Making my excuses, and hoping for the future

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I know it's been an inordinately long time since I've written, and I actually wish I didn't have such a good excuse.  But unfortunately I do.

My engagement fell apart (and with it all my happiness and stability and functionality) in a most spectacular and traumatic way back in June, after months of pain and torment – obviously, I wasn't doing much baking during that time, and the aftermath was too filled with tears and logistics and fleeing the country for me to be thinking much about food at all.  I was lucky if I could remember/force myself to eat one small meal a day.  Needless to say, there wasn't much I could say here that would be anything but depressing, so I stayed away while I tried to pick up the pieces of a life I no longer wanted to live.  I moved back to San Francisco and am currently living with my parents while I try to get through this extremely dark time.  It's been the most difficult few months of my entire life, and there have been days when, if Morpheus had offered me one pill to keep going and one to stop everything right then, I would certainly have taken the latter pill.

But, and this is important, there have been bright spots.  Hours, even a few hours in a row, when I forget how much pain I'm in.  And every month there have been more of those hours – this month there have been whole days.  It feels like nothing short of a miracle, and I spend a lot of my time waiting for the relapse (there have been many of those, some unbearably long and brutal), but it seems time is finally starting to heal me a little bit.

And then a few days ago, I baked a galette.  It hardly counts as baking, since the dough was given to us by a neighbor and my mother prepped the apple-pears, so I literally just tossed the fruit with some sugar and spices, rolled out the dough, and brushed melted butter over the top, but it was a start.  And I had a feeling that things might actually be okay one day, far off in the future.

So to thank you for sticking around through my long hiatus, and as I ask you to please bear with me as I continue to gather the shreds of my heart and paste them together with spit and mud – I'm not as sharp as I was before all this, but hopefully that's temporary – I offer you this 'recipe' for an easy free-form galette.  It may not be much of a project, but it lifted my spirits and made me believe for a moment that maybe I could patch my life back together with a little patience and melted butter.  I hope for you it's at least a semi-pretty and tasty solution to the question of what to serve after dinner with friends.

A Dream Deferred: Italian Almond Cookies

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When my guy and I were in Rome a couple of years ago with my brother and his girlfriend for Christmas, the apartment we stayed in was just down the street from a tiny bakery that had the reputation of selling some of the best cookies and panettone in the whole city – a lucky accident of which we took full advantage!  Every few days we would wander in and make use of my ever-more-limited Italian to buy a bag of treats: chocolate-dipped Christmas trees, jam studded thumbprints, mini pistachio biscotti, and our absolute favorites, chewy, dense, heavy-sweet almond cookies.  Those ones were always the first to go, and we kept finding ourselves having to negotiate over who got the last one.  If only I didn't require so much time stalling while I tried to remember the word for almond (mandorla – of course now I can remember it!), we might have just gotten bagfuls of those each time and called it a day!

So of course the minute we got back to the UK I looked up a recipe.  And then I bookmarked that recipe, bought ground almonds, and... promptly put off making the cookies.  I think I avoided it for so long at first because almond paste (one of the main ingredients) is super expensive, but after a while I just kept forgetting about them.

'Paris Is Always a Good Idea' – Dark Chocolate Sables and Some News

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As usual, I've been wanting to spread the news about these amazing sables (or, as my French co-worker corrected me, sablés) since I first baked them, but as usual life has gotten in the way.  In face, I have an unusually good excuse: this post is especially apropos because the BF took me on a surprise trip to Paris the weekend after I made these French cookies – and he proposed!  Of course I said yes (if you've been following this blog for a while you know that he and I are already practically married), and have been consumed by wedding planning insanity (on top of work and book promotion) ever since.

Nonetheless, even with a head full of even more things than before (sigh), I still can't stop thinking about these little beauties – ooh, maybe I'll make a batch for the wedding!  Ahem, sorry.  I get distracted a lot these days.  Where were we?  Right!  I can't stop thinking about these sables, so it's high time I passed them on to you all so you can obsess over them too.  Trust me: they're worth the lost sleep.

Converting the Skeptics: Sticky Toffee Pudding

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I made sticky toffee pudding for the first time back in November – I'd been invited to a British-themed dinner party and I had no idea what to bring for dessert (having of course claimed that course before my phone had even registered the invitation email).  Normally I count on my large roster of American sweets to wow the Brits among me with little effort, but I didn't think it would be fair to break from the theme just because it was outside my comfort zone.  Still, what exactly constituted a British dessert (or, as the Brits say, 'pudding' – actual pudding is 'angel delight'...don't ask me why)?  Most of the really successful dishes have American and European counterparts: lemon drizzle cake, shortbread cookies, fruit crisps...  I didn't want to make super-classic Eton mess or a Bakewell tart (I actually hadn't thought of that one, but it would have been too much effort for the day anyway), so I was at a loss.  Until I remembered that old pub classic, and one particular skeptic to whom I still have something to prove.

I have a personal bone to pick about sticky toffee pudding: I need to prove to my older brother that a dessert made mostly of dates can be indulgent and delicious and completely unfruity.  I tried to explain sticky toffee pudding to him last summer and he wouldn't listen to my description of the dish itself, just kept making that irritating 'blegh' face that only brothers can keep mastering to such an infuriating degree well into seeming adulthood.  I swore up and down that I would make it for him someday and he would eat his words (and facial expression), along with half the pan.  So when I was trying to think of a British dessert to bring to girls' night I decided this was a good opportunity to practice, ensuring that when I do eventually make sticky toffee pudding for my family in SF, their socks will be duly knocked off.

How to Tart up a Dinner Party: Easy Apple Tart

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I have a fantastic friend here in London who used to be my tutor and is now the source of most of my shocked belly laughs – he's crude and shameless and hilarious and I love being around him.  So when he invited the BF and me to dinner at his house, of course we rearranged our schedules to make it work.  I offered to make dessert, and my request for preferences was met with the line 'A tart sounds appropriate.'

Well, what could that be besides a challenge?  (Okay, yes, it could be an insult, but it was written in a cheeky tone, not a mean one.)  I immediately started going through my recipe bookmarks in search of the perfect tart – I wanted to make this super-easy showstopper, but of course we couldn't find raspberries anywhere in London in the dead of winter, so it had to be apple or pear.  The tricky bit: as I had plans that day to go to the Taste of Christmas event, it had to be something I could make either very quickly or in advance.  As it turned out, the recipe I used was a little bit of both.

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!