05/07/14: Joining 'Growing Communities'

I've really outdone myself today. Being as admittedly apathetic as I am most of the time, I feel it's important to acknowledge that I've gotten an unprecedented amount done today. Y'see, a dear friend of mine is moving to Berlin on Sunday so we thought it only right to congregate for a number of farewell drinks last night, a plan that quickly descended into drinking Smirnoff Ices (yepp) & dancing around pool tables to Justin Timberlake at almost two o'clock. I was quite prepared for today to be a write-off. I have, however, since crawling out of the depths of bed at midday, done a load of laundry, swept the kitchen, been to 'Sainsbury's', washed up & made a batch of homemade granola, all of which have made me feel a lot more human than having to wash my hair in the sink this morning. Mm.

 Amongst all of this uncharacteristic productivity was my also remembering to write this blog post about...joining Growing Communities, hooray! For those not in the know, Growing Communities is a 'social enterprise' of local, East London people that run a box scheme of weekly, organic, sustainable & locally grown vegetables. Since really committing to vegetarian cooking, I've often found myself reading up on various companies that offer vegetable boxes & been umm-ing & aah-ing about whether they would be affordable or worthwhile. I went through a phase of buying all of my fruit & veg from Ridley Road Market & was amazed at how much cheaper it was compared to the supermarket but that kind of shopping unfortunately no longer fits into my weekly routine. It was one afternoon walking past the allotment where they grow the 'Hackney Salad' below followed by a nudge from Ava of Guac & Roll that I decided to go ahead & sign up.

Opting for a weekly 'standard no potatoes' bag (I figured potatoes & onions are amongst the cheapest & easiest to supplement), Growing Communities were so pleasant & helpful at every juncture - answering emails on everything from being able to opt out if I wasn't totally sold to when I would be able to collect my first bag. Cities can feel like big, anonymous places where these feelings of genuine community can be hard to come by but I know that I, at least, get a real sense of fulfilment when knowing that I'm investing in my local area. It also works out at just over a fiver a week each for my boyfriend & I which is an undoubted saving on what we would usually spend in the first two aisles of Sainsbury's.

So what's in the bag? This week, a huge bag of luscious spinach, a perfumed pouch of fresh basil, an eccentric bunch of vibrant beetroot & green garlic (the latter of which I've never tried!), a couple of paper bags of mushrooms & cherry tomatoes & 'Hackney Salad' that I'm looking forward to piling into work-day sandwiches. I'll admit that it's going to be a big change & one that will take a bit of adapting but this is all for the better - using fresh, seasonal produce in my cooking, being less reliant on rice or pasta as the base of any dish, eating less meat substitutes & more real & nutritious foods. Oh, & knowing that 85% of the vegetables I received this week were grown the UK, brilliant! I'm also hoping that starting from ingredients rather than recipes will be make me a better cook, a more creative, thoughtful & instinctive one, although we'll wait & see.

I'm already eyeing up Kitsunetsuki Kitchen's beetroot, basil & roasted garlic risotto & then there's this evening's hot chickpea & spinach curry that'll make sure I sweat out the rest of these toxins, blargh.

What do you make of the 'Growing Communities' scheme?

Do you know what to do with green garlic?!

Speak soon - O. 

26/06/14: Another week, another cookbook

While my life is sometimes prone to change most of the time it does just stay the same - I do my best impression of Annie Hall once a week in suede waistcoat & floral skirt, increase my worrying dependency on caffeine, make feline friends - & that's okay, especially if you're able to fill your days with all of those things that you've come to love & never tire of. While my Sainsbury's shop is, to a large extent, exempt from such a compliment, today, a rare mid-week day off, has been wiled away as such. After a languorous morning in bed with homemade granola, several mugs of tea & cartoons on my laptop, I pulled on some jeans & a handful of tote bags & headed to the couple of charity shops just down the road from my house. It's been a while since I've been able to dig out any secondhand bargains but I was lucky today in spying this linen, floral blouse, an old Monsoon label fraying from the neckline, & with a three pounds price tag. I don't think I will ever shake the habit of excitedly changing into my latest purchase as soon as I get home, musty charity shop smell be damned, & that's exactly what I did while the grill warmed for lunch.

Seeking to justify my hankering after yet another cookbook - this time Anna Jones' beautiful, functional, vegetarian 'A Modern Way to Eat' which you can see a sneak peak of riiiight here - I spent yesterday evening, having pulled my head out of one book, flipping through my beloved 'Smitten Kitchen' cookbook which, closely followed by Nigel Slater's 'Eat', was the first that I bought. Ever. Inevitably, I was fittingly smitten for the first couple of weeks that I cooked from it & then jars of Sacla pesto sneaked back into my evening routine after a long day at work & it began to gather dust under the stacks of books in my bedroom. I've recently gained a new determination, however, to not neglect my cookbooks & their infinite resources of inspiration & beauty - just last week I spent my morning making the most delicious broccoli pesto from scratch, most of it finding its way from the bowl into the spine of 'The Green Kitchen' cookbook in which I found the recipe. A whole head of broccoli, a couple of generous handfuls of hazelnuts, plenty of olive oil, garlic & black pepper, I spooned it into a jar & peddled to the park to spread it onto oatbakes for lunch & later into wholewheat fusilli for supper.

Buoyed by my renewed enthusiasm, I
thought I would look again to my culinary library for ideas for a leisurely Thursday lunch perched on my backstep. I've long thought that including recipes for salads in cookbooks was something of a cop out but I discovered last night that this prejudice was misguided having stumbled on one for a kale salad with chopped radishes (something I've never bought let alone topped & tailed), dried cherries, toasted pecans & feta cheese with a honey, mustard & olive oil dressing. With a bag of kale bigger than I realistically knew what to do with, this big bowl of varying colours, flavours & textures was exactly what I needed & will doubtless make again when lunchtime inspiration is running at a low (& there're always leftovers pecans, my ultimate weakness, to add to weekday breakfasts, hooray!)

There are, actually, a whole host of things to look forward to at the moment, for which I am grateful - managing to book some holiday off work for a European jolly with my Dad & assorted other family members next month, finding myself totally enthralled in the first of Karl Ove Knausgaard's 'My Struggle' cycle (I can't remember the last time that I was so under the sway of a book & already have the second to read soon afterwards), snapping up this beautiful bib, frilled smock dress from The White Pepper (it hangs so beautifully & has pockets so it's a double thumbs up for sure) & excitedly scribbling the start of teaching date for my masters degree in my diary. I've also struck up something of a friendship with my local Growing Communities thanks to the ever-brilliant Ava who talked about them in an eye-opening blog post on Shake, Guac & Roll (srsly, read it, you won't regret it) - but all of that can wait for my next post when I'll have more to share. For now, there's lentil curry to cook.

What've you been cooking up lately? 

Are you reading anything that I'll fall similarly head-over-heels with, d'ya think?
Speak soon - O. x

  

18/06/14: Literary lately #3

Ah, the golden hour. Is there anything better? I must admit that I enjoyed today's even more than most because I was able to enjoy it sat in the dappled sunshine of London Fields at five thirty, the breeze in my plaits, rather than from the gaps in between people's heads on the overground back from work. My shifts are a little different this week so I've found myself with a rare mid-week day off which I duly decided to put to use peddling from E8 to NW1, Hackney to Camden, for a chickpea burger in a granary bun stuffed with shredded lettuce & beetroot washed down with a delicious Ethiopian iced coffee, nom. I made it back to the homestead just in time for the sun to start sinking behind the skyscrapers & for me to finally kick off my Doc Martens, prop up my bicycle against a tree & read a chapter or two of my current book.

This current book just so happens to be Jean Rhys' slim novel, 'Voyage In the Dark', a quaint Penguin Classics edition that I picked up in a secondhand bookshop in Stratford-Upon-Avon a couple of summers ago. It was while reading Olivia Laing's wonderful piece in The Guardian about women writers & alcoholism that I remembered owning such a volume among the (huge) stack of my to-read pile by my bed & decided to dig it out. I studied Jean Rhys' 'Good Morning, Midnight' during my second year of university & have always considered her to be a fascinating character, a woman whose tragedy is acutely expressed by Diana Athill & quoted by Laing:

'No one who has read Jean Rhys's first four novels can suppose that she was very good at life' but no one who never met her could know how very bad at it she was.'

'Voyage In the Dark' is one of those four novels that tells the story of the young Anna Morgan, a native of the West Indies for which she longs, & her fall from innocence during a flirtation with an older man she meets while on tour with a theatre company in England. While only two thirds through, the sense of the outsider & the character's experience of reality at one remove is particularly striking, elegantly expressed in the permeable border between the worlds of her wild childhood home & her rented rooms in London, her family & her current associates, her past & her present. First published in 1934, Rhys' perception of the significance of being a woman is also central to the novel, from the pressure of society's expectations to the ease with which men are able to hold them in their sway. It is the simplicity of the poetry of Rhys' prose that I really adore & I shall be sad to finish this little heartbreaker of a book.

I must admit that my tendency towards tales of hardship & misery has not waned of late & the book that I finished reading to make way for Ms. Rhys is certainly evidence of this, namely Oswald Wynd's 'The Ginger Tree'. It is now with horror that I realise that despite having been through so much education & an undergraduate degree in English Literature, I have not read so much as a page of a book originating from anywhere further East than perhaps the Czech Republic, sparing pieces of Dostoyevsky aside, & certainly nothing originating from Japan or China, something I hope to put right very soon. It started with this. 'The Ginger Tree' tells the story of Mary McKenzie, a young Scottish girl who takes a ship to China to marry a wealthy military attaché only to have an affair with a Japanese solider for which she is outcast - with her husband intending to return her to Scotland & the wrath of her mother, Mary instead flees to Japan to live out over forty years in an unfamiliar place that never truly embraces her differences. Widely recommended & a bestseller at the time of its publication in the 1970s, I had high hopes for this novel which were only partly realised. While sensitively written, especially considering the author was writing a female character & a mother at that, the story's telling through diary entries felt both claustrophobic & distancing - the reader never gets a complete sense of the protagonist from a singular perspective & thus your empathy for her is complicated &, arguably, made more difficult. Some passages that described the Empresses' palace in Peking & the landscape of the Fuji mountains in Japan were very beautifully wrought but I will need to read with greater variety if I am to get a more authentically drawn representation of these places, I think.

Reading about other cultures & particularly texts in translation has become another habit of mine that seems to have established itself of late. This is only reinforced with another couple of recent acquisitions from the ever-brilliant Pushkin Press, 'Red Love: The Story of an East German Family' by Maxim Leo (translated from the German) & 'The Spectre of Alexander Wolf' by Gaito Gazdanov (translated from the Russian) The first speaks of my love of biography & fondness for Berlin that I've had ever since learning German at school; the second has been endlessly recommended to me by many & whose blurb is too gripping not to have me at 'hello', or privet.

Both of these will, alas, have to wait until I have, at long, long last, started the first in the 'My Struggle' cycle by Karl Ove Knausgaard, for which I am quite giddy with excitement. 

 What's your favourite place to find yourself during the golden hour?

What're you reading at the moment?

Speak soon - O.

16/06/14: Becoming a Bettette!

So, here is the big secret that I've been keeping under my proverbial hat for a little while now...I'm featured in the latest issue of Betty Magazine! It was in one of the first posts on this little blog that I first waxed lyrical about this magazine & it has since gone on to become a force to be reckoned with in the world of indie publishing.

I was sad to have to skip out on the Shoreditch launch of their summer issue in which I have found my name under the list of contributors (work, shmork) but I was thrilled to hear the distinctive thud of a brown envelope dropping through my letterbox last week with this beauty within.

My article is one that I wrote on my culinary hopelessness, particularly while living in a fairly miserable New Cross maisonette almost two years ago now, seeking to encourage readers to not cower in front of their oven door as I did for so long. Quite aside from the surreal feeling of seeing the article I'd scribbled in my notebook in palpable print, I'm so proud to be sharing the pages with so many talented ladies, from the stunning cover girl Laura Jackson, whimsical illustrator of animals in tea dresses Gretchen Ellen Powers & the Charlotte/Charlotte team that manage to seamlessly pull together wonderful issue after wonderful issue.

Here's hoping that this is the first of many posts delivering news of this sort but for now I'm still reeling from the heady perfume of those freshly printed pages. Thank you so much for the opportunity to contribute, Betty & may this be the just the beginning...!

(Pssssst, you can order your issue here: http://bettymagazine.bigcartel.com/product/pre-order-betty-magazine-summer-2014)

Speak soon - O. 

09/06/14

I suppose it was a case of oversight on my part (or perhaps, at best, a kind of naive ignorance) that I failed to realise that I hadn't started a blog sooner because I don't have an especially eventful life. I know that we are all essentially creatures of habit but I suspect that, mostly thanks to my mother, I lead a life of less variety than a considerable number of other people who are prone to this sort of online documentation. This is often &, indeed for the most part continues to be, the case but lately there has been a flurry interest in the otherwise mundane day-to-days of this Hackney dweller & this comes in the form of this fella that I'm very happy to welcome into my life & introduce to all of y'all: Fernando!

I speculated about becoming a cyclist in London in my last post & that seemingly endless umm-ing & aah-ing finally came to an end with the combination of an evening's idle browsing of the internet & my chancing upon an unexpected day off last Monday. I was very lucky to stumble upon the Facebook page of 'The Hackney Peddler', a hole in the wall in Hackney Downs Studios around the corner from my East End bedroom, that specialise in doing up & selling on classic bikes. Admittedly seduced by the good looking people & their equally attractive bicycles that feature on the Peddler's instagram, I decided to make the trip on Monday to see if they could sort me out with a set of wheels. It turned out the answer to this was yes & quickly too - one of the guys had me measured up against this blue racer within a minute or so &, for once practically dressed in jeans rather than a pencil skirt (thank god), I was soon shakily making my way towards a peddle around Hackney Downs. Shakily is likely an understatement - with racing handlebars, very skinny tyres & by far the lightest frame I've ever , this bicycle was unlike anything I'd ridden before & my confidence was knocked. Andrew & I said our thank yous & think about its & headed for 'The Russet' just opposite for a delicious deliberating lunch of lentil salad with peppers, green beans & a side of E5 Bakehouse sourdough. We soon realised that I'd already decided, my heart was set & after agreeing on a few adjustments (upright handlebars, a new saddle, wider - not to mention sturdier - gauge tyres & a full service), the deposit was down & so were the hours being counted until I could collect him on Tuesday.

Needless to say, since swinging by that place that evening after work, the two of us have been pretty much inseparable. I've been realistic with myself about needing a lot of practice before embarking on my Hackney to Hampstead commute but I'm already amazed at watching the capital shrink before me as I swing my leg over the saddle (& it's quite a swing, let me tell you, phew) I was left with such a good feeling at every encounter with 'The Hackney Peddler' & couldn't recommend them enough - I very obviously know nothing about bicycles (still dreading the first time my chain inevitably comes off, eek) but I was at no point made to feel as such, instead helped along the way & encouraged to ask as many questions as possible. I've already fitted myself out with an attractive helmet (only partly sarcastic, I'm actually quite fond of it, y'know) & planning a more rural route to work, so looking forward to saying an overdue farewell to those packed overground trains.

 I've been enjoying getting aforementioned practice this weekend alongside making more homemade granola, propping myself up against trees in parks with my book (currently 'The Ginger Tree' by Oswald Wynd, interspersed with a few pages from the latest 'New Yorker' issue), tucking into a couple of bowls of leftover curry for lunch, gaining a few more freckles but ultimately spending altogether too much time in bed behind curtains after a busy week, yawn.

I'll hopefully be back soon with an update as far as getting some of my scribbles into an actual form that is put in front of other peoples' eyes (often referred to as 'getting published') - I'll hopefully find some time this week to get some ideas onto paper for the upcoming issue of the wonderful 'Chickpea' magazine, or at least before July 1st, wish me luck.

Here's to the start of something beautiful.

Speak soon - O. 

24/05/14: Life lately #1

'Best laid plans ' & all that has been a phrase that has rung particularly true lately - with visits home rearranged (twice in one month!) & attendance at a friend's housewarming bbq this afternoon cancelled on account of my waking up to a sore throat & blocked nose (sorry Emily!) Otherwise, things have been good lately & there've been some particularly good things going on, namely.

Lots of reading & writing

I went through a few months a couple of summers ago of reading literary biography obsessively - all of Barry Miles' oeuvre on the Beat poets, almost everything written about Virginia Woolf - & it's a habit that I had since fallen out of. That was until I happened to unearth Scott Donaldson's 'Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald' last week & promptly haul the Oxfam hardback to work & back every day, not making too many friends on the overground on the way there either. It has made me quite melancholy to read of the trauma that the two of them put themselves through, especially Fitzgerald with his chronic alcoholism, but is nonetheless a brilliant study. I have a copy of Olivia Laing's 'Last Trip to Echo Spring', another non-fiction book particularly about writers & drinking which covers both the aforementioned alongside Tennessee Williams & John Ashbery - perhaps I'll have a little space between the two whose stories evoke a similar misery.

As far as writing goes, I've been able to find the time to do some scribblings lately &, miraculously, even impose some kind of order on them so they're vaguely coherent. I've long been petitioning some of my favourite little magazines to allow me to feature in their pages & here's hoping I'll be back with some good news before long.

 These new polka dot trousers are my life & I'm OK with that

Spending time with good people

As I've said before on this little blog, Andrew & I have been adapting to each other's different schedules ever since I started working in September & I feel as if we're finally falling into a good rhythm. Even if it's just a stroll down to our local market for a pretzel & a flip through the vintage rails one afternoon, it feels good to be making time for one another, especially as our two & a half year anniversary is fast approaching! (Achem, which I may or may not have forgotten about until, err, yesterday, sorry sweet) Last night we went to see 'Antony & Cleopatra' at The Globe (neither of us, English students both, had ever been before) which was so much fun if an ache-y experience, my insisting on the five pound tickets for the standing area, yow!

I've also finally hopefully arranged to go home for a weekend after a series of near-misses, mostly involving my smaller sister's involvement in away rounders matches (she does not get her sportiness from me, let me assure you) & my graciously swapping shifts & splitting my weekends of late. It's been a little while since I've made the journey & I'm looking forward to a long bath, lots of food & a stroll around the market town that never changes much.

Being inspired & taking pleasure in the smallest of things

While I've blogged my weekly eats once before, I think that my contributions to The Beet Generation'  (previously 'Paisley & Peeptoes') are likely quite a way from being comprehensively representative of my increasing obsession with food. This has, in part, been encouraged by the free foodie supplements that I regularly collect from work but also from the burgeoning group of inspiring & inventive cooks, a fair few of them vegan as it happens, that I've discovered on Instagram, namely Ava of Guac & Roll whom I've mentioned before (& have to thank for the recipe I recently used for homemade onion bhajis, woah) &, more recently, Laura of Kitsunetsukikitchen (hope that's spelt right!) whose photography is enough to inspire devotion in any carnivore. These are the people that have made me more determined than ever to be constantly seeking out new recipes, to cook creatively & be thoughtful of what exactly it is that I'm putting into my body ,woohoo! Above is this morning's thrown together breakfast of natural yoghurt with honey, pumpkin seeds & organic (unsweetened too, praise be) apricots, most leftover ingredients from another batch of homemade granola. So yeah, thanks guys & keep it coming. 

New adventures

It is the mention of home that makes me think of new adventures, particularly my potentially becoming a cyclist in London, outside of my usual forays into hiring Boris bikes when the sun finally rolls around in August time. She, for shame, hasn't had a proper introduction on here but I was actually gifted the most beautiful mint green Pashley bicycle by my Dad a year or so ago that has been languishing in my Home Counties bedroom ever since, never ridden.You see, aforementioned parent was (rightfully, probably) paranoid that she would be stolen in London  &, trying to sell our house back home, my mother has been threatening to plant up her basket with pansies & have her as a centrepiece for the garden. I'm now faced with the decision of whether to bring her down or preserve her for posterity & buy myself a more battered model that will see me from Hackney to Hampstead twice a day in this fair weather (she types, looking out on rainclouds) & avoiding that hellish stretch of overground - exciting all the same, once I've invested in a good helmet, eeeek.

Time for another honey & lemon for me & then an hour or so of fresh air I think - lurgy be gone!

Do you cycle in London or know of anywhere to get a decent secondhand ride?

What good stuff is in your life at the moment?

Speak soon - O.

18/05/14

It is easy to resign yourself to hopelessness at the best of times, I have realised of late. Yesterday was one of those days -I had graciously swapped a shift with someone at work & thus split my weekend, finding myself thoroughly confused at my 7:25 alarm sounding on Saturday morning. That sense of disorientation & ineptness that started my day turned out to have set the tone as I was dealt a particularly generous handful of rude customers & had a hectic afternoon that was very much at odds with the otherwise blissful tone of my lunch hours amongst sun worshippers on Hampstead Heath. Luckily, it was home to a mug of green tea with honey & 'The Thick of It' reruns with Andrew that managed to rescue me from the despair that threatened. 

Making the best of a bad situation is a valuable lesson & one that has been reinforced today as the two of us had decided to stay home so my conscientious student could get on with essay writing. Instead of lamenting our limited appreciation of the sunny skies outside, we propped ourselves up by our bedroom windows & read until three o'clock - I finished reading the latest 'Granta' issue all about Japan cover to cover (I've never bought it before but now suspect that I've been missing out!) & particularly enjoyed the contributions from Rebecca Solnit & Hiromi Kawakami, the latter of which also has a novel out from Portobello Books, 'Strange Weather in Tokyo', that I am really very excited to read soon.

At three o'clock I set about making lunch for the two of us, an asparagus tart from a recipe I found on the 'Cellardoor Magazine' blog, chopping vegetables, rolling out pastry & grating (a lot of) Gruyere cheese. Reading some more of the biography of Hemingway & Fitzgerald I'm 150 pages through while the tart was in the oven, the two of us eventually tucked in with some rocket & balsamic vinegar on the side, both feeling very full & satisfied afterward.

As it happens, perhaps we are both sated from our day off on Friday when we picnicked by the Serpentine in Hyde Park for the afternoon, my having a fair few (frighteningly swollen) insect bites to the remember the meadow-y expanse of Kensington Park Gardens by. We were both certainly grateful for a more restful couple of days this weekend after two consecutive dinners out the previous weekend, the latter with my Dad in Archway, the former at mine & Andrew's friend Jonathan's house down the road from us in Hackney. I always enjoy going round to Jonathan's house as it reminds me of home back with my Mum - a house full of books & pictures with wooden shutters on the windows, rugs strewn over armchairs, back issues of 'The New Yorker' precariously stacked atop wicker tables. Oh & his noisy British Blue cat, Marco, whom I can ordinarily coax into affection within half an hour of arrival. The gentleman himself is a wonderful host as well as vegetarian cook - dishing up asparagus in butter with walnut bread to start followed by a lovely fennel bake, finished with cheese & biscuits. We stayed until two o'clock drinking wine & talking. 

I have been trying to write of late but it has not been easy -I figure that I am tired or surrounded by too stuffy an atmosphere in which to feel creative, manifested in the pretty pink & white carnations that I had to bin this morning, exposed to too much sunshine & dried out to the point of being percussive. I have been dreaming a lot of Cornwall lately where Andrew & I spent a blissful week last summer, but a moment standing in the sunshine in bare feet on the boards of our little garden, surrounded by sodden armchairs, will have to suffice for now. Andrew bought me the latest issue of 'Oh Comely' yesterday by way of inspiration & I hope that it will be enough to get me through the week that starts all over again tomorrow along with the memory of the sound of the sea washing to shore.

Have you been able to enjoy the sunshine lately?

Speak soon - O.