Irish coffee, Ireland style

Yes, apparently you have to go to Ireland to get the real deal.  The difference is in the cream:  over there, they layer on thick cream that doesn't dissolve like the sprayed-from-a-can whipped cream with which it's served in the States.  Powers is the whisky of choice.

I had one at Tigh Ned's ("Tigh," pronounced like tea, appropriately enough for this blog; it basically means pub) on Inis Óirr (i.e, Inisheer), one of the Aran Islands, while waiting out some rain and the arrival of a pony trap for a tour of some of the island.  This came with sugar already in it, just not so much that the primary taste sensation was sweetness.  It was a good cup of coffee in which I could taste the whisky, and the thick cream made it smoother.

The next day, I had this one at the Roundstone Cafe in the village of Roundstone in Connemara.  The lady at the cafe served it without sugar so I could add to taste ... and the Demarara crystals were lovely.  Fortunately, I think us kids can try this at home!

We were on a short meal and leg-stretching break, and I chose to have an Irish coffee then nosh on a Clif Bar back on the bus.

It was just as good as the one at Tigh Ned's.  There's a new Irish restaurant in Oakland near Jack London Square, called Slainte, and I'll have to see if they make them like Mam used to, won't I?

BTW, one of our day trip guides mentioned the Irish sitcom "Father Ted," in the context of acceptable Irish alternatives to actual naughty words.  The opening helicopter shot sequence is up on YouTube, and the chopper flies over Inis Óirr.  The dead giveaway is the old shipwrecked tanker on the southern shore; the sea heaved it up in a winter storm in 1960 and there it's sat ever since.  Lovely little island.  It's in the Gaeltacht, but apparently people speak Irish at home and among their friends and English in public, so I didn't have a chance to look like an amateur.

Chicken Curry Pie, Mash and Peas – The Pie Maker – Galway

When Bing Crosby sang about little cottages on Galway Bay, he made the town sound like a quaint little fishing village.  That would be nearby Claddagh, birthplace of the famous rings, which got razed and rebuilt after a tuberculosis epidemic.  But, no worries:  someone has lovingly recreated a typical cottage where folks can sit around a fireplace while singing songs and telling stories.  Seriously, not ironically.

Galway City itself, population 79,000 in a county of 225,000, is a university town offering an acclaimed tech education well below Stanford prices.  Parts of it are shiny techie brand new.  And yet, the center of town is a charming pedestrian mall whose streets angle off from each other.  Down toward the Spanish Gate (Spanish and Portuguese sailors were early trade partners) is the adorably cute hole in the wall called The Pie Maker, looking like a relic from another age.

Only it isn’t.  The space was carefully designed and compiled, and the owners would love to franchise it, so it’s a good thing the food is excellent.  Your Correspondent had a chicken curry pie with mash (as in, potatoes) and mushy peas that weren’t mushy at all.  And (an imported) ginger beer.  We chatted with the manager and the eponymous Pie Man, and expressed the opinion that a version would be a hit in San Francisco, but the financial risk would be prohibitive.  They asked what they could charge for their pies here, and we were thinking the Bi Rite Market, artisanal food crowd and decided the pies without sides could probably go for $18 or more (in Galway, with sides, €13).  They were stunned.  We would have been too, except we get to do our being stunned at home in San Francisco and knew whereof we spoke.

All in all, a very delightful late lunch.  Oh, and the JFK portrait on the wall.  I saw one of Jack and Jackie elsewhere, so apparently it's still a thing and this may not have been for effect.

Full Irish Breakfast – The Clarence – Dublin

Your Correspondent’s first hotel stay in Ireland was The Clarence, on the Quay at the edge of the Temple Bar.  This stretch is Wellington Quay; the names change every couple of blocks.  This hotel is owned by Bono and The Edge of U2, who were out on tour … not that we were likely to run into them anyway.  The accommodations were lovely.  Breakfast for guests was at a discount, so on a big tour day we made sure to fortify with the full Irish breakfast.  The Clarence’s version is done well, with smaller portions than we had elsewhere.  All the elements were there:  eggs, sausage, Irish bacon, black and white pudding, a grilled tomato half, mushrooms, and baked beans.  It’s similar to the full English breakfast, of course, but the Irish bacon is back bacon with a wing that the Eggs Benedict slices don’t have.

We had this breakfast elsewhere with two slices of bacon and two sausages.

The “puddings” are actually rounds from sausages.   The white pudding is on the bland side, but the black pudding can be spicy.  In San Francisco, the Eazy Freezy market on West Portal carries Irish bacon, bangers, and a blood sausage that’s the black pudding but not as big around.  It’s on the spicy side, and does go well with eggs.

The Irish bacon aside, I don’t think this beats an American breakfast of eggs, bacon and hash browns.  It’s not something I could eat every morning … and so I didn’t.  Salmon and eggs, when on the menu, made a lovely change of pace.

Fish and Chips – Super Miss Sue – Dublin

Over the course of two weeks in Ireland, Your Correspondent ate fish and chips only twice, partly because her traveling companion wasn’t keen on them, and she ended up cursed with an overly battered version at a “chipper” in the Temple Bar in Dublin that touts all the celebrities who have eaten there.  The two of us, though, hit the jackpot at SMS, or Super Miss Sue, in Dublin.  Super Miss Sue has a takeaway side and a café side, separated by curtains, and, apparently, a restaurant side that we didn’t even see.  There was loud music in the takeaway, so we were happy to find the café (with this cool neon sign).

The fish and chips were heavenly!  Since it wasn’t busy when we were there (before supper time, because it was our arrival day and we were hungry early), we got to chat with the proprietors, who are actually Brazilian.  True to our suspicions, they do have a special recipe for the batter.  They said it was a secret, and we said we were just curious and not prying into the ingredients.  They also cook the fish and chips in beef tallow, which definitely added to the flavor.

This very filling serving was €16, maybe a little higher than what we’d pay in an Irish bar with food in San Francisco (e.g., Harrington’s).  This definitely lived up to the advance billing.

Day 17-the road to Hana

This vacation has featured a lot of driving. You'd think that being on an island would limit your carbon footprint, but since it's our holiday we're trying to catch a bit of everything to see (and snorkel). So today we drive the Road to Hana. If you're interested you can pick up a cd to listen to as you drive along, one that tells about hotspots and local info. We chose instead to follow along with our old guidebook, new map and eyes, stopping wherever our fancy took us.

Our conclusion was that the Road to Hana is pretty touristy. We got to dip into a few waterfalls, which was fun, but it was a lot of driving to get to Hana. The best part was the drive on the back road around the tip of the island through the lava fields standing in the jeep and feeling the breeze in our hair. There is always someplace beautiful to see on these islands, and Maui doesn't disappoint. If you don't have a lot of time to drive, skip the Road to Hana and go get another shaved ice while you watch the sunset.

Beth's Excellent Adventure—Part 14: O'Neill's Irish Pub, Kings Cross, London

Heya, Adventurers!  This is J.K.’s friend Beth, reporting from England, where I had many culinary adventures and remembered to take pictures of some of them.

My last outing in England was an inside-the-stone-circle tour of Stonehenge.  September, it turns out, is the high season for Stonehenge, so if you have a hankering to do more than walk up a path and stare from a distance, plan ahead.  Inner circle tours are limited; be prepared for an extremely early morning departure from London if you can’t get the late afternoon tour.

And yes, one of the quotes about Stonehenge on a wall in the new visitors center is from guitarist Nigel Tufnel.  You know the one.

My late afternoon in London was comprised of tourist highlights but for one thing.  Another new friend and I bailed at Earls Court (her stop) rather than sit in that day’s bad traffic, and she made me pose for the obligatory shot of pretending to enter the police box there (the original for Dr. Who’s TARDIS).  I got across town on the Underground and a walk just in time before the Temple Church closed to get photos of the effigy of William Marshal (the 1st Earl of Pembroke one).  Best.  Medieval knight.  Evah.  As regent for young Henry III, he reissued the Magna Carta, twice, after John got the Pope to excommunicate the Barons who engineered it.  He saved England from falling to the French at the Battle of Lincoln, when he was 70 years old (Richard the Lionheart had chewed him out once for climbing a siege ladder when he was in his 50s).  The US Naval Academy site has a lengthy essay on him.  Fascinating dude, on that Sandford maternal line family tree (him and two daughters).

The Temple Church is the church of the Templars, and they do play trippy music and sell Da Vinci Code stuff.  From there, the original Temple Bar is a short walk; it was the end of the day and I saw a couple of barristers walking down the street with their perukes in hand or a bad, looking as though they’d had long days before the courts.  Then to Trafalgar Square, and on to hear Big Ben peal, passing tourists taking selfies with a long-suffering decked-out guard at Downing Street.

Then back to Kings Cross, and supper at O'Neill's Irish Pub.  Wild boar and chorizo burger, with Irish cheese.  And a Guinness.  The burger was fabulous, flavorful with dense texture.  The chorizo was a thin slice, Spanish style, not the Mexican sausage type.  The Guinness, alas, wasn’t the original and it wasn’t room temperature.  Great way to finish a special day, though.

Beth's Excellent Adventure—Part 13: Brough Castle Tea Room and Ice Cream Parlour

Heya, Adventurers!  This is J.K.’s friend Beth, reporting from England, where I had many culinary adventures and remembered to take pictures of some of them.

So my Wednesday in Cumbria was going to be a big day:  Setting foot in the actual ancestral village of Sandford, where Sandfords had been documented back to 1186 and were probably there earlier.  There’s a B&B and pub, the Sandford Arms, said to be on the spot of the long-vanished Sandford Manor.  Unfortunately, it was closed for lunch on Wednesdays, so I missed an opportunity to drink in the footsteps of my ancestors and have an ancestral village Tea Time Adventure.

The plaque I’d seen on Google maps street view that had looked like a marker for the original Manor was about local public footpaths and bike paths.  A gentleman unloading yardwork tools out of his car saw me photographing it, and struck up a conversation.  He grew up there, on his grandmother’s farm, and had never known any actual Sandfords.  (This related to a joke the cousins have passed around, regarding the “Sandford pate” on the pub’s menu, that we hoped it didn’t contain any actual Sandfords).  He did suggest that I continue walking that road over the hill and down to the River Eden.  I did, and got my glam shots of the ancestral countryside.

Meanwhile, I had gone back there, and there was no there there.  However, on a return look at the plaque (they call them “boards” in England), next to the “You are here” (you bet I was!) was a notation that said Sandford Manor.  That was just off the fork in the road, and I investigated.  There was one old barn, etc., but it didn’t look as though it could be original with an updated façade.  I took pix anyway.

Walking back toward the bus stop, I saw a suspiciously old-looking building and snapped that.  It had a typical stone garden wall, but at the corner of it was the ruin if something much, much taller.  It was “cob” (stones in a binding material), it looked ancient, and it could only have been the remnant of a Sandford Manor wall.  I’d gotten on the ground, and had actually found a little bit of there there!  This made the trip a little more than “Well, I set foot there!”  It had still been mostly an academic exercise, but our Sanford family in the States had touched the earliest known Sandford dwelling.

With no lunch (or WC stop) to be had in the village of Sandford, I walked down the road to Warcop.  There, where the local is now closed, a gentleman responded to my inquiries by inviting me in for a pit stop and then a cup of tea.  This was the delightful Joseph Richardson, wildlife photographer and campaigner to save the native red squirrel (article but not the promised photo at http://www.cwherald.com/a/archive/eden-man-provides-a-glimpse-intohidden-world-of-red-squirrel.247716.html; see http://www.wildfoxproductions.co.uk and I have to see if there's a US region version of the DVDs or hope he still has VHS tapes).

Since Joseph had some shopping to do in nearby Brough, he dropped me off at my destination there, after we exchanged contact info so we can be pen pals.  I am truly my grandfather’s daughter; Samuel Elliott Sanford traveled the world and made friends wherever he went.  I presume he had the same good taste in new friends.

At my final destination for the day, I had my Tea Time Adventure:  a burger made from local beef, the beef shorthorn (as opposed to the dairy shorthorn).  It was, as happened in the afternoons, clouded up, so I ate this and the green salad (with grapes!) inside amidst the livestock and ranch gear posters.  However, I could have eaten at the picnic tables outside the Brough Castle Farm Ice Cream Parlour & Tearoom.  Forget the stereotypes of Wimpy burgers you may have of England; this was another that had a dense texture and a full, beefy flavour.

And they promise their sundaes can make you more likely to get pregnant, if you're aiming at that.

As for the backdrop:  Whereas Brougham Castle, with only two more letters, is pronounced “Broom,” Brough Castle is pronounced “Bruff.”  Go figure.  It’s another Vieuxpont/Clifford castle restored by Lady Ann Clifford that fell into ruin anyway.  That may sound blasé but it’s not; I will be “digesting” my exposure to this big batch o’ family history in the Border Country for some time to come.

And remembering the burgers already digested.

Beth's Excellent Adventure—Part 12: Indian Plaza, Penrith

Heya, Adventurers!  This is J.K.'s friend Beth on location in England and remembering from time to time to photograph meals.

On my last night in Penrith, I was ready for a sit-down meal that might include a taste of English roast beef. What I turned to instead, out of tiredness and deciding against a full European restaurant experience, was Indian Plaza.

I like saag. In the States it's a dish of creamed spinach with some chunks of lamb. At Indian Plaza, it was a lamb dish with spinach. Big difference. And it was very tasty. I started out with pakoras, which were a little chewy rather than crisp. I liked them.

I had garlic naan with the lamb, which here is called saagwalla.

The restaurant is next door to the cinema, and looks as though it used to be a movie theatre big lobby. There were interesting colored lights, the colors subtly changing one into another, shining from under a lip under the ceiling. The place was partitioned into a couple of squares, so there was more than one light show going on at any one time. The cinema next door had a poster for a broadcast to theatres live production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Gillian Anderson. Hope a film gets to the States some time, but I fear the drawls will be bad, or, worse yet, they'll do Southern characters speaking with English accents.

Overall ... I had a tasty meal, and know I will be nostalgic for saag, walla or not, that actually contains a more than decent amount of lamb. There's an Indian restaurant off I-80 in Dixon; I'll have to try that some time. Lamb capital of the USA, can you compete with the sheep country of Cumbria?