County Down to County Fermanagh

Friday, January 18, 2008
Belle Isle, Lisbellaw, Co. Fermanagh

The wind and rain are howling outside but I am snug in my courtyard cottage at Belle Isle, a country castle on an island near Enniskillen, full of my simple but delicious supper of salad, cold meats and cheese, fruit, and some eggs. I left Bangor at lunchtime, remembering to wave at Reed and Walt who were on the deck at home to see me off on the train to Belfast, where I got the bus for a 2 hr ride to Lisbellaw, where Fiona Plunket, the estate’s p.r. manager whose husband is the land agent, picked me up. Tomorrow I’ll participate in one of the cookery school’s day courses with chef Liz Moore. This would be a romantic destination for a couple but I am enjoying my solitude for this little bit of time, knowing that I’ll be back with the boys tomorrow night as usual.

The countryside is a crazy quilt of every shade of green, even in January, small pastures and fields of random shapes marked off by thick hedges and sometimes, rock walls. The countryside seems unspoilt to my American eyes – after leaving the environs of Belfast it was one bucolic farm scene after another, some grand country houses on hills overlooking their grassy grounds, some more modest gray clad boxes with slate roofs surrounded by stone or newer metal outbuildings, even a few whitewashed thatched cottages tucked away, slowly being overtaken by hedges and brambles. While in Bangor some of the houses facing the sea have been painted in cheerful pastel colors, the tradition in these parts looks to be gray or white buildings, either with the stone exposed or more usually, clad in concrete or plaster. Even the new houses are built in the shape and style of the old ones, so it’s hard to see where new development has happened, especially here where the creeping damp mossy greenness quickly takes the gloss off fresh stone.

Baking Bread on Sunday

Many people I know are afraid to try baking bread because some baked goods like muffins and cakes are so finicky and prone to failure. Bread, however, is different. Bread is forgiving and flexible.

Andre Colin, a goat farmer and a country baker that I met this fall in France, who bakes 150 loaves every week to sell at the local market, explained to me that some bakers "like to make it sound like bread baking is really difficult, as though a good baker is God. But I am not God!"

Try baking a loaf of bread and having a slice of it while it's still warm, with a little butter and honey drizzled on it. You might not be God, but you'll feel like you're in heaven!

Here's my basic bread recipe:

Pour 1 pint of lukewarm water into a large ceramic mixing bowl. Add 1 1/2 tablespoons of dry yeast. Stir to dissolve, then add 1 tablespoon of salt and 4 tablespoons of olive oil. Stir until well mixed.

Add 1 cup of coarsely ground whole grain flour and stir until well mixed. Then, add 3 or 4 cups of finely ground white bread flour (high protein or "strong" flour, not pastry or cake flour) and stir until well mixed.


Put a 1/2 cup or so of flour on the counter and dump the dough onto it. Scrape the bits of dough and flour out of the mixing bowl and add it to the dough, pour a few tablespoons of olive oil in the bowl, and set aside. Start kneading the bread by folding the dough in half towards you, pushing down on it with the heel of your hands, rotating it a turn, and repeating. Add flour a bit at a time until the dough is smooth and elastic and no longer wet and sticky. Keep a little flour on the counter underneath the dough so it doesn't stick, although it is okay if there are some bits of dough clinging to your hands and the counter.


Drop the ball of dough into the bowl with the olive oil and then turn it over to coat the dough in oil. Cover the bowl with a towel and put in a warmish but not hot place to rise for about an hour. Prepare two bread pans by coating their insides with olive oil.


When the dough has doubled in size, dump it out onto the counter and deflate it by kneading it a few more times. Then divide it evenly into two pieces. Shape each piece into a loaf with your hands - doesn't matter how you do it - and drop one into each pan, cover with the towel, and let rise again for another 45 minutes or so, until they're just poofing up above the level of the sides of the breadpan. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit or 200 degrees Celsius, and bake the bread about 45 minutes, until well browned. If you like, use a knife to decoratively slice the top of the risen loaves just before you put them in the oven. For a rustic look, sprinkle a little flour on the risen loaves before baking, too.


Remove from the pans and cool on a rack completely before storing in an airtight place.

Clinton New Hampshire and Chicken Maryland

Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Bangor

Of course, daily reporting in to your spouse – who is keeping track of every penny of your joint budget – of how much money you spent is also a great strategy for cutting back. I might have easily spent double the amount I did at Frankskinsense this morning had I not known I would have to ‘fess up to Walt as soon as I got home. But I did find on her clearance table some essentials that we needed – shampoo, moisturizer, cleanser, bubble bath for Reed that smells like coconut, etc. Plus a few luxuries like salt and oil scrub that I think my almost 40 year old skin will appreciate. But in looking at the list of ingredients for this scrub, I think I might be able to concoct this stuff myself in the future for a lot less money. I’m sure there are recipes galore online.

The London newspapers all got it wrong this morning - although none of them were dumb enough to put that Obama had won in New Hampshire, they pictures were of him, and the stories were of Clinton switching to plan B in the wake of her almost certain defeat. The papers' headlines were already done at 11 pm our time last night, almost 8 hours before the decision was final in N.H. So tomorrow's papers will be more interesting. The press here really loves these stories, by the way, they're so excited at the prospect of the end of the Bush era, although the more thoughtful commentators seem to think that the wisest if less inspiring course of action would be to elect Clinton, who is a world-class leader and who will not inflict her political learning curve on the country and the rest of the world. I'm undecided. I want to vote for them both.

Next door neighbor June gave me quite a treat yesterday, taking me along with her church women’s group for a lunch outing to the Ramblin’ Rose restaurant, not too far away in Crawfordsburn, attached to a garden center. We were a crowd of about 40 mature ladies, in a restaurant considered an old ladies restaurant – according to Pearl who eats there every week on Sundays – because the menu is so traditional and homestyle. I examined the high tea menu for the restaurant, which is available on Fridays and Saturdays from 4:30 to 6:30 pm, and discovered a nice variety of traditional seafood and beef dishes – no surprises there, all you have to do is look around and you’ll see why Ireland and the British Isles are cow heaven – and some more ethnic chicken selections such as sweet and sour chicken, chicken curry, and something called Chicken Maryland, which was breaded and fried chicken accompanied by corn, sweet potato, banana, pineapple, and bacon. This was apparently very popular a few decades ago and to me it sounds sort of Caribbean/Islander/Southern and I need to find out if anyone else has heard of Chicken Maryland! Anyway, interesting how chicken was the dish with which it is acceptable to experiment, or at least slightly veer towards the spicy. No such flights of fancy with the haddock or the beef cutlets.

My lunch consisted of a chicken breast cooked with bacon, mashed potatoes, a roast potato, creamed leeks, and carrots, with apple pie and custard for dessert.

Travel to Save Money

Monday, January 7, 2008
Bangor

With the new year and the horrible economy in both the U.S. and in Britain, the newspapers have been talking a lot about reining in personal spending. For instance, in the Times last weekend I read a feature written by three brothers who simply agreed not to spend any money for a week. They were allowed to stock their refrigerators before they started and to take public transportation to work. Of course they saved hundreds of pounds by bringing their own lunches and not buying coffees or putting gas in their cars and all kinds of things they normally do without thinking about it.

It got me thinking about our own finances. Many people assume that to live abroad requires great personal wealth – but we’re an example that this ain’t necessarily so. By living in other people’s houses (sometimes wonderful, sometimes difficult), not owning a car, using the library for our reading material, and limiting our spending to our food and personal toiletries, the occasional item of used clothing, and public transportation, we are able to live fairly cheaply – it would be even cheaper if the dollar wasn’t doing so badly. The key is knowing that whatever we buy we’ll most likely have to carry on our backs when we move on! That is a major strategy in the battle not to accumulate junk.

And, by spending a year in other people’s houses we’ve taken a year off from spending money for improvements for our own home and car– except for major repairs, like sewer pipes, which require attention no matter what side of the world we’re on. No paint, no tile, no power tools, no gas, no furniture, no books to put on the shelves, no newspaper subscriptions… you can read all kinds of books about simplifying your life but there’s nothing that will accomplish this faster than traveling the world with a backpack.

You’d think I’d miss having all my cookbooks and my normally huge stack of reading material in the bedroom. But know what? I’ve been able to find every recipe I’ve needed online. And having a single book on my nightstand is relaxing in a way that an entire shelf of unread material, waiting and waiting for me to get to, is not. By the way, right now I’m reading The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt, about Venice. He wrote Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the bestseller about Savannah, and this one is great too.

Let it snow

Sunday, January 6, 2008
Bangor

Snow on Friday at last, none too soon for the neighborhood children who’ll play in any kind of snow, even this soaking wet kind that packs together into lethal projectiles and weighs so much that to make even a smallish snowman requires gargantuan strength. The snow started down on Thursday evening. By bedtime, it was gone. But when we woke up on Friday morning, the ground was covered with the magical stuff. Lucky for me, since I’d forbidden Reed from going outside to play in it after bedtime on Thursday, when all the neighborhood children were out throwing snowballs at each other. Reed ate breakfast and got dressed and brushed his teeth in record time and headed outdoors while it was still dark. Aside from a few hours inside in the afternoon when his friend David came inside for a few games of checkers/draughts while it was pouring rain outside, Reed was outside from dawn until dusk. He could barely keep his eyes open during dinner.

The t.v. news for Ulster was filled with scenes of cars gone off the road during the snowstorm Thursday night. Us winter-hardened Midwesterners just smile and shake our heads – as if knowing how to drive on snowy roads somehow makes us morally superior to people who live where there are palm trees!

Sausage Rolls

Thursday, December 27, 2007
Bangor

Everyone else is out shopping at the post-Christmas sales but Walt made an apple pie and I made sausage rolls today, baking instead of shopping. Sausage rolls – a roll of seasoned pork sausage meat baked in puff pastry - are extremely British. I’ve never seen them anywhere else. The recipe I used was in Gary Rhodes New British Classics cookbook. I hadn’t heard of him before but now I’ve seen him on t.v. a lot and so far all his recipes that I’ve tried have turned out just great. Reed and I love sausage rolls; Heatherlea, the excellent bakery/restaurant downtown, makes them and we have popped in for a snack more than once after swimming. But homemade ones, I have to say, are better. Even Walt liked them, and he doesn’t usually care much for sausage anything.

Christmas Photos

Reed in his shepherd outfit.
The tree we finally found and had delivered to our house. Reed decorated it mostly all by himself, with a little help from Mom.