Cockles and Mussels, Alive, Alive Oh

Holidaying at home is the theme – self enforced,  but we’re making a good fist of it.  Until Saturday just gone at least. We headed for the coast – not Folkestone for fresh day-boat fish, but for a change, Hastings – you know Battle, 1966, Norman the Conqueror, Harold and that arrow, etc.

My goodness, what a shock. We’d been out of season once before and bought good fish. The fish in the shops today was below cat food standard – hungry cats at that. Dead eyed dicks if ever. The streets sprawled with ample flesh, tattoo’s and barely dressed girls, many with can in hand - talking ‘Sewer English’ (three stops down from Estuarine).  

What to do – we’d driven there to make an afternoon of it and it was nine degrees below the worst that one could expect. It was the location for Hugh’s Fish Fight as I recall – one chippie there even had chalked boarded ‘Hugh’s Baps’ – I never did  get that bet on with Paddy Power.

Gulls Flying Upwise Down

I want to use the late great saxophone player, Ronnie Scott’s joke about even the birds were flying upside down – but I’ll leave it for those of you who used to hang out in Pre-RIP Ronnie Scott’s Club.

We found one shell fish stand – tasted before we bought to check for  NBC on the cockles and whelks (non brewed condiment – what people think is vinegar).  All A1 OK.

No safe looking bars to drink Guinness – all full of pugnacious humanity spilling onto the street.

We’d come prepared with a mini picnic  - egg mayonnaise sandwiches, salami, olives, bread, cucumber and lemon.  S Pellegrino, but no wine.

Oyster Slurping – Shucking Habit!

I had two oysters at the stall – witnessing alongside that disgusting English habit of drinking down oyster and juice all in one and exclaiming “Aaarghh!” - I looked the other way and thought of Sir Toby Belch.

One hour was enough to bear. We drove home ready to make a splendid holiday pasta of seafood.

One tip.  If Hastings ever comes up on your culinary radar, blank it. The place is a tip. Worse was, it was all our fault - we were thinking holidaying at home and we broke the rules – and did we pay a high price for the sheer awfulness of the trip.

The Tranquil in the Mayhem

One word in its favour. Walk westwards away from mayhem and you’ll find a near deserted small beach. As I was reminded by Joy (refer: www.walkwithjoy.com) , there’s always beauty in Nature when you look for it, even in the most unlikely places.

The best was the lone poster advertising the local Seafood Festival in September – a large dead brown fish on a plate tail to camera, a bottle of red wine with two partly filled,  smudgy glasses each holding what looked like fermented wine at differing levels – a second plate carried crab sitting alongside two very sad, pale pink boiled prawns, all largely obscured by the wine bottle.  Can’t wait – well actually I can.

Back home and we cooked a dreamy meal, eaten under the trees - pasta with cockles and finely sliced whelks in a fresh tomato sauce, followed by two small corn fed chickens (home cooked on the rotisserie - filled with fresh thyme and lemon). Fresh made chilli oil for the pasta primi piatti and the simplest of sauces for the chickens – stock, a few crushed dried cepes and a piece of pancetta that was dangerously close to eat-by date.

So, even after the shock of the seaside blunder, you can holiday at home in joy filled splendid circumstance.

Even yesterday’s Telegraph talked about the ‘Stay at Home Summer’.  Happy days for those top few retailers who hold onto 18m customers who’d otherwise be shopping abroad for a couple of weeks or more.

We added the freshest and squeekiest of courgettes to the outdoor feast – sliced, de-seeded and dried off in E/V olive oil – then a squeeze of lemon and a sprinkling of fleur de sel. They were half eaten by the time this shot was taken.

Back to the lucky retailers and our holiday-less summers. Will they rise to this exciting challenge to make a miserable reality into a dreamy shop?