Cheese | A Vet’s Life

It’s been a lovely week with John. One of the things I never considered, when I fell joyfully into motherhood, was how lonely it could be when they all went away. Mostly, I have adjusted to a more solitary life, but that unique love never goes away.

We spent the first half of the week in Settle, staying in a rental close to Mum and Dad. It was a gentle week with a lot of cafés and coffee. It’s not very exotic, but I had this delicious ham and chutney sandwich at Country Harvest, which is a few miles outside Settle.

The bread was perfect. White and soft with a tasty crust that still allowed the flavour of the thick slices of country ham and generously spread butter to come through. I followed it up with a vanilla and strawberry scone with jam and cream. I actually shared half and half with John, who ordered the most wonderful lemon meringue pie. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture of that, but if you can imagine a tangy, lemon tart, piled unfeasibly high with clouds of meringue, you’ll pretty much be there. The scone was delicious as well. I’d be hard pressed to say which I preferred.

John’s friend Ben came to stay over Tuesday night, which was also his birthday. He lives in a yurt in the Lake District and plays in a band, who have just finished doing seven music festivals over the summer. It was great to have him stay and Triar thought he was lovely too!

We went to Rind, which is a pizza restaurant attached to The Courtyard Dairy. The Courtyard is a wonderful cheese shop, which is becoming internationally renowned for its amazing selection of cheese. It’s also a great experience as they encourage you to try slivers of cheese, many of them local, but others sourced from around the world. We went in a couple of times and I still have some of the cheese in my fridge as we didn’t get through it all.

As you would expect, the pizzas in Rind are amazing too, topped with some very special cheeses. I should perhaps have gone for one of the more unusual cheese combinations. Last time, I had blue cheese, honey and walnut, a combo I later introduced to Lara’s family on my weekend in Northern Ireland, but the chorizo and honey sounded so delicious that I ordered that, and shared half and half with John, who ordered a cheese rarebit pizza. They were, of course, wood fired and wonderful and I definitely want to go back!

The original plan was that John and I would come up to Dumfries and he would stay in my almost complete spare bedroom, but it wasn’t to be. John and his partner Yoana run a small business creating websites and a new client rang him during the week. Her website had been hacked and the person who created it was no longer available, so she wanted John to help. The old website couldn’t be saved and the hackers were getting quite unpleasant, demanding client information, so John spent a considerable amount of time creating a new, temporary site for her to use while they set a new one up.

It was complex as her old emails needed to be transferred to the new site, but as the whole thing was time sensitive (and inevitably stressful for the lady whose business was under threat) it couldn’t really wait. Alongside that, on the morning we were meant to drive North, we also wanted to fit in a trip to Leeds to get something John had left at a friend’s house. By the time the work and trip were done, it was four in the afternoon and we decided we would try to find somewhere more local to stay instead.

We really landed on our feet as we found an apartment above The Railway bar in Cononley, just beyond Skipton. It was a lovely flat, restfully decorated in Scandinavian style, with Yorkshire touches, which made me feel very much at home. The bar was lovely too and having it just downstairs was very tempting on those two long, hot days.

I took John to the airport yesterday morning and he got home safely, as did I. Donna and I had a cuppa in the afternoon and (generous as ever) she invited me back for the evening. Triar enjoyed the visit too and spent some time in her paddling pool.

Next week, I’m off on a new adventure. I am going to be locumming at the PDSA in Glasgow. I’m genuinely excited as it’s in one of my old stomping grounds. I worked there for Vets Now, back in the early 2000s, so I am familiar with the building, even though I assume the workforce will have changed entirely as that is now twenty years ago. It’s mostly doing surgery, which I love, but I will also hopefully do some consulting days, which will get me back into the swing of small animal work.

I shall leave you with some pictures of the annual Settle Flowerpot Festival, which is just gearing up. There seemed to be a lot of new exhibits this year and the people of Settle are getting more and more inventive. Anyway, thanks for reading and I hope you have a lovely week, wherever you are.

Something caught my eye as Thomas drove into Stonglandseidet on Friday. On the front of an unassuming building, a sign: Senja Roasters. It seemed an unusual name for somewhere so far out into the countryside. Cafe culture hasn’t reached rural Norway to the same extent it has reached the UK. I have driven round the northern end of Senja before and thought that a coffee shop would have turned a pleasant drive into a proper day out. And so I tucked away the information in my head to check out later. It was more a stir of curiosity than a white hot hope.

I checked it out when I got home and my interest grew. Senja Roasters, I discovered was indeed a café with, as I had hoped, a special interest in coffee. Not only that, it had a real foodie vibe. Local Arctic ingredients – tick! Complementary use of imported food – tick! Vegetarian? Vegan? Yes to both. There it was, a truly international eating experience, tucked away on an island in a remote part of Norway.

The menu sounded great. The brunches or Frunches (the Norwegian word for breakfast being frokost) included the delicious sounding Challah Toast – “French toast made out of challah bread or brioche, brunost and mascarpone whipped cream, honey, roasted pears, pumpkin seeds and almonds.” and Banger Fritters – “Beetroot and ginger, smoked carrots, and crispy tofu.“

The dinner menu sounded good too. Butternut soup with fried butternut and crispy cabbage, poached halibut with cherry tomatoes, sugar buttons and saffron sauce, homemade rhubarb crumble.

And so this morning, I asked John if he would like to come out on an exploratory mission with me. Good as the café sounded, there was a chance it wouldn’t live up to expectations. I also wondered about price. The website didn’t say and it seemed liked the kind of upmarket place that would charge upmarket prices in a city in the UK. How expensive would the same experience be out on Senja?

It was a fair drive from home, so by the time we arrived, it was definitely approaching lunchtime. First impressions were good. Though it was empty, the surroundings were very pleasant: a mixture of clean blue walls and rustic wood that fitted well with the menu.

We had intended to drink coffee, check out the prices, and come back another day. We ordered coffees – a cappuccino for John and a latte for me. The waitress (I think she was Daniela, though I forgot to ask) brought our coffees very promptly. I explained we probably wouldn’t be eating today, but would like to see the menu. She brought them – printed on ordinary A4 paper – another good sign. A pre-printed menu doesn’t always indicate poor food, but if the chef is using local ingredients, which can vary from day to day, it’s much more likely the menu will vary as well.

To my pleasure, the prices didn’t seem any higher than they would have been in London. For Norway, they were normal. The coffee was wonderful too: well rounded and smooth, with no trace of bitterness. Within a couple of seconds, all my careful plans were abandoned. I asked John whether he would like to share the cheese platter, and he agreed he would.

The website had listed the team behind Senja Roasters as being from Spain, Finland, Germany, Russia, Australia and France, so I was hoping for a truly international selection and I was not disappointed. There was Manchego Ezequiel, imported directly from Spain, Chevre goats cheese, Norwegian Brie from Dovre Ysteri and Gorgonzola pikante defendi.

It was accompanied by homemade blueberry and onion jam and quince marmalade. There were warm, crusty bread rolls, salt biscuits and Norwegian flatbreads. It was a wonderful combination.

I asked Daniela a little about how long Roasters had been open. To my amazement, she told me that it had only opened last week. Like us, the team had felt that Senja was rather short on coffee shops, and rather than regretting, as I had done, they had decided to do something about it. Amazing to think that if Thomas and I had passed by only a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have made such a wonderful discovery.

As it is, we will definitely be going back. Today’s menu sounded delicious, and Daniela said it would continue until the end of this week. After that, there will be summer menus. I hope that the tourists, who flock to Senja in the summer, will discover Roasters. It is definitely worth a visit.