by Ed Balls
INGREDIENTS
2 chicken breasts
2 tbsp fish sauce (for marinade)
1 lime
1 red or green bird’s eye chilli, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
1 stalk lemongrass, outer layer discarded and finely chopped
2cm piece of ginger, peeled and grated
200g French green beans
1 pre-prepared pack of stir-fry vegetables or a head of broccoli or 2 pak choi, big leaves chopped and smaller sliced
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp fish sauce
2 packs of wok-ready medium (or thick) noodles
Bunch of fresh coriander, finely chopped
METHOD
Chop the chicken into bite-sized pieces and marinade for half an hour with the fish sauce and the juice of half a lime.
Heat the oil in the wok, then add the chilli, garlic, lemongrass and ginger and fry for 2 minutes. Add the chicken and green beans and stir-fry for 5 minutes. Add the stir-fry vegetables/broccoli/pak choi and cook for 2 more minutes. Add the soy sauce, fish sauce, the juice from the other half of the lime and noodles and stir-fry for 3 more minutes. Stir in some fresh coriander, turn into a bowl and garnish with a sprinkle more of coriander.
9 HOLIDAY FARE
When I lost my seat in Parliament in May 2015, we had already booked a special post-election US summer road trip: a holiday in California, with a week in a 32-foot-long camper van – an ‘RV’, as the Americans call them – travelling between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Out of Parliament and out of work, I couldn’t wait to hit the road.
Holidays played a vital role for our family when Yvette and I were both in politics. They were an opportunity to get away from the Westminster whirlwind and say sorry to the kids for all those hectic months of late-night votes, endless phone calls and weekends spent campaigning. It was more of an escape if we left the UK – the more time zones away the better. And I was always happiest when the trip gave me the chance to do some proper outdoor cooking.
I realise now, looking back, that holidays for me have always been based around journeys – it’s what I inherited from my parents and have passed on to our kids. Of course, when our children were very young, arduous and itinerant holidays were initially too difficult. Instead, once my parents moved back to the UK in 2001 and settled on the north Norfolk coast, Yvette and I set about reliving our own childhood holidays. For me that meant returning to Sheringham: sandwiches on the beach, pitch and putt when it was cold and drizzling, regular trips to see the lifeboat, and fish and chips on the seafront in the evening sun – the only place on the east coast of England where, looking down the Wash, you can watch the sun set on the sea. Yvette’s childhood holidays were usually spent on the west Cumbrian coast, and every year we have travelled over to the Lake District to stay with her parents on a lovely small caravan site near Windermere, climbing up the fells and working up an appetite for Lakeland sticky toffee pudding.
As the children got a little older, we got our holidays back on the road, starting with car trips to Disneyland in Paris and the joys of the school holiday queues. I’ve spent more time queuing for the slow-moving Dumbo ride than I would ever choose and, unlike in America, the food was as dismal as it was overpriced. The hotel breakfasts each morning were an astonishingly brutal free-for-all of overexcited kids and parents desperate to make sure their offspring were stuffed with carbs before heading into the park. But with repetition comes experience. We learned that the key to a good Disneyland eating experience was to book a table at Cafe Mickey, just outside the main park. The food was still pricey, but worth it, especially because during the meal, Mickey, Minnie, Goofy and Pluto would come round the tables. That look of wonder on a four-year-old’s face as they are hugged by their Disney heroes for the first time is magical.
We realised over the years that France wasn’t very child-friendly when it came to eating out. We had one particularly bad experience in a Parisian brasserie where the promised Menu Enfant turned out not to be pasta or chicken nuggets but small portions of foie gras and snails. After that, on future trips, we opted for self-catering, staying on lots of caravan sites in different parts of France. As our political profiles grew, however, France was just too close to the goldfish bowl we lived in back home. On one occasion, with the children dawdling in a Calais children’s playground, I shouted gruffly that they needed to hurry up or they’d be making their own way home. ‘Watch it,’ the man standing next to me said, ‘that wouldn’t look good in the Mail.’ Trying to relax and get away from it all was hard enough without our fellow holiday-makers acting as freelance reporters!
Even worse was our experience with cruising. A few years earlier, just after the birth of our first child in 1999, my mum and dad had been enticed by Uncle Frank and Auntie Doreen into the world of cruising and we agreed to join them on a one-week Mediterranean trip with Costa Cruises, long before infamy and tragedy struck the Italian operator with the grounding of Concordia in 2012. The food was stupendous and just about everyone else on the cruise was Italian – almost all of them on their honeymoon. This, it turned out, was the tradition in southern Italy. After the wedding party, all the guests would come down to the dockside, the bride and groom would board the ship, and then, from the top deck, the bride would throw her bouquet down to the waiting bridesmaids below. It was an extraordinary spectacle, and made for an unforgettable journey, with the boat rocking at night even when the sea was completely calm. Our tiny daughter, then only eight weeks old, was captured on the honeymoon video of countless newly married Italian couples, usually being eagerly cradled by the bride.
When my parents persuaded us to go on our second – and last – cruise, eight years later in 2007 and this time with three children, it was a disaster, and not only because I was laid out for four days with a cruise ship bug. The food was bland and boring, and our fellow passengers weren’t Italian honeymooners but fellow Brits. Yvette and I were by then both Cabinet ministers, and after a day of having our every move watched, commented on and occasionally photographed, we spent the rest of the time in hats and dark glasses. For the kids, though, it was a dream come true, with the all-inclusive package meaning all-they-could-eat burgers, hot dogs and waffles all day long. Our six-year-old son couldn’t believe it. He was in heaven.
Cruises weren’t for me and Yvette, so we turned to train travel. I’d always wished I’d gone interrailing when I was a student, despite Yvette’s rather bleak tales of uncomfortable overnight journeys, dodgy food and running out of money. So, using a family interrailing pass, in the summer of 2014 we set off by train from St Pancras and travelled all the way through France, Germany and Italy to the Aegean. It was a memorable journey, but Salzburg in Austria was the highlight.
The people of Salzburg rightly celebrate their city as the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Tourists flock from all around the world to see where the young genius lived and wrote his great piano concertos, symphonies and operas. If they’re lucky, these visitors will dress up in their finest clothes, eat in one of Salzburg’s Michelin-starred restaurants, and then see Mozart’s Magic Flute or Barber of Seville performed in the ornate stone amphitheatre in the centre of the town.
However, Salzburg has an even greater claim to fame for families like mine – an even more vital place in our cultural history. Its fountains, amphitheatre, gardens, lake and nunnery evoke for us great songs of sadness, laughter, love and discovery, but not those written by Mozart. Because for me, Yvette and our children, Salzburg will forever be the location where The Sound of Music was filmed, making it the greatest holiday destination we ever visited.
I should explain from the outset that, if there is one thing that unites our family more than the enjoyment of food and the embarrassment at Dad’s latest TV ventures, it is the love of musical theatre. For myself, I trace that back to my childhood, when my mum would sing along to Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dre
amcoat. But I’d lost touch with modern musicals until my kids started performing in their own school versions, and we developed a shared love of West End favourites like Les Misérables, Matilda, Rent and Wicked.
Our all-time favourite, though, remains The Sound of Music, which we can sing off by heart, and in harmony, and which always makes me cry at exactly the same point – when Captain von Trapp hears his children filling their house with music for the first time since his wife died, instantly regrets his harshness towards them and their new governess, Maria, and ends up joining them in song. Love has returned to the house. It gets me every time.
Searching the internet, Yvette made an important – perhaps life-changing – discovery. A British tour company based in Salzburg was offering a ‘Sound of Music Musical Bicycle Tour’. She booked ten spots for us and the Smiths, the family we go away with every August. On the train to the city, Yvette declared that, if we were going to go for the Sound of Music experience, we’d better look the part, and brought out curtain material she’d ferried from London for us to turn into impromptu neckerchiefs, headscarves and lederhosen, just like the von Trapp children had done in the film. The train was crowded but everyone looked German or Austrian, and seemed happy enough to see these eccentric Brits with their sewing kits getting into the Bavarian look. Until, that is, a fellow passenger on the next table leaned over and said, in a deep Brummie accent, ‘We’re sorry you lost the general election. Hope you get back soon.’ I thanked him very much and resumed sewing buttons on my curtain-fabric lederhosen, feeling rather foolish.
Our embarrassment was quickly forgotten, however, when the tour commenced the next day. Each of us chose a bike and pulled on our costumes. Our guide had a boombox on which she played the appropriate song at every key spot in the town. We tripped through the Mirabell gardens, danced around the fountains in the main square, exercised in front of the big house by the lake, shook the gates of the locked nunnery and bounded through an alpine field, where the hills were indeed alive with the sound of music.
Interrailing was fun, but the opportunities for me to relive my Boy Scout days with a spot of outdoor cooking were limited. That’s why my favourite family holiday is the American campervan road trip – driving an RV through the US national parks from Utah to the Grand Canyon and up the West Coast. It’s just like camping, but, unlike a normal tent, the RV has bunk-beds for the kids and a double bed for the adults – Yvette’s kind of camping holiday.
I’ve driven these huge RVs up steep mountain roads and through Starbucks drive-ins, into supermarket carparks and up and down the famous urban hills of downtown San Francisco. I love America, and I particularly love the kind of good diner-style American food you can find on any road trip. I’m always horrified by the huge portions and excessive menu choice – or at least I always pretend to be. I love BBQ, but also the taste, spice and colours of the Mexican- and Spanish-influenced cooking of the southern America states, and I’ve come to love Cajun and south-western American recipes inspired by American TV chefs like Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay. On an RV holiday, there is nothing to beat a good, proper breakfast quesadilla as the sun glimpses through the pine trees high up in a rocky-mountain campsite. And every evening we BBQ and build campfires to scare off the bears.
Sadly, on that 2015 post-election trip, Yvette didn’t actually make it to our RV. Before getting the vans, we had decided to spend a few days at Lake Powell, a 200-mile-long man-made lake in the Rocky Mountains stretching way north from just east of Las Vegas. Along the sides of this huge lake are hundreds of inlets, mountain ravines flooded with water when a massive dam was completed in 1966, creating an incredible winding shoreline with a total distance equivalent to the whole length of the American West Coast. Despite its size, the lake can only be accessed from two entry points, south and north, where RV-style houseboats are available for rent, along with a small motorboat for exploring up the ravines. We had to stock up all our provisions before we boarded the boat and then travel off for our days of quiet, watery seclusion.
We had booked that holiday before the general election and before I lost my seat, hoping our holiday would be a chance to escape with the kids, who had put up with a lot; but once Yvette became a candidate in the leadership election which followed Ed Miliband’s departure, we knew we had a problem. She was torn between the family holiday we were all desperate for and her need to keep travelling the UK in the final weeks of her leadership campaign. She and Andy Burnham had agreed early in the campaign they would both cease campaigning for ten days in August so their respective families could have some time off, but by now Jeremy Corbyn was surging ahead. No sooner were we out on the lake than her campaign team were sending urgent messages wanting her back in Britain immediately, and the phone signal, miles from anywhere among the mountains on the Utah–Arizona border, was very bad. We were also eight hours behind the UK, which was usually a great asset on our August holidays; this time it meant Yvette continually felt a long way away from what was going on.
We decided that Yvette would have to fly home early that coming weekend. But until then, the only place we could reliably get any phone signal was right in the middle of the lake. So each morning, at 4 a.m. – noon in Britain – Yvette would wake me up, we’d climb on board the little motorboat and chug out into the middle of the lake. I then sat for an hour reading my book with the sun rising behind me, while Yvette talked over the day’s plans with her campaign team back in the UK. I’ve thought about those mornings a lot over the subsequent years when people ask me if I miss being in politics, and if I would ever want to go back. I’m not saying wild horses couldn’t drag me, but it might take a pretty big RV.
BREAKFAST QUESADILLAS
Serves 4
There’s nothing to beat the thrill of a quesadilla eaten outside in the garden, on a boat or in a mountain campsite. The base recipe here is for a breakfast quesadilla – scrambled egg and bacon and all the extras. But if you’re in a hurry, or tired, you can just roll all the ingredients in a warm tortilla and, bang, you have a breakfast burrito. They’re also great in the evening with prawns and mango – just add mango instead of tomatoes in the salsa and prawns in place of the bacon and egg. Or duck with plum sauce. Or goats’ cheese and chopped basil. Whatever you fancy.
Breakfast quesadillas work best when the spicy richness of the main filling is offset by cool tomato salsa, guacamole and sour cream. If you’re camping, you can make them in a frying pan, but at home I think the oven is much better, as you have more control. Whichever way you decide, just don’t overfill them or you will end up with a big mess to clean up!
INGREDIENTS
4 flour tortillas
Melted butter to grease and baste
4 rashers of bacon
4 eggs, scrambled with 1 tbsp butter and 1 tbsp milk, whole or semi-skimmed
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp red onion, peeled and finely chopped
3 tbsp Cheddar cheese, grated
2 tbsp fresh coriander, finely chopped
Cayenne pepper, to sprinkle
250ml sour cream
FOR THE TOMATO SALSA
300g small cherry tomatoes, chopped
½ red onion, peeled and finely chopped
1 tbsp green jalapeños, finely chopped (from a jar works best)
1 tbsp honey
1 lime, quartered to squeeze juice
½ tsp cayenne pepper
½ tsp salt
½ tsp ground black pepper
4 tbsp fresh coriander, finely chopped
FOR THE GUACAMOLE
2 ripe avocados, mashed
½ red onion, peeled and finely chopped
½ tbsp green jalapeños, finely chopped (fresh or from a jar)
Juice of half a lime
2 tbsp sour cream
¼ tsp cayenne pepper
¼ tsp salt
¼ tsp ground black pepper
2 tbsp finely chopped coriander
METHOD
Preheat the oven
to 180°C/350°F/gas mark 4 and lightly butter a baking sheet.
First make the tomato salsa and the guacamole – just combine all the ingredients for each in a bowl, mix well and leave to sit and intermingle.
Fry the bacon until it starts to crisp and then chop up into pieces. Make the scrambled eggs – put some butter in a pan, whisking the eggs with a tablespoon of milk and salt and pepper, and empty out into the hot pan and stir until they start to thicken nicely. Set aside.
Lay a flour tortilla on a board. Brush with butter. Place a tablespoon of scrambled egg and a tablespoon of tomato salsa in the centre of the tortilla. Sprinkle on some bacon and red onion with half a tablespoon of cheese and half a tablespoon of coriander. Fold over the tortilla to make a crescent shape, brush the top with butter and sprinkle on some cayenne. Don’t overfill or the contents will spill everywhere.
Repeat four times and put the completed tray in the oven for 10 minutes.
Allow the tortillas to cool a little, then cut in half and serve the oozing triangles with tablespoons of guacamole and sour cream and another tablespoon of tomato salsa.
BBQ SAUCES
I love to BBQ standing outside, beer in hand, at one with nature, shooting the breeze. It’s why I’ve always enjoyed the traditional American-style ‘long and slow’ BBQ where the fire is alongside the meat rather than directly underneath, and the meat cooks indirectly over many hours in the hot tangy smoke before being basted at the end in a special vinegary North Carolina pouring sauce. But slow-cooked BBQ isn’t always right, especially when the kids are hungry and you haven’t got twelve hours to spare. Then you just have light the coals, heat up the grill, toss on the sausages and get basting. The following are the two sauces I use all the time, and especially on holiday, one for more leisurely BBQs, the other with speed in mind.