The GirlAlive Blog

Edinburgh Book Festival

This last weekend I went to see John Green at the Edinburgh Book Festival. I’ll show you some crappy pictures that are really just still shots taken from my video camera.

I also took some video when John was speaking. It is a bit crappy because we were sitting way in the back. My husband is 6′5″, so we didn’t want to block anyone’s view.

Also, while we’re on the subject of nerdfighters, my guinea pig Spike is a nerdfighter.

He has a deformed paw in the front (we don’t know how it happened and it doesn’t seem to hurt him), and the toes are separated like a nerdfighter gang sign.

A look back on British food.

Brett suggested that for my whole “tell me what to write thing“, I should do a brief review, five years on, of the foods on my British Food site. Okay. Sounds like an idea to me.

First of all, there is always the question about whether there are foods I have tried but not reviewed. Oh my, yes. I don’t have a camera with me all the time and I don’t always have a notepad to take notes about what I think about food. In short, I’m not cut out to be a full time food blogger. So first, I’ll give a few short reviews of foods I can think of off the top of my head that I’ve eaten and never got around to reviewing on the site. I may do full reviews later, but for now this’ll have to do.

Eton Mess: Tasty. All kinds of tasty.

Pavlova: Just as tasty as Eton Mess. My husband likes toffee pavlovas, but I prefer berries or fruit. Fantastic summer dessert.

Tikka Masala: It is always billed as “Indian” food, but it was invented in Glasgow. I love most Indian food, including Tikka Masala, Korma, Jalfrezi, naan bread, and everything else. You can buy a jar of decent ready-made curry sauce for about £1, and then combine it with rice or cous cous and a can of chickpeas and some veggies for a really good and really cheap vegetarian dinner. It’s usually eaten with chicken (or turkey) but I can’t afford much meat lately, so chickpeas are great too.

Doner kebab: Again, tasty. It’s very similar to the gyros sold in the US, but I think is more Turkish than Greek. The main difference is the sauce. Instead of the creamy cucumber sauces you get in the US, doner kebabs are usually served with a hot sauce reminiscent of buffalo wing sauce.

Anyway, on to the review of the stuff I’ve already reviewed.

Irn Bru: I’ve had a few bottles of Irn Bru over the years. It’s a nice change from standard cola for a caffeine hit. Generally, I go for the diet when possible, which is just as good as the regular, in my opinion.

Oatcakes: I have them now and then with cheese. They’re especially good with aged Scottish cheddar.

Scotch Eggs: I hate to admit that I eat scotch eggs. I don’t eat them often, but now and then I have one. They’re an easy quick lunch when I decide that I don’t care if I die young.

Toad In the Hole: I think I might have made this dish once or twice since the review. It’s tasty. I came up with a great Americanized variation on it a few months ago. I substituted cornbread batter for the Yorkshire pudding batter and hot dogs for the sausages, and it made a tasty sort of corndog loaf.

Mushy Peas: I still eat mushy peas sometimes. They’re good with fish and a healthy dose of vinegar.

Scotch Dumpling: Haven’t touched one since the review.

Jaffa Cakes: They have released all kinds of Jaffa Cake variations in the last couple of years. I’ve tried lemon, lime, raspberry, and blackcurrent. I still like the original orange best.

Christmas Pudding: Haven’t had one since the review. I have had some mince pies, which I guess I should review at some point.

Selkirk Bannock: Not eaten since the review.

Lucozade: When I gave up sugary beverages, I gave up Lucozade, even though I only had maybe 3 bottles of it before then. Last time I had any was when it was used as a measured amount of sugar for a blood glucose test. I think that might have been one of the reasons I gave up sugary beverages.

British hot dogs: No. Never again. They’re an abomination. My husband sometimes buys some hot dogs in a jar, which are squishier than I prefer, but they’re still much better than the cans.

Pickled Onions: I have a pickled onion now and then. They’re pretty good sliced on tuna or cheese sandwiches.

Spotted Dick: I eat a lot of spotted dick. (Done giggling now?) It’s one of those things I don’t eat all the time, but I have to buy it everytime someone from the US comes for a visit. They will not leave my house without trying spotted dick.

Custard: One of my favorite go-to desserts. You can buy little cups of custard, like pudding cups. Easy, cheap and tasty. The low fat versions are good too.

Haggis: Nope. No more haggis for me. I eat a lot of vegetarian haggis. It’s actually very good. But the regular haggis with the festival of organ meat just isn’t my thing.

Smarties: Haven’t eaten these much. I guess I just think there are chocolate options here that are far more interesting.

Lemon Curd: I think I’ve had this on toast once or twice. I should use it more. Maybe on meringues to make mini-pavlovas or something. I have had it as a coating on cheesecake, which is good.

Chocolate Spread: I like chocolate spread. It is great stuff. Yet I still don’t eat it much. I’m a fan of peanut butter, so that is always my first choice.

Bubble and Squeak: Still a good side dish, but I don’t opt for it often. It’s kind of a lot of work.

Flapjacks: I’ve had a lot of Flapjacks, and tons that were better than the test ones. The ones they sell at Julian Graves are fantastic.

Jelly: Nothing against jelly, but we’ve mostly had the pre-made cups of it with fruit because our fridge is too small to fit a big bowl of anything. I seriously miss American refrigerators.

Jamaica Ginger Cake: Had some last night. Drowning in rum sauce. It was good. But there was a lot of rum sauce.

Cornish Pasties: Had some of these a couple days ago for lunch. They’re tasty, but I’ve probably only had them maybe twice since the original test.

Sticky Toffee Pudding: If it’s available and I can afford it, I will eat sticky toffee pudding. I’ve even chosen it over chocolate. It’s amazing stuff.

Yorkshire Pudding: I don’t eat these much, simply because of the fat content, but they are tasty. Yorkshire puddings were a particular favorite of my cousin Raeanne when she visited last year.

Scotch Pies: Can’t honestly remember if I’ve had these since the test. Probably not. I think mostly because there are so many other pies with better crusts here. Like pork pies and cornish pasties.

Branston Pickle: Still one of my favorite things to have on a cheese sandwich.

Marmite: An abomination (unto Nuggan). Satan’s poop. Not suitable for human consumption. And I still don’t care how much you love Marmite. Tell me all about how much you love it, and I will silently judge you. There is something wrong with people who think that Marmite is food.

Piccallili: Don’t think I’ve had any since the test. I probably should. I think I tested it on the same day as Marmite, and so it scarred me against it. Someone served it on The Great British Menu the other day and it looked really good.

Crumpets: One of my favorite easy breakfasts. My favorites are either to have crumpets with peanut butter or melted cheese.

Cranachan: I don’t think I’ve made this since the test. At least not properly. But it is still a fantastic dessert. I would almost prefer it non-alcoholic though.

Meat Pie (in a can): Haven’t had it again, and probably never will.

Weetabix: I’ve had Weetabix a few times, as well as the oat version Oatabix. I found that as much as I wasn’t a fan of Weetabix with milk, it is really good with yogurt. Especially fruit flavored yogurt.

Black Pudding: The cafe here in town serves a full breakfast for about £3, and it includes black pudding. Which I don’t like. I always shove it onto my husband’s plate. It still just tastes like a blood clot to me.

Pork Pies: One of my favorite snack/lunch/picnic kind of things. It’s like Spam in a crust. What’s not to like?

Digestive Biscuits: Not my favorite cookie, but not bad. I recently found some chocolate chip digestive biscuits, and they’re really good. Lower fat and higher fiber than a standard chocolate chip cookie, but full of chocolate chip tastiness. I’ve had a lot of the digestives with a chocolate coating on one side, but I still prefer the chocolate chip ones because they don’t get melty chocolate on your fingers.

So there you go. A look back at all the foods I reviewed, four or five years later. Most of it doesn’t seem nearly so foreign to me anymore. I’d have to say that the number one thing I love about British food is the fact that you can get so much of it that is local. There are so many more small farms and so much more variation than there is in the US. And the British are so proud of their produce and they do their best to produce food that is of the highest quality, not just the largest quantity. I love buying a pack of strawberries, a pork shoulder, and a package of cookies and seeing that it was all produced in Scotland.

What do I miss in British food? I miss high quality Mexican food. I miss Dairy Queen. I miss root beer. But overall, I love British food, and most days I don’t even think about the stuff I’m missing. They have the basic ingredients here to produce food that is familiar to me, now that I’m used to working with the local ingredients.

The Easiest Root Beer Recipe in the UK

Okay, so there’s not much root beer in the UK. There’s one brand I can sometimes get, but it’s not great. And it’s way more expensive than any other pop. So my parents sent me a bottle of root beer extract. So I have the root beer flavor, but no fizz or sugar, so it has sat on a shelf for a while as I was trying to find a good recipe.

The other day I had a flash of brilliance. Cream soda already has fizz and sugar, and the flavor will blend just fine with root beer. So a 2 Liter of cream soda + a teaspoon or so of root beer extract = a pretty passable root beer.

Merry Christmas

This year my husband has been eating mince pies, but I can’t stomach them for some reason. They aren’t bad, but I’m just really not in the mood this year. We pretty much never do the usual British turkey dinner for Christmas because we did that at Thanksgiving. We also almost never have Christmas pudding. So we’ll be doing our own thing. Pork loin and sweet potatoes and bread pudding. Should be good. I’ve been watching the Christmas specials on the British food network, and on the American food network and noting some differences. I’ve also just been thinking in general about the things that are different here at Christmas.

Things I love about British Christmas:

Christmas crackers. Little thingies that pop and there is stuff inside. They’re pretty fun and I’m not even freaked out by the popping noise anymore.

Royal Institute Christmas specials. They do a week of science shows for kids, but they’re usually pretty fun and interesting.

Doctor Who. There’s usually a Christmas episode. It is usually awesome.

Extra days off. There’s Christmas, then there’s Boxing Day and the last place I worked made me take the entire week between Christmas and New Year’s off. And you get January 1st and 2nd off in Scotland.

No one has a big yard, so no one puts up obscene amounts of lights. Therefore, no one notices or cares when I refuse to hang lights on my house.

The outdoor temp is not too bad. I grew up in northern Minnesota, so I’m always into a December where the snot does not freeze inside my nose. But it’s still cold and snowy enough to feel like winter.

Things I hate about British Christmas:

Christmas music. They never seem to listen to any remotely traditional Christmas songs. It’s just the same 4 pop songs over and over again, and they’re all obnoxious. Christmas should be more Harry Connick Jr. and a LOT less Wham!.

Brussels sprouts. Who decided that the vegetable that everyone hates is “festive”? I don’t even hate brussels sprouts, but they are nowhere near tasty enough to deserve to be served for Christmas.

Stilton. They include this blue cheese in every cheeseboard. I mostly love British cheese. But I cannot stomach stilton. It tastes like really powerful moist sweatsock. Only worse. I’d rather eat earwax.

They don’t have hot apple cider here. They don’t have eggnog either, but I’ve never been a huge fan anyway.

My family and friends are not here. I miss my parents and my grandpa and my cousins and my brother and his wife and kids.

Real friendly, or Seattle friendly?

My husband and I have been planning to move back to the US, or maybe to Canada for a while now, but the question remains of where to move. I grew up in Duluth, and a significant portion of my family still lives there. My brother lives in Illinois. A bunch of my family lives in Iowa. Quite a few of my friends live in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

It’s pretty easy to look online and find information about the cost of housing and job markets in different places. It’s even pretty easy to look up information on bus schedules and routes. Pictures of local landscapes are plentiful. But the one thing that is probably most important is nearly impossible to quantify. There is no way to measure how friendly the people are.

In Minnesota, the people are friendly, with provisions. Out in public, people keep to themselves. Even staring at a stranger is considered rude. The norm is to simply ignore all people you don’t know and if you can’t do that, short and polite noncommital statements only. You see, in Minnesota people mostly believe that if you are too friendly you are inviting someone deeply into your life. Minnesotans are not against friendship, but they also don’t want to commit to a friendship until they have collected the necessary information to know if you are worth it. But once you’re accepted, you have friends for life. My mom still exchanges Christmas cards with people she worked with 20 years ago. I am Facebook friends with a ton of people I knew from high school, college, and even the one year that I worked in Duluth before I moved to Scotland. Once you’re in, they will be on your side for life. They want to be in each other’s lives in a good way.

Seattle is a different story. I lived in Seattle for 5 years. People there are welcoming and friendly from the first minute you meet them, but they don’t mean it. They expect friendship to only exist while you’re standing in front of them. Out of sight, out of mind. If you change jobs, your former co-workers won’t talk to you again after that. People from Seattle will have long friendly conversations with you on the bus one day and look at you as if they don’t recognize you the next day. Relationships are friendly, but completely shallow and fleeting. I had a group of “friends” that I hung out with several evenings a week for about two years. I went on weekends away with them. I even went to Russia with some of them. When circumstances in my life changed and I stopped attending the same church as them, they all disappeared from my life. Now, about half of them won’t even accept me as a facebook friend and the ones that will never speak to me. I witnessed several of them be very friendly and welcoming to someone when they were in the room and then talk about how annoying she was when she left the room. Basically, you can’t trust them for a real friendship. They might be friendly, but that doesn’t mean they want to be your friend. (To be very clear, I have a few actual friends from my years in Seattle, but most of them were not originally from there.)

Then there’s Edinburgh. There is no definition of “friendly” that applies to this area. It was even once voted “the unfriendliest city in Europe.” If you’re the least bit different, they will taunt you in the streets and harass you even if they’ve never met you. They make it very clear the first time they meet you that they don’t like you and want you to go away. I’ve met some friendly people here. I had some great co-workers at my last job and I even still keep in touch with a few of them. My husband’s family and friends have been great. But they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Most of the people here hate outsiders just as much as the people of Seattle do, but they’re much more open about it. In some ways, that’s preferable. I don’t have any illusions of friendship here. I know that I don’t have friends. They don’t wait until you’re out of the room to say how much they hate you.

So where to move? It’s hard to know where I can move that the people will be genuinely friendly. There is no easy statistical friendliness index. Even if there was, Seattle would no doubt come off as very friendly, even though you’re more likely to find real friends in Minnesota, where people seem cold and distant. I don’t have any answers on that one.

I won something!

Okay, so a while ago I happened upon a fairly amusing web site called I Hate My Message Board. The first attraction for me was the snack food reviews. It’s always fun to find someone else who is willing to try all kinds of weird foods just because they’ve never tried them before. There was a contest there for the scariest product. The item I really wanted to enter was a thing I found at the new Lidl here. They had a special on Greek food, including a can of “musky octopus”. Not only was it a horrifying CAN OF OCTOPUS, but they felt the need to include the modifier MUSKY. But I did not enter that product in the contest because the scary can of octupus cost something like £3.50, and I would never ever ever eat it. For £3.50 I can buy quite a lot of food that I am actually willing to consume.

Instead, I entered the product from my British Food site that scares me the most. You’d think that would be Marmite, but it’s hard to see how bad Marmite is without tasting it. No, the one that frightens me the most is the hot dogs in a can.

Today Tracy announced the winners of the scary product contest, and it was me! Hooray! British hot dogs are the scariest product her readers could find. Although the placenta shampoo is pretty darned creepy too.