Chinese Orkney Style

 Posted by Mark on Thursday, 29 October 2015

 

Witches Brew from Jerrys

On Friday night, whilst having our traditional end of the week ‘beer o’clock’ at the Flattie bar in Stromness we got chatting to the barman and one of the locals and it transpired that during the winter season the Hotel that is attached to the bar from time to time holds a ‘themed meal night’ and this Saturday evening it was going to be Chinese. Everyone in the bar spoke very highly of the quality of these meals and as we haven’t had a Chinese for about a year, although there are a couple of Chinese restaurants on the island, Anna and I thought it would be a great idea to give it a try. Unfortunately the evening was fully booked but they would give us a call if they had any cancelations.

The next day whilst driving into Kirkwall I got a call from the shop that had our new fridge freezer in storage for us. They had a customer who needed a replacement fridge freezer in a hurry as theirs had packed up and the shop wondered if they could sell ours and get us another one for next Friday. Of course we agreed as we were not quite ready to take delivery.

After doing what shopping we had to we headed back home and found a message on the home line from the Hotel, they had had a cancellation and so we could come to the Chinese Buffet meal that night. The night turned out to be great fun, we met quite a lot of people we knew, and it seemed to be very popular the food was delicious! Lots of it and you could keep helping yourself. We had a great night which was rounded off with some live music.

Previous to this bacchanalian feast, we had arranged to meet up with a couple that Anna had been chatting to via Facebook. They had moved up the same time as us and had rented one of the places we had seriously look at, ‘Green Kitchen House’ we had nicknamed it. We agreed to meet up in Julia’s for a coffee and it turned out that the couple were heavily involved in the Orkney Archaeology Society (OAS). The news was also broken to me that I had been nominated to the OAS committee, something that was suggested a while ago but as I hadn’t heard anything I just assumed that I had been ‘blackballed’. Apparently not.

They seem to ‘do’ Halloween big time here in Orkney, the shops are full of merchandise along with almost every shop doing a special themed display, when we popped into Gerri’s Ice Cream parlour the weekend she closes for the winter, she even had a couple of specials with a Halloween theme so I just had to treat ( or is that ‘trick or treat’ ) myself to a ‘Witches Brew’ – Orkney ice cream with green jelly, black sugar dust and lots of suitably shaped jelly pieces, yummy.