Category: On life in general

Saturday 13 February: Ireland 🇮🇪 : Irish Stew

When I casually mention to my friend R that I am cooking my way round the world and am wondering what to do for Ireland, without a second’s hesitation, she says “Irish stew” and looks at me like I am an idiot. Obvious really.

(On the same walk, I ignore friends who try to suggest that in fact Iceland lies between Canada and Ireland and that a faithful interpretation of the rules will lead me to fermented shark meat, which is somewhere next to authentic Canadian cheddar cheese curds in the meat and dairy aisle of the non-existent global foods grocery. I point out that they should really look at a map and that not once on one of my many transatlantic flights did I come anywhere near Iceland…)

Helpfully R phones her mum and gets her to take a photo of the recipe for Irish stew that her family use.  I have got no idea what the book is called or who the author is, but the recipe is super simple and involves easily obtainable ingredients though I draw a blank when I try to get hold of some Guinness.

I start by browning some cubed beef before removing and browning some sliced leeks and diced carrot before coating in 4 spoonfuls of flour.  I work in some port and a large amount of beef stock, redcurrant jelly, Worcestershire sauce, bay leaves, salt, pepper and quartered chestnut mushrooms before reintroducing the beef. Then cook in the oven for 2 hours or so until the beef is tender and topping with a bit of curly parsley.

Again, I have to wait an eternity for the stew, smelling its deliciousness hours before I can touch it.  

Finally. Gentle port and redcurrant beef gravy. Soft mushrooms. Soft stewed beef. Fruity carrots but no sign of the leeks. A little perk from the parsley. Not a potato in sight. The whole effect is soft and sweet and really quite delicious. Buttered sourdough bread is a great accompaniment.

Fabulous. And when I reheat for lunch three days later, it is even better.

It takes me back to good days staying in a friend’s cottage on the coast near Sligo, a place of sanity and sanctuary in the awful week after the bloody Brexit vote. It makes me think of the warmth of Irish friends and the kindness of two great Irish bosses: John Bruton, my ambassador in Washington days, and Charlie McCreevy, my then Commissioner. It is perfect for a winter night in these hard days.

Sunday 14 February: United Kingdom 🇬🇧 : Fish & Chips

On the home straight. The last time that I was in the UK was over a year ago, over to see my youngest sister who was visiting from Australia as part of her 50^th birthday celebrations, the whole family sat together in a posh restaurant, completely unsuspecting what would come next. Absence makes the heart grow fonder: enforced absence even more so… Who knows when we will next meet again?

So to cook British food is emotional: it reminds me of the ties that bind, of the special feeling that I had in the days before the Channel Tunnel, crossing over to the UK by ferry, and often seeing the White Cliffs of Dover. 

If I were to cook a dish that reminds me of home, it would not be a British classic but one of my mother’s classic dishes: a ham, chicken, egg and cheese pie, salmon with mashed potatoes, broad beans and homemade mayonnaise, or the lemon cheesecake that she made for me without fail during my childhood, every time I returned from boarding school for the holidays.

But for the purposes of this trip, it obviously has to be Fish & Chips. No other recipe immediately summons up the country. No other British recipe has such a claim on foreign imaginations, with the possible grim exception of the Deep-fried Mars Bar that some unkind friends suggest.  (The same who suggested the fermented shark meat.)

I ate it rarely in my childhood despite living in a fishing village: a rare outing to the chip shop on the quay front, sitting outside, looking at the boats in the estuary, the fish flaking into small bits in the newspaper wrapping, the big fat chips slowly absorbing the malt vinegar that I had doused them with.

In the years since, it has been a rare joy, eaten once every few years.  I remember an Easter driving trip to Dorset, sitting on a pebbly beach with a bag of fish & chips, a thermos of tea, and a Mars bar, watching the sun go down on the red cliffs and a small bonfire nearby with friends clustered round.

I find a good recipe from an American Anglophile: Daring Gourmet at https://www.daringgourmet.com/fish-and-chips/

As with the American burger and fries, it requires careful preparation and then everything going as fast as possible, all the more so as I have to use the same deep fryer for the chips and fish.

I prepare the chips in the usual manner, though allowing for more chunky chips than I would for a Belgian fry.  In the UK, my guess is that they only fry once, but I ignore the authenticity in favour of decent chips and do a second fry after letting them dry and cool.

Then I make the batter, my first time, mixing together flour, yeast, and salt before whisking in some cold fizzy IPA. Belgian Coast IPA is as close as I can get to a British beer. I make this in a small rectangular container.

Then I take my fish.  I am unable to find cod, but plaice is just as common, so I go with that, tamping it with paper towels, dusting it in cold flour, and then, with the batter as close as I can get it to the fryer, dip the fish into the batter and then straight into the frying basket and straight into the fryer at around 180C before it makes a colossal mess. The bubbling fryer is a wonderful sound.

I fry it for around 5-6 minutes until golden, before serving the lot with boiled peas – not mushy as I am a southerner – and the chips, which I sprinkle with salt and douse in malt vinegar.  I also spray a bit on the fish. And a second bottle of the IPA on the side.

The effect? A thin coating of crispy batter. A soft melty interior of moist plaice, made even better with the malt vinegar.  Vinegary chips: nice and soft and salty.  Soft fresh peas, mixed in a small dollop of mayonnaise.

It is simple. It is indulgent. It takes me right back to Appledore quay in the late 1970s.

I lick the plate clean.

Monday 15 February: Home: Belgium 🇧🇪 : Carbonades flamandes / Vlaamse stovery / Flemish beef stew with frites followed by Dame Blanche over speculos ice cream

I started in Belgium on New Year’s Eve with moules-frites.  A ‘departure’ meal deserves a ‘homecoming’ meal ‘on return’.  I opt for carbonades flamandes: the ultimate warming Belgian beef stew, all the more traditional because of the use of a good abbey beer.

To get ahead, I make it the same evening as the fish & chips, browning beef cubes just as I had done for the Irish stew then browning some onions (which always takes an eternity) before deglazing the frying pan with some beer and then pouring the whole lot and rest of 2 bottles of beer over the beef and onions into a Dutch oven, together with thyme and bay leaves.  After leaving to stew over low heat for about 2 hours, I mix in some redcurrant jelly.

The following day, I reheat and then double fry some chips.  I serve the whole lot with the requisite big dollop of mayonnaise and of course with a bottle of beer.  Comme il faut…

The effect? The beef is nice and tender. The sauce is wet but rich. The chips are just pleasure even if not on a par with the wonders produced by the Maison Antoine or Frit’ Flagey. The beer completes the sense of homecoming.

But I am not done, because my friend M has complained that I never make dessert, so in her honour and to balance the Flemish main course, I make a simple but typically Walloon dessert: a Dame Blanche. Traditionally this is hot chocolate poured over vanilla ice cream but to amp up the Belgian side, I use ice cream flecked with speculos (brown sugar biscuits) and with a few speculos on the side. We overlook the fact that it comes from Haagen-Dazs…

It is creamy and indulgent and I feel very full. 

But it is good to be home.

Home. It took lockdown and the other awful events of the last year to make me realise that Belgium truly is my home and likely to be for many years to come. It crystallised my quiet affection for the place and my many good Belgian friends. And the bike has helped: cycling through countless small villages, along countless country lanes, past countless churches, the countryside rarely boring. 

Epilogue: three reflections

I finished this strange challenge over a month ago and only now do I get down to finishing writing about it. That is in large part due to the fact that I have been crazy busy at work, and using my weekends to escape outdoors.But the other reason is that I wanted to chew on it and what I learnt about it. And I have three reflections.

My first is what a wonderful diverse world we live in.

I had cooked a number of the dishes before: the spaghetti alla puttanesca, the Burmese chicken curry, the gong bao chicken and fish-fragrant aubergines, and of course the burger and chips.

But following both the spirit and the letter of my self-set challenge meant cooking – and first finding – viable recipes for countries that I have never even set foot in and recipes that I have never tasted: Bosnian beef stew, Lahori chicken, Chingri Malai. I had to trust to the world of Google and the amazing army of chefs around the world eager to share their cuisines or understand others.

It generated many wonderful surprises. And a few horrors due to my poor cooking. I was exposed to new tastes and new textures.

What a quietly wonderful thing it is – and a testament to the beauty of our modern world – that even in semi-lockdown I was able to locate most of the ingredients within a few kilometres of home in the outskirts Brussels. I now have some strange and wonderful stocks for which I have to find a use: Vegeta seasoning, Japanese pepper, Gochujang sauce, and… black ping pong balls… Sorry: Iranian dried limes.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin is quoted as saying “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are”. These recipes unlocked – at least partially – cultures far away and hinted at steaming kitchens on hot evenings. For a few moments at least, they transported me away from the sadness and loneliness of a hard COVID winter.

My second reflection though is a counterpoint to the first: underneath this, there is a surprising commonality in the ingredients that we use around the world. I cooked over thirty recipes from twenty-seven countries. My only criteria were that the dish sounded doable and that it was representative.

Yet for all the joy of sliding from one region to another with new tastes creeping in – a kick of chilli as I moved to the Indian sub-continent, limes, coconut milk and fish sauce in South-East Asia, tomatoes and potatoes as I returned to the West – I kept finding the same ingredients popping up in many of the dishes irrespective of the continent, and most of them so common as to be completely unobtrusive. 

My very unscientific tally is that eight ingredients appeared at least eight times.

In ascending order: rice, cinnamon, coriander, potato, chilli, tomato, and way ahead, garlic and onion which each appeared in over half the dishes.

The onion: allium cepa. Present in pretty much every cuisine around the world (including African and Latin America which I did not ‘touch’). So present that you probably don’t even notice it. Long-lasting, nutritious, flavourful. Put it this way, try spending a week of cooking new dishes each day without using one. 

And the wider allium family: garlic, shallots, spring onions. I used them in all but three of my recipes.

Think about that for a bit and what it means for our existence and migration on this planet. Wikipedia says that it has been cultivated for at least 7,000 years.

And then think about the tomato and the potato, those former strangers to European shores, imported from the Americas and yet now again prevalent throughout our food worldwide. The ultimate successful immigrants.

And my third and most important reflection comes from thinking about which of these dishes I enjoyed the most and find myself craving.

My top six in order of ‘visiting’ are:

• Bosnian beef stew;
• Bangladeshi Chingri Malai;
• Burmese chicken;
• Japanese tori katsudon;
• Russian borscht; and…
• British Fish & Chips

“What do you mean, British Fish & Chips?”, I hear you think. “Have you ceased thinking like a loyal Eurocrat and succumbed to Johnsonian nationalism? It’s not even quality food: it’s fried, salted and vinegared food with peas as an apologia”.

Hold with me a minute. My choice is a genuine one.

If anything, the fish and chips are the most salient. Because the act of eating is not always about the taste or the nutrition. It can often be an act of memory, taking us back to happy or resonant experiences in the past.

I cannot see a bowl of broad beans without remembering my childhood and the experience of sitting outside on a summer day peeling the gloriously green bean pods from our garden, dropping the beans into a plastic bucket and feeling the soft cottony interior of the pod.

Food does that to us.

Food takes us to a cold and windy quay front of our childhood with our family around us.

Food takes us to a dining room full of the laughter of long-absent friends over a shared meal too many moons ago.

Food takes us to a Greek seafront on a wonderful holiday, the sun setting over the island, the wine white and sturdy, the fish as fresh as can be.

Food takes us to a rackety overnight train out of Bangkok and a metallic bowl of tom yum infused with coriander and lemongrass.

Food takes us to a housing bloc on the Latvia/Lithuania border, where a vivacious immigrant from the Ukraine took me for a swim in the nearby river and then cooked a meal of sheer simplicity and deliciousness before I crashed out on her sofa. And charged me a princely 5 Euros for the privilege.

This is not about quality: it is about a particularity to a point in time.

Though it must be said: that fish and those chips were quite delicious.

This has never been conveyed better than that wonderful scene in the Pixar film Ratatouille where a delicate bowl of ratatouille silences a critic eager to savage by taking him back to his childhood.

But food is of course an act of the present: it is the most transitory and subjective of experiences. It is a moment of pleasure that is purely now. All these dishes were delightful to eat (and many of the others too). They were moments when I could close my eyes and just enjoy. There are meals and tastes that you just want to linger forever in your mouth. And how many of them there are in so many different ways: freshness, sweetness, spiciness, saltiness, meatiness, fruitiness, nuttiness, and of course umami to name but a few. 

Perhaps you wondered what posts about cooking recipes are doing on a website ostensibly dedicated to comfortable bike touring.  This is after all “Bike, Bed and Wine”, not “Bike, bed and steak sauteed in a little butter with a side of fries and lamb’s lettuce in a light vinaigrette”.  

And yet it has everything to do with bike touring. Because to experience a location by bike is to be completely in the moment. To tour by bike is to immerse yourself in the landscape, to feel its every contour, to pick up its every smell.

Bike touring takes you to the big cities but also to the small towns and the off the beaten track hotels and restaurants. You have no choice.

Fried pigs’ ears in Shipka.

A simple dinner of trout and marinated pear salad followed by chicken schnitzel in the outskirts of Arta.

A small tavern in the lakes of Lithuania, not far from one of the major missile bases of the former Soviet Union, serving chicken with lemon.

It’s also a really good excuse to eat a lot of fabulous food in the evening to go with your glass of wine. Or two. For purely medicinal purposes.

(And besides, the title “Bike, bed and steak sauteed in a little butter with a side of fries and lamb’s lettuce in a light vinaigrette” was already taken…)

But I digress…

Because food is ultimately an act of the future as well. Indeed, it is one of the most future-facing acts we can undertake. To eat food is to live for the future, to survive.

Consider the reverse: the hunger striker, the elderly patient who refuses their food. To drink or sleep is an impulse.  To eat is a decision.

How funny that in culture, we associate food with the end: the Last Supper, the condemned prisoner’s last meal, when really food is the start or the continuation.

And right now, we must live for that future. We must live for a day when we can sit and eat with friends and family again, when we can sit in a small tavern in a frontier town, chewing on chicken, when we can sit in a bordello-like Manhattan restaurant savouring an outlandishly big New York strip, when we can arrive in a Russian town on the Volga and taste authentic borscht for the first time, or the back streets of Dhaka for a plate of jingling prawns, or the hillsides of Sarajevo for a peppery beef stew…

This is not complacency: this is hope. Hope for the times as yet not had, to the experiences that await us when it is all over. Hope for what we will do when we are able to live again. Hope for how we will now live our lives when we are aware of how and how fast it can be taken away. Hope that we will live our lives with a new intensity.

Because as that wonderful illustrator, the late Maurice Sendak said in his final interview: “Live your life. Live your life. LIVE your life.”

So eat…

https://speakola.com/motivate/maurice-sendak-live-your-life-2011

Saturday 6 February: Japan 🇯🇵 : Miso Soup and Chicken Katsu Don

Japan… The first time that I went there was on a business trip for my organisation’s annual conference. On my first evening, sluggish with jetlag, a Japanese colleague took me from the hotel to the central train station in Tokyo for a light supper in a small restaurant: two simple bowls of food, fish and chicken, both beamingly fresh, especially the fish.  I was transported… That first visit to Tokyo was a wonder of fresh fish in all kinds of ways, but also walking along streets with garish plastic food in plastic bowls.

Years later, in early September 2018, I spent two weeks on a J Pass, travelling around southern Japan by train. The food was always memorable even if it involved dealing with a few not so discreet racist comments or attitudes along the way. Chicken, fish of all kinds, and lotus root and other unusual vegetables.

A quiet delight was staying on the coast not far out of Tokyo and finding a Japanese bakery that did takeaway coffee and pastries filled with sweet red beans in one and sweetly salty seaweed in another. I had breakfast on a bench looking over the sea full of surfers in wet suits.

So for a first course, I opt for that most basic starter, a miso soup with tofu and seaweed.  For seconds, a chicken katsudon: chicken in a soy sauce and breadcrumbs mix on top of a bed of rice. My Googled recipes get the thumbs up from my friend E’s Japanese wife, though they also involve a few queries at my local Japanese / Korean supermarket. I walk out not entirely convinced that I have got the right type of dashi stock…

The miso involves vegetable broth in which I cook some sliced chard, and spring onion with some yellow miso paste, dried seaweed and silken tofu worked in.

The chicken comes from Just One Cookbook. I take some thinly sliced chicken breast, season them with salt and pepper, coat them with flour, beaten egg and some ready-made panko breadcrumbs that I should have scrunched up beforehand.  I then fry until golden brown and remove.  I then take some red onion and a marvellously gooey sauce made of the sludgy dashi, sake, mirin, Japanese soy and sugar, cooking until the onions are soft.  Finally, I add the chicken back in and then beaten egg, whisking vigorously before laying the whole thing on top of a bed of rice and adding some curly parsley (in the absence of mitsuba).

I serve the whole lot with some chilled sake. For purely medicinal purposes.

The effect?  The soup should be soft but turns out rather salty, probably because I used the wrong type of stock, indeed too salty to be pleasant.  It is better the next day when I add much more water.  The seaweed is lovely though and the other ingredients rather lost.

The chicken looks like a mess and I see that I had added too little beaten egg at the end, but tastes delicious: crunchy and chewy.  What little there is of the egg is lovely and helps bind the rice. The sauce might be rich but is delightful and sweet. The addition of parsley really cranks it up as does the subtle kick provided by Japanese ichuban pepper. The rice completes the lot, gently absorbing the rich sauce and holding it all together.

And the sake is terrific.

All in all, not worthy of a Japanese chef, but a mighty delicious meal. 

After my travels in the East, I feel sad to be retreating to more Western forms of cooking and am not greatly looking forward to a Russian meal.

Sunday 7 February: Russia 🇷🇺 : борщ/ borscht

Again I Google the options and it comes down to a solid choice between kotlety: meat patties, and borscht: beetroot soup. I opt for the latter and find a recipe again by the great Felicity Cloake in The Guardian. It is true that the recipe is not 100% Russian and probably closer to Polish barszcz, but who cares?

Despite being nervous about the stains from peeling and using raw beetroot, I go ahead, wearing a pair of latex gloves.  I start by frying onion in some melted butter, add diced beetroot, carrot and celery, and sliced leek all with some allspice berries and bay leaves until soft before adding chopped potato and a whopping 1.5 litres of beef stock, simmering for 15 minutes and then adding chopped cabbage, crushed garlic and more diced beetroot. Finally I add some cider vinegar, sugar, pepper and a good pinch of salt.

In these latter stages, I depart from the recipe because the green cabbage looks too much for my deep red soup and the cooked soup is too lumpy.  So I gently plunge in a blender and give the whole lot a bit of pureeing, until I have a mixture that is half smooth, half chunky bits of beetroot, carrot and celery. 

I serve the whole lot with some sour cream and chopped dill. And some chilled vodka. For purely medicinal purposes.

The effect?  Even before plunging my spoon in, I marvel at the wonderful colour: not just the beautiful redness of the soup but the white cream and the green dill.

And when I do taste?  Oh man, that is one lovely soup… The beetroot is magnificent, so wonderfully fresh yet warming. The lovely mix of the pureed soup and the chunks of beetroot. The dill works fabulously as a counterpoint, with the sour cream adding depth. And the carrot, celery and potato are all there in the background, adding a bit of heft.

It is stupendous. It is healthy. It is delicate. It is perfect for a snowy winter evening. It makes me yearn to go to Russia. 

And it is even better for lunch and dinner during the rest of the week.

Monday 8 February: United States 🇺🇸 : Burger and fries

The first time that I lived in Washington, DC, it was as an EU diplomat. I remember another diplomat saying to me “The problem with DC is that it has no middle”. He meant that it was extremes of poverty – in the Southeast quadrant – and wealth – in the Northwest.

To my mind, he was more accurate about the food than the people.  And not just in DC.  In my first stint in the US, I managed to visit all 50 states. I discovered the amazing beauty of the country and – despite all the prejudices that people might have from recent events – the kindness of the people.

But it has to be said that the food was rarely average.  I had some fantastic meals – often, it must be confessed paid for by others on expense accounts – oysters, steaks, seared tuna, grilled fish and the like. I have a great fondness for Low Country/ Louisianan cooking: shrimp n’ grits, jumbo, creole sausage and the like. Then there were the ethnic foods: Mexican, Salvadoreno, and the like.  I used to live ten minutes from a Salvadorian restaurant that served lomo saltado: steak, peppers and chips in gravy.  Bliss.  I enjoyed Jewish and Yiddish cooking: whitefish sandwiches wrapped with gherkins and crisps in a local deli.

But I also had some really dire food: meat cooked so hard it was dry, overboiled vegetables, a Philly steak that nearly gave me a heart attack, and worst of all the chefs mostly in ski resorts or upmarket destinations who got it into their heads to do fusion cooking: ahi tuna in a ginger-agave glaze and the like. The worst meal I remember eating was in a hotel restaurant in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania – it was either that or a takeaway from KFC – a lunk of watery ham in a sickly raisin sauce.

But obviously it is the burger and fries that mostly captures American cooking, usually served with coleslaw. On the one hand, it is incredibly basic and simple. On the other, try to make it in isolation and you risk a chaotic mess as happened to me the first few times I tried last summer, frustrated at having to wait an hour for one from my local bistro.  Why? Because like Chinese cooking, so many ingredients have to come together at once and the cooking has to be pretty much to-the-second on both the burger and the fries.

The burger bun needs to be just toasted and quickly spread with the relish: so simple on the surface yet so difficult to get right.  Tomato sauce on its own will not do: too bland to hold it all together.  Other concoctions that I tried similarly came out wrong, though a mix of one part ketchup, one part American mustard and two parts mayo will do as a quick fix. I end up with a recipe from Lidia’s Commonsense Italian Cooking by Lidia Bastianich which I cook over Christmas and reheat in the microwave.

The lettuce, tomato, onion, cheese and gherkin need to be cut and lined up. Any coleslaw or salad lined up.

The chips should be peeled, thinly sliced, and double cooked and served at exactly the same time as burger, which itself is right to the second. It can only be cooked when the pan is steamingly hot, instantly searing its base, cooking for two to three minutes, flipping and cooking for two or so more. Here, the timing is tricky as it is difficult to see exactly what is going on without disturbing the burger.  I have been told that for a medium-rare burger, you should watch the red line in the middle of the burger and cook until very thin. In practice, I cook about 20 seconds more and find it to be just right. In theory, you should put the cheese slice on top for the last minute to melt it, but I opt for a quick softening in the microwave.

And then all assembled on the plate as quick as you can. An exercise in the virtues of mass production and spatial layout that would make Henry Ford beam.

And eaten. 

Without shame. With aplomb. With your fingers.

Washed down with a cold and iced Coke or watery Budweiser.

The effect?

It is a symphony of nothing. It is perfect.

It is nothing to linger over. It sits with you.

It is sinful. It is indulgent. It is… gone.  Already.

A small perfect moment of burger juices, bun, cheese, relish, gherkin and frankly who cares about the lettuce, tomato and onion?  They are there somewhere. Slightly removing the total guilt trip.

The fries are overdone and yet also perfect, dipped in a good dollop of ketchup.

It is a dish that you want to make sit on the naughty chair in the naughty corner, while quietly winking at it to keep doing the same thing.

It takes me back to good times in the US: to smashing crabs on the Eastern Shore, to eating massive steaks in Iowa, to a lunchtime visit to Chez Panisse in Berkley, California, to a Manhattan steak joint dressed like a bordello where I was already done with the steak and fries before a cheesecake arrived that was so big that I had to concede defeat after a few mouthfuls. It takes me back to long lost friends and long done road trips, to the majesty of the red rocks of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, to driving through the Californian sequoia in the thick of night with two friends, to arriving in Anchorage, Alaska, just before midnight and driving for four hours through empty roads, pine trees all round, my friend asleep in the passenger seat, to driving round Georgia and the Carolinas in a blue convertible with my parents, my mother gamely sitting in the back as the wind rushed through her hair.

Wednesday 10 February: Canada 🇨🇦 : Poutine

Canada… I’ve travelled around quite a bit of it – or at least the Eastern part – including one absurd episode where I had to exit the US by car to renew my American work visa at the American Embassy in Ottawa, reassuring a resolutely unconvinced Canadian border guard that I had every intention and likelihood of exiting his country as quickly as possible.

And yet, ask me to describe the food and it largely defeats me, beyond maple syrup and… poutine… It is the only Canadian dish that I can at all remember eating and even there, I might have had it in New Hampshire or Vermont…

But poutine it has to be, and the sheer simplicity also commends it: fat fries, gravy, cheese curds. The only problem being that cheddar cheese curds are kind of hard to come by… so my recipe – taken from www.seasonsandsuppers.ca – recommends substituting a ball of mozzarella.

The recipe calls for a gravy made from a mix of beef and chicken stocks, 2 parts beef to one part chicken, thickened with some flour and cornflour and then seasoned with fresh pepper to taste. Once the chips are ready, you ladle over the gravy, mixing it with the chips, and then toss in some strips of the curds/ mozzarella.

I add some parsley at the end and give the gravy quite a bit of pepper to the point where it is closer to a sauce au poivre.

The effect?  Without the authentic cheddar cheese curds, it is not as I remember it: a thick cheesy crust melting over the chips and gravy and imparting a smart tang. And it is utterly wrong: the parsley the only remotely healthy thing in it.

So why do I find myself scooping it all up?  Why do I want more?  The stringiness of the cheese, the peppery and sinful thick gravy, the soggy chips. Wrong, wrong, wrong, but please a second serving just to check on how wrong it is… Just to be sure.

I have sinned. Spank me. It was worth it.

Saturday 30 January: Vietnam 🇻🇳 : Cha Gio and Phó – Fried Spring Rolls and Soup

My 1996 trip to South East Asia ended by crossing into Vietnam, staying a day in the gorgeous city of Hue before ending in Hanoi. Time flies and it shames me that I have not been back since. The food was simple and wonderful.

Luckily, living in Belgium and due to the fact that Vietnam was part of French-colonised Indo-China, I am well-served with decent Vietnamese restaurants. An occasional indulgence is to have fried spring rolls served with lettuce to make me feel slightly more virtuous.

And of course, Vietnam is well known for its fabulous noodle soups: phó. 

So I decide to have a go at both, even though it quickly becomes clear that the soup will require a lot of preparation.  Not only that, the recipe that I follow – found at Recipe Tin Eats – calls for huge quantities of beef to make the base stock: over 3.5 kilos in all and a mixture of marrow, meaty bones and brisket.

Still, I am cooking on a Saturday so I have time, letting the beef stew in boiling water with star anise, cinnamon, coriander, cardamom, onion and ginger for the best part of four hours – filling the house with the delicious smell of the star anise in particular – straining the whole lot (but reserving the brisket) then at the last minute throwing in some cooked noodles, slivers of brisket and some slices of beef tenderloin, letting it cook for a few minutes and then throwing in sliced red chillies, coriander, and beansprouts.

The spring roll – found at The Woks of Life – is time consuming in its own way, combining hydrated thin rice noodles, grated carrot, chopped wood ear mushroom, pork, shallots, ginger, garlic and a mix of egg white, vegetable oil, fish sauce, salt, white pepper and sugar. I arrange them all in small logs, ready for the tricky bit, wrapping them in rice paper wrappers dipped in warm water until ready to roll.

I am sure that there is a clever way to do this and that one learns the feel of when rice paper wrappers are just moist enough to roll, but I never quite got the hang of it in 20 attempts with my rice paper either too stiff or too soggy.  And my rushed technique would have left a true chef covering their eyes. I ended up with a bunch of misshapen stuffed condoms, desperately squeezing them as they dried.  After leaving in the fridge for an hour, which did little for their appearance, I then fry them three at a time until golden (and in my haste, forget that I should double fry). I watch them bubble into even more grotesque shapes. And then serve up with some – sorry! – commercial dipping sauce.

The effect? Let’s start with the soup. Honestly, a bit of a let down after all the effort and expense – easily the most expensive recipe I have cooked. The beef broth and beef slivers are dominated by the fresh ingredients, hardly noticeable underneath, especially the red chillies. It is beautifully fresh, but a bit underwhelming…

The fried stuffed condoms? Actually rather nice… Gloriously crunchy with a fabulously moist inside, the pork juices really coming out with the soft noodles and vegetables, though the mushroom does not really emerge.  Oily and indulgent… and appropriate for a mid-winter night in this horrible time.

Sunday 31^st January: China 🇨🇳 : Gong Bao Chicken and Fish-Fragrant Aubergines

After crazy experimentation, a return to some kind of familiarity, even though I have never been to China.

As with France, Italy and India, how do you represent a country with as wide and varied a culinary repertoire as China?  Impossible so I settle for two dishes from Sichuan: Gong Bao Chicken and Fish-fragrant Aubergines, which, while hardly representative of the whole country, are both delicious and give some sense of the ingredients and cooking approach.

I take them from two books from Fuchsia Dunlop: Every Grain of Rice, and The Food of Sichuan, wonderful explorations of cookery even if many of the recipes are off limits until I can find the relevant key ingredients. I have cooked them before and loved them. Both are relatively simple to cook once you have done the prep.

The aubergines are chopped into thin batons and left to salt before being deep fried until “slightly golden”. Then the wok is emptied of aubergines and oil and chilli bean sauce added, sizzled and then finely chopped ginger and garlic, chicken stock, sugar and then the fried aubergines, before thickening the sauce with some potato flour or cornflour, adding some Chinkiang vinegar and spring onion greens.

Bite-sized chunks of chicken breast are marinated in a sauce of light soy, Shaoxing wine and potato flour (or in my case, cornflour).  A chilli oil is made by frying dried chillies with Sichuan pepper. The recipe calls for 10 chillies but I have learnt to tone it down a bit. Then the chicken is stir-fried until just brown before adding ginger, garlic and spring onion slices, before adding a sauce of light and dark soy, Chinkiang vinegar, sesame oil and a potato flour-water paste and finally adding roasted peanuts.

An hour or so of prep followed by ten minutes of furious movement. Served up with rice.

The effect? The tender chicken pieces. The Sichuan pepper. The soft fruity aubergines. The ginger, the garlic, the spring onions all making their appearance on the palate. The crunchiness of the chopped peanuts. The luscious chilli bean sauce. And more and more, the lingering kick of the chillies and pepper, making my lips tingle and my brow sweat, especially after swallowing a chilli.

It is magnificent.

But it also makes me sad. Because Chinese food should not be eaten on your own, but shared with friends around a joyous table. It makes me pine for happy lunches with work colleagues at the Sichuan Pavilion in Washington, DC: the Asian aubergines bright purple and coming with Thai basil, the chilli fish, the mapo tofu, the pork belly, the tea-smoked duck… It makes me pine for sadly absent friends usually sat around my dinner table on several dishes but now outlawed until this bloody evil virus has been kicked senseless.

Monday 1^st February: Korea 🇰🇷 : Beef Bibimpap

Korea has been on my mind for a while. I was supposed to spend 48 hours in Seoul on an EU-Korea dialogue only for the trip to be cancelled less than an hour before I was due to leave for the airport. My naïve plans for 2020 involved a late summer fortnight on my bike in the South Korean countryside.

A rare joy in the good times was going out with friends to a Korean restaurant just off the Place St Boniface in Brussels and having a hot stone bowl of beef bibimpap, cooking and mixing as you eat, the rice burning to the bottom of the bowl like Swiss cheese fondue.

So I Google for an appropriate recipe and again find a feasible one at The Woks of Life. It involves blanching some fresh beansprouts and watercress separately and seasoning them with salt and sesame oil. Then stir frying some julienned carrots until tender but slightly crunchy. Then frying minced beef until brown and mixing in some soy sauce. Finally, frying an egg.

Then you arrange the whole lot on a bed of rice together with some kimchi, a “good dollop” of gochujang sauce and a sprinkling of toasted sesame seeds. And then you mix the whole lot with gay abandon. OK, I made the last bit up.

The effect? A confession: I did not fry the egg as I am not wild about fried or boiled eggs. Nevertheless: the whole thing is a gloriously mad mixture of flavours and textures: the beef mince, the crunch of the beansprouts and the carrot, the rather weak watercress, all jazzed up by the kimchi and gochujang sauce.

It is like nothing else and yet it is quite delicious. It even feels vaguely healthy. In truth, it is the gochujang sauce and kimchi that really make it work, binding it all together in a tingly spicy rice mix, but never mind: it is good food.

Friday 22 January: India 🇮🇳 : North Indian Lamb Curry with Basmati Pilaf with Dill and Cardamom

Two recipes from two great cookery writers: Anjum Anand and the legendary Madhur Jaffrey.  As ever on a Friday evening, I start rather late after my evening walk and pay the price.

Fry some cardamom and bay leaf before adding chopped onion and browning it (which always takes 2-3 times as long as the recipe says it will. Add chopped lamb, fry, followed by a ginger-garlic paste and mix of turmeric, coriander powder and garam masala. Then add chopped tomatoes, bring to a boil and simmer until the masala is cooked through and the harsh taste has gone (which again takes forever).  Add water, bring to a boil and cook for 35-45 minutes until the lamb is tender, before adding some fresh coriander.

For the rice, again fry some cardamom and bay leaf but this time with cinnamon. Again fry chopped onions until brown. Then add basmati rice and chopped dill, stir and then add chicken stock, bringing to a boil. Cover and cook on very low heat for 25 minutes.

By the time I serve up, it is well past 11 o’clock at night. 

The result? A gentle, soft lamb in a mild sauce, giving that delicious flavour that can only be cooked lamb.  The freshness of the coriander. Again, those joyous moments where you feel a moist cardamom pod in your mouth. The rice is great, but in truth the dill is a bit dominant.

Still, it is quietly fabulous and I want more, even if it did take an eternity.

Saturday 23 January: Bangladesh 🇧🇩 : Chingri Malai – Bengali Prawn Curry

For Bangladesh, again a bit of Googling and several recommendations that Chingri Malai is the most representative national dish, albeit one initially associated with Malay fishermen.  I find a number of recipes but settle for one from www.gastronomicbong.com

I marinate some unpeeled large prawns in salt and turmeric before frying very briefly until the shells change colour.  I remove and replace with bay leaves, cinnamon, cardamom and cloves, sauté very briefly in oil and then throw in some chopped garlic and chopped onions until translucent. I then add a little crushed ginger and garlic, chopped tomato and salt and cook until ‘soft and muchy’ (sic) before adding chilli, more turmeric and some water and cook the resulting masala.  So far, so very similar to the lamb curry.

Then the twist: coconut milk and sugar, briefly cooked before adding the prawns for about 5 minutes.  I am supposed to add a small bit of ghee, but overlook. I serve the whole lot with simple basmati rice.

The result?  Delicious… The juicy softness of the prawns. The lovely sweet coconut sauce. The masala is quiet but rich, with the odd delicious hint of the cardamom and the lingering kick of the chilli powder.

The whole thing is such a quiet and comforting symphony of flavours, each having their moment without overpowering the others.  Again, I want more. More! MORE!

With no one to tell me what a pig I am, I take the prawns, shell and all, crunching the body and legs as if I were eating soft shell crabs and sucking the heads with their taste of rock pools.

Utterly fabulous.

Sunday 24 January: Myanmar 🇲🇲 : See-Pyan – Burmese chicken curry

This is a beautifully simple Asian curry stew that I had already tried once before, taken from Madhur Jaffrey’s classic “Ultimate Curry Bible”.

Marinate a skinned and chopped whole chicken in curry powder, garam masala, and salt. Make a paste of garlic, ginger, onions, cayenne pepper and paprika. Fry the paste in oil until dark and reduced.  Add the chicken until lightly browned and then add chopped tomatoes, a stick of lemongrass, and some fish sauce. Then cover with water, cover and cook gently for 25 minutes before boiling off the sauce.

I serve this with another lovely and simple dish: Meera Sodha’s cinnamon and clove pilau from her book “Made in India”.

The result? Despite boiling off the sauce for considerably longer than in the book, the sauce is still rather watery, not so much a sauce as a stew. But it is marvellous nonetheless: wonderfully subtle and delicate, with that lovely salty kick from the fish sauce, and the freshness of the infused lemongrass. The chicken is beautifully soft and chewy and again, without anyone to reprove me, I can shamelessly lick and chew around the bones. 

It is a glorious Asian experience: chicken pieces in a subtle and slightly oily sauce and all coupled with the equally subtle pleasure of the clove and cinnamon-infused basmati rice. And the knowledge that it would be even better reheated over the next days – and was, the sauce firmer, the chicken softer and having absorbed more of the sauce, splendid with the rice.

It makes me dream of temples and hot Asian nights.

Monday 25 January: Thailand 🇹🇭 : Tord mun pla and paad thai: fish cakes and Pad Thai

As with France, Italy and India, this was a hard choice: how to represent a country that has added so much to the global cooking repertoire? The dish that made me fall in love with Thai cooking was a bowl of tom yam served on the overnight train from Bangkok to Chang Mai in Easter 1996: it was a revelation: the lemongrass, the prawns, the spices, all slurped out of a metal bowl on an old train.

I also think of smashing Thai green chicken and aubergine curries, of red peanut curries or yellow massaman.

But sometimes you just have to go for a cooking experience that makes you nervous.  I have often eaten Thai fish cakes as a starter and loved their strange spongy, spicy texture: the flecks of chilli. 

But to cook them? 

And to cook Pad Thai, that seemingly super-simple Thai concoction of noodles, peanuts, coriander and prawns?  Tempting fate.

So I have a go, Googling the fish cakes and taking a recipe for Pad Thai from Ken Hom’s “Ken Hom cooks Thai”.

And indeed the paste for the fish cakes is tricky: whirring together white fish fillets with red curry paste, coriander fish sauce, lime juice and egg until my food processor almost breaks, and then stiffening them up with some cornflour (in the absence of rice flour) before scooping them up and forming them into patties for frying.

The Pad Thai is simpler in theory but involves a lot of prep, shelling and deveining prawns, cooking thick noodles, chopping garlic and Thai chillies, slicing shallots, beating eggs and then preparing a mix of soy sauce, lime juice and fish sauce with sugar and freshly ground pepper. And then there is the garnish of lime, coriander, spring onions, chopped roast peanuts and chilli flakes.  All a lot of things to come together at once.

So with the cooking of noodles, the frying of prawns, followed by the garlic, chillies and shallots, and then the frying of the noodles with beansprouts, the egg and the mix of sauces, it is all a bit chaotic, and then I have to fry the splodges of fish cake mix.  

The effect?  The noodles a bit dry and garlicky from sitting too long after cooking. No sense of the fried shallots, chilli, and garlic, lost somewhere in the eggy noodles, the whole thing helped only by the prawn, peanuts, coriander and lime juice. But when I reheat for lunch the next day, the whole thing comes together: the noodles improve, the prawns perk up and the citrusy-peanuty-coriandery covering gives it that glorious Thai freshness.

And my ugly fish cakes? Quite delicious. Perhaps not as spongey as the professional version but still very nice, lingering on the mouth with a slight spiciness and working well with my dipping sauce.

Wednesday 27 January: Laos 🇱🇦 : Pork Larb

Larb is a dish cooked in a number of countries, but my research tells me that it holds a special place in the hearts of Laotians. I find an extremely simple recipe: toast then grind some rice grains. Stir fry some minced pork then add the rice powder, some lime juice, fish sauce and sugar. Fry for another minute before adding chopped shallots, spring onion, red chilli, mint and coriander. Then serve with – ideally sticky – rice and lettuce.

That’s it. Super easy to prepare and yet delicious.The smell of fried pork and the fresh veg with a kick of lime and chilli. Utterly simple. Utterly delicious. The salty pork in its juices. The fresh green vitality from the mint, coriander, lime and lettuce. The soft sliced shallots. The quiet balance of the rice. The delicate hints of the red chilli without being overpowering. My lips tingle delightfully without knowing quite why. Yum, yum, yum.

It is the delicate taste of Asia: fresh ingredients all well prepared and quickly heated. It takes me back to a wonderful trip through Laos in 1996 in the days when there were few tourists and we were exotic creatures enchanting the local children. It takes me back to a great stay in Luang Prabang, the former capital, and the wonderful smell of burning charcoal.

Oh to be travelling once again…

Saturday 16 January: Iraq 🇮🇶: Fasoulia – Iraqi white bean stew

This is a very simple recipe taken a while ago from Meera Sodha’s series “The new vegan” in The Guardian.  Cook some chopped onions mixed with pepper, ground cinnamon, ground allspice, cumin and coriander stalks for 20 minutes until soft and dark.  Add chopped tomatoes, 2 tins of cannellini beans and 200ml of water, bring to a boil and then simmer for 10 minutes.  Serve with a dressing of rapeseed oil, coriander leaves, lemon zest and juice.

The effect?  Perfectly nice but a bit bland, especially the beans. The spices are pleasant but it lacks a kick with only the crunchy coriander and lemon dressing lifting it. The onions are still a bit undercooked even after over 20 minutes.

Monday 18 January: Iran 🇮🇷 : Khoresh-e-gheymeh – Persian Dried Lime, Lamb, and Split Pea Stew

Another Middle Eastern stew, but very different and a lot more complicated to cook. I take this from Persiana by Sabrina Ghayour, intrigued by the dried lime and lamb combination.

Again, fry some onions until soft (this time, I take my time…) Sear lamb chunks on a high heat. Coat in turmeric, then saffron, then cinnamon.  Add tomato puree and dried limes and then coat in water. Cook on a low heat for an hour and a half. Then add 200g of yellow split peas for a further hour.  

At this point, I leave overnight in the fridge. When I take it out the following evening, the limes still feel rigid, sitting in the stew like black ping pong balls, though there is an odd limey smell, and the split peas are still pretty dry too.  So I give it all half an hour more with some more water to soften, and serve it all with basmati rice and some fried potato slices.

And finally… the peas are still quite hard – though just about chewy – but the lamb is splendidly soft. The lime… is just odd… The rice soaks it all up nicely. And you can never go wrong with fried potatoes. I chuck some flat leaf parsley on top, which improves it all. The tomato sauce is delicious and works well with the lamb.

All in all, I am glad that I tried it and judging by the few times I have had Persian cooking in the past quite realistic, but not a recipe that I would rush back to.

Wednesday 20 January: Pakistan 🇵🇰: Lahori chicken

This one is the result of a good bit of Googling and comparing of recipes. Many of the classic Pakistani dishes suggested are prevalent throughout the Indian subcontinent but Lahori chicken stands out as defiantly rooted.  One can almost hear the muezzins of Lahore as I cook and eat it.

Give a large amount of skinned and sliced chicken and a small amount of quartered potatoes a quick marinade in turmeric, cayenne pepper and salt. Make a paste of onions, garlic and ginger. Fry some cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, black peppercorns, dried red chiles, coriander seeds and cumin seeds. Add the onion paste and a green chile.  Add some tomatoes and puree for a few minutes, cool, remove and then puree the whole lot.

Then brown the chicken and potatoes in the same pot, slowly add yogurt and then add the tomato masala. Once boiling, add water, and cook for around 30 minutes half-covered before uncovering and reducing the sauce. Finally add coriander and lemon juice.

The effect? After the subtle spices of the Middle East, the sheer heat of the spices makes my tongue tingle. It is gloriously hot, with a lovely lingering after-taste as the different spices play out: sneaky hints of cardamom and cloves, the perk of the cumin and the freshness of the coriander. The chicken is slightly overcooked and dry – I was on a Skype call – but still really chewy. The potatoes again balance it nicely.

The best spicy food continues to ask your mouth questions long after you have swallowed it, flavour after flavour, and especially the hints of cardamom, that most wonderful soft friend.

And the vibrant colours of a vibrant subcontinent: the turmeric-orange of the chicken and masala counterpointed by the lush green of the coriander.

This is a dish that says more. It is a dish that I want to cook again. It is a dish that makes me dream of sweltering nights and sweltering spices. It is fabulous.

Friday 8 January: Bosnia 🇧🇦 : Bosanski Lonac / Bosnian Stew

The first dish from a country that I have not yet visited though will get to as soon as this crisis is over. I Google recipes and specialities of Bosnia and this one comes up regularly. The recipe that I use is from allyskitchen.com

It is a Friday evening and I start cooking late after getting back from the supermarket. So late in fact that I only serve up at around 11…

The recipe is simple though. Start by frying some beef. Add some spicy sausage. (The recipe for American audiences says pepperoni, but I am forced to go for chorizo.) Add some garlic and shallots. Deglaze with a bit of vodka and then vegetable stock. Season with salt, chilli flakes, whole peppercorns, and bay leaves. Then add layers of tomato, carrots and potatoes. Leave in an oven for 45 minutes. Add some chopped celery. Cook for a further 15 minutes. Throw in some basil briefly. Leave for 15 minutes. Eat.

It is utterly simple. It is utterly delicious.

It is a balance between the tender chewiness of the stewed beef, the soft fruitiness of the carrot, the solidity of the potato, the crunch of the celery, and the kick from the peppers, chilli and chorizo, with a lingering hint of the basil, all held together with the tomatoes.

It is a country stew with knives drawn and guns at the ready.

And it is even better for lunch the next day, and dinner a few nights later. The peppercorns rise up like jewels from the ocean, sublime from their marinade.

I can’t wait to ride in Bosnia.

Saturday 9 January: Montenegro 🇲🇪 : Brav u Mlijeku / Lamb in Milk

Another Balkan stew but a different type of preparation, again the result of extensive Googling. The recipe I use is from internationalcuisine.com. Some of my friends blench when I tell them that I will be cooking a milk stew yet it is very common in the Balkans and Italy.

A garlic and parsley sauce blitzed with fennel seeds and chopped rosemary. Chopped bits of lamb shoulder fried in the green sauce until loosely brown. And then the milk, first to deglaze and then to stew. Peeled and chopped potatoes and carrots and a few rosemary sprigs are thrown in and then the whole thing is left to stew for 75 minutes.

Finally, the meat, carrots and potatoes are removed and the milk sauce is reduced then pureed. To balance the heaviness of the stew, I make a Shopska salad. Admittedly this is not so much Montenegrin as Balkan or more specifically Bulgarian, but as it is widely made across the whole region, I see it as fair.

The end result? Utterly fabulous. The lamb is soft and chewy, retaining all its gorgeous flavour. The sauce is lightly cheesy, halfway between a bechamel sauce and a cheese sauce. As with the Bosnian stew, the carrots are soft and fruity and the potatoes give the sauce some heft. There is the odd delightful taste of the fennel.

And all of this is balanced by the freshness of the salad: cucumbers, tomatoes, black olives, peppers and goats cheese, all blended with oil and red wine vinegar: the very taste of so many Balkan meals from my journeys.

I go to bed with a heavy but happy stomach and a hope that it will not be too long before I ride through Montenegro.

Sunday 10 January: Albania 🇦🇱 : Butrint Mussels

The first time that I went to Albania was in 1994 as part of a ‘study visit’ with fellow students from the College of Europe. The country was crazy but wonderful: few cars but thousands of satellite dishes all pointed towards Italy. After our first dinner in the country, my Albanian friend A pulled me and a few other friends away to a converted underground bunker where we were joined by his family and fed what I recall as sheep’s intestines in a milk sauce. I was delighted to be part of the special group, but after a hefty main dinner, had to squeeze the food down to please my hosts. I still remember the stomach ache…

On that trip, we also had a roasted suckling pig, lamb, and other meats grilled over a fire or hot coals. And returning to Albania two years ago, it is fair to say that stewed lamb or barbecued meat would have been the most representative way to eat Albanian. But having just made two stews and being in the thick of winter, I settle for a more modest recipe from Rick Stein’s roadtrip from Venice to Istanbul based on some mussels he had on the coastal town of Butrint. I figure that it will be my last fish for some time, the recipe sounded intriguing, and it gave me a chance to try again with mussels.

The recipe is super easy: sweat some garlic, diced green pepper and sliced onion in some olive oil for a few minutes. Add some ouzo (or in my case pastis) and 600g of cleaned mussels until the mussels are well steamed, and then briefly heat some passata and feta with a bit of chilli flakes and seasoning before scattering some chopped dill at the end.

This time, I leave the cleaned mussels in cold water for 20 minutes to get rid of the salt, an approach that works nicely.

The effect? Perfectly edible and nice to eat, but I had the feeling of two separate dishes, not quite complimenting each other, with the tomato and feta sauce rather overpowering the delicate taste of the mussels.

And was it really Albanian? Googling it too late, I found no other reference to it so suspect that it was a local chef trying something out. Greek feta and ouzo, Italian passata.

And yet in some way very Albanian. Few countries have such an energetic diaspora. The country was almost destroyed under the Hoxha dictatorship with local traditions dying out and thousands heading abroad (and many others leaving to escape the dire economic situation of the post-communist years). Many of those émigrés have returned, bringing with them the experience and tastes of their time away, including a generation of Albanian chefs ready to experiment using foreign-inspired ingredients melded to local ingredients. So very, very New Albanian.

Monday 11 January: Greece 🇬🇷 : κουνέλι στιφάδο / Kouneli Stifado / Rabbit Stew

I use the time saved making the mussels to get a stew for the next evening mostly done, based on a recipe from Sue Smillie in a recent series in The Guardian in which writers evoke dishes associated with their travels.

Again, super simple: sear a whole skinned and jointed rabbit – in my case with the smoke nearly burning the kitchen down – and then remove. Throw in some whole peeled small onions and garlic cloves. Pour in some red wine and vinegar to deglaze. Add water and returm the rabbit pieces. Stick in the oven for one and a half hours until the skin falls off easily.

Having done that, I remove it all and reheat the next day, serving with a Greek salad very similar to the Shopska salad served with the Montenegrin lamb.

The effect? The rabbit is pleasantly chewy. The rich brown onion sauce provides a gentle back up for the bunny, subtle and very unlike the rather overpowering French onion soup. Again, the crisp freshness of the salad provides a nice counterpoint.

It is simple. And yet, in the emptiness of my lockdown home and no one to be disgusted, I find myself plucking the rabbit bones and unceremoniously sucking every bit of meat from them.

It also evokes a very pleasant memory of a delicious braised rabbit in a converted Turkish baths in the back streets of Chania, Crete, as well as pleasant summer memories of open air barbecues and the smell of the charcoal and roasting meat. Quietly wonderful.

Wednesday 13 January: Turkey 🇹🇷 : Circassian Chicken

My final dish for the week, and the end of Europe and the start of Asia.

When I think of eating in Turkey, I think of a night on the suburbs of Istanbul near the end of my ride from Sofia to Istanbul in 2018, sitting outside on the banks of the Bosphorus with a plate of fried whitefish, a decent salad, and a glass of raki mixed with water.

But I also think of a night in the nondescript town of Saray in Thrace, chosen only because it had a hotel and was a convenient stop on the way to Istanbul, in which with very limited Turkish, I ended up in a cheap and cheerful restaurant where I pointed at the cooked chicken stew that I wanted and had it doled out to me. Simple but nice.

So I opt for my third Rick Stein recipe, and again very simple: poach two skinned chicken breasts in chicken stock until tender enough to peel into thin slices with your hands, whiz some walnuts with breadcrumbs, crushed garlic and the leftover chicken stock to the point of a creamy walnut paste, mix with the chicken, throw in some chopped coriander, and drizzle the whole lot with some red pepper sauce made from grilled and peeled red peppers, tomato puree, and cayenne pepper all whizzed together with a bit of olive oil.

The result? It is like a warm chicken salad on steroids. The soft moist goodness of the chicken pieces, the delightfully creamy walnut paste and the gentle kick given by the red pepper sauce. Delicious and indulgent.

On to the Middle East…

January can be such a dull month, a let-down after all the hype of December, the days still dark, winter at its coldest, and miserable weather.

And this January in particular is a difficult one, with lives still very restricted because of the evil bug, and threatening to get a lot worse before the springtime of mass vaccination. It may be a long time before we can travel easily again.

So I had the idea to cook my way around the world, as though I were visiting by land and sea, cooking or eating a dish from each of the countries that I would have passed through.  

Originally I wanted to complete it by the end of the month, but as two of my New Year’s Resolutions are to take life more calmly and to limit my food wastage as much as possible, I decided to take my time and stick to my usual rhythm of cooking a few dishes a week.  This also means that I can get out for long bike rides and walks without feeling that I have to rush home to cook a new dish.

For those of you who haven’t endured my cooking, I should note that I am really not a very good cook: put me in front of a collection of ingredients and ask me to improvise a dish and I would be hopeless. My chopping skills are hopeless. My timing is even worse.

But I am a relatively adventurous cook, ready to try out new challenges and cuisines and I can – more or less – follow a recipe. And I am learning the real stuff, bit by bit, burnt steak and squishy potato by burnt steak and squishy potato.

Week One

Thursday 31 December: Belgium 🇧🇪: Moules frites / Mussels & chips

Why start the day before? Because every adventure must have a departure and surely then a departure meal. I live in Belgium so that must be my departure meal.

I mull over the options and am initially tempted by carbonnades de boeuf, a deliciously meaty stew that feels just right for winter. But looking at my itinerary, I realise that I will have plenty of stews as I ‘travel’ in the Balkans and Middle East. Other options are chicken waterzooi, a chicken stew, so again no, and paling in t’ groen, eels in green sauce but I’ve always found the green sauce – mostly parsley – rather insipid.  Eels need something to spice them up. 

So the obvious dish has to be moules frites, or Mussels and Chips, the Belgian dish above all other: a dish redolent of Belgium’s supremely ugly seaside but also of wood-panelled taverns and a dish that you can eat nearly all the year, though really it is best enjoyed during winter and autumn when the mussels are fresh off the Belgian and Dutch coasts.

I settle for a simple moules marinière recipe from Ruth van Waerebeek’s “Everybody Eats Well in Belgium Cookbook”: chopped and sautéed shallots and celery stalks, a bit of thyme and parsley, all washed over with dry white wine before steaming the mussels.

But first I have to clean and check the mussels and frankly, every time I do this, it makes me feel awful. Because you go through, examining each one to see whether the shell is closed and if it is open, you give it a quick tap on the counter and give it a minute to see whether it closes or not.  If it closes, it is alive and can be… sentenced to death by steaming… If it does not close, it is already dead and can be thrown in the rubbish with the other mollusc corpses… I feel like a mass murderer.

The consolation is the smell of the brine that the mussels came in: instantly taking me back to the salty air of my childhood on the edge of an estuary. I am transported to rockpools and shrimping and deep green seaweed.

Then I chuck the mussels into the wine stock and only slowly realise that I have made a big mistake by not adjusting the amount of stock to the smaller amount of mussels that I am using, so instead of steaming them, I am boiling them and when they come out, the alcohol has not burnt off and the mussels are still salty from the brine. The mussels are still delicious but the mariniere is clearly still drunk: white wine fumes overpower the celery and shallots.

But the frites are fantastic. A simple recipe: cut up potatoes into chip sized bits, deep fry them once at 170C for 5-10 minutes, let them cool and then fry them again at 190C for 2-3 minutes. I make use of the deep fat fryer that I have bought myself for Christmas.  To avoid the smell permeating the entire house, I cook outside on my freezing patio, but still the waft goes everywhere. The result is fabulous, especially dipped in a bit of Belgian mayo and mustard.

Friday 1 January: France 🇫🇷: Soupe à l’oignon / French onion soup

Again, many recipes to choose from but only one serious contender as most of the rest are regional ones: choucroute alsacienne, bœuf bourguignon, bouillabaisse… French onion soup must surely be the embodiment of French cookery. My friend Magali tells me that it is reputed to come from Louis XV getting hungry during a stay at a hunting lodge and finding only onions, butter and champagne to cook with.

My recipe comes from a British writer – Felicity Cloake – but a British writer with a deep commitment to French cooking. She is also a keen cyclist and fan of the Tour de France and combined all three in her book “One more croissant for the road”, the story of a summer spent cycling round France, eating regional delicacies and in search of the perfect croissant. It is not a classic but it is good fun and Felicity really knows her stuff, writing a regular feature for The Guardian on “How to cook the perfect …”.

This is taken from that series and combines the best elements of recipes.  She does though warn that it takes a lot of time. And it does. Doing one thing: slowly browning four chopped onions in 80g of butter without the onions sticking or burning.  I spend over two hours, having to stir the onions every few minutes, patiently waiting for them to turn ‘golden brown’, taunted by the deep brown pictures in her article.

For most of the cooking, it is not so much onion soup as butter with onions, the sheer smell of the butter cooking the onions. It reminds me of the famous advice for making perfect mashed potato: “Du beurre, du beurre, et encore du beurre” (Butter, butter and yet more butter”.

Finally I get to mix in some flour, some thyme, some balsamic vinegar, some dry cider and some beef stock before simmering for a further hour.

For the final result, I slice a baguette, rub garlic over the slices – of course – then grill them before adding melted cheese, and grating a bit onto the soup as well.

After all the work: delicious, sublime: sweet, sweet onions in their own heavenly gravy with the croutons absorbing the butteroniony sauce and just a hint of the cider. Utterly French. Utterly delicious.

Sunday 3 January: Italy 🇮🇹: Spaghetti alla Puttanesca

I take a day off to recover from a fever that thankfully turns out not to be COVID but to be a mild flu. Luckily my next dish is the easiest of the lot and an old favourite.

Why spaghetti alla puttanesca?  Hard to find a dish that sums up the wonders of Italian cookery, but I think that this has a good claim. For a start, how many Italian dishes have so many of the key ingredients of Italian cooking all rolled into one? Pasta, fresh tomatoes, salted anchovies, capers, tuna, flat leaf parsley, red chilli, olives, lemon, all cooked with extra virgin olive oil.

I also love the fact that like much Italian cookery, it is so damned simple: boil a pan of hot water, put in some pasta, cook up a loose sauce based with whatever you have in the store cupboard or on the window sill.  When travelling in Italy, I have often admired the sheer simplicity and unpretentiousness.

And then there is the combination of the salty umami of the anchovies and capers with the subtle kick of the red chilli, cinnamon and lemon juice.

Utterly simple, utterly delicious.

Monday 4 January: Slovenia 🇸🇮: Idrijski žlikrofi – Idrian dumplings

After the familiar and easy, the totally unfamiliar and challenging. Slovenia is a beautiful country and I have eaten very well there, most memorably a ten-course meal on a cold December night in a hamlet out in the middle of nowhere, yet only 30 minutes from Ljubljana with my friend Marjan.

So I go for dumplings with a warm chicory salad.  I have not done much baking and have never made dumplings, but why not try?

As soon as work is over, I start making the dough, pounding and kneading away, almost pleading with it to soften up and become smooth.  After well over half an hour of this, I conclude that good enough is good enough and leave it to set for half an hour. While doing this, I have put some potatoes on to boil… and in the heat of the kneading completely forgotten about them. By the time I remember them, they are totally soggy.  Still, I figure that this will make mashing them easier: no big deal. Then I mix them with some freshly fried bacon and some chopped chives and marjoram – the recipe is unclear on the quantities. I also chop and boil some more potatoes and a chicory for the salad.

I move back to the dough and start rolling it. The recipe calls for a thickness of 1-2 mm, which I try to do, again figuring that enough is enough after a solid 10-20 minutes of rolling. The dough is just about 2mm but hey, what can possibly go wrong?

I then try to squeeze the potato mixture into compact hazelnut-sized balls, but the mixture is still hopelessly soggy.  But I have already spent about two hours on this and am getting seriously hungry, so I persist and make lines of soggy balls and then roll the dough over them and cut, trying to make little dumplings and then squeeze the dough together to make little hats.  My dumplings are rather bigger and much less elegant than those in the recipe, but again, what can go wrong?

Finally, I boil them, waiting for them to rise to the top of the water – with them ballooning as they do so, before fishing them out, whipping up a bit of salad dressing for the potatoes and chicory, scattering some lamb’s lettuce on top and serving it all up at around 10.30 at night. I manage to take a plausible photo, but when I finally bite into the dumplings, the dough is disgusting, like undercooked pasta but much softer, still ballooning in my stomach, and the filling is totally insipid. Even the salad is boring.  

I chuck the sad dumplings into the organic waste bin… and dream of one day sitting down in a small Slovenian town to a plate of delicious dumplings in a beautifully meaty sauce… and thinking “Wow! I couldn’t do that…”

A disaster but at least I had the guts to try.

Wednesday 6 January: Croatia 🇭🇷– Grilled sea bream with blitva greens

After my disaster with Slovenia, I opt for a much simpler recipe, one from Rick Stein’s book “From Venice to Istanbul”: grilled sea fish with a potato and green beans side.

And it really is simple: boil the potatoes and French beans and then toss them in some lightly fried garlic. Baste the fish with a bit of olive oil and grill until done.

Even before I start cooking, I have the wonderful smell of the fish as they come out of their wrapping, reminding me of the smells of my childhood in a fishing village.

Grilled lightly until the flesh is soft and white, the sea bream is quite delicious, taking me back to happy sunlit evenings on the Croatian coast. A reminder of how easy fish is to do if only you have the nerve.

And the blitva greens? The tender but firm potato, the soft and juicy beans both absorbing the garlic make a wonderful solid counterpoint to the fish. Surf and turf.

The whole washed down with a glass of Slovenian white.

I can almost hear the waves…

The nothing days between Christmas and New Year are a wonderful time for rest and reflection. The end of the calendar year calls us to close up the mental accounts and settle the psychological profit and loss for the previous 360-odd days: to look at what has been achieved but also what has remained undone.

But in 2020 of all years, there was obviously much that we COULDN’T do, no matter how hard we would have tried.

But even when we legally could, I found myself too tired to do so. I went through the year in an almost permanent state of fatigue, reaching the end of each day mentally and physically exhausted.

Some of that was the unexpected mental effort from doing everything digitally, getting ‘Zoomed out’. 

But some was the mental strain of having to deal with the continued uncertainty and fear, and having to handle the difficult emotions of others.

So a more realistic assessment of the year involves asking yourself not what you did, but what you learned. What is it that you will take forward? 

This awful year could actually help us in the long run, like a kind of Resilience Boot Camp.

So below I have listed just some of the things I learnt. I would love to hear from you about what you learned too.

I learned to love my house and what I have. I always appreciated it but I never had enough time: rushing off to work and then only back when late and dark for a quick supper then bed, or at weekends rushing out shopping or riding or to see friends. Whereas now, I had the chance to see the changes of light during the day, to observe the changes of season, to see the different ways that weather played. To observe the squirrels, the magpies and yes, the bloody pigeons. To see the trees across the road from my home office come into glorious life, bake in the summer heat, discolour and then return.

I learned to love my neighbourhood. About fifteen minutes away, there is a forest surrounding an old monastic abbey: the Red Cloister or Rouge Cloître. In earlier years, I would get there maybe once, twice a year. Since the crisis started, I walked there at least once a week and usually more. In the thick of the first lockdown, I was there every night, out for two hours. I explored it with friends and on my own. One evening as I was walking near the lakes around dusk, I heard a rustling and looked up to see two boar coming down to the stream to feed. It was a magical moment. The forest is continually changing, with familiar paths looking different from one week to the next.

Now it is turning winter and I am still exploring it, these days by night twice a week with separate friends, rediscovering the paths that I have walked by months now lit up in the moonlight or light pollution.  In addition to the boar, I have seen chipmunks and squirrels. My evening walks are serenaded by owls.

On Winter Solstice, a friend and I stopped and lit candles on the path, the drizzle ensuring that they would not burn the forest. We danced to a few songs. A young woman came by, walking her two black dogs. My friend said “Do you want to join us?” and she said “Actually, yes…” a total stranger taking a bit of release in a difficult time. In the dark, neither of us could see her face so we have no idea what she looked like. But the three of us danced there and let our cares wash away.

I learned to be a better cook, trying things out for myself – who else? – and learning to taste, to improvise with missing ingredients, to improve. I tried Chinese, Indian, Italian, Belgian, Iranian, and whatever Nigel Slater and Yotam Ottolenghi came up with in The Guardian.  I learned to enjoy my failures. The other day, I cooked a Persian meat stew. It came out looking like a bad case of dog diarrhoea. It tasted delicious. I will never be a brilliant cook, but I matured and started to improvise.

I learned to slow down including on the bike, to take in the nature, especially in that eery quiet of April, when hardly a soul stirred. As I rode through France and Italy, I was regularly passed and I did not care. I am still learning to slow and calm down: to overcome my impatience, but it’s a start.

I learned to appreciate that nature around me and the sounds that are usually masked by traffic. I started to learn how to recognise trees. So far, I am limited to oaks, pines and beech trees but it’s a start.

But I also learned that without humans, something essential is lacking.  I will never forget cycling through the empty centres of Brussels and Leuven with bars and restaurants shuttered.

To my surprise, I learned that I like working in an office, surrounded by noisy humans. I always used to resent the trudge into work and the disruption of colleagues, but now I pine for it. But that office is only right when it is filled with human noise. In the slight relaxation of the rules in summer when we were able to go back into the office again in limited numbers, the only times I enjoyed being back were when I was surrounded by the team. 

I learned to humour my team, and the way that quiet moments of listening and encouragement to a despondent team member one week would often yield results week later when one of them would lift me out of a slough by their positive attitude and enthusiasm for life. When we started to get back to work in late May and they allowed us back 10% at a time, I was so thrilled to be back that I was hardly working for two hours. The member of my team who I had nominated to come in, swept past me, switched on his computer, and calmly told me that yes, he would be happy to talk but maybe at lunchtime or in the afternoon: he had work to do. Dead right and I learned and got down to work.

I learned that I can be strong in the storm but I also learnt to accept my negative emotions and be kind to them. Those early weeks of lockdown felt like going down a dark tunnel with no knowledge of when we would see light again. I woke up with a sense of dread but I learnt to see the positive and get through each day. I learnt to surf the waves of my emotions however irregularly and fiercely they hit.

I learned to accept my limitations. Including my slowness in learning to identify trees. And my poorness at slowing down.

I learned to be less judgmental of others as they surf their own waves and react differently to the fog of uncertainty and misinformation over the virus and vaccines. I learnt that some friends were mighty oaks that toppled in a storm whilst others were delicate flowers bending with each breeze but surviving due to deep roots. I learnt to accept both and do my best for them but also to step back from internal personal struggles that are not my own.

I learned to appreciate my real friends both in person and online. But l also learned that I yearn for the moment when I can see them again face to face with no ‘social distance’.

I learned the importance of touch. When I met up with a friend for my first restaurant meal after the relaxation of lockdown in that all too brief summer, and she hugged me as we left, I nearly fainted. It was my first serious human contact since I had hugged my parents goodbye four months earlier. I hunger for touch.

I learned how extraordinarily lucky I am to have a secure job out of harm’s way while health workers and many, many others put themselves put themselves out there, day after day, week after week, month after month, and business owners and workers see decades of hard work and financial investment washed away.

I learned that there are many quiet heroes. But that there are also many vocal dicks.

I learned to read people by their eyes. I learned that I love noses and mouths.

I learned how few hours we have in a day, how few days we have in a life.

I learned the fierce urgency of now, the importance of seizing the moment like a wild fish in life’s rushing stream.

I started to learn how to write a blog and a piece for LinkedIn. I can still fit all the followers of this site into a large cardboard box. I learned not to care.

I learned that I should have followed the advice to choose a title for my blog that was sufficiently wide and general to allow for wherever I found myself wanting to take the site later. Because otherwise you end up with a post on resilience and life learnings in a site dedicated to comfortable bike touring…

I learned that you have to punctuate your words with pictures because otherwise people get very bored.

I learned that you are still learning every day. Even in early January when you think that you can sum it all up.  Every day.

And I learned that you shouldn’t overthink or over-elaborate a post. Sometimes you should just stop right there and click ‘Publish’.