Travelling to London - Try the Fresh Fruit

Summer time, especially July and August, is the best time of year for fresh fruit in London.

Every supermarket has fresh fruit. Try Tescao, Marks && Spencer, Waitrose, or budget friendly Lidl and Asda.

I wrote a poem about the fresh fruit and added photos which I shall show you here.

Fruit salad. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright. 

Early breakfast in pyjamas

Orange orange on a white saucer. Photo by Angela Lansbury.  Copyright. 

Oranges, and bananas

Yellow banana. Photo by Angela Lansbury.  Copyright. 

In the fridge what do I see?

Strawberries we save for tea 

What shall we have for our tea?

For our tea, for our tea

What shall we have for our tea?

Not today, On Sunday

I see big red strawberries

Strawberries, strawberries

I bit big red straberries

For my tea on Sunday.

Ripe red fresh fruit. Finest flavour in August in London. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright. 

What shall we have for our tea?

Not today. On Monday

We can have big raspberries

Raspberries Raspberries

Not for tea on Sunday

For our tea on Monday

What do you like? What do you say?

For our tea on Monday.

Big blueberries. Photo  by Angela Lansbury.  Copyright. 

Blueberries, blueberries

I love to see big blueberries

I'd like to eat big blueberries

For our tea on Tuesday

 Blackberries, blackberries

I see big blackberries

I would like big blackberries

For our tea on Wednesday

Red currants, red currants

I can see big red currants

Red currants on Thursday

For our tea on Thursday

.

Black currants, black currants

I can see big black currants

Black currants on Friday.

For our tea on Friday

Pitted Dates. Photo by Angela Lansbury.  Copyright. 

Figs and dates, on the plates

On the plates, By the grapes

Red grapes from La Fromagerie in London

. Photo by Angela Lansbury.  Copyright. 

I think we shall have to wait

For our tea on Saturday.

Cream from top of Jersey whole milk. Sold by Tesco in London. Photo by Angela Lansbury.  Copyright. 

On our birthday we add cream

Thickest cream you've ever seen

That is such a lovely dream

On next birthday we'll have cream

Toys' food's ready every dawn

For yellow teddy bears and a blue unicorn

Well give food them which gives them joy 

All the wooden and soft toys

For toy kittens and a puppy

Serve whatever makes them happy

Healthy food which does them good

On plastic plates, fruit made from wood

Artificial fruit. Fridge magnets. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright. 

For my breakfast what do I see?

I see big red strwberries

Maybe we should save them for tea

Big and small red strwberries.

We went out to pick the fruit

Green and red apples on the tree

Green apples on tree in garden. Photo by Trevor Sharot.  Copyright. 

In supermarkets and small shops

Bananas and raspberries - not chocolate drops

Durian is served in season

Banned on buses for a reason

They smell bad to somebody

Never mind, there's more for me.

I see figs and I see dates

In the bowls and on the plates

We will have fruit salad soon

On the table, served with spoons.

On my birthday I will choose

Fruit that's red or pink or blue

On my birthday I can choose

To share it with my friends and you 

I imagine thick white cream

What a lovely coloured dream

I imagine thick white cream

What a lovely coloured dream.

I will share it all with you

Green and yellow, red and blue

I will share it all with you

It's a dream which could come true.

I thought I'd share my thoughts with you

It's a dream, let's make it true.

Coloured fruit, in red and blue

It's a dream, let's make it true.

-ends-

This can be sung as a round for children, at a birthday party, in a classroom.

My husband and I have found that Lidl is our cheapest supermarket. This was confirmed by a recent survey by an independent body. For concenience you might look for the nyumerous smaller more central stores, such as Tesco Express which is often near a railway station.

Please share links to your favourite poems on this blog.

 

How To Make A Flag Cake For the USA, UK, Italy or Singapore

Make A Cake
American

American Flag
Earlier in July I wondered how to make a cake for July 4th and the whole month at my Toastmasters Club meetings showing the American flag. I now know you can use raspberries or strawberries and white icing, and red food colouring. (For an American or UK flag for the blue add blueberries.)

Singapore Flag

Singapore
Cheapest, smallest, simplest. Buy a cupcake. Cover half with white frosting. Put red jam or dyed red over the other half. (Or red foil taken off a wrapped chocolate.) Cut white frosting into a crescent and five small five point stars. And / or add the letters Sg. And place the cake on a large plate on a print out of the Singapore flag.

Italian Rainbow cake
Making a cake with a design on top is relatively easy. More time is needed to bake a cake with colour all the way through. rainbow cakes are popular and impressive. The easiest mutlicolour cakes are two colour or three colour.

For example, the red, white and green of the Italian flag.

Italian red, white and green food, in colours of the national flag. Photo by Exapler from Wikipedia.

Multi-Colour Sandwiches
I have also at the World Travel market in London, England, in November, seen multicolour sandwiches, layers of different coloured bread, celebrating a national flag.

Red Food Colouring
When I looked at rainbow cakes most cooks said that natural dyes such as beetroot and strawberry gave very pale colours and you would get better results from food colouring.

You can also get red and white colours using Jello (American brand of jelly).


UK Flag
If you are in London you could make an England cake which is much easier. the England glag or St Goerge's cross is a red cross of plus sign on a white background.



England flags are sold off in supermarkets the day after an England football match.  (The Swiss flag is white cross on red.) the Red Cross ambulance is a thick red cross in the centre of white background with a large white surround.

DIY & BOUGHT FLAG CAKES
Simple flag cakes in red and white
https://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/food/a-slice-of-patriotism
https://bakeavenue.com/products/singapore-flag-cake
Elaborate cakes showing flags, personalities, landmarks, Merlions and more
https://mothership.sg/2015/08/this-is-the-amazeball-result-when-19-super-creative-patissiers-bake-birthday-cakes-for-singapore/
YouTube How to make a flag cake (for a US flag)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svRuAovIfmI
How to bake a green pandan cake with red and white Singapore flag topping using cream cheese.
http://www.foodiebaker.com/pandan-coconut-cake-with-cream-cheese-frosting/
Edible photo topping on backing sheet you peel off, From UK, free shipping to UK and can be posted worldwide:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Birthday-Cake-Edible-Image-Printed-Topper-Decoration-PERSONALISED-Mobile-Phone

About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker, teacher of English and other languages.

Singapore National Day Celebrations To See: Oct 6, 9, 10

Flag of Singapore

Singapore National Day is August 9th, and it celebrates independence in 1965 from Malaysia, now the neighbour with whom Singapore makes constant efforts to stay on good terms.

The national languages of Singapore are English, Chinese (Mandarin), Malay and Tamil.

Events to watch in person or on TV:

1 The parade.

2 The speech.

3 The fireworks.

Things to do:
Volunteer to help.
Attend events at your Community Club.
Watch TV.
See the parade.


Birthday Banner at Community Club in Singapore. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

Photograph flags in streets and banners adorning Community Clubs.
Select red and white outfits to wear, such as white shirts and blouses, red ties and jackets, red shoes, red brooches..
Find red and white food or drink such as:
White bread and tomatoesL yogurt and strawberries, milk, white lassi, red and white plates.

Writing from Singapore in the week of Friday 28 July 2019 I can tell you that the Singapore flag has been displayed along the streets and on the buildings for days.

Singapore flags reflected in the pool. Cashew Heights. Singapore. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.




Flags on a balcony at Cashew Heights condo complex.

Happy Birthday Singapore vertical banner. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

Features on the vertical banner to notice and point out to tourists: red and white of the flag with a crescent and stars, the Merlion symbol, the fireworks

I am president of Braddell Heights Advanced Toastmasters Club and we will be wearing red and white, the colours of the national flag, at our meeting held two days earlier, July 7 2019. Other Toastmasters Clubs will do the same.

You can buy Singapore flags to drape over the back of the car's exterior wing mirror. Novelty, souvenir and stationery shops also sell attractive round badges with the flag symbol.

A preview of the fireworks takes place on August 6th. You can see a video preview online. At the weekend, on Saturday 10th of August, 2019, another five fireworks displays will be in the heartlands, the suburbs.

Good vantage points are high residences or offices or rooftop bars (which might sell tickets or increase prices like on New Year's Eve). If you can hear te fireworks but not see them at a buidling such as a hotel, try walking around to a public area such as a stairwell or lift lobby on the other side of the building.

Check last train times. Wear read and white and keep your camera charged and with you ready to capture the magic moments.

Make A Cake
American
Earlier in July I wondered how to make a cake for July 4th and the whole month at my Toastmasters Club meetings showing the American flag. I now know you can use raspberries or strawberries and white icing, and red food colouring. (For an American or UK flag for the blue add blueberries.)

Singapore
Cheapest, smallest, simplest. Buy a cupcake. Cover half with white frosting. Put red jam or dyed red over the other half. (Or red foil taken off a wrapped chocolate.) Cut white frosting into a crescent and five small five point stars. And / or add the letters Sg. And place the cake on a large plate on a print out of the singapore flag.

Red Food Colouring
When I looked at rainbow cakes most cooks said that natural dyes such as beetroot and strawberry gave very pale colours and you would get better results from food colouring.

Flags and badges
Flags and pages are sold at novelty stores, cheap Singapore dollar or two dollar stores, stationery stores.

You can buy a hat with the letters SG for 5 Singapore dollare from the shop in the YWCA.

Useful Websites
FIREWORKS
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/ndp-2019-fireworks-to-be-set-off-from-singapore-river-for-the-first-time

DIY & BOUGHT FLAG CAKES
Simple flag cakes in red and white
https://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/food/a-slice-of-patriotism
https://bakeavenue.com/products/singapore-flag-cake
Elaborate cakes showing flags, personalities, landmarks, Merlions and more
https://mothership.sg/2015/08/this-is-the-amazeball-result-when-19-super-creative-patissiers-bake-birthday-cakes-for-singapore/

About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker, teacher of English and other languages.

Summer Strawberries and Foods In Season In London - mouli vegetables and fruit

VEGETABLES
I look for the new and surprising. In Tesco supermarket's reduced price area after 6 pm I saw a large long white vegetable, called mouli.

I asked an assistant, "What do I do with this?"
He replied, I thought unhelpfully, "You cook it."
Yes, I guessed that, but how do you cook it?

I got home and looked it up on the internet. First I kept finding a brand of kitchen machinery for chopping called a Mooli.   Then I found recipes. Wikipedia lists it under Daikon radish.

Mooli is a kind of horseradish. You could use it to spice up a soup such as a potato soup. But you can also eat it chopped into discs in salad. Pleasantly crunchy.

I didn't find it spicy at all.

Tesco also had a yogurt drink. (You could make your own lassi from a mixture or yogurt and milk, with added mango, or salt, or sugar.)

Then onto dessert.

FRUIT
Strawberries And Cream
Strawberries are in season in the supermarkets, small red strawberries with real summer strawberry flavour. Strawberries are traditionally eaten with pouring cream. Sometimes you get an offer to buy both together.

Perfect Pineapple
Summer fruits are superb value. In Tesco I saw pineapple for 80p, down from £1 and £1.10 earlier this year.

Summer Pudding
Our next trip to the supermarket will be searching for summer pudding.

Useful Websites
visitbritain.com

https://www.tesco.com/direct/moulinex-manual-grater/191-1850.prd?source=others
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikon

Author

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photogrpaher, author and speaker.

My Mango Misadventure

Problem
You see items on the floor. Your first thought might be - it's free, free goods, free food, unwanted. Your second thought might be, but it's dirty. Your next thought might be, put it in a plastic bag and wash it later. More thoughts. You should not take what doesn't belong to you. You are not supposed to take fruit from trees. But what about windfalls?
Put me down - you don't know where I've been! What could go wrong?

Answer
I picked up a mango. I could not see which tree it came from. I picked it up. It made a lovely / dreadful smell in my tote bag. I had visions of home made mango lassi.

Story
When we got our windfall mango home, we washed it. Then we cut it. Out pops spider or something similar.

We try cutting out one side of the fruit. But the other side is affected.

Er - no. Not worth the risk. I need not go into details.

OK, I'll go into details:
1 Yuk - as the old joke goes, the only thing worse than seeing a worm in the apple you are eating is seeing half a worm.
2 You could get an upset stomach.
3 It could multiply.
4 You could excrete living creatures.
5 You could get one living creature stuck and growing in any part of your body causing irritation, pain, a growth.

Presumably cultivated fruit (on trees in orchards) is sprayed against insects. Maybe fruit trees in public places are also sprayed to reduce the numbers of insects causing problems and infecting other trees. Maybe not.

I have great respect for farming methods and farmers. I have had such trouble with everything in my UK garden, from aphids on roses to slugs in strawberries to insects eating fruit on trees and birds eating fruit on trees and making holes in fallen fruit and leaving only half of each windfall apple.

Never mind, say the family. It didn't cost anything. Learning experience.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer.

More About Eton Mess and Summer Puddings Worldwide

Making meringue is a good way to use up egg whites which are left over from using egg yolk to make mayonnaise.

I tried excellent Eton Mess meringue at The Hayes Conference Centre, Swanwick, north of Derby. 

Eton Mess

Eton Mess is named after the town of Eton in England. I had previously had Eton Mess in Eton, which is across the bridge from 

Windsor.

I have also tried making it at home. It can look like it says, a mess, unless you make the cream into elegant waves and peaks on top on a large platter. Another way to serve it is in individual servings in glass bowls so you can see the red colour of the fruit peaking though the white. The fruit helps offset the scariness of the meringue.

It is also a way of serving up the broken remains of meringue from a pavlova from tea time. But be careful about keeping cream. At home and runny cream offered to add to a pavlova would usually be served separately in a jug, which can be kept in your fridge and brought out when needed, to be sure it doesn't go off. But I would more usually add cream after dinner, rather than at tea team.

Pavlova

Pavlova is a dish of circular solid meringue with fruit in a dip in the centre, made popular when served by a hotel to attract customers at tea time with a dessert named after the dancer Pavlova who had a successful tour. Pavlova is claimed as a national dish invented by both New Zealand and Australia.

When I visited Australia and New Zealand I tried to track down where it was made first. As far as I remember, it was served at a hotel in one country, named after Pavlova there, then mentioned on their menu or history or the local newspaper; but a similar meringue with fruit, not necessarily circular  as a raised ring with a base in the middle, appeared perviously in a recipe in a book or magazine in another country.

Nowadays, 2016, we get fruit all year in the UK, not just summer, flown in from the Channel Islands which are warmer, and grown in greenhouses in 'the garden of England', Kent. However, the fruit at other times of year is not as soft and flavourful and juicy. When fruit is abundant in summer the prices come down and the most popular puddings include Summer Pudding, made in a small mound with fruit encased in bread soaked to a red or black currant colour.

Whilst is it exceptionally hot in the UK in summer 2016, hotter than Europe where may Brits are taking holidays, it is winter in New Zealand and Australia. In previous centuries you had food in the season when it was harvested locally. But now you can fly to England or Australia and New Zealand for summer weather and summer puddings twice a  year. 

The BBC has comments and links to recipes for Eton Mess.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/eton_mess

The Hayes, where I enjoyed Eton Mess this month, is one of a group of three centres in the UK. More details about them from: http://cct.supafi.co.uk

Learning Italian for cakes and snakes, plus English in Scotland

French, and Spanish Sentences Russian
I am learning Italian on Duolingo. I had already heard some strange sentence in other languages. When I was a child we used to make jokes about absurd sentences such as 'la plume de ma tante' (the pen of my aunt).

A famous sentence about Spain is for for those learning Spanish, but English. When teaching English, one heard 'the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain'. (This came up in the Hollywood version of My Fair Lady, teaching English.)

The Elephant Out of The Room
At least both those sentences deal with everyday objects. But today I had to translate 'the elephant walks on the strawberries' in Russian.

Italian Cakes - and Snakes
Later the Italian possessives sentences had me in hysterics. I had to translate: 'My snake eats your cakes'.

How often would you need that? Well, I hear you asking. How do you say it?

Il mio serpente mangia la sua torte. No I haven't. It should be le tue torte. Or le vostre torte.

There, you see I have learned it. Perhaps that is the purpose of it. One kind of memory system is to remember totally absurd images.

Singaporean Sentences about Scotland
I can remember the absurdity of the answers I was given when I was teaching English as a second language in Singapore. In one class, I was teaching a lesson about what countries and people from those countries were called. One example was Chinese people live in China and grow rice. Another example was Scotland and Scottish people. The sentence I was given in class by a pupil was, "Scottish people live in Scotland where they grow rice."

Living in London, England, it was obvious to me that the people in Scotland eat porridge and some of them drink whisky. For the benefit of any readers who live in Asia. Scotland has mountains, cold mountains. In Scotland they they have pine forests and sheep. Sheep? Yes. Remember, The Edinburgh mill sells wooden clothes made from sheep.

The people in Scotland eat shortbread and potatoes. They do not grow rice.

Never let the truth get in the way of grammar.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer. Language teacher. Author and speaker.