Amherst to Edinburgh

We’ve had our favorite food, sushi, in Edinburgh, and we brought friends. They had never had sushi before, but were up for (and genuinely enjoyed) everything. In my view, this reflects positively on the state of the world. Things are looking up.

Then again, sushi is a mood elevator par excellence.

As part of the experience, I have a few new rules to follow when eating sushi in a foreign country. This shouldn’t be taken as advice for eating sushi in a place other than America; I intend the following rules to hold for any sushi lover trying a restaurant away from their usual haunt.

Rule 1) Find out what fish is farmed nearby, then order it as sushi. If it’s a small country (and the UK qualifies as small), fish from the whole of the country can be considered “nearby”. If it’s a larger country, think about what is available regionally.

A trip to the grocery can be very informative. One of the things I’m liking best about shopping at a supermarket in Scotland is that all foods, somewhere on their label, list the country of origin. For the UK, the primary farmed fish seems to be salmon. Other types of  cold water fish are also caught in regional waters.

Rule 2) Find out what fish is imported from a far away place, then don’t order it as sushi. The tuna we’ve had here was from the Maldives. We didn’t apply this rule soon enough, and had tuna sashimi. It wasn’t very fresh, because (presumably) it was shipped in from somewhere far to the south of here.

Rule 3) Don’t eat what is particularly rare. This rule should be generally applied when eating any fish at all. Again, ordering tuna was probably a mistake. Some tuna is only wild caught and rapidly declining in numbers. Not only does eating such fish have ethical implications, it is also generally true that the less there is of something the more likely it is that it has to be imported. In that case, rule 2 kicks in.  The Monterey Bay Aquarium publishes an annual guide to help seafood fans stay current on fish populations.

Next to that, the usual internet surfing for reviews of local restaurants are always a good place to look, as is any local food guide.

To sum up: Sushi in a foreign country is a good thing. Salmon sushi in the UK is also a good thing. Tuna sushi in the UK is not such a good thing. And with the rules we’ve discovered having sushi here, hopefully we can fill in the blanks for what sushi is good in other places around the world.

-Don and Nateene

Hello! This is mostly a celebratory photo post. Today was one of the rarer sun-filled days in Edinburgh, so Don and I decided to go out be sponges. Or at least to reawaken some of the hibernating melanin in our bodies.

Our stroll took us along the Grassmarket, which led us into an amazing vintage store called Armstrong’s.

After trying on hats and coveting old things that we could not afford we walked back to Tollcross and picked up a few supplies from the Chinese grocery store and discovered a restaurant (also Chinese) that offered a 15% student discount. We took them up on their offer and had fried duck and king prawn in a chili-honey sauce with green peppers over noodles. After that we walked home through the Meadows where we ran into numerous other sponges. It was lovely.

-Nateene

It is the day of preparation for Lent, when the eating pancakes was made obvious by the need to up the eggs and fat, the eating of which were prohibited during the forty days of Lent.

Pancake races
Holding Pancake races is a tradition in the UK which dates back at least to the 1400s and are practiced in villages and towns throughout the country. It is thought to have originated when a housewife heard the church bells ringing for service whilst in the process of making her pancakes, so she ran out of the house still carrying her frying pan and pancake.

Nowadays, contestants have to carry a frying pan, complete with pancake, and race to the finishing line tossing the pancake a number of times throughout the race. The winner is the one who gets to the end first having constantly tossed their pancake.

-Nateene

recipes4us.co.uk blogs.guardian.co.uk

We went exploring today. Through rain, wind, sleet, and oddly rounded pieces of snow, we headed west. We’ve been at least a small distance in the other cardinal directions, after all, and we had found out that the closest thing Edinburgh has to a Chinatown lies at an intersection of five roads, called Tollcross, to the southwest. The first destination in a westerly direction, however, was the farmer’s market. And so we started our morning out walking down the Cowgate to Grassmarket, and then took a winding path up some stairs to the castle terrace.

That’s right. The Edinburgh Farmer’s Market meets directly below the castle. I’ve been to a few farmer’s markets—the ones in Tucson and Amherst, of course, one in Chicago, and ones in Cambridge and Somerville outside of Boston. They all have a lot in common; Good people, good food, and the heart-wrenching choice of deciding whether you want to purchase organic cheese from the stall with the guy with the long beard or the stall being staffed by the woman with the sun hat. They meet in suburban parking lots, at their own swap-meet-like grounds, and frequently on the sort of road that is regularly cleared of traffic for street events. I’ve never been to one that convened directly below a castle. It was delicious. We had a lamb burger, an ostrich burger, and chips that were made in front of us by a really friendly Scotsman who was intrigued by Nateene’s raccoon hat and wondered at length if we had ever eaten Armadillo. We also bought one jar of blackcurrant jelly, one of raspberry, and some locally grown onions to take home. We put off the decision regarding the cheese until next week.

After finding directions to Tollcross from a guy selling fresh shellfish and smoked haddock, we headed south. We were to take a right, and a left, and then another right, and go past a strip club… you know (and here, the man made a brief, clothes-flinging gesture), a strip club, and then keep left, and we would be there. It had started to snow, so we ducked into a bookshop and a few vintage stores between the planned destinations.

Tollcross itself seemed like a pretty friendly neighborhood. There was a Chinese grocery that was a little better stocked and definitely less cramped than the one we’ve been frequenting near George Square and the University. There were also a couple less expensive Chinese restaurants, two theatres (well, one cinema and one actual theatre), and a bunch of cafes and pubs and other stores. We also stopped into an Indian boutique, completing the trifecta of commonwealth languages by hearing some Hindi (we had been speaking English all day, and the people in the Chinese grocery were comfortable with Cantonese). The skyline seems like it opens up a little bit to the west of there, with buildings that are only three or four stories instead of five or six.

After that, we took a different route back towards Bristo Square (where the University Student center is located, just south of where we live and just north of George Square). Along the way, we passed an old, abandoned church, a school that resembled a smaller version of the castle and was on a hill that afforded a clear view of the same castle in the background), and some other sights. Heading to the west really panned out—the way winds just enough to obscure the batch of sights waiting just around the corner.