Thoughts on Jaffa, oranges and Paddington bear

This blog is about low-carbon family travel. Here's a way to make use of Jaffa oranges and imagine yourself in Palestine or even Jordan's scented orange orchards. Post by Nicola Baird 

Stage 3 of making a Jaffa Cake - add a chocolate layer to the orange jelly layer.

Perhaps it's the time of the year but everyone seems to be talking oranges at the moment (January 2015). Admittedly I did go and see the film Paddington - so sweet, and a fantastic advert to the joys of making marmalade at home.

For the past 10 or more years I've made my own marmalade using Seville oranges available just after Christmas. But this year I've worked out that endlessly cooking boiling sugar and orange pith does my electric hob no good - at any rate I've had to replace two cracked hobs over the years. And though people have kindly offered their gas rings, I just can't imagine how I'd pace myself making marmalade in a friend's house as it seems to be a 24 hour experience!

And so I've turned to creating homemade Jaffa Cakes. Like marmalade making it is a bit of a procedure - lots of putting items to cool in fridge and freezer, not to mention the hunt for Agar flakes (a kind of seaweed that helps turn sauce into jelly).

Stage 1 of making a Jaffa Cake. This is the Genovese sponge base (lots of egg white whisking necessary). I made a trifle from the leftovers that didn't manage to make it into a 5cm disk.

I love Jaffa cakes and I'm always urging my non UK students to try them, claiming they are quintessentially English, and a biscuit. Until now I had no idea where the name came from. Turns out it's all a concoction - they are named after Jaffa oranges which are grown by Arab farmers in what is now Palestine. But you can also find Jaffa oranges growing in Cyprus, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey. A nice thought to have about such troubled areas.

I'm not going to include the recipe of either my marmalade or the chocolate orange biscuits as I just looked on the internet, and recommend you do the same. But I can warn you that it takes a while and is definitely a tricky recipe. What i liked about making them was the little jaunt it gave my head out of my kitchen think and over to warm, scented orange orchards.

Over to you
What does the smell of oranges make you think about? Travel or teatime treats?

A taste of the Lebanon

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. Lebanon is where people go for bars and beaches - a Western style experience in the Middle East. And it's also where more than 400,000 Syrian refugees have ended up trying to escape the bloody Syrian conflict. Clearly Lebanon is a generous country, but what's it like and how can you get a sense of Lebanon when you live in London? Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs).

Taboulleh, yoghurt, humus, fava beans,
feta cheese with tomato, flat bread,
followed by mousakka - all Lebanese delights.

On 27 March 2013 at Mosaic Rooms, 26 Cromwell Road, London, SW5, Hana el Hibri is giving a talk about the new 30-day, 440km Lebanese mountain trail, a journey she's written about in her book A Million Steps. The aim is: "To raise more awareness about how special this Middle East country is - many of the paths are Roman, or Venetian, it's a history lesson," says Hana.

Hana hopes the newly opened path will promote eco tourism, and protect the range from dumping and quarrying. The idea of Lebanon being the perfect spot for a long distance walk (like Hadrian's Wall or the Coast to Coast) is such a surprise to me - all I've heard about Lebanon in the past year or so is how it has opened its borders to thousands of Syrian refugees.

Million Steps video trailer here.

Delve into my mind and I can tell you about Lebanese cuisine too. For instance taboulleh is a parsely salad with lemon and chopped tomato, not bulgar wheat with a sprinkling of parsely. Now take a look at the photo above and see how to serve it with lashings of yoghurt at the wonderful Tarboush restaurant on Edgware Road. We also enjoyed vine leaves, and our one meat eater lucked out with chicken kafta although she could have tried lamb or goat.

Tip if you are making your own yoghurt you can get a better set if you start it in a thermos, especially if you don't have anywhere very warm to leave it.

Here's a website which has all you need to know about Lebanese culture - from the fact that skiing is very popular to it being an extremely modern, rather Westernised place where Arabic, English and French pepper conversations.  It's also where Yanni, on his 2012-13 world without borders tour, opens the 2013 Byblos International Music Festival (which runs from 30 June - 1 July). Yanni's Live at the Acropolis TV show is the world's 2nd best known music video - after Michael Jackson's Thriller. It's been seen by half a billion people in more than 65 countries... See here.

Tarboush, 143 Edgware Road, London W2, tel: 020 7706 9793

See all my posts on Lebanon here.

Over to you
When you hear the word Lebanon what do you think of? Or what do you recommend to do in the UK to give you a sense of Lebanon's unique Middle East mix?

Reading the Middle East - my book list

As part of my family's attempt to keep our world outlook broad and carbon footprint narrow books can't be beaten. The challenge was to read a book (translated!) from every country in the world, see this post. Obviously I can cheat a bit as I read around 60 books a year and as I haven't just stuck to books from the UK over the years I can revisit old "friends". Let me know if you have any ideas for books you reckon are a must read (PS I prefer novels!).. The collection below are books with a particular Middle East perspective that I've read recently and enjoyed. My local library has been a godsend, your nearest may well be too.

• Egypt - Diary of a Country Prosecutor
• Iran - Persepolis
• Iraq - Reading Jane Austen in Baghdad
• Lebanon - In the heart of the heart of another country

Clockwise books that focus on Iran, Lebanon & Egypt.

EGYPT - Diary of a Country Prosecutor by Tawfik al-Hakim (1898-1987, a man with an astonishingly long life!). This classic short book was published in Egypt in 1937. It's a darkly comic tale of how an imposed legal system wrecks the lives of legal bureaucrats and the people. I laughed so much and was also reminded of my favourite non-UK title, Tales of the Tikongs by Epeli Hau'ofa from Tuvalu. Both books show how introducing foreign bureaucratic systems (in the Egyptian case, the Code Napoleon) was unworkable unless the administrators tweaked it to suit their particular circumstances. Bribery and sloth figure highly - but most of all in Egypt there's a Kafakesque sense that the system will be the undoing of you too.

Although Tawfik is a man there are some shocking insights as to how women are treated done through the administrator's diary entries of gossip; his own approach to the beautiful girl Rim and a horrifying tale of how a local midwife typically treats a mother to be (both baby and woman die - the mother's vagina stuffed with straw, it's grim).

The story races along - starting with a murder and our administrator hero setting out for the scene of the crime half asleep and deeply resentful. He knows how the case is going to go... and in some ways it does, but there are twists and turns along the way which would outwit anyone. I loved the description of getting to places - especially in a car and on a horse (the rider longs for a safer donkey). The restorative power of a cup of tea or coffee reminded me of the more modern Botswana fashion for Rooibos tea in Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency series starring Precious Ramotswe written by African-born Scot Alexander Mcall-Smith
Should you read it? 10/10 (!) Comic classic.

IRAQ - Talking about Jane Austen in Baghdad by May Witwit and Bee Rowlatt - a compilation of emails from a north London mum and radio researcher (Bee) and an Iraqi university professor (May) which switches from ordinary to extraordinary (teething babies in London via the complexities of shopping in Baghdad). I've now met both Bee and May - they are amazing women.
Should you read it?  Brilliant book club choice as it compares two women's lives without judgement.

IRAN - Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2000) is a wonderful,well-known black and white graphic novel (originally published in French) by an Iranian woman who documents with great skill the miserable mistakes women especially (but men as well) are forced to live through by being born an Iranian in the 20th and 21st centuries. Outsiders love it: the New York Times voted it in the top 10 books published during 2000-2010 - more than 1,500,000 have been sold, and there's a film of the same name). Yet this book is a peon to the love Iranians have for Iran at the same time as it shows the hideous decisions families have to make to stay alive. I also read the Complete Persepolis - which follows the heroine Marji (it's an autobiography!) through the 1980s in an increasingly troubled Iran and then on to a new life in Vienna, Austria, and finally to France where she lives now.
Should you read it? Yes - ideal for 14 year olds and up, especially girls.It's shocking in all sorts of ways, and there lies its power.

LEBANON- In the heart of the heart of another country (2005) by Etel Adnan (woman) takes an overview of Arab-American perspectives on war in the Middle East, most especially the bombing of Baghdad which starts the most recent Iraq war. She is well known for her Lebanese civil war novel Sitt Marie Rose, but this was the first time I'd read her work. It's not fiction, more a Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) style collection of poetic journalese written with emotion and insight rather than just facts... I have to admit that I didn't much like this book. But Etel is a stylish writer and her life view is massively different to someone like me who has been brought up in the UK. She talks of chestnut paste, lemon trees and old women washing clothes where I'd write pasta, oak and washing machine. So when I wasn't finding it indulgent I was admiring the imagery.

That said her final section is an astonishing piece of writing - the breakdown of sentences as Etel tries to cope with the lovely pleasures of a sunshine holiday and then back home to safe day-to-day normality in the US (her adoptive home although she has an uncontainable world view) as the Western allies start to bomb Iraq. The truncated style echoes her state of mind, and by this stage in the book you do feel you live in her mind.
Should you read it? If you like poetry yes.

Over to you
Any suggestions about armchair travel via books (or films) are welcome. 

Paradise for the quick and the dead

Nell used fair trade jelly beans to give her the energy to tour so many graves.

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. This post takes you to Egypt, Lebanon and Victorian visions of paradise - via Highgate Cemetery. Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs).  


The locked black gates are finally opened a few minutes after 3pm. Just like the website they open without a creak. But the moment I pay up (£7 for an adult, £3 for a child) a rogue rain cloud drops its load into the courtyard. It's as if Highgate Cemetery (West) doesn't feel like visitors today. But then the weather changes again - brighter clouds scud past and the sun breaks through into the woodland walkways, turning even the granite and crumbling graves a sort of picturesque (if your taste is vampish).


Our guide is superb, an Archway local dressed in white - an angelic effect I'm  certain she intended. Within minutes we know that Victorian London was expanding so fast that it needed more graveyards - the result was the Magnificent Seven which ring London.  In 1839 Highgate Cemetery was opened, but you needed a lot of cash to be buried here especially if you wanted a plot by a path or a large family vault. The price didn't seem to inhibit Londoners - it's claimed there were 30 funerals a day at the purpose built chapel (Church of England to one side, dissenters (ie, anyone else) to the other). 


Our guide claimed that there are now 169,000 people buried in one of London's most desirable postcodes (NW6) in 50,000+ graves. There are just 30 plots left on this side of Swains Lane, apparently available to any of us, so long as you pay £20,000. There are more plots available on the east side though.

At the entrance of Egyptian Avenue. Anyone with a vault had their name and street they'd lived in carved on it.

How to mourn
Victorians were death experts, as well a generation might with such high infant mortality and generally shortened life-expectation. 


These graves tend to tell the story of their occupant's life. So coachman James Selby has a long whip and a horn on his stone, and adornments of inversed (ie, upside down) horseshoes. Anything inversed is a sign of death. Selby's grave was funded by his coach driving colleagues and friends. There's a pic of him here, famous because he won a £1,000 wager that he could drive from Piccadilly Circus, London to Brighton and back within eight hours. Indeed his life legend lives on that he could complete a coach and the four horses needed to pull it in just 47 seconds. Quite astonishing. I can't even get out of my office chair that fast!


Tour highlight
As you climb uphill there's a huge stone Egyptian Avenue where the super-rich buried their families in 12-people tombs. It's very Egyptian looking - lotus flowers and columns, except these are inverted. Even the keyholes are the wrong way up as a mark of respect. With the tree roots twisting up the banks and the dark overhang of heavy June-cloaked trees there is a strange impression in the graveyard of other worldliness, just like the commissioners of the Pyramids must have tried to achieve. Years ago there were 80 gardeners keeping the undergrowth neatly trim, but now a handful of volunteers manage it as a wildlife paradise - and certainly the dappled pathways attract gently flickering butterflies on their hunt for nectar.


After the Egyptian Avenue you pass the Circle of Lebanon - vaults designed to keep 18 people, although curiously none are full up - the maximum is nine family members - which completely encircles a magnificent Cedar of Lebanon tree. This is 300 plus years old, far exceeding its expected life, which is a pleasing thought in such a crowded cemetery. 

Watch this 3-minute film (click on the arrow above) with some rundown scenic shots of the cemetery before it received some tender restoration.

This is George Wimbwell's grave. He ran a travelling circus starring many animals, including the lion, Nero, above, who was good-natured enough to let children clamber on him.

Vandals in paradise
These big cemeteries became run down after World War 1 resulting in serious vandalism. In a bid to refinance the place Hammer Horror was allowed to film but that seems to have added to the kudos of getting into the graveyard and breaking off a bit of stone for your own. These vandals were clearly immune to the places' atmosphere - in the vaults which are not allowed to be filmed many coffins are piled up as if in an Ikea cupboard, their human contents now long rotted and seemingly forgotten. It's a very dark, spooky place which I hope not to have nightmares about.


That said - you must go. What's more three days later I was back inside as a volunteer working on conservation tasks. It gives you such a calm feeling - and you're never short of reading material on all those gravestones...

Margate gets its mojo back

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. Here are some thoughts on art, sand, chips and shells at Margate. This post is by Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about books and blogs).  

Margate isn't the only seaside place to slip out of fashion.

Spain's Torremilinos was all the rage in the 1960s (Monty Python mocked it as the Costa del Sol's home of spam and chips); there was Paxos in Greece as the place for your bit of fun in the sun during the 1970s. Where did you go in the 1980s (Kenya?) or 1990s (if Thai backpacking try Alex Garland's The Beach) or 2000s (Croatia) - all subject to tourist trends.

But when the visitors move on towns - even countries - can suffer horribly too. That's what Margate was finding. With it's lovely sandy beach it had been the perfect Victorian resort. Plenty of East Enders - and other Londoners - were still happily visiting in the 1950s and enjoying the famous funfair, Dreamland (closed since 2003). But each year things seemed to go a little more downhill. In the 2001 census it was a place of high unemployment, and even now as you walk around it's very obvious the B&Bs are filled with social tenants, not holidaymakers.

Have you been?
But suddenly Margate's THE place to visit again. In 2012 the new Turner Contemporary exhibition was opened which offers a Tate-art experience (white walls, small labels, a caf downstairs), and expansive sea views out to the Isle of Thanet windfarm. The first exhibition is fabulous - as it should be for JMW Turner had strong links with Margate.

Tie that exhibition to a really friendly place, a super fast train across Kent to St Pancras and the knowledge that this is the town where Tracey Emin grew up and you have plenty of reasons for taking a trip.

Nell, 11, just wanted a day trip featuring ice cream and chips (both eaten on the beach). I also wanted a beach that allows dogs to tear around (until 1 May) and Pete suspected we'd all love Turner and the Shell grotto. Turned out he also found a pub to watch West Ham beat Bolton 4-0 too. What's not to love about a quickie to Margate?

Where in the world?
However, it turns out you can't be anywhere else when you're in Margate. I tried, but it is a uniquely British experience. However the Shell Grotto offers a fantastic puzzle - who could have built an underground temple decorated with 4 million shells without anyone noticing? Despite English Heritage listing it as a Grade 1 site, theories are varied. Although my instinct says this is obviously a Victorian fake (my dad didn't do end of pier exhibitions for nothing you know!) it's fun to hope that it is really a Phoenician temple built in the second half of the first century. These traders (busy trading tin from Cornwall and on to the Continent lived in an area roughly where the Lebanon is now.  For examination of the evidence see Patricia Jane Marsh's booklet The Enigma of the Margate Shell Grotto.

Over to you
What do you think is fun to do in Margate? Or which UK seaside towns offer a little taste of the places other travellers like to visit via planes?

Wanted: one fly and a BBQ

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No, not with these ideas to get you to the Lebanon. This post is by Nicola Baird 


So what do you know about the Lebanon? I was stretching my mind and found nothing until I remembered Beirut. You go there for fabulous food and nightlife, but also to wander around caverns, temples and overhear French and Arabic in the neighbourhoods. See more ideas at tripadvisor. 


What about the trees?
And then there's the cedars of Lebanon, those infamous, vast scented pine trees that the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians squabbled over, and later the British used up making railways. You can visit a cedar of Lebanon on a National Trust tree trail, here's one at Hatfield Forest, Essex.


But to get a taste of Lebanon in the UK here's a great tip from my friend Hannah. She says pick a nice day and then take my daughters to a trout farm to have a go fishing.


I thought I'd misheard. Here's what I think about fish farms... Minus points = overcrowding of fish & over use of pesticides. Limited plus points.  Possibly a good way to farm protein and definitely an easier way to catch "wild" fish, even using a fly? But read on...


At the fish farm her friend visited, there were lots of people enjoying a weekend outing - either keeping up the skill of catching a fish, or teaching their family to do so - and then cooking up the catch. She said the smells of BBQ fish were delicious, and after befriending a family with one of the most succulent smelling meals she left with a fabulous Lebanese recipe for making trout taste extra good.


See this website for 100 of the best Lebanese dishes. They really look yum.


All I need to do now is identify the nearest trout farm, and maybe just give it a go. 


Cross fingers there will be someone from the Lebanon cooking up a storm when we are there...