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Enjoy this fun guest blog from redweek.com

Tasty English Food with Odd Names

Spotted Dick  

You laugh now, but this is actually an incredibly tasty treat so popular that Heinz even offers a canned variety. Spotted Dick is a type of English dessert, much like a pudding or custard, with currants or raisins mixed throughout. “Spotted” refers to the dried fruit in the mix, though different reasons have surfaced as to the “dick” part of the name. One theory has “dick” stemming from an abbreviated form of the word “pudding” and here’s how: pudding becomes puddink becomes puddik becomes dick.

Black Pudding  

This traditional breakfast side in England might be more easily identifiable if it were called by its alternative name: blood pudding. Yes, this breakfast sausage (a savory pudding, not like your neighborhood Jell-O) is made with dried animal blood mixed with a filler, usually suet or vegetables. And I’ll tell you this: it’s a lot tastier than some of the other pseudo-animal byproduct meat dishes that we get served up in the U.S. If you want an authentically English meal, try a black pudding

Cornish Pasty 

I must’ve eaten at least one pasty every week while I lived in England. They’re like fast food but not fried: they’re sold at little pasty shops (the one near my house was the West Cornwall Pasty Co.) and you can take it on the go. The small to medium ones can fit in your hand; the larger ones take a little more care since they’re pretty darn big.

Traditional pasties are filled with stew beef, potatoes and onions but there are all sorts of variety like breakfast pasties with egg to Thanksgiving pasties with turkey and cranberries. Cornish refers to the county of Cornwall which is strongly associated with the food; pasty is derived from pastry which is used to make the baked dough pocket for the food.

Rent a timeshare in England, and you’ll have a good excuse to become proficient in English – food, that is!

Analise Marcus is an avid anglophile and food lover. She recommends booking affordable airline travel with an Travelocity promo code so you have plenty of funds to research all the local culinary delights wherever you go.

How are things? I know, I know, I should have written sooner. After all, we’ve been together for five years now – can you believe it? As they say, ‘time flies when you’re having fun’. We’ve definitely had some fun together.

I remember when we first met (almost by accident). I never imagined that we’d hit it off like we did. Back then, everything about you seemed magical to me. You were so different than what I’d known before. You were so full of surprises – and every day I spent with you seemed surreal and wonderful.

Visiting the Forbidden City in Beijing on my very first trip to China in 2005

Remember the day I saw a woman carrying a baby in one arm and using her free hand to help push her husband’s three-wheeled truck (filled with plywood) up a hill? Or the time a man carrying an unsheathed, giant meat cleaver stood next to me on a crowded bus and I was the only person who seemed to notice? Remember the long bike rides I used to take out into the countryside west of Zhengzhou? Those rides always made me feel like an explorer – and each new village I rode into felt like a discovery.

Remember my English students back then? The freshmen wore their over-sized camouflage uniforms while they marched around the campus, looking as if their nervous energy might cause them to combust. Remember the first day of class when they began cheering and applauding the moment I walked through the classroom door? I felt like a Rock Star.

And the food. China, you’ve always seemed to understand the way to my heart. You’ve given me noodles…unbelievable noodles. Fried noodles served in flimsy Styrofoam bowls on the street. Giant bowls of thin noodles in salty beef broth. Thick noodles, handmade by young men in track suits attempting to hip-hop dance, stretch noodles, and entertain large crowds of noisy customers simultaneously. And my favorite – noodles covered in mud-colored, salty, garlic-laden, bitter sauce. Yes, I love your noodles.

But beyond noodles, you’ve opened my eyes to a world of food I never knew existed. You stretched my palate – no, stretched is the wrong word – you destroyed my palate, and rebuilt it China-size; bigger, wilder, better. You taught me to love tofu. And fresh yogurt served in glass bottles with paper lids. And wheat gluten marinated in oil, vinegar, sugar and spices. You served me baked duck heads, deep fried eel bones, barbecued dog, pickled chicken stomach, stir-fried flowers, roasted pig snout, grilled scorpion, and so much more. When I didn’t love the flavor, I loved the ingenuity of your cuisine.

With my friend, Cole, during my first trip to the Great Wall in 2005. I've been back four times since.

For me, China, your food typifies what I love about you. Over the past five years, I’ve never known what to expect. Sometimes you frustrated me with your unpredictability, but I was never bored. As with your food, your people, culture and language have also stretched me into someone new; someone more patient, open-minded, and concerned with the World beyond my own neighborhood. To borrow a term I know you love to use – You’ve truly made my life so much more “colorful”.

As you know, China, I’m in America now. I’ve been here for about a week, and it’s been great seeing my family again. I love America – but you already know that. America is my home – it’s where I’m most comfortable, and where I’ll always fit in best. But, that doesn’t change my love for you. Life isn’t found in comfort.

I’ll miss you while I’m away, and I’ll think of you daily.

Love,

aaron

Aaron Carmichael is an author of short stories and was both a teacher and a student in China.

Breakfast at the Jeffersons! Homemade strawberry shortcake! Why not?! It was yummy!

Since most of my journey’s these days are to the Phoenix area, and so most of my shared discoveries are from that area, when this post came to my attention, wanderlust kicked in and I found myself dreaming and wishing I could share similar discoveries from exotic lands. Don’t misunderstand:  Phoenix is a fun place! But it lacks a bit of the intrigue of the exotic places we might find abroad, such as a restaurant named “W by Wanlamun” in Thailand.

Having enjoyed my vicarious experience of discovering great food in an exotic location while reading this well-written post (which is supported with intriguing descriptions and pictures), I want to share it –and it’s curious restaurant– with you. I hope you find the discovery as delightful as I did.

Who knows– some of you, while traveling abroad, just might find yourselves in Chiang Mai, Thailand. And when you do, PLEASE confirm for me, the Great Food at this Fun Place!

And until I can get a little further away, I invite you to also visit Wanderlust and Lipstick for great travel tips, guidelines, stories and inspiration!

Please enjoy this post:  Local Flavor: W by Wanlamun

I was hoping to share with you a couple of new ‘favorites’ entrees I just discovered at Pita Jungle, but since a picture is worth a thousand words…well, you will just have to wait… since at the time, I was so hungry and eager to dive right in that I forgot to take any pictures!  Ok, ok …if you must know, it was Wood Fired MahiMahi served over jalapeno hummus with pita chips AND the Island Shrimp Pizza, a lavosh base topped with feta cheese, roasted peppers, pineapple, and a mango glaze with the shrimp. Get the picture? Okay, I promise to return to Pita Jungle , if I must, just so I can take pictures of these tantalizing entrees!

Meanwhile, how about exotic culinary items from travels abroad, a potential “orgy of gustatory delights” ?  Enjoy this fun “Party in the Pantry” post. It is a delightful read with great pictures and definitely feeds my wanderlust to travel abroad.

The author, it appears, has in her pantry many gifted foods from other’s travels as well as from her own. Perusing my own pantry, I realize that I have, over time, been blessed with a bounty of gifts exotica from other’s travels: chocolates from  Belgium; Cherry BBQ sauce from Michigan;  paprika from Hungary. I have even sipped on Burundi coffee…

Read this entertaining post with me. What savory souvenirs do you have or remember having?

I was looking for something different to do (and inexpensive) for my daughter Toria’s birthday party.

I checked out the internet — there’s chef classes, make-your-own-pottery, digging for dinosaur bones, things like Boondocks, or the water parks — all fun, but kinda pricey.

Then, after looking at the latest on Great Food Fun Places blog, and seeing the berry-picking again, I was inspired to see what “pick-your-own” places were around the my area. I live in the Denver, Colorado, metropolitan area and remembered driving to Greeley to visit my niece and her husband, and seeing signs for raspberry picking.

So, after a little more internet searching, I found Berry Patch Farms in Brighton, Colorado; and they have birthday parties!

They reserve a picnic table for you, have refrigeration space if needed, drive you out to the berry field on a hay wagon and each kid gets to pick a pint of berries to take home. They have chickens and turkeys and cats and dogs and a pot-bellied pig.

We brought sandwiches and chips and pickles and carrot sticks and cupcakes for our picnic, and some balloons to decorate. It turned out to be a really fun time.

The kids were all really into picking the strawberries (we were a week too early for raspberries) – they ate as much as they picked, and a couple of them ate their berries during lunch – they didn’t even make it home!

The birthday girl, Toria, seemed to have a good time and it helped to have two big teenage brothers along to chase and tease and give piggy-back rides, etc.!