MY YEAR IN NOSH

 It being the end of the year, the assiduous blogger obviously has to do a round up of things eaten and formerly unblogged about.

 

Here for example is a tuna melt eaten at Caffee Torelli, right by Kew Railway station:

 

Here is a galette at L’Hirondelle in Walthamstow:

Here’s a Cornish Pasty and a can of Diet Pepsi (I drink at most one can of Pepsi a year and afterwards usually wish I hadn’t).  

I was sitting alone eating my pasty on the seafront in Dovercourt when this dog came along and stared at me in a beseeching way:  

 

His owner came along knot shortly after, riding on a mobility scooter, and said told me that dog had recently become ‘a beggar.’  His begging did him no good.

 

This is a scone with butter and jam, from the caff at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire:

 

Must say I never really crave scones and yet when one’s put in front of me I tend to enjoy it.

These are Gyozas and Sushi Tacos (yes, really) from Kensu Kitchen, an establishment within Medz Corner, a kind of food court in Kensington High St.  The sushi tacos worked, more or less.

This is a fairly dreary plate of sausages with extras at Dirty Dicks in Spitalfields – the sausages themselves were the problem.

This is a ham and cheese sandwich with chips at The Mad Bishop and Bear in Paddington station:

And these are some truly remarkable and excellent seasoned chips from Ousia in Charlotte Street, London:

 

Then then there were two weeks in California, and the brakes came off.  (Nobody wants to eat while wearing gloves)

 

There was this very substantial tuna salad sandwich at the 1919 Cafe in the Huntington Gardens, San Marino:

These are Beef Wellington Bites at Zin in Palm Springs:

 

These are some so-so eggs Benedict at the Lakeview Bistro in the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown LA.

 

All in all it wasn’t such a bad year food-wise.  I hope you can say the same. Cheers.

 

 

 

 

 

FREEZE DRIED

 

Obviously lots of cafes have toilets but I believe last week I saw what might be world’s only toilet block containing a café, in Cliff Park, Dovercourt, Essex.  From this direction it says pure toilet block 

 

though from the side and front it looks far more like a caff.

 

And they serve a damn fine scone with butter and jam, seen at the top of this post.

We were in Dovercourt to see a (let’s say) modest exhibition called ‘William Friese-Greene and the Birth of Cinema,’ at the Harwich Arts and Heritage Centre which is located in the Mayflower Primary School.

 

Friese-Greene was an inventor, who owned all kinds of patents, chiefly relating to motion pictures, though he also had a colour film process.

 

Like many an inventor he had good years and bad years, fortunes came and went, and at one point he left the fleshpots of London for the seaside calm of Dovercourt, quite a posh place at the time.  This is him:

This is him as played by Robert Donat in the film The Magic Box.

 

This is me pointing at a picture in the exhibition of one of his inventions:

 

The  Arts and Heritage Centre was selling some themed beer ‘Friese-Greene – Inventive Steps,’ created by the Harwich Town Brewing Company. I believe this was the first time I’ve ever bought beer in a school, but I had to take it home it drink it. You can see the same thing on the label that I’m pointing at in the exhibition.

 

 

It tasted as good as it looks.

 

(Pictures mostly by Luna Yearwood-Smith)