tonight was thai red chicken curry.

with lots of lime and ginger.

visually busy.

My boyfriend split up with me, I moved out of his house, I moved in with my mum again for a bit, I lost my job, I ate a lot of nice food and took photos of it. I'm happy anyway, change is exciting, always.
poached eggs (from my grannys chickens) with soda bread and butter and steamed asparagus.

our fruit bowl.

smoked trout and blueberry salad

beetroot juice

trouts marinating in grapefruit juice just a couple of hours fresh from being caught.

tropical trout, overdone rice and yummy papaya and white wine sauce.

flying

bad at updating this blog the last couple of weeks because I have been.

• celebrating my birthday.
• visiting my best friend in Norway.
• lazy/ill.

I have photos thats are not on the internet yet so I will upload them and post about foooood and tings when they are because I am still lazy and a little ill.

spicy coq au vin from a crazy?

Friday night I walked all the way from Chiswick to Notting hill. I was bored and it felt like a good idea. I saw some very big houses and on the way back a young pretty black girl with a wonky afro waved and me and said "hello, hello", I did the same back and she stopped. She told me that she hadn't seen me in years so I told her I didn't know her (sometimes I pretend back that I know them but maybe that's a bit mean? I didn't do it this time anyway) and she said yeah but we were all humans anyway. We chatted for a bit and she told me that I looked like a crazy like her too and then we had a hug and I gave her my flower (a daffodil) and she said, "don't you end up crazy and homeless like me ok".

Photobucket" border="0">

Saturday was boring and the only exciting thing was drawing a bunny on a t-shirt and painting some of it brown and then I had some mango sorbet in a scooped out orange half. I would like to have taken a photo but there are no batteries for the digital camera and we couldn't afford them after I spent all the money on fish and chips and fabric paint and plasticine. The plaice I had sucked, cod is the tastiest but I feel guilt when eating it because it is over farmed and going extinct?

Sunday I made my first ever coq au vin. It was okay. I found a 'quick coq au vin' recipe on the bbc website and followed it loosely. I couldn't afford olive oil so I had to use what we had which was chilli infused olive oil and I fried a yellow and red pepper, half an onion and some mushrooms in that. We struggled with the two chicken leg portions I had got and spent a long time trying to rip and cut the flesh from the bone and then threw it in the pan 'til it was a bit golden (I covered it in cayenne pepper for no good reason) and poured in a mini bottle of cotes du rhone. I watched it while it sizzled and finished of the last dribbles of wine from the bottle, I tried a spoonful and it was far too spicy and not thick enough so I put lots of creme fraiche in it and served. We had it with boiled buttery potatoes and it was yummy I loved all the wine soaked fatty chicken but it was still a bit spicy, I want to make it properly next time.

the trocadero.

My friend Zoniel has been in Thailand for two weeks doing fasting and collecting coral from the beach and changing her hair. Zoniel usually has beautiful flame red hair but now she has dyed it a beautiful honey blonde. It looks really different but it still looks great and different. change is exciting anyway. I used to change my hair colour on an almost weekly basis (orange, green black, blue, pink, sliver, etc) and now I'm scared to do it in case it doesn't look right.
Zoniel runs a night with some friends at a club called st moritz in soho on Wednesdays, so she was there on Wednesday and drank and stayed up all night with people and then carried on drinking with Tom Beard around Soho throughout the day on Thursday before I went and met them in some pub on Berwick street. Tom beard has curly hair and dresses like a farmer and is friends with some people that I think are losers but that's okay because he has some kind of magic about him.
Zoniel is in this picture with the ginger hair and I am the one screaming (I do not know how to make a good photoface so I often just open my mouth big).


I had a Magners (I am glad that Magners has changed London into a largely cider drinking city) in there and tried to listen to them talking over the top of loud music and lots of loud people. I don't think that it matters that I couldn't hear much of what they were saying as sleep deprived drunk people usually just talk like loonies anyway. We went from the pub on Berwick street to Yo Sushi on Rupert street. I should stop going back to Yo! really because each time I love it a little less, especially since the firecracker rice went up from £1.50 to £2. It is delicious sticky fried rice with vegetables but it is a pretty tiny portion and there is nothing exciting about it enough to warrant charging two pounds for it. Zoniel poured the soy sauce into our dishes for it and it spilled all over the counter, oh that drunken soy sauce! I had three yasai gyoza (vegetable dumplings) with a dipping sauce, 2 crispy salmon skin ISO rolls, some smoked salmon rolls with cream cheese and cucumber and one of Zoniel's avocado maki rolls. We had to order them all because it seems that they have stopped putting the cheaper stuff on the conveyor belt. It's not bad food, it just seems to taste worse with each visit (I still go back though, it's tasty enough and easy and feels like it's cheap even when it isn't) but maybe that's because since I first started going there (3 years ago when I worked at the odeon and would eat my lunch there every single day) eaten superior yasai gyoza, sake nigiri, avocado maki rolls and stuff.

Since they had spent a large portion of their day already bowling at the Trocadero I was quite jealous and they were keen to go back so that was our next stop. We played pool (me and Zoniel versus Tom, he won) and they ordered an apple shisha. Being inside the Trocadero feels like being on holiday in a foreign country, it all feels much noisier and brighter and different to the London that I am used to. I guess we just stepped into another of London's worlds.
The trocadero....

When you go to the bowling bit to book a lane they give you this funny little black disc kind of thing with little red lights on it and then when your lane is ready it vibrates. This made me feel more like we were on another planet than just another country. The bowling shoes are the ugliest I've seen yet in any bowling lane and made my feet look like cartoon feet. I got a couple of full strikes but mostly I threw the ball and it careered off to the side of the lane and hit nothing. I reckon I could have got full strikes every time if I had the guts to take a run up every time and used the lighter pink balls, but I was scared of slipping and falling over and there was not a pink ball to hand every time. I think Zoniel won. The highlight of the bowling (more so than my full strikes even?) was how amazing my glow in the dark rib t-shirt looked in the crazy uv blue lighting they had in there. I GLOWED.


Tom has a friend called Coz (who is okay, not one of the previously mentioned losers) and his little brother has a band who were playing at Nambucca (this pub I used to live above) and Tom had promised to go and see them and the only way to get there in time was to take a taxi. He didn't have the funds so we went to the golden nugget casino, which Tom and Zoniel had signed up to be members of earlier, so that he could win the funds for a taxi. The man who took my bag and made me look into some camera had the funniest looking face that was big and fake tanned and he had funny looking wig-hair too. Smarmy faced. I told Tom before we got upstairs that I had a good feeling about the number 32. We went to the roulette table and he put a chip on 32, it won nothing so he put it on odds next and won some then I told him to try the 32 again but he didn't, the ball landed on the 32. For me this is proof that I should probably give up my job and become a professional gambler, I am halfway to being a psychic maybe. He won £14 which is enough to get a taxi from the west end to Holloway and like a strong man he stopped there and we left and I parted ways with them to go home and sleep.

the world cheese awards

wooo hoooo, they are coming soon.
18th -21st March in fact.
Except that it seems unless you are in the food business or working helping to judge the cheese awards you can't go? Maybe I am wrong, I hope so. It is my birthday on the 21st of March and it would be a perfect birthday treat to go to the world cheese awards.

m&s cheese and pimp my snack.

At the moment (I say at the moment but it could be a permanent thing, I just don't know) they have 99p cheeses in Marks and Spencers so I bought a delicious creamy lemony soft goats cheese from there the other day which got finished in a few hours and some manchego which tastes likes toffee.
I used to work in a shop called La Fromagerie in Highbury and I've tasted many manchegos and I don't believe I've tasted one yet as good as the ones that they sell. Especially good with some quince paste (also known as Membrillo). I found this picture of some manchego and quince on epicurious.com.
Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting" border="0">

Also this week someone showed me this great website called pimpmysnack.com where people make massive versions of small snacks, basically.
My current favourite is the massive fruit pastille ice lolly.
Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting" border="0">

coaches

This is how my weekend went.

Friday - went to my mums house. I was tired and starving when I got there and I put my mum in a bad mood in the car but I forget how I did it. We got back and my little brother (Joshua, 15) had completely forgotten to stir or keep an eye on the chill which was burnt. He had been drawing a storyboard for a plasticine animation that he is going to make, my mum forgave him because he had been doing something creative and not watching TV.

I had to wait for 30 minutes in agony from being so hungry with nothing to eat in the house until the chili was served. it was alright but the rice was overly sticky and not very nice, she made a delicious houmous which I just smeared over everything to make it taste better. The best thing my mum cooks is stew with dumplings and as I don't visit very often I would like it if she made it every time I came down to see her.



Saturday - I got the coach to see my friend Theodora in Cambridge. It was a beautiful coach journey and the late afternoon sun was making London look golden. It is so nice just to get out of London sometimes and go past fields and big pylons. Also the moon was big and full and low and playing some kind of funny game with the clouds so I spent a lot of my journey just giggling at it.

My cowboy boot has a big hole in it and the streets in Cambridge were wet so I had to do this funny thing with my foot when we walked up to Theo's house that made it look like I was limping and didn't really keep my foot dry. We stopped at Sainsburys and I bought one of their cheap goats cheese and a red wine that was reduced to four pounds but in a posh looking bottle with a pretty picture of a hummingbird on the front.

Theo made me a pasta with spinach and cream and cherry tomatoes and goats cheese. Theo has always made amazing food for me since I was 14 and she was 13 and we would go back to her house over a weekend of partying to get some sun dried tomato paste and goats cheese sandwiched on brown bread with seeds. Her mum is one of my favourite cooks in fact and they often have pasta with a salad (and amazing dressing) and they eat it every night together like a picnic on the sitting room floor. We ate and drank a cheap acidic wine and talked about how mental people in Cambridge are and I wished there was more of the pasta because it was creamy and more-ish.

We watched a lunar eclipse that made the moon turn red for a bit but didn't do much else and then this boy called barefoot Pete came over with Hebrew writing on his arm and he cooked lots of k up in the kitchen. I used to live with a boy who cooked k when I was 15 and I remember it smelling like a fried breakfast and not being too bad but this time the smell really bothered me and it felt like it was invading me so I had to sit outside on the doorstep for a bit. He did not wash the pans up after him, so he had bad manners as well as a bad beard that made him look as though he had long pubes growing from his face.

We went to a party down the road at about 2 in the morning where I got to experience lots of Cambridge students first hand, most of them are gay with each other. I told a lie to one called Enzo that I was the neighbour from next door round to complain about the noise keeping my kids up. He believed me and apologised but said it wasn't his party. We didn't stay long at the party and I crashed out in Theo's bed almost the second we got home.




Sunday - Before I got the coach home we went to Theo's favourite panini place on drummer street we walked past a very beautiful round church (one of only two in the country) and Theo told me a bit about the history of Cambridge city and how it is the only city in England with no cathedral. I cannot remember the name of the panini place, it sounded like sasindys but I don't think it was. It was very busy and we got the last two seats in there. Theo had something with pesto but I didn't pay too much attention because my panini was far more exciting. I had dolcelatte, mozzarella and artichoke hearts. It cost £4.50 to eat in which in my opinion is pretty expensive but maybe that's how paninis roll these days? Back when I was a regular panini purchaser they were £2.95. It was perfect, the bread wasn't too hard or too soft or too crispy, it was Goldilocks just right and the cheese was creamy rich and beautiful and Theo bought me a cloudy apple and elderflower juice bottled in Cambridgshire that made me want to live in an orchard.

The round church -

The coach trip back home to London was not quite as fun as the way there, a woman with big long false nails sat next to me and I wanted lots of room. I did make a big list of all the things I want to do this year which included

• making at least two films,
• finishing building a miniature village,
• getting into film school and
• getting a job with observer food monthly.

I had to do the funny limp thing again in the wet streets on the way from the coach station to the bus station at Victoria. I stopped briefly in Yo Sushi and they annoyed me. I only wanted a crispy salmon skin ISO, the waiter said I should eat more and I told him that was all I wanted thank you so he pointed out that I had only eaten an ISO roll (which was very handy because I consume small amounts of food and then completely forget what I have just done!) and finally let me go when I said really truly honestly that was all that I wanted.

I didn't have dinner at dinnertime because I was sulking but Jonny bought it up when I was normal again so I had a delicious roast at 3 in the morning. Jonny's mum is a great cook.

titillating tiramisu and tarte citron.

Last night after a long day of pms and being mental and hiding shoes and having cramps and breaking up and a glass and clearing up the glass and crying lots I went out for dinner. My eyes were a bit puffy from crying and my hair very unwashed and matted and I was wearing the same stupid smelly clothes I have had on for days. I decided to try to distract from crappy clothes and puffy face and bird nest hair with a lot of red lipstick and use Lush's Karma perfume to mask the fact that I smell.

I met with my friend Laura at her work in Shepherds bush and we got the 94 bus into town. Laura is sometimes called Laura Elvis because she looks a bit like him. On the bus I just moaned a lot about how sad I felt and then we got off and met Lotta at Oxford circus station. Lotta is Swedish but she has been living in England for about 5 years or something now, she can fight well and snowboard.

We walked up to Rupert street and went to a restaurant called cafe fish. I know of cafe fish because in the summer Becky and I went there and I tried oysters for the first time. I have eaten a lot of oysters since then and I still think the Cafe Fish ones were best. We got a seat in the smoking area, I didn't mind this massively because Lotta and Laura smoke rollies and I find they don't stink quite as bad.

Lotta had a pen which I borrowed but I didn't take my book out with me so I had to write on a receipt what we got to eat so I wouldn't forget when writing about it.

It is nice looking inside, perfect lighting (this is of great importance to me) and a shiny looking bar and a big piano that a man was playing well and nautical design.

For starters we had ........
-6 rock oysters.
-tiger prawn, rocket and feta salad.
-moules mariniere.

We shared all of them, Lotta refused to swallow hers and chewed it instead and then said it was only okay, well she should have swallowed. They were Laura's first ever oysters and she loved them and put a shell in her bag to take home. The tiger prawn and feta salad didn't really do it for me but Lotta and Laura thought the prawns were good, I had to reach over with my fork to take bits anyway. The mussels were delicious and I dipped my bread in the sauce (Lotta held the bowl to her mouth and drank some) and it made my fingers stink in the most glorious way.

This is what we had for mains.......
-fish pie (Laura)
-spaghetti with prawns and crab meat in a ragu sauce (Lotta)
-spaghetti vongole (me)

None of us were massively into our Main courses. Mine was just like any spaghetti with tomato sauce really and all my clams just tasted of tomato sauce. I wish the tomato sauce had of been a little smoother also. Lotta and Laura got full up before finishing theirs and I hate to see food go to waste so I finished both of their meals off also. I think my main was best really, Lotta's was similar to mine but without pretty shells in it and Laura's wasn't rich enough for me.

We had a cigarette break (they smoke and I spoke because I don't smoke) in between main course and desert. I should mention our drinks now. Usually I would go for a juice but I drink juices too quickly and then order lots and spend ridiculous amounts of money on what is usually cheap juice so we ordered a bottle of the cheapest white wine (les freres) which was actually pretty nice and had a big jug of iced water.

Desert was....
Tiramisu (Laura)
Tarte Citron with blackcurrant coulis and creme fraiche. (me)
double espresso (Lotta)

I am not really a desert person, I am more about the savoury and was just going to got for a nice palate cleansing blackcurrant sorbet but I was convinced to be a bit more exciting and treat myself seeing as I felt like shit. They were beautiful looking. I have included a picture I drew of my amazing tarte citron, though I think I may have drawn the coulis squiggles wrong. I really couldn't do it justice anyway.
I had a bite of Laura's tiramisu first which was sublime.
My tarte citron had a lovely crispy creme brulee style top to it, looked beautiful and when I ate it I thought I was going to have an orgasm.

After finishing desert Lotta produced a camera and took photos of us sticking our tongues out over empty plates. Silly Lotta, this is like filming people with the sex afterglow but not in the act. SHE SHOULD HAVE DOCUMENTED THE DESERTS WITH HER DIGITAL CAMERA.

Our waitress seemed a little nervous but she was very sweet and good and every single one of the chefs said goodbye to us and wished us a good weekend so the service was lovely which is another thing I had like it for last time I visited. I wanted to kiss them on the face for the tarte citron but I didn't.

The meal came to £98 for three of us and was well worth it. I still want to lick my lips and drool when thinking about my desert today.

a rambling cheese picnic across London

the title (just so you know) is from a quote, so there. "The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

This weekend my friend Lynzi came up from Guildford to eat cheese with me and wander. I've known Lynzi for ages but I haven't seen much of her over the last couple of years, except for when I went to her birthday party in September but I got bored and went home early. Lynzi used to live in London with her boyfriend Lardy and her five snakes and would make me cocktails when I visited her but she moved back home after those buses exploded.

We went to Jeroboams in Holland Park and got some Beenleigh Blue, Camembert Calvados, Appenzeller and some kind of small creamy cows cheese wrapped in vine leaves that I have forgotten the name of. We then went next door to tesco and got some of their posh relishes (one onion and one apple) and a baguette and I tried to convince Lynzi that cherry lambrini was the best pairing for our cheeses. She got four wine and hibiscus spritzers instead. Up the road from tesco's is 'Paul'. Paul sells posh sandwiches and breads and tarts and that. I got a fig tart and a slice of some kind of blueberry pie thing.

Cheeses..
Appenzeller:
Beenleigh Blue:
Camembert Calvados:

and the hibiscus spritzers:

This is the order in which our rambling picnic went:

First we took whatever turns we fancied until we found a nice church that had a big stone face in the garden. There were daffodils in the garden and it looked pretty and like the right kind of place to start a cheese picnic. We sat on a bench in the garden and opened a spritzer each and swigged on them like teenagers then broke off some baguette and had it with camembert calvados and a little bit of apple chutney. Camembert Calvados is just normal camembert soaked in calvados and covered in breadcrumbs. Lynzi liked the camembert calvados and so did I but it was not amazing and did not make me cry with happiness or dribble down my dress. An old man with obviously dyed brown hair walked past and gave us a mean stare. I don't know why he did it.

We walked from the church to the nearest bus stop and jumped on the first bus and got off outside the big parks with that massive gold statue in Kensington. Before we sat on the bench there we watched a squirrel making moves and approaching Lynzi like it wanted to fight her. Here we ate some of the small soft cows cheese and Lynzi decided that it was her favourite and I thought it was pretty nice and creamy but a little bland. We also ate a little of the Appenzeller here. Two French boys walked past and spat on a pigeon. This upset me a lot so I told them they were vile disgusting boys, they tried to kick the pigeon (it flew off, pigeon 1 french boys 0) and then said "sankyou".

From the park to the natural history museum down Exhibition road. we visited another Pauls for skinny baguettes. We walked past a place called cafe daquise that has yummy Polish food and despite the feast of cheese and bread behind and ahead of us it was hard to fight the temptation to go in and eat herring.

We had this plan to eat our food inside this little room where they show a film about babies in the womb. There were too many small children in the womb room so we had to sit in a room that had plastic arms and skeletons in it. We sat on a long bench with a fat sleeping man on it and ate our beenleigh blue next to him and stunk the entire arm and skeleton room out. Beenleigh blue is one of my favourite cheeses, it is a sheeps milk blue like roquefort but less salty and with a slightly sweet aftertaste. Beenleigh blue comes from ticklemore cheeses in totnes, Devon who make lot of wonderful cheeses including a nice hard goats cheese called ticklemore. The fat man next us snored a lot but didn't seem to be bothered by our smelly cheese and chat and only woke up occasionally to talk his wife and daughter when they would come and check on him and play with some of the plastic arms. We finished almost all of the cheese and polished off the other two spritzers before walking around the museum and taking photos of each other posing like animals in front of the stuffed animals. We went to the gift shop (my favourite bit) and I bought Jonny (my boyfriend) an elephants head on a stick that makes obnoxious elephant noises, a pack of shark top trumps and a crocodile head the you can blow eyes out of.

This is Lynzi with the hippos.

And me with the arm thing.