16/07/14: Life lately #2

 I think that, in spite of certain arduous complications (ahem, no hot water, ahem), if I think that life is pretty good then it must be pretty good. Especially this past weekend that involved some much needed down time after a hectic few weeks in which  two days off together have been rare. The boyfriend was working on Saturday so I had the day to myself, scribbling on squared paper in the sunshine of my desk almost all morning (see my last post on a new source of inspiration) with homemade granola & plenty of tea. After a lunch of leftover chickpea curry I jumped on my bicycle, Fernando, & peddled down to Columbia Road at about three o'clock, prime time to snap up some bargain blooms. Peonies are my absolute favourite of flowers, their petals a little rougher around the edges than your average rose & those deceptively tightly balled buds slowly bursting into that unmistakable fragrance, but even though the season was later this year because of the rain, I was beginning to worry that I wouldn't be able to get any. Luckily, my fears were unfounded & I was soon wheeling my bicycle back in the direction of Haggerston Park with an armful of three bunches (two pink, one white) of the flowers for a mere ten pounds. Accompanied by an iced coffee & my book of Katherine Mansfield's short stories, I spent a very happy couple of hours in the isle of calm that Haggerston Park has always provided when London Fields has, err, not. It was down to Brick Lane that I cycled come six o'clock to meet Andrew from a long day at work & we wandered lazily home for the World Cup final which I will shamelessly admit was about the third match I'd watched of the tournament. Still, Deutschland über alles!

Monday soon rolled around (I did say that my weekends have always been slightly skewed!) & after a languorous morning spent reading & grudgingly getting dressed, Andrew & I decided on a similarly serene afternoon in St. James' park. I had had the idea of going to see the thoroughly exciting new exhibit on on Virginia Woolf at the National Portrait Gallery (last time I was there it was for David Bailey, remember?) but the weather was just too nice (read: sunshine) for me to consider lurking in the shadows, even for my most favourite of writers - another day, no doubt. So instead we picnicked on pretzels, nectarines, raspberries & blueberries while reading our books in the sunshine & getting freckled knees until gone six o'clock. Almost unbelievably neither of us had yet had the chance to see the new Foyles on Charing Cross Road so ambled up there through a bustling Trafalgar Square. While it will doubtless take more than one visit to get a sense of the place & rid of my sentimental attachment to the old premises, the new shop is doubtless something to behold - an open central atrium with plenty of light &, on this occasion, sun, the smell of fresh paint that lingers, displays of beautiful editions zig-zagging with the staircases up & up & up.I somehow

escaped with a little literary pamphlet (that, okay okay, featured Lydia Davis whom I have not finished fangirling for yet) called 'The Next Review' which I've already read almost cover to cover & the latest 'Chickpea Magazine', a vegan quarterly whose photographs & content are always, without exception, delectable.

 The two of us were reluctant to abandon the warm, summer's evening but soon resigned ourselves to tiredness (& my 7:30am alarm set for the next day, yawn)  & were soon home to rigatoni with ricotta & big broad beans from this week's Growing Communities vegetable bag. My signing up to the scheme has been something of a learning curve, I've got more vegetables to collect tomorrow without having cooked everything from this week's bag & I'm making gradual progress in thinking about a more organic assembly of my meals i.e escaping the 'meat & two veg' mentality of my childhood. Still, I'm finding myself so satisfied with the vegetables themselves, their freshness & quality as well as the feeling of connectedness that they give me, & I've cooked some delicious dishes this last week or so - Kitsunetsuki's beetroot risotto, from-scratch bean burgers with plenty of spring onions (both in such a natural form as I've ever encountered!) & griddled carrots, heaps of Hackney Salad alongside veggie kievs & roasted cherry tomatoes. I've the latter left from this week that I'll mix into a chilli non carne & then there's a bountiful bunch of swiss chard to stir into a potato curry, I reckon.

I think it's likely that I'll note down a few of these recipe ideas for the boyfriend as I'm, dun dun duuuun, off on holiday next week! To tell the truth, this time next week I will actually be in Rome with a handful of family, spending a few days there followed by a couple in Sorrento & Capri & I could not be more excited. Aside from the good company I am looking forward to lots of walking in the city, the sunshine, the books, the opportunity to dust down my SLR lens &, of course, the food which I plan to savour at every meal - from Italian coffee & pastries to burrata & basil salad to an improbable amount of pasta. Needless to say, this will all be documented in my notebook & later, here on this blog so do check back. I'm no where near organised enough as far as packing lists go but I think my reading materials of choice will be the latest issue of 'The New Yorker', a pinched copy of my Mum's 'The Infatuations' by Javier Marias & the topical (well, Venice isn't too far off) 'Journey by Moonlight' by Antal Szerb.

For now, I'm going to busy myself with a long-awaited spaghetti alla puttanesca & listen to the rest of this podcast from Shakespeare & Co. of Lydia Davis (yes, her again) reading from her wonderful new collection 'Can't & Won't' - you should too!

Speak soon - O.  

15/07/14: The Opposite of Loneliness

I hadn't planned on writing a blog post today but I feel as if it's been something of a significant Tuesday.
I read a lot at work (occupational hazard of booksellers, I admit), mostly recipe books & first pages of novels, occasionally a short story during a particularly rainy afternoon, all things that are always enjoyed but not necessarily remembered. Today was different. I had read about Marina Keegan before, likely in the American press although I can't remember with any clarity the circumstances of this discovery. I do remember being struck by her story, that verb being apt given the real shock of what actually happened - a bright undergraduate student at Yale & aspiring writer, between graduating from college & starting a job at 'The New Yorker', is killed in a car crash at the age of twenty two. I'm twenty two. What incredible, inexplicable tragedy. It wasn't, however, until an encounter with the book of posthumous (posthumous!) writing she left behind that I felt the force of this sadness that has left a hollow in my chest. This is particularly true as my feelings weren't always so ambiguous - I thought, however cynically, of the impossibility of really knowing the quality of the writing in the light of its dark context, of the undoubted parallels between Marina Keegan & the girls I disliked at school & university because I envied them - the ambitious, opportunity creating & fulfilling, optimistic & successful.


A first look at the cover of 'The Opposite of Loneliness' dispels these feelings almost instantly - a young girl stands in a park with cuffs pulled over her wrists & balled into her palms, eyes level & face smiling & the potential & the future that she already represents is haunting. This continues throughout this slim but vital volume during which Marina writes engagingly, in fiction & non-fiction, on themes of the fragility of hope, of the importance of achieving 'the opposite of loneliness'. In these pages, a girl so unlike myself, talked me around to this impatience for and anticipation of all that awaits her in life with the knowledge of her seemingly arbitrary and senseless death only increasing their poignancy. The dust jacket is covered with laudatory quotes from adoring professors &, while further testament to her promise, Marina says all that she needs to in her own words. They make me feel newly determined to make the most of every opportunity, to flip the 'v's at food intolerances, to be curious about the world around me, to fill more & more pages of my notebook (more & more pages of this blog) with whatever is important to me & to have the self belief that enabled her to graduate from an Ivy League college without the dread of unemployment or unhappiness.

So, Marina Keegan, I might not change the world with the knowledge of your relentless optimism or dedicate myself to your legacy but right after I finished that final page, I scribbled a list of things that I want to write about soon to make an impression on the world & I think you'd be okay with that too.
Read the titular essay here & I hope you feel that it changes you too.

Speak soon - O.

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.