After four months of pretty tight lockdown, Scotland re-emerged in a pretty big way this week! All shops, gyms, beauty salons, restaurants, bars are now open. Of course, there are some caveats – masks are still required in stores and restaurants and bars cannot serve alcohol inside.
That latter point has made restauranteurs and bar owners try to transform their outside space, if they’re lucky enough to have it, into outdoor cafe seating as if they’re in some sunny Southern European climate. Opening day was Monday and it was definitely Scotland – rainy on and off all day, windy and bone-chillingly damp. And from the crowds of locals drinking at the tables outdoors, the smarter ones with hooded parkas, they didn’t mind the nasty conditions one bit. After four months, I can’t say I blame them.
I altered my walk routes this week to pass through the downtown commercial area a number of times. It’s definitely nice to see it coming alive again after many months of feeling like a ghost town.
One funny thing I found were these old police boxes on the main street. Apparently they were used before the era of cell phones for police offices to nip into to make a call, fill out a report or eat a bite of lunch. I thought they were still used by the police, but this week when they opened, I saw one that has been turned into the smallest coffee shop ever and a second one that strangely, given its former use, sells CBD products (containing cannabidiol derived from hemp plants).
In spite of the all the new buzz, I’m still quite happy in quiet pursuits like visiting nearby parks and natural areas, though I miss sharing these experiences with family and friends back home.
And one last (indoor) adventure this week has been my largely failed attempt at tsoureki, a Greek Easter bread, as today is Orthodox Easter. Tsoureki is similar to Jewish challah, brioche or the Slovak Easter bread my grandmother made in that it’s eggy, rich and a bit sweet.
However, tsoureki includes some heavily aromatic ingredients that perfumed the apartment in such a nice way – orange zest, mahlab and mastic. Mahlab is made of ground seeds of a certain kind of cherry and imparts cherry and bitter almond flavors and is used in Greek and Middle Eastern dishes. Mastic is a very unusual product – it’s dried resin from certain types of conifer trees, harvested only on the Greek island of Chios. You actually get tiny beads of the dried resin that you crush.
My experiment was a bit of a flop. The dough is really sticky and my attempts at hand kneading were messy and not terribly effective, thus didn’t rise properly. Our oven also doesn’t close and it’s hard to keep a consistent temperature. But, hopefully, it still gave D. a scent of home on on a holiday.
Thanks for the beautiful photos! So glad you’re free to wander about as you like. The bread looks delicious. Is the Mastic used in making Retzina?
Hi Gloria, Thanks for reading. From what I understand, pine resin is used in making retsina, but the mastic is maybe a bit more specialized – it’s resin from a particular tree that only grows on the island of Chios. It’s used for a range of things, including medicines. Not sure if there is any specialized Chios retsina that uses this mastic.
The pictures were wonderful, the one of the brooding sky over the river was especially good. Sorry your bread, baked for you beloved wasn’t satisfactory. I thought it looked very nice. And what a thoughtful gift for d. Where on earth did you find the ingredients? Miss you.
Hello Anne, miss you too! There are lots of little ethnic stores here specializing in supplying produce and dry goods to different groups -Middle Eastern, Indian, Chinese, and Afro-Caribbean. We ventured into a Middle Eastern one for the Mahleb and asked them about the mastic and they pulled it out from behind the counter like a treasured jewel. Indeed you buy a packet with just a few drops of dried resin. It smells wonderful as you crush it.