Cicchetti's in Piccadilly, you lucky Londoners

Time to talk a bit about food before I bugger off to bed.  We fly to Corfu in the morning in spite of LowCostHolidays.com's attempts to sabotage the trip - including removing my name from the airline passenger list 'by mistake'.  Yeah right.

We've been doing a bit of eating out over the last few weeks but I've had little chance to blog about it.

Firstly, I noticed when we were in London for the Jubilee that San Carlo Cicchetti's was due to open on 21st July at Piccadilly.  Ooh that was yesterday!  It's not often that London follows what we do up here but SC's Cicchetti's have been smouldering beneath House of Fraser in Manchester for some time now and the food is truly fabulous.  As is the bar and the sexy waitresses.  Little Venetian titbits (is titbits a word?).  All delicious.

And then, even though I would rather not admit to it, we did Red Hot World.  We first noticed this place when we were driving through Manchester early one Saturday evening.  We thought we were witnessing a riot on the streets (as Morrissey would say) but the crowds were actually queuing for this peculiar world buffet which  the kids will love and the parents will tolerate because the kids are happy.  Actually the food is fine; staple buffet Chinese, not so great sushi, great looking Indian (which I had to avoid because of the turmeric allergy) and a dessert section which looks the dogs bollocks and on the whole tastes like it.

I'll tell you what is the most interesting thing about Red Hot World and that's the anthropological exercise of observing how differently the nations of the world choose to eat when faced with a massive selection of round-the-world-foods.  In general the white British stuck to pastas, carvery and puds but every Japanese person there (and there was a surprisingly large number of them) had the most enormous plate of fresh fruit.  All of them.  And they piled it up before they ate their main course as if paranoid that the rest of the punters would nab it.  As if!

Lastly, for this blog post, we did the Foodies Festival (I find I now cringe at the term 'foodie') at Tatton Park which was actually quite enjoyable.  The lovely, entertaining Charles Metcalfe took us around the Med talking wines.  I would quite like a mini-me Metcalfe in my pocket at all times.

We had Bhel Puri (which I always thought was some kind of facial paralysis) from Chaat Cart who get my vote because there was no turmeric in the spicy rice crispy concoction.  Here's a pic of their recipe for it.

If you can't read it, it's basically rice crispies with potato, tomato and chutney.

Then there were the curious chimney cakes which were a yeast dough, layered with butter, rolled and wrapped around a hollow metal cylinder and then cooked infront of one of those donner kebab type things.

Yummy cinnamon sugar things

And that's it really for now.  Sweetie the cockateil has gone to a newly opened pet hotel for the week.  We can watch him 24 hours a day by 'petcam' ap.  The owner has strict instructions to stuff him and keep moving him around all week if he pegs it.  The last thing I need is Zoe insisting we fly home after 2 days because the bloody bird's died.