Travel Discount

I just got a letter from Overseas Adventure Travel asking me to encourage folks to take a trip with them. I’ve traveled with them a number of times (China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Morocco, Egypt and Jordan), and I have a very high opinion of their operation. So if you’re looking for a great tour to an exotic location, I can heartily recommend OAT.

To sweeten the deal, they enclosed a card saying that anyone who has never traveled with OAT before who mentions my name and customer number will get $100 per person off their first tour booking.

Be advised, OAT only books travel departures from the U.S., so if you’re reading this in Sydney, it would be kind of out of your way. But if you’re in or near the U.S., that $100 per person might be a nice bonus, encouraging you to try out this outstanding operator. (Not just tourist sites — home-hosted dinners, lectures with experts on local culture, visits to schools, cooking lessons, and lots of other opportunities to help you really get immersed in your destination.) And the groups are small — usually 16 or fewer people. So you can get into places and do things that you can’t do on a bigger tour.

Check out OAT at http://www.oattravel.com/ for more details on available trips.

And don’t forget to mention my name and customer number — Cynthia Clampitt, customer number 000637771A — to get $100 off for each person for your first trip with OAT.

Happy travels!

Fields of War

It’s probably because I enjoy and often write about history that I’ve ended up with a lot of friends who are also focused on history. As mentioned earlier, I have a cousin who has written about World War II in Italy. I have an old friend who is one of the world’s leading authorities on Napoleon Bonaparte, and while he doesn’t have a book out, he has published dozens of other people’s books. One acquaintance has written an excellent travel guide to American Civil War sites.

Unusual among these folks is Robert Mueller, because even though his book focuses on a specific region (France and Belgium), it does not focus on one war, but rather spans the centuries, sharing the key battles that have marked this landscape and directed its history.

Fields of War: Fifty Key Battlefields in France and Belgium is a travel guide, as well as a history book. It guides readers to the monuments and battlefields of turning points in Europe’s history, from the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) through World War II. The many national awards the book has won — including the Military Writers Society of America 2010 Bronze Medal in the Travel Category — are testament to its scholarship and usefulness. One can almost imagine the millions of warriors who have fought as Mueller guides the readers across the places these key battles occurred.

If you have any interest in military history, and especially if you’re planning a trip to Europe, you definitely want to buy this book. You can go straight to Amazon to order it, or you can first visit Mueller’s excellent blog, French Battlefields. If you didn’t want to travel before, you will probably want to once you’ve visited his site or read his book. Definitely recommended.

Scarborough Pie

During the holidays, I was invited to a potluck dinner where I knew a couple of people were vegetarians. I had a load of cheese and onions on hand, so I thought a pie of some sort would be a fun thing to attempt. However, knowing that one of the vegetarians doesn’t like quiche, I knew it would have to avoid being too custardy. And so was born Scarborough pie — so named because I used parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. (If you don’t immediately see the connection from the list of herbs, I suggest you listen to the song “Scarborough Fair” by Simon & Garfunkel.)

The winter has been mild, so the sage, rosemary, and thyme were still growing out in the pots on my balcony, so parsley was the only one that I needed to use dried — though using dried herbs would work splendidly, as well.

The non-quiche friend loved this. I hope you do, too.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 10,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Spinach Casserole

It’s interesting to consider how dining habits change over time — both society’s and our own. A lot of new things have been introduced, a lot of food fads have come and gone, and a lot of things that were once hard to get are now readily available. And, personally, dishes with which I grew up and dishes that were cornerstones of my culinary repertoire when I first lived on my own have been pushed aside for increasingly complex or exotic foods. However, in the last couple of years, I have from time to time gone back to some of those old recipes. A few need to be updated, but some are still perfect, and I wonder how I ever let them go. Granted, I grew up in a family that took cooking and eating seriously, so I had some good material to work with. But it has been fun to rediscover some of these old favorites.

One such old stand-by was the spinach casserole below. It is a lovely dish deliciously scented with rosemary (the history of which was touched on in the previous post). I believe this was the first recipe I had that used rosemary. When I had my first apartment and lots of single friends, I would always double this recipe. Enjoy.

Spinach Casserole

1 10-oz. pkg. frozen spinach
1 cup cooked rice
1 cup shredded cheddar
2 eggs, slightly beaten
2 Tbs. melted butter
½ tsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp. salt
1/3 cup milk
2 Tbs. scallions (green onions), chopped (white part and 1 inch of the green)
1/4 tsp. rosemary

Cook and drain the spinach. Combine all ingredients, crumbling the rosemary slightly as you add it, to release the volatile oils. Place mixture in a shallow, greased casserole dish. Bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes. Serves 4.

© 2011 Cynthia Clampitt

Rosemary

“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance,” says mad Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This was not a new thought, as the ancient Romans placed rosemary in the hands of their dead, as a remembrance. Nor is it a thought that is confined to antiquity, as Australians remember their war dead with sprigs of rosemary in their buttonholes on ANZAC Day. Interestingly, science is now finding that this is not merely a romantic fancy. A key compound in rosemary is rosmarinic acid, which is so effective in aiding memory that it is now being tested as a possible treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. So it is “for remembrance” indeed!

But that’s not all it does. Rosmarinic acid possesses antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and antimicrobial properties, and has been used to treat peptic ulcers, arthritis, cataracts, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, and bronchial asthma. And here you just thought it was a fragrant little herb. (And if you have ever grown it, you know that it is wildly fragrant when fresh. I have a friend in Australia who has it as a hedge around her garden, and just brushing past it is an intoxicating experience.)

Amazon Prime-Kindle

I posted this information on my other blog, but then I remembered that most of the folks who subscribe to that blog do not subscribe here, and vice versa. However, though my book, Waltzing Australia, is not as strongly focuses on food as this site is, it shares with this blog a focus on travel–so I’m putting the announcement both places.

Shortly after my book, Waltzing Australia, went live for Kindle readers, Kindle Digital Publishing asked me if I’d consider giving them exclusive rights to the book for the next 90 days. So the planned version for other ereaders is being postponed. However, there is good news for Kindle owners who are also Amazon Prime members: you can check Waltzing Australia out of the Members Lending Library for free.

Both the print version and Kindle version will still be available for sale, if you aren’t an Amazon Prime member — or if you simply prefer to own the books you read. But for anyone with Amazon Prime, you can now read Waltzing Australia for free, as one of your membership benefits.

I hope this leads to many more people sharing my adventures, and that more people will find out what a dandy travel destination Australia is.

Cockaleekie Soup

As noted in the previous post, it is likely that it was Scotland’s French allies who introduced the leek into Scotland — at very least, the French encouraged their use in Scottish recipes. Probably the most well-known use of leeks in Scotland is the country’s famous cockaleekie soup.

Cockaleekie soup would traditionally be served as a soup course, with the chicken removed and served later, probably after the haggis. However, I like the more recent, semi-traditional versions that can, with the addition of salad and bread, be a whole meal. (Also, traditionally, you’d be boiling an old fighting cock with its head and feet still on—so I don’t think you’ll be too disappointed that this has been updated.)

The addition of prunes is an item of controversy–some see them as immutable tradition, others view them as pollutants. I like the vaguely wine-like undertones they give the broth. You can make your own decision. If you opt for prunes, you need to use ones that still have their pits; if the prune has been pitted, the insides dissolve and make the broth muddy. Though I add prunes while cooking, and enjoy eating them myself, I recommend leaving them in the pot if serving this dish to guests, since a pit can be an unwelcome surprise in the midst of feasting.

Leeks

When King Henry says, in Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” that he will wear a leek in his cap, he is identifying himself with his Welsh subjects. The reason this created a connection is that, when King Cadwallader and the Welsh faced the Saxons in battle in AD 640, the Welsh soldiers identified themselves by wearing leeks in their caps. Leeks were so closely associated with the Welsh, that a leek appears on some Welsh coins. It is to the Welsh what the thistle is to the Scottish.

Leeks have been consumed for so long in Wales and other Celtic countries that some hypothesize that the British Isles are a possible point of origin. Other scholars say the Mediterranean is where they emerged. They were popular in Egypt and ancient Rome (Nero’s nickname was “leekeater”), the Chinese were praising leeks by 1500 BC, and leeks were being written about in Mesopotamia as early as 2100 BC. So wherever they started, they clearly were popular and on the move pretty much from the get-go.

If leeks did start in the Mediterranean, rather than colder climes, as some hypothesize, then the Romans would have brought them to Britain when they invaded in 43 AD. So Britain has had them for a couple millennia, even if leeks didn’t actually start out there.

Djej Makalli

Since I’ve written a fair bit about Morocco on this blog (original post here, plus a redirect to more extensive writing here), I figured it wouldn’t be amiss to include yet another Moroccan recipe — especially because, if you’ve gone to the trouble of making preserved lemons (see previous two posts), you might want more than one way to use them. So here is another use for those lemons — a wonderful Moroccan tagine of chicken with preserved lemons and olives. (I’ve also written about olives and their history, and offered a recipe for Moroccan marinated olives, so you’re getting to the place now that you could create an entire Moroccan meal. Just add the Moroccan orange salad for dessert.)

Traditionally, this would be cooked in the earthenware cooking vessel known as a tagine (of which I wrote here), but the recipe below has been modified for preparation in more common cooking vessels, so you can enjoy it even without owning a tagine. However, so common is the cooking method that the dish (and other tagine-cooked dishes like it) is also known as a tagine.

So while I generally encourage people to simply add a few exotic elements to their regular menu, rather than trying to prepare entire meals from one country (just to make the task of expanding one’s repertoire a bit less daunting), with this recipe, you’ll now be able to cook an entire Moroccan meal, should you wish to do so. Hope you enjoy this as much as I do.