist saying could she fill in a medical history form and this is where I find things get a bit odd. One question is Do you smoke tobacco, pan, gutkha or supari?

Now this struck me as very odd indeed and shows how things have changed. I have never heard of any of those other than tobacco and I doubt many people born in the Uk have either, so where is this huge influx of foreigners that need to inform they smoke pan? Or is it that the form is inspired by some obscure EU directive and is "universal".

If we have any supari smokers in the Borders please let me know, I wouldn't even know where they came from or what it is!

Ship on the Shore Leith

Our family visited this restaurant last night after our first choice Chop Chop was unexpectedly closed. Its a nice place well decorated and lots of polished wood. The staff are attentive and we were lucky to go un-reserved as many after us were turned away and sent to lesser establishments.

The menu is odd I find, no warming fish soup or chowder and very expensive "plats" of fresh crustacean. However a bit of work found a lovely big 1 kg pot of mussels with big chunky fries that were excellent. My wife had local lobster although it was a small half was well cooked. My son had sea bass done Asian style which while the sea bass was nicely cooked was not the best choice. My advice stick to simple things and you will be very well pleased with the night. We were. The desserts were sweet and chunky to match the chips and the glass of Belhaven Best went down a treat with the mussels.

Just along from here is Shore which we tried twice on the advice of Rick Stein and were disappointed both times. They are all owned by one group, but this particular place has done it right.

WEB SITE

Cafe Cassis - Top Secret

As one approaches Edinburgh from the South East via the A7 one comes into Old Town by the gates to Arthur's Seat park. To the left is Salisbury Road and on that road is the rather excellent Cafe Cassis one of Edinburgh's secret best restaurants. It is hidden away under a small hotel down some stairs.

The chef is French and the food is best described as quality home cooking. Go at lunchtime weekdays for a three course meal absolutely top class for £10 a head! Wow is all I can say as I go back again like it is my grandmothers table. At weekends and in the evening it rises quite a bit to about £25 a head maybe £30 if you choose dishes unwisely.

Cassis is a real find, the place itself is a bit old fashioned as so many French restaurants are, but the food is just worth going back for, whether its Toulouse sausages, or well cooked fish, its what you might get in a small town say 50 miles from Paris, where locals congregate because the food is good and reasonable and most important reliable.

Cafe Cassis website

Off Grid - Almost

Since we acquired our little cottage in the Borders we have been doing small improvements and upgrades while we wait forever for the Borders Council to approve a very minor extension to our house. We applied in July and still not got the final paperwork and warrants.

Meanwhile we had to alter our use of energy. We were paying £150 a month electricity and £2500 a year for oil for the Stanley range cooker. Plus £300 on coal from our open fire. In total £4600 a year energy costs.

Our solution is in two areas. We installed solar pv and a biomass boiler using pellets and changed the open fire into an Aga insert wood burning stove.

So far our experience is that the wood burning stove which converts about 80+% of fuel into heat versus our open fire of 20% is magically good. I light it on cool evenings and it uses about 4 logs all night and warms not just our lounge but also all the corridor. Now with coal we used to feel very little heat at all, it as all about the cosy flame.

The PV is early days but from my calculations we have gone from paying £150 a month to earning £60 a month and free electricity. Of course we have had good weather this autumn so we will see over a year. So far though this looks like a real winner. We have a computer device that turns excess energy into water heating through the immersion.

The biomass is new so all I can report is that it warms the house through and heats the water so it works!. Pellets are £250 a ton which is 100 bags. We are using 1 bag a day but in the winter this may get to be a lot more its hard to be sure yet. But in the summer the PV heats all our water, so we should hardly use the biomass. Even if we use 3 tons thats £750 versus £2500. Plus the government wants you to convert to eco friendly renewable heat so they load the deck by paying you for the install over 7 years. Cannot be bad.

So I am hoping that by next year we will look back on turning £4600 costs into about £1500, saving over £3000pa.

Stack Dim Sum Edinburgh

For anyone who wishes to actually eat real Chinese dim sum, this little unpretentious restaurant off Leith Walk in Dalmenny St is the place to go. Stack is a family kind of place and from the outside almost run down. Inside is not the plush rooms associated with Chinese restaurants but a plain simple room that holds about 8 tables. All of them full of local Chinese eating dim sum very quietly and with great enjoyment. Its a serious eating place.

The quality of the dim sum served is extraordinary and one is immediately aware that this is not the taste one gets in flashier uptown "foreign" oriented Chinese restaurants.

Outstanding for me was the pork ribs in black bean and the amazing rice with pork and pickled vegetables, but all the offerings were at the top of their class. Its all about taste and this place has that. My sons liked the duck spring rolls and we all thought their sui mai was the best we had ever had. But these are highlights in a feast of good.

Captains Galley - Scrabster

The amusing story here is we booked this restaurant for dinner thinking it was a big fish and chip shop. When we arrived and saw the menu table d'hote at £50 each we nearly fell through the floor as we took our two boys 15 and 18 and they are not gourmet eaters.

But oh gosh were we in for one of our greatest surprises. The Captains Galley is not on any of the Michelin Guide starred lists but it should be. Jim Cowie can cook and if not a star he must be very close. He is whimsical which came as a big surprise, when I ordered roast belly pork and oysters as a starter and the dish knocked my socks off. Perfect crispy slow cooked pork combined with oysters so fresh they started climbing off the plate!

All our meals were top of the line and above. A large piece of very fresh cod served roasted with slow cooked ox tails, langoustines simply split and grilled piled high on a plate with a light lime sauce, it was all too much. When one goes to Kitchen in Edinburgh one prepares for a night of exquisite delight, so thinking this was to be a good fish supper ill prepares one for the gastronomy the class the sheer quality of this food.

How he keeps it going stuck in Scrabster (which I guess he won't leave as he has superb access to the freshest catch), I don't know. The restaurant was not full although there may have been 12 others who enjoyed a night to remember. But how do Scrabster folk afford it? How do they not? Its a mystery. Service from Jim's wife was a light touch with everything just right.

A place to go and savor....

Link to captains galley

Roxburgh Hotel near Kelso

Had lunch at this palatial mansion in the hills above Kelso owned by the Duke of Roxburghe. It is billed as a 5 star experience. I cannot confirm this, see below.

Positive

1. Love the atmosphere and the place
2. Nice service fairly attentive staff who smiled and were helpful
3. Well laid out tables nice bathrooms
4. Overall a good attempt at serving a quality lunch 
5. Our vegetarian guest had the best meal, good pasta and simple but nice melon and sorbet
6. My wife's roast beef while not rare enough for her was tasty if a bit tough.
7. Desserts were nicely served and good. 

Negative

1. Let down by frankly poor quality cooking.
2. My minestrone would not be recognized by any Italian. Basically it was blended tinned tomatoes with a few veg and some pasta bits. It had no depth and taste. Minestrone needs good stock and is not a tomato soup but rich pasta and vegetables. 
3. My roast pork belly was really not right. I had a slow roast pork belly as a STARTER recently at a Michelin restaurant and it was twice as big and 10 times as tasty with a superb crispy crust. The tiny piece you served was badly cooked, the skin rubbery and inedible, the pork hard and tough. It was served with bizarre attempt at modern cuisine ie two uncooked spring onions artfully draped over an uncooked piece of fennel, potatoes with no flavor at all. The gravy was nice though.

Finally when I paid the bill the reception asked me if it was a good meal and I replied no, and went into detail to be told "oh sorry".

Chaophraya Edinburgh

Wife and I had an anniversary dinner at this spectacular Thai restaurant just off George St in Edinburgh. Chaophraya Link.

The restaurant is on top of a building and has a glass extension with lovely views over Edinburgh Castle. Its a lively place full of the glitterati of Edinburgh and has a popular bar that attracts its own crowd.

The food is served with panache and its very visual. having said that its not authentic Thai at all. One cannot replace chilli peppers with sweet peppers and get away with it...sorry Chaophraya. Not one dish we had had any bite to it, it was all bland, we might just as well have gone to a Canton Chinese. I think the owners have lost Thailand in an attempt to cater to the crowd.

The starters were the best, we had a lovely pork rib, an excellent duck salad and papaya salad. The dumplings and rolls were average as was the tempura shrimp.  Of the mains the duck with tamarind was good, and all were very eatable. Its just that they didn't taste like Thai food at all. Gone was the sparkle, the bite, the freshness that makes this cuisine stand out.

Finally I have to mention the price, at £160 for 4 people who had no wine I found it very expensive for what we got. Chicken with cashews with maybe 8 pieces of chicken, shrimp with garlic maybe 8 shrimp. We cleaned every plate.

Cross Keys Hotel - Kelso

My wife and I ate there today for Sunday Lunch. They do a carvery on Sunday. The dining room is very nice, decorated after Rennie Macintosh in light wood. The carvery was nice, choice of beef pork and gammon. Service was good and staff pleasant. The price of £40 for two including drinks was excellent.

Its a shame the meal is let down by poor vegetables, tasteless carrots and home care tasting cauliflower yet with a good cheese sauce. I wonder if they are all frozen to be honest. The pork came with the most awful bottled or tinned apple sauce, uneatable.

The other thing was the very minimalist menu. If you didn't want a carvery your choice was fish and chips basically. We didn't fancy any of the very uninteresting deserts so I had coffee which was very good. A simple coffee pot and milk, none of these fancy latte's.

My wife had the best meal which was her starter of Stilton and broccoli soup and crusty bread. The soup was very good, built on a  good stock base and tasty.

Doubt if we would ever eat there again. These run of the mill places with little real thought in the meal are not to my liking.

Cross Keys Link

British Engineering - A Total Failure

Today I decided to replace my bathroom wall heater. My experience shows that British Engineering, once world class has fallen so far as to be useless.

Lets start with removing the 1990 existing heater. The outside screws are Phillips they were so corroded that I had to drill them out. When I got inside I found that the positive and negative were flat head screws and worse the earth was a nut and bolt. So in 1990 British engineers were so bad that they had three different sets of heads all requiring special tools.

Turn to my brand new Eterna wall heater. Take it out of the box and examine it to find that the wall mounting screw locations are all under the heater itself making it impossible to actually screw into the wall!. Now who thought of that brilliant idea? Eterna Wall Heater

The heater itself is on a swivel base, the base cannot be removed from the heater as it uses locked nuts which if removed could not be put back once the heater was mounted. The heater covers the base so you cannot access the screws for wall mounting!

Induction cookers - warning

I love induction cookers and have been pleased with this efficient and fast heat concept. But I have now had two of them and each went wrong within 12 months for the same or similar reasons.

Cracks, as you can see, develop in the case and these cracks let in spill from the pans and then the electrics get damaged and the unit stops working. On one I actually got a nasty electric shock from the controls. I cannot see why they develop. Its not strain from a heavy pan or such as we use them mostly to fry but nevertheless the design seems flawed. In the case above the top is a glass type material and the controls below are one unit so the small strip of plastic is only about 1/2 inch wide and thin so it cracks easily.

US Misses the Point on Indian Diplomat

It seems to me that the US is missing the point on the current outrage in India over the strip and cavity search of a female Indian diplomat. They are of course covering up and standing firm closing ranks etc. and their plaintive cry is "well the maid was abused".

They are missing the point that this case encompasses the rage of a huge country whose people have continually been the subject of bad treatment at US immigration, this is just the point of impact, the female diplomat is just a very good example of a lovely Indian girl stripped in front of callous US Homeland guards and violated.

Claiming the guards "had the right" is foolish and helps no one. Basically why would you strip search and cavity search an accredited Indian diplomat whose supposed crime is she underpaid her worker? How does this justify such a search? Is there any, any at all, reason for the search? Was she suspected of anything...of course not, I know exactly what happened and so do you. She was protesting and the guards said "we we'll show you miss uppity n word".

The US should apologize and discipline all the guards and the senior man who instigated this outrage. Its the least they can do to correct this error of judgement.

Cows are the problem?

The ongoing debates and upsets about ECO global warming and such has me much amused. Today I read that the big problem that the climate scientists failed to understand was cows. Why? Well cows fart a lot and that is the very gas that is supposedly destroying the globe.....believe it or not. So don't sheep and deer fart too? Is Scotland at the forefront of global warming, has this been considered in the debate on Independence? I am sure, if they knew, Cameron and Osborne the terrible Eton twins would tell Scots that if they vote for independence the world will fine them for too many farts...and not just in parliament.

I sit and shiver in the cold Scottish winters which is why their are only 5 million people living in a beautiful land almost as big as England. I seriously don't believe in global warming. I think its all a lot of fuss about nothing, and that the same scientists who made us all stop eating eggs for 20 years will one day say "Ooops we got it wrong...sorry" and return to their cozy funded research, isolated form the real world as they are.

Best White Bread

Well I didn't ever expect to have to award the "Best" to two different bread shops but the reality is that this is true. The bread shop in Peebles I think its called Forsyth but its close to the gas station on the same side makes the finest tasting white bread I have had for a long time. Their wholewheat sucks though as its one of those crumbly loaves and not a good taste.

Fords in Berwick maintains its crown as by far the best brown bread and a very good white and excellent Scottish bread, but Peebles white has a magic taste that reminds one of childhood somehow.

Visit to Barcelona

Our family visited Barcelona and found it a lovely sophisticated little city, we had a great vacation, even our teenage sons admitting reluctantly they enjoyed it!. We stayed on a boat in the Yacht marina among the super yachts, quite an experience, picture of me eating breakfast on deck wow felt a million dollars. The yacht is really great mainly because the host and owner Cas is just the best, he makes you feel at home and caters to your every whim. Their web site is http://www.bed-and-breakfast-barcelona.com/ one of the nicest ways to visit a city.

The city reeks of Gaudi, he really is Barcelona in many ways as his vast artistic genius fills the city and affects everywhere.

We had the most fun however around Montjuic the hilly North of the city where the architecture and feel of the place is splendid. There are good restaurants everywhere serving the best of Spain and around the globe

Fish and Chips Kelso - The Town House

Had a late night fish and chips from this fairly new chip shop in Kelso. The other one is not very good at all but this one is not bad. I would rate it about a 5/10 The chips were big and chunky which was good , the batter a bit oily but ok. The mushy peas were awful and sweet tasting, no idea where they came from never tasted mushy peas like them before. Just like many of these place a menu that is so extensive its obvious they can't cook it all properly. Why do the new breed of chip shops think they must cook 500 dishes??

When  Chip shop brochure says they also sell cat food and aspirin one has to wonder where chip shops are going frankly!

Our Own Ooft! hot sauce

My wife and I have spent two years developing a family daily recipe into a product. Our table always had hot sauce based on my wife's fathers recipe. Friends begged for a bottle and in the end we decided to make it for sale. Well two years on and we have learned a lot but now we do have a product to sell.

http://www.ooftsauce.com/

Kweilin - Edinburgh

This friendly little Chinese on Dundas St is the best Chinese I have eaten in Scotland. It is expensive, as four of us was nearly 150 pounds. But in fairness we had a whole lobster in black bean which was very nice indeed. Do not choose sweet and sour fish as its a bit fishy I found ( menu said sea bass or monkfish but I think we were served a lesser fish), and the char sui was a bit dry, but the rice, noodles and choi sum was top class. It is noted for fresh seafood so i would suggest sticking to that, but they can cook. Seriously good Chinese in a nice room.

The true horror of British Restaurants

In the 1960's and 70's British restaurants were known all around the world by travelers as the worst. They served up awful food using microwaves, and this period has been epitomized in many cooking programs as the "scampi and chips" generations.

Unfortunately despite the efforts of the Roux brothers in the 70's until today and of many many chefs down to Jamie Oliver today the real problem has not been uncovered until my visit to Siamese Kitchen in Duns this week made me realize.

The big problem is the British people themselves who put up with rubbish and say "oh well it wasn't bad really..." when it was in fact awful. The lack of understanding of real cuisines (what can one expect from British travelers who go to Spain and order fish and chips)  has led them to accept totally awful Chinese, Thai and Indian restaurants who produce to rote their bland boring chop sueys and rogan joshs, cooked below par, with little flavor and very few original or fresh ingredients.

The number of times we have been recommended restaurants by people and when we tried them we were shocked at how bad they were is almost 100%.  In this blog I have tried to be very fair to all the restaurants reviewed but if you read them there are VERY few who have not had serious problems. You get what you pay for is not true. You get what you deserve is maybe closer to the truth, if we don't complain and ask questions we will get this rubbish forever...think about it!

Siamese Kitchen - Duns

Oh dear what to say about this, the only Thai restaurant in the area? Two lovely ladies run it and they have spotlessly clean kitchens and are lovely people. Unfortunately they have either allowed their cooking to deteriorate to locals tastes, or they fail to cook properly. I think the latter as the pad thai had echoes of the real thing, but sadly lacks all flavor. Thai cooking is all about the use of FRESH herbs  peppers and they have eliminated all that. Also the chicken with basil and peppers has no basil and no peppers so as you can imagine is pretty bland! What a shame, they are both Thai I think and they probably cook great food for themselves but serve up this watered down bland concoction for guests. I cannot recommend it which is a great shame as the Borders desperately needs alternatives to haggis and neeps!!