If you can't pop to the seaside, you need to improvise...

(What I left behind - and I do like to be beside the seaside, beside the sea...)

Though I don't regret our coming to America for our big adventure, there are some things that Arizona just doesn't have. 

In fairness, I've been very pleasantly surprised by the things we can get that I thought we wouldn't be able to - salad cream, Heinz baked beans, decent tea, malteasers...there's even fish and chip shops here that aren't too bad.

And then there are the things that are easy to get in the UK that we can't buy here...but we can buy the things we need to make them! We're getting pretty good now at homemade onion bhajis (here's the recipe we use from Chef Jeena) and a whole variety of curries.

But there are still two big gaping holes we haven't managed to plug yet - Bovril and 'the seaside'.

Though we can get most British staples in speciality food shops (eg. World Market and Lee Lee Oriental Supermart), they don't sell Bovril...and Phoenix is a long, long, long away from the sea.

I remember watching a quiz show on telly not long after we arrived last November where a contestant was asked her greatest desire. She said she'd always wanted to see the sea - she had NEVER ever seen it, living smack bang in the middle of the United States. I couldn't believe it. How had she coped all her life?

I love the sea.

My early years were spent in Whitby, North Yorkshire, a picturesque maritime town, with a wonderful bustling harbour, cobbled streets, multi-coloured houses, highly vocal seagulls, the smell of the sea, seaweed, the world's greatest fish and chips......

Though I've lived inland for the rest of my life, you're never more than 70 miles away from the sea in the UK. And I don't think a year's ever gone by without at least one visit or summer holiday to the seaside.

But Phoenix is (allegedly) 3,541.19 miles from the closest seafront. Getting to the beautiful briney is no day trip...

So, feeling particularly homesick the other day (I was going to say seasick, but that's not right), I decided to improvise. It's about 7 miles to my nearest Long John Silver's:

Yep, it's an American slant on your local chippy...so it naturally has a drive-through:

and enough choice to totally baffle me...had I not just wanted fish and chips:

So I bought my 'fish combo' (2 pieces of fish, which tasted near enough haddocky and I choose to have 'original batter' rather than 'breaded', 2 Hushpuppies, which are deep fried battered cornbread balls...not at all like British hushpuppies; and chips....which though not chunky enough to be perfect, tasted the nearest thing I've had from an American fastfood restaurant to real chips yet....oh and a drink, a lemonade iceflow....a old-style lemonade taste slush puppy...and actually very, very nice).

And I brought it all home, put on my swimming costume, hit play on my ipod's 'sounds of the sea' relaxation playlist, took the wireless speaker into the back garden yard and ate my fish and chips in the pool without having to fight off any pesky seagulls...

It wasn't Whitby, Llandudno, the Isle of Wight, Seaton Carew, Bognor, Robin Hood's Bay etc etc...but for the land-locked desert, it wasn't bad.

Now I wonder how one makes Bovril...

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