Frozen Fens

One of my Christmas presents this year was a Thai cookery book, just flipping through it brought back some great memories. At the weekend just before going off to do the weekly shop we selected a couple of recipes, put the ingredient lists together and set off. I am a keen eater of curries and have been making them for 30 years. I use pre-prepared ingredients as well as work from the basic ingredients and have quite a selection of various spices - but not the right ones for the Thai curry it seems/

I have much less experience of Thai food and I was a bit surprised not to have heard of all of the ingredients. In fact it is a bad move to select brand new recipes just before nipping off to the supermarket. In the end we managed to find most of the ingredients and it was the less exotic ones that nearly tripped us up - the local Tescos has plenty of galangal (a root with earthy/citrus/lime flavours - but I had never heard of it) we could not find peanuts, we found some un-shelled ones that did the trick though. The dishes - Thai meatballs and curried noodles - sounds easy huh - 30 odd ingredients though.

The preparation required the use of a pestle and mortar, unfortunately, unbeknownst to me (nice word eh), our pestle and mortar had expired so we switched to a small blender we have. The blender is not very good - it replaced a great blender that we got to mix food for the kids as babies/toddlers (youngest is now 15) it died around a year ago and the replacement can barely mix up guacamole from soft avocados. (I know use a fork). So we ended up putting all the ingredients in the blender and then having to take out the chewed up pieces and laboriously chop them up, lemongrass stalks were the most troublesome.



In the end though the two dishes were delicious and definitely reminiscent of my cycle ride through Thailand. We also learnt a thing or two about different ways of preparing food. All in all it was a surprising success. Although my tip is not to smell the fish sauce before putting it in the food - it tends to put people off.



The weather here in the Fens has gotten much colder than usual. Last night it went down to around -6C and when I went out for a cycle ride it started at 5C but dropped to 0C by the time I returned home (over the space of 3 hours). As I mentioned before the gloves are great and I wear multiple layers of clothing, including a "sweatband" around my ears and a bright yellow hat. I also have cycling boots and leggings. With that lot I generally stay pretty warm, with the exception of my feet - they start to get colder and colder and at the end of the ride feel pretty solid and numb. If it gets bad I hop of the bike and "kick" to get some blood into them. I think the problem is that I have metal cleats (clips) in the soles of the shoes and they conduct heat away from my feet.

Last year they started the construction of a new cycle way across the fens starting with a wooden bridge across a lode. The earthworks included digging two pits to create a new wildlife habitat. Here is one of them - frozen solid.

Looking the other way you can see the ramp up to the bridge and how clear and blue the sky is. The dot in the centre of the picture is actually the moon.

Although it is not recommended to go skating anywhere even when it is very cold it is a tradition in the fens to flood fields (shallowly) for ice-skating. On the way back through Wicken Fen I saw a couple of ice-skaters out on a natural "pond". It is where the field floods and I don't think it is too deep. They seemed pretty good - although I saw one or two tumbles.

The real challenge of cycling in the cold weather is that many of the roads and tracks I cycle on do not get gritted/salted and so get very icy. Halfway round I began to wish I was wearing a cycle helmet - the roads were extremely slippery in places, a good test is to pull on the rear brake quickly, although don't do it when cycling fast and see how easy the bike skids, I always unclip my feet when performing skid tests. At the moment it is very, very easy to slide.This path through Wicken Fen is actually pretty reasonable, it is not smooth and there was a light sprinkling of snow over it when also provides some traction.

So far I have cycled around 240Km/150miles my target for the year is around 12,000Km/7,500miles. I have updated my log, it goes back to 1994, with gaps for 2000/2001 when I tore the cartilage in my knee. Here is a bit of my log.