Back from Milford SF

[jacey]

I'm tired out, but it was a great week full of fascinating people, mind-blowing ideas (almost literally) and about 160,000 words of intense critting. Twelve writers, 25 pieces of writing, 25 hours of formal critting and who-knows-how-many-hours of reading. The standard was scarily high. mevennen , bluehairsue , maeve_the_red  and chrisbutler  were all there, plus some old faces and some new.

Chocolate and alcohol featured in varying amounts. Much useful information was shared. Post-crit discussions continued to chew over stories and ideas. Meal-time discussions often turned gory and at one point we realised that the Welsh language class - which came in on Tuesday morning and stayed for lunch - had gone very quiet just as bluehairsue  was expounding on cannibalism.

Trigonos - the centre where the week is held - is a fabulous place with its own frontage on to a Welsh lake with Snowdon peeking up in the distance and the Nantlle Ridge looming up above. This is the view from the main house down to the water. Wherever you point your camera you come up with a magnificent landscape - even in the wet. It's not a hotel, but it's very comfortable and the atmosphere is welcoming and easy-going.


The only slight drawback (for me, but not for others I hasten to add) is the centre's food policy - excellent and totally praiseworthy in theory as it's sustainable (mostly from their own garden), but it's vegetarian with a strong vegan bias and sadly not really to my taste (or my digestive system's) as I'm a) not vegetarian b) definitely NOT vegan and c) not keen on vegetables except when served up with meat/fish and lots of gravy/sauce, veggie or otherwise - and cooked with SALT (please!). Breakfast was toast/cereal/fruits etc. so no complaints there. Lunches were fine (delicious home made soups). Starving was impossible because there were also yummy cakes with afternoon tea plus delightful desserts at dinner. But sadly the main courses for dinner diverged from my definition of food.  No one else seemed to worry, but root vegetables al-dente aren't my thing. Crunchy green veg is grea, but I find crunchy potato and swede less appealing. I feel guilty for griping because the chef took great pride in his cuisine and for many people it's one of Trigonos' plus points. Also he very kindly made me other stuff when pulses or peppers were dish du jour. Unfortunately my idea of comfort food is shepherds pie and his is roast courgette and tomato with brown rice. Nuff said?.

Anyhow, I came home and made liver, bacon and onions casseroled in rich gravy. Ah! Much better. It's not the meat I miss, it's the gravy.

Comments

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Bloody hell! I'm such a product of my Yorkshire upbringing. Will post more on food later.

[brownnicky.livejournal.com]

I like lots of different kinds of food and did flirt with a vegetarian diet back in the early nineties but I am horribly carniverous - give me a bloody steak and I'm happpy. I feel your pain.

Sounds like a rewarding time. What did you do with the short story?

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

It's not so much that I'm horribly carniverous in the quantity of meat that I eat (though I do like my steak looking as though a competent vet might revive it), but I like the trappings that go with meat and potatoes meal. The gravies and the sauces make a meal for me. I think I've just come to the conclusion that I like sloppy food rather than dry. Give me beef gravy or Hollandaise sauce rather than salsa verde any day.

The story got the thumbs up, I'm pleased to say that there was a body of opinion that thought it would make the basis of a good novel. I got the usual Milford caveats and nitpicks, all good stuff, of course, but I was well pleased.

I took another novel beginning, too which I've had on the back burtner for a couple of years and got some good comments on.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I'm so jealous. I had so much fun last year. I even liked the food (most of the time -- as you said, there was always cake).

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Yes, the cake made up for the lentils most of the time.
:-)

[ferlonda.livejournal.com]

Boy, I'd have been sunk, dietarily, what with my grain/rice intolerance. I'd have lost weight, tho'... so maybe a plus? Was there butter or was there a vegan/veggie alternative?

Sounds like you had a great time regardless of the food and intense workload.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

To give them all credit they are very good at catering for special diets - and they do quinoa which would suit you down to the ground. (And a lot of cous cous if you eat that.) There was spread, though I'm not sure it was real butter as it was in their own pots. On a couple of days there were blocks of butter which were pretty real. And there's a guest fridge so you can take your own if in any doubt. Knowing your dietary preferences you would have eaten about half a pound of butter per meal - on everything - to make it slip down. Maybe that's where I went wrong. I should hgave gone and got butter in large quantities. (Makes note for next year.)

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

It was real butter! I don't do marg.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

It tasted fine to me, certainly. Though I have been known to do the dairy spreads like Clover with no problem, so I can't always tell whether it's 100% real as long as there's some dairy in it.

ferlonda is a total real-butter-freak though,and she'll happily admit that herself. I've seen her go through a half pound of butter in two or three meals.

I too am generally of the impression that butter should be spread thick enough to leave teeth marks, however when I'm sharing and the butter pots are smallish I tend to have much more modest amounts even though I know they'd happily provide more butter if I asked.

The more I chew this over (sorry, pun only half intended) the more I realise that my problem is not meat or lack of it, but is twofold: a) the lack of salt content and b) having food that slips down easily.

It was only when you were talking about T and salivary glands that I pinpointed that last one.

[ferlonda.livejournal.com]

Real butter can make the most boring hot veggies more palatable, especially in large quantities with some decent salt and pepper.

Nope, can't eat cous cous, much as I love it, as it's just mini pasta balls so grain. Sigh. I miss eating grains but I sure don't miss the side effects!!! And we've both lost weight since last fall when we really stopped eating it- William in particular is looking really good- so that's all right.

But basically, I'd have been stuck with just vegetables which much as I love them (and I do- I'll take your share of the squash you detest!) I would have really missed the meat component.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Meat or something savoury.

Someone on a newsgroup I inhabit was trying to describe the flavour associated with 'savoury' and did it in chemical terms, but I can only describe it in terms of things which are savoury in my book: a combination of one or more items in the meat/onion/cheese/salt range.

[ferlonda.livejournal.com]

"Umami" is the word, Japanese for "deliciousness."

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

But is the Japanese concept of delicious the same as mine?

[ferlonda.livejournal.com]

LOL! No, but they do use the word specifically in reference to the mouth-feel/taste of meat fats and also to MSG so...

On this thread, we were invited to dinner at a friend's house and she said we were having chicken wings. Yum, we said, and, Can we bring anything? Nope, she said.

So we had chicken wings cooked on their gas grill, delicious, and also a marinated turkey breast. No rice, no pasta, no quinoa, no veggies, no salad, no nothing except grilled meat.

I went to the store to get ice cream for desert and I almost bought a carrot to gnaw on for the walk back. If I could have washed and eaten it before getting back to the house I would have done so.

I felt very odd afterwards.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

MSG - yes that's definitely a contributor to some things with a 'savoury' flavour. I can't say I like the idea of additives, but MSG certainly pushes some of my taste buttons, I'm sad to say.

Re the no-veg thing. You must have noticed the same in Germany when staying with our mutual friend, GW. When we were there I ate myriad things which had ultimately started out as part of a pig. I did not try 'mett' (if that's how you spell it) which turned out to be raw minced pork. (Yes, eaten raw!!)

We did hit asparagus season on one trip so it was pig and asparagus in more or less equal quantities.

But my first ever continental trip was Belgium in 1975 and after a week of meat and potatoes of varying kinds I was screaming for anything green and leafy.

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

I wish I had your reaction - I put on one kilo I really didn't need. The food was more to my liking, mostly because I grew up with a mediterranean diet, but yes, I missed the meat. Although I have to say after the first weak attempts at meat, less so. The ham? Eeeeeek.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Hi Anna, glad to see you on LJ, I've just added you to my flist. And it was lovely to get to spend some time in your company at Milford.

I haven't actually checked my weight. Because I didn't find the main course to my taste I dived into the desserts and cheese enthusiastically (I was hungry) and I never passed up on cake. That's not good.
:-)
To say the chef constantly tells us he's a professional chef his meat cookery - such as it was - was not good. Juicy was a word not in his vocabulary. I'm trying to think back to the meat options. There was ham in the risotto on day one which was tasty but hadn't been trimmed sufficiently well so had some dubious bits in it. The chicken legs were OK (better than last year when they were not-quite-undercooked). But the sliced cold ham was horribly salty (and I like salt) and the colour was poor (it looked as though it had been sliced and left for too long). Was there any other meat? There was certainly no dark meat

We had the fish pie one day which was OK and one day the chef kindly made me mackerel as alternative to pulses, but cooked it by laying a piece of mackerel on top of some plain sliced potatoes and baking it in the oven without a covering and with no liquid, hence it developed a tough outer layer and was very dry.

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

Here in England my main complaint is that I can't find veal anywhere. I know why, but I still gripe about it. And I can't find liver - what are they *doing* with all the liver? I can find calf liver at Waitrose, but I am not going to buy it a 30 quid a kilo, let me tell you.

Which is a pity because chopped liver in fried onions and sage with a bit of marsala wine was one of my favourite foods ever. Mhhhh.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I buy lambs liver (frozen) from Sainsburys and it's fine. I got some from Asda yesterday but I had to ask for it and the assistand first told be they didn't have it and then found it and seemed more surprised than I was. It is there, but you have to look. The chicken livers were easier to find than the lambs liver.

[julesjones]

Thanks for the warning -- that's Milford crossed off my list, because I'd be thoroughly ill after a week of that diet. One of the issues with fibre-intolerant IBS is that what a lot of people think of as a wonderfully healthy diet can make me utterly wretched after as little as one meal, depending on what's in it.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Sorry you got the wrong comment - I posted a reply to Annas comment on your thread.

To answer yours. Please don't let me put you off Milford because of food. As I say the chef is excellent at catering for special diets if he's given the specifics. This year we asked for it not to be as lentil-tastic as last year and it wasn't - generally. I didn't have to eat pulses at all because I basically told him I couldn't eat them. I can - but not in that kind of quantity or my insides don't cope well. You'd only need to give him a list of what you can eat and he would oblige.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

They're very good with allergies and intolerances as long as they know about them, and they are flexible. If you have IBS they would take it very seriously.

[julesjones]

The problem for me is that I am a supertaster with IBS -- and people who specialise in vegetarian and particularly vegan cookery tend to be extremely heavy-handed with flavourings that taste foul to me in anything but what a friend refers to as homeopathic quantities. Add that to the enthusiasm for brown everything cereals-wise (wheat bran is a very strong trigger, brown rice isn't good either), and simply avoiding the pulses isn't going to do it. It's just too complicated to find something edible in a strongly vegan-orientated cuisine for that length of time, especially if I don't have the option of going off to find a takeaway.

Which is a severe annoyance, because I happen to *like* a lot of vegetarian food, including various things I can't eat nowadays unless I'm prepared to spend the next two or three days taking immodium. :-/

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

The only reason I didn't have the option of going off to find a takeaway was that we are a one car family and so in order to leave Best Beloved with transport I generally catch a lift if possible. Therefore I've never had my own car there.

There was always white bread at breakfast as well as wholemeal bread and some specialist bread (an oat bread or a gluten free one, I think) but the rice did tend to be brown as no one had specified otherwise.

Breakfast was delightful, in fact. A wide choice of toasts, a wide choice of preserves or nut butters or yeast-based spreads and a choice of different fruits from prunes to grapefruits and yoghurt. There was also a board of sliced cheese of the Emmenthal/Edam variety. I think I scared them the year I took my own jar of Bovril.
:-)

Lunches were great, too. Always a home made soup, quiche or (veggie) sausage plait or pate with home made bread and a choice of freshly made salads. I mostly just pigged out on the soup.

[julesjones]

Ah, if there's at least white bread and preserves/cheese available, that makes it a *lot* more practical, even if I have to live on cheese sandwiches for the week. It is actually possible for me to live on a vegetarian diet for a few weeks if the cook is willing to eschew brown flour and rice, as I proved last year when I stayed with a friend while I flat-hunted -- although poor kalypos_v was getting a bit desperate for new recipe ideas by the time I left.

We are currently a zero car family, me having carefully selected a flat based on its walking distance to a bus route with a bus every five minutes in rush hour to where Best Beloved works. :-) We still haven't got around to buying a car, on the grounds that we can hire one for a weekend every month for the same price as the cost of owning one. So for now I plan cons etc on the basis that I will be confined to the site and its immediate environs.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

The no-car thing makes sense if you can walk to work and to local shops. Living in Birdsedge I have no access to local services without a car. I can't even go to the post office without driving.

There's a bus into Huddersfield but the buses home again are placed so that you either get twenty minutes or three hours in town and the journey takes nearly an hour each way because the bus winds through every village imaginable.