Food & Bicycles

Foil-baked Sea Bream by Steve Fagg

Reading these entries, you might be forgiven for wondering if there's anything much else in our lives!

This week isn't going to offer much in the way of contradiction either. Early in the week Lisa created a chicken, mushroom and spinach gratin which proved a big hit, served with brown basmati rice. On Saturday we pulled out a lot of curry stops to entertain our Changchun friend, Emma, to dinner. I contributed my masala bhindi and fragrant basmati rice, Lisa cooked the Keralan dish Kochi chicken curry from Atul Kochhar's "Indian Essence" and made a sublime dal tarka with split red lentils, Emma prepared a cooling cucumber and tomato raita, and the feast was rounded out with paratha bread and pickles from Al Amin. We had mango kulfi (Indian ice cream), also from Al Amin, lined up for dessert but Emma pleaded a full stomach so that stayed in the freezer. As usual, the talk continued long after the food was finished and Emma returned home, clutching her share of the Kulfi, a dinner's worth of left-overs from the meal, and a sea bass long after midnight.

The sea bass was one of two that we got from our local East Asian superstore, Cho Me, on Saturday. We enjoyed ours on Sunday evening, baked in foil with herbs from the garden, served with some variety of choi (also from Cho Me) accompanied by a home-grown salad of mixed leaves and tomatoes.

Prior to the sea bass, Sunday had been a bicycle day. My hopes of travellin to London to see the final stage ofthe Tour of Britain and supporting events in the flesh were scotched by our very late night on Saturday but we did watch the BBC coverage of the race on the TV and enjoyed the spectacle of seeing the reigning world champion, Tom Boonen, win the final stage with veteran Brit Roger Hammond second and rising British star Mark Cavendish third. Watching this on the box inspired us to get out on our own wheels and go for a ride. After our exertions last Sunday, we wanted to see how we felt with some local undulations so, after we rode into Cherry Hinton along Coldham's Lane and then through Church End and Fulbourn Old Drift, we climbed up into Fulbourn itself and, from there, took the Shelford Road. This led us over the Gog Magog hills and down into Great Shelford. Our way back was through Trumpington, along Long Road and Queen Edith's Way into Cherry Hinton, then back through Church End and along Coldham's Lane home.