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Posts with category ‘Travel’

In Leiden

Posted on September 5, 2006

To Leiden in the Netherlands for a four-day visit, spending my days walking the cobbled streets beside the canals in the delightful old university town. The handsome 16th- and 17th-century buildings speak of the civic wealth acquired during the glory days of Dutch commerce and power. This was Rembrandt’s home town and he remains the favourite son, though not entirely unopposed. Here, the first European tulips were propogated by Dr Clusius (the botanical gardens are still superb) and here gin was invented by Dr Silvius (we stand, we bow) in the medical department of the university.

Corfu Report

Posted on September 11, 2006

From Holland to Greece for a stay at our old house in the mountains of Corfu, carrying on with renovations that have preoccupied us for 25 years.

Still in Corfu

Posted on September 19, 2006

This morning we were woken by a peal of thunder so long and loud it might have been announcing the end of the world. I opened the shutters and they were ripped from my hands by the wind and flattened against the walls. Instead of the usual 7 a.m. vision of the sun rising gracefully over the ridge across the valley there was nothing to see but roiling dark grey cloud, lightning and horizontal rain. I was soaked in an instant and dragged the shutters closed again. Given our altitude, we were actually inside the storm clouds and it was all very violent and Wagnerian with garden furniture skittering across the patio and plants bent double. The climax hurled hail into the rain and now there’s not a petal left on the ornamental rose bushes. But the tiny vermillion flowers on the useful mint bush have survived. There’s probably a moral to be drawn in that, but I don’t know what it might be. An hour later, the storm was moving away to alarm the Albanian coast and there was even a glimpse of blue sky above our house. Then the wind changed and the storm has swept back. Weather like this can hang about for days, circling the island, snagged on our mountaintops.

Good and Evil

Posted on September 25, 2006

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“Put some pictures into your blog,” instruct the powers that be. “Brighten it up a bit!” What next—music? But they have a point. So here goes.

Nunc est Bibendum

Posted on February 26, 2007

In London for a few days, where Jamie Oliver is raising cash for Comic Relief doing commercials with children and the must-see TV event is a weekly competition between chefs forced to cook the fastest omelette. I’ve only been out once (my mother’s cooking is too good) and that was to Bibendum in the fabulous Michelin building on the corner of Sloane Avenue and the Fulham Road, which friends assured me is back in form after a handful of disappointing years. The ground floor is an oyster bar and florist but the main dining room is upstairs—a fairly plain space but comfy, adorned with old photos of Michelin garages in Europe.

Ionian Again

Posted on March 5, 2007

On Saturday night at about 1:00 a.m., as we were leaving the excellent Maistra restaurant on the beach at Akharavi, the surf whispering in the darkness, the frogs in the ponds beside the car park croaking to wake the dead, we glanced up at the moon. It was blood red with a slender fingernail of white near the top. A lunar eclipse! Not unexpected to those who keep a proper almanac, but it took me by surprise. Spectacular! An hour earlier, the heavenly orb had been bright enough to read by. As we watched, the pale rim vanished and the moon hung there glowing a baleful crimson, as if Mars had swung closer to Earth to see what was going on.

Gezundheit

Posted on March 12, 2007

Last week I scoffed at the village wisewoman who foretold disaster after a brick-red moon. What a fool I was, what a mutton-headed fool, what an addle-pated dolt. Her cackling kin, riding their storm clouds at midnight across the streaming welkin, sent an ague down to torment me. It settled onto the sinuses and at the back of the throat and I woke up with what doctors call “a cold.”

New York and breakfast

Posted on March 26, 2007

Just got back from a 72-hour, 9-restaurant eating visit to New York City—not a feeding frenzy, more an exercise in relentlessly sustained satiety. With me was Nathan Isberg, chef at Czehoski and Coca, who proved a thoroughly delightful travelling companion, partly because we seem to like pretty much the same kind of food but also because he generously bought me the latest copy of Seaways’ Ships in Scale magazine. He certainly knows how to butter up a critic. We encountered some unexpected disappointments but they were more than made up for by inspired cooking at Casa Mono, Del Posto, Blue Ribbon Brasserie (the Manhattan one, not the Brooklyn one) and The Spotted Pig. Did we eat a lot of duck eggs? I rather think so, but with duck eggs even two can seem like a lot. I must get my notes in order and generally sort through the mare’s nest of memories that remain from the trip, separate fact from fancy, and fashion the more accurate bits into a column for June’s Toronto Life.

Chinook thaw

Posted on June 26, 2007

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Just when I thought the little single-prop Beaver sea plane was going to crash into the rocky pine forest that lined the shores, I noticed the inlet. Then we were in amongst the trees, gliding down onto water like a dark mirror, carrying on along the passage to the hidden lodge. A weekend of salmon fishing and sea kayaking had begun.

Gluttons

Posted on July 3, 2007

To Winnipeg on a flying visit to eat at Gluttons, the specialty food store and bistro at 842 Corydon Avenue (204-475-5714). It’s an interesting place, on the cusp of suburban Winnipeg and its Little Italy area, housed in a 1919 building that was originally a bank, then a fur storage ,and is now Gluttons, owned by a most hospitable young man called Jameson Watermulder. The real reason for my visit, however, is that the chef there is none other than Makoto Ono who won Gold Medal Plates Grand Finale, the Canadian Culinary Championship in February, beating out such established stars as Mark McEwan and Robert Clark, and I’ve been meaning to pay him a visit for ages.

Salad Days

Posted on August 27, 2007

Three skinny feral cats have fallen in love with my wife and follow her everywhere like a retinue of tiny servants. It might be Wendy’s personality or it might be her habit of opening tins of tuna for them twice a day. I bought some lamb chops on Thursday, intending to barbecue them. While the black and the white cats struck flamboyantly distracting poses in the courtyard to the delight of all, the grey tabby pulled the bag of meat off the kitchen counter, tore it open and ravaged the cutlets. To the victors the spoils. The cats ate the raw meat in the garden, away from the wasps.

The Corfu delicacy shop

Posted on September 6, 2007

Everyone loves the idea of a shop that is exclusively devoted to local produce (it would make a lot of sense in Niagara or Prince Edward County). Here on Corfu, Greece’s membership in the EU means that the island is deliberately flooded with things made in other European countries. For years—decades even—people who wanted to find antique furniture and bric-a-brac that was actually from the island had to weasel it out for themselves from dumps or estate sales or a handful of dark little shops in the main town. It was fun but time-consuming. Local craftsmen also had to be tracked down by word of mouth. Finding local food and wine was much easier—until quite recently one could assume that the produce, meat and fish for sale in the market in the old fosse of the Venetian fortress in town was home-grown. Here in the north of the island, where we have no central market, travelling greengrocers used to show up several times a week in the mountain villages, flatbed trucks laden with fruit and vegetables. (Dimitri was our regular guy—he used to let us weigh our babies in his scales). Everything local; everything seasonal.

Coast to Coast

Posted on October 29, 2007

A huge treat this week was the world premiere of a feature-length movie, The Islands Project, written and directed by Michael Stadtländer. The great chef showed it at the Royal Cinema on College Street on Thursday evening to a large and enthusiastic crowd as part of the eco-friendly Planet in Focus film festival. First came a charming, funny and scary short documentary movie, P is for Papaya, by a young filmmaker called Aube Giroux. The story tells of her obsessive love for papayas, a passion suddenly threatened by the discovery that most of the papayas that reach us in Canada come from the U.S. and are genetically modified by the addition of a gene collected from a particular virus. Needless to say, the rest of the world shuns this Frankenfruit, but our beloved government has decided not to tell us about it, so Canadians and Americans continue to gorge. There aren’t many delightful anti-GMO films, but this is one.

Great Scott's!

Posted on December 24, 2007

In London, England for Christmas, seeing old friends and relations and staying in my mum’s flat on the Fulham Road, I am overjoyed to catch the last episode of season three of The Mighty Boosh on the television (my son gave me seasons one and two on DVD and they travel with me everywhere). I make my mum watch it and she finds it funny, even though (or perhaps because) its theme is acting and its plot hinges on the thespian rivalry between one of the protagonists (Howard Moon) and an alcoholic crab called Sammy. Meanwhile the other hero, Vince Noir, is trying to fit into a pair of very tight black drainpipe trousers so he can be cool enough to perform with a mod band he idolizes. What an amazing series of coincidences! And I’ll tell you why.

Rabbit showdown in Corfu

Posted on December 31, 2007

To Corfu for a week of monklike solitude. Thanks to the technological marvel that is Olympic Airways, I reached the island three hours late (sometime around 11 p.m.) and decided to stay in Corfu Town at the Cavalieri hotel, a former townhouse of great comfort that still retains the elegant and world-weary mood of the Venetians who built it 300 years ago. The fabulous rooftop restaurant is closed during the winter, but Greeks eat late and I was confident of finding the Rex or the Aegli open for business. Walking down Kapodistriou Street towards one of these restaurants, I was thinking of a piquant stifatho of rabbit braised with sweet baby onions in a dark sauce spiked with vinegar. Yeah, that’s it—a stifatho! The roads were wet but the clouds had moved on and an inquisitive moon peered down over the citadel, smirking a little, I thought, as I stood outside the dark and padlocked restaurants. These nights between Christmas and the New Year are treacherous with holidays. Some of the bars along the ’Spianada’s stately stone arcades were still open. Too crowded. Instead, I ended up in a café with an exclusively Latin American menu; I made do with a no-name chicken quesadilla and a glass of Chilean plonk. Did the world find Greece while my back was turned or did Greece discover the world?

The Mother of All Parties

Posted on January 14, 2008

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This blog post, dear reader, is essentially an invitation. An invitation to a three-day gastronomical extravaganza being held on February 7th, 8th and 9th right here in our own backyard. And since you have shown the impeccable taste and good sense to click on this blog, I am delighted to offer you a unique opportunity to take part in the culmination of this amazing weekend at a substantially discounted price.

Easter onions

Posted on March 18, 2008

I lent my cherished copy of Marnie Woodrow’s short stories, In the Spice House, to my daughter. Now I want it back for rereading purposes, reminded of its resonances by a visit to that aromatic Kensington Market emporium known as House of Spice. I was looking for powdered bay, needed for a particular recipe that I’ll be reviving in a couple of weeks. I described it once in Outlook magazine, but even that public exposure failed to mitigate the private, emotional pungency of the flavours. The dish slipped into our kitchen more than 20 years ago, when our children were toddlers and we were living on Corfu. It was the gift of our nearest neighbour, Kleopatra, the village wise woman, and I cooked it once or twice under her critical eye. When we moved back to Canada, the recipe came with us and eventually found its own place on our calendar, settling there like a cat on a comfortable pillow, as part of a secular Eastertide dinner.

Chatto Bio Pic

James Chatto

James Chatto worked as a dishwasher, actor, waiter, bow tie salesman, choreen, bookseller, nanny, tennis coach, lounge singer, KFC truck driver (fired after 1 day), olive farmer and janitor before moving to Canada in 1987 and becoming a journalist. These days, he writes about food and restaurants for Toronto Life, about wine and spirits for Food & Drink and edits the menswear magazine, Harry. Two of his books are still in print: A Matter of Taste (co-written with Lucy Waverman) and The Greek For Love, a memoir of Corfu. James is married and has two delightful children.

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