England with Mother

I woke up about a month ago with the strong feeling that I never wanted to leave England. I had fallen madly in love with it. I loved their strange place names like "Basingstoke" and "Cockfosters." I loved their adherence to tradition at all costs. I loved the brilliant and incomprehensible color of green that comes out when the sun shines on the grass. But most of all, I love the people. British people get bad rap, but they're some of the funniest, kindest people you will encounter (now the Italians, those are some truly unsavory people.) England is in almost all respects, a perfect country. Except for one thing; all of my friends and family live an ocean and a continent away, in California.

Now I love California too. It's the best state in the Union in my opinion, but I've always had an Old World soul. Ask any of my friends. No really. I organized and successfully threw a tea party for my fourth grade teacher. Of course this is undeniably significant of my billboard-sized homosexuality, but I think this also speaks to a love of the eccentricities of Europe. And also a love of cake (it always comes back to food here on my blog, have no doubts about that.)

Up until my epiphany I had alternated between being homesick and being in love with England, the kind of love that they have in the movies, a love to rock the ages. Jack and Rose, Scarlett and Rhett, Adam and the British Isles. But I also had been having recurring dreams where I was able to fly back to California for a weekend and visit all my friends and family (and dogs.) I missed them terribly. But on the morning of my epiphany, I felt like I would be able to live an ocean and a continent away from them.

And then my mother came. I love my mother, everyone does. She's effortlessly lovable and genuine to the core. She taught me to love all things kitsch and camp, something so few appreciate these days. She's a wacky woman. Until she visited me in England, my mom had never had a passport and excepting Hawaii, she had never left the North American continent.

Walking around London with my mom was a different experience. She travels differently than I do. Whereas I often want to get to my destination as quickly as possible, my mother wants to explore every nook and cranny along the way, which makes you find things you didn't see. In Bath she and my cousin found locks along canals. She chatted up one of the other tourists on the walking tour and found out about a restaurant famous for its buns that we later went to and enjoyed.

And as I traveled with her, I remembered all the things I loved about California; the hodge-podge of Los Angeles, the hippie elegance of San Francisco, the poppies that bloom along the five in Spring, the oranges in my hometown of Redlands.

As we took the elevator (that is one word I simply cannot let go of, it is not a "lift" and it never will be) up from the Tube, my mom handed me an orange that she had picked from the tree in our yard. They say that the sense of smell triggers more memories than any other sense, and as I lifted the orange to my nose and dug my nail into it, my love of California came flooding back to me. Earthquakes, Mexican food, driving, traffic, all my friends, all my family, all my dogs! It had been so long since I'd had proper fruit that had been grown and allowed to ripen under legitimate sunlight. How could I even think of living anywhere else?

And now I'm of two minds. There's the part of me that loves California and shorts and oranges and the way the sun turns everything golden early in the morning. And then there's the part of me that loves England and it's ancientness and traditions and vaguely socialist democracy. And it's weird, to feel simultaneously homesick and content with where I am. My alternating feelings I had before my epiphany have now synthesized into some strange alloy and I don't know how I feel anymore.

But what I do know is this; I have two months left here in England, and I'm going to have the most amazing time living in a place that I love and that will have a very large piece of my heart. And then I'm going to go back home to California, a place that I also love, that also takes up a large part of my heart. And so when it comes time to leave England, and give up my overseas address and overseas mobile number and the amazing feeling that come from being international and having an accent, I'm happy to be giving it up for a place that I love just as much.

Pancake Day!

In the States we call it Mardi Gras. Everyone gets drunk, wears beads, and generally acts like they're on the set of a "Girls Gone Wild" video. I was told before I left that most Europeans view Americans as drunks. I imagine that Mardi Gras has not done much to stem this reputation. In England, instead of Mardi Gras, they have Pancake Day. And no, that is not a euphemism.

It wasn't that the idea of Pancake Day was strange to me. Heaven knows all of my posts on this blog come back to food eventually. No, what struck me as strange about Pancake Day was the wholesomeness of it. It was something that actually sounded fun. Because I was born with the soul of a seventy-nine year old woman trapped inside me, I'm not the biggest party person, and consequentially, participating in the no-holds-barred bacchanal that is Mardi Gras has never appealed to me.

Pancake Day arose out of the need to get rid of "rich" food items like milk, sugar, and eggs before the more somber season of Lent, which is a time when Christians celebrate Christ's fasting in the wilderness. It is traditional to give something up for Lent. I've personally never done this, but this year, as a challenge to myself, I have decided to give up chocolate. I expect that in two weeks time I will have either given in to stress and gone back to my cocoa mistress, or have murdered my entire flat in cold blood.

I made the Pioneer Woman's recipe for sour cream pancakes. In doing this, I had to wrestle with not only the Metric system, but the English Imperial System of Measurement. A US Customary cup is roughly 236 milliliters, however an English cup is exactly 284 milliliters, this would have been all right had the tablespoons I was able to track down been in proper ratio (an American tablespoon is 1/16 of a cup) but no, they weren't. Luckily, I am not only a culinary but also a mathematical genius, and I was able to make pancakes that were delicious beyond all means. I ate them with golden syrup and shared them with my flatmate Kam.

I had made my pancakes earlier in the evening, my flatmates were going upstairs to cook in their friends' kitchen, and I was expecting a quiet night of catching up on some television and wolfing down chocolate digestives and a Snickers bar before the clock struck midnight. But when I went to the kitchen, I was met with utter madness. Apparently the friends' kitchen was in use and ours was to be the scene for Pancake Day. Eggs were being smashed against the counter, people were whisking with forks and spoons, and pancakes were being poured on all four hobs in the kitchen. And then a fatal mistake was made, someone brought out an electric hand mixer. They needed my help. They just didn't know it yet.

Baking is a delicate process. Too much of one thing or not enough of another, and you might as well go into the corner and cry yourself to sleep. Not that I would know anything about that. I don't even have corners in my kitchen. It's a perfect circle. Perfect, like me. No, I'm not on any medication, why do you ask? But I digress. Using an electric mixer with pancakes would serve to activate the gluten, which would make them not unlike the Hopi bread that you can get at scouting events and various historical reenactments. Things were eventually straightened out. Condiments were lined up as if they were soldiers going off to war. Every plate and utensil was pulled out and distributed and soon the feast was on!

It's strange how one day of celebration can be expressed in such polar opposites. Across the States, people would be drinking and vomiting and revealing their various body parts to each other for beads, but here, we were eating pancakes. And for the first time, it felt like I was really celebrating Mardi Gras, or at least Mardi Gras as I would like it to be.

Back to the Capital!

The strangest things about living in England, is that London is only a two hour train ride away.

It's not a matter of being close to a big city, or even a global city. I live an hour away from Los Angeles, a world city in its own right. It's that Los Angeles,was never the seat of a vast imperial empire that at its height owned nearly two thirds of the planet. It's being two hours away from THE global city.

The National Theatre is an amazing place. We have one in the States, but it's not publicly funded, so the name is a bit of a misnomer. I corralled two of my UC friends into going to see Twelfth Night with me. We had to read it for our class, and the production was going to be good, Sir Peter Hall was directing, and his daughter, Rebecca Hall, was playing Viola. Tickets were sold out but apparently that doesn't mean anything here, because we got obscured-view tickets for £10, and when we got there, people were still buying tickets mere minutes before the show was going to start (of course, as we learned later, not all obscured-view seats are created equal.)

This is Kelsey. She's sassy. We left for London at about eleven, and our friend Ashley left at noon (We weren't sure if Ashley was coming when we bought the train tickets, otherwise we would have waited the hour for her.) I bought a bacon sandwich on the train. And may I just say that, as much as it shames me, English bacon blows American bacon out of the water. And they do not mess around with their bacon sandwiches. Bread, bacon, other bread. Done. Kelsey would have none of it because she's a vegetarian. Everyone's a vegetarian these days. It breaks my heart (or perhaps it's just all the English bacon... or the cake balls... or the cupcake\macaron\donut combination that you will see in a few moments.)

This is a TARDIS. Apparently. They're from Dr. Who, which I don't watch but would like to. Kelsey brought us here because she loves Dr. Who. In doing this, Kelsey has shown that she is more of a nerd than even I am. I will never forgive her for that.

Me being me, we of course had to go to somewhere and get overpriced food. The whole impetus for Harrod's was that you could literally get anything. If you wanted an elephant, they would get you an elephant. I'm almost certain that there are shadowy departments in the basement where you can have people killed, right next to the yacht salesman.

This being the case, Harrod's has a Krispy Kreme. Right next to Laduree. I took Art History in high school, and as such, whenever something so sublime is juxtaposed with something so mundane, I must assume that it is a sign. A sign that I also needed a donut. They don't have them here. Or they do, but not in the quantity or quality that we have them in California. Sure you can get a donut at Tesco, but it's not going to have the luscious airiness or the paradoxically soft crispness that donuts made by Asian immigrants do. Not that Krispy Kreme is in any way a good substitute for these donuts, but nostalgia forced me to do it.

We then made our way to the thee-ay-tah. That's Ashley in front of the London Eye. If there's one thing I love as much as food, it's the thee-ay-tah. I plan my life around my theatre tickets, and expect others to do the same. When I have tickets for a show that I really want to go see, I'll have nightmares where I somehow forget to go. I'll check the tickets daily just to make sure I've made arrangements for the right day. I think this is a healthy way of living.

For nearly as long as I've been obsessed with theatre, I've heard about the National Theatre in London. The History Boys and Amadeus premiered here, Angels in America premiered here before it even made it to Broadway. Just about every great modern director has worked here, Peter Brook, Peter Hall, and of course, Laurence Olivier. This is a theatre-nut's Jerusalem.

We went in, got our tickets, took our seats, and waited. I was nervous. I'm always nervous when I sit down to see something I'm really excited for. Sometimes the cast just isn't feeling it, or your dinner isn't sitting right in your stomach, or the director didn't consider that not everyone will be sitting front row center. It's so hard to get that alchemy that makes the theatre so addicting. But the play started, and it was so magical.

Shakespeare plays are often done with a "concept" in mind. They transpose the action to modern times or to Mussolini's Italy or to Jamaica. The whole point of this is to clarify relationships and situations that sometimes don't hold a lot of weight in our society anymore. But Sir Peter Hall (who used to be the Artistic Director of the National Theatre) did not do this, everyone was in period dress, the sets were minimal; a patterned sheet and the silhouette of a town in the back. And yet every word and every emotion came across with utter clarity. Shakespeare's comedies are filled with such magic and metamorphoses. So many productions try to manufacture this for you, and it's not something that can be made, it can only be summoned. I left the theatre feeling as though I had been cleansed, which is why I go to the capital-T Theatre, for catharsis. It is one of the many necessary functions of art and we so seldom get it.

On the train ride back I pulled out the cupcakes I had bought at Harrod's. In the three times I've gone to Harrod's, I spend a good five minutes ogling the cupcakes. A good cupcake can be almost as hard to find as catharsis. I've grown weary of high-falutin cupcake places. They never live up to their hype (I'm looking at you, Sprinkles.) But I decided to give in and bought two cupcakes, an Oreo one, and the perennial Red Velvet.

Not the best. Too crumbly for my taste. In my opinion, the best cupcakes are found in small, unpretentious places. For my money, Martha Green's in Redlands is about the best cupcake you can get, though I do have a soft spot for Sift up in Ronhert Park.

Our train arrived at 2:00 in the morning. Ashley, Kelsey, and I trudged our way back to our various accommodations. We had class in the morning, but losing a few hours of sleep is worth it when you have London as your pay-off.

Indian With Kam

On Saturday night, my flat mate Kam made us Indian food. And it was delicious. In an unrelated noted, Kam told me that she thought my last blog post was harsh to British food, while I hold that I was actually championing British food. Such is the sign of a true artist when one's work can be taken and interpreted in many different ways. Even if they are wrong interpretations.

Kam made a potato and chickpea curry, with handmade roti (a word that I had to google,) and a delicious yogurt sauce. I made brownies. I feel that sometimes, we can achieve harmony in the culinary world that we may find inescapable in our larger sociopolitical lives.

From right to left is Hannah, G, and Sam, G's boyfriend. Gillian was there too but she wasn't here for this picture. Our kitchen is nice. It's the only one that has this corner-booth type setup. All the others in the building have a picnic table arrangement. All the others in the building wish they could be as cool as we are.

Kam is from Hong Kong originally (though she is ethnically Punjabi.) She speaks four languages. She is an amazing cook. She will one day be in running for world's best mother.

Look at those. She made each and every one of those from scratch and rolled them out by hand! I get antsy when I have to buy cupcakes for people who aren't me.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. You can practically see the flavor bursting forth from the pan.

But back to me. This is my blog after all. I made Nigella Lawson's "Every Day Brownies" from her book Nigella Kitchen. This was my first attempt at baking in a country that has adopted the Metric System. (Away from me for a second you can see Gillian taking a bite of Nutella in this picture as well as G successfully hiding her face.)

Metrication, or the process of adopting the Metric system, began at the end of the eighteenth century when the system was adopted by France. Like most things from France, the Metric System confuses and worries Americans. By the end of 1970s, most of Europe had fallen to the flash and jazz of the meter and the gram. But not the USA. Officially, the Federal Government adopted the Metric System in 1975, but it never caught on (even if it is easier, makes more sense, and not based on Henry VIII's various dimensions.) In fact, most recently, my great state of California has actually been moving to demetrication. A decision that I stand by.

But back to Nigella. I was using her recipe from her newest book. It was simple and I already had most of the ingredients. Because Ms. Lawson is British, and the cookbook was originally published in England, the original recipe (indeed, the recipe she gives on her show) was in metric, but mine was in US Customary because my book was bought in the states. Just to clarify, I needed to convert my recipe that had been conceived and published in Metric, from US Customary, back into Metric. It was truly the Victor/Victoria of brownie recipes. I eventually gave up on conversion and decided to use the other side of the measuring cup where "cups" was listed.

And they were good. Chocolate here is different. It doesn't have the bitter chemical aftertaste that some cheap chocolates have in the states. Even the bar of "Tesco's Best" that I threw in with the brownie batter was really quite good.

I'm of the opinion that brownies aren't allowed to have a long life on this Earth. They must be eaten as rapidly as possible, otherwise someone else might get more than you, and that would be bad.

Great night, great food, great friends. AND, if you look closely in this picture, you can see two of my fillings.

You've been warned about their food, right?

When I told people I was going to England, the conversation always turned to their cuisine, or lack thereof. Bangers and mash, fish and chips, steak and kidney pies. These are not the names of great culinary feats. In fact, they hardly sound like food at all.

This may come as a surprise to you, but I love food. LOVE IT. The line between food and sex in my mind is about as clearly defined as my abs. As it so happens, I'm quite a good Cook myself (did you catch the pun in there?) I've been wowing my flat mates with my cooking skills, whipping up curries and teriyaki stir-fries and portobello mushrooms marinated in wine and garlic, served on a toasted bun with mozzarella and prosciutto and a red wine reduction.

You know. Simple things.

But there is this one thing that my flat mates make that seems like a strange mish-mash of foodstuffs to my American sensibilities. And yet it is strangely alluring.

Baked potato, sausage, can of beans, cheese, done. That's not a ghost guitar in the background, it's my flat mate Jim. Not all places of higher learning in England are haunted (as much as we may want them to be....)

So you fry up some sausages. These are sweet chili pepper ones from the student food store on campus. They looked amazing in real life, but I couldn't get a good picture without the flash. I wish I had Ina Garten's photographer. I wish I was Ina Garten. (Though honestly, who doesn't?)

You bake a potato in your microwave that doubles as a convection oven. My flat mate G made banana bread in here last Sunday. It was quite good (or as my flat mate Hannah might say, "well good.")

Everyone in England, without fail, eats these beans. I don't believe we have them in the States. I would have definitely noticed that turquoise can. And if we do, I've never seen anyone eat them (much like how the Spam industry survives on hipsters giving cans to each other to be "ironic.") Why is that? Is Heinz a British company? Our almost First Lady was the heiress to the Heinz throne, one would think it was an American company. Or perhaps that's why she didn't win? The British sabotaged the 2004 General Election because Theresa Heinz-Kerry was going to steal their baked beans.

Yes. I'd like to believe that.

The only cheese available anywhere in England seems to be cheddar. I went to one of the local grocery stores, Morrison's. I was looking to get some gruyere or maybe some parmesan. But no. They had cheddar. Granted, they had every type of cheddar known to man, but one would think that the British would have developed a taste for something grander in their sesquicentennial of ruling the planet.

Oh mama. Jim told me to butter and salt the potatoes before I put on the beans. This sounded a little excessive. I was of course on board with it. And besides who am I to question an Englishman on his native cuisine?

Those English. They may not know how to do unholy things to an egg like the French do, but man do they know their potatoes. My flat mate Jim said that if he hadn't just eaten, he would have gone and fixed himself some as well.

Pregnant women and those with heart conditions may want to look away from the next photo.

Mmmm. English food is delicious. It may not be as pretty as French food, or as vibrant as Italian food, or as mindshatteringly delicious as Mexican, but it has an earthy, rustic quality that you don't find elsewhere. There's a spontaneity to it. They lived on an island for centuries and didn't have access to fresh herbs or tomatoes (the poor sods) and they worked with what they had and created a style of food that is all their own. It's comfort food to the max. Because heaven knows you need comfort when you've forgotten what color the sun is and the streets run red with the blood of the King's latest bride.

And boy do they know how to use a can of beans. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go find some dessert.