Reflections on Valentines and moving on

So it's Valentines Day on Saturday.

As ever, there are lots of tempting food tales knocking around to help you show appreciation for your loved one. And yet again, I've failed to pre-empt this and have some suitable treats to share with you here, but the thing is, I'm not very good at making a special thing out of Valentines Day these days.

You see, this is a bittersweet time of year for me. Circumstances first conspired just over 16 years ago with the outcome that our wedding anniversary takes place on 13th February (and not on 29th May as originally planned...) - cue several years of being asked if we'd got the date wrong as we booked and then sat in empty restaurants, NOT enjoying the 'specially chosen Valentines menu' because we were 'a day early'. And then, as this year, the raised eyebrow from those suspicious types that think we must be mad to have got married on the 13th and have to endure a Friday 13th wedding anniversary every so often (to that I say "13 is a lucky number in Italy". Check it out.) By the time you've got over all that and enjoyed the anniversary, well, we've mostly said it all on our anniversary.

And then, in 2006, Blue was diagnosed with leukaemia - on 13th February. Our wedding anniversary. This is absolutely not a 'poor me, poor us' post, although I guess it is quite self-indulgent. But it was a dark day if ever there was one. And although that is all over now, I still can't resist giving it a prod every now and again, just to see if it still hurts as much. Thankfully, it doesn't - each time I go there, and I go there less and less - the part of my soul that screams whenever I edge towards it is a little harder to find, the nightmare is a little less easy to wake. 

My memories of that period are slowly distilling themselves into a series of snapshots. Not quite sepia tones yet, but fading year by year as Blue shows himself to be strong and healthy, robust and nothing like the chemo-ravaged toddler I cradled for so many months, willing him to survive and hoping that the Husband & my relationship would too... 

One of those snapshots is of a table for 2, carefully laid with a clean tablecloth, the wedding present cutlery, candles ready to be lit, a fire laid in the grate. I was going to cook a special meal for the Husband that night in 2006. It was a Monday night. It was going to be Nigella's sake steak and something chocolatey. But I left the house that afternoon to take Blue for a hospital appointment and didn't go home for 2 weeks.

Somehow I've never felt like cooking for either our anniversary or Valentines since, but just as Blue has recovered so have better memories begun to replace the bleak ones, and I've become more willing to celebrate our anniversary with something more than a battening down of the hatches and a thankfulness that we're all still here and alive another year on. So this year, the Husband and I are heading out. I'm very excited. The babysitter is booked and we're heading off to Lampeter Town Hall where Tom Holden will be hosting one of his supper clubs. 

Enjoy cooking for your loved ones - while you're slaving over a hot stove, I'll be enjoying something quite delicious!

Cardiff - Cocktails and Quesadillas

The Husband and I escaped to Cardiff for a night this weekend. Too late to book ourselves into any of the great places to eat that had been recommended to us, we decided to embrace some of the ‘chain’ restaurants present in this fantastic city – and we weren’t disappointed.

I visited Cardiff once before, quite a long time ago. With the Husband (although he’s been back since). In fact, we went to see the last England v Wales international at the much loved and now obsolete Arms Park. As I remember, Keiran Bracken’s thighs featured quite heavily (for me at least), as did a man dressed as a leek. Actually, there were quite a lot of men dressed as leeks, and I was quite disappointed not to see even one man-sized leek when we returned to our adopted homeland’s capital on Saturday. What was noticeably prevalent was the rampant goodwill amongst Welsh & Springbok supporters, a general atmosphere of happiness and optimism. Not surprising really, because Cardiff is a lovely city – wide streets, a mixture of old fashioned department stores and arcades and ultra-modern architecture.

When I say we embraced chain restaurants, we did have an initial foray into the independent food scene, visiting the New York Deli, as recommended. Situated in one of the gorgeous little arcades, as well as enjoying the food, if you sit in the window you can also be intrigued by the barbers/tattoo parlour opposite...

Bagels, hoagies, sandwiches heavy on the salt beef and swiss, I enjoyed a delicious Cardiff Devil’s Hoagy – cream cheese, salt beef and gherkins, smothered in a pungent horseradish and tabasco sauce.

I’d specified heat of 4-5 (out of a scale of 1-10) and it was just fine, and set me up perfectly for an afternoon at the Laguna Spa that the Husband had booked me in for (yes, while he watched the rugby, but you know what – each to his or her own, and I was pretty happy with my part of the bargain).

Emerging into the early evening, jubilant Welsh crowds fresh from their win over the ‘boks, we decided we were in the mood for cocktails, and found ourselves initially in 10 Feet Tall. 

Packed to the gunnels we pushed on through, found a table and settled down to a mojito and a long island iced tea. Very good they were too, but “…very young and hip…” as Twitter advised me. We didn’t feel like it was overly young & hip, but it was quite noisy, and the crowd was definitely drunker at 6.30 than we were ever going to be getting lively, so by definition we were probably too old to be there, and took the advice of Twitter to hightail it over to the newly opened Wahaca, and their cocktail bar.

Now I’ve long wanted to eat at Wahaca, Thomasina Miers’ Mexican streetfood chain, and the fact that there was a cocktail bar where we could wait for our table made it a no brainer. The more I eat Mexican food, the more I love it: fresh flavours of lime and coriander, beans and tomatoes, avocados, smoky spices. It’s the smoky spices that I really love – chipotle and all that.

We were duly assigned a mobile phone-like pager and an estimated table time of 8, and headed upstairs for a tamarind margarita. Wahaca in Cardiff is in a big modern unit, spread over 3 floors and from the top you can see all the way down. There’s plenty of plate glass giving views of John Lewis opposite, and a relaxed but ‘buzzy’ vibe to the bar. It wasn’t heaving either, so we got served pretty quickly and settled down to enjoy our cocktails and the snacks – tortillas and delicious guacamole. I loved the tamarind margarita – the lemony flavours combined well with the lime and the high grade tequila they profess to use. In fact it slipped down far too easily, as did the Husband’s Wahaca Mule, after which I had a Mojito DF and the Husband had something with hibiscus in which was too flowery for me, but he enjoyed it…

I could have stayed there all evening, quaffing delicious cocktails and nibbling tortilla and guacamole, but perhaps fortunately, we were called to our table, where ‘Jack’ welcomed us. Now, Wahaca operates a little like Wagamamma, whereby the menu is printed out on a table mat/piece of paper, and the waiter or waitress will scribble over it as you give your order. ‘Jack’ was clearly following his script which was a little irritating, explaining how we should order, writing his name on the menu - in case we forgot? But we managed to let that go, ordered mainly from the street food and sides menu, and pretty quickly had some totally delicious morsels in front of us. And another cocktail.

The first morsels were the fennel pork scratchings with more guacamole. You can take the girl out of the North of England, but you'll never rid me of my love of pork scratchings, and this were divine morsels of fennell-y saltiness. Perfect with the guacamole. Even more so than the tortillas we'd eaten earlier.

After that, it wasn't long before we were presented with: pork pibil tacos, black bean tostados, chicken taquitos and chorizo & potato quesadilla. And spicy slaw, 'greens' (lush lush lush - tenderstem brocoli  drizzled with chilli garlic oil and lime - I could have eaten kilos of it), and the sauteed sprout special. It is nearly Christmas after all...

If you ask me, Mexican served this way is pretty much the perfect food to eat when you’re happily tipsy and feeling full of goodwill: cheerful food, bright and vibrant, and really fresh tasting. Wahaca may be a chain, and I haven’t eaten in any of the other Wahacas, but it was lovely. I also liked the way that they used British ingredients like Lancashire cheese where appropriate. Wahaca has won a sustainable food award a couple of times, and I wondered if they might be able to use Welsh cheese in the Cardiff Wahaca – but that’s being really petty because the food was fantastic and, deprived country girl that I am, the view was pretty good too.

To be utterly honest after the lovely ‘main courses’ we didn’t really fancy any of the puddings on offer, churros and hot chocolate and various ice creams, so we decided to do some ‘urban foraging’ for a fix of lemon tart. But that’s for another post…