The Joy of Ironing

The English translation (using the expression in its loosest possible sense) of the instructions for an appliance recently bought at Freitas Braga & Braga gave rise to some fnarks in the Duncan/King household:-

Having identified the knob, cap, head, bottom and protecting sheath and decided on the degree of steam to be employed, one is then advised to:-

 

 

Not convinced vinegar is absolutely necessry but very important is:-

And as if all that wasn't enough, one is presented with the delphic enjoinder:-

Is it just me?

Serving suggestion

My friend Sarah over at A Taste of Savoie is by way of being very foody (how do you spell "foody" by the way? should it be "foodie"?) and takes some jolly good photos of her creations so I thought two could play at that game and I could showcase some of the culinary delights of the Azores. Specifically lulas recheadas:-

 Looking a bit like a Faroese fjord on whale hunt day, that's actually a tin of squid stuffed with a subtle blend (devised by Pitéu's award winning team of chefs) of onion, rice, tomato, spices and salt. It's floating in a liquid which looks as if it would be more at home in an automatic gearbox but which is described on the box as "American Sauce". And actually it's one of the tastiest things I've ever eaten - really. And I don't normally like squid (calamares) considering as I do stripped out silicone bathroom sealant to be more palatable.

  Eat yer heart out Taste of Savoie!

Another fave lunch is sardines but not just any old sardines, they must be petingas. These are much smaller than common or garden sardines (you get about 7 or 8 to a tin instead of the usual 2-3) and have a much more subtle flavour - or they probably would if they didn't come drizzled in a medley of anti-fouling and WD-40 called tomate picante

 

Whether it's lulas or petingas, though, they should be accompanied by crusty fresh bread to mop up the sump oil delicate sauce. (Do you remember when cans of soup used to carry the warning "Do not boil to avoid impairing the delicate flavour"?) My bread of choice is the humble papo seco which means dry - er, I don't actually know what papo means (in my dictionary it says it means "chat" but that can't be right - Marisa?)

 

Anyway, such are their delicate sauce absorption properties, I suggest that, next time there's an oil spill, they simply scatter the area with papos secos - about half a dozen ought to cope with a spill of Exxon Valdez proportions.

Environmental disaster threatens as an offshore American Sauce well suffers a catastrophic blow-out

And then, if you've got any bread left over, you could always have a spread of Pé de Torresmo. This surprisingly more-ish blend of polyfilla and red diesel is manufactured by an outfit called Sociedade Industriale de Carnes Lda. which translates as "Industrial Meat Company" - I wonder which marketing genius came up with that. It probably doesn't do to dwell too much on the factory conditions.

Shortbread to go with our afternoon tea today, though!

Percy Update

Bad news about Percy the Palmeira I'm afraid.

He has succumbed and his mortal remains been removed. I don't know where they have been disposed of.

R.I.P.

Delia's Vocabulary Collection

Carol was looking for a recipe on Delia Smith's website earlier (for non-UK readers, Delia's a sort of British Martha Stewart without the criminal convictions. A certain sector of the population considers Delia - unlike Martha - to have an element of sex appeal. I'm not one of them but I believe it's something to do with cold fingertips and a buttoned-up schoolmarmy tone of voice. Judge for yourself.

I've digressed already. Where is this going, you're asking yourselves? Oh yes, Carol was looking at Delia-Online for a recipe and left the page open and when I saw it, it wasn't so much the recipe as the advert on the right which caught my eye.

An advert for something to do with testing your IQ, note the question Qual é a capital de Portugal? Goodness knows what an awareness of the capital of Portugal has to do with one's IQ but that's beside the point because the significance of the ad for me was that it at last cleared in my mind the difference between the Portuguese words qual and que. Qual is "what" (as in "What is the capital of Portugal?") and que is "which".

It is from little breakthroughs such as these, from sources as unlikely as Delia Smith, that I grope slowly towards an  understanding of Portuguese. Now all I've got to do before tomorrow when the TV repair man is coming is master the Portuguese for "I think it's either because my satellite dish is misaligned or because it's vibrating in the wind." Whose website am I going to find the answer to that on - Jamie Oliver's, the Duchy of Cornwall's, Dennis Compton's  ... ?

(PS - Dennis Compton doesn't have a website - it's a Fawlty gag.)

Linguiça

When I first saw these things ...

... in the shops in Santa Cruz, I thought they  must be crude representations of rowing boats or badly designed ashtrays. Or perhaps badly designed ashtrays in the form of crude representations of rowing boats but, whichever, they must have had some vital function to judge from the volume of them on sale.

Little did I realise they are in fact assadores do choriço which translates as "sausage griller" (choriço being the generic Portuguese word for a sausage and not necessarily what we Brits would characterise as a chorizo:  every chorizo is a choriço but not every choriço is a chorizo, if that helps. That's a syllogism. Or is it a Venn Diagram? And what's a salsiche? I digress.)

Anyway, assadores de choriço work on the beautifully simple principle that you pour about a quarter to a half inch (1-2cm) deep of cooking alcohol into it, bung the choriço on top and throw a match at it (in that order).

A top tip for the operation of assadores de choriço to avoid dripping molten nylon is not to place them directly under Balinese boat kites suspended from your kitchen ceiling:-

Once the alcohol has burnt off (and your Balinese boat kite has decayed to a glutinous blob - only joking), the choriço is done and looks like this:-

I know what you're thinking. And I'm thinking it too looking at that pic but, seriously, this sort of choriço is called linguiça. It was home made and given to us by a neighbour. It's not really a sausage as we Brits would understand it, it's more chunks of meat and fat stuffed into a sausage skin.

I used to make the mistake of attempting to eat linguiça like a British sausage, i.e. cutting in slices and eating whole. Doing that with linguiça involves chomping through the fat and is quite revolting. Instead, the trick (for me anyway) is to cut the skin open and eat the meat and leave the fat - approached that way, linguiça is one of the tastiest things on this planet. It's rich though - I can't manage much more than about 8 inches at a time (as the actress memorably remarked to the bishop). 

Advertising

I've spent quite a lot of time tonight devising strategies for advertising the Palheiro which is our self catering holiday apartment in the garden.

Apart from our own website ...

... we're also listed with the very excellent Archipelago Azores who I highly recommend for their personal service in putting together a tailor made itinerary round the islands and relieving you of the hassle of working out flights etc.

(How do they know we're lovely?)

We've also listed on a couple of the apartment rental websites which it's free to advertise on and these did produce a few bookings last year but we decided it was time to get serious and start - ulp! - paying for some advertising. I approached this by doing a Google search of "holiday accommodation azores" to see who came up tops and was fairly flabbergasted to find that our own website comes out on the first page!

                           

Be that as it may, I decided that an entry on top listed holiday-rentals.co.uk was the one to go for at £209 for a year's listing.

Now I've been through the mill of listing one's property on these holiday accommodation websites, the free ones, before. It's a riot of checking boxes to list the facilities available. But it has to be said that holiday-rentals.co.uk took this to an entirely new dimension. Apart from the fairly routine is there a hairdryer and tumble dryer etc., I was asked such esoterica as how many oars did my kayak have, did I have WiFi access - there wasn't a checkbox for "don't know" and I was beginning to feel like I was in the Not the Nine o' Clock News sketch "We don't sell gramophones here, grandad! Do you want woofers and tweeters? Do you want a bag over your head?"

Even more astonishingly was whether we were a "low allergen environment"? That would surely depend on what you were allergic to, wouldn't it? And perhaps most bizarrely of all was, does the property have a fish cleaning table? I kid you not.

It does as it happens.

                       

Not recommended if you're allergic to cats, though. Or fish.

Caldo de Marisco

It's Portuguese for "seafood stock cube" and I'm feeling a bit smug because we get it in Portugal - indeed even out here on Flores - but you don't get it in Britain. This was pointed out by a friend who eyed our Caldo de Marisco enviously when she was out here visiting a while back and took a few packets home with her. The subject came up again when we were staying with her during our recent sojourn in Scotland and she spotted the cubic metre of ham stock cubes which we were taking back because - smugness wearing off now - we don't get them in Portugal.

Perhaps we could start a "Stock Cube Swap Shop" and could we extend it out to other provisions as well because another thing we don't get here is corned beef? And brown sauce. And noodles and cous-cous while I think about it. Coleman's mustard as well. Blocks of parmesan cheese. Pine nuts. Horseradish sauce. How about a couple of frozen octopuses for a hamper of the above items?

                          

Is that Cheggers on the left?