Scalloped scallops

When you travel, you're often surprised by the look of familiar food. In western Scotland, you often find diver scallops on the menu. They're tender and sometimes surprisingly large. But the most striking attribute for me is the "wee orange bit" (as described by my server), which as near as I can tell, is the muscle that connects the animal to its shell.

At home, that muscle is a tough membrane that we remove before cooking them. On these Scottish scallops, it's a delicate balloon that folds up in your mouth. Of course, it's one of those foods that makes you figure that the first guy to take a bite when he discovered it must have been pretty hungry.

In defense of pub grub

The pub is to the UK what the diner is in America, a place for home-cooked food without pretension. But the UK pub scene is undergoing a bit of a transformation with the emergence of what they call "gastropubs." Now no pub appears to be so presumptuous as yet to call itself a gastropub, but we've already visited lots of places that go well beyond shepherd's pie and bangers and mash. There are often salads, even.

Here's an example, from Tobermory on the island of Mull. Because so much of Scotland is on the sea, fish and shellfish are often prominent in the local cuisine. This salad cost in the range of a lunch salad in the US, and it's just covered with crabmeat. In the center is a puddle of prawn (shrimp) salad, and guarding the whole dish are a pair of stern-looking langoustines. Pub grub, indeed.

Delighted in Inverness

It's still too soon to draw conclusions about the whole of mainland Scotland, or for that matter, the whole of Inverness. But so far, lunch has been an absolute pleasure.

Many places in town offer a 2-course lunch most days, and the sweet spot for price is from £5.95 (about $9.00) to £10 ($15 for two courses.) When we travel, it's common for us to have a big lunch: we're already out, it's often half the price of dinner, and you never get starved for dinner, so you can be a little healthier about it. These two-course lunches let the restaurant show off great dishes using local ingredients, and they allow me to taste twice as much of the local cuisine than I might have otherwise. The photo is of my first course at Cafe1 (on the high side at £9.50), billed as "chicken, leek and mushroom terrine, wrapped in Parma ham with a saffron dressing." Our first lunch, at the Mustard Seed for £5.95, was equally satisfying.

I could get used to this.

A Word about Haggis

It's Scotland, so haggis is on the list of experiences to have. For some time, I erroneously believed that haggis was just for tourists, but that is entirely untrue. Haggis is as common to cuisine in these parts as sausage is anywhere else.

I've tried it twice now, and I think that both times it was in its very usual appearance. The first was in a "mixed grill" in Orkney, with egg, sausage, bacon, black pudding, mushrooms, and tomato. The haggis there was offered in a slice next to the slice of black pudding.

This was also my first taste of black pudding, also called blood pudding, which is equally an equally accurate description of its appearance and content. The haggis had a similar taste to Philadelphia's scrapple, except it was somehow drier, probably due to its grainy consistency. It's made from similar ingredients and simmered for hours in a sheep's stomach (yum!), and it contains oatmeal (which explains its graininess.)

Today I tried haggis again, this time in one of its more native surroundings. It was served in a pile on a plate, and accompanied by a mixture of potato and turnip called "clapshot." Clapshot is an Orkney dish, so it originated not very far from this northern mainland town Wick.

Though I'm presumably in a place where English is the native language, mashed potatoes are never called "mashed potatoes"; they're almost always called "tatties." Turnips are never called "turnips", even though everybody knows that's what they're called to everyone but them. In polite company, such as the supermarket, they're called "Swedes". On menus, they're "neeps". So you'll often see a dish served with "tatties and neeps", which sounds like it's on the menu at Hooters.

Here's the luncheonette version of haggis with a mountain of clapshot and a sprinkling of peas. I couldn't finish it because of its huge size. But I'd order it again. Just not tomorrow.

And for more on the luncheonette that served this, one of the lunches available was macaroni and cheese. Alongside it you have your choice: baked potato or chips (fries). At least my peas are green.

Too many choices; what to eat first. Not complaining in the Shetlands.

We've just arrived in the Shetland Islands well in the north of Scotland. It's our first stop in the UK, our first stop in Scotland, but Shetland cuisine has its own identity, so it made sense to stay as local as possible. Guidebooks helped me know what to look for when scouting out restaurants.

The posted menu at Monty's Bistro in Lerwick made us hungry mid-morning, and we rushed inside as soon as it opened officially at noon. It resides in a 130-year-old building nestled behind the main intersection of town, with a bar on the first floor and a restaurant on the second. The room sports the original stone walls and wooden floor, with friendly servers and fetching blackboard specials.

This lunch plate at Monty's Bistro sells for £7.50 and is billed as "Grilled undyed smoked haddock fishcake." It's served with an herb-dressed green grape and cucumber salad, and drizzled with a sweet mustard sauce. Smoked haddock on its own is a typical Shetlands dish, and the cake's body was subsidized by gobs of mashed potato, which provided a pleasant dilution to the smoky and oily attributes of the haddock.

Apparently undyed fish is a local point of pride; I've seen it lauded in several brochures for the Shetlands. I never realized before that smoked fish was dyed; I was never even sure that it was dead.

Truthiness: Challenge your consumption assumptions

Brilliant social observer Stephen Colbert coined the term "Truthiness" to describe concepts that have the ring of validity without the substance. I sometimes have to remind myself that I'm not in Kansas anymore (actually, I've never been in Kansas) and my general guidelines about finding food don't necessarily apply overseas.

Here's one example. I'm in Norway, which is a very expensive place to eat. Today, a Sunday, we selected the local Chinese restaurant for lunch. On the one hand, this is very wise, because many establishments are closed on Sundays, and immigrant-owned restaurants are often open whenever they might draw a customer. On the other hand, though, I've had to revise my expectation that ethnic food is comparatively inexpensive, as it is in the US. In America, you can get a giant plate of Mexican, Indian, or Chinese food for a relatively low price. It's been my experience in Europe that ethnic food is priced about the same as a similar local plate.

Here's my Sunday "special chop suey" plate, at $22.50. (Note, too, that the name of the restaurant is written in Chinese and English, but not Norwegian. The menu was in Norwegian and English.) This price is about what I'd pay in Norway for a pan-fried filet of fish with some boiled potatoes. During the week, the special lunch for $14.50 at this Chinese eatery includes a dish like this and a cup of soup. Similarly, the "dagens" daily plate here in town would cost somewhere in the same neighborhood. This is what I've found all over Europe, that ethnic food is an alternative to the local cuisine, but not a particularly cheap one.

So we eat at ethnic places overseas for the experience, and not for the price.

Apparently, my belief that ethnic food is cheap has "toothiness", rather than teeth.

Off to a rocky start

When you're on a short vacation, you're most likely in a hotel, or staying with friends, and the one chore you don't have to do is cook for yourself. We're staying overseas for about five months, starting in Sweden, living in our own quarters, and eating every meal out isn't an option. Even I could get sick of travel food if I had to eat every meal out for that long a time.

Cooking in my own kitchen while I'm away from home isn't a challenge, but sometimes grocery shopping can be. All of the slight or sharp differences in cuisines are reflected clearly in the supermarket. Meat is cut differently, so your cooking instincts might not work. Some foods are emphasized; others are hard to find. I spent weeks looking for mustard in Italy once. Maybe Italians just don't use it. For this reason, it's often fun to wander through a foreign supermarket, just to see what's important to people in the kitchen, even if I have no intention of cooking anything.

I'm in Sweden, a place that's very familiar to me, a place with large supermarkets, a place with people who speak perfect English even if all the signage is understandable only to the chef on Sesame Street. Normally this isn't a problem for me. Today it was.

We had our first big trip to fill the refrigerator and to set me up to make some recipes in advance of needing to eat them. My first official act when I arrive in a kitchen is to make scones. Today I decided to make four batches, 32 of them. We'll have lots of visitors this season and scones are what my guests wake up to.

I was out of salt. Table salt was out of the question; I use kosher salt exclusively for cooking. I have no idea what Swedes would call kosher salt, though I'm sure I've bought it in the past. The market had two sorts of salt, as far as I could tell, fine table salt and salt with grains larger than kosher salt but well smaller than the salt you'd grind in a grinder. Normally, I'd stop someone in the aisle and ask about it. In Sweden, if they can't answer my question, it's because they don't cook. It's never because they don't speak English. But I didn't bother doing the research. I bought the larger-grained salt.

Scones are baked goods, and they need a little salt to work. I was sure that either the food processor would break up the salt, or the 400-degree oven would melt the grains, just as it would with kosher salt. I was wrong. My husband tasted a scone (his official role in sconemaking) and said, unaware of my ingredient swap, "Gee, there's a large piece of salt in this one." Indeed, he later told me that the whole scone had a sort of salty bite to it. Thirty-two scones, none of which passes the quality control test. My husband promised to eat one every day until they are gone (the way you might eat a Hershey's kiss even if it included a little taste of salt.) I'll hold off on cooking anything else until I fix the salt situation.

Taking travel with a grain of salt isn't as fun as it sounds.