Jammy Breakfast in Remarkable Places

I don’t know about you but when it comes to food and especially breakfast, I tend to fall into the routine of having the same thing for several weeks running until I get sick of it and then come up with a new idea. Over the last few weeks, a favourite breakfast of mine has been two poached eggs, one tomato, half an avocado and some toast. Many moons ago when I worked in the kitchen at Seaton Carew, I decided to make some avocado cream to use in a starter. The taste and texture made me baulk and I ended up going off avocados. Many years later, I learnt to like them again, maybe too much as, this morning, the inevitable happened again. One glance at an innocent avocado and I felt queasy. 

Looking for an alternative breakfast idea, I opened the fridge and spotted a couple of jam jars. I am not a great lover of jams and marmalades but I occasionally enjoy a thin spread on brown toast. 

My mother made many delicious jams and preserves. Home from school, a favourite snack of mine was a slab of freshly baked bread, real butter and copious amounts of quince, apple or fig jam. Ahhh!

At boarding school, coarse-cut marmalade was always on the breakfast menu. Mind you, my Algerian boarding school catered for students whose hometown didn’t offer higher education not the children of the rich elites. The marmalade was made with lovely homegrown oranges but the shreds of zest tended to be enormous. Instead of spreading it on toast, I spooned out the juice and left the rest. It tasted something like a sweet Orangina, a soft drink made with fresh orange juice. 

While at Algiers University, I often visited my brother who worked and lived in the capital. Once, raking through his cupboards, I came across a jar of my mother’s grape jam! Wow!

I opened it and nearly got knocked back by the alcoholic fumes oozing out of it. I wolfed down a few spoonfuls, no bread! I decidedly got a bit tipsy.

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine suggested that I might like to watch a new food series called Remarkable Places to Eat. I often steer clear of this kind of program which usually have an ulterior motive, such as the promotion of a tourist destination or the revival of a fading product. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this series falls into my category of guilty pleasures¬: food and travel. A genial Frenchman, restaurant maître d’, Fred Sirieix travels to Venice, Edinburgh, Paris and San Sebastian accompanied by British chefs to discover their favourite places to eat. A tiny place in Venice made me dream about coming out of retirement and opening a food shack with no more than 10 seats to serve my kind of cuisine. I was so inspired that, at the end of the first offering, I raced into the kitchen and made a simple mushroom and asparagus risotto. Back in front of the telly with the dish and a glass of wine, I began watching the second episode which whisked me off to Paris and La Tour d’Argent.