My Granola Mornings
A Snack Attack Journey
I love to come out in the chill May English morning to the “garden” behind our rental flat in Norwich, where we are staying for five weeks. Any proper Brit would sneer at our garden: an oblong of gravel with a worn wooden café table with a mossy green sheen and two chairs daubed with bird shit on the backs. I wear a puffy down vest over my pajamas and red rubber slides that look like fish, with a goggly eye on each toe. Cupping a bowl of Dorset Cereal’s “Nutty Granola” doused generously with cold, thin grey oat milk, I feel calm and meditative out here with birdsong as my only soundtrack. Maybe this is why horses look contemplative chewing their oats, but theirs are not as sweet as these. Baker extraordinaire Dorie Greenspan recently posted about “Granola OG or Nuggety.” Dorset’s skews nuggety, but what I like is that the nuggets are so easily broken up as you chew.
During what I’ve come to think of as “My Granola Mornings,” the day’s promise is unsullied by anxieties or self-flagellating taunts at my lack of “productivity” or by bickering with the Chef over the free Jazz he is likely playing in our living room. Still, a niggling worry I have during my granola mornings is that I am starting to feel that this easy, private outdoor time is something I will require when I get back to New York City along with Dorset Cereals granola, a product i can only find on British supermarket shelves.
The Chef and I have a knack for travel, and I think part of it is how quickly we each create new routines with which to anchor ourselves. It’s probably no surprise that what anchors me are routines around British foods I have come to love (or that what anchors the Chef are times spent at the local pub, which is happily still the Alex). The following British food items have a special place in my heart and stomach:
British butter – When the Chef and I started out 30-some years ago, I will always remember that first morning in his brother’s East London house, spreading tasty yellow British butter on just-toasted slabs of “tin” or “bloomer” bread. Now sister-in-law R. makes her own sourdough tin bread every morning. While she and A. have gone vegan and spread something called “Flora” over their toast, they thoughtfully purchase butter for our visits. The yellow Anchor “block butter" is more flavorful than its wan American cousins, and, from what I have read, it is not from food coloring but because dairy cows in Britain are likely eating more grass than processed feed, at least during the summer months (Anchor lists its only ingredients as “milk and salt.”). This increases the amount of yellow-pigmented beta-carotene in their milk fat. Once churned, the beta-carotene membranes break down and spread the glorious yellow throughout. When I eat British bread and butter, I can’t help thinking of vast corn (wheat) fields and the cows in the lea munching green grass, “udderly” content (there’s a theme of farm animals going on here ;) ).*
Purple Sprouting Broccoli , Norfolk strawberries, “Fine Beans” and more – The market stalls in Norwich are an iconic city site. Brightly colored, each peaked stall is striped with white and bright primary colors. Inside the dense warren of shops are fish and chip vendors, Asian fast food counters, cheap luggage and belts on revolving racks, tie-dyed tee-shirts and watch batteries. In front are the fruit and veg stands. Mike, Debs & Sons is where I got rhubarb stalks as long as my arm and where they have pints of local Norfolk strawberries that don’t need sugar. Early in April the market posters advertise “Purple Sprouting Broccoli.” The Guardian’s Alys Fowler wrote that the violet colored “florets…have all the sweetness of a cold winter and yet the tenderness of summer to come.” Sweeter still are yellow sprouting broccoli, and then there is also the long, thin “tender stem” broccoli . In our “Golden Triangle” neighborhood, I’ve also become fond of Ford’s Fishmonger, Fruit & Veg. This immaculate store has a list of about twenty different kinds of fish—from rockfish to salmon trout to cockles—but usually only six or so that are on offer. During this stay we’ve prized the utterly fresh cod, grilled with EVOO, salt, pepper and thyme sprigs. Store personnel seem to guard their goods with pride. Generally, taking your own produce is frowned upon. You will point to your “fine beans” (string beans) and the small packed-with-earthy-flavor new potatoes and they will weigh and hand them over in brown paper bags, twisted to close at the top.
Cream, cream and more creams – I remember the first thing I marveled at when my sister-in-law took me on my first exploratory journey to Tesco’s: the cream aisle. There was single cream, double cream, extra thick double cream, clotted cream, soured cream, extra thick and luxurious Jersey double cream. When I poured double cream on top of my Norfolk strawberries last night it felt sinful; you wouldn’t pour thin American whipping cream on top of fruit. And I have to think the creams and milks here are not full of chemicals since they have such short shelf lives.*
Cromer crab – I put this in here for the Chef, but Cromer is one of the cheery, slightly tatty former seaside resorts that dot the North Norfolk coast. It’s known for its pier—one of the last in the UK to offer a full “end of pier” show (which my mum-in-law greatly enjoyed when she could get there), and its crabs, which are dense with flavor. You can see all sorts of folks from children to pensioners, hanging buckets off the pier, though it’s more for fun since the crabs are too small to keep. We went to the stalls along the seaside and bought a fully cooked and dressed crab for £6. My mum-in-law gets her Cromer crab from “the fish man,” who comes through her suburban neighborhood in a van every Wednesday. “No matter what I get, it’s always £5!” she tells us, tubs full of melt-in-your mouth marinated herring , dressed Cromer crab or sea bass filets.
Taylors of Harrogate coffee bags – Our AirBnB comes with a cafetiere, one of the more messy ways to brew coffee, and since I drink only one cup of decaf a day I buy pretty boxes of Taylors of Harrogate coffee bags (the art on the box reminds me of Winslow Homer paintings!). I have not seen these nor the simple concept back in the states. Ground roasted coffee beans in a light bag that you pour boiled water over and press/squish against the side of your cup with your spoon, leave two minutes to steep, and then have a fairly decent cup of coffee. It’s not instant coffee, but more like a tea-bag version of filter/drip coffee.
Bourbon Creams – Proust had his Madeleine. II have my Bourbon Cream. Simply a rectangular dark chocolate biscuit perforated with 5 holes on each side, filled with dark chocolate buttercream and sprinkled with large flecks of sugar, these biscuits whisk me back to the grey dorm room in University of London’s BirkBeck College where I was doing a summer study abroad program after my junior year at University of Virginia. I was terribly lonely among my fellow travelers—students who seemed more wealthy, worldly or whose sole purpose was getting as drunk as possible. One day early on, Peg, the Irish cleaning lady on our hall, heard me sobbing in my dorm. She ushered me into the utility room and gave me Peek Frean’s bourbon creams, a cup of milky tea, a sympathetic ear and probably some Irish folk wisdom. I’ve been partial to the biscuits ever since, and they taste the same whether they are Peek Frean’s, originator of the Garibaldi biscuit and creator of bourbon creams in 1910, or the supermarket brand for 50p a package.
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*I know I am vastly oversimplifying the dairy industry in Britain both in my assumptions about grass fed cows and chemical-free milks. They do simply taste better, so I have to think they are better, and better for you, but I will read up on this!
I have to stop here, because the sun is shining. We’re on an overnight jaunt in an unlikely place, Lowestoft, a faded, down-on-its heels seaside resort that is the easternmost point of England. I did my twenty-minute-yoga routine on the windswept beach this morning, kneeling to do cat-cow, with my knees scrunching into small flint stones and shells. It wasn’t Dorset’s, but our lovely Hotel Katherine breakfast featured tasty granola (OG, not Nuggety!) that I doused with milk. Both my routines from home and my new routines, like my granola mornings, ground me on the earth, which, despite all its troubles, is a good place to be.