Peru is where the best eats are... (via east london)

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. We do this in a bid to be less polluting and tackle climate change while at the same time keeping a global outlook. Here's a culinary visit to Peru (the first time I've taken a virtual trip here), via a trendy London eatery specialising in south American dishes (but luckily not serving guinea pig). Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs).

Alpaca are on the menu in Peru. This farm is in Buntingford, Hertfordshire - but these animals
are used for their wool and sold as impressive livestock.

Over Christmas I was invited to a few parties and at each one someone seemed to be talking about the wonderful food from Peru. My knowledge of Peru is limited to Paddington Bear who was a fan of marmalade. I assumed that was a code to mean in the "deepest, darkest jungles of Peru" (I'm quoting THE bear) food wouldn't be so good. And maybe it isn't in the forest. But the Peruvian urban centres have quite a reputation for delicious food amongst travellers and the south American expats I met at these various parties.

Dreadful pic, sorry, but here you have plantain (green banana)
chips on the left and deep fried and breadcrumbed plantain on
the right. Both were delicious and served at Andina.

So what's going for Peruvian cuisine? And where can I try it?  Turns out that it's super popular in trendy east London. And it's not just the hip crowd who are there, as it's suitably British-palate friendly offering more indigenous potatoes you could shake a chip fat pan at. It's also the original home of quinoa which is either a super food or a food of the gods, depending on which blogs you follow. I just think of it as pricey but then three work colleagues led me to the fabulous tapas-type dining at Andina in Old Street (just near Shoreditch High Street overground) and tasted near-perfect Peruvian ceviche, quinoa salad with avocado, toasted pumpkin seeds etc. The quinoa had a bit of crunch, so tasty. There was quite a bit of meat on offer - marinated, grilled and served with a sauce - which I don't eat so can't give you feedback on this. But... it seems that Peru has something for everyone: the veggies, the pescatarians and the carnivores.

Plus there's meant to be amazing Chinese food - brought to Peru by railway workers - which tastes just like it did 100 years ago because the locals liked Chinese tastes, whereas in the UK noodles and sauce needed adapting to suit our famously conservative palate. It's a lovely idea to think of a dish like lomo saltado (stir fried beef) being pure to its origins - and still able to offer a - delicious - taste of a different time.

According to the National Geographic if Peru had a national dish then it would be ceviche - raw fish marinated in lime and red onion and then served with sweet potato and choclo (maize with super big kernels).

They are an adventurous lot in Peru - guinea pig (cuy) is often on the menu. You definitely shouldn't try this at home on Chocolate (or whatever cute name your pet has) but when roasted they do still have a lot of bones so it's a dish for chewing and spitting. But you could try making causa - alternate layers of avocado and thinly sliced potato which is given extra interest by adding tuna fish (often from a tin) and hard boiled egg.

Strangely I spent xmas day just by an alpaca farm... In Peru the alpaca is famous for making good dried jerky. It's fun to have learnt so many things about Peru. Of course people know it best for Machu Pichu. Now i just have to decide what's a comparable destination in the UK to this famous altitude-splitting hike? Let me know in the comments...

The oldest stones in the world take you where?

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. This post takes a trip around the oldest stone circle in the world - in the heart of Wiltshire - and triggers some ideas about other ancient stone creations from Africa to South America. Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs).

Avebury wasn't as crowded as this photo implies - this group of all ages, ranging from mid 80s to 2 and a half, are all friends of mine. Having a walk before lunch made a family celebration even more enjoyable.

Stones are all pretty old - but the complex sarsens at Avebury are hands-down winners. Whatever it was at Avebury - and it's certainly the largest stone circle in the world - was built 200 generations ago (it's roughly four people to 100 years).

So you can go there - and I took a train to Swindon and then a half hour bus ride direct to Avebury - and imagine yourself in any of the other stone wonders of the world, such as:

• the Parthenon in Greece, (447BC)
• the Mayan pyramids of Mexico (AD300)
• the end of the Incas in Peru 
• Great Zimbabwe (AD1350)
• Easter Island, Chile (AD1000-1600)

I expect Alexander Keiller found excavating Avebury as tricky as I found beating Nell at Connect 4 - one of the outdoor games provided by the National Trust.

Or you can enjoy the child-friendly facilities provided by the National Trust (they are very big on kids doing stuff - ideally 50 things to do before you are 11 and three-quarters) which for us involved a spot of Connect 4, an inter-active museum and a hunt for rare great crested newts along the edge of the pond.

There were also giant draughts boards and mini trampolines - as if we were at a wonderful street party.

Don't forget to have a good walk around the stones - it can be a short stroll or a long yomp over to manmade Silbury hill or even the long barrows that surround the main site.

More information and opening times at http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/avebury/ A nice surprise: it's free entry for English Heritage members.

I wish someone would bring me chocolate

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. Here I have a look at chocolate.... Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs). I also publish an interview every week with people who live or work in Islington at islingtonfacesblog.com - there's a prize for the 100th follower.

This is Austrian chocolate - marzipan swirls covered in
chocolate, and utterly delicious. This was a gift
from friends.

I eat chocolate every day. And I intend to continue to do so.

My morning cup of coffee is perfected by a chunk of chocolate.

At university my chocolate life was even better - whenever I studied at our otherwise rather horrible student house, the scent of cooking chocolate from the factories inYork helped (maybe hindered) the synapses.

How to get it
More than 3 million tonnes of cocoa beans are harvested each year - growing in countries not far from the Equator (top producer is the Ivory Coast, then Indonesia, coming in at number 10 is Peru claims wikipedia). No surprise then that between December and Easter I can usually rely on having a stash of chocolate – thanks to Christmas gifts,  and then Valentine’s Day, my birthday and mother’s day. (Seeing as Valentine's Day is coming up I thought I better make an appeal...)

And from April to December I'd face a hungry gap if I didn’t supplement my supplies by chocolate buying missions at the local corner shop.

Loving chocolate is a habit I’ve passed on to my daughters. Indeed for my eldest’s 13^th birthday we booked a free tour around the unique chocolate factory in Adelaide. Haigh’s Chocolates is really well known in Australia, but not available overseas, unless you have an Ozzie pal visiting.

Chocolate lovers don't have to leave the country (indeed the point of this blog is that we rarely do leave) because in the UK there are plenty of chocolatier opportunities: Cadbury World’s claim to fame is that it is one of the UK’s most popular tourist attractions. And then there’s the Roald Dahl museum which sells dreamy hot chocolate at Cafe Twit, and reminds the family about the classic story Charlie & theChocolate Factory. This book has now been reborn as a musical in London’s West End.

And there are also tours - and kids parties - at the Land of the Yorkie bar, York here.

Raw ingredients
Finding a ripe yellow podded cocoa bean is definitely tricky in London, but you can have fun doing a different sort of chocolate hunt by looking at chocolate bars to try and work out where the company sourced their cocoa beans. See if you can find the Fair Trade logo too, that way if you do make a purchase you’ll know that the person who grew those beans got a fair price for their hard work.

• Places to visit for your own DIY chocolate tour: 1)York and Birmingham. 2) Any shop shelf displaying chocolate. 3) And in my house my secret chocolate stash (the one that if anyone hears me rifling through allows me to deny everything, because "I eat like a bird")...

Over to you
What's your favourite chocolate - other than the one in your hand?

Living history at Ironbridge

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. This post takes a look at the joys of visiting the birthplace of the industrial revolution and wondering what it must have been like in its heyday... was Ironbridge the sort of hell some unregulated resource hotspots seem to be now - say when making mobile phones on Indonesia's Bangka island?  Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs).

It's rare that I make a long car journey with my family, mostly because taking a train is far more comfortable. However in August we decided to drive from London for a fortnight in Wales so hired a car which would allow us to make a detour. For kids who don't use cars much a pitstop at a motorway service station can be a highlight, so what we needed was a place to stretch our legs.

Ironbridge was the obvious candidate for a cultural stop-off too. It's the birthplace of industrial history - a fact I kept sharing with my passengers as we turned in the direction of another brown tourist sign that led us to Ironbridge from the M54. 

To begin with the kids, dog and my partner all seemed underwhelmed by the prospect of visiting an iron bridge (this is a very literally named location but it was built in 1779 so should be forgiven for that!). 

However when my family saw that Ironbridge is set in a beautiful gorge the mood changed. There are 10 museums to visit, and most are open every day from 10am-5pm. Some are free although the family pass offers 12 months of visits and on our short stop-over we didn't need to pay for anything, other than the snacks we picked up. 

Best of all the area offers a real sense of Victorian working history - not just the bosses, but also the workers involved. This honest interpretation is clearly liked by visitors - recently Tripadvisor rated Ironbridge as a better place to visit that the Pyramids in Egypt. It's also rated one of the top UNESCO sites in the world (ie, in a beauty/historic battle against Macchu Pichu, Peru and the Great Wall of China). See UNESCO's info here.

What I liked after hours of motorway driving was the serenity... yet in it's hey day Ironbridge and the surrounding area was simply hell. This is partly explained by a journalist writing for The Daily Telegraph, see the link here:

The gorge contains a four-mile stretch of the River Severn, flowing south from the Welsh mountains to the Bristol Channel. There has been iron-making there for centuries: what put it on the map and – arguably – fuelled the industrial revolution was mass production. In 1709 a Bristol Quaker, Abraham Darby, began smelting with coke from the Shropshire coalfield instead of woodland charcoal. His Coalbrookdale Ironworks churned out the raw material that would underpin everything from railways to steam power. The gorge glowed with industry 24 hours a day like a vision of hell. Darby’s grandson built the elegant, single-span, cast-iron bridge itself in 1779.

It made us all think about how industry has been cleaned up - at least in most of the UK. Yet for some workers conditions remain life-threatening and environmentally destructive. For instance the business of mining for the materials needed to make smartphones devastates parts of the coast and farm land on the Indonesian island of Bangka. 

In the end we walked over the iron bridge and took the dog for a run along one of the many footpaths that follow old railway routes (it helps that the area is so well signposted, see pic above). We also sped around a tiny  museum (free) and then stocked up on pies and coffee. I could have stayed for several days, and indeed plan to return as there's a huge amount to explore at the Blists Hill Victorian Museums, Ironbridge Museums and Coalbrookdales Museums sites. 

Best of all it's a very car-free friendly location - with free park and ride well signposted.

Find out more at www.ironbridge.org.uk including the special evening events and Christmas weekends (16-17 November 2013).

For updates about Friends of the Earth's make it better campaign, see http://www.foe.co.uk/what_we_do/make_it_better_about_37804.html