I love seeing new places but when I get to France it’s like my whole body heaves a sigh of relief. It just feels right. We had a wonderful weekend between my days of interviews and I will write more later. But in the meantime, check out the magic that I saw when I got to town last Wednesday:
It was very cold and miraculously clear, but there was mist sitting in some of the side streets. Amazing, non?
I barely remember the brief Glasgow trip, though it was only a week ago. I came down with a terrible cold just in time for my flight back to the UK after Thanksgiving (thanks, tin can of recycled air! Ah, air travel…) and spent the entire flight with my ears *killing* me thanks to the congestion and pressure. I flew through Amsterdam and got to Glasgow around noon on Sunday, but was feeling so wretched that I didn’t get to explore as much as I hoped. I did brave the rain for a couple hours to go find a drugstore and buy a travel alarm clock, so I passed along Buchanan St. and saw some young bagpipers (in kilts), which convinced me I was in the right city.
Glasgow presented an impressive but rather forbidding face to me:
But the people were lovely and the square where we were working summoned up all sorts of scenes from Victorian novels. (Especially in The Little Princess, when Sarah Crewe is watching The Big Family unload from their carriage across the square.)
After muddling through work despite the extremely congested head, my colleague and I ate a couple good dinners. Monday we ate at Two Fat Ladies, a seafood restaurant nearby that had recently won a Best of Glasgow award. I had a spicy tomato soup (good for the congestion!) and a delicious bowl of mussels. Tanya had an amazing plate of grilled sardines (they were enormous, about 5-6 inches long) and seared scallops. Yum! And a great little dining room, very friendly service, etc.
Our second night we went across town to the famous Ubiquitous Chip, an enormous place with several different dining options. We opted for the brasserie menu, and sat upstairs on a kind of catwalk overlooking the dining room.
I experimented, starting with rabbit liver (served with french toast and mushrooms):
…..Eh. Not a great texture. I’m used to the silkiness of fowl livers, and was a bit put off by how tough this was. May have been overcooked, though? Tanya had scallops again, which were excellent.
I followed that with an appetizer (but still enormous) portion of the house specialty, Vegetarian Haggis served with neeps and tatties:
The haggis was a little bland (it’s mostly lentils) but it grew on me. The turnips and potatoes were *delicious* and the whole thing was very good.
And that was that! A very quick visit, but I definitely want to go back to Scotland soon, with Ben. I want to see Edinburgh! I want to explore the countryside!
I know I haven’t been very food-focused lately, but it’s been a busy time! I had to share this photos, though, because they amuse me so much. When I got home from London the tree in front of our apartment was still glowing pure, bright yellow. It didn’t look like any leaves had fallen. On Friday, I took some photos:
So yellow! So many leaves! (It’s the back tree in question, not that already-bare front one.)
On Saturday we went downstairs and poof! All the leaves had fallen overnight!
London feels like it was three years ago already. I got in on Sunday morning and waited a long time to be able to leave my things in my hotel room. Then I spent the afternoon shopping, including a delightful hour or so at the Muji store on Oxford St. With the dollar so weak (so, so weak) I did limit myself, so not much exciting new stuff came home with me.
As the rain started to pick up I went to Fortnum & Mason to wander around in a daze, examining the gorgeous tins of tea (I couldn’t resist a luscious turquoise tin of Earl Grey for myself) and the many amazing things on offer downstairs in the food hall.
Not a clear photo but this a vacuum sealed package of quail eggs–Apériquail–with a packet of celery salt, ready to serve on your most elegant occasions!
Since I’m a self-sacrificing type, I also experimented with some of the famously-better British candy bars:
Mars
Toffee Crisp
The milk chocolate in the UK is indeed leagues better than the waxy stuff in the US, but I still don’t like it much. Dark chocolate for me!
I ate a take away pizza from a place that….only serves delivery, my first night. I walked over in the rain hoping to sit down and read somewhere besides my tiny hotel room, but no luck. In fact, I couldn’t find the place (it was unmarked, in a basement, since it’s only delivery!) and knocked on the locked door of a closed restaurant where two women were sanding down some church pews. Seriously:
They let me wait inside while the boys downstairs made my little pizza. After I left, balancing the pizza in one hand and my umbrella in the other I saw a dog outside a little shop, staring intently down the street. I followed its gaze and there was a fox, standing stock still on the sidewalk. It stood there long enough for me to get the dog’s owner to confirm that I wasn’t losing my mind, then trotted off down an alley. Weird night.
The next night I had extremely tasty dim sum with two co-workers. For lunch one day I had amazing Lebanese, also with co-workers. And my last night I went for Indian (had to!) and ate the word’s largest dosa, though I still don’t know quite what was in it. Whatever it was, it was spicy. Potatoes and lots of other stuff.
I also spent some happy between-work minutes wandering around Selfridge’s, which was two blocks from our office. Do you think the staff posed that wooden hand, or a customer?
I’m trying to play catch up a bit… I’m currently in Paris, where it is 1 a.m. Ben is joining me for the weekend tomorrow, and I’ve taken loads of photos, as one does, but I also have a pre-trip backlog. Namely Thanksgiving, which I did almost literally on the fly between trips. I had never roasted a turkey. The one time I roasted a chicken it was a disaster. But off we went!
I went to London the Saturday night before Thanksgiving, worked Monday-Wednesday, then flew back Wednesday afternoon. I got in around 7, we picked my brother Tom up from the airport, and headed home. Ben’s mom and brother joined us for a pasta dinner shortly after we got back (Ben, bless him, cooked), and I trotted off to bed soon after that.
Ben had done the shopping, using lists I’d pulled together on the fly from London. Naturally I’d forgotten lots of things since I wasn’t actually looking at recipes or, you know, spending more than 3 minutes thinking through what I needed to make Thanksgiving dinner. I did not discover any of the missing items until Thursday morning, when it was too late to do much about them (more on that in a moment).
Wednesday night after I went to bed, Ben and his mom made chocolate cream pie. In the morning, Ben made pumpkin pie, and we encountered some first-time-use glitches with the oven, so it took about two hours to get it cooked. Just as I started panicking, though, the oven fixed itself and behaved nicely while I baked the turkey. Meanwhile I realized I was missing shallots (for the beans), parsley (for the stuffing, oh well), celery (also for the stuffing), carrots (for stock and around the turkey), and, for the stuffing, of course….Bread. I meant to get a bag of those croutons that are already all dried out, because this was The Thanksgiving For Shortcuts.
Hmm.
What can you do at 11 a.m. on Thanksgiving? No grocery stores were open. Eventually Tom went to 7-11 and purchased two snack containers of baby carrots and celery, and a loaf of Pepperidge Farm white bread. He cut that up into small pieces and I toasted it as hard as I could without browning it. Meanwhile I prepped the lovely turkey, a little 13-pounder, that we’d gotten from Trader Joe’s. He was pre-brined, so I just had to remove the giblets, etc., give him a nice butter/salt/pepper massage, and slide him into the oven (breast down to start, per Bittman).
I started a stock that never came to anything, and over the course of the morning/afternoon I made the stuffing (dressing, I guess, since I cook it out of the bird), cranberry sauce, and Ben and Tom made a hectare of mashed potatoes. Tom blanched beans, which he later dressed with lemon and olive oil, since we didn’t have shallots. I nearly forgot to make the cauliflower soup that I wanted to start with, but I did that right before we ate. The brined turkey gave of lots of nice drippings and Bittman has you put veggies and broth in the pan, so there was plenty of juice. I used his method, which involves boiling down the drippings and adding cornstarch (dissolved in water) to thicken if needed. This had the benefit of being simpler than a roux, with fewer lumps, and also being gluten-free, so Christy could eat it. She said she hadn’t had gravy in years!
The feast:
First of all, Mr. Turkey. He was fantastic!! Combined with the brine, Bittman’s Start Breast Down and Flip method worked great (he says this maxes out around 10 pounds, but the guys managed to flip our 13-pounder, though I was not around when they did it so who knows…) and the white meat was very juicy. Hurray!
Before the turkey, though, we had soup:
Then the good stuff:
Followed (many hours later) by pies, courtesy of Ben!
It was the last meal at our patched together little table/kitchen table combo:
Because the next day our long back-ordered table came in, and the guys brought it home!
When my mom was in town at the end of October, we spent a day shopping on Newbury Street, and at one point we revived ourselves with a quick pizza and salad at Sonsie, a restaurant that has been there at least since I was in college. The pizza was really good (much better than I expected): Several tasty cheeses topped with butternut squash and walnuts. I later recreated it using some of the leftover delicata squash we had cooked.
Note the blackened walnuts on the lower right:
The old stove went to 600 not including the broil setting–it was nuts. And, um, walnuts cook fast.
The pizza was really good, but not quite as good as the restaurant one. The delicata isn’t very sweet, which I love when it’s a side dish. But in this you want the sweet squash to contrast with the bitterness of the hazelnuts and the richness of the cheese. I’ll try it again with some butternut, maybe. The textures are great and I really liked that sweet/bitter interplay so I want to play around more. (It’s a nice riff on the usual butternut squash or pumpkin ravioli topped with browned butter and walnuts.)
Will post Thanksgiving, etc., but tonight I head back to Europe–Glasgow, Paris and Lyon–and won’t be back in the states until 12/6. I do have loads of photos uploaded and ready to post, though…
I am off on a couple weeks of work travel… I have a backlog of things to post and hopefully will work my way through them at the various hotels. For tonight, I’m headed to London, please think Smooth-Travel thoughts in my direction!
(The Temporary Waterloo Bridge, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, 1938)
Almost two weeks ago we were home for the weekend, without guests or a trip, for the first time since…. Hmm, early September. There was a crazy storm on Saturday, which I was excited to see forecast since Ben had studying to do and I wanted nothing so much as an excuse to laze around all day. Friday I got a delivery of a lovely loaf of challah from a guy in the office, and I stopped after work to pick up essential groceries so we wouldn’t have to go outside all day.
Witness, a perfect day (half of the Sunday NY Times comes Saturday, so we had that handy!):
I wandered out to the dining room around 9:30, greeted by steaming steel-cut oatmeal cooked by Ben, who is the Oatmeal Master. His other areas of expertise: brownies, chocolate chip cookies, and pancakes. I’m not going to argue with that skill set!
After a very leisurely breakfast we retired to the living room and lit a fire, which we kept going all day. It was a violent storm, extremely windy with sheets of rain and dramatic whipping-about of all the trees.
When we got hungry for a little lunch, I got out the naan I’d bought the night before, drizzled them with olive oil, and topped Ben’s with goat cheese and mine with ricotta salata and leftover beets, and heated them up:
Later there was mint tea (I love the Trader Joe’s brand):
And through the day, the fire and my annual re-read of Pride & Prejudice. What could be better?
We were supposed to go to a party that night but we didn’t end up heading out into the rain. A friend from b-school came over and we had a casual pasta dinner. So cozy! As much as I envy the outdoor living thing you can do in Southern CA, I could never give up late fall/winter days.
Ben ordered the new stove, and we’re thinking about hoods; scary and exciting stuff. Here’s what we’re thinking:
Hood: We need a recirculating hood because drilling through to the outside for ventilation will be a nightmare. Not sure what to do yet.
Stove: I saw the white enamel Viking in Domino at least a year ago and flagged the page, never imagining I might actually have a place to put it. Over the summer I saw it in person at the kitchen showroom where E worked. Stunning. Supposedly it is coming Friday! We will see if the plumber can actually detach our old stove in time, and come hook up the new one. Sadly, I leave for London Saturday night so I won’t get to play with the new stove much at all. (The photo is of the 36″ version–we’re getting the 30″, which will free up some space on that side of the room.)
I have ordered a bunch of prints over the last couple months (for all over the house), and when the last one arrives I will start thinking about how to frame them. I mocked these up at Frames by Mail… I’m thinking these first two, with some other stuff, would be good in the kitchen:
Amy Ross, Manshroom
Keep Calm, Tea
I adore Etsy artist Sk8ordiehard, and I’ve been eyeing her Fungi poster for many moons. But the bright colors definitely send things in a different direction than those mellow browns. Hmmmm.
I already have those first two prints (well, “Tea” is on its way), but they could live in other places in the Funghi poster seems like a better fit in the kitchen. What do you think?
