Serial Cooking – Smoked Haddock And Curried Rice
This recipe is another from Lindsey Bareham in The Times.
Lindsey called this an incredibly lazy twist on kedgeree. I have tried to make it even lazier.
Note.
- I started with a single Marks and Spencer’s smoked haddock. Just two pounds and no bones or skin.
- I hard-boiled an extra egg for the fridge
- I used an onion instead of shallots.
- I didn’t have any fresh chives or coriander
I rather liked it for a New Year’s Eve supper.
Is This Tube Advert Going To Upset Nicola?
I saw this advert on a Metropolitan Line tube train today.
Is This Tube Advert Going To Upset Nicola?
Are some Scots, going to dislike the advert?
A Christmas Gluten-Free Sandwich From M & S
I was looking to buy a sandwich for my lunch tomorrow in Marks and Spencer in Islington and couldn’t see any bright green packets.
The reason was there were only two and several of these Christmasy sandwiches.
A Christmas Gluten-Free Sandwich From M & S
I’ve seen gluten-free Christmas puddings and mince pies, but I’ve never seen a seasonal gluten-free sandwich before!
Perhaps things are getting better!
Serial Cooking Teriyaki Beef And Noodles
This is another based on a recipe from Lindsey Bareham in The Times.
The main ingredients for meal for two, are a decent sirloin steak, an onion, 100 grams of green beans, a small cup of frozen peas, 50g of noodles and some teriyaka and soy sauces.
This recipe has various options and this is my method for two small portions.
It’s certainly more interesting that steak with chips and peas.
Cinty’s Fish Pie With Celia
Cinty’s fish pie is excellent and goes down well with a beer.
Cinty’s Fish Pie With Celia
I made two and the other kept in the fridge for a couple of days.
An Alternative Source Of Celias
It would appear that Waitrose are no longer stocking Celia gluten-free lager.
As I can’t live without them, I went to the Celia web site and searched for an alternative supplier near me.
I found Harvest E8, just up the road from Dalston Kingsland station.
It certainly is a well-stocked organic shop.
Serial Cooking – Chicken, Leek And Bacon Shepherd’s Pie
This recipe is another from Lindsey Bareham in The Times.
The main ingredients are a Waitrose pack of roast chicken thighs, 75g of bacon lardons, 500g potatoes and 200g trimmed leeks.
It was a very simple and good shepherd’s pie.
Breakfast By The Don
The Meadowhall Shoppin Centre in Shefield sums up what is right and wrong about shopping centres.
To like it has a big Marks and Spencer by the train station, so I can can get gluten-free snacks and sandwiches on my travels. It also has a Carluccio’s for something a bit bigger and like today, I can walk out by the River Don to have my breakfast.
As this is the site of the Tinsley Chord, which is supposed to be built by 2017, there didn’t seem much going on. This article on the BBC says everything is starting to run late.
Other than that there are no maps, so that once they get you inside the doors, you get lost and hopefully for them, you buy something you don’t need.
It just makes me angry and I hate the place with a vengeance.
But then the only reason, I go there is to get fed! Or change trains or between a tram and a train!
Back From The Hague
Before I left on Thursday, I wrote Off To The Hague Today and started the post like this.
Is there any other train journey between two capitals in the world, that is more difficult now than it was six or seven years ago?
It certainly doesn’t get any better.
Arriving in Brussels, the hourly train to Antwerp and The Hague left in half an hour, so I thought if I could get a ticket to The Hague, I might go direct.
So I tried a machine. But these only sell tickets to Belgium.
Ticket Office?
The queues were horrendous, so I got on the train to Antwerp as my Any Belgium Ticket would get me there!
At Antwerp, I took half an hour to buy a ticket and after a lunch of nuts and the worst coffee, I’ve ever had, I caught the next train to Den Haag HS, where I changed for Den Haag Laan van Nieuwe Oost Indie.
Express train it is not! On this main InterCity route, some of it has a speed limit of just 100 kph. Even London to Ipswich is a 160 kph line.
Coming back, there were a few delays and it took exactly four hours from the time I got on the InterCity train at Den Haag HS before I was on my on-time Eurostar leaving Brussels. Admittedly, forty-five minutes of so was checking-in and waiting for the Eurostar.
Incidentally, Den Haag to Brussels in 172.9 km. and can be driven in two hours.
London to Birmingham is actually slightly further and Virgin does it around 85 minutes.
If that isn’t a disgrace, I’m a Dutchman!
What wasn’t a disgrace was the food on Eurostar!
I’d forgot to ask for a gluten-free meal, but I was assured the main course was gluten-free. I’m pretty certain it was and it was also delicious.
So at least the last part of the journey went well and we arrived in St. Pancras on time!
Passenger services through the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994, with services to and from St. Pancras starting in November 2007.
The new Class 374 trains to start a service to Amsterdam and Cologne are now sitting in sidings, with services supposed to start at the end of 2016.
Judging by the history of the development of services to places other than London, Brussels and Paris, I suspect that date will slip to somewhere about 2026 or even 2036.
The biggest problem seems to be the multiplicity of different electrical systems between France, Germany and The Netherlands. At least we chose our 25kVAC overhead system is the same as the French and has been since at least the 1960s.
I despair, that I’ll ever take a High Speed train direct to Rotterdam and then take a local train to The Hague.
No wonder the EU is such a mess, if the UK, Belgium, France, Germany and The Netherlands can’t agree on something purely technical like a connecting railway.
Marks And Spencer’s Gluten Free Food In Stations
I regularly travel by train and visit stations, outside of my normal patch of London. Once away from the capital, often the only substantial food I can get as I pass through the station are Marks and Spencer’s gluten-free sandwiches, a drink and perhaps some fruit.
At some stations, you can rely on gluten-free sandwiches being available most of the time. In this group would be.
Birmingham New Street, Cambridge, Liverpool Lime Street, Manchester Piccadilly, Oxford and Reading
Then there are important interchange stations, where possibly unless you’re there before nine, there’s never any gluten-free sandwiches.
Cardiff, Edinburgh, Sheffield and Newcastle
The worst major station for gluten-free food is Nottingham. The food shop is a Morrison’s, which I’ve never used. To get any gluten-free food you need to go to the city centre, which is a long walk or a return on the tram.
Other stations to avoid if you’re a coeliac like me, are Blackpool, Derby, Doncaster, Huddersfield, Ipswich, Norwich, Middlesbrough and Preston.
The last two are places where it is very difficult to buy any gluten-free food at all.
The Anonymous Widower 