Pintxos me, I must be dreaming.

San Sebastian is a large town on the northern coast of Spain. Not far from the mountains that border France, this is part of the Basque region.




Basque cuisine has a very long and proud history and here in San Sebastian, there a huge variety of food on offer, including plenty of seafood. Wandering around the old town of San Sebastian, you might stumble across one of the private cooking clubs, called txokos. These are traditionally men-only clubs, where men gather and shop and cook together, often followed by some singing.


The bars, which are everywhere are always groaning with platters of small foods - usually on bread - called pintxos. These are usually one or two bites and often have a decent amount of mayonnaise in them.


The way to eat and drink here is usually standing at the bar. I ordered a beer and asked for a plate. As I enjoy my beer, I reach out and choose whatever looks good from the platters spread from one end of the bar to the other.

The presentation is exceptional and everything looks appetising and exciting.



Some are based on seafood, others on jamon or vegetables. Some bars are better at certain things, so experimentation and window shopping are part of the meal. Ingredients that are very common are octopus, baccalao (salt cod), anchovies and jamon.


At lunch and dinner, the popular places get so crowded that people will squeeze in to order a drink, grab a few pintxos and spill out onto the street to drink, eat and chat. All of the bars have cold beer on tap, one of the most common being San Miguel, a light refreshing beer, great for drinking on a hot summer day. Another favourite is the local cider, usually poured from very high up to incorporate air into it, can be a taste to get used to as it can be a bit sour.


Probably the most surprising thing about most of these places is that they work on the honor system - that is you drink and eat and then tell the bartender what you had and he will charge you accordingly. Most pintxos are served with skewers and the bartender can sometimes just count these and charge you for that number.

San Sebastian is a very popular tourist destination and I heard more English spoken than Spanish as I was walking around the town. There is always something happening and people wander around all day and all night, eating, drinking and dancing.

It's great to hear aussie accents and chat with people about good places around town, but it's important to get past the obvious tourist places and find the exciting places that are doing something a little different and I'll be talking about a couple of these in the next update.

Serbia wraps up with Saran

Our last night in Serbia and we moved closer to the airport, New Belgrade. This is also close to an area called Zemun which is home to a well known restaurant called Saran (Carp). Heading down to Zemun was an experience, with streets full of people and cars, I'm glad we were in a taxi because there is no way I would have been able to get through without hitting someone or something.

When we arrived at the restaurant, the outside area was full of people, but luckily there was one table available. The service was great and the atmosphere, even though the place was packed, was still conducive to conversation - at least until the 5-man band decided to start playing right behind my head. They didn't stay there long though, moving off to play at other tables and the music wasn't too loud.

To start, since this is a fish restaurant, we chose the Riblja Corba (Fish Soup) which was full of flavour and the fish had a great texture, although there were a lot of bones and these can be a disctraction from enjoying the soup.

We also ordered the pate and this was delicious with lots of paprika and garlic.


For mains, mum chose the fried catfish which had a light coating of batter and was tender and juicy.
Dad chose the fish in tomato stew. This was light and tasty, full of fresh flavours and if I could choose again I would have selected this.

What I did order was the Catfish cooked in mashed potato and cream. This sounds great and it really was, but it was soooo rich I could not even eat half of it.
Overall this was probably the best traditional meal I had in Serbia, a great way to finish my time in this country and even though there is obviously still much room for improvement in the way Serbia sells and presents it's cuisine, there are places that are genuinely making great moves forward and I look forward to seeing what happens in a few years.

The Village People

Once again thanks for the comments and emails, keep them coming!

This update has been a while coming, but there is a reason for it. We have spent the last week in the countryside of Serbia, mainly based in a town called Sremska Mitrovica. Mainly, this time has been spent catching up with family and friends I have never met (or met a very long time ago), but who are very important to my family.

I didn't feel that in depth discussion of each visit would relate to the subject of this blog and I know this would have had very little relevance to many of you. However, it has revealed many things about the hospitality of Serbian Villages and the food and drinks associated with it.

Firstly, some background info. From anecdotal evidence, the unemployment rate in Serbia is currently near 50% and this is reflected in a very big way in regional areas. Driving through the various villages and towns, I noticed a large number of older people and very few young people. There are very few jobs available in these areas and many of the factories that had previously supported the regional economy are now sitting empty and derelict. The pensioners who have lived here most of their lives are surviving on pensions that are roughly in the range of $200 - $300 AUD per month. This may be barely enough to sustain a minimal existence for one person, but often this money is being used to support a household of people due to the lack of jobs.

To supplement their incomes, many of the homes we visited raise animals to support some of their food needs. Almost everyone has at least a handful of chickens to supply eggs and some raise pigs, cows and/or goats either to sell for extra income or to slaughter for food for winter. Also many households have much larger gardens than we are used to in Australia. This is still barely enough to support families that are at or below poverty levels.

One more thing that is very different to the way we know things at home is that many of these villages are made up of farming families. They don't actually have residences on their farms in most cases as their land is spread out in various lots, not all in one place. They head out in the mornings to work their land and come home at night. This means that instead of being spread out like many of our farm families are in Australia, the villages are a concentrated population of people who work the surrounding farmland.

Having said all that, every single house we walked into, we were offered shots of Rakija (often made in that particular family), coffee and food - many times a full meal. As much as we saw how poor these people were, they were also very proud of their home-made foods and would not accept any refusal. I can't say I felt hungry once in the last week.

Sorry for the lack of photos, but I don't feel quite comfortable about taking pictures of people's cooking inside their homes. Some of the highlights were: Rakija (of course) in copious quantities and varieties and many people offered to pack a bottle for us to take home to Australia, Sarma (cabbage rolls filled with rice and meat), Kulen (home made salami), chicken livers and giblets, snails and the cakes.

I did eat out at the local pizzeria and tried the icecreamery and both were sensational. The pizza base was delicious and thin, just the way I like it and the local salamis, hams and bacon really work well. The local specialty seems to be a combination of the above with a topping of sour cream, I recommend it wholehearedly, but don't expect the sizes we have in Australia, the small is easily larger than most of the medium pizzas in Melbourne and the largest size is close to a meter wide! The only note of discord here was that the tomato sauce they use for the pizza is actually Ketchup and they serve their pizza with a side of ketchup to add onto the pizza as you eat. I tried this once to see what it was like, but never again. For anyone coming to the area, the restaurant I sampled was Pizzaeria XL which is in the mall in the centre of town and the beer is great, with local 500ml beers only costing 90 dinars (about $2 AUD). The icecreamery of choice by the locals is called Sport and is in the same area. If you don't understand the name of the flavour, just try it anyway. They won me over when I couldn't make up my mind and the server took a very small amount from each flavour so that each scoop had about 5 or 6 flavours. I have no idea which were my favourites, but as a whole it was great!

Another highlight of this week is that it is right in the middle of cherry picking season. Almost every house we went to had a cherry tree and many had more than one. On a 30 degree day we went out to help one of the farmers harvest cherries from their orchard. This involved a group of about 8 or 10 people loading into a trailer towed by a tractor over land that you wouldn't be able to take a normal car through. With no suspension, this was a fun, but painful journey while hanging on for dear life. When we arrived, most of the group went about picking cherries, while I and a couple of others worked on building a fire to grill the meat we had brought with us. The beer was placed to cool under a nearby flowing spring of cool, fresh, delicious water. After we had built the fire, we placed the grill on top to heat and got cooking. On the menu were cevapi, kobasice, various salads and lots of bread. Not to mention all the cherries you could eat. To drink we had - yes, you guessed it - rakija, beer and fresh water directly from the spring.


There are plenty of green lizards running around and someone did say they spotted a snake, but don't anyone tell my dad, ok? I'm not sure that we were a huge help harvesting cherries as we only spent half the day out there and there were still plenty left on the trees when we left, but it was a fantastic day.

New friendships were made:



And we loaded onto the trailer for the trip back.

Trufflicious

What do you do when you are offered a chance to use a product that you rarely get to work with? In my case I was asked if I wanted to cook for a dinner party using truffles. Of course I said yes and honestly any chance to cook with the produce I had seen at the market in the last few days would have been great, but the truffles were an added bonus.

What do I know about truffles? Not a huge amount. They are a fungus that grows under oak trees, have a strong earthy taste and are usually used in very small quantities (just a few grams per serve). Traditionally they were hunted with pigs who are specially trained to be able to smell them underground, but dogs are used quite a bit now and gave the benefit of not eating the truffles like the pigs sometimes do.

My first thoughts were to do something that really showed off the truffles and something I knew how to do reasonably well. I narrowed it down to pasta or risotto.

Next I had to think about what other ingredients would support the truffles without overpowering them. I decided on bacon as part of the risotto flavour base and pan-seared duck breast which would be sliced and just a few slices used to top each dish – something rich and flavourful to match the earthy taste of the fungus.

I also decided to do a risotto and that I would not prepare a dessert, but would make an appetiser. Thinking back to the market I remembered that there were some great looking zucchini available and decided on an antipasto recipe from Gordon Ramsay, cheese-filled zucchini rolls with pine nuts and basil.

Shopping list in hand, we headed off to the market and my first mission was to find two cheeses, parmesan (for the risotto) and ricotta (for the zucchini rolls). After our third delicatessen we found some Grano Padano parmesan cheese, but ricotta proved impossible so we found a local fresh cheese with a very similar texture and flavour. One thing we couldn’t find was pre-made stock, so I opted for powdered chicken stock rather than making it from scratch (don’t tell anyone though, it’s our little secret).

The next hurdle was the duck; there was none at the market at all. There had definitely been some on our last trip, but they were all out this time. I quickly tried to think of a replacement ingredient, but decided to go with just the bacon risotto instead until we stumbled across these:

Absolutely amazing! Fresh Chanterelle mushrooms! I don’t even know if we can get these in Australia, but I’ve seen them on TV and love their colour. There were also fresh Porcchini and other mushrooms I had never seen before. I bought some of the chanterelles and the main ingredients of the night were complete. Finishing off the shopping trip, we grabbed the rest of the ingredients: Some amazing fresh garlic, onions, thyme, basil, parsley, zucchinis, pine nuts, short grain rice, and lemons.

Let’s move on to the dinner. The first thing I prepared was the zucchini rolls, follow this link to Gordon Ramsay's recipe.

It is important to note that I had several eager (and not-so eager) helpers and my thanks go out to them, it made the whole night go much smoother.

For the risotto, I brought approximately two liters of stock to the boil and turned the heat down to low to keep the stock hot. While this was happening the chanterelles, herbs, garlic, onions and bacon were being chopped.

In a hot pan, I sauteed the chanterrelles in butter with thyme leaves, salt and pepper. The next thing I did was get the bacon into another pot with a little butter and olive oil. I like to leave the bacon in slightly larger pieces because it tends to shrink quite a bit as the fat renders. After the bacon was nice and brown and the kitchen got that amazing fried bacon smell, I added the dices onions and garlic and let them sweat for a while.

Once the onions were nice and soft, I added approximately 2 cups of the rice and stirred until the grains started to become transparent. At this point, I added a cup of dry white wine and let the rice absorb it, stirring all the time. Next I began adding the stock a ladle or two at a time and stirring until the liquid is absorbed.

I added the chanterelles for the last few minutes before the rice was done. Once the risotto was nice and creamy with just a little bite left in the rice, I turned off the heat and added the thinly sliced truffle.

One was enough for six people, so I didn't use both. Once the truffles had time to heat through, I added the grated Parmesan and chopped parsley. Here is the final product.

The result, even if I do say so myself was delicious and if the feedback from the guests was any indication, this was a definite success. If you'd like to try this but don't have access to truffles or chanterelles, you can substitute other mushrooms and I would suggest trying two or three different types.

Next update will be two more Belgrade restaurant reviews, stay tuned to see if they were better than the last one.

Are Three Hats Better Than One?

After sleeping through my first evening in Belgrade, I was conscious of my dwindling remaining nights in this city. I needed to see what a restaurant dinner was like here. especially after seeing the availability of great produce earlier in the day, I was eager to see how that translated onto the menu and ultimately the plate. Now I'd like to apologise at the start for the quality of photos in this post, I'm still working out the settings on my camera and I'm trying to avoid using a flash so as not to annoy other diners.

Was it a revelation? A life and perception altering experience? You'll have to keep reading to find out. Don't scroll down to find out because I'm watching!

We decided on the restaurant Tri Sesira (Three Hats) as it is in an area full of restaurants that is usually buzzing with people and each restaurant has a live band that wanders from table to table playing traditional local music. What better way to immerse ourselves in the culture?

The weather was a little on the chilly side, but in true Melbournian style, we opted to sit outside and experience the atmosphere of the area. We had arrived a little early for our 8pm reservation, but there was only one other table with people on it outside and perhaps half the tables inside were full.

Starting off with a shot of Zuta Osa (Yellow Wasp) which is a brand of plum brandy, the waiter suggested a cold appetiser to share consisting of some smoked meats and cheese. How could we say no after the fantastic smoked meats we had seen at the market earlier?


The prociutto was quite nice and the fetta a little too salty for my taste, but overall this was a reasonably good dish to go with our drinks.

The menu was extremely meat-centric (as I expected) but I was disappointed to see very little reflection of the gorgeous seasonal produce we had seen and experienced earlier in the day.

For main course we opted for a selection of mixed meat platters and (because I have to try something a little different) a serve of Gigerice (chicken livers). As a salad I ordered the roasted capsicum.

The salads came first, which smelled amazing and you can see in the photo below how much garlic was used for the dressing.


One disappointing aspect of this dish was that is wasn't cleaned. Normally roasted capsicum would be served with the skin, stem and seeds removed so that the diner just enjoys eating the dish without having to clean around the stem and work their way through the skin. The taste was very nice and perhaps a little more roasting would have brought out more of the sweetness of the paprika and I would probably use less garlic as it was a bit overpowering.

Next came the main course, lots and lots of meat.


There was cevapcici, chicken breast, pork cutlet, shashlik, steak and the livers (wrapped in BACON!). On the side were chips and raw white onion without dressing. Since this is what Serbian cuisine is known for, I was expecting the meat to be delicious and juicy and while I know that Serbs don't usually use spices or sauces in a big way to flavour their meat I was hoping that the natural taste of the produce would stand out.

Unfortunately I was disappointed on almost all counts. By far the best part of the meal so far was the roasted capsicum. The meat was almost universally overcooked, dry and very hard to eat. As far as the meat went, the cevapcici were the juiciest on the plate but couldn't even hold a candle to the ones we get in Melbourne even from the supermarket. The livers were by far the most flavoured thanks in large part to the bacon and were possibly the only item that wasn't completely overcooked. The onion was far too strong to eat and seemed to only have been put on the plate as an afterthought or garnish or just to fill up the empty space.

After the morning at the market and seeing what is available as far as produce goes, I find it very difficult to reconcile in my mind such a sad example of the local cuisine.

Well, putting the main course aside, I hoped that dessert would be able to make up for it at least in some small part. Trying to go for something that was traditional and that would hopefully be something that would be common and hard for them to mess up, I selected crepes with walnuts (something I remember my grandmother making when I was a child). Also the menu suggested that these were then cooked in milk, something a little different but similar ot another dish common to my grandmother's kitchen. Unfortunately I was told this was not available at this time, but having decided on crepes I chose another dish with an interesting description. The one line menu item seemed to be saying that the crepes were served in a zabaglione-type sauce made with wine. This is a sauce made with eggs and sugar and is usually quite sweet and fluffy (very rich and decadent) but I didn't know how the addition of wine would affect it, thinking that perhaps they used a sweet or fortified wine.

Technically, the sauce was smooth, velvety and rich, but the wine they had used had a particularly high acidic taste and could almost be described as sour. I really didn't like this flavour combination and felt it really took a lot away from what, otherwiseW, was a really nice dessert. The crepes were great, the walnuts were a nice textural contrast to the smooth crepes and silken sauce and really held their own, but that wine flavour was just too distracting.

Another distracting thing I thought deserved a mention was the band. There were five of them and they were playing and singing at the top of their lungs and making it impossible to talk to other people at the table. It was ok when they were in another room or at a reasonable distance, but the pair of guys at the table next to us were well and truly into their rakia (perhaps a bottle each) and were tipping the band and signing along.

Overall I felt a little betrayed by this meal. Not necessarily on my own behalf, although I feel I was promised a lot more than was delivered, but I felt betrayed on behalf of the hard-working people I had spent the morning with in the market. People who were proud of their produce and were eager to have people try what they had to offer. I say this because most tourists would experience their first taste of Serbian produce from a restaurant like this one and most would never get a chance to see what is really available to these restaurants as far as raw materials go.

I had to take a step back and reassess how I was judging this meal. Was I being too harsh and judging them unfairly by standards I have become accustomed to in Australia? Sometimes I tend to do that, but I also don't want to make excuses and begin saying things like "This was a pretty good meal.....by Serbian standards" or "As far as Serbian food goes...". I had to know if I was the only one that felt this way, but after asking my parents - who have been to Serbia many times and have eaten at this restaurant previously - their response was similar to mine. They said that this was worse than an meal they have eaten at that restaurant before and perhaps the worst they had eaten at any restaurant in Serbia.

Maybe this is a one-off thing and I guess it would be good to get a bad experience out of the way first and move on to better ones as the days go by, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't starting to become concerned about what I would find.

Stay tuned.

New Blog

Welcome to the first installment of the Voracious Grazer! I've been meaning - like most of you out there I'd guess - to start a blog for a long time now. I'm traditionally a procrastinator and would have left this until much later on in my life (probably never) if I gave myself half a chance. There are hundreds of reasons why I should not start a blog today: The name doesn't sound quite right, It will take too much of my time, etc.

BUT....I'm going to do it anyway. I might not tell anyone about it, or I may never make a second post, but I've started it and surely that is the hardest part? Right?

The purpose of this blog is primarily to share my thoughts, experiences and travels with whoever wants to listen (or no one as is more likely). I'm starting it on the eve of my first trip to Europe and one that I hope will be full of great experiences and meals to remember.

The plan is still a little sketchy, but that's the way I like to travel, no planning and just let things happen. I'll be starting off in Serbia, which is where my family comes from and seeing where my parents grew up. From there I would like to head over to Italy, then through France, Spain and Portugal. Now while I don't plan to lock myself in too rigidly to specific destinations and timelines, if anyone out there has some feedback or a list of places not to miss, please post a comment and let me know.

I don't want this first post to stretch on too long, and I'm not sure what internet access will be like in Serbia, but I'll try to post something in the first few days of my arrival.