Busy as hell recently. Working on a book manuscript. Eating relatively well: green beans, chilies, onions, and cashews tonight; roasted potatoes and pork loin chops with apples cooked in butter, sugar, and Scotch whisky last night.
A few weeks ago Simon was in Edinburgh on business. We went to some local standards: Mums for haggis, Mosque Kitchen (in new digs with higher prices and smaller portions), Newington Fish Bar, and Mussell Inn (scallops and mussels doused in cream, leeks, shallots), but the highlight (and new for me) was Café St. Honore, in New Town. This place, all dark corners and old empty wine bottles, serves a charming instance of the paradigm of Scottish fine dining: French bistro food made from Scottish ingredients. We ate bowls of cullen skink, a really fine example of this dish, a light cream stew of potatoes and smoked haddock (think New England clam chowder as Old Scottish haddock soup), a delightful terrine, and the ubiquitous scallops with black pudding. For the main course, Simon ate roasted lamb, while I had salmon with whitebait and various accoutrements. I couldn’t complain about any of this; it was a kind of effortless and satisfying food, the kind that makes you feel better, or at least not worse — this would sound like “middling” were it not such a rare cuisine.
The following week I was in Albuquerque for a wedding, stuffing myself with cheese enchiladas (outstanding instances from, Los Compadres, the Froniter restaurant, and El Patio), breakfast burritos (from the Frontier, doused with green chili salsa), and chile rellenos (at El Patio, made from whole green chiles). The New Mexican cuisine is so necessary, so foreign to the insipid blandness of the UK. There are more chiles in one Frontier breakfast burrito than exist at present on the entire island of Great Britain.
There were some rather fine IPAs available in Albuquerque as well, from the Marble Brewery and from a trendy-ish suburban brewpub called Chama River. I felt relaxed and at peace for a week, reclining in hotel rooms, walking slowly in the sun, drinking outside in Algodones (about 20 miles north of the city), such that arriving at Heathrow en route to Edinburgh gave every impression of making landfall on the wrong side of the Styx.
