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Catching Up...
Feb. 9th, 2014 03:19 pmOf course the year I decide that my New Year's Resolution is to be better at corresponding, I completely fail to update my journal on a regular basis. I blame the day job. It's not that my new job at the library eats up THAT much time (it's only 4 hours and not even every day), but I tend to veg out a lot more after work and when I do have time, I've been trying to spend it writing.
Also, our entire family got the shonen flu/cold (so-called by me because it seemed to power-up at each person it hit.) The last victim was Shawn and she was basically out with it for nearly a month.
...oh, yeah, and I killed my Mac Book Pro.
But, ,enough excuses. The point is, I'm trying to catch up now. For the first order of business, I should show off some of the things that have been happening. Most notably, after the family recovered from our collective illness, we finally all sat down to tea and opened the care package sent to us by my friend![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
empty_mirrors. Some time ago, you may recall, I posted a picture of me trying fruitcake. My face was very, OMG WHAT?
My friend is from Wales and was fairly horrified by my reaction and determined that I hadn't had good fruitcake--which seemed reasonable to me, since fruitcake in America is kind of the punchline to a Christmas joke. So, we decided to exchange fruitcakes. Alas, the fruitcake shelf life here is about ONE DAY after Christmas, so I wasn't able to find our version to send. Instead, I went to United Noodle and packed up a box of Japanese treats including natto (which you may also remember me posting about eating.) We send our respective boxes and waited.
Shawn thought it would be fun to have a series of UK days, in which we pulled out the fancy tea pot and dishes and such and made a kind of THING of of it. Here's a picture of the contents of the box:
As you can see,empty_mirrors was very generous. She sent us Jelly Babies (which I have a fond memory of eating with my mother in Oxford or maybe Canterbury), Jaffa Cakes (which my family had to hide from me after the second day because I was devouring them all by myself), treacle (because Mason wondered what it was, having read about it Harry Potter -- funny story to follow), and a number of fun fruit cakes. She also sent along a package of her tea (I asked her just to send whatever she drank at home, so I could taste a bit of her life).
Shawn pulled out some of our fancier china and we sat down:
Looks lovely, doesn't it? The tea (Kngihtsbridge Red?) was very good. If my parents are reading this: do you remember that morning in London when we got up early to go listen to the soap box speakers in Hyde Park? I bought tea from a street vendor that morning? It was kind of classically foggy and cold that morning? Anyway, this tea is probably higher end*, but the taste reminded me very much of that experience, which is to say, this is now my FAVORITE BREAKFAST TEA EVER.
----
edited to add:empty_mirrors notes that "higher end" might be a bit kind, as this tea is half the price of PG Tips, for instance. You wouldn't know it from the taste, however, IMHO.
----
Okay, here we are starting to dig in.
I should have taken notes, because can't remember the name of this particular cake. I DO remember what it tastes like. I remember expecting, from the looks of it, to be more cake-y. Instead, the inside was a giant mass of squished raisins with a little bit of wheat flour gumming it all together. My adjectives probably don't make it sound very appetizing, which is unfair.
It was tasty, but I would also use adjectives like DENSE. And, via Skype,empty_mirrors taught me the word "claggy" as a good description: meaning, "clay-like." Shawn and I also spent some time trying to decide if Americans would call what we were eating "fruitcake." We ultimately decided that what we could call it, particularly in terms of flavor (flavour), would be "spice cake." And, like American spice cake, the predominant fruit in British fruit cake appears to be raisins. There were other fruits listed in the ingredients, but raisins were really the largest percentage (in this one, I believe they were 40% of ALL the ingredients).
So yeah...fruitcake, we discovered, is a completely different thing in the UK.
In fact, I think the subtitle of this whole exchange experience could be: "In Which Lyda Discovers How Little English She Speaks." Because treacle? We got a can of it and we decided we should look up what one does with treacle ONLY TO DISCOVER IT'S MOLASSES.
The British have a different word for almost everything, I swear to God.
The treacle can, though, by itself, as a curio, is a cool thing. For instance Shawn and I spent a lot of time puzzling out their logo. She sent us "Abram Lyle & Sons" Lyle's Black Treacle which appears to have a dead lion surrounded by a swarm of flies as its logo. After reading the tiny printed motto: "Out of the strong came forth sweetness" I had a vague memory involving the short story I wrote about Samson and his first, unnamed wife (sometimes called the woman of Timor). Turns out, I was right, those weren't flies, they were supposed to be bees and it has to do with one of the weird-ass riddles Sampson uses to trick his Philistine wife.
But, yeah, that really IS supposed to be the carcass of a dead lion.
As a logo.
A logo promoting FOOD.
I should also mention that, on a separate occasion, Mason and I gobbled up all the Cadbury chocolates thatempty_mirrors sent. Some of the textures were odd to me, because: airy. Chocolate bars here in the US tend to a) be sweeter and b) more compact (if that's a thing.) I liked the flavor of the Cadbury better than some chocolate here, but I felt it compared very similarly to Hersey's milk chocolate in terms of taste (feel free to argue with me, dear reader). However, I'm probably weird in that I kind of prefer the waxy/smooth (?) texture of chocolates like Dove. I should send some to empty_mirrors in our next exchange so I can hear what she makes of our chocolate. I would expect "too sweet," but I'd be curious what she made of the texture.
Okay, on to more foreign treats:
Eccles Cakes... now these, I liked. I was not, once again, expecting the center to be a completely dense collection of fruity mass. However, there was something about these that worked for me. A LOT. I think these were my favorites of all the things (with the notable exception of the Jaffa Cakes which I would probably give a small fortune to possess and unlimited supply of). Maybe it was the really shortbread-y, flaky exterior. Perhaps it was the fact that the fruit was just a gooey center, not mixed in with flour. Whatever it was, I liked them. This was the food, however, that made Shawn wonder: "When do you eat Eccles Cakes? Are they a breakfast item...or what?" So next time I was chatting withempty_mirrors, I asked. She said: "Tea. Think High Tea."
I think, if Eccles Cakes were to try to market to the US, however, they should totally sell themselves as a breakfast food. In some ways, they're a fancier (less sugary) version of a Pop-Tart (Wiki link for my non-US friends). The package instructions even suggested that they'd be good heated in the oven (or microwave, thoughempty_mirrors cautioned that if we did that to be wary of pockets of super-heated fruit.)
The final fun cake-product was this:
Welsh Cakes. These were also yummy, also very shortbread like: buttery and flaky. Much like the Eccles Cakes, but the fruit was dispersed throughout, more like a scone. But, as we were eating these, I noticed the packaging had this interesting warning:
MAY CONTAIN STONES??? WTF. My first thought, as an American was: Seriously? What are they processing this in a barn and they randomly pick up gravel or something and toss it in the batter?? What kind of insane food safety do they have over there in the UK??? I was ready to harass my friend about it when it suddenly hit me: stones. As in "I gave my love a cherry without a stone..." what we would call a "fruit pit." Those British and their ridiculously baffling use of the English language don't mean stones as in rocks, they means stones as in fruit pits.
D'oh.
Like I said, I swear the British invented their language JUST TO TRICK US.
Also, our entire family got the shonen flu/cold (so-called by me because it seemed to power-up at each person it hit.) The last victim was Shawn and she was basically out with it for nearly a month.
...oh, yeah, and I killed my Mac Book Pro.
But, ,enough excuses. The point is, I'm trying to catch up now. For the first order of business, I should show off some of the things that have been happening. Most notably, after the family recovered from our collective illness, we finally all sat down to tea and opened the care package sent to us by my friend
empty_mirrors. Some time ago, you may recall, I posted a picture of me trying fruitcake. My face was very, OMG WHAT?My friend is from Wales and was fairly horrified by my reaction and determined that I hadn't had good fruitcake--which seemed reasonable to me, since fruitcake in America is kind of the punchline to a Christmas joke. So, we decided to exchange fruitcakes. Alas, the fruitcake shelf life here is about ONE DAY after Christmas, so I wasn't able to find our version to send. Instead, I went to United Noodle and packed up a box of Japanese treats including natto (which you may also remember me posting about eating.) We send our respective boxes and waited.
Shawn thought it would be fun to have a series of UK days, in which we pulled out the fancy tea pot and dishes and such and made a kind of THING of of it. Here's a picture of the contents of the box:
As you can see,
empty_mirrors was very generous. She sent us Jelly Babies (which I have a fond memory of eating with my mother in Oxford or maybe Canterbury), Jaffa Cakes (which my family had to hide from me after the second day because I was devouring them all by myself), treacle (because Mason wondered what it was, having read about it Harry Potter -- funny story to follow), and a number of fun fruit cakes. She also sent along a package of her tea (I asked her just to send whatever she drank at home, so I could taste a bit of her life).Shawn pulled out some of our fancier china and we sat down:
Looks lovely, doesn't it? The tea (Kngihtsbridge Red?) was very good. If my parents are reading this: do you remember that morning in London when we got up early to go listen to the soap box speakers in Hyde Park? I bought tea from a street vendor that morning? It was kind of classically foggy and cold that morning? Anyway, this tea is probably higher end*, but the taste reminded me very much of that experience, which is to say, this is now my FAVORITE BREAKFAST TEA EVER.
----
edited to add:
empty_mirrors notes that "higher end" might be a bit kind, as this tea is half the price of PG Tips, for instance. You wouldn't know it from the taste, however, IMHO.----
Okay, here we are starting to dig in.
I should have taken notes, because can't remember the name of this particular cake. I DO remember what it tastes like. I remember expecting, from the looks of it, to be more cake-y. Instead, the inside was a giant mass of squished raisins with a little bit of wheat flour gumming it all together. My adjectives probably don't make it sound very appetizing, which is unfair.
It was tasty, but I would also use adjectives like DENSE. And, via Skype,
empty_mirrors taught me the word "claggy" as a good description: meaning, "clay-like." Shawn and I also spent some time trying to decide if Americans would call what we were eating "fruitcake." We ultimately decided that what we could call it, particularly in terms of flavor (flavour), would be "spice cake." And, like American spice cake, the predominant fruit in British fruit cake appears to be raisins. There were other fruits listed in the ingredients, but raisins were really the largest percentage (in this one, I believe they were 40% of ALL the ingredients).So yeah...fruitcake, we discovered, is a completely different thing in the UK.
In fact, I think the subtitle of this whole exchange experience could be: "In Which Lyda Discovers How Little English She Speaks." Because treacle? We got a can of it and we decided we should look up what one does with treacle ONLY TO DISCOVER IT'S MOLASSES.
The British have a different word for almost everything, I swear to God.
The treacle can, though, by itself, as a curio, is a cool thing. For instance Shawn and I spent a lot of time puzzling out their logo. She sent us "Abram Lyle & Sons" Lyle's Black Treacle which appears to have a dead lion surrounded by a swarm of flies as its logo. After reading the tiny printed motto: "Out of the strong came forth sweetness" I had a vague memory involving the short story I wrote about Samson and his first, unnamed wife (sometimes called the woman of Timor). Turns out, I was right, those weren't flies, they were supposed to be bees and it has to do with one of the weird-ass riddles Sampson uses to trick his Philistine wife.
But, yeah, that really IS supposed to be the carcass of a dead lion.
As a logo.
A logo promoting FOOD.
I should also mention that, on a separate occasion, Mason and I gobbled up all the Cadbury chocolates that
empty_mirrors sent. Some of the textures were odd to me, because: airy. Chocolate bars here in the US tend to a) be sweeter and b) more compact (if that's a thing.) I liked the flavor of the Cadbury better than some chocolate here, but I felt it compared very similarly to Hersey's milk chocolate in terms of taste (feel free to argue with me, dear reader). However, I'm probably weird in that I kind of prefer the waxy/smooth (?) texture of chocolates like Dove. I should send some to empty_mirrors in our next exchange so I can hear what she makes of our chocolate. I would expect "too sweet," but I'd be curious what she made of the texture.Okay, on to more foreign treats:
Eccles Cakes... now these, I liked. I was not, once again, expecting the center to be a completely dense collection of fruity mass. However, there was something about these that worked for me. A LOT. I think these were my favorites of all the things (with the notable exception of the Jaffa Cakes which I would probably give a small fortune to possess and unlimited supply of). Maybe it was the really shortbread-y, flaky exterior. Perhaps it was the fact that the fruit was just a gooey center, not mixed in with flour. Whatever it was, I liked them. This was the food, however, that made Shawn wonder: "When do you eat Eccles Cakes? Are they a breakfast item...or what?" So next time I was chatting with
empty_mirrors, I asked. She said: "Tea. Think High Tea."I think, if Eccles Cakes were to try to market to the US, however, they should totally sell themselves as a breakfast food. In some ways, they're a fancier (less sugary) version of a Pop-Tart (Wiki link for my non-US friends). The package instructions even suggested that they'd be good heated in the oven (or microwave, though
empty_mirrors cautioned that if we did that to be wary of pockets of super-heated fruit.)The final fun cake-product was this:
Welsh Cakes. These were also yummy, also very shortbread like: buttery and flaky. Much like the Eccles Cakes, but the fruit was dispersed throughout, more like a scone. But, as we were eating these, I noticed the packaging had this interesting warning:
MAY CONTAIN STONES??? WTF. My first thought, as an American was: Seriously? What are they processing this in a barn and they randomly pick up gravel or something and toss it in the batter?? What kind of insane food safety do they have over there in the UK??? I was ready to harass my friend about it when it suddenly hit me: stones. As in "I gave my love a cherry without a stone..." what we would call a "fruit pit." Those British and their ridiculously baffling use of the English language don't mean stones as in rocks, they means stones as in fruit pits.
D'oh.
Like I said, I swear the British invented their language JUST TO TRICK US.
