Oh the irony of all! On the weekend during which the question I - and many other Maltese living in London - have been asking for years (where can I find pastizzi?) was finally answered (at the Brunswick Centre Food Farmers Market on Saturday morning, or visit www.ilovepastizzi.com) I end up getting the worst case of indigestion ever due to - you guessed it - eating too many pastizzi, though, I hasten to add, they were not bought at the aforementioned stall. I did eat a massive amount of them, I have to admit. Fourteen actually, 10 of them in practically one sitting. Add to them two packets of galletti, a bag of biskuttini tar-raħal (the ones with icing) and - wait for it - 18 fried ravjul. By Sunday night I was in bed crying. I actually had to spend the night on the sofa - with a hot water bottle round my waist - where I must have drifted off at about 3 a.m. only to be woken up a couple of hours later by the news of the Lehman Brothers' collapse. Never mind London Fashion Week. If there ever was a case of "Don't leave the house under any circumstances," Monday morning was it.
All this food was acquired on Saturday morning when I joined a group of friends to go to Malta Day at Westminster Hall. Earlier in the week, at a barbecue birthday celebration, one of the party mentioned it and we all thought we'd turn it into an outing. The excitement mounted during the week, as news of Kinnie, pastizzi, ġbejniet and a whole mouthwatering, artery-blocking list of all the things that we miss about Malta started to trickle in. Having not visited the island for a whole summer, you can imagine how that felt!
None of us really knew what to expect, so during the 10-minute walk to the venue, we conjured up all sorts of colourful (read twisted) possibilities, so it was almost disappointing to walk in on what at first sight could have been mistaken for an ordinary village fête - only much, much louder. I could see the face of the English man among us grimace as the sound hit his ear drums. ("If these people were English," my friend later shouted into my ear, "you would only have a murmur.") This was no ordinary noise. This was full on Maltese noise. It did not help that the room had awful acoustics. Neither did the din emanating from the badly dressed teenagers singing and dancing to a crowd best described as disinterested.
It was pure Maltese chaos - in a comforting kind of way, not a bad one. Children ran around screaming and shouting, while their mothers queuing to get food, their eyes scanning the room keeping track on them as they continued to add to the chaos, and men standing around chatting, completely oblivious to what is going on. A few groups of "studenty" types were scattered around the room but it wasn't what you'd call a young crowd. I wouldn't say it would make a foreigner intending to visit rush out and buy a ticket either, but that wasn't the point of the event. It seemed more like an opportunity for Maltese people to get together, in which case, it achieved what it set out to do, although there is plenty of room for improvement.
Needless to say, I got a bit carried away at the stalls, and ended up going home - by bus, since the Victoria line was down again because of these never-ending works being carried out - carrying two bags brimming with goodies which include two dozen frozen pastizzi and a bag of about fifty dozen ravjul (just to give you an idea of the weight I was carrying). I made loose plans with the boys to meet up later for a drink, "loose" being the operative word there, since I knew that once the oven was on and those little pea-filled babies going, there was very little that would get me out of the house.
And that is how, a day and a half later, I ended up in the agony I was in. As the X-Factor led to yet another Almodovar movie (Carne Tremula, for some reason I had a Maltese connection to it in my head, but I was wrong) I scoffed my way through half the contents of that stall, all the way through breakfast, lunch and tea, by which time I knew that something was wrong. Flatmate had a bit, but she didn't seem very impressed by any of it - all the better, I thought.
It will be some time now before I visit the stand in the Brunswick Centre. My stomach is still traumatised by the whole event. In fact there's still another dozen uncooked pastizzi lurking around in the freezer somewhere, and I still can't get myself to open it.
All this food was acquired on Saturday morning when I joined a group of friends to go to Malta Day at Westminster Hall. Earlier in the week, at a barbecue birthday celebration, one of the party mentioned it and we all thought we'd turn it into an outing. The excitement mounted during the week, as news of Kinnie, pastizzi, ġbejniet and a whole mouthwatering, artery-blocking list of all the things that we miss about Malta started to trickle in. Having not visited the island for a whole summer, you can imagine how that felt!
None of us really knew what to expect, so during the 10-minute walk to the venue, we conjured up all sorts of colourful (read twisted) possibilities, so it was almost disappointing to walk in on what at first sight could have been mistaken for an ordinary village fête - only much, much louder. I could see the face of the English man among us grimace as the sound hit his ear drums. ("If these people were English," my friend later shouted into my ear, "you would only have a murmur.") This was no ordinary noise. This was full on Maltese noise. It did not help that the room had awful acoustics. Neither did the din emanating from the badly dressed teenagers singing and dancing to a crowd best described as disinterested.
It was pure Maltese chaos - in a comforting kind of way, not a bad one. Children ran around screaming and shouting, while their mothers queuing to get food, their eyes scanning the room keeping track on them as they continued to add to the chaos, and men standing around chatting, completely oblivious to what is going on. A few groups of "studenty" types were scattered around the room but it wasn't what you'd call a young crowd. I wouldn't say it would make a foreigner intending to visit rush out and buy a ticket either, but that wasn't the point of the event. It seemed more like an opportunity for Maltese people to get together, in which case, it achieved what it set out to do, although there is plenty of room for improvement.
Needless to say, I got a bit carried away at the stalls, and ended up going home - by bus, since the Victoria line was down again because of these never-ending works being carried out - carrying two bags brimming with goodies which include two dozen frozen pastizzi and a bag of about fifty dozen ravjul (just to give you an idea of the weight I was carrying). I made loose plans with the boys to meet up later for a drink, "loose" being the operative word there, since I knew that once the oven was on and those little pea-filled babies going, there was very little that would get me out of the house.
And that is how, a day and a half later, I ended up in the agony I was in. As the X-Factor led to yet another Almodovar movie (Carne Tremula, for some reason I had a Maltese connection to it in my head, but I was wrong) I scoffed my way through half the contents of that stall, all the way through breakfast, lunch and tea, by which time I knew that something was wrong. Flatmate had a bit, but she didn't seem very impressed by any of it - all the better, I thought.
It will be some time now before I visit the stand in the Brunswick Centre. My stomach is still traumatised by the whole event. In fact there's still another dozen uncooked pastizzi lurking around in the freezer somewhere, and I still can't get myself to open it.