Tag Archives: Pizza

Hebridean Way: Day 13 – Stornoway to Inverness (and home)

Distance cycled 15.6 miles / 25.1 km
Cumulative distance cycled 334.8 miles / 539 km
Islands visited (daily total) Lewis
Total islands visited 10+1 of 10
Average speed 11.1 mph / 17.9 kmph
Weather conditions Drizzly rain

In the Museum Nan Eilean we’d seen a photo and some drawings of a stone structure that we didn’t recognise, and so with our ferry leaving Stornoway early afternoon we had some time (if not the weather) for a final wee jaunt in the morning to make the most of our last day in the Outer Hebrides.

Memorial Cairn to the Grias & Coll Raiders, March 1919

The plaque nearby reads:

This memorial commemorates the events following the First World War, then returning servicemen took the law into their own hands and claimed the land that the government had promised them.

It is built at the place of confrontation between the crofters of the area and Lord Leverhulme, the owner of Lewis and Harris at that time.

Conflict arose when Leverhulme bought Lewis and Harris in 1918. He planned to industrialise Lewis and opposed the Board of Agriculture’s scheme to divide some of the farms into crofts for landless families.

In March 1919, some of the biggest land raids took place at the farms of Upper Coil and Gress. Land raiding continued throughout Lewis until 1921, when a disillusioned Leverhulme gave up his industrial projects for good. As a result, many people without work emigrated to Canada.

The government finally kept their promise to meet the demand crofts, and the people won the right to the land.

Before he left the island in 1923, Lord Leverhulme gifted the parish of Stornoway to the people, it is now run on their behalf by the Stornoway Trust.

While we were researching its location, we found that these memorial cairns are dotted around Lewis so we were surprised we hadn’t come across them. Then we found they’re of various different designs and we had seen one on the route – the one for the Pairc Cairn Deer Raiders.

Sheltering from the weather with a coffee and cake in Stornoway while we wait for our ferry

While waiting for our ferry we found out that the strike action by ScotRail was extended and as a result our train from Inverness to Edinburgh had been cancelled 2 days prior. Their call centre were very helpful – we were booked to travel on a Sunday, so we could use our ticket for any train on a day either side, and while there were seats for us, there were no bicycle reservations for the Saturday left. LNER have one train which was also fully bicycle-reserved.

Boarding the ferry from Stornoway and the end of our time on the Outer Hebrides.. for now :o)

We’d pre-booked a specialist bike transfer from Ullapool to Inverness with the excellent (in service and in name) Ticket to Ride, and spent the time thinking of ideas for getting us and our bikes home: car hire – ~£200 but none available; van hire – same; turn up at the train station and hope for a bicycle cancellation; coach – ~£50 a last resort and we’d have to pack up the bikes into boxes or bubblewrap; courier the bikes – ~£30 each packed up again, and we would have to impose on our lovely AirBnB hosts in Inverness for storage…

The excellent Ticket to Ride collecting us and two fellow Hebridean Way cyclists from Ullapool – hi Charlie and Alice!

Anyway, cutting a long story short, we decided that we’d rather have the full Saturday to explore Inverness, and ended up booking a taxi-friend of a taxi-friend of Ticket to Ride to take us and the bikes to Edinburgh to meet our onward connection home.

That first night we had a lovely evening at the Black Isle Brewery bar with Charlie and Alice drinking beer, eating pizza and talking cycles and holidays! As is so often the case, we came away from one trip with more ideas & recommendations for future ones!

Our day in Inverness, clockwise from top-left: Inverness Botanical Gardens; the view from the top of Tomnahurich Cemetery; real ales and wood-fired pizza (heaven!) at the Black Isle Brewery Bar – so good we went twice; Leakey’s book shop (also heaven!)

Cuban Food

Before we visited we’d heard that Cuban food is not very exciting so we didn’t have high hopes. There were high points, mostly in the dinners that we had in our casa particulars, but for the most part we found the food to be fairly dull and certainly not a highlight of the trip as it has been in so many of the countries that we’ve visited. We were surprised that, compared to their neighbours (either the surrounding Caribbean islands or nearby Mexico), neither chillis nor other spices were commonly used. It is perhaps telling that the best meal we had (by a long way) was at a Spanish restaurant – Castropol on the Malecon in Havana which is run by the local Spanish Asturianas society.

Breakfast

Breakfast in casa particulars is very standard and although priced separately to the room it seems to be expected that you’ll take it – fresh fruit (some combination of papaya, pineapple, guava or mango), freshly made juice (usually papaya or guava, on good days mango!), coffee (filter, pretty strong, never instant and we were very rarely offered tea), eggs (fried, scrambled or omelette as you like), bread (always white, sometimes dried out and crispy), sometimes cheese or ham (both processed) to go with the bread, or as a sandwich. It was tasty enough but got to be pretty boring by the end of 6 weeks!

Casa particular breakfast

Street food and snacks

It’s fairly easy to find a bite to eat when you’re wandering the streets in Cuban cities. Pizza shops are everywhere and, while it’s not what an Italian would recognise, the pizzas are served hot from the oven, the puffy dough topped with a slick of tomato paste and a sparse sprinkling of cheese, handed to you folded in half with a small piece of cardboard or paper to protect your fingers (asbestos hands required!). They became our go-to lunchtime filler, not so healthy, but Andrew would have had at least one a day if I’d have let him… At MN$5-10 each (about £0.15-0.30) Cuban pizzas are delicious and cheap.

Peso pizzaAndrew looking very happy with his first Cuban pizza even though he had to deploy his handkerchief to protect his fingers from the steaming dough!

As an alternative to pizza, sandwiches are the other lunchtime option, also sold from little hole-in-the-wall shops. The bread is always soft and white with highly processed ham and/or cheese to fill it (interestingly cheese was often more expensive than ham). Sometimes we had bread with mayonnaise (i.e. a mayo sandwich, better than it sounds), or bread with tomatoes (the best option if it’s available), and occasionally fritters of savoury dough or mashed potato. If we were very lucky we found a stall selling pan con lechon, roast pork sandwiches.

Street food vendorWe bought sandwiches and cake from this friendly vendor in Bayamo

Cuban street foodStreet food (clockwise from top left): peso pizza; ham sandwich; pan con lechon; fritter sandwich

Cuban sandwichIn bars and cafes sandwiches were often toasted. The ‘Cuban sandwich’ contains roast pork, ham and cheese and somehow manages to transcend all three

Meat

Chicken and pork were the most common options, usually just fried with some garlic or onions, but the best meals we had were beef and lamb. Ropa vieja literally means ‘old clothes’ but it’s a lot tastier than that sounds, imagine pulled pork but made from beef in a sauce made from tomatoes and peppers. We were served lamb casserole a couple of times in different casa particulars and each time it was meltingly tender and deeply flavoured – why don’t they do something like this with all the chicken and pork?!

Cuban meatsClockwise from top left: fried pork with garlic; Ropa Vieja is not pretty but it is tasty; chicken leg; lamb casserole for dinner in Viñales

LiverWe didn’t come across much offal but when I saw the unfamiliar word ‘hidalgo’ on a menu and found in our dictionary that it was liver I knew what I would be having for lunch! The liver was sauteed with onions and green peppers and made a nice change from the more usual options

Seafood and fish

Cuba is a long, narrow island which means that you’re never far from the sea and so it’s hardly surprising that fish and seafood are readily available. We had various kinds of fish as well as prawns, lobster and even octopus. Again we found that they would most commonly be prepared quite simply by either frying or grilling perhaps with a little garlic or a tomato based sauce.

Cuban seafoodClockwise from left: At St Pauli I had octopus salad and Andrew had prawns cooked with garlic; a mackerel like fish in tomato sauce; lobster in Baracoa

Rice and beans

The standard starch with a meal is rice, either plain white or the rather politically incorrectly named ‘moros y cristianos’ (moors and christians), a mix of rice with black beans which was our favoured option. I really enjoy bean soups and I think they’re probably a staple of Cuban home cooking but we hardly ever saw them on restaurant menus – I suspect it’s considered poor people’s food. We did sometimes get bean soup as a starter for dinner in casa particulars and when I requested it for dinner from our casa in Camagüey she looked very pleased to be asked for it. The beans are usually either black or kidney beans and the soup might also contain bits of ham, peppers and pumpkin.

Black bean soupBlack bean soup in Camagüey – delicious but not easy to photograph!

Vegetables

A salad of tomatoes, cucumbers and white cabbage was the customary accompaniment with dinner. If we were lucky it had some grated carrot, beetroot or cooked french beans on the side too. Otherwise the only vegetables that we were served, apart from a rare bowl of pumpkin soup, were plantains or green bananas. Plantains seem to fall somewhere between vegetables and starch in terms of how they are used in Cuba. Sometimes deep-fried until they are crispy (chicharritas), sometimes fried but soft in the middle, sometimes baked into a tart shell and filled with prawns or meat as a starter, they seemed to function a bit like potatoes.

Cucumbers and tomatoesWhen we didn’t feel like pizza or a processed cheese sandwich for lunch we bought a handful of tomatoes and cucumbers and a loaf of bread.

PlantainsPlantains in their various guises (clockwise from top left): this market stall gives an idea of how much plantains are used; fried plantains as a side dish; plantain shells stuffed with prawns and cheese as a starter; plantain crisps

Sweets

Satisfying your sweet tooth in Cuba is easy and cheap. Cakes, biscuits and pastels (little pasties containing guava jam) are available from street vendors and hole-in-the-wall shops and generally cost MN$1-3 each (£0.03-0.09). The cakes are heavy on the icing which looks like swirls of cream but is actually marshmallow fluff! We found quite a lot of sweets made from nuts, as well as the coconut based cucuruchu in Baracoa, we saw bars of pounded peanut in several places and cones of caramelised peanuts were for sale in all of the main squares on an evening. In restaurants flan (Spanish creme caramel) is the most common option.

Cuban sweetsCuban sweets (clockwise from top left): cakes with a generous swirl of marshmallow fluff; bars of ground peanuts and guava membrillo for sale; flan; a cake vendor roams the streets in Matanzas

Ice cream cafeCubans love their ice cream and there are cheap ice cream cafes in every city

Drinks

Soft drinks in Cuba fall into two categories: freshly made fruit juices or cans of Cuban made fizzy pop. Alongside the usual cola, lemonade and fizzy orange options is Malta, a malted soft drink which smells exactly like a Soreen malt loaf – too sweet for me but Andrew liked it. At peso food stands what looked like squash was served by the glass but as we weren’t sure about the water used to make it we never tried one. Coffee is also available at peso food stands and usually cost MN$1 (~£0.03) for an espresso size cup poured from a Thermos flask. Tea is practically unknown so if you’d struggle without it I would advise you to pack some teabags!

Cuban soft drinksMalta, natural lemonade made from lime juice and sugar topped up with mineral water and tuKola

Sugar cane juiceSugar cane juice (guarapo) in an idyllic setting near Viñales

As sugar is a major crop in Cuba, it’s unsurprising that the most common alcohol is rum which is distilled from sugar cane juice. Rum based cocktails, e.g. mojito, daiquiri, piña colada, were the order of the day if we weren’t sampling one of the various Cuban brands of lager-like beer. In Havana, there’s a micro brewery in Plaza Vieja in the heart of the old town. We tried one of their brews and really enjoyed it but sadly the service was so awful that we couldn’t bring ourselves to go back.

Cuban alcoholClockwise from top left: daiquiris; mojitos; Cristal was my favourite of the local beers; piña coladas

The best pizza is in Naples, Italy

A bold statement I know, but I love pizza. That means I’ve eaten a lot of pizza. I took up running and yoga so I didn’t have to restrict my consumption of it. Before we arrived in Naples we’d heard that the Italians make the best pizza in the world and we thought, “yeah, OK, it’s going to be good, but we enjoy the pizza back home so how good can it be?” Then when we got to Sicily we thought the pizza there was the best we’d ever had, only to find out that Italians consider the best pizza to be in Naples, and we thought “what, better than this? that’s gotta be some amazing pizza!

Pizza, DiMatteo, Naples, Italy

Our first taste of the real thing, courtesy of Di Matteo’s on Via de Tribunali (i.e. ‘Pizza Street’) in Naples. Former USA President Bill Clinton ate here when he visited Italy in 1994

Well, we’ve been here just over a week and after 5 pizzas and a calzone, they were absolutely right. Naples is the home of pizza, and there’s no better pizza than the Neapolitan hand-made pizza.

Margherita con Melanzane pizza,, Di Matteo, Naples, Italy

Mouth-watering close up of Julie’s Margheria con Melanzane (tomato, cheese, basil leaf and aubergine) pizza at Di Matteo’s restaurant. The dough is proved for about 24 hours and is so thin that we easily put away these dustbin-lid sized beauties and seriously considered seconds.

Pizza oven in L'Antica Pizzeria de Michele, Naples, Italy

Pizza Margherita piping hot from a typical wood-fired oven. The thin base, simple, succulent and rich tomato sauce and a sprinkling of toppings mean the pizza cooks very quickly and has a charred, black-spotted underside. This is L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele, the pizzeria that “Eat, Pray, Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert visited

Legend has it that Pizza Margherita was invented in 1889, named after Queen Margherita of Italy, and consists of a tomato base, white mozzarella cheese and topped with a basil leaf. Green, white and red – the colours of the Italian flag!

Ham and Ricotta Calzone, Starita, Naples, Italy

My Ham and Ricotta Calzone at our local Pizzeria Starita. Fantastic..

Pizza Romana, Starita, Naples, Italy

Julie’s Pizza Romana at Pizzeria Starita. We agreed that while the bar had been set high by Di Matteo, Starita excelled at the art of the pizza. Obviously we need to apply the scientific method and repeat our tests before deliberating, cogitating and coming to our conclusions

I think I may truly be spoiled once we leave Naples. *sniff*