Oh god, I haven’t quite tuned my study’s halfway point post yet… Quick! A distraction! Food pictures!

No, I haven’t starved to death quite yet. On the contrary, I’ve been flourishing; my determination not to blow all my money on food has fostered a bit of creativity in me. Not only was I inspired to seek out a few ‘traditional’ Scottish eats (the results were… oily. In the best way), my own cooking skill has increased as well. I’ve found a few new dishes to bring home! My meager cooking talent means I’m not going to share everything I make, but I will show off one new thing I’m proud of.

Here, dig in:

Cafe Piccante – Fish and Chips, Deep-Fried Specialties

I have to thank one of my readers for suggesting this place to me. In a Facebook message, a guy named Ben (who I will never be able to thank enough) mentioned Cafe Piccante as a good place to get one of the other big famous Scottish dishes: the deep-fried Mars bar. I was intrigued, because I thought that deep-fried candy started in the Southern States, so I had to investigate. And on this place’s menu I discovered that pizza, by the same transcendent ritual as the Mars bar and fillets of cod, could become something more. After I heard that I think I whited out for a few hours and finally came back to consciousness wandering the streets of Edinburgh in a majestic daze. The world is a strange place, not better or worse, but wholly different, with what I have learned about food this month. I feel like this has been Scotland’s gift to me.

I want to share this with you:

That is a pizza that someone breaded in fish batter and left adrift in a sea of sacred oil for about five minutes. Do you know what kind of holy chemistry happens between frying batter and mozzarella cheese? They fuse into something hinted at by each in their raw forms but unreachable without the strength of each other. It was chewy, flavorful, stretchy, salty, crispy, everything I would want from pizza or a deep-fried anything. They took standard European pizza, inedible by anyone with functioning taste buds, and by some strange alchemy made it into food. Lethal food, to be sure, artery-sawing, liver-shanking, gut-gnawing food, but delicious food all the same.

And the Mars bar? It was pretty good, if you didn’t think about how awful for you it was. I think the batter actually helped it, as I’m not generally fond of Mars bars, and the whole thing was insanely rich. Somewhere between the soaked-up oil and the melted chocolate which oozes out of every opening and around your teeth like chocolatey anti-toothpaste, you hate yourself just a little bit. The Mars bar is such a beautiful abomination that you feel like you’re actually helping the world you live in by ridding if of the thing, by imprisoning it in your iron stomach where it can’t hurt anybody anymore. Oh, and the ice cream kind of sucked. I mean, to the extent that ice cream can suck, which admittedly isn’t very much. Not a lot going on for flavor, and it had this weird flaky frozen texture. That wasn’t half as bad, though, as the sin of quickly melting into the crust of the mars bar and making it a pain in the ass to eat.

Again, special shout-out to Ben for the food tip! And to my grandparents, please… in our future family gatherings, don’t remember me like this, sitting on a park bench and stuffing half a deep-fried pizza in my mouth. And then going back a few days later for another.

Irn-Bru – A curious energy drink, to be mixed with vodka

Irn-Bru (pronounced Iron-Brew) is, simply put, a bright orange soda that tastes like bubblegum. That makes it sound so innocent. However, the adorable bubblegum taste effectively masks any of the vodka that is constantly mixed in with these, so while it’s tickling your feet on pink clouds of childhood wonder, your liver is getting worked over like a piece of meat in Rocky’s freezer. It’s a beautiful, terrible thing, like Kutná Hora’s ossuary (or as I call it, the Bone Cathedral):

Edit: One of my faithful readers corrected my misconception that Irn-Bru is an energy drink, and they also suggested you can get a pretty good Irn-Bru sorbet at S. Luca, an ice cream place in the city. I’ll have to check that out…

Tortilla – Cooked by a giant crowd of Spanish tourists, and washed down with all-you-can-drink sangria

Which is really the only way to eat anything. Not so much of a recommendation or a review as a mention of how strange food can just happen to you. I’ll just go ahead and clear this up early, ‘tortilla’ in Spain is not one of those things you wrap your tacos in. It’s like a giant potato omelet. Now despite my fetishization of Spanish culture, I haven’t tried much Spanish food (unless you count my calling Pizza Rolls ‘tapas’). Lucky for me then, that in a neighboring hostel a group of Spaniards decided to throw a massive party, complete with real tapas and buckets of mojitos and sangria for as long as the supply held out.

This tortilla is the only thing I could get to (besides the sangria; oh bless, I got the hell out of that), but it was worth it. I believe the traditional Spanish tortilla is made from eggs, potatoes, onions, and garlic. It doesn’t sound that great initially, but I wasn’t expecting the garlic, and my mind was blown; for three-quarters of a second, it was the best thing I’d ever eaten. I spend nine days in Barcelona without even seeing a tortilla, and it finds me when I’m in Edinburgh years later. Go figure.

Fried Noodles – How I Now Win At Life

So while I was sitting around the hostel, bored to death of supermarket tortellini, I dug through my personal catalogue of things I can cook to see if there was anything I hadn’t tried yet. And while it’s not something I knew how to make, I was struck with a flash of inspiration from my Dublin noodle shop days. I was going to fry some noodles. Holy hell. Why didn’t I think of it before. The result was this sexy platter right here:

Oh yes. Not only did I fry those noodles, I fried the hell out of them. In sesame oil, with soy sauce, carrots, snow peas, broccoli, baby corn, and green onions. I’ve been experimenting a bit since then to find the best time to add each veggie to get it to the texture I want (which is pretty intuitive, hard stuff goes in first, soft stuff last, bean sprouts and green onions don’t get cooked at all), and I’ve tried a few other mediums like rice and wheat pasta that turned out… okay, just not as brilliant as the egg noodles. Today one of the hostel girls hinted that I could try adding garlic or making it spicy, and that blew my mind open. That shows what an amateur I am at this, but I’m not ashamed, because it feels good to be learning these things from trial and error. Prescriptive cooking like baking is nice and all, I enjoy it, but it’s kind of cool to be working with something that requires timing and creativity. I have almost as much fun playing with cooking it as I do eating it. And just think of what it’s gonna be like when I learn how to cook a REAL dish…

My Celebratory Ice Cream

Yes, I’ve already used this picture. Yes, it was in the last post. But I’m still super-stoked about my reward ice cream. Did you climb a mountain today? No? Then you don’t get any. When you climb a mountain, we can talk about your ice cream cone.

Again, this thing was delicious. Rich, sugary, creamy, the chocolate was thoroughly chocolatey, and the pistachio was lively, with a strong citrus flavor. And of course, the whole thing tasted like victory.