What has happened?

Well a number of things really. Firstly we spent several months travelling around the UK WWOOFing with the intention of picking up hints and tips for gardening our way to self sufficiency at some undefined point in the future. Along these travels we saw animals kept in the respectful way they should be, children being brought up knowing exactly where their food came from, including the explicit gory details of the animals’ execution (which, by the way, didn’t seem to upset them in the slightest), we also thought a lot during that time about whether or not a strict vegetarian diet for the UK to feed itself was really possible. Can all those hills used for grazing sheep really be turned over to efficient veg production? No.

So, to cut a long story short, on one of our final WWOOFing stops our hosts offered us meat, and we ate it. First it was rabbit. By this time this was a relatively simple choice. The rabbits had spent their entire lives running around the fields surrounding the farm we were sat in. They led the ultimate free range lifestyle. They were not pumped full of drugs. They were not farmed intensively.  They did not suffer from unnatural diseases as a result of the way they were kept. They weren’t subjected to high levels of stress as they were not transported miles in cramped conditions to meet their fate at an abattoir. They were just rabbits, doing what rabbits do. Then one unexpected second they were no longer rabbit. They were, literally dead meat. Charged with the crime of feasting on the wrong vegetables and  too much frolicking they were shot just when they weren’t looking.

So that was the rabbit. It had wrangled it’s way out of our reasons for not eating meat and ended up in a very tasty rabbit and orange stew. Next came the pig.

But this is “Egg But No Bacon!”

I know, but this is what has happened, and it’s time I let the truth out. It was at the same farm we’d eaten the rabbit. On a return visit we walked into the kitchen to find our host salting bacon. “These are our pigs!” she said rubbing salt into the skin. It was all so matter of fact. To be sure they has been upset. We’d heard several of our WWOOF hosts tell us stories of the first time they killed their pigs. How sad they’d felt, for days even. Grown men crying. This is what responsibility feels like. But along with the tears comes a respect for the animal you could never have buying it shrink wrapped in a supermarket.

So they gave us the choice again. They were planning a roast for dinner. Did we want some? This seemed a step up from the rabbit somehow. I’m not sure why. I think it’s just the scale of it. Pigs are the size of a person. They look at you. They run over to you when you come to feed them scraps. They have personalities. They make odd noises. They are hysterically funny. So this was the choice. Did we want to eat another living being? Something that had lost it’s life only to end up here on the table covered in salt to be sliced, fried and served with an egg? Was this what we wanted?

After some deliberation we both decided to go for it. I’m not sure whether it was a full acceptance of the proposal that it is ok to eat living things, after 4 years of thinking I still don’t feel like I know enough to make a fully honest decision on that. This was more a taking of an opportunity. An experiment if you like. How would it feel to eat an animal that we know had been raised and killed in a way that we thought was acceptable?

So how did it feel? Honestly it was odd at first. I cautiously took a slice of meat from the carving dish and put in on my plate beside the usual pile of potatoes, carrots and peas. I kept looking at it, pushing it around my plate, preferring at first to eat the potatoes. Then, when I thought no one was looking (why?!) I quickly cut a piece, popped it in my mouth and chewed it up. Blimey it was tasty!

This meat was a million miles from the pork I’d given up. It seems like over time we’ve been conned into accepting dry flavourless meat. This home reared meat was completely different. So succulent, and the crackling was something else! So I had the results of my experiment. The dead pig proved everything I had suspected. Badly reared animals result not just in suffering for them, but also the actual flavour of the meat suffers.

So where does this leave me now? Am I destined to return to a diet of frozen chops, chicken fillets and Big Macs? No way. The original arguments still stand. In fact they have if anything been strengthened by these experiences. The intensive animal farmed in entirely unacceptable. I am more convinced than ever of this.

I can’t take on the supermarkets, but for myself my next step is to take as much responsibility as I can for any meat I eat. A neighbour recently brought around a rabbit and taught me how to skin and gut it. Soon I may go out shooting with him. We have bought a quarter of a pig from the farm we worked at. We bought into the pig when it was just weeks old. Beccy and Tony have raised the pig for us in a way we are happy with, and in a few weeks from now we will go to collect it, chopped and bagged up for the freezer. I imagine this quarter of a pig will last us a long time. But in preparation for when it does run out, maybe we should get our own pigs.

So “Egg But No Bacon”, will you be changing your name to “Bacon and Eggs”?

No. Well, at least not for the moment. There is a difficulty with this kind of ethical eating that I’m not sure how to deal with. People know now that we eat meat. What will happen if I go to someone’s house for dinner, or somewhere else I am not absolutely sure of the origin of the meat? I can’t say I’m not vegetarian but I won’t eat your meat. Well maybe I should if I feel strongly enough, it’s just something about it doesn’t sit right. It is guaranteed to turn people against you and anything you have to say before you’ve even began.

We need a new way of talking about meat eating. There is something about saying to people “I am a Vegetarian” that I was never comfortable with. To be honest I think it’s a meaningless term. As I see things you can not BE a Vegetarian, you are just a person and you choose not to eat meat. It is not part of your essential state of being. By saying you are a vegetarian it takes away responsibility and the need to think. If you say, “I can’t eat this because I am a vegetarian”, it doesn’t really mean anything, it is not an explanation. What is happening is that you won’t eat it because for some reason you choose not to.

To clarify and explain why I think the distinction is important I suggest that the opposite is also true. You don’t eat meat because you are a meat eater (or not vegetarian). You eat meat because you choose to. And with that choice comes the responsibility of thinking about what you are doing. Every time you eat a dead animal you take responsibility for how that animal has been kept. By eating the meat you are saying you accept responsibility for the death of the animal and that you approve of the conditions it has been kept in.

It is up to you what those conditions are.

If you want something a bit more than sight seeing and sunbathing from a trip then Karma Waters is definitely the place to be. The home page of the website opens with the statement, “At some point we understood and accepted that life is Karma and this is our place”, from there follows an explanation of their “Busi-ness” (that activity that keeps you busy) model of Karma Investment,

“Karma Investment is to consciously invest in improving your own life and that of all others (people, environment, animals, etc.) by consciously making the focus of all “investments” (time, energy, knowledge, etc.) to improve personal & collective karma”

Regular readers may recall we came here on one of our first days and ended up in a conversation with the owner, Paul, which somehow convinced us Hoi An should be our home for the month. We’ve since been back many times and enjoyed inspirational conversations covering, as you can probably imagine, life, the universe and everything.

Aside from the spiritual guidance we received here, another draw, if you need one, is that this place has perhaps one of the best views of any Hoi An cafe – a quiet spot looking out across a beautiful tropical river. The food is very tasty too, it comes in generous portions and is intentionally healthy with no MSG and all fresh ingredients.

We had a lovely night there on Friday when we enjoyed sharing an enormous Chinese style Hotpot with Paul, his wife Duyen, their kids and some of the people who work there. I fear we may be a bad influence on him though in encouraging him to stay up late chatting when he had to be up early. We seem to have this effect on people. But you know, if the time is right, you’ve just got to go with it.

Duyen is responsible for the creation of most of the meals on their menu and kindly agreed to some unofficial cooking lessons, so over the last few days I’ve been taught how to make one of their soups, a spicy salad and a vegan pancake roll. Amazing. Here is the first of those recipes, Curried Vegetable Noodle Soup. Thanks again for sharing it with me! There are more videos on the Karma Waters website showing how to create other dishes from their menu.

Curried Vegetable Soup with Noodles

Recipe for 1 LARGE bowl, enough for 2 people.

• 1 carrot peeled and cut into chunks
• 1 medium sized potato peeled and cut into chunks
• 2″ of taro root peeled and cut into chunks
• 1/8 of an onion finely chopped
• 3 mushrooms (they used something similar to jelly ear) chopped small
• 3 or 4 pieces of crispy tofu sliced
• 3 cloves of garlic, chopped
• glass noodles (not sure on measurement, say about a 1.5cm diameter bundle?!)
• 2 tbsp peas
• 1 tsp curry powder
• 1/2 tsp paprika
• Veggie fish sauce (or soy sauce)

1. Put the carrot, potato and taro root into a pan with just enough boiling water to cover and simmer until tender then drain (keep the cooking liquid).
2. Place the glass noodles in a bowl of cold water to be used later.
3. Heat 1 tbsp oil in a pan, add the garlic and onion, cook for one minute, then add the curry powder, cook for a further minute before adding in this order and stirring between each new addition the drained veg, tofu, peas, and mushrooms.
4. Add a good splash of veg. fish sauce (or soy sauce) and then add the reserved cooking liquid from the vegetables.
5. Cover and heat for a couple of minutes, add salt, pepper and a tsp of paprika, heat for 2 minutes more then remove the glass noodles from their water and add them to the pan. The soup is ready when the noodles are cooked.

The last couple of weeks in China were spent down in the south with a trip to Hong Kong and a couple of it’s islands and then a week stay at the English school in Yangshuo. I have to say I think the main part of Hong Kong was probably my least favorite place of the trip so far. Maybe it was just too familiar? Loads of the same fancy shops we get at home, its rip off Irish pubs and fancy bars are far too expensive (£6/pint!) and the huge commercial centre with enormous skyscrapers and shopping centres really wasn’t for me. Sure you can get away from that and find, I suppose, more traditional areas, but the most obvious thing there is money and work. And if you’re after seeing something more ‘traditional’ there are a million other places in China you can go see it with out the priceyness (Guangzhou for example is amazing!).

We had a scary trip on the Metro one morning. We hit it at rush hour and found ourselves drawn into the march of the drones.

It was very freaky. Every person walked silently and quickly with blank expressions in a constant flow around the underground platforms. Such a contrast to the lively hussle and bustle of the streets we had grown used to on the mainland. I was really relieved when we finally escaped!

A trip out on a couchsurfing mission to Cheung Chau was definitely good idea. Apart from the island being something of a sun soaked tropical paradise with lovely quiet beaches and great walking around the green hills, we struck it lucky with our host who turned out to be a really lovely person, and an amazing cook!

Actually it was the guy on the right, Nir, who was the official host, but he was working away on the first night and back late others, so his girlfriend Wanda took over the job and really she did a lot more than you would ever expect! We were treated to an amazing curry using vegetables I’d never even seen or heard of, papaya salad with a fantastically spicy dressing, a tasty Thai(?) dessert, which was like jellyish type squares and a special Spring Festival sweet treat which, I think, was sugar cane which had been boiled up for hours to create a thick sticky sheet which is then cut into slices and fried til crispy. Yum!

She also made this soup, which went straight into the top ten soups of the trip so far.

It contained so many different root vegetables and squashes with all different tastes and textures. I’d really like to try them again when we get home (if only I could remember what they all were!). It was really a pleasure to meet her. We shared a couple of great evenings sat chatting outside on their balcony overlooking the beautiful bay. She had an interesting background, having grandparents from 4 different ethnic Chinese backgrounds. She grew up on a farm and so from them had learned so much about food and growing. Their balcony was home to an impressive range of fruit trees, vegetables and herbs that was really an inspiration. No excuse of not having the land when we get home! Her family had emigrated to Canada when she was young but her back ground gave her a great knowledge of and enthusiasm for Chinese culture, traditions and all styles of Asian cooking that it was a really amazing opportunity for us to be able to speak to her about.

The mornings there were similarly spent relaxing on the balcony. We’d have breakfast and read a while and watch the small boats sail by before maybe going for a stroll to the tiny temple just down the path where an elderly man practiced Tai Chi under a banyan tree . Amazing. A big thank you to Wanda and Nir for opening up your home to us and treating us so well.

While we were stying on Cheung Chau we took the ferry across to Lantau, the home of the “Big Buddha”. Which was really quite impressive. The statue is 34 meters tall, making it the world’s largest seated Buddha.

Don’t make the mistake though of arriving here straight from Hong Kong on the metro and taking the cable car (! ARGH!) across. You’ll get dropped in a hideous “traditional” (ie fake) street full of expensive tacky souvenirs where, for a fee, you can also visit the Buddha experience (some sort of virtual tour I think) and plastic banyan tree. I think after arriving this way it would be difficult to take the important spiritual significance of the site seriously. The over commercialisation of it all really detracts from the spiritual significance and tranquility of the beautiful surroundings. I wonder if the monks who decided on this project really anticipated that area surrounding their once peaceful temple would be turned into a theme park.

On the same island Tai O is definitely worth a visit. A beautiful old fishing village of stilt houses and narrow twisting streets to get lost in you’ll see a way of life unlike anywhere else, and also, if you’re lucky a surreal display of cut out characters from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to a very bizzare image I’m sure I’ll never understand the significance of which was a dog (or pig?) giving birth to several dog/piglets which are then cleaned by a dog/pig wearing a bikini. Hmmm.

This post is getting too long, so I’ll skip a few things and just briefly mention again our stay at the English school in Yangshuo. Again organised through couchsurfing we spent a week there with accommodation and food in exchange for 2 hours conversation 4 days a week. It was really a brilliant thing to do and we’re already thinking about going back at some point. As I said it was a great opportunity to meet people, we had some really interesting chats with some of the students and amongst went out with the whole school for a lovely hotpot dinner, my new favourite meal!

While we were there we met a lovely couple Frank and Jane who we also ended up spending quite a bit of our spare time with going on various bike and boat rides around the surrounding area, which is stunning. The Karst rock formations spring up magically from the ground everywhere for miles around and we went on a 3 hour boat trip along the Li River which winds its way through this amazing scenery.

Apart from the good company it was also incredible to have someone with us who could do the various deals. Nothing ever has a fixed price and the boat trip we did if it were even possible would no doubt have been at least 2 or 3 times the price without Frank’s hard bargaining. It was also useful to have them around to translate the signs like this one:

Which reads, “For your safety, do not sail on the rafts”. Hmmm. Not that it made any difference. Here we are happily ignoring this piece of government advice.

“Chezzer!” Ready to board the raft!

Just to check if anyone has actually read this whole post I’ll leave you with two pictures. You can leave any comments for discussion below.

What is she doing?

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Our last stop in Russia was a couple of days in Irkutsk, including a day trip to Listvianka on Lake Baikal. The lake was amazingly beautiful. It is the largest fresh water lake in the world at around 400 miles in length, so looking across the lake was more like looking out to sea, except for that it was frozen! Actually it wasn’t completely frozen, in a few months it will be frozen enough for people to drive all the way across, but right now it is just frozen around the edges. Still enough for us to stand on, which we did!

One day there was a bit of wind which was causing part of the lake to freeze and shift across as we watched it. The sound was incredible! Never seen anything like it in my life. The ice that was coming across was only a couple of mm thick, but you could imagine the power that anything thicker could have, it was unstoppable. As soon as one bit hit the edge the power from behind would force it up and shatter it into tiny pieces which then would form the frozen edge. And I’d always watched these nature progams thinking,”but how would ice move huge rocks?!” Now I know.

One day we were there some important religious type person arrived. Crowds of people were on the street. He blessed the lake, then with a branch splashed water on everyone, then people collected water from the lake and then, crazy people, some of them got in! It was -15! I can’t imagine how the water must have felt. Brrrr.

While we were at the lake we went dog sledging, which was fantastic. Weaving around a forest, being pulled along by 10 very giddy dogs on a sledge, dodging trees and clinging on as we bounced over bumps was great fun. Seemed like the dogs loved it too. If only it snowed all the time at home we could all scoot around on sledges, woopeeeee!

Also at the lake there are places which have these amazing Banyas. which are the Russian Saunas. Actually the one we went to was more like a sauna house. As well as the typical sauna room first there is a small room for you to hit each other with branches in, then a separate room with a small pool of cold water to plunge into, which I think was coming straight from the lake and then also there was like a lounge attached where you could order food and beers to be delivered. Wow. As it was off season we had this whole place to ourselves! If there are a few of you can hire the whole thing out for a few hours which I imagine would be brilliant fun!

We left Russia via a 2 day train journey to Harbin, our penultimate stop on the trans-siberian, and for both of us our first visit to China. The train station door opened up onto a very busy square. There was hundreds of people rushing around. Everyone seemed to be in quite chirpy moods too. Lots of smiles around. As we stepped out of the station into the squre the first thing we saw was an enormous colourful tree, about 20 meters tall and looking like something from a computer game it really wasn’t what I was expecting to see! Stood next to it was a huge ice sculpture all lit up different colours.

We could see our hotel from the station, however between us and it there was a huge road, about 4 separate sections of 2 or 3 lanes each. As far as we could see there didn’t appear to be any subways so we joined the Harbinians and dashed across the road with all our bags, jumping out of the way of cars which seemed to come from every direction and leaping over the barriers in between each lane of traffic. This whole situation was made all the more ridiculous by the fact that despite it being a very cold place (-23 when we were there, but often colder), meaning that for at least 4 months of the year the whole place would be covered in snow and freeze up, all the road and pavement surfaces were made out of the most slippery surfaces I’ve ever know. In some places there were even patterned sections of polished marble, to make things even more fun! People seemed to be sliding around everywhere clinging on to each other and giggling.

Harbin was sooo cold. We found it quite difficult to stay outside for more than about 30 minutes at a time. We both had every item of thermal underwear on we owned, scarves wrapped round our faces, two pairs of gloves and many pairs of socks on and despite this it was still too cold. We found we had to plan our route for the day carefully to make sure it didn’t involve us being somewhere outside for too long and we kept dashing into random shops just for the warmth.

Food in China so far has been an experience! We’ve had some very good meals and some where things didn’t work out quite as we expected… So to start with the good. Dongfang Jiaozi Wang (Eastern King of Dumplings) is indeed the King of Dumplings! We tried dumplings a few times in Harbin and these were definitely the best. Also they were around half the price of other places. They have a menu in English too! Well sort of, some of the literal translations have been quite amusing. I must remember to note some down in the future. Things like “The fire lights the bean moving” often randomly appear next to pictures of vegetable dishes. Somehow though we managed to negotiate this menu and order ourselves a few things which as far as I could tell contained no meat! Hurrah!

Although I did think for a second when this arrived that it might be snakes!

Luckily it turned out to be very tasty aubergines that we forgot we’d ordered. Phew.

We also had these mushrooms, described on the menu as edible tree fungus we had to try them.

I wondered what on earth had arrived when we got them! They turned out to be a type of mushroom very similar to jelly ears that grow commonly at home. The taste is fairly bland, but they came served with the hottest horse-raddish sauce I’ve ever tasted! Anymore that the tiniest dip on the edge and although it didn’t burn your tongue seconds later the sensation in your nose is as if all the hairs in your nostil are being stripped by strong acid, this is followed by fits of coughing and eye watering. Despite this the taste is so good you can’t stop yourself from trying it again and falling for the same nasty trick.

Our second meal in Harbin was not quite so successful. There is a food market on the high street which has a canteen style restaurant above it. We sat down, got the menu, compared it to our little dictionary and sheets of safe veggie stuff. We also had help from a waitress who could speak some English. Although there’s no real way to say I am a vegetarian, we showed her our page of Mandarin with the closest you can get, it says various things. “We eat vegetables”. “We DON’T eat Meat/Fish/Chicken”. She looked nodded, crossed off somethings we’d ordered and suggested some other things instead. Brilliant.

We thought we had ordered two types of vegetarian dumplings, a pancake filled with spring onions and some green tea. What actually arrived was dumplings which contained pork, not even pork and vegetable, just pork. A lovely cabbage and pork meatball soup and some orange juice, not green tea. The only thing we’d got right was the pancake. Oh well. Eating around the edges again. This blinking pork is tormenting us.

At least we didn’t end up with a plate of these little creatures which were on sale downstairs, wriggling around in a pot in the middle of the salad section!

Another thing we discovered in Harbin is that the Chinese like to serve their soup in ridiculously big portions. We went to one place and ordered what we thought would be small bowl of soup. It was really cheap, we nearly ordered two so we could have one each, but decided instead to order other things to try then share the soup. But look at this enormous vat that arrived! Also contrast to the tiny size of the bowls to eat it from! There was at least 20 servings of soup in it! All for around £1. Crazy!

I’ll leave it at that for now. More to come from Harbin including the most amazing market I’ve ever been to and photos from the famous Ice Festival.

We had a fairly quiet first day really. We went to pick up the tickets for the next stage of the journey from our friend John. However when we got there he realised he’d lost them. Oops. Two tickets to Moscow thrown out with the rubbish. Luckily he was able to get them re-issued although it sounds as though it was a complete nightmare. Russians seem to have a great fondness for bureocracy. The process involved many forms,lots of signatures, much confusion and of course a fine. Something he tells us you get used to after a short time of living in Russia. It seems that as well as the liking for official documentation that corruption and bribes are very much an accepted part of everyday life. 30 kph over the speed limit? 300 rubles = no problem.

While we were over at John’s we went to the supermarket, where we bought some of the amazing salads the seem to sell pretty much everywhere in Russia. Check out this plate of yumminess:

The strange things that look like tuna are actually aparagus although I and no one I asked had any idea how it had been prepared. It was kind of like a crinkly tube with a really odd texture, a bit like a juicy rolled up finger from a rubber glove. Bizarrely this texture made it a very pleasant thing to eat. The round things are a type of smoked cheese. We bought almost half a kilogram of this and it only cost us around ??1.50. Prices seem to vary wildly. Often we’d see what appears to us to be 2 identical items, but one might be one price, the other 5 times more. We were probably eating dirty tramp food, but I thought it was really tasty.

Andy and I left John to look after his poorly girlfriend the first night and on his recommendation went to a bar called Fidels, which is on the road just to the side of the big shopping centre on Nevsky Prospect . Great bar, about a third the price of anywhere else we’d seem, also much better atmosphere.

Anyway, so it was here we got decided to act like the Russians and start drinking Vodka. Except that we didn’t act quite ike the Russians and forgot to match each vodka with ??????? (Zakooska – a small snack) and instead choose to match each vodka with a beer. Big mistake.

After only a short time the vodka had well and truely caught us out. I remember first sitting quietly chatting to each other, then taking to strangers, then giving out our emails, then dancing, and by the end of the night finding it really quite tricky just to walk in a straight line. It was that kind of drunk where it hits you so quick you’re well aware of losing your abilities, but have absolutely no way of doing anything about it. We woke up the next morning with writing on our arms and a note pad full of people’s email addresses and our various sribbled attempts at writing our names and where we were from in Russian.

Drawing of a watch, time reads “NOW”

We didn’t manage to get out of bed unti 4pm. John and Sasha invited us around for dinner. John made us a lovely mushroom risotto, made with wild mushrooms that Sasha’s Mum had picked earlier in the year. It seems in Russia, as with most other countries we’ve visited so far people don’t have this irrational fear of fungus that weare conditioned with at home. It’s common for people to go picking here, most people would easily be able to identify the edible mushrooms and know what to do with them. I’m not sure whether or not I would really like this to catch on at home. It does seem to be becomming a little more popular, with foraged wild food a must in any trendy restaurant. However if everyone cottons on to it there will be none left when we go hunting. Yes we need a few more of the scare stories please. Mushrooms are bad, often very poisonous. You can die you know. In seconds! Aaaargh!

After the meal we headed for town to visit a few bars. Andy knew John from Uni and it seems that since then he has transformed himself into a kind of international superstar DJ, and is quite well known in Russia. This was really handy as it gave us access to bars that would otherwise really have been impossible to go to. We went to one place completely unmarked. You had to knock on the door, someone would open it, say hello to John and Sasha then welcome us in. Apparently there are quite a few of these ‘friends’ bars. It was a really nice place, quite funky decor, a dj and very nice, if a little expensive, Belgian beer. It seems the people who run them have enough friends to keep them going so they don’t really need tourists or other random people off the street wandering in to crash their party.

Our next day in St Petersburg just kept going wrong from the start. The kind of day you just want to give in and go to bed. We’d got up and walked and walked taking in the sites until we wanted lunch. The plan was to go to the Hermitage after we’d eaten, but after faffing around getting hungry and frustrated trying to find places the guides had recommended we eventually gave up and just went anywhere. Our food took forever to come and by the time we got to the Hermitage it was only 2 hours until closing. I read somewhere that this place has like a hundred million pieces and even if you looked at each one for just a second it would take around 7 years to go round the whole place. We obviously didn’t have enough time. We did attempt to go in, but after buying tickets we were directed to the cloakrooms, a huge long corridor packed full of fur-coat clad Russians pushing and shoving their way around. I couldn’t stand it. We just had to get out. Somehow we managed to get our money back on the tickets quite easily and practically ran outside to our freedom. Never again. I’m not sure when would be a good time to visit that place. We thought we’d gone at an off-peak time, I hate to imagine what it would be like in the summer.

Thankfully once we’d given up on doing the tourist thing the evening did get better. We went to a lovely Georgian restaurant for dinner called Aragvi. Georgain food is probably the best option for veggies in Russia. With an emphasis on salads and bean dishes there was lots of choice. In fact it was a bit like my favorite place in Manchester, Aladdins.

We had Lobio a kind of slightly spicy crushed bean stew with lots of paprika, a Georgian salad which was just a normal kind of salad stuff, but then a great heap of parsley on it and we also had a cheesy bread, the name of which I have forgotten. This bread was amazing! It was very rich though and more than one in a lifetime would probably be enough to give you a heart attack. There was a good centimeter of melty cheese covering the entire top. This is the kind of place where its good to go with a few friends so you can get a good range of dishes to share between you. If you do this I would recommend only getting one of these cheesy breads between four people, rather than eating half each like we did, or you will end up going to bed feeing like a whole person has somehow crept into your stomach, refused to leave and fallen asleep.

On our last day in St P all enthusiasm for the Hermitage lost we went instead to the Kunstkamera Museum. Without doubt the craziest museum I’ve ever been to. It was began as a collection of various artifacts of scientific interest from around the world by Peter the Great in 1714 to build Russia’s understanding and scientific knowledge. He sent people around the globe to collect items and also offered payment for anything unusual. So the place now contains huge glass cabinets full of the standard various bits and bobs of small tribes and artifacts from around the world, but then at the back there’s a room full of glass jars of pickled deformed feotuses. Babies with two heads, no heads, placentas with five babies attached and skeletons of small children with various conditions. After a few minutes it’s all a bit much really.

In the evening we said our farewells to John and Sacha over a traditional Russian meal at a lovely Russian restaurant. A place I would really recommend…. if I could find the link. Although if you’re strict veggie perhaps don’t opt for their “cabbage soup” schi. Ours came complete wth huge chunks of fatty pork. Mmm.

That bit floating around just to the bottom right of the sour cream is a big dirty lump of fatty pork. This probably actually means it’s a good quality schi, but to us it just meant yet again picking bits out and eating something we knew contained meat. Luckily this doen’t really bother either of us too much having decided it’s better to just accept it will happen and get on with it rather than starve or miss out on local specialities. And the soup was very nice. I can imagine for some veggies though that eating out in Russia could be really a struggle. I’m also becomming worried that all the soups we have tried so far were only so tasty because they were made with meat stock. I’ll have to work on creating the perfect vegetarian stock if I’ll be able to replicate them well at home. But I have an idea for the secret ingredient and I’m looking forward to giving it a go. This place claims on it’s advertisement that their stock, made in the traditional way, takes over 8 hours to make, so maybe that’s the key? Long and slow. Usually a good thing.

So apart from the meaty vegetarian soup this was a great place. They specialise in blinies and have over 40 different types on their menu. They serve Kvass, a kind of Russian homebrew beer drink with a very low alcohol content. I thought it tasted a bit like coke, but without the sensation that it could easily strip your insides. They also do these great chip type things which are fried with wild mushrooms. Lovely jubly.

So that was that. St Petersburg, tick! Thanks to John and Sasha for all the help and guidance around your great city.

John, Sasch and Kvass.

After St Petersburg an overnight train took us to Moscow for a quick one day stay with some of John’s friends. They had a really nice flat on Tverskaya Lamskaya, the Moscow equivelant of London’s Oxford St, just two minutes stroll to Red Square. Brilliant.

We didn’t really do too much in Moscow. To be honest I think we were both a bit tired from all the wandering around and Vodka experience in St Petersburg so now we really just wanted a nice chilled day. Went to Lenin’s Mausoleum to see Lenin’s dead body. This was a strange experience. The enormous marble tomb on Red Square was very dimly lit and at the foot of each stairwell and the end of each corridor stood a very serious looking Russian soldier only just visible in the darkness. When you enter the room with the body you are forbidden from stopping even for a second, despite the fact that only one or two other people are there. So you slowly walk around each edge of the glass case peering in at a preserved body. Very odd.

So after a quiet eveniing eating Pizza and watching football at Paul and Iena’s and a couple of drinks in a local bar we had an early night in preparation for the next few days adventure, the 86 hour train journey on the Trans-Siberian to Irkutsk.

The lady in the chair in front was rather large to say the least and every time we went over a bump, which was about every 5 minutes, her chair bounced back with the weight an banged into my knees. I thought the whole chair was going to collapse and she’d crush me. What a nightmare.

We made it alive though and luckily our hostel, the Old Town Hostel was not too far from the station. We dropped our bags off and had a snooze in the common room until our room was available. The room turned out to be really nice. Practically a small flat, it had a little kitchen and our own bathroom which we weren’t expecting. Great stuff. I’d definitely recommend staying there.

Vilnius itself is absolutely beautiful. It was -15 degree and 6″ deep in snow the day we arrived, with perfect clear blue skies. The town is one of, if not the, prettiest town I’ve ever seen. It’s one of the largest baroque style towns and was inscribed on the UNESCO world heritage list in 1994 due to its uniqueness.

For lunch the first day we went to meet some people from couch surfing who had helped us to buy train tickets to St Petersburg. This is a great example of how valuable couch surfers can be when travelling. We’d posted a message on the forum as when we’d tried to book the tickets ourselves no one on the phones spoke any English and it was not possible to book over the internet. We asked if anyone had any idea of how we could do it. One person rang the station for us and found that there were actually only 2 spaces left in the train we needed to get and that you had to pay for them and then collect them in person within 6 working days! This would be completely impossible for us to do as we were still in the UK so we began to panic a little. But then another person offered to go buy the tickets for us if we transferred him the money and then we could go meet him to collect them when we arrived. Now everyone we told this to thought we were a little bonkers, but that’s the great thing about couch surfing. I think it’s pretty unlikely you’re going to get anyone who will rip you off. Maybe it does happen, you obviously need to be careful and check people’s references but mostly you should be able to judge that a person is trustworthy. Amazing.

So we met Augustus who had bought us the tickets and his girlfriend Katja and went to Balti Drambliai for lunch. You guessed it, more soup. Very good spicy soup.

Augustus and katja had been travelling around South America for the last 3 years on $10 a day and had only been back in Vilnius for a few days. The contrast must have been quite hard. After travelling for so long with the kind of freedom of lifestyle and mind that will develop I imagine it must be very difficult to come back. While Vilnius is undoubtedly very pretty it is, like any main town, based mainly around working and shopping. They said a lot had changed since they had left and I got the impression maybe not in a good way. They said they planned to go travelling again soon, I really hope everything works out well for them. They were very inspiring and helped us out so much for no reason other than they are good people.

Apart from Balti Drambliai we went to a couple of other places that definitely deserve a mention. The first was Sue’s Indian. I normally wouldn’t specially recommend going to have something like a curry in a country that has it’s own speciality cuisines, but this place was really fantastic. Better than any curry I’ve had at home. Even in Rusholme. The tastes were just different somehow. The spices seemed so fresh and we had the most amazing peswari naan ever. It was just perfect. Almost worth going to Vilnius just to go there. It would take about 3 days to get there the most direct route though, so don’t wait till you’re too hungry to set off.

The other place was restaurant called Zeppelin. It was here we had our first of I imagine many experiences of not getting exactly what we thought we’d ordered. We’d walked all the way across town to go to this place as I wanted to try Zeppelins which are a traditional Lithuanian dish of a kind of potato shape stuffed with cheese. However despite being named after the things and apparently specialising in them, at the exact time we arrived they had ran out and wouldn’t have any more for at least an hour. It was already quite late so we opted an alternative potato dish, described on the menu as “Potato pancake served with sour cream”. What actually arrived was the most greasy plate of grated potato covered in little pieces of pork and fried onion, topped with a few rashers of bacon for good measure the whole thing was dripping in pork fat. Yum.

I expect this is going to happen to us quite a lot during our journey across the world, so we decided we just had to get on with it, scraped the meat off and ate the greasy, pig flavoured potato cake. It was actually pretty tasty, if I can admit that. The waiter must have thought we were mad when collected our plates and found we’d only eaten the potato and left all the ‘good bits’.

Overall Vilnius was really a great place. Maybe my favourite few days so far, apart obviously from the lovely events of Paris. I’ll definitely be going back, it is just so amazingly pretty, and a good size too. You can really get a feel for the place after only a day or so, which is great when you’re moving around quite quickly as we are at the moment. There are loads of great bars and restaurants too. One of the main reasons why I think it was so pleasant was  that it hadn’t been spoilt by the kind of stag weekend invasions that seems to have happened to other similar European cities. I hear some blinkin budget airline is planning on starting flights there next year, so this may all be about to change. I really really hope it doesn’t.

Since leaving university Andy and his friends have met up once or twice a year in a gathering that has come to be known as “Harcourt” (named after the house/street they shared). Each year they take it in turns to organise the weekend, and this year it was Andy’s turn, which meant I had the task of feeding this gruesome looking crew.

Originally a strictly lads only affair the arrival of various small people has led to the invite being extended to wives, girlfriends and children. I’m pretty happy about this as although I’ve only known them for about 2 years rather than the 10 or more years they’ve known each other, it’s a brilliant get together, always loads of fun, really nice to see how much of an effort they’ve made to stay in touch for all this time. Harcourt has become a definite highlight of the year for me.

As we’ve not been working over the summer we’ve had a lot of time on our hands to organise things and after a brainstorming session at the pub we got a little over excited (drunk) and decided it should be a Hallowe’en themed fancy dress weekend, hired a clown and set about planning various surprises and treats for everyone. It was so much fun doing it all! Everyone seemed to have a great time and despite me doing my usual trick of everyone arriving on the Friday and drinking far too much wine and waking up with a horrific hangover I managed not to make too much of a mess of the food, hopefully everyone enjoyed it.

We found a great place for the weekend in Belper, Derbyshire, the “Old Baptist Chapel”. It was a converted chapel and though we didn’t realise it at the time of booking, in good theme for the weekend, it came complete with a garden full of graves! How spooky. The place was lovely though, absolutely huge, with lots of space for the kids to run around, a great lounge with about 8 sofas in it and a pretty nice kitchen on a kind of mezzanine level which had a window overlooking the lounge. There’s a sauna too! Didn’t get used by our guests over the already hectic weekend, possibly not the best thing for kids. However you get the place for 4 days for the same price, so with no jobs to rush back for on Monday, on Sunday Andy and I found ourselves alone in the house with a couple of left over bottles of wine, so we made up for the lack of sauna action over the weekend. It was very nice indeed. Already thinking about going back!

Here’s a quick run down of the weekend’s activities and menu:

Friday – Welcome Party
Champagne Reception and a Selection of Canapés
(ok, so it was Cava and snacks including homemade hummous and crudites, brocolli and stilton quiche, red pepper and goat cheese mini quiche and mozzarella, tomato and basil tarts)

Saturday – The BIG Hallowe’en Day

Boogely BIG Breakfast from 10am
A full breakfast of bacon, pork sausages, goat sausages, scrambled eggs, scrambled duck eggs, beans, mushrooms, black pudding, toast, tea and coffee.

Lunch – Help yourself buffet of sandwiches and homemade apple pie (recipe below) and ice cream

A spooky stroll around Belper Woooooo

3.30pmish back to the house of horrors for the

Hallowe’en Harcourt Fancy Dress Party

Giggles the clown!
Pumpkin carving competition!
Fancy dress! Prizes for the best dressed!
Fun and Games!

Dinner from 6.30pm
Fajitas, Wedges, Sour Cream, Grated Cheese, Salsa and Guacomale (recipes below)

It was a little tricky cooking for 17 people, but I had a team of choppers and washer-uppers and it all went ok apart from a small problem with the oven which seemed to have no heat distribution and either didn’t cook at all or burnt things to a crisp within seconds. Hmm, very handy.

Another strange thing was cooking meat for the first time in two years! Much as we would have liked to make entirely veggie menu there were a couple of committed carnivores there who no doubt would have withered away if we hadn’t have given them their meat injection for the weekend. We had a bit of a trauma about where to buy it from. Obviously not practiced in where to buy good meat, and how much to expect to pay it was a bit of a challenge.

We went on a little research mission. Wirral Farmer’s Market had an overwhelming amount of meat, but it was difficult to tell to much about it and although I’m sure they would be normally happy to chat the place was so busy at the time we were there I doubt the stall holders would really have appreciated a million questions about the origins of their meat and the animals living conditions.

We went round the various butchers in New Ferry and compared prices to what we could buy in supermarkets where we could have gone if we wanted to buy something that had been locked up all it’s life, fed an unnatural diet and pumped full of chemicals. Possibly not completely fair and they did sell some organic meat, but then you have the issue of how they’re probably ripping the farmers off blah blah blah… Stop it Leanne! This rant belongs in another post.

The butchers were in most cases a little cheaper, definitely on the standard prices, although supermarkets do these buy one get one free offers, making their meat cheaper, but again impacts on the already struggling farmers. The supermarkets organic meat, was however a complete rip off! £3.99 for 6 slices of bacon! No wonder people choose not to buy it. We ended up only paying a couple of quid more for about 3 times the amount of local organic bacon which we eventually decided to buy from Church Farm, a Soil Association certified organic farm shop in Thurstaston a couple of miles from where we’re living.

We also bought goat sausages from the farmer’s market. We chatted to the lady for a while who told us primarily they kept the goats for cheese. However obviously you can only get milk from the female goats, as such any male kids would usually be taken away from their mothers and slaughtered soon after birth which causes a lot of distress for the mother. They decided the best thing to do would be to allow them to stay together until the kid would naturally leave, at which point they were sold on for meat. So in effect the meat was like a byproduct of the cheese rather than the other way around. Although they didn’t have organic certification (this can be expensive and very difficult to maintain) it was a fairly small farm, definitely free range, no use of chemicals and an emphasis on the animals welfare. We bought a few sausages for people to try at the Saturday morning breakfast. Generally I think they went down quite well.

Now here is an admission/an interesting discussion to be had. I never tried goat while I was a meat eater and was a little intrigued as to what it would taste like. Hmm. I’d been thinking about it for a few days. When breakfast was served there were a couple of sausages left over which hadn’t been taken. I don’t like waste. I knew where they were from and had bought them happy for other people to eat them. I just wanted to know what they were like! I cut a bit off one and put it on the side of my plate. I kept looking at it while I was eating my beans and eggs, pushed it around the plate a few times, “Should I eat it, should I eat it?” I ate everything else first, and then chopped the piece of sausage in half, popped it in my mouth and ate it. It was indeed pretty tasty, very different to pork sausages, kind of more rich and creamy taste somehow. I didn’t want to eat more though, and am definitely happily not back on the meat eating side. But as I’ve said before I’ve seen meat eating in a different light since staying with people on various small holding who have a completely different  attitude towards meat and the animals it comes from than you get from the detached relationship you have when you buy your prepacked meat from the supermarket fridges.

I’ve included a few of the recipes from the weekend for you below, and some picture right at the end (is this the longest post ever!?). Making your own dips for fajitas is a great idea, especially when you’re making it for lots of people. So much fresher tasting, cheaper and you can adjust the chili to your own taste. The leftovers were great in sandwiches! Mmm. Oo, nearly forgot, I’d made welcome packs too, with skeleton straws, balloons, Hallowe’en shaped chocolates from the Chocolate Cellar and I’d made some Hallowe’en ginger biscuits to go in them too. They were great! Seemed to go down quite well with the kids who loved all the spooky shapes. Would be a brilliant thing to give out to any trick or treaters when real Hallowe’en comes around.

Expect several dozen pumpkin recipes in the next couple of days. The pumpkin carving competition left us with around 10kg of pumpkin to think of something to do with. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

From previous posts:

Brocolli and stilton quiche

Home made hummous
For the version for this weekend I’d just made plain hummous, so no red peppers and also I’ve stopped putting the onion, garlic and bayleaf in with the boiling chickpeas, it seems to be nicer without. Maybe the quest for the perfect hummous needs updating?

Guacamole

• 1chilli, finely chopped
• 1/2 bunch coriander, chopped
• 10 cherry tomatoes, finely chopped
• salt, to taste
• 1/2 red onion, very finely chopped
• juice of 1 lime
• 3 ripe avocados

1. Mash the avocados with a fork then mix in all the other ingredients.

Salsa

• 250g/9oz fresh tomatoes, finely chopped
• 1 small red onion, finely chopped
• 2 chillies, finely chopped
• bunch coriander, finely chopped
• salt, to taste
• lime juice, to taste

1. Combine all the ingredients together in a bowl.

Apple Pie

For the pastry:

• 10oz plain flour
• pinch of salt
• 5oz butter
• 6 tsp cold water

For the filling:

• 3 large Bramley cooking apples, chopped, stewed and cooled
• sugar, to taste (approx 2 tbsp)

1. Preheat the oven to 200C
2. Sieve the flour and salt into a bowl. Rub in the butter until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.
3. Add the cold water to the flour mixture. Using a knife, mix the water into the flour, using your hand to firm up the mixture.
4. Divide the pastry into two halves. Roll one half out so that it is big enough to cover an 20cm plate. Trim the edges with a knife using the edge of the plate as your guide.
5. Cover the pastry with the stewed apples and sprinkle with sugar to taste.
6. Roll out the other half of the pastry. Moisten the edge of the bottom layer of pastry and place the second piece on top.
7. Press down on the pastry edges, making sure that they are properly sealed. Trim off any excess pastry with a knife.
8. Press down round the edges with your thumb to seal and make a pattern round the edge.
9. Prick the surface of the pastry lightly before placing the pie in the oven and sprinkle with a little sugar. Cook for 20-30 minutes.

Hallowe’en Ginger Biscuits

• 75g soft brown sugar, sieved
• 2 tablespoons golden syrup
• 1 tablespoon black treacle
• 1 level teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 level teaspoon ginger
• 1 pinch ground cloves
• 100g butter
• ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 225g plain flour
• Hallowe’en shaped pastry cutters

1. Put the sugar, syrup, treacle, 1 tablespoon of water and spices in a large saucepan. Then bring them to boiling point, stir all the time.
2. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the butter, cut into lumps, and the bicarbonate of soda.
3. Stir in the flour gradually until you have a smooth manageable dough
4. Leave the dough covered in a cool place for 30 minutes.
5. Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface to 3mm thick and cut out the hallowe’en shapes.
6. Arrange them on the lightly greased baking sheets and bake for 10-15 minutes are lightly browned and becoming firm.
7. Leave the biscuits to cool a little and harden on the baking sheets for a few minutes before transferring them to a wire rack.

When I first stopped eating meat it was mostly for health and because of problems with intensive farming. Everyone will probably now have seen something about the terrible way many animals are kept. Chickens seem to be on the TV all the time now. And if you care to look the internet is full of information about the ways our animals for food are kept which some viewers might find disturbing.

There are so many problems, and this post would be more like a book if I went through them all properly now, so instead here are a few of the problems and some links. Maybe at some point in the future I’ll go through a few issues and witter on about what I think about them specifically in more detail.

I didn’t really like meat that much anyway.

This is an easy one. If we had a roast dinner, my favorite bits would always be the vegetables. Although there are a few seafood things I miss and I used to enjoy trying new different types of meat at restaurants, or for special meals, I generally wasn’t that fussed. Faced with a growing concern for all the nasty things people were doing so I could eat meat, I thought it would be best if I just stopped.

Chickens (Widespread accepted animal abuse, for your lunch. Lovely)

http://www.vegsoc.org/info/broiler.html

“Each bird has an area of around 0.05m², similar in size to an A4 sheet of paper. As the birds grow, conditions deteriorate and the sheds become increasingly crowded until the shed floor becomes a solid mass of chickens competing to reach food and water. The birds’ natural behaviour to perch, walk, run and fly are obviously frustrated in the shed environment.

Standard intensively farmed broiler chickens are reared to their slaughter weight of around 1.8 to 3 kg within just 6 weeks of being hatched (chickens are normally fully grown by 5-6 months). By selective breeding, the length of time broiler chicks take to grow to 2 kg has been halved in the last 30 years. As broilers are bred to grow as fast as possible this has lead to them becoming more inactive. Their frame cannot support their own weight and this affects the way they walk and puts additional stresses on their hips and legs. At just 6 weeks old, they spend 76%-86% of their time lying down. Birds severely crippled and deformed die of starvation and thirst, unable to reach food or water. Other birds may only be able to move by using their wings to balance”

Most chickens in UK are kept in this way, I mean you can’t really expect them to be wandering around in a nice field in the sunshine pecking away at grubs and seeds for at least 6 months like they would naturally take to reach full size, if you want to pay £2.50 for a whole bird. Not only is this bad for the chicken, but it’s bad for you too. They are fed on an unnatural high energy diet, which unsurprisingly means their meat is not made up the way it would naturally be, contains an imbalance of fats, and is probably another one of the reasons why we have such high rates of diet related diseases. Maybe even more importantly than the damage to individuals health is the problem that the food that feeds the chickens is increasingly soy, which is itself farmed intensively. Huge areas of rainforest are being destroyed to meet demand, with serious environmental implications.

Cows (are meant to eat grass, not corn. And rainforests should grow trees, not corn)

I recently started reading another of Michael Pollan’s books, “The Omnivores Dilemma” , you can read an except from it here. I’m only part way through, but so far it’s mentioned some pretty interesting stuff I’d not thought about relating to cattle farming. He talks about how cows are now almost exclusively fed on corn based diets. This is not their natural food and they can only survive on it for so long before they start developing problems, so they are pumped full of various drugs and bred to combat this.  Again this means the cows lead an unnatural unhealthy and short life and their meat contains an imbalance of fats which means we probably do too. Again there is the problem of where all this corn is coming from.  Even when rainforests are not being destroyed it is probably not the best idea to convert huge areas of your land to mass mono-cultures. This destroys bio-diversity and makes crops susceptible to disease which means more pesticides and more chemicals indirectly in your diet.

To create 1kg of meat it takes 16kg of grain. If we ate the grain or soy or whatever rather than feeding it to the animals we wouldn’t need to destroy as much of the world to produce the amount of food we need. Economic factors seem for some bizarre reason to effect peoples behaviour more than environmental issues,  and if we don’t all kill ourselves by killing the planet first, this misuse of resources will start to effect people more and more as population increases and the price of oil, which all food production relies on, goes up or if oil *shock horror* runs out and we will no longer be able to ignore the real source of our meat.

Dairy products (Eek!)

I’m not vegan. I eat eggs, milk and cheese, in fact I love cheese, it’s one of my favorite things. Also I eat it knowing it is probably not vegetarian and infact contains rennet, which is definitely not vegetarian. Sometimes I think this is a sign that I’m not really all that committed the everything I’ve been saying. Maybe it does. But any kind of reduction is better than none. Do what you can and be aware of what you are doing, but there is no point having a terrible life. Ultimately we should all kill ourselves if we wanted to stop harming the planet and it’s animals and I don’t want to do that. It’s not good to focus in on the negative details of something positive you or other people are doing. It might make you give the whole thing up as a pointless effort if you’re not quite perfect, which is just not true. However one thing I do need to make more effort on is making sure the things I eat are organic (which sets much higher welfare standards as well as stopping the animals being pumped full of drugs) or at least free range. Eggs get snuck into loads of things and you can pretty much guarantee they are from caged hens. Cakes. I always forget when I am buying cakes, you get distracted by the cream. Which probably came from a cow which got lame and developed mastitis (infected, swollen, painful udders) to produce the milk for my cream cake. Lovely.

http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2007/06/dairy-farming/
http://www.milkmyths.org.uk/report/sufferingsilence.php
http://www.cvmbs.colostate.edu/ilm/proinfo/necropsy/notes/udderlesions.htm

Fish (Vegetarians do not eat fish)

Nuff said really. But this has to be the most commonly asked ridiculous question. “Oh you’re a vegetarian… Do you eat fish?” No.

http://www.vegsoc.org/fish/

Erm, maybe I’ll start eating meat again.

I recently had a short stay Wwoofing on a smallholding in Cornwall called Plan-it Earth. Originally I had thought I wouldn’t go anywhere that kept animals for food, but this was an environmental project and sounded really interesting, so I thought I’d see what they were doing.

They kept a small number of animals for their own use and were also able to get well reared meat from friends in the local area. All the animals were well kept, out doors, had lots of space and varied diets.  They killed them and prepared them themselves, which they admitted was always a difficult upsetting process. But rather than a mindless over consumption of cheap meat in every meal as many people tend to eat, this meant they and their children had a great respect for the animals. They would have meat maybe a couple of times a week, used every part and generally had a more real relationship with their food and the animal it came from.

This made a lot more sense to me and made me realise that maybe it wasn’t just eating animals in itself that I had a problem with in some kind of karmic reasons, but that mainly it is because of environmental and animal welfare issues which in the current system makes eating meat unethical, and that it is possible to farm animals for food in an acceptable way. Perhaps in the future you will see me gnawing on pork chops again. I was certainly tempted like never before when I could see the pigs in the field outside. Actually that just made me feel a bit odd. Maybe I’m not ready yet, but you know.