Salmon on a board

Food, like music, is something that can instantly transport me to a time or place, intricately associated with feelings - usually happy ones, I have to say - I don't have many bad memories associated with food (apart from tripe).

My memories of 2 trips to the States, for example, are chiefly those of the $10 lobster dinners, corn dogs, and frozen margaritas the Husband and I enjoyed on our first proper holiday together to New Orleans, and of a fabulous salad with deliciously cold white wine my friends and I ate on a roof top garden in Manhattan - very Sex and the City, although we were none of us searching for love, only enjoying each others company for a long weekend...

France is enmeshed with a series of memories for me - lusciously ripe peaches and tomatoes purchased from road side stalls on the south west Mediterranean coast, the freshest tower of fruits de mer eaten in a restaurant on a harbour wall somewhere on the Cherbourg peninsula - the crabs being fished to order out of the sea, snails eaten in various guises, the first - and only - meat fondue I've ever had, at the age of 16, the day after I arrived for an exchange visit with a family that I am still in touch with nearly 30 years later... And salmon, nailed to a board and cooked over a fire, Finnish style, when I was an au pair in my late teens, early 20s.

The salmon always fascinated me. The family I was helping out had moved to an old farmhouse that was being renovated. The kitchen was out of action and we were BBQ-ing most days. The father of the family, Bruno, would appear home from work with various delicacies, and one evening, announced we would be having saumon Finlandais. I can't remember what it tasted like (unusual) but the mere fact that it was cooked in such an unconventional manner and was edible, amazed me. At that point, I hadn't done much in the way of camping...

So it's always been on my mind to recreate this, and it turns out the Husband wanted to try it too, and eager to create some memories (not necessarily food-related) for the kids, we headed down to our local beach, Mwnt, for some late afternoon bodyboarding and a cookout on the beach. I'd like to say we caught our fish but we didn't, but you can't have everything, can you...

And literally, all you do is get a decent piece of wood - we had some oak board, nail your piece of salmon to it,

and wedge it next to your fire while it cooks.

You can always cook some sausages while you're waiting...

I'd love to be able to include beautiful shots here of the food on the beach, perfectly styled, but this is what really happened, - beach food, that we ate...

And another food memory - 6 months pregnant with Blue, in Winchester with the Husband's amazing Great Aunt visiting from Australia, eating juicy cherries in the Cathedral grounds on a blazing hot day. Every time I've eaten cherries since, I've thought of that moment. But we had cherries this evening, after the salmon, bought from a local market garden, Glebelands, this morning. We ate them as the sun finally dropped behind the 'mwnt' itself...

I think perhaps cherries will trigger a new memory from now on.

Moules Marinieres

We had a holiday once, the Husband and I, in the very North West of Scotland, on the mainland just before you cross to Skye, in the shadow of Eilean Donan (the 'Highlander' castle if that helps). 

There are many things I could recount about that holiday - the incredibly long drive north, from Salisbury Plain (including an interesting evening in Penrith), towing a dinghy; the persistent sea mist that hovered about 3 inches above our heads for the entire week (apart from 1 day); the midges that occupied the 3 inches between our heads and the mist; the fact that the Husband had to be in daily contact with the powers that were at the time, being as he was still in the Army, and being that a little issue called Afghanistan was looming - but mobile phone signal was - ahem - patchy; the even longer journey home punctuated in all senses by a burst boat trailer tyre which kept us enjoying the delights of Fort Augustus (tearooms, doilies, the Loch Ness Monster) for 6 hours while Mrs McTavish who'd already taken the post bus to Inverness earlier in the day, attempted to locate a replacement for us...

Do I make it sound like a less than perfect holiday? Well in fact it was great - there was sailing, walking, there was visiting of castles (but of course), otters, whisky... But one of the best things about the holiday - certainly one of the most memorable - was a little note in the visitors book in the cottage we hired, an aside mentioning a place on the opposite side of the loch where you could find great mussels. As you might imagine, we were up for a challenge, and indeed, instructions followed, we treated ourselves to an evening of moules écossais after which I seem to remember walking to the nearest establishment offering both musical and alcoholic entertainment for a ceilidh...

Fast forward too many years to state, and a few weeks ago, the Husband came home from work with news of 'the' place locally to find mussels. Of course, I cannot possibly reveal the whereabouts of this treasure trove, but on Saturday, with the tides looking favourable, he set off with the kids to forage.

Of course, once you know where to go, the issue is not collecting the mussels, it's making sure they are safe to eat. Wild mussels aren't, of course, subject to the UV treatment of farmed mussels, so if you're going to eat them, you have to take care from where you collect them (somewhere with a big tidal range, lots of water, no sewage pipes...) to how you keep them, clean them and cook them.

So the Husband's 3.8 kilos of mussels. Kept in sea water overnight after a rather fraught journey home in the back of the camper van. We made up 4 litres of brine, and then spent a good hour or so this morning de-bearding and scrubbing them, then soaked them in the brine for another 4 hours before cooking them (having discarded any that were open and didn't close on being given a sharp tap.

Lunch, then, was entirely the Husband's creation, adapted from the recipe we used in Scotland all those years ago. 1.5 onions finely chopped and sweated in a good knob of bitter (about 30g, it looked like to me) with 2 crushed cloves of garlice. Once they were good and soft, his sous chef (me) tipped the mussels into the pan while he tipped in about 250 ml white wine, and then banged the lid on for 5-6 minutes while the mussels steamed in the winey vapours...

Then all you need is bowls to serve the mussels in, good bread and bob, as they say, is your moule...

Delicious - not a bit of grit, creamy, fresh and full of the flavours of the sea. And while not completely won over, the kids ate them too. Pretty successful, I'd say...