ElsieD

Tonight we were back at The Heritage Cafe for dinner. John wanted toutons so he had 2 toutons less a bite and mac and cheese which he enjoyed. I had pan fried cod with scruncheons, mashed potatoes, mixed carrots and peas a double helping of mustard pickles aND a bit of touton. It was all good. The fish was so fresh, moist and flaky. We did take a bite or two before I remembered to take a picture. For dessert we brought home a lemon square to bring home for later tonight. I spied a date square being delivered to someone's table so I got one to take with me and we will have it in the morning on the way to catch the ferry. I forgot to mention that the apple crumble cheesecake made up for the bad apple pie the day before. This is something I'm going to try to duplicate. I tried to worm the recipe out of them but no dice. The picture of the view is what you see from our table at The Heritage Cafe. Not too shabby. The other is of the food mentioned in this post, with a tea bag on the plate with the date square to give you an idea of the size.

Thank you. She did say to do this but I neglected to put that in my post. I have since corrected it. Yes, they sure are good. We are about to go there for dinner again (outside of the fact the food is good, it's the only decent place here) and I'm trying to think of an excuse for having another one. We leave Burin early in the morning to go to our next spot so won't have another chance. I had one last year that was very heavy and I did not care for it very much. Glad I took a chance and tried them again.

Did my description compare to how you do yours? I like the idea of frying the innards.

Yes, black bears. There may be others but the black bears were the ones specifically mentioned by the biologist at the Salmonier Nature Park.

I asked about making toutons at home. I was told that you use a regular white bread dough, and let it proof once. Then you cut off chunks of dough, 3 to 4 ounces each and gently form them into a ball. The dough will deflate a bit as you do this but you don't want to punch the dough down. You heat some neutral oil in a frying pan and put the dough in that. Fry gently until the underside is crispy then fry the othe side. Total cooking time is about 10 minutes and the dough will rise while it is cooking. The end result will be a very light bread, nice and crispy on the outside and hot all the way though. . Devour while hot.

Suzilightning, this is for you!

Sign along the highway.

Here is today's breakfast. John had the Newfoundland breakfast with an extra touton. Bologna is a staple item here and in the interests of this blog, that is what he had. He enjoyed it very much. I had, as you can see, an egg, a touton and what they call breakfast potatoes, pan fried with onions and red pepper. We ate it all. Those toutons are something else. Crispy exterior, soft, fluffy interior. The fry them up as they get an order. I can't wait to make them at home. Coffee for John, tea for me.

We are about to get started on our day with the first stop being The Heritage Cafe for toutons and, in my case, tea, coffee for John. We are going around "the boot" of the Burin Penninsula today. This is not a great distance which is a good thing as we are getting lots of wind today so want to be safely ensconced in our little efficiency unit when it starts. Wind gusts of 100 to 120 kph are expected and the warning is to watch out for tree limbs being broken off and to watch for loose objects flying through the air. As we were nearing the end of our drive down that barren stretch of highway yesterday, we came across a local craft store called The Tea Rose and stopped in to take a look. They have beautiful handcrafted items, all locally made. Here is a picture of my purchase - a pair of really soft wool (non acrylic) slippers, a snowman and a Christmas ornament of a lighthouse. The snowman is about a foot tall.

We found a nice little place for dinner called The Heritage Cafe. It is at the end of a local road in the outskirts of Burin, outskirts being a relative term. They had on their menu on few typical Newfoundland offerings. I have posted the menu below so you can have a look. I had the molasses baked beans, a fish cake with mustard pickles and a touton with syrup. Most people eat toutons with molasses but you could get syrup instead and since I was having molasses baked beans, I opted for the syrup. John had the turkey dinner. Everything is made from scratch. I sure enjoyed my meal. The fish cake was very light which was nice because they can often be dense. The beans were good too, but the toutons - oh my, that was special. Piping hot, dipped into the syrup, it was delicious. Less successful was John's turkey dinner. He said it was good but nothing special. For dessert, we opted for two pieces of apple crumble cheesecake but when they were brought out and we had a look at them, we decided to share one instead. That was one humongous piece. We got it to take out and will have it later. We both want more of those toutons and we non-breakfast folk are going there tomorrow for breakfast. Below are pictures of my dinner, john's dinner, dessert and the menu. I should also mention that it is the only non-pizza, non-McDonald's place in Burin, population about 2,500.

When I was here the very first time, my friend Wilson, at whose house we were staying, took my friend and I "troutin'" as they call it here. We went to a freshwater stream and there we tried to land something. We were there in the middle of the stream, in our waders. We didn't catch anything, but we sure had a great time. We were fishing for speckled trout. The water is pristine and if you are not looking at the ocean, you are looking at a cape, a pond, a lake or a stream. The Atlantic around here right now is, I'm told, around 5 or 6 degrees celcius.

Perhaps because this stretch of road is so "barren" the authorities saw fit to build a "rest stop" complete with antenna???

As mentioned above, restaurants can be scarce. We are driving through what a local called"the barrens" and this stretch of road, about 150 km doesn't have a thing on it other than lakes, ponds, rivers trees and rocks. Thankfully for lunch we had our emergency stash:

Tonight we are staying in Holyrood and had dinner at The Tea Garden. Lovely place, overlooking the water. I was still on the fullish side after our lunch so I only had seafood chowder and some garlic shrimp. Tonight the chowder had spuds in it. John had cod baked in a chili sauce with mashed potatoes, carrots, asparagus and spaghetti squash. It was all delicious and we are now in our rental sitting on an actual couch as opposed to beds and grateful for it, with a glass of wine at hand. Tomorrow we are going down the Burin Penninsula and will be staying in Burin for two nights.

A couple of random notes. Yesterday we tried to go to Mistaken Point Ecological reserve to look at fossils of the oldest complex life forms found anywhere on earth. Some of these are as old as 575 million years. We got there only to find out that they were taking reservations from Sept. 6th onwards, so there was no tour for us. My husband was particularly disappointed. Today we walked the boardwalk which takes you through the Salmonier Nature Park. It is here that wildlife that are injured to such an extent that they would not survive are brought here to live out their final days. We saw a number of different species, but a lot of them weren't exactly posing for pictures. I'm looking at you Mr. Red Fox, Mr. Moose, Madame Lynx, Mr. Peregrine Falcon and the Miss Snowshoe Hare. We did get some shots of some of the others and I've included a picture of a Snowy Owl and a couple of caribou. That was a really interesting place and it took us 1 1/2 hours to go around it. We got to talking to one of the biologists who told us a bunch of interesting stuff about the moose and caribou. The moose were introduced to Newfoundland in 1904. All 4 of them. Those 4 are responsible for the 110,000 that are on the island today. I know what you are all interested in first and foremost is the food. Places to eat here are not always easy to find. For lunch today 2 places were recommended, and one of the two not really. They were the only two places around where we were. Which is why we ended up eating lunch at the golf course. As I have mentioned before, in some places Newfoundland is very sparsely populated. Today we drove for half an hour down the only road going down the side of one peninsula and didn't see as much as one house let alone a restaurant. Then we went through a small community and for the next 15 or so minutes, didn't see a thing other than some VERY big potholes. So I can see that sometimes you feel pretty happy just to find a place to eat because the alternative ain't pretty. I just decided that I will also include a picture of a bakeapple (cloudberry) patch that we came across in the Nature Park. They were all over the place. But, they are still red which means they aren't ripe. They ripen to a yellow/gold colour. No bakeapples for me.

I watched this and I felt kind of sorry for them, but i'm sure that's because of the cuteness factor.

Perhaps I should have because I love aged cheddar cheese with apple pie. But I was so stuffed I wasn't sure i'd be able to eat the pie let alone with cheese. Reading chromedome's comment I may not have gotten it if I had asked. About the pie - it was the sad part of the meal. The crust was very thick and unpastry like and the apples were only very slightly cooked. I didn't touch the crust, and only had a bit of the apple. My husband had one bite of his and that was it for him. the rest of the meal was sure good, though. By the way, I also like cheddar on apple crumble. Actually, cheddar with apple anything, as long as it is an old cheddar.

Huiray, thanks for your post. The shrimp were hot when we got them and stayed hot because it took us just 18 seconds to eat them. Just kidding, but only about the 18 second part. I think I will assume that they were shell on. I don't know if they were seasoned with anything or not because of the sauce which reminded me somewhat of a sweet Thai chili sauce. Maybe I will try the shrimp head and tail on one day but I have never heard of them being served in a restaurant in my city.

An example of the scenery we are going through. (Still have Internet! ) On the highway picture, there is a Penninsula across the water which we will be travelling on tomorrow. It is the Burin Peninsula. The road picture also shows what shape the roads are in. One piece of highway was downright terrible.

A lot of today was spent driving back roads and Internet reception was spotty to non-existent. So this is quick post to tell you what we had for lunch. We had an appetizer of bam bam shrimp. They were delicious. We couldn't get an answer to our question and we have never eaten shrimp with the shell on, but these were deep fried and whatever was on the outside was shatteringly crisp, and didn't remind me of any batter coated shrimp. Can anyone tell me what shrimp deep fried with the shell on are like? This was followed by cod au gratin for me and fish and chips for John. The fries were bad, but the rest of the food was fairly good.

So on to dinner. The soup course is set and tonight it was cream of carrot. It was as smooth as silk, they obviously had put it through a sieve. It was served with a piping hot tea biscuit, and regular and roasted red pepper butter. This was followed by cod with homemade tartar sauce for me, while John had pork tenderloin with a balsamic glaze and a roasted granny smith apple stuffed with partridge berry. We had noted that a crab claw was available for an extra cost and we had asked for one but they are out of season. Both dishes were served with roasted garlic mashed potatoes and a sweet pepper/zucchini medley. We had some Pinot Grigio with this. They were generous with their pours as they were 8 oz. each. By the time we were finished with all that, and lunch having been not that much earlier, we were stuffed and decided to take dessert back to our room. We don't normally eat dessert but we do like something sweet before we go to bed. So, we each got a piece of apple pie. Since it has to sit around for a couple hours we just asked for it plain so doesn't look all that great. But I can say, that I am sitting on the bed typing this and that pie is about 15 feet away and I can smell the filling way over here, and it smells gooood!

Yes, that bottom picture shows the cod tongues. I couldn't stop oohing and aahing over those miniature boats and village. Some things are so strange here compared to what I am used to, and in a good way. That miniature setting and the folk art being two such examples.

Someone asked about the price of onions here and I can't seem to find the post. We were in a grocery store today so I had a look. A 2 pound bag of cooking onions cost $2.99. Red and Spanish were just a bit shy of $3 a pound. Red, orange and yellow peppers were $5.89 a pound.

I don't know what the coffee scene is like as it isn't something I go looking for. We have had some excellent coffee in two places - Rocket and Coffee Matters. Sorry I can't be more helpful.