London Restaurant Recommendations

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Okay, it's time for the round-up of my favorite places to eat in London!  We're going to go by price, since I know that's often the most important consideration for visitors to this fine and expensive city – bear in mind, though, that London is very expensive, so when I say places are 'cheap' I mean sort of 10 pounds for a main, 5 if you choose very wisely.  It really doesn't get cheaper than that, except in McDonald's or a local 'chippie' (Fish n' Chip shop).  So here we go!

Cheap places (usually better for lunch than dinner):

Baozi Inn, in London's Chinatown, is a teeny little place that serves really good (and apparently authentic) Chinese dumplings, soups, and other dishes.  It's great value for money and quite cozy, so perfect for a stop-in on a rainy afternoon fighting the crowds in the West End.

New Culture Revolution is another great (and cheap!) Chinese place – lots of basics on the menu, noodle dishes and stir-fries etc, but my absolute favorite is the dumpling soup with pork and Chinese leaves.  The broth is homemade, the dumplings are tender, and the meat tastes healthy and clean, not full of gristle and grease as you sometimes get.  The location in Angel is just off the super-busy high street, and they always have room for walk-ins (at least so far), so it's a great option for lunch or dinner away from the maddening crowd (are you sensing a theme in my restaurant choices?  You sense correctly!).

Borough Market is always a good idea if you're looking for an inexpensive breakfast or lunch – note that a trip to the market is rarely inexpensive, as there's so much temptation that I almost always run out of money very quickly, but it's easy to get a great sandwich or a delicious plate of something Greek/Italian/Spanish/you-name-it for about a fiver (the above meat pies are even cheaper).  Can't beat that!  Plus, the people watching is divine.  The only drawback here is that it's all outdoors, so your usually-lovely seat in the next-door churchyard might be a bit soggy if the weather is doing its usual English thing...

Sometimes You Just Have to Eat Out

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As you all know, I've been crazy busy these past couple of months, and one of the knock-on effects of that is not having as much time to cook/bake.  I spend a lot of evenings after work online, answering emails and writing body blog posts and, when I can, vegging out and staring at the wall, and before I know it it's time to go to bed to get not enough sleep before I have to wake up and do it all over again – meal planning and cooking have taken a very distant back seat.

Luckily, I have a boyfriend who is usually willing to share dinner duty, but I also eat a lot of pasta and frozen fish cakes and quick-roasted whatever-veggies-we-have.  When I do eat something lovingly planned and cooked without any time pressure, it's usually because I'm eating out.  And that's the other way in which I'm lucky: I happen to live in a city which, contrary to its out-of-date reputation, offers a lot of delicious restaurant choices.  Even luckier: when I go home to San Francisco or visit NYC, I have even more choices, spread across a different selection of cuisines.

I want you guys to know the great food that I know – especially here in London, since it can be so difficult for visitors to find tasty, affordable food here.  So to that end, I'm going to start a new type of post on this here blog; I don't have time to write full-on reviews of every restaurant I love and have loved (that would take forever and by the time they were all posted half the restaurants might have changed ownership or gotten more expensive), but I can certainly list them for you and add some links for further info!

So keep your eyes peeled.  First up will be London, since I think that's the city that most urgently needs the PR, but then I'll also do posts for SF and NYC, and maybe even Rome and Paris.  I'll make a new page (like the Recipes page) and gather links to the posts there, so that if you're visiting one of my fair cities and don't want to have to hunt down the original post you can get back to it easily.

Should be fun!  Now I just have to find time between household chores, work, publicity, and trying to get at least 6-7 hours of sleep a night...  Don't worry – I'm on it!

Thanksgiving Across the Pond

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Normally around this time of year I'd be looking out at the above view, loving Northern California with my whole heart while the women in my family (that's about 90% of the clan) bustle around in the background, bickering over seating charts and discussing salad choices and oven schedules and answering the ever-ringing phone with the same refrain: "Butterball Hotline!"  It's the most wonderful time of the year – Thanksgiving is when the extended family gathers, really, and we break up into nuclear pockets over Christmas/Chanukah/New Year's.

This year, though, I can't afford the time or money to go home.  For the first time ever in my life, I'll be missing out on Thanksgiving with my family, and it hurts to think of everyone gathering without me while I sit in my office and schedule books for production...  So I decided I wouldn't allow myself to mope.  If I can't be with my family, I'll make my own holiday, right here in the land our forefathers fled before the holiday ever existed – the BF and I will be doing a Friendsgiving this year, and we're holding nothing back.

We've invited Brits and expat Americans and even a few from farther afield, and the guest list has gotten a little out of hand: we're now expecting around 25 people.  Our table seats ten, and we don't even have that many chairs, but I figure making do and an attitude of 'the more the merrier' is what Turkey Day is all about, so to that end we've bought a bunch of paper plates and plastic cups and cutlery and are planning to seat people wherever we can (including the floor), and we've ordered a 10kg turkey and people will be bringing sides, and I'm going to bake at least two of my family's famous pumpkin pies and mash lots of rutabagas, and I'm committing all the wisdom on the NYT Thanksgiving Helpline to memory... so I think it'll be great fun in the end.

I'll still miss my family, of course, but there's no cure for homesickness like being run off one's feet, and I think I've got that pretty well covered – in fact, I would do well to pause in the middle of my recently-constant moans about how stressed I am and be grateful for everything I have: a great boyfriend, fantastic friends, a book that I wrote up on Amazon for pre-order (!!!), a new job title that ought to bolster my resumé nicely, and a family worth missing when I can't be with them.  I'm a pretty lucky lady.

And now I must stop thinking and go do things, for there are more dishes to wash and seating charts to plan and pie crusts to be rolled out and RSVPs to gather and wine to be ordered and...

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

Beauty Comes from Within: Sexy-Ugly Hedgehog Cookies

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One of the BF's favorite kind of cookies is oatmeal chocolate chip, for which he'll hardly get a raised eyebrow from me: the toothsomeness of an oatmeal cookies with the sweetness of chocolate?  Obviously.  I myself am a fan of the good old oatmeal raisin as well, but the more people I poll, the more I feel like this cookie has unfairly fallen out of favor.  Alas, poor oatmeal raisin... well, more for me!

Anyway, when I went to visit the BF in Boston a few weekends ago, I planned on bringing him some oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, but for some reason (I guess because, really, I wanted to eat them), I went with my gram's chocolate chip shortbread cookies instead.  He was never any the wiser, and those cookies are the bomb, so I didn't feel too guilty.  I did, however, find myself craving them the following week (I suppose the idea had planted and refused to let go!), and as I was going to have some girlfriends over for dinner – and needed to make some cookies to mail to a friend for his birthday – I had an excuse to make them.

Work/Life Balance and Lemon Sugar Cookies

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Life has been manic lately.  I know every third post for the last two years has probably started that way, but this time it's really true (or maybe life just gets more and more manic as we get older, and manic takes on a whole new meaning every year??  Oh god, I hope not...).  Anyway, work has gotten increasingly more intense, and as of next week I'm going to be working in the office every day (as opposed to my current schedule of half-in, half-out), and things with the book are heating up too – the relevance of all these facts to you lovely sweet-toothed readers is that posting may be a bit sparse in the coming months.  I'll definitely do my best, as this little corner of the internets is one of my favorite places to spend that in-between time (not quite free, as in time to stuff my face and watch Downton Abbey, but not quite work, as in bust my butt and get paid a little bit for it), but these days I have little time to bake, and even littler daytime to photograph.

Nonetheless, we all know I'm not going to stop baking altogether, and between my usual stress-baking tendencies and the fact that we're doing our own Thanksgiving over here this year, there should still be plenty of fodder for posts.  But you may have to forgive me if I'm not super creative; when I'm stressed and pressed for time, all I want to do is throw together something I'm pretty sure will taste good.

And that was the plan with these cookies.  Lemon + sugar + butter = obvious choice.

Falling into Nostalgia Again: Apple Spice Cookies

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One of the times I miss the US most is the first week of fall, when that first bite hits the air in the mornings and people start pulling out scarves and boots from the backs of their closets and the leaves haven't quite turned yet but you can tell they will be soon.  This time of year always brings the nostalgia pretty hard, and usually I cope with it by taking long walks in the park with the BF, stopping for coffee and a snuggle, and, of course, baking.

This year, the BF just happens to be abroad – back in the States, actually – for a sort of med-student study-abroad program.  I've been handling the separation pretty well, due mostly to being run off my feet with work, book stuff, and general back-from-vacation admin, but when the leaves started turning I did start to pine a bit (no pun intended).  Still, I was determined not to mope (or eat my feelings any more than I'm already wont to do); I may not be able to take long, chilly walks with my guy, but I can still bake, dang it!

I Made A Real, Frosted, Layered Birthday Cake (and It Only Took Two Attempts and About a Million Eggs...)!

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Last Friday my company had a 'wine and cakes' party in our department, celebrating the first birthday of the imprint I work for.  Now, as someone who often brings homemade baked goods in to the office, I expected to be asked to make something, which I was happy to do.  What I didn't expect was being volunteered to bake a birthday cake, which to most people might just mean a cake but which translated in my head to many-layered cake of wonder with homemade icing and decoration, which is something I'd yet to attempt.  Still, I figured it would be a good opportunity to try something new (namely, making a fancy icing). 
 
But then two things happened to make the plans much more stressful.  The first was that my friend Tess, who works in the marketing department, asked me to use a recipe from one of our books, which wouldn't in itself be a problem but I had been hoping to use a tried-and-tested American recipe, or at least one with tons of online reviews – of course I agreed, though.  And the second thing was that my very well-meaning friends 'bigged up' my baking in a company-wide email.  And of course, as we all know, there's nothing like a little outside pressure to make a cake fall flat.