11 knife point muggings

Gentle readers if you are of a fainting disposition avert your tender eyes. But if you are made of more finely tempered steel - holy shit! SB was out for a run today on a local rail trail and was flagged down by a couple of bobbies, who told her that there'd been 11 knife point muggings of solo females on the trail in the LAST WEEK. SB says, "that sucks". Hmmm. Perhaps I should buy her a Michael Vick pit bull for company.

In other news, my friend Mark Vinson (rhymes with "Prince Valiant") has sent me a mouth-watering depiction of a recent decent into the deepest depths of culinary ecstasy:

"I too had some fine food lately. Today I had grilled cheese sandwiches. All six were fabulous. I started with day old wonder bread, spread some inexpensive margarine on it, then added two slices of processed American cheese. I grilled them all to perfection in a Wal-Mart pan. Sometimes I get in too much of a rush at the start and heat the pan too quickly and then have to reduce the heat half way through the process. This means I burn the first couple and the last few are soggy. Not today though."

Mark is the ruler of the buglab at USU and is impervious to cold and is able to eat three steaks as large as your arm in one sitting. He also looooves Choco Tacos.

This past weekend we went to a benefit concert in Eaton (small town near Oxford) where two of my coworkers played in a totally sweet band called Frank-a-delic. They do a great ska version of anarchy by the sex pistols. We stopped into a local McDonalds and I had some fries and a shake, purely for anthropological purposes. As always, tasted like decay and frothy incandescent doom.

Then on Sunday we hooked up with my colleague Hieke and her husband Felix and wee Peter. Felix and Peter both have great hair. Part of London was shut down for a cycling festival - it was fun but a bit mobbed - lots of carnage with the little tykes careening into the barriers, just like Abdujaporov in the TDF back in the day. Heike treated us to lunch at Gaby's falafel stand near the National Portrait Gallery. Great! Huge falafel balls, well fried, coarse nubbly texture. We then went into the NPG but got bored quickly and had some tea. That night we ate at Sosta here in Crouch End using the tastelondon card (2 for 1) and it was good - just like Le Nonne in Logan, only twice as expensive. SB had a guinea fowl breast stuffed with parma ham and spinach - ooooo and on a cauliflower & broccoli mash.

And finally - joyous tiding - our local convenience store has responded to my request and now carries the caramel digestives.

And finally - this was the rice and beans from a few nights away ago. Spicy!

Cookie vomit

Obviously we've been taking it easy this weekend. I have time to post twice. But given the shocking nature of the upcoming post, my one or two readers will no doubt be grateful.

We went out for a walk on High Street (not high street, which is like saying main street). We walked by a desultory looking bakery, but one cookie caught my eye. It reminded me of these cookies you could get in Aidone, in Sicily, in 1989, in a small bakery one street off the piazza. I spent the summer there doing archaeology, drinking Peroni, eating gelato, and dying for these cookies, which were available intermittently. Oval in shape, the size of three unshelled walnuts, chewy, slightly boozy ... made, looking back with my cranium full of cooking knowledge, with great heavings of butter, raw almonds (probably), coarse sugar, a quick blizzard of lemon zest, maybe a dribble of vanilla, and then doused with powdered sugar, allowed to cool and rolled in sugar again, the baker like a pig rooting for a tasty corn cob at the bottom of the mud pile. So good, I've never forgotten them. Different than Greek Wedding Cookies, which I know how to make, but are more dry fading to melting in the mouth.

And the bakers daughter was hot, I tell you, hot! Sicilian women are gorgeous. So many stories from that summer, but for now I will confine myself to cookies.

This cookie from the modern era, on High Street, looked a bit like the one I loved. We walked in, I ordered one, took it out to the street, and took a small bite ... rancid animal fat, powdery texture like drywall dust mixed with small ball bearings, staleness like die hard 3 ... I spit it out on the sidewalk, hurled the bag down in the middle of the intersection, and jumped up and down on it, a madman in a cloud of sugar long since robbed of any sweetness by the cruel witherings of the eons. The taste lingered for years, death on the tongue, horrible putrescence.

Tonight I made lovely garbanzo beans with brown rice topped with a spicy green bean and caramelized shallot whateverthehellyoucallit.

Food tour

We spent most of Saturday cycling around the city, checking out various eating options. First, we rode from Crouch End (also pronounceable as "Crouchend", with a fake French accent) over to London Fields, to meet my colleague Heike and her 2 1/2 year old son Peter. I saw Heike along the bike path in London Fields and stopped perhaps a bit too quickly and SB almost ran into me. A lively start to the day.

We browsed through the Broadway Market between London Fields and Regents Canal. I quite liked it. Seemed far less precious than Spitalfields and less crowded than Borough Market. We picked up a loaf of sourdough from DeGustibus and 100 g of Montgomery Cheddar. The bread had a good flavor, but was a touch underbaked and no crust to speak of. Also, it'd been baked too close to the other loaves so the sides were undercooked. Peter got a small cement mixer.

Then it was off to E Pellicci, where we enjoyed what was surely the finest meal we've had in London. Pellicci is an old Italian cafe (caff here) with glorious inlaid wood paneling, a mousetrap sized dining room, and excellent standard English breakfast. I had Lasagna - sauce was a bolognese - bechamel mix. The dessert was eh but the overall experience, fantastic. Must go back.

From Pellicci we rode through the city over to St Pauls, across the Bridge to the Tate Modern - quick natural break there - then a quite slow meandering ride to the Old Post Office Bakery (http://www.oldpostofficebakery.co.uk/) in Clapham. On the way we stopped at a knitting shop near Waterloo. There was a French street Market. Odd.

Anyway the Old Post reminded me very much of Rising Sun Bakery in Charlottesville. I worked there for two years at UVA. Small, run by hippies, very good quality. We had a checkerboard shortbread cookie and went back for a poppyseed version. Checkerboard cookies are a pain in the ass to make. You have to roll out thin sheets of contrasting dough, chill, stack, cut, restack, chill, cut, and bake. Old Post did all these steps, but seemingly refused to let things come out too rectangular - so it ended up looking like a chuck close cookie. Picked up a tiny rye loaf. SB hates rye, but they were out of everything else. The cappucino at the Portugese market across the street was bilgewater.

Then off to the Lighthouse Bakery on Northcote Street. Closed, and seemingly permanently. Northcote, though, full of hipster leaning establishments and Italian meat shops. SB is currently mad for cupcakes and we picked one up from a vendor. Mmm. Mmm.

From there we rode across Batersea Bridge into Chelsea, where SB was politely lectured by a woman on the operation of pedestrian walk/don't walk signals on traffic lights. This is the flip side of the public loutishness described in the earlier post - a strong urge to hector strangers on their behavior. The British dipole, either end of which would be totally unfathomable to most across the briney.

I navigated us back through Hyde Park and we checked out this year's pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery - this one by Frank Gehry. Spectacular. It reminded me a Frank Gehry creation.

Then back through more well-troden parts of London to Crouch End. The last part of these rides always a bit of a grind. I made grilled cheese sandwiches with the rye and cheddar. Should've added a bit of salt. Drank a czech bud and read for a while.

Public biliousness

The UK and the US are so similar in so many ways that the more subtle differences only come out after quite some time. This being quite different than India, where one is more readily confronted by cultural differences, such as people pooping in the streets or camels and donkeys traveling on the superhighways.

Here, traditional British society is reserved, quiet, perhaps a bit dour, etc. This being quite different than the states, where on the surface people seem to be a bit more freespoken. Here in the UK, on the other hand, there is a nearly constant effluvium of people seemingly at the bursting point of rage or other forms of public dissonance. I was inclined to chalk this up to happenstance, being in a real city, etc. until I picked up "Kitchen Con" by Trevor White. He spends an entire chapter describing how vicious, biting, and destructive the UK food critics are and how comparatively meek the US critics are. This is undoubtedly true, and it translates into many areas of life here (thankfully not to my colleagues at work, as far as I can tell). I think that a high level of very public disagreement, argument, yelling, rudeness, and general loutishness is expected and perhaps encouraged.

It's doubly weird because if this same level of behavior was going on in the states, you would expect someone to pull a gun and for things to escalate in a hail of lead. Here, at some point someone backs down, and life proceeds as usual.

Also, the Crunchy Bar is fantastic candy and the digestive with chocolate and caramel is spectacular.

In other news, we went to Bath last weekend and had a fine time there with much oohing over the Cotswold scenery, which we viewed by velocipede. Bath is well known for hot smelly water, naked Romans, leprosy, soft stone, Jane Austin, a fleeting time of among-class mixing, an abbey built over the bones of a cathedral, angels on ladders, and a population of wretched three-chord street musicians surely well past the carrying capacity of far larger towns.

What else. I went to a sea level rise meeting and learned a great deal of science. The coffee wasn't fit for the pigs but the tea was drinkable. One day I had a nice toasted sandwich with red peppers, red onion, pesto, and cheese.